Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Pencho פנצ'ו was an old Italian paddle steamer.
Registered name: Stefano
Capacity: 279 tons

In March, 1939, a convoy was supposed to set out, but, Slovakia gained independence and contact was lost with the organizers in Prague Praha.
To get 300 or more Jews of army age out of Bratislava, they acquired a small fishing vessel, Stefano.
JPost.com cites: "In 1939 Alexander Citrom, a Zionist from Bratislava, managed to purchase an ancient, Glasgow-built, Naples-registered 250-ton Danube riverboat in Rumania."
S Farkash cites: "The nerve-wrecking period of waiting was exacerbated by the outbreak of World War II; the ship which was purchased in France (“Saint Brieux”) was requisitioned because of the state of emergency; the money for the transport of 300 people remained in London and the center of the illegal immigration network moved to Bucharest in Rumania."
JPost.com cites: "In April the Pentcho set sail upriver to pick up its passengers. When Citrom saw it arriving in Bratislava, he remembered, "Rather than a ship, it looked more like the caricature of a submarine."
The Italian ship owners refused to approve the name, so Reuben Franco, donated his nick-name, Pentcho.

On May 18, 1940, Pencho פנצ'ו sailed from Bratislava down the Danube River, carrying 514 passengers, mostly Betar members, including a group of 101 passengers who boarded in Yugoslavia, who had been released from Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps on the condition that they never return.
JPost.com cites: "They had to have visas, and the only ones available were highly improbable: they were for another land-locked country on the other side of the world. And so five hundred passengers boarded the ship armed with visas for Paraguay, with the intention, obviously, of not going to South America but aiming for the aliyah bet, or illegal immigration into Palestine."
Anna Pizzuti cites: On May 16, 1940, Pencho פנצ'ו sailed, carrying 520 passengers. The stated destination was Paraguay, and her passengers had Paraguayan visas, The Russian skipper, overdosed on morphine, was dragged off the vessel. The Romanians kept her from entering the country,wandered for 4 months along the Danube River, mostly through Hungary and Yugoslavia, and then, with no fuel, she drifted downstream, with Bulgarians and Romanians shooting at her to keep her from mooring.

Yehuda Bauer cites: "In July, 1940, another Revisionist ship, the Pencho, was moving along the Danube. with no money and less chance to cross the Mediterranean. The passengers had paid £13,000 ($42,000) to organizers, who then abandoned them to their fate. Among the refugees were some of the the leaders of Zionist organizations in Germany and Czechoslovakia."
Anna Pizzuti cites: In August, 1940, the Yugoslav government dispatched a tug boat, to accompany Pencho פנצ'ו through the "Iron Gate" to Bulgarian territory. Finally, she reached the Danube delta,

On September 21, 1940, Pencho פנצ'ו, after making some repairs to the paddle wheel, sailed from Sulina, without a radio, without a transmitter and without welding equipment, was allowed to sail to the Black Sea.

In early October, Penchoפנצ'ו sailed for Palestine.

On October 9, 1940, the eve of Yom Kippur, Pencho פנצ'ו's boiler blew up, and she shipwrecked a few meters from the shore of Mytilene, or Samos, reports differ, in the Italian Dodecanese Islands.
Albert Alcalay and Imre Lichtenfeld cite: "Pencho stranded on the uninhabited Aegean island of Kamilanisi, 50 km north of Crete and 80 km west of the Italian Dodecanese Islands. They made a bridge out of planks, and , all the passengers left the ship in exemplary order and with no sign of panic, with the help of young men who stood on either side in the water. The women with children left first, then the rest of the women, the old people and, finally, the young men. At the end of Yom Kippur, Pencho sank, and her passengers remained on the island for ten days."
On October 11, 1940, Pencho פנצ'ו sank in the Aegean Sea.
Albert Alcalay and Imre Lichtenfeld cite:: "On October 20 , 1940, the Italians rescued all aboard, and transferred them to Rodos, where the paasengers, who had lost almost all their luggage, had to live in the Rhodes athletic stadium for several months."
S. Farkash cites: The passengers spending 500 days on Rodos. The local Rodos Jews, known as Rhodeslis, brought them food, blankets, and supplies.
Yehuda Bauer cites: "Its 512 passengers were rescued by the Italians and interned at Rhodes. From there they were transported to the Italian detention camp at Ferramonti in the south of Italy; they survived the war, and most of them immigrated to Palestine after their liberation."