Jews

Jews in Cyprus

After World War II, the impact of British opposition was devastating to Displaced Persons (refugees), recently saved from Hitler's ovens but now in limbo created by international unwillingness to accept them as refugees. The one destination they preferred above all others was Palestine, but entry there was blocked by the British policy. Between August 1945 and the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, 65 "illegal" immigrant ships, carrying 69,878 people, arrived from European shores. In August 1946, however, the British began to intern those they caught in camps in Cyprus. Fifty two thousand Jews were interned and 2200 babies were born on Cyprus between 1946 and 1949 on the island. Most of the fifty two thousand displaced people were between thirteen and thirty five years of age.innernet.org.il momentmag.com mifamilyhistory.org habonimdror.org heritage.org.il britains-smallwars.com

Israel honors 'Papa' hri.org
Pictures of the camps ushmm.org
Jewish Illegal Immigrants at Kraolos, Cyprus fcit.coedu.usf.edu
The Forgotten Jews of Cyprus eretz.com
Jewish Teens Re-Create Voyage of the "Exodus" centerforcatholicjewishstudies.org
Abraham Lampert's Cyprus Stone Sculptures poetryjewels.bigstep.com Artifacts from Cyprus detainment camps yadvashem.org

Photos
British soldiers transfer children refugees from the Aliyah Bet ("illegal" immigration) ship "Theodor Herzl" to a vessel for deportation to Cyprus detention camps. Haifa port, Palestine, April 24, 1947. ushmm.org
Jewish New Year's card sent from the Cyprus detention camp. ushmm.org
Jewish New Year's card bearing the photo of a young couple and their child and a drawing of the illegal immigration ship, the President Warfield [later renamed the Exodus 1947]. ushmm.org
Passengers aboard the Exodus 1947 watch as the boarding party from the British destroyer, H.M.S. Ajax, approaches the illegal immigrant ship. ushmm.org
The last group of European Jewish refugees leaves a British detention camp for Israel. Cyprus, February 10, 1949. ushmm.org ushmm.org
Jewish refugee youths, prevented by the British from landing in Palestine, learn sewing at a detention camp. The machines are provided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Cyprus, 1947. ushmm.org

The film Exodus, staring Paul Newman made in 1960 was based on the book by Leon Uris. Filmed in Israel. An epic drama of postwar Palestine, the founding of Israel, and the ship called Exodus, filled with Displaced Persons from the Britich detention camps of Cyprus.

Ruth Gruber, an American journalist, cabled the New York Herald: During the "battle," the British rammed the Exodus and stormed it with guns, tear gas and truncheons. Gruber noted that the crew, mostly Jews from America and Palestine, fought back with potatoes, sticks and cans of kosher meat. The Exodus’s second officer, Bill Bernstein of San Francisco, was clubbed to death trying to prevent a British soldier from entering the wheelhouse. Two orphans were killed, one shot in the face point blank after he tossed an orange at a soldier.
When she learned that the prisoners from the Exodus were being transferred to Cyprus, she flew there overnight. While she waited for the Exodus detainees, she photographed earlier Jewish prisoners living behind barbed wire in steaming hot tents with almost no water or sanitary facilities. "You had to smell Cyprus to believe it". palestinefacts.org

The Decision to Detain Jews in Cyprus: An overview of the camps and conditions within motlc.learningcenter.wiesenthal.org

HOW THE JEWS CAME TO CYPRUS
Taken from "Picture Post" September 7 1946
Picture Post journalist Fyfe Robertson and photographer Charles Hewitt were in Cyprus when the first boatloads of illegal Jewish immigrants arrived. With scant help from authorities on the spot, they give a picture of what happened.

The Woman Who Wonders if Her Wanderings will Ever End: An 'Illegal' Jewish Immigrant Arrives in Cyprus Is she from Germany, Austria, Poland? Did she hitchhike to the Mediterranean or did she walk all the way? How did she get a passage to Palestine? What matters to her is that she is harassed and miserable, and has failed to reach her destination. Sick and bewildered, she lies on the quay at Famagusta, Cyprus. Around her are British soldiers. They treat her gently. But before her stretches something with which she is no doubt familiar—the barbed wire of a camp.

THIS story is not a pretty one. The whole episode of the forcible trans-shipment at Haifa of thousands of men, women and children of the world's most persecuted people, their shipment to Cyprus under armed guard, and their imprisonment there, with all the inescapable and intimidating precautions of any concentration camp, adds no glory to Britain. Whatever its justification, it was bound to be distasteful to humane and civilized men. In consequence, care should have been taken to avoid unfortunate incidents, and above all to ensure that facts were adequately reported.

This clearly called for quick, commonsense decisions at every adequate level, yet the whole operation was left, as far as I could discover, to local Army officers and Colonial Office officials;
and there can be few organisations with a more rigid hierarchy or more wholly circumscribed authority than the Army and the Colonial Office. The result was an ostrich-like and meaningless secrecy, the issuing of orders almost calculated to cause friction, based on Heaven-knows-what dim red-taped mental process, and obstruction of the Press carried to unbelievable lengths. There can be no doubt—and no Army officer or Colonial official I have questioned denies it—that the rioting at Karaolos Camp would not have happened if prisoners had been allowed to talk freely to journalists. The Karaolos rioting was, I think, wholly avoidable, and though the young K.S.L.I. guards, who stopped the break-out, fired over the heads of the prisoners, it is unforgivable that a situation should have been allowed to arise where Britain's good name was left in the hands of inexperienced youngsters with guns. In fact, in the end it was reasoning and not rifles that quietened and dispersed the rioters.

I was on a boat in Famagusta Bay when the first refugee ships arrived. For a week Cyprus had been waiting for them, and the wildest rumors had been going around that these were the first of many thousands that Britain would settle in the island for political purposes. In countries abroad where there is a Jewish population and where people are suspicious of Britain, there were stories of bad conditions and brutal treatment on British ships. These Stories were not true, and here on the murmuring beach stood four pressmen anxious to see for themselves and tell the world. But the authorities said no. No photographs, no facilities, no information. - With difficulty we persuaded a fisherman to sail us out to the anchored ships.

Thirty soldiers were bathing under the bows of the Empire Rival. Above them a crowd of fellow-soldiers shouted and joked, but amid all the laughter and happy larking there was one terrible thing—the tight, bitter faces of the prisoners, young men and women, who were looking on from a cage on the foredeck. Most of the men were stripped to the waist, and looked very fit—some even tough and powerful. The majority seem to be in their twenties. Most of the girls, many still in their teens, were dressed in bathing costumes. They seemed scarcely to talk to one another, but just looked down with those blank faces full of bewilderment and hate.

On the Empire Heywood, some of the women and children, who had taken care not to notice us, began to chant louder and louder in unison. I could distinguish only the world, “Palestine,” reiterated repeatedly.

One of the tragic scenes of our times: Under the guns of H.M.S. Ajax illegal Jews are disembarking in Cyprus

Journey's End for the folk who had hoped to find a home at last. They've had years of terror. Now they want security and a new life. They try to pour into Palestine. Palestine cannot absorb them all. Camps for 10,000 are built in Cyprus. But still the Jews come

Then two ^Z' craft began to load the prisoners. The stretcher cases were lowered by sling. They were handled with great care and gentleness by the British troops. Motionless, their fingers hooked in the wire mesh of the cage, the prisoners crowding the shipside watched in silence. On shore, ambulances waited.

The Army expected trouble after the Haifa episode, where those Jews who refused to transship, were forcibly moved. There was however, no trouble at all. Very gently, perhaps overawed by the troops, or perhaps accepting the inevitable, prisoners walked down the gangway. First came an elderly woman, stepping cautiously, with one soldier going in front to reassure her and another close behind to help her. Other soldiers followed, carefully carrying babies and very young children.
The elaborate precautions—tommy-gunners right across the roads, jeeps going before and behind, the lorries which took them to the camp and extra police to cope with possible demonstrations by the Cypriots or the prisoners were unnecessary. Curious Cypriote waved to the lorries and one Greek-speaking prisoner shouted "I am not a criminal, why are they putting me in a concentration camp?”

We were not allowed to follow the immigrants to their camp, but after protests a visit was arranged a few days later. We were told we would not be allowed to talk to prisoners but that we might be allowed to submit, in writing to camp leaders in the Commandant's Office, officially vetted questions which must not include questions touching on political matters, country of origin, conditions aboard ships, events in Haifa, or anything except conditions of the camp.

Hardly were we inside the camp when the trouble began. Peaceably at first, in the unmarried compound, the sound of singing warned us of the approach of a big procession. Almost all the adults came up-the main avenue towards the main entrance singing, "We want freedom!" and carrying the Jewish flag. At the entrance, guarded by men of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, there was shouting and stone-throwing as the singing mob burst through the barbed-wire gate into the outer perimeter.

Shots Fired Over The Crowd
One soldier was knocked down and two received nasty but not serious injuries from stones striking them on the head, and a newsreel man had his camera-case smashed. The mob was halted by blank cartridge shots or live bullets fired in the air, they were driven back inside and the gates were closed. Outside I found a line of soldiers drawn up with rifles ready, and the two injured men having their wounds dressed. In all I beard about 30 shots and a great deal of shouting.

The reason for the demonstration was refusal to allow reporters to talk to Jews. Even the vetted questions to the two camp leaders were banned. On hearing this, the leaders hurried away and organized a procession. On reaching the gate there was some stone throwing. Two or three men in a state of painful excitement and obviously unbalanced emotionally, were being restrained with difficulty by other prisoners. But a crowd is a dangerous and unpredictable thing, and mounting excitement and the inescapable pressure of those behind caused the leading demonstrators to burst through the barrier and spill into the outer perimeter. They had advanced only a few yards—they were obviously not really attempting to escape—when the guards fired above their heads; but though the prisoners halted, they did not retire. It was at this moment that Mr. Fishman, a Jewish journalist from Palestine, climbed the barricade and spoke to the demonstrators in Yiddish, promising access to reporters if they would retire and disperse. Upon this they retired.

When the Empire Rival, which had returned "to Haifa, arrived again at Famagusta with almost 800 more Jews, Pressmen were allowed to go out in “Z” craft for landing operations in the early morning, and permitted aboard the Rival after the Jews had landed. There were no incidents, and this time there was no parade of military strength along the route to the camp. It was noticeable that these immigrants looked less fit than the first arrivals. They were sullen and suspicious and in many cases plainly under-nourished. They showed more clearly the results of concentration camp and persecution. Among the slogans on the white walls of the holds that housed them—48 feet long and 40 feet wide-was "More of us will come. Bevin will not stop us."

When I left Cyprus there had been no further trouble at the camp. It is to be hoped that the special Cyprus legal amendment providing for the use of fire-arms to prevent escape will never be needed. The new arrivals have been absorbed quietly and the camp authorities, by improving the diet, providing showers, allowing newspapers, and permitting letters—censored in Palestine —to relatives, are gradually removing some of the immediate causes of complaint. The food should, and surely will be, increased and varied. For the fact is that Army rations are not only unsuitable for little children but insufficient to people suffering from prolonged undernourishment and present frustrations. The Camp Commandant himself, who, in caring for the prisoners, makes the best of the supplies he is allowed up to the present, said that many even apparently fit prisoners were badly in need of building up. "These people," he said, "could eat double the Army rations.”

As this camp and a new one still being hurriedly built will accommodate 10,000 the authorities are evidently anticipating
Many more illegal ships. The single-mindedness of Jews, seeking sanctuary from persecution, stigma, and the failure of the great Powers to tackle the problem except on the lines of next war's strategy and political expediency, may yet create in the Middle East a Displaced Persons problem more knotty and more calculated to cause hatred among peoples than the plight of Europe's homeless.