- , Saturday 30 June 2007
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The other diners are oblivious to the identity of the frail old man who lights yet another cigarette and then fixes the listener, his friend Avi Livney, with piercing eyes. He is 83-year-old Ike Aronowitz, former captain of the illegal immigrant ship Exodus. Who would recognise him? He is known to the world in an entirely different incarnation: as the blond, blue-eyed Paul Newman, who played Aronowitz in Otto Preminger's 1960 film Exodus, based on Leon Uris's blockbuster novel of the same name.
Both film and book tell the story of the postwar illegal immigration ships bearing a human cargo of Holocaust survivors who tried to break the British blockade of Palestine in the last days of the Mandate. It was an incident that would become part of the founding mythology of Israel, legendary because the fictionalised account came to symbolise the birth of a nation and generated international sympathy and support. But it was a fairy tale. In Uris's version, the Jewish refugees, stranded on Cyprus, are saved by a sympathetic British general who convinces the British government to allow the ship to land. In real life, the British army boarded, killed three people, loaded the passengers on to prison ships and took them back to Hamburg. When Uris was researching his novel in 1956, he interviewed Aronowitz, who was unimpressed by his credentials: "I told him: you're a great writer of bestsellers, but for history you're the wrong guy. He was very offended."
Two years after the end of the war, 200,000 homeless, stateless Jews were still in displaced-persons camps all over Europe, while Britain and the US placed visa restrictions on entry to their own country. Britain, which then ruled Palestine, issued only 1,500 entry permits a month in an attempt to limit immigration for fear of increasing ethnic tensions. The Zionist policy of illegal immigration was part humanitarian rescue mission, part political gerrymandering of the country's population. It gave Holocaust survivors hope of a new home, but was also designed to flood Palestine with Jews ahead of the UN partition vote expected in November 1947.
For the Exodus's American crew, the trip was an incredible adventure. Though young, many were experienced seamen just out of the wartime navy, and were recruited by word of mouth in the Jewish community, their heads buzzing with Zionism. As Americans, they saw themselves as re-enacting their founding fathers' anti-colonial struggle in the War of Independence; as Jews, they were enraged about the plight of the refugees. New Yorker Avi Livney was 19, fresh out of the navy and asking around about how he could get on to one of the ships. The initial response was discouraging; official Jewish and Zionist bodies disclaimed all knowledge of the operations. "Ultimately, I got a call from somebody telling me to meet him in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a place I had never been. A number of weeks went by and then I got another call. They told me they had a ship ready to go - it was called the President Warfield."
Livney was sent to Baltimore, where he got a taxi to the pier: "We drove along past all these magnificent ships, we got to the end and I thought we must have missed it. Then I saw a hulk. It was an embarrassment, not a ship." The President Warfield had started life as a luxury 200-berth steamer taking wealthy passengers up and down Chesapeake Bay. At the start of the war, it had been commandeered by the navy to ferry troops for the D-day landings; returned to the US to be sold for scrap, it had been bought for 40,000 of the collected dollars of US Jews. It nearly sank when it first left Baltimore and had to return to port for repairs. Eventually, it set sail for Marseille amid press speculation about what a ship supposedly bound for China was doing with Mediterranean charts. Stopping at the Azores, Livney says, they were greeted by US sailors who jeered, "Are you going to run the British blockade in that? Big secret!"
While the ship made its way across the Atlantic, a parallel organisational structure was moving Jews from the displaced-persons camps to southern France, where the ships would arrive. Norbert (now Noah) Klieger was born in Strasbourg in 1926; his father, a journalist and author, foreseeing that Hitler would start a war, had moved his family to Belgium, believing it would stay neutral. After the invasion, father and son joined an underground resistance group, but in 1943, aged 16, Noah was picked up and deported to Auschwitz, and his father and mother were sent there a year later. He ended up in Auschwitz Monowitz, the rubber factory, where he worked alongside Primo Levi and was forced to join the Auschwitz boxing squad, in which Jews fought each other for the amusement of the commandants. Auschwitz, not political ideology, made Klieger a Zionist. "I realised that the only solution for the Jewish people was for there to be a country they could run to." Surviving both the camps and the death marches, he eventually found himself just outside Ravensbrück, where he was liberated in April 1945 by the Red Army, which held the inmates for two months, hoping to send them to the Soviet Union. Klieger smuggled himself into the French zone and joined Mossad Aliyah Bet, the precursor to Mossad, which at the time was in charge of protecting Jews in the Diaspora. For the whole of 1946, Klieger was involved with the European end of the clandestine immigration operation, which had offices and agents across the continent.
David Passow, who had been ordained as a rabbi in America during the war, became the New England director of the American Christian Palestine Committee, a network of American Christians of all denominations who were supporting clandestine immigration, with contacts, he says, in the Vatican. Passow was sent to Europe, where a Methodist newspaper, Zion's Herald, gave him press accreditation that allowed him to move freely across borders. In charge of the Warsaw office, his role was to build public support for illegal immigration and to convince apprehensive Jewish refugees that they should try to get to Palestine. "They needed reassurance in all forms," he says. "The passport to the whole thing was to give them some kind of hope. The reaction ranged from total negation to total acceptance and anticipation. But what was most striking to them was that I was an American who spoke Yiddish."
One hundred and 60 trucks were chartered to bring refugees from the camps to Marseille, where the President Warfield was waiting - a manoeuvre complicated by a France-wide strike that required a union payoff. By now Klieger had decided it was time to go to Palestine himself. "I sat in the cabin of the first truck. When we got to port, I said, 'Where is the ship?' I figured that for $40,000 it would be something like the Queen Elizabeth. I said, 'This is a ship?' " The crew had ripped out what remained of the interior and built shelves to house the 4,500 passengers, each with enough space to lie down, reminding them of the concentration camps they had left. Also on board were 150 Zionist Jews from North Africa.
Klieger was given a blue and white armband and told to prevent passengers from ascending to the bridge. "All of a sudden a young kid came along, whistling, wearing nothing but shorts, plimsolls and a cap. He was determined to climb up and I thought I was going to have to hit him. It turned out this was Ike, the captain. He was 23 and he looked 16."
"Ike" was the Haganah (the main Palestine Zionist organisation) codename for Yitzhak Aronowitz. A short, black-haired Pole, he was born in Lodz and grew up in Danzig, until his father presciently took the family to Palestine in 1936. Unlike Klieger, with his first-hand experience of the firm grasp of Soviet hospitality, at the start of the war Ike had romantic ideas about the egalitarian Red Army and swift promotion. Accused of being all talk, he gave in and joined the British merchant marines. He had nothing personal against the sailors he met, but to Jews in Palestine Europe was a hell of death and endemic anti-semitism. They saw themselves not as western colonial implants in the Arab world but, like their US counterparts, involved in a worldwide struggle against British imperialism, drawing inspiration from the struggle for Indian independence.
Aronowitz had sailed aboard the President Warfield from Baltimore as the first mate under a non-Jewish American captain who was paid off once he had got the ship across the Atlantic. Promoted to captain, it was his first command. Despite his inexperience, he proved a sailor of chutzpah and skill. Closely watched by the French authorities, the ship had to slip out of Marseille to the port of Sète, just up the coast, to evade detection. Unable to afford a tug, they had paid a pilot but he hadn't turned up, and Aronowitz had to negotiate a series of tricky turns to get the ship through the narrow channels and into open water. "Ike was a genius," Klieger says.
They left on July 11 1947. It was a seven-day voyage to Palestine, and despite the discomfort and the limited chance of success, the passengers were optimistic. "The atmosphere was incredible," Klieger says. "We had a radio broadcasting in four languages, we had folk dances, we sang. There were women who taught the children, everything was organised. The spirit was something out of this world - they knew that, at worst, they'd get sent to camps in Cyprus. They would not be free, but what was the big deal? Ninety-five per cent were [Holocaust] survivors, they were ready to endure anything, because they knew that the partition vote was coming and in a few months there would be a Jewish country."
For the young crew, this was the first time they'd come face to face with survivors, and they spoke to them using their common lingua franca, Yiddish, emphasising both the common bonds of culture and the sense of a shared destiny. "I was once talking to a group my own age," Livney says, "and at the end one girl told a particularly harrowing story and said she had only one wish, to have her own table. I've never forgotten that, and I've gone on wondering whether eventually she got her own table."
The crew had been sworn into the Haganah when they left America, and the leadership in Palestine had also sent what Aronowitz - already rankling at attempts to exert authority over what he saw as his ship - calls "a political commissar", Yossi Harel, a senior Haganah member. Tensions erupted between the Americans and what were then called Palestinians (Jewish residents of Mandate Palestine). The Haganah radioed the ship, ordering it to change its name to the Exodus 1947, which many of the Americans hated. "We wanted something with more zip," Livney says. "Personally, I wanted it to be called the Eleanor Roosevelt."
As the ship neared the Palestine coast, it found itself hemmed in by British destroyers. Harel said the point had been made and they should give in. "He didn't want us to resist the British," Aronowitz says. "He wanted us to surrender. But most of the passengers were more courageous and had more guts than any of us - they had seen terrible things." Aronowitz rebelled. The crew had prepared plans to repel the British soldiers by placing nets over the deck, but they didn't have time to get them out when the surprise raid took place at midnight on July 18 and they resorted to throwing cans of kosher corned beef at the boarding party. There were three casualties: two passengers - one a 16-year-old boy, shot in the face, according to a witness - and one of the young crew, Bill Bernstein, who was clubbed to death with a rifle butt. He died in Aronowitz's bunk.
The battle with the British was not only played out on radio and in the newsreels. Representatives of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (Unscop) had been sent to Haifa as observers. The brutal treatment of the Exodus's passengers had become a powerful propaganda tool in the Zionist campaign, but in Jaffa, 15-year-old Hasan Hammami, the son of a wealthy Arab businessman, watched and listened with foreboding: "I remember seeing pictures of the Exodus as it was being towed into port in Haifa. Its pictures were in the papers. I remember clearly the news about this and other illegal immigrant ships. Most were regularly reported on the official radio station, which broadcast in Arabic and was located less than half a mile from our house.
"The mood was one of sorrow for the poor, weak, hungry Jews who had come from European concentration camps, and of the condition they'd been driven to," Hammami says. "But it was mixed with fear of being overrun by European Jewish immigrants. There was bewilderment and anger - why were they being sent to Palestine, given all this aid to settle in a land that did not belong to the power that was admitting them and that they did not own?"
All the passengers were forcibly disembarked at Haifa - the crew had hiding places on board and were able to slip away and evade arrest. The rest were loaded on to three British ships, imprisoned in cages and returned to Europe. On arrival in France, they refused to disembark and after three weeks at Port-de-Bouc, amid worldwide publicity, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin took what seems now the inconceivable step of returning them to Hamburg, where they were re-incarcerated in refugee camps. It was a PR catastrophe. "Back to the Reich," one US newspaper put it. "Return to the death land," said another. "If there is an Almighty," Aronowitz says, "he sent us Ernest Bevin in order to create a Jewish state."
The story of the voyage of the Exodus ended there. The ship remained in Haifa harbour until 1952, when it caught fire and burned to the waterline; the hulk was towed to Shemen beach. "It was the greatest tragedy of my life," Aronowitz says. "I thought we had lost this battle, but I wrote to John Grauer [a Methodist minister and the only non-Jewish member of the crew], 'If we have one more defeat like this, Britain's empire will sink into oblivion.' "
In 1948, after the British Mandate formally came to an end, during what Israelis call the War of Independence and what Palestinians call the Nakba (the Catastrophe), the Hammamis were driven out of Jaffa. Another refugee ship set sail, this time in the opposite direction. Hasan says, "We left in a Mediterranean saiq, a traditional cargo boat, [with] more than 3,000 people like sardines, escaping for their lives. We ran out of water in the first few hours, I saw a woman abort three feet away, and we were intercepted by British navy ships several times and they let us go." After days at sea, they arrived in Lebanon, where the now penniless family struggled to make a living and give their children an education. Hasan wandered from one country to the next, eventually settling in Florida, where he had a successful career as an engineer.
Aronowitz, now 83, became a ship owner running lines to China, Singapore and Iran. Livney and his wife live on Kibbutz Barkai, a short drive from Aronowitz's house where, this year, the day after Independence Day, the red flag was flying proudly alongside its Israeli counterpart from the roof of the communal building. Passow, now 89, retired two years ago from a professorship at Hebrew University and lives in Jerusalem. Klieger was reunited with his parents in Brussels and made it to Israel six days after the state was declared. He became a journalist and is on the editorial board of Israel's leading newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, where, at 81, he still goes to work every day, the forearm on which his Auschwitz number is tattooed bent over his keyboard.
Politically, they all took different directions. Livney, a teenage member of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist-Zionist youth movement in New York, maintains his socialist convictions - he and his wife have been active members of Peace Now. Aronowitz, who started out on the left, developed a feud with prime minister David Ben-Gurion in the early 50s, when Ben-Gurion broke a shipping strike, driving Aronowitz to the right, perhaps more out of intransigence than ideology. As Livney says diplomatically, Aronowitz was always strong-willed - a couple of weeks earlier, he'd briefly hit the headlines again, this time for being in court for driving without a licence for 18 years. To Klieger, a specialist writer on anti-semitism, European anti-Zionism remains inexplicable: "How can a normal European think we are wrong?" he says. "Not only do they think we are wrong, they say we are wrong, that we are Nazis!"
Listening to these old men in a sunlit restaurant as they talk about events of six decades ago, one is struck by how the history of Zionism, and the Zionist policy of illegal immigration that brought hope to Jewish refugees and made new refugees out of Palestinians, has an additional meaning we have half-forgotten - that in taking on the British empire, the survivors of an attempt at total genocide were recovering their pride and dignity, their sense of being human. The defiance of the blockade helped them overcome their shame at having been victims.
"I would say that if I had to do it again, because, God forbid, we had an extreme situation, I would," Passow says. "There is no question that it was an act of heroism and proved that, when push comes to shove, the Jewish people were capable of great things. Of course, living in Israel today, you wouldn't say that."
