British soldiers attend a stricken female passenger and her husband at the Kuecknitz railroad station after their forcible return to Europe.
Overview
- Caption
- British soldiers attend a stricken female passenger and her husband at the Kuecknitz railroad station after their forcible return to Europe.
Pictured are Batia Michaele (Fleisher) Gutstein and her husband Michael Gutstein. - Date
-
1947 September 08
- Locale
- Kuecknitz, [Luebeck] Germany
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Yeheskel Fleisher
- Event History
- The Exodus 1947 was an illegal immigrant ship carrying 4500 Jewish displaced persons from Europe to Palestine during the final year of the British Mandate. It became the symbol of the struggle for the right of unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine and the need for a Jewish national home. In November 1946 the Mosad le-Aliya Bet (the Agency for Illegal Immigration) acquired an American ship, the President Warfield, an old Chesapeake Bay pleasure steamer. During World War II, the vessel had been converted into a troop ship for the British navy. After taking part in the Allied landing at Normandy, the ship was taken out of service and anchored in the ships' graveyard in Baltimore. Immediately after the Mosad purchased the vessel, its interior was reconfigured in order to maximize the number of passengers it could hold. By the end of January 1947 the initial conversion was complete and a crew of nearly 40 American Jewish volunteers had been assembled in Baltimore. The crew was joined by a Methodist minister, John Stanley Grauel, who served as the official observer for the American Christian Palestine Committee. It was the Mosad's intention to mount a huge illegal immigration operation that would draw the attention of the international media and influence the members of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), who would then be visiting Palestine on a fact-finding mission. In early July 1947, Jewish DPs were moved from camps in Germany to transit camps in the south of France. With the cooperation of several French Socialist cabinet ministers, they boarded the President Warfield at the old port of Sete, near Marseilles. Once it was out to sea, the vessel was renamed the Exodus 1947. The ship was intercepted by the British navy off the coast of Palestine. The sailors were able to board the vessel, tow it to Haifa, and unload its passengers only after an extended struggle, which left two passengers and one crew member dead and many injured. In the port of Haifa the illegal immigrants were transferred by force to three British vessels--the Ocean Vigour, Runnymede Park, and Empire Rival-- to be taken back to France. This marked a significant change in British policy from what had been the standard procedure since August 1946, namely, the deportation of all apprehended illegal immigrants to detention camps in Cyprus. When the ships arrived in France on July 28, most of the passengers chose to remain on board. The French refused to accede to the British demand to force them out. For a month the three ships remained anchored near Port-de-Bouc. The refugee passengers suffered under grueling conditions. Finally, after a hunger strike, the British decided to return the refugees to DP camps in Germany. The ships arrived in Hamburg on September 8 and their passengers were forcibly removed by British soldiers. From Hamburg, they were taken by prisoner trains with barred windows to the Poppendorf and Amstau DP camps in the British zone. Most of the Exodus refugees remained in the DP camps for over a year, reaching Israel only after the state was established in May 1948. In 1951 the Mayor of Haifa announced that the Exodus 1947 was to become "a floating museum, a symbol of the desperate attempts by Jewish refugees to find asylum in the Holy Land." The project was put on hold while attention was focused on issues of national security. However, on August 26, 1952, the ship caught fire and burned to the waterline. It was towed out of the shipping area and abandoned on Shemen beach. On August 23, 1964, an attempt was made to salvage the Exodus 1947 for scrap, but during the process, the hulk broke loose and sank. It remains on the bottom of Shemen beach near Haifa.
[Source: "Poppendorf statt Palastina" (The Haganah Ship Exodus 1947), an online exhibition by Henrik Jan Fahlbusch et al.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/exodus-1947.
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Yeheskel Fleisher
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Yehezkel Fleisher is the youngest child of Shlomo David and Tame-Dvora Fleisher. He was born on June 21, 1917 in a small village in Lithuania and grew up in the somewhat larger town of Kursenai where his father sold leather and fur goods. The family also ran a small grocery store from their home. Yehezkel had three brothers, Haim Ber, Zalman Lezer, and Reuven Leib and two sisters, Esther Raize and Batia Michaele. Yehezkel studied in a cheder, a Tarbut school, and graduated from a public school. He then learned sewing and leather making. In 1934 Yehezkel moved to Telsiai to join a Hehalutz hachshara. Two year later, after learning that he could not receive an immigration certificate for Palestine, he left the hachshara and opened his own shoemaking workshop. In June 1941, Germany launched a surprise invasion of Lithuania. When the war broke out, Yehezkel was on route to Linkuvo, near the Latvian border. He was rounded up along with other Jewish refugees, brought to a crowded warehouse without adequate food, water or sanitation and threatened with death. After ten days, he was transferred to the "Red" prison in Siauliai where conditions were even worse. The prisoners were forced to dig the graves of other Jews. After six weeks of imprisonment, Yehezkel was released, ordered to wear a yellow star and sent to the new ghetto in Siauliai. Immediately after his release, he had a photograph taken of himself that he kept with him throughout the war as proof of what he endured. Since Yehezkel was a trained craftsman, he was given work outside the ghetto in a leather workshop. One year later, in 1942, he met Leah, a friend from the Telsiai hachshara, who had smuggled herself into the ghetto after spending a year in hiding. Yehezkel helped her officially register in the ghetto by telling ghetto officials they were married. Following the November 1943 children's aktion, Leah made contact with Christians who had hid her prior to her arrival in the ghetto. A few days later, her acquaintances arrived outside the ghetto at 5:00 a.m. with a horse and wagon, and Leah and Yehezkel escaped the ghetto together with another couple. Yehezkel lay hidden in the wagon until they safely arrived at an isolated village early the following morning. They remained there for six weeks until a friend of the rescuer warned him that the police knew he was hiding Jews. Yehezkel and Leah evaded the police search by hiding in the roof of the barn, but left immediately for a new hiding place. Leah and Yehezkel stayed in their new hiding place for half a year. Yehezkel, who had kept his leather-making tools with him, supported himself by making purses. He gave them to a Jewish woman who was married to a Lithuanian in Telsiai, and she sold the merchandise in Vilna. Eventually, this arrangement also proved to be too dangerous. During their year in hiding, Yehezkel and Leah hid with twelve different families in addition to spending nights hiding on their own in fields or forests. They were eventually liberated by the Soviet Army in the summer of 1944. At first, the Russian soldiers refused to believe that Yehezkel was Jewish until he showed them the photograph taken after his release from prison wearing a yellow star. Yehezkel and Leah wanted to leave Lithuania for Palestine. In December, 1945 they went to Vilna to join a Bricha convoy despite the fact that Leah had given birth to their daughter, Elka, only 17 days before. The convoy's first three trucks safely left Lithuania, but police stopped and fired on the fourth truck, with the Fleishers on board, at a checkpoint. One passenger was killed and two others were injured. The Fleishers escaped into nearby snow-covered mountains, but Elka nearly died in the process. They returned to temporarily to Vilna but eventually made their way to the American zone of Germany by way of Bialystok, Warsaw, and Lodz. They arrived in Berlin by Pesach 1946 and met Yehezkel's sister and brother-in-law, Batia Michaele and Michael Gutstein. The Gutsteins planned to illegally immigrate to Palestine on board the Exodus. However, since Yehezkel and Leah had a baby they were told that they were not eligible to sail with them. After the British forcibly returned the refugees to Europe, Batia who had taken ill had to be carried out of the ship on a stretcher. Yehezkel, Leah and Elka legally immigrated to Israel on January 10, 1949 on board the ship Atzmaut. Both of Yehezkel's parents and three of his siblings, Esther Raize, Zalman Lezer, Reuven Leib were murdered during the Holocaust.
- Record last modified:
- 2005-03-24 00:00:00
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