soc.history.war.world-war-ii

Has anyone read "Exodus 1947" by Ruth Gerber? She was a reporter for
the NY Herald Tribune and first to report from the Soviet Artic.
During 1944, while working for Secretary of the Interior Harold L.
Ickes, President Roosevelt sent Gruber on a secret mission to escort
1,000 WW2 refugees in a secret convoy across the Atlantic to America.
This, in turn, led to her coverage of one of the worst incidents in
Jewish history as well as the spark that launched the State of Israel.
Gruber waited in Haifa on July 18, 1947 for the ship "Exodus 1947" to
come in. But what she saw and captured on film was the most moving
event in her life. The Royal Navy had rammed the ship of 4,500
Holocaust survivors crammed into a former tourist vessel meant to hold
no more than 400 passengers. They boarded her and fought these people,
finally detaining them below deck in squalid conditions- all to
prevent her from entering Palestine.* Gruber interviewed many of the
survivors from Haifa to the prison camps on Cyprus where she was lied
to by the British authorities that the DPs would be freed. Instead,
they were herded back on board prison ships (described by the British
as hospital ships) and taken to southern France which rejected them
and ultimately back to the death-land of Germany where the Germans
openly mocked them in front of the occupation forces. Gruber, the lone
journalist, took her stories and photos and sent them to the New York
and Paris Herald Tribunes which were shown round the shocked world.
British and French anti-semiticism was very much alive post-WW2 and
the British Mandate in Palestine was used as a cover-up for brutal
behavior on the part of the RN and British foreign policy decisions
concerning Holocaust survivors (referred to as simply DPs). This
incident sparked such outrage that it arguably influenced the UN
decision to finally create the State of Israel in 1948. In 1948,
Gruber took her photos and material and made a book called
"Destination Palestine" that bercame the basis of Leon Uris's best-
selling novel "Exodus" which led in turn to the famous movie "Exodus".
"Exodus 1947" also contains the wretched living conditions in the so-
called DP centers of ravished Europe where the Holocaust survivors
originally came from.

I strongly recommend this book to everyone.
"Exodus 1947", Ruth Gruber, 1948/1999, ISBN 0-8129-3154-8

* The British Royal Navy intercepted "Exodus 1947" 17 miles out from
Haifa in international waters and used 5 destroyers and 1 cruiser to
ram her from three sides. British soldiers and Marines then hostilly
boarded her and threw tear-gas bombs, used guns and truncheons to beat
the Holocaust survivors into submission over a 3 hr period. One person
was killed, 5 were dying, and 120 wounded.

Rob