On March 19, 2025, the Evangelism Missions Archives received a wonderful item for its Zamzam collection (Collection 624): A 58-page typescript with handwritten notes of a diary kept by one of the ship’s passengers, along with a photo.

The Zamzam was an Egyptian vessel which had been chartered in early 1941 to take passengers to Africa, including over 100 missionaries. Travel was dangerous, of course, because war had broken out between Germany, Great Britain, and France and was being waged on land and sea. As a civilian vessel under a neutral flag, it should have been exempt from attack. However, the German commerce raider Atlantis mistook it for a troop transport and started shelling the ship on April 17, 1941. The captain of the Zamzam used a flashlight to frantically signal the German ship that the Zamzam was a noncombatant vessel with women and children aboard and the German stopped the attack, but the damage was done. The Zamzam was sunk. However, all the passengers and crew were pulled out of the sea by the Germans. They were transferred to a German supply ship and taken to Nazi-occupied Europe. America was not yet in the war, so American citizens were repatriated back home. But all British citizens, as well as members of the British Empire such as Canadians, were sent to German internment camps where many stayed until the end of the war in 1945. For about one day, the sinking of the Zamzam was big news in American and British newspapers, until it was known that all passengers and crew had been plucked from the waters.

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