by Ruth Gruber
The Exodus 1947 carried some six hundred orphans whose parents had perished in the Holocaust. Some of the British soldiers and medics tried to comfort the bewildered children. This soldier was abashed when I thanked him for his compassion. Nearly everyone carried a green bottle of water to sustain them on the journey from southern France to Haifa. It was the first thing the British took away from them, as though they feared it was a secret weapon. On the dock, the refugees were separated from one another to be searched: the men to be searched by soldiers, the women by hostile Arab women. Some of the refugees fought the soldiers who were trying to pull them down from the ship. The most severely wounded were taken to a Haifa hospital; the dead were taken to martyr's road in Haifa cemetery. I joined 15,000 mourners at their funeral. Most of the refugees were eventually settled in Israel.
The 4,500 refugees from the Exodus were forced onto three prison ships. Families were torn apart, their baggage carelessly thrown off the side of the ship and never retrieved. Soldiers distributed a mimeographed statement in several languages that told the refugees they were going to Cyprus, where they would get their belongings back. Film was removed from their cameras and the cameras were then confiscated. Scissors, knives, razors, and even fountain pens were confiscated and never returned. I had the feeling that they were being robbed of any objects that might have given them some independence.
Refugees waited in line to be sprayed with DDT powder.
British soldiers created their own Arc d'Triomphe on the dock and rested their guns on Army gurneys, as though cause and effect had been confused. The refugees were forced to walk a long journey from the battered river boat to the prison boat, passing inside tracks filled with soldiers under the hastily built archway.
The three “hospital ships” sat patiently in Haifa harbor, each one prepared to take 1,500 refugees. President Roosevelt had assured Congress that all Lend-Lease ships would be returned to the United States when they were no longer needed. We never expected that these same ships would be turned into prison ships. Their sole purpose now was to carry refugees captured in Haifa to the British prison camps in Cyprus. I flew to Cyprus and waited for days to meet the Exodus refugees on the three prison ships. Where were they? No one knew.
The Cyprus prison camps, 1947. Colonel Cardozo had assured me in Haifa that soldiers had filled each of the three so-called hospital ships with 1,500 refugees from the Exodus.
“Where are you taking them?” I asked him.
“Cyprus.”
A short flight from Palestine, the Cyprus prison camps were filled from 1946 to the birth of Israel in 1948 with over 52,000 Holocaust survivors. British military and elite. But the three ships carrying the Exodus refugees never reached Cyprus. It was considered too good for them. They were taken to prison camps in Germany, escaped, and were in Israel when it became a nation.
No reporter had ever been allowed into these camps before. It was a British secret that they were interning all these DPs, Holocaust survivors. They had come to Cyprus in all kinds of ships, little fishing boats—they sailed in anything to be able to get to the Promised Land. The British brought them to the two prison camps on this crown colony, Cyprus. But even Cyprus was considered too good for the Jews of the Exodus. They were taken to Port de Bouc, the village near Marseilles from which they had embarked for Haifa.
On orders from London, British guards prevented reporters from entering the camps. I was smuggled in as a new member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which helped administer the camp. They brought in food and clothing, set up schools, and with the help of the Jewish Agency even trained young men in self-defense.
DDT filled the air with its poison. Most of us did not know then the damage DDT did to our crops, our birds, and our bodies. We were all victims: refugees, staff, even the soldiers.
An ingenious father gathered up rags and pieces of wood to make a bassinet for his baby in Cyprus. Everywhere I went in the camp there were babies. It made me realize that life juices were returning. Every man and every woman wanted a child to help make up for the millions of babies the Nazis had burned. The joy in having a baby changed the climate in the dismal camp. I felt my own anger at the misery—no water, no privacy, the improvised schools with fifteen-year-olds learning to read and write— tempered by the new births in Cyprus's military hospitals every day.
I hated the architecture of the prison camp, with its bare tin huts stacked against one another to the horizon and the long dirt road walled in on both sides by chain fences. It was the grim architecture of Auschwitz. You had to smell the latrines for 20,000 people in each of two camps to believe it—and you didn't believe it. You had to smell the garbage that piled up waiting for the trucks that didn't come. Each evening, I left the prison camps and went back to the fashionable Savoy Hotel with its guests dressed in evening clothes. I showered but I felt I could never wash away the smell.
How can you have a baby in this prison camp?” I asked the young mother. “Don't you know,” she answered gently, “that under Hitler, as soon as a Jewish woman was pregnant, she was burned. Women were the propagators of the race, and they were the ones who had to be eliminated first. This is our answer to Hitler. You can have a child and live.”
With the irony and humor that has kept Jews sane for thousands of years, they renamed the bridge that the British soldiers built “the Warsaw Ghetto Bridge.” In Warsaw a footbridge was built by Poles to keep Jews off the streets leading to the ghetto. In Cyprus the bridge was built when rumors flew that water was to be delivered on a little truck. The refugees hoped that when water ran out on one side of the bridge they could find water on the other side.
In an exhibit of my photographs in Philadelphia some fifty years later, a woman studying this picture screamed, “That third woman on the stairs is my mother, the man in the doorway is my father.” She thanked me for giving back her parents, even if it was only in a picture.
The refugees were allowed to leave—first in; first out.
Artists among the refugees wanted me to help them make the young men look older so they could leave out of turn. I painted dark lines and shadows on their faces and gave them ugly false teeth. I did my work carefully, hoping to fool a British guard. We hoped they looked old enough to pass muster, but when the British soldiers tested the muscles on their arms, the men were pulled out of the departing line. We never gave up, and to our delight we often succeeded.
A doctor performs the ritual circumcision on two baby boys in a Cyprus camp. Exultantly their fathers sing “Am Israel Chai”—“The people of Israel live!” More than eight hundred weddings took place and 750 babies were born in 1947.
Refugees rest during the interminable wait to get certificates to leave the island.
My camera recorded the frustration, bewilderment, and discouragement as more refugees captured by British warships descended from prison ships into Cyprus's Famagusta Harbor. They did not know how long they would be confined behind barbed wire. They only knew that Cyprus was a suburb of sorrow.
In each segment of the camp I found a lonely child waiting while her mother, exhausted, used her meager ration of water to keep her children clean. It is the innocence of this little girl that captivated me. I took this picture as a promise to myself that I would come back to spend more time with her. I returned and she was still sitting there. Children of the Exodus had enormous patience. They knew that one day their dream would be fulfilled.
Beneath this desolate landscape men were secretly digging a tunnel that would get them out of the camp. It ended at the harbor of Famagusta, where if they were lucky they were hidden aboard fishing boats that took them to Haifa. They often asked me to sit with them in a circle near the entrance to the tunnel to hide it.
In the Cyprus prison camps, parents spent their time making toys for their children. I could not get my fill of the beautiful children growing up in a prison background. Did they know the sacrifices their parents had made to try to enter Palestine, only to la
nd in Cyprus? Resilience, I thought, was the key to their survival. Resilience and hope.
Even on this prison island older men began teaching the Torah to younger men and children.
These fortunate refugees were preparing to leave Cyprus. It was a rare experience to photograph smiling people on the prison island.
“I haven't seen my mother since the war began,” the smiling man told me. “After all these years of running, hiding from bombs, seeing people murdered, then these last two years on this prison island—Cyprus—who can believe it? Who can believe I'm going home? I'm going home at last. Eretz Israel.” He uttered the words “the land of Israel” as if they were a song.
Refugees departing from Cyprus for Israel.
The Runnymede Park was one of the three ships on which refugees were taken from Haifa to Port-de-Bouc in southern France.
On the ship, the prisoners were allowed on deck to use the outhouses. “It's good here,” they said, “there's air.” Two wooden outhouses provided just six holes for 1,500 people.
Below, half-naked people lay next to one another. The space that they filled on that slimy floor was their kitchen, their dining room, their bedroom—everything. That's where they lived. And there were both younger people in their twenties and babies, because every man and every woman wanted a child. There were a lot of babies, no elderly people. They had all been burned.
The Exodus refugees on the Runnymede Park painted the swastika on top of the British Union Jack. They were defying not only the British empire but also the whole world. This became Life magazine's Photo of the Week.
Inside the hold of the Runnymede Park, one of the British ships that the Exodus refugees were transferred to, a mother who gave me her child to hold. She was beautiful—beautiful. The mother said, “My life is over.” I asked, “How old are you?” She said, “Twenty-three.” I said, “Don't talk that way. They can't do anything worse to you than what they're doing here. They'll let you go. They'll have to.” She was much wiser than I. She said, “No, I'm going to live. I'm going to live so my child will live. I'm going to live so that no Jewish child is ever torn from its mother's arms again. So that no child is ever burned in a gas chamber.”
After I gave the baby back to her mother, the British officer who had brought me to the ship said, “You have to leave now. We're taking off.”
He took me back to the harbor to rejoin all those other correspondents who had come from all over the world when they heard that the British were sending the Jews of the Exodus back to Germany, to the death land. In the launch back to the harbor I sat next to the British consul general in Marseilles. He saw that I was carrying a camera. On the dock he called all the reporters together, and that's when he focused on my camera and demanded my camera and film. I turned and walked away—with the camera and the film.
The Birth of Israel and the War of Independence
1947–1948
After traveling for three months in the spring and summer of 1947 with UNSCOP, I settled in Switzerland, where the committee members were to spend another month arguing, disagreeing, and often flying home overnight to get instructions from their heads of state.
During those defining months of travel, the two Latin American members of the committee, Dr. Jorge Granados of Guatemala and Dr. Enrique Fabregat of Uruguay, became my best sources. Dr. Fabregat even asked me one day in June, while the committee was in Vienna, to be his guide and interpreter and take him through the Rothschild Hospital DP camp. “I want to see those terrible conditions you showed us in your photographs,” he said.
Fabregat was shaking as we stepped around exhausted people lying in the street outside the hospital. He looked tortured as he leaned over children covered with dirt and sores. One hundred new DPs had just arrived from Romania, we were told, and there was no place to put them except on the street.
A young man in torn trousers stopped us. His eyes were bloodshot; his voice came up from his guts. “In Romania,” he said, “they killed some 30,000 Jews in two hours. They took Jews to the slaughterhouse and hung them alive the way they hang cows, and they put knives to their throats and slit them. Underneath them, they printed a sign: KOSHER BEEF.”
Neither of us could talk as we continued stepping over the people lying in the dirt. “Look at that couple over there sleeping”—a middle-aged refugee took my arm with his left hand and pointed his right finger at the two people. “Look how they sleep. In the rain and in this hot sun. Soon it will be winter, and they will be sleeping this way in the snow.”
“Let's go.” Fabregat's eyes were watering. “We have to end these conditions. We have to get these people out of here, and take them to Palestine.”
As the committee's work in Switzerland closed down, Dr. Fabregat and Dr. Granados confided to me that there would probably be a unanimous decision to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. I was so excited that I asked them if I could cable the Herald Tribune, revealing this historic solution.
“Absolutely,” they said. “Just don't mention our names.”
At the same time, the New York Times reported that the committee was in disarray and would probably be unable to make any decision. I knew the source for the story. It was Harold Beeley, the secretary of the committee, who later became Britain's ambassador to Egypt.
The Herald Tribune had it right.
November 29, 1947. The fifty-eight members who then composed the United Nations General Assembly began voting on partition. I sat at the edge of my chair in the press section as the delegates called their votes out loudly, “yes,” “no,” or “abstain.” The vote was tallied: thirty-three members, including the United States and the Soviet Union, voted yes. The no vote was thirteen, made up largely of Arab states. There were ten abstentions, including Great Britain. It was a Solomonic decision.
The hallowed hall of the UN came alive as delegates, visitors, and even hardened journalists jumped up, yelling and applauding. I applauded, wishing I could jump ten feet. At last, I thought, the homeless survivors of the Holocaust will have a home.
My joy was dampened as I watched Azzam Pasha and Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia stand up. Their faces were twisted with anger; their white robes and headdresses shook as they motioned to the delegates from all the other Arab states to follow them. At the door, in Arabic-accented English, Azzam Pasha shouted, “Any line of partition drawn in Palestine will be a line of fire and blood.”
The Middle East burst into fire. Terror begets terror. Arab countries began assembling guns, tanks, and planes. Ben-Gurion dispatched Golda Meir to the States to raise funds to buy weapons. In one week of impassioned speeches, Golda raised over $50 million. In several communities, we were asked to make speeches together. Golda always asked me to speak first. She knew no one would leave until they heard her speak, which she did with power and urgency.
It was easy to understand why Britain, having relinquished control of Palestine, would refuse to sell arms to the Jews to fight the Arabs. But why did the United States agree to allow Golda and others to raise money, knowing it was for arms and planes, and then put an embargo on selling them a single bullet? I was in the UN when our ambassador, Warren Austin, still trying to undermine partition, rose to make a last-minute proposal: to create a trusteeship for Palestine. Austin was stopped on his way to the podium by a journalist who read him the news: President Truman had agreed to partition Palestine. Truman had pulled the rug from under his State Department.
No matter how busy President Truman was and how many people he refused to see, there was one man for whom the door of the White House was always open. He was Eddie Jacobson of Kansas City, Missouri. Eddie and Harry Truman had been buddies in World War I, with Truman as captain of their unit and Eddie his sergeant. Returning to Kansas City, they opened a haberdashery store filled with attractive ties, shirts, and men's gear. The postwar depression bankrupted them. But both men worked hard and repaid all their creditors.
Saturday night was their poker night. Truman's favorite
affectionate name for Eddie was “you bald-headed SOB.” Eddie called Truman “Harry” until Truman became the president. After that, Eddie addressed him only as “Mr. President” and spoke of him only as “my friend.”
In March 1948, I met Eddie and his wife, Bluma, while on a speaking engagement in Kansas City. After the talk, Bluma invited me to their home to meet their two young daughters, Elinor and Gloria, and then prevailed on me to leave my hotel and stay with them.
In their home, Eddie, a modest, soft-spoken mid-Western Jew, told me that several Jewish leaders in Washington had called him. They were in a panic that the UN vote on partition was in danger of being replaced by putting Palestine into a trusteeship. That would mean the end of a Jewish state and an Arab state.They were pressing Eddie to ask the president to see Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who was president of both the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the World Zionist Organization.
Eddie told me that when he asked for the appointment for Dr. Weizmann, President Truman suggested that he come on Saturday, March 18. He told Eddie to have Dr. Weizmann arrive at the kitchen entrance of the White House. The British ambassador would be leaving through the front door.
This unusual arrangement worked out well.
Dr. Weizmann, seventy-four years old, frail and nearly blind but brilliant, charmed the president.