Thank you so much for publishing the story of ‘Preston and Bernice’s Great Adventure’ on your blog. I am an American working in France as an English as a second language teacher. Most of my students are professionals from various walks of life, meaning that I am constantly on the lookout for material that is well-suited to their specific needs and requirements.

Following the Costa Concordia cruise ship accident, I was speaking with one of my students (who is a travel agent) about the threat of cruise trip cancellations related to the incident. I mentioned that my parents and grandmother (who was also named Bernice, coincidentally) had continued to include cruising in their travels, despite having been on a cruise ship that was taken into captivity during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. When my student started asking me more detailed questions on the subject, I realized that I couldn’t give her good answers. I was only four when they went on that cruise, and I guess I wasn’t curious enough about it afterwards to have gotten more specifics.

That evening, after my lesson, I went online to see what I could find on the incident, and I was rather disappointed, when it seemed that I couldn’t turn up much of anything. I started to wonder if my parents had their story straight. If, after all, the passengers of a cruise liner had been ‘taken hostage’, as they claimed, wouldn’t I be able to find some mention of that online somewhere? Had I been perpetuating their exaggerated story all these years?

I contacted my parents and most fortunately they were able to remember the name of the ship. Armed with this new piece of information, I was able to drum up one mention of the event in a kind of ‘life history’ of the cruise ship Romantica (which coincidentally, also ran aground before your grandparents and my relatives climbed aboard!)

And then I found your blog. What a gem! While it was not the official news thread I was looking for, the story you told brought back the distant memories of their early recounting, and filled in some of the details I’d never heard. It was just what I needed to clear up my understanding of the events in my story.

Another funny coincidence is that another student of mine works for a company that supplies military diving equipment for frogmen, something I knew nothing about before coming to France to teach English. When you mentioned them in your story, I had a very clear picture of an important detail (i.e. the explanation of the explosions the passengers had heard) that would undoubtedly have slipped right by me a few years ago.

I thank you for taking the time to write this story down, and for making it publicly available online. After reading your story and some other articles on the Yom Kipper war, I feel that I have a much better understanding of what happened back in October 1973. You may have thought you were writing down your family story simply for you and yours to look back on and enjoy, but it reached around the world and solved a stranger’s problem. I thought knowing that might put a smile on your face today.

With appreciation and gratitude,

jennifer evanson
(jenevanson@gmail.com)