Well, I realized that I hadn't posted at all from Tel Aviv. Actually, that's because it was pretty banal stuff -- lots of beach and pool time. Restful and enjoyable for sure, but nothing to write about. But today we left for Haifa (on the Northern coast of Israel). First the hotel. We had reserved a room at the Dan Panorama but they contacted us and told us that they had overbooked and would we be willing to stay at the Dan Carmel (a more expensive hotel) for the same price. Lamah lo? (Why not? -- and, along with "nu" a favorite expression of Israelis). So when we arrived we expected to get one of the less expensive rooms, but I asked if they had a room with two beds. The guy said no, but he could give us a very nice room on their "Executive Floor" with a king bed. We took it.
Wow!!! We are on the top floor with a huge balcony which looks out on Haifa bay and -- a couple of firsts for me -- our room has a doorbell and a TV in the bathroom so you can watch TV while you take a bath!! Sarah is beside herself! It IS pretty cool.
We didn't get here until about 2'ish so this afternoon we decided to visit the "Illegal" Immigrant Detention Camp at Atlit (maybe 15 km away). Really fascinating. This is the camp in which the British detained a number of concentration camp survivors whom the Haganah was trying to sneak into Palestine (as it was called then). Think about the movie Exodus -- more on the true story of the Exodus later. So imagine that you have just survived the horrors of life in a place like Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen and you think that you are finally coming to the promised land. Instead, you wind up in a detention camp which is eerily reminiscent of the concentration camps. Of course no one was being exterminated or beaten, and the living conditions were somewhat better (people had their own beds in barracks that accommodated about 50 people each). However, barracks are barracks and these look an awful lot like the ones I saw at Auschwitz. They also were stiflingly hot in the summer and brutally cold in winter (no heat or fires allowed). As the detainees arrived, their first stop was the disinfection barracks where they had to strip and their clothing was placed in a disinfecting vat and they were powdered with DDT (to deal with lice, etc.) before being required to shower. Again, imagine what fears this must have aroused in these survivors who had so recently been interred in camps where gas chambers masqueraded as showers!! The internees were then separated into two sides of the camp (men on one side, women and children on the other) with a fence in between them. The camp was secured by barbed wire fences and guard towers (hard to tell the difference between these and those at Auschwitz) with armed guards. Additionally, they were counted morning and night. All of this must have been a horrible deja vu experience for these folks.
Fast forward, if you will, to October of 1945. A Palmach unit (the Palmach were the "strike forces" of the Haganah), led by none other than a young Yitzchak Rabin, engineered a prison break from the Atlit detention camp and 208 internees were freed. The plan was nothing short of brilliant. The Palmach got eight of its members into the camp about a week in advance under the guise of being Hebrew teachers. While teaching the internees Hebrew they also prepared them for the breakout so that there would be total cooperation. These operatives discovered that two of the camp guards were Jews and gained their cooperation. As a result they were able to sabotage the weapons of the British so that they were inoperable! After a daring escape in the dead of night, all of the internees were immediately resettled in kibbutzim. BTW, when the State of Israel was established in 1948, almost a fifth of its citizens were individuals who had been "illegally" brought into Palestine!
So the true story of the ship Exodus. The ship, originally named the SS Warfield, was American made and had actually been slated for demolition before it was sold to the Haganah and renamed the Exodus. BTW, it was also skippered by an American. Like most of the blockade running ships, it was in very poor condition. What was unique about the Exodus was its size. Most of these ships carried a few hundred passengers at most. The Exodus was able to carry >4500!! Clearly this was not a ship that was going to "sneak" by anyone and, because of this, it was intended as a ship which would "challenge" the British blockade of Palestine. Indeed, the Haganah hoped that its size and its sea-unworthiness (I know, I made that up, but you know what I mean) would force the hand of the British since detaining it at sea might well lead to its sinking. It embarked on its voyage on July 11, 1947 departing from France. When it approached the shore of Haifa it was attacked by British boats and boarded. In fact, three passengers were bludgeoned to death during this operation. It was brought into shore but the occupants were immediately placed on a boat (more seaworthy) and shipped back to France! Upon arrival, the passengers refused to disembark, and the French refused to forcibly remove them. What was the "solution" that the British came up with? Ship them back to Germany!! When the passengers got word of this they staged a hunger strike. Unfortunately, it was unsuccessful and the ship was indeed sent to Germany where they were forced to disembark and interred them in DP camps. BTW, most of these passengers did, in fact, reach Israel after the state was declared.
An interesting aside to the Exodus story is that, although the passengers were unsuccessful in their initial attempts to reach Palestine, the ship carried reporters from all over the world and the outrageous story was covered extensively. It is believed that the outrage that this debacle represented had a direct influence on the members of the UN when they voted for the partition of the British mandated territory in Palestine which led to the formation of the State of Israel. For sure, I can't imagine that the British had this in mind at the time!!
So, tomorrow we are going to Rosh HaNikra (on the Lebanese border) and to an Australian zoo near here. I know -- what has that got to do with anything? Well, Sarah read about it in the guidebook and really wants to go and see the koalas. So, it is on the agenda. Saturday will be beach day and a tour of the Bahai gardens (which we can see from our balcony). On our way (?) to J'm on Sunday we will go to Akko and to Lohamei Hagheta'ot (a kibbutz that was established by fighters from the ghettos during WWII and which has a museum that memorializes this).
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