Gertruda's Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (31 page)

Facing them, on the slopes of the Carmel, the white houses of Haifa shone in the summer sun. The survivors looked longingly at the city. This should have been the gate of their entrance to Palestine, but they knew they would only see it from a distance. On the roofs of the houses and the tops of the mountain, thousands of residents watched excitedly as the
Exodus
limped to port. Many of them had friends and relatives on the ship. The hope of soon reuniting
with them vanished. Here and there, a poster condemning the British was seen; shouts of protest were heard. There, too, among the big crowd on land, were quite a few who sobbed bitterly.

The tugboats of the port were tied to the
Exodus
and pulled her to the dock. Not far away, on the left, the gloomy fleet of illegal immigrant ships that had previously been captured by the British were anchored, their smokestacks cold, their windows dusty, the ropes of their anchors slack. When the
Exodus
was emptied of its passengers, she too would be moved there.

At four-thirty in the afternoon the
Exodus
was tied to the main dock of the port. Next to her were anchored three British ships of evacuation, the
Empire Rival
, the
Runnymede Park
, and the
Ocean Vigour
, which were to take the immigrants. Between the dock and the port stretched coils of barbed wire. Units of guards and soldiers of the Transjordan Legion were posted there to prevent escape. Hundreds of “anemones”—British paratroopers wearing red berets, elite airborne fighters who had fought heroically behind the German lines in the war—boarded the ship, blocked the passages, and locked the latrines. Flyers in four languages distributed to the passengers of the
Exodus
demanded that they disembark without resistance:

The mood was despondent. The faces of the passengers fell, couples hugged each other, parents clutched their children to their bosoms, and Gertruda calmed the furious Michael: “Don’t worry; Cyprus is only a way station to the Land of Israel. A little patience and we’ll get to Tel Aviv.”

First the murdered were taken off, including fifteen-year-old Zvi Yakobovitch, who did not survive his injury, and Bill Bernstein, Ike’s first mate. They were taken on stretchers, only half covered to give the impression that they were merely wounded, so as not to attract the attention of the press photographers who were taking pictures of the evacuation of the
Exodus
. But the refugees weren’t fooled. Protests rose among the thousands of passengers on the ship. “There are murdered men here!” they shouted to the journalists. “Don’t let them hide them!” The British quickly covered the bodies.

After the murdered men, in stretchers or leaning on doctors and nurses of the ship’s crew and the British army, the wounded and the sick were taken to the military hospitals in Haifa and the internment camp in Athlit. Then, by order of the British officers in stiff uniforms, carrying polished wood sticks under their arms, the operation of disembarking the rest of the refugees began. Most of them resisted and the British used force to evacuate them. The sturdy soldiers had no trouble evacuating the exhausted Holocaust survivors.

A shudder of emotion went through the bodies of the immigrants when their feet landed on the dock, on the soil of the desired Land. Many knelt and kissed the ground.

On the ship itself, behind locked doors in the storerooms of the lower deck, Yossi Hamburger and Ike Aaronovitch remained along with the other Haganah members who had played vital roles on the
Exodus
. They were hiding from the British for fear they would be
arrested as soon as they got off the ship. Soldiers carefully combed the ship, but didn’t discover them.

Deep in the water under the ship, dull explosions were suddenly heard. From the decks of the British guard boats sailing around the ship, sailors were placing sea grenades into the water of the port to keep Palmach divers from trying to sabotage the evacuation ships and prevent them from sailing.

Long lines of immigrants wound around the entrances of big tents. They were brought inside in groups of ten. In one of the tents, there was a strict body search for concealed weapons. In the other tent, they were sprayed with DDT. They were then hustled off to the evacuation ships. When one was filled, the other began boarding on the gangplank.

The sun set in the sea, evening fell, and big searchlights illuminated the dock. Minister Grauel stood next to Gertruda and Michael, in the line at the tent. A British soldier examined Gertruda’s documents and looked at her sternly.

“You’re not a Jew,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

The officer demanded an explanation and she told him.

“You can stay in Palestine,” he said.

“And Michael?”

“He’ll be evacuated to Cyprus like the rest of the Jews. Don’t worry. We’ll take proper care of him.”

She shook her head no. “I won’t leave him alone,” she declared. “I’ll stay with him.”

The officer shrugged. “As you like,” he said indifferently.

Now it was Minister Grauel’s turn. The British leafed through his American passport and asked why he was on the ship.

“I volunteered to help them,” said the minister.

“What you did is a crime,” claimed the officer.

“Helping poor people isn’t against the law.”

“But the attempt to break through into our territorial waters without permission is definitely a crime. I’ll have to arrest you.”

Minister Grauel parted from Gertruda emotionally and hugged Michael affectionately. “I’ll never forget you,” he said.

Two guards were called to the examination tent. They confiscated Grauel’s documents and informed him that he would be interned in a hotel in Haifa until a decision was made to try him or deport him.

They got into a jeep, passed through the military barricades, and left the port. The jeep climbed the road up the mountain and stopped at the entrance to Hotel Savoy. Grauel was sent to the reception desk, where the two guards didn’t take their eyes off him.

The reception clerk gave Grauel a registration form. At the line for address, the minister wrote “The
Exodus.”
The clerk looked at him with interest.

“You’re from the ship?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“The hotel bar is full of foreign journalists. They came to write about the
Exodus
and the British won’t let them get near the ship. They’d love to talk with you.”

Grauel got a key. “I’ll be in my room,” he said to his guards.

“Okay. Don’t you dare leave the hotel. We’ve got orders to stay here as long as you’re in the hotel.”

“I’m tired,” said the minister. “I’m going to sleep.”

He turned to the staircase, but instead of going up, he went down to the bar, where a group of journalists was sitting. Grauel went to them. “I’m from the
Exodus,”
he said and they stormed him. Cameras flashed and notebooks were pulled out. Grauel learned that the group represented all the major newspapers in the world. He told them about the ship’s journey of hardships, the blockade in
the middle of the sea, the bold resistance, the killed and wounded. They feverishly wrote his words. This was precisely the material they had been seeking.

Two American journalists told him: “You’ve got to tell all this to the UN commission.” The commission, composed of representatives of eleven countries and set up to check the situation in the Land of Israel and to suggest possible solutions to the UN, was staying at the Eden Hotel in Jerusalem. Grauel said that he was in fact interned and that his guards were in the hotel lobby. He doubted if he could go to Jerusalem; but the American journalists, smelling a good story, said they would find a way to sneak him out. The three of them slipped him out the back door of the hotel and into a car. On the way to Jerusalem, the British stopped them at roadblocks, but the Americans waved their journalistic credentials and the soldiers let them go on.

After sixty hours with no sleep, Grauel was exhausted and could barely stand on his feet. Nevertheless, he knew he couldn’t rest now. Every minute was precious. All the information he could give the members of the commission was vital. They were surprised to see him. They ordered dinner for him, and for the next three hours they questioned him about all the details of the wretched journey of the ship. At the end, they told him he had made quite an impression on them.

Battered and abandoned, the
Exodus
remained at the dock and, with British permission, a cleaning crew boarded to clean the filth and clear away the wreckage. The Haganah members hiding there asked the cleaning crew to smuggle them out of the port. A few of the cleaning crew left the boat and went down to the company offices. They came back with Ogen company work clothes and the Haganah members put them on and hurried off the ship, one at a time, before the eyes of the British guards, carrying piles of garbage like the rest of the cleaning workers. Shortly after that, there was no one left at port.

The three evacuation ships—the
Empire Rival, Ocean Vigour
, and
Runnymede Park—
were packed with passengers from the
Exodus
and sailed to the open sea. Thousands of desperate evacuees crowded on their decks and gazed at the shore of Haifa as it grew distant. They turned to their British escort and asked for information about conditions in the transit camps in Cyprus.

“You’ll be very comfortable there” was the answer they received.

“How long will we be there?”

“A few weeks, no more.”

The ships made their way on the sea. The weather was fine and the sea was calm. For a few hours the evacuation ships sailed north to Cyprus, and then an unexpected order came over the radio:

The pilots of the evacuation ships immediately changed course and turned left.

A few days earlier, the British had decided in absolute secrecy to return the illegal immigrants to where they had come from. By returning the refugees to France, they wanted to set an important precedent for future illegal immigrant ships: no longer internment in Cyprus, but return to the port of departure.

The three evacuation ships kept to their new course. Conditions on these ships were hard for the passengers. Difficult but bearable living conditions had prevailed on the
Exodus:
these conditions were much worse. The refugees had to sleep on the iron floor, each of them was given only one blanket, and they had only the clothes on their backs—they had been forced to leave all their belongings at the port of Haifa. Given only meager food, one ship protested with a hunger strike.

As the evacuation ships approached Porte-de-Boque, on the French coast, thousands of Jews, members of organizations and youth movements, began streaming to the town, waving posters in Hebrew
and Yiddish at the ship:
DON’T DISEMBARK!
There were also posters in French aimed at the lenses of the journalists’ cameras.

The immigrants on the decks of the three British ships, who heard that the French had tried to tempt them to disembark and stay in France, also prepared gigantic posters and waved them as they approached the port:
FRANCE, THANK YOU, BUT WE WANT THE LAND OF ISRAEL
.

Hundreds of journalists packed the docks of the small town. Big groups of Jewish youth movement members danced folk dances and sang in the central square. From all over the region, onlookers came to the town to see the immigrants of the
Exodus
with their own eyes. The cafés and restaurants overlooking the port were filled.

Officials of the French government boarded the three ships and offered permits for unlimited stay in France to everyone who would agree to disembark, promising a fast track to French citizenship for those who did. A representative of the survivors said, “If you want to help us, send medicine and food.” He rejected the offer to disembark.

Time passed slowly in Port-de-Boque in the heavy summer heat. The French government’s efforts to persuade the passengers to get off the ships failed miserably. Ultimately, only 130 passengers, some of them sick, decided to disembark and stay in France.

The British knew they couldn’t leave the evacuation ships in France forever. They considered their options and decided to transfer the immigrants to a camp in the British-occupied area of Germany, ignoring the sensibilities of those refugees returning to the country that had murdered so many of their families.

The order to sail to Germany was given on Friday evening, July 28. The immigrants could only protest and sing “Ha-Tikvah.” The British weren’t moved.

In Germany, the evacuees were concentrated in camps Pependorf and Amstau near Lübeck and greeted by local residents with open hostility. As if no time had passed since the Nazis were in power, hatred of the Jews flourished again in full force and displeased the inmates of the camp. Every single day, the survivors encountered rejection and insult. In the cafés and restaurants of the towns near the camps, they were refused service and brawls with anti-Semitic innuendos constantly broke out. In the spa city of Reichenhall, the employees of one hotel wrote a song that began: “Too bad we didn’t kill enough Jews.”

In mid-March 1948, two months before the British army left the Land of Israel, the borders were still closed to illegal immigrants. The evacuees of the
Exodus
finally lost patience. They detested the camps in Germany and found it hard to bear the difficult memories they felt there. They demanded that the Haganah agents do everything they could to get them to Palestine. To ease their oppression a little, the Haganah decided to launch an operation to guarantee that at least some of the immigrants would get there. About one thousand of them, including Gertruda and Michael, were chosen to trick the British and slip into Palestine without being arrested. They were outfitted with colorful summer clothing, cameras, and lots of
chewing gum, taught a few useful sentences in English, and given forged travel documents. At the port of Hamburg, they boarded the grand ship
Transylvania
for a Mediterranean cruise and were ordered to behave like tourists. None of the other passengers already on the ship realized that not a single member of the big noisy group of tourists was actually an American citizen. After four days at sea, the ship anchored in the port of Haifa where buses waited to take the disguised immigrants on a day tour to the holy sites. On the docks stood British soldiers, glancing at them indifferently. Among them, Gertruda recognized some of the officers who had conducted the evacuation of the passengers of the
Exodus
only a few months earlier. None of them recognized her.