by Ruth Gruber
I gasped. The ship had the biggest hole I'd ever seen. An entire deck had been destroyed. I could see torn pipes, people running, mothers searching for children, lifeboats hanging at crazy angles.
The first ones off were some of the 150 wounded, carried on stretchers: their heads, their arms, their legs bandaged. British Military Police unwound the bandages to make sure these were genuine wounds. Only the most badly wounded were put on ambulances and taken to local hospitals.
The rest of the passengers began descending the gangway looking tired, bewildered, hopeless. Those who refused to come down were dragged down by soldiers. A few British soldiers tried to help by lifting babies from their exhausted mothers' arms.
The soldiers then herded the people into separate Army tents, one for men and one for women. They were ordered to take off most of their clothing and then sprayed from head to toe with DDT. Families were separated indiscriminately and forced onto the “hospital” ships bound for the prison camps in Cyprus.
On the dock, camera in hand, I was shooting the scene more with my heart than with my fingers, often stopping to help some of the overburdened women and hug some of the frightened children. For some of the teenagers, this was a great adventure; but for most of the adults, it was one more day of anguish.
That night, meeting some of the crew members who had escaped, I learned what had happened during the battle at sea. The British warships had attacked the Exodus from two sides. The British marines were armed with pistols and clubs, with firecrackers and tear gas; the passengers and crew were armed with potatoes and cans of kosher beef.
The firecrackers, tossed at the Exodus, frightened the crew for a moment, and in that moment eighteen British soldiers rushed down the drawbridge of one of the warships and jumped onto the deck of the Exodus.
Bill Bernstein, from California, who had been a U.S. naval officer in World War II, was guarding the wheelhouse when a marine clubbed him on the left temple. I watched the British soldiers carry him down the gangway on a stretcher, one knee up like an innocent child. I did not know how soon he would be dead.
His body was followed by the bodies of two sixteen-year-old orphans. Hirsch Yakubovich, from the DP camp at Kloster-Indersdorf, had been watching the action from a porthole. He tossed an orange at a marine entering the ship. The marine shot him in the face and killed him. The other orphan, Mordecai Baumstein, from the DP camp at Bad Reichenhall, was trying to beat off the marines with a can of beef when a marine shot him in the stomach.
Some of the crew, Americans in their early twenties, disguised themselves as refugees and threw in their lot with the passengers. Others managed to escape and returned to Europe to sail more ships filled with DPs hoping to enter Palestine.
Hiding in a secret shelter he had made in the bowels of the ship was the captain, Ike Aronowitz, a twenty-two-year-old Palestinian Jewish seaman who looked like a street-smart kid. His identity was kept secret lest the British arrest him for sailing this “illegal” ship. In the dark of night, when the last British soldier had left the dock, he escaped with a few other members of the crew.
The next day, I flew two hundred miles north to Cyprus to meet the three “hospital” ships. I was greeted at the Cyprus airport by the heads of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), who convinced the British soldiers guarding the gate of the largest of the camps that I was a new JDC employee. The JDC man told me the distressing news that the three ships seemed to have vanished.
For nearly a week, while waiting for some word, I met with refugees, heard their stories of terror and survival, and photographed their life in the camps. If I had thought the DP camps in Germany and Austria were horrors, Cyprus was worse. It was a hot hellhole of desert sand and wind, of tents and Quonset huts with a long road hemmed in by two walls of barbed-wire fences and a wooden watchtower guarding the whole camp. The architecture had come straight out of Auschwitz.
The Mediterranean Sea creamed the shore, but there was no water in the camp. No privacy. To sleep together, couples hung a blanket from the top of the tent or the hot roof of the tin hut. There were no sewers. You had to smell Cyprus to believe it.
The camp was guarded by young British soldiers who resented their role as policemen and babysitters for Holocaust survivors. But the camp was run, not by the soldiers, but by social workers, teachers, and doctors sent by American Jewish organizations and by the Jewish Agency. These workers helped the refugees set up their own self-governing bodies and schools. I was shocked sitting in a makeshift outdoor school under the summer heat, watching fifteen-year-olds learn that 1 + 1 = 2.
The life juices that had dried up for men and women in the death camps returned. Seven hundred and fifty babies were born the first year in the Cyprus hospital.
“Until I came here, I believed in science,” Dr. Walter Falk, the tall, kindly pediatrician who had come from the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, told me. “Today,” he said, “I believe only in miracles.”
Each month, another 750 men, women, and children were allowed to leave the camp for Palestine. The order was “first in, first out.” When it was their turn to leave, the people had to line up at the exit gate, show their exit certificates, and return their British-issued aluminum bowl, cup, and Army blanket. Some tried to escape by hobbling with a stick and looking like old men, hoping a guard would have compassion and let them leave without a certificate. A former makeup artist asked me to help paint black lines on young men's faces and fit them with false teeth. I relished my job, hoping my artwork to age them would get them through. Sometimes it succeeded; more often the guard would feel their muscular arms and tell them, “Who you kidding? Get back!”
While I waited for news of the three missing “hospital ships,” I learned how Golda Meir, then head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, had come to Cyprus with a special mission.
Standing on a platform of crates, she talked urgently to the refugees. “There is typhus here in the camps. We cannot allow Jewish babies to die. We owe them life. I am asking you to make a sacrifice, that some of you, who are slated to leave this month, give up your right and wait for next month.”
A man interrupted, shouting, “Hitler did enough to me in Europe. Now I've been in this hell for six months. I want to get out!”
“Friends, hear me,” Golda answered. “If we delay getting the little children right out, they may die. We want them to live. We want all of you to live. We want all of you to come home.”
A woman called out, “She's right! I've waited so long, so many years. I can wait another month. Golda, take my certificate. I have no babies anymore to be saved. My babies are dead.”
Golda succeeded. The “baby transport” was filled with babies under age one and their parents, taking them to freedom.
In the short span of three years, from the end of the war in 1945 to the birth of Israel in 1948, some 52,000 Holocaust survivors were incarcerated behind the barbed-wire fences in Cyprus.
At the end of my stay in Cyprus, I learned that the reason the three “hospital ships” carrying the Exodus refugees had disappeared was that the British Parliament could not decide what to do with them. Finally, after a raging debate, they decided that the Exodus refugees should be taken back to Port-de-Bouc, the port near Marseilles from which they had set sail on their tragic journey.
I flew to Port-de-Bouc and soon made contact with local French officials, who told me that they had orders from their foreign minister, Georges Bidault, in Paris to comply with the British demand that they force the refugees off the ships.
“We make our own laws here,” one of the Frenchmen confided. “We know who the enemy is. Those refugees are not the enemy. We will welcome anyone who wants to disembark voluntarily—maybe someone is sick or ready to have a baby. Of course, we will give them food and shelter. But we will not force anyone off.”
The officials arranged for their longshoreman to put me in a motor launch and send me around the three ships, the Runnymede Park, the Ocea
n Vigour, and the Empire Rival. I waved to some of the people on the decks—the same people I had seen getting off the Exodus in Haifa. While I watched, they raised signs printed in gentian violet, blue ink, and red lipstick on bed sheets and white underwear:
Á NOUS LA PALESTINE
LIBERTé, éGALITé, FRATERNITé
WE THANK FRANCE BUT TELL ENGLAND
TO GET US OUT OF HERE
WE WILL GO ASHORE IN EUROPE
ONLY AS DEAD MEN
One day, a French worker, who had delivered the food supplied by both the JDC and the French Aid Society to the Empire Rival, approached me on the dock at Port-de-Bouc.
“We're not supposed to talk to the people when we bring up the food,” he said, “but one of them whispered to me, ‘We're hungry. We're hungry for books.' ”
We made sure the next shipment was loaded with books, newspapers, and several Bibles.
The captain of the Empire Rival decided all books in Hebrew and Yiddish were propaganda and ordered them burned. These refugees were the people of the book and the people of the land. And on this fateful voyage, both the book and the land were taken from them.
Life on the ships became more intolerable every day. The temperature was boiling. The British hoped that the heat, often reaching 105 degrees, would drive the people down. But the people refused to go. Then four days of rain fell through the holes in the deck, and the refugees, sleeping on the floor of the dark hold or standing against the walls, were soaking wet. But the people stayed. They went on a hunger strike, and when I wrote it up for the Herald Tribune, the British denied the hunger strike in their press. The survivors began to feel that the world had forgotten them.
Avi, a representative of the Jewish secret service who had come from Jerusalem, sent a letter to the refugees to assure them they were not forgotten. He reminded them that they had astonished the world by their hunger strike.
It must be said that now, for the first time, the American press began taking a systematic interest in your fate. The New York Herald Tribune sent one of its top journalists, Ruth Gruber.… She understands us well and her articles have special importance. Last night, she tried to obtain permission to board the ships from the [British consul] and he refused. She did manage to get to the vicinity of the ships and take photographs. Meanwhile this action has succeeded, that is, people are again taking an interest in your fate.
After eighteen days of suffocating heat, Bevin announced that the Exodus Jews were to be taken to Germany, the death land. It was hoped that such a drastic solution would discourage more Holocaust survivors from trying to enter the Holy Land.
The world was outraged. Reporters flew in, clamoring to board the three ships. Edward Ashcroft, the British consul general in Marseilles, called us together on the wharf. A scrawny man with a dark mustache riding over his lips, the trademark of the CID (Criminal Investigation Department), Ashcroft was dressed, British-fashion, in khaki shorts separated from his knee-high socks by a stretch of hairy thighs. It was hard to think of him as a diplomat.
“I can't let you all go aboard the ships,” he proclaimed, “so I will select three.” He ticked three fingers off: “One for the British press. One the French press. And one the American press.” His forefinger pointed to me to act as the American pool correspondent. He then invited me to sit next to him in one of the launches. The water was rough. My camera, hanging from my shoulder, kept hitting his bare thigh.
The launch took us out to the Runnymede Park. It was ironic to me that it was named for the site on which the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. That document guaranteed that no king is above the law.
I climbed aboard the Runnymede Park and was greeted on the bridge by Lt. Col. Martin Gregson, the commandant in charge of the soldiers guarding the three ships. He stood with one foot on the deck and the other inside his cabin, grinning as if this were a vacation cruise.
Gregson stopped grinning for a moment. “Ashcroft tells me you're from the New York Herald Tribune. Go on, ask me some important questions.”
I was quite sure I would get casual and airy answers to any serious questions, so I decided to ask some statistical ones. “Colonel, you're in charge of these three ships. How many babies have been delivered on them while the ships were anchored here in Port-de-Bouc?”
“I don't know,” he waved his hand. “Put down any number you want, maybe six, maybe a dozen, maybe twenty. They're always having babies.”
I left the grinning colonel, who invited Ashcroft for a last drink before he was ready to turn his three-ship armada toward Germany.
A young, serene-looking captain from the Sixth Airbourne Division came toward me. “I've been assigned as your escort.”
He led me to the fore section of the bridge. Below me on a crowded deck, hundreds of half-naked people were jammed into a steel cage, as if they had been thrown into a dog pound. They began shouting at me in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Ladino, their words tumbling over one another.
Several called up to me, “It's good down here. Air. There's air down here.”
Some air, I thought. Inside the steel cage was a wooden outhouse with two six-holers for 1,500 people. The smell, the agony, the contempt for life, the human tragedy made me want to shake the world by its lapels: how can you let this happen?
This was no hospital ship, I realized; this was a prison. It was a former Lend-Lease ship that President Roosevelt had loaned to Britain to save her from Nazi submarines at the beginning of the war.
Strong-armed young men, naked to their shorts, raised a huge black banner held upright between tall poles. They had painted a purple swastika on the British Union Jack. My hand trembled as I shot several rolls of film to capture the flag from every angle.
The people in the cage, watching me with my camera, applauded and cheered so loudly they brought Colonel Gregson out of his cabin. I was shooting a new roll when he walked to my side. He was still grinning.
“They'll be pleased that you're taking pictures of that flag. They've been working on it for weeks now.”
These were Jews the world had never seen, Jews who had refused to be killed in the gas chambers, Jews who had refused to wait in DP camps while governments and committees like ours had argued over them, Jews who were defying not only the British Empire, they were defying the whole world.
“Go below,” a man shouted. “Go see our floating Auschwitz.”
I descended the stairs to the hold. It was a scene out of Dante's Inferno. Heads here. Feet there. Some of the people, learning that I was an American and a Jew, began handing me little slips of paper with telephone numbers.
“Call my uncle. He's in Chicago.”
“My mother's in New York. Call her.”
“Take pictures!” they shouted. “Show the world how they treat us!”
I took more pictures, but I was blind. The only light came through prison bars shielding the one tiny prison window. And I was blind with their agony.
I doubted any of the pictures would come out, but when Eric Hawkins, the British-born editor of the Paris Herald Tribune, had them developed, he told me, “I never cry over pictures, but they made me weep.”
“I shook taking them.”
“Ruth, these pictures belong to the world. I gave them to the AP, and they traveled around the world in eight minutes.”
On the Runnymede Park, my escort from the Sixth Airbourne Division told me it was time for me to go. I stood on the wharf with a young Haganah girl, weeping as we watched the three prison ships sail for Germany. “Now,” she said, “you will see the birth of a Jewish state.”
In 1947, Helen Reid asked me to cover UNSCOP. I accompanied the eleven-member committee through Europe, Palestine, and the Arab lands. We were in Vienna when Dr. Enrique Fabregat, ambassador to the UN from Uruguay and a member of UNSCOP, asked me if I would take him to visit the Rothschild Hospital as his guide and interpreter. The Rothschild Hospital had been turned into a DP camp. On this day one hundred refugees arrived from Romania
. Some of the children told me how they had escaped from soldiers and police and had traveled across mountains and through forests to get to Vienna. The little girl leaning into her mother's arm tried to comfort her. Soon they were to get their first hot meal in weeks in their new pails.
Each day, dozens of newcomers arrived at the Rothschild Hospital DP camp. The hospital was so overcrowded that people slept on the street and in the bushes.
The camp served as a stopover for thousands of Jews crossing Europe to secret ports in the Mediterranean. Their goal was to circumvent British war ships that were attempting to blockade them and, at last, to reach the Holy Land.
Wherever we traveled the members of UNSCOP questioned people about the horrors they had survived. As we prepared to leave the Rothschild Hospital, three thousand men, women, and children joined us in singing “Hatikvah”—the song of hope. It is now Israel's national anthem.
The battered ship Exodus 1947 as it limped into Haifa Harbor.
One whole deck was shattered by British warships before it reached Haifa in 1947. I found it hard to believe that the ship did not break apart.
Awounded refugee from Exodus 1947. My camera shook as I tried to capture images of refugees who had been beaten over the head or who were being carried out on stretchers. Bill Bernstein, the first mate and a former U.S. Naval officer from San Francisco, lay unconscious on a gurney with one knee up like an innocent child falling asleep. He died soon after he was brought down.
Aseverely wounded refugee from the Exodus, helped by a soldier and a friend. British soldiers, kind to some of the refugees, were ordered to unbandage head wounds to make sure the refugees were not faking injuries. The severely wounded were transported to Haifa's hospitals and allowed to stay. The people trickled down the gangways looking weary and shattered. Surrounded everywhere by troops, they made their first steps on the dreamed-of soil. They were exhausted and breathed the air.