It was crazy dangerous, this Aliyah Bet thing. Still, over two decades, more than 100,00 people, 70,000 of them Holocaust survivors, dared the adventure. Let’s call it that: Adventure.

 

I’m guessing young children heard adults say that to them in May 1939 as parents gathered what fit in a suitcase, scurried to the harbor, and boarded the German ship, S.S. Saint Louis. These lucky Jewish people held pending US visas. They carried landing certificates and transit visas for Havana. Havana is where they would wait to be granted entry to the United States. Adventure.

 

“No, sorry, Kitty can’t come, she will be fine with Bubbe.”

(Can’t you just hear the conversations, the tone, the effort to be casual?)

“Bubbe can’t come. We will write to her.”

“It’s an Adventure! It will be fun.”

(Imagine it.)

 

No one was wearing a yellow star yet, but who didn’t feel the ongoing effects of the previous November when Nazis torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes and schools, destroyed businesses, killed 100, and sent some 30,000 Jewish men to Nazi concentration camps. If Kristallnacht didn’t prove conditions for Jews were worsening, what would? For some, it was time to go.

 

May 13, 1939. The Saint Louis left Hamburg for Cuba carrying 937 Jewish refugees with properly procured paperwork. The ship was provisioned for a two-week passage.

 

May 27: Havana. Even before the ship sailed from Hamburg its owners knew (the passengers didn’t) that the Cuban president had rallied his people against Jews. Mucho Entusiasmo! 40,000 Cubans joined their leader’s chant, “They will not take our jobs!” and “Fight the Jews until the last one is driven out!” 

 

Let me see if I can make this brief. I have yet to define Aliyah Bet. Cuba cancelled the ship’s landing permit. After days of standing off in Havana’s harbor, after absorbing the reality of being rejected the Saint Louis sailed close enough to Miami, Florida to see the city lights. They had pending visas. Surely . . .

Surely not.

Entry to the United States was denied.  

The American president did not respond to the telegram asking for refuge. The State Department sent a telegram saying, “We have quotas. There is a Waiting List” Really, in all fairness, the passengers must “await their turn . . . before being admissible into the United States.”

 

I added the bit, “Really, in all fairness.” I acknowledge the complexities of immigration. It’s just that I’m thinking how it must have felt for people who left everything hoping to survive. How it felt for small children, a month now on a two-week Adventure. 

 

How about Canada?

Sorry, you’ll not be stopping here. If we allow this, god only knows how many more desperate people  will follow.  The reasoning was not wrong, was it? Sorry, but, “The line must be drawn somewhere.” So, it was. The ship was forced back to Europe. 

 

I know this blog will be waaaaay too long but how can I not mention Captain Schröder, the German Master of the Saint Louis? Schröder treated his passengers with dignity, allowed religious services to be held, covered the statue of Hitler with a tablecloth. He even considered wrecking the ship on the British coast to force the country to receive the refugees. Captain Schröder flatly refused to return his ship to Germany with Jews aboard. 

 

June 17, 1939, the Saint Louis docked at the Port of Antwerp. 

In September, World War II officially started. 

Go ahead. Explain this Adventure to your children. Figure where to go with your suitcase and whatever cash you have at hand.

Fast forward to the term that captured my attention in John McPhee’s book, “Looking for a Ship.”

 

Aliyah — “to ascend,” to “go up.” (Numbers 14:44) The Hebrew word is found only once in the Jewish Bible but once was enough to fuel intention. Get up, get out, go up to Palestine. The effort was an easy to spot Underground Railroad on water.

Bet — The second letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Why not Alpha, the first letter?

Alpha belonged to Aliyah Alph,  those first legal attempts to remove Jews from Hitler’s growing menace. How well did that work? Remember the Saint Louis? More than 200 Saint Louis passengers died in concentration camps. Waiting. 

“Bet” proclaimed “the second way,” a clandestine way, the “any way we can” way, the desperate illegal way. 

 

Shortly after the close of WWII, between 1946-1948, a small group, young, idealistic, and unpaid American and Canadian volunteers, Jewish and not, helped man sixty or so broken-down, salvaged ships, and clandestinely, illegally, dangerously, carried Jewish detainees, refugees, orphans, and Holocaust survivors, away from British Displaced Persons camps scattered in Germany and other European cities. That is, they attempted to do this. They aimed for Palestine.

 

The problem was this: Palestine was under British control, and the Brits (who had fought valiantly to free Jews from Axis brutality) rightly feared allowing more than a few Jews at a time to immigrate would foment a pother among Palestinian Arabs who, also rightly, anticipated being squeezed off land belonging to their families for generations. Really, no one in the world outside of the British and those starved and desperate Jews knew much about this people smuggling effort until — well, maybe you’ve heard of it; until The Exodus. The Exodus without Moses,

 

The Exodus

July 11, 1947

The Exodus was a worn-out US owned coastal freighter/passenger ship launched in 1928 and re-provisioned by Aliyah Bet in 1947. Its plight became a book. Then, in 1960, a mostly fictional movie. The true story involved Holocaust survivors, hundreds of orphaned teens, and Jews fleeing displaced persons camps. Getting aboard involved fake passports, cognac, bribery, and slight-of-hand. Originally fitted to carry a few more than 600 people, the Exodus left Sète, in southern France on July 11, 1947, with 4,500 Jews aboard.

 

 If I remember rightly, the plan was to beach the boat near Haifa, and lower the people to land with rope ladders. The true story, not-the-movie-version, had the British deciding “to teach these refugees a lesson” by following the Exodus with six warships. 

 

July 18, 1947, within twenty nautical miles of the Palestinian coast, the British rammed the decrepit vessel. The British commander, furious with these“Jew-runners,” boarded fifty Royal Marines with orders to subdue. Of the three killed, one was a young American clubbed to death. The rightly subdued were loaded aboard three British warships, and carried back to France.

 

September 7, France refused to force refugees off the ships. After stubborn resistance, and a 24-day hunger strike on board, the three ships sailed to Germany, and there forcibly transferred their spent captives to British controlled detainee camps. I’m trying to imagine it, to feel it. I’m trying to not hum the 17th century Christmas tune about seeing three ships come sailing in . . . It takes my breath away to picture theses ships tying to Hamburg docks.

 These were wartime rescuers, these Brits. It was a rock and hard place, wasn’t it? It’s policy vs. people; paperwork vs. personal tragedies, possible Palestinian rebellion vs. Jewish pain. 

As John McPhee’s bunk aboard the Stella Lykes had, the world was rolling 30°, banking six times a minute while 4,500 “refugees” “detainees” “displaced persons” ““orphaned kids,” “Holocaust survivors” finally were thrown off these ships; women and children without difficulty, men by force, into tents behind wire fences. In Germany. 

 90% of the “illegal immigrants” carried by Aliyah Bet ships between 1946-1948 were captured and incarcerated. 50,000 were held on the island of Cyprus in camps originally built for German POWs. But. Some. Made. It.

Does “Some” make it worth it?

 Aliyah Bet passengers had shopped at corner grocery stores, stocked the shelves, taught school, treasured items belonging to their parents and grandparents, had doctor’s appointments, were doctors themselves; raised children, or vegetables, or a ruckus, were children; people who honored God or didn’t, respected authority or didn’t. How would we know, once they became a category: Jew. Detainee. Refugee. Survivor. How easily we can be taught to ignore, even hate, by the creation of categories. 

 Wop. Kike. Jap. Chink. Coon. Okie. Jerry. Fag. Spic. These were categories familiar to my ears as a child during WWII. “They” were not “Us.” 

 

“They” were on ships seeking safety, but they were not us.

 

“Refugees,” “Detainees,” “Survivors,” not Jacob or Josie, not 14-year-old Lisa among the hundreds of orphaned teens aboard The Exodus, — way too many tragic stories for us to consider. Not the nine surviving babies born aboard that boat but moved with their moms to a crowded camp; or what about the newborn and mother who died? What were their names? Does it matter? Not individuals escaping Germany, then forced back to barb-wire wrapped camps in that country. I mean, how hard is it, this business of being humane among humans? How comfortable have we humans become by piling people into categories?

 

Thank you, crazy, idealistic young people of the US and Canada who crewed collapsing ships, who caught the spirit of caring, who gave it a try against all odds.

Thank you, John McPhee, you who knew the individual names, cared about the stories and habits of men you met aboard a ship you would never board again. Thank you for mentioning Aliyah Bet.