Another passenger was Wilfrid Israel, a member of an important Anglo-German Jewish family and a rescuer of Jews from the Holocaust who had close connections to the British government. He was born in England to an Anglo-Jewish mother and German Jewish father, and he and his brother had run the Nathan Israel Department Store in Berlin until it was seized by the Nazis in 1938. As early as 1933, he was obtaining information about Nazi arrest lists and warning the intended victims. He worked with consular officials in the British embassy to obtain visas, and he dismissed 700 of his firm's Jewish staff with two years' pay in 1936, telling them to save themselves by leaving Germany. After Kristallnacht, he was instrumental in setting up the Kindertransport which saved more than 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and Austria. He remained in Berlin until 1939 when he left for Britain. He returned to Berlin once more before the outbreak of war to secure the departure of a last trainload of children. On 26 March 1943, he left Britain for Portugal and spent two months investigating the situation of Jews in Spain and Portugal; he found as many as 1,500 Jewish refugees in Spain, many of whom he aided in obtaining Palestine certificates, and he proposed a plan to the British government to aid them.