Atlit Detention Camp

On Tuesday we visited the Atlit Detention Camp. This was originally built to be a POW holding camp, but in the mid-1900s it became a jail, essentially, for illegal immigrants (or the more preferred title here: clandestine immigrants) to what is now Israel. As anti-semitism grew more and more explicit, Jews were escaping their home countries (Germany, Russia, Syria, etc.) to take refuge here. The land was then under the British Mandate, and the people in Palestine demanded Britain slow the influx of new immigrants, so they put a limit on how many people could enter the country. But the Jews were fleeing for their lives and had nowhere else to go, so they still came.

Those who were able to elude the authorities were welcomed into Kibbutzim, and those who were caught were sent to these detention camps. People who were kept at places like Atlit say that although the conditions were rough, they were the lucky ones. Others who were blocked before making it to shore, or who arrived after all the detention camps in Palestine were full were sent to similar ones in other places, like Cyprus (where our guide’s grandparents met, after her grandmother survived Auschwitz), still kept out of Zion—and even worse, many people drowned before arriving or being caught.

The detention camps were drastically different from concentration camps in that prisoners had plenty to eat, were not subjected to violence and unspeakable experiments, and were not humiliated, nor punished when they tried to escape. However, living conditions were still hot, humid, and crowded. And people living there were surrounded by three barbed wire fences, watchtowers, and patrolling guards.

When you were captured trying to immigrate without papers (since the number of papers awarded was incredibly limited), you were sent to the camp and first on the “to do” list was to sterilize your clothes, clean your body, and debug your skin and hair. Many people had escaped from torrential circumstances, and spent weeks in boats crowded to as much as three times their capacity. They could arrive ill, starved, half-dead, and carrying any number of mites. So, while the showers were meant for their health, and comfort, many still resisted with all their might, remembering the “showers” in Germany that turned out to be gas chambers. Even if there was a shared language (which there was not, as people came from dozens of countries), the explanation that it was for good intentions probably would not have calmed their nerves.

However, immediately there was a distinction. While they waited in line, the soldiers handed each prisoner an orange. Imagine! In the hot, dusty, humid, crowded line, handed an orange. What relief! However, many people had never seen one and did not know how to eat them. They bit right into the peel, and only later along the way learned how to peel them to get directly to the sweet juice. Many people tell stories about sneaking back in line after the shower just to get a second orange to try it the “right way”.

To get rid of bugs, they were made to cover themselves in a talc-like substance that was DDT—we didn’t know back then of all the health problems it can cause, and then enter the showers, put their clothes in a little turnstile thing where workers then put them in the washing machines, and shower en masse, men in one room, and women in the other.

Tragically, in the confusion, and probably under the strain of a lot of panic, many people forgot to empty out their pockets before sending their clothes, and countless bits of memorabilia were lost in the steam that sterilized the clothes: letters from loved ones, journals and memoirs. Pictures. All these pieces of their lives that may have been their last connection to people they’d never see again, were destroyed in a manner of minutes as they fought down panic to continue surviving in this finally safe place, after all they’d been able to carry them through.

Sometimes their clothes shrunk in the steam. One girl remembers her wool dress coming out of the washer looking like a doll’s dress. She was greatly grieved, understandably. She was provided clothes somehow, but that was not good enough for her friends. They gathered some beige material from here and there, and were able to make a new dress for her! Can you imagine her face when they surprised her with it?? She wore that dress on her wedding day.

During their time in the detention camp, they learned Hebrew and often a trade that would help them in their new lives after they were released. They worked in the camp, planting trees and stuff, studied and played various games to pass the time, and of course engaged in Jewish Geography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_geography). At night, when the barracks grew quiet, people remember hearing sir names called out into the darkness, in the hopes that someone would recognize the name and the next day seek them out to share some little snippet of a story about any family members they had seen, or knew where they had gone, or how they had perished.

Men and women were separated by a barbed wire fence, but once a day they came together for an hour, and they connected and re-connected with each other. Wives met up with husbands, parents with children, and new romances were born. At one of these gatherings, someone snapped a picture that illustrates just how different Atlit was from any concentration camp. The people in it are clearly healthy, well-fed, and even smiling. They have hope.

The barracks showed evidence of some of the trauma they had survived. Even though they were given food several times a day, and plenty of it, many people still stole away extra, and hid it in bundles hanging from the rafters. The idea was that this might protect it from mice, though that seemingly was not the case.

Every night, soldiers would count the people in the barrack and then lock the doors. In the morning, each person was counted to make sure no one had escaped and was hiding on the grounds somewhere. Prisoners used to pester the guards by hiding people under the beds, or putting belongings where no one slept, to send them out on a wild goose chase around the grounds after the supposed missing person.

Few people did actually escape on their own. But in one instance, 208 people fled the camp all at once. The Haganah (the underground Jewish military, which later became the Israeli Defense Force) had caught wind that the people in the Atlit detention camp were to be deported back to their countries of origin. For Syrian Jews (and many others) this would mean an immediate death sentence the moment they landed. The Haganah sent in six “Hebrew teachers”—who did actually teach some Hebrew, but who also prepared the prisoners for the escape, gathered intel from inside the camp, and disabled the sentries’ guns by removing a small, but crucial part of the gun (the clip, maybe? I’m not gun-literate. ;-)). On the 9^th of October, 1945, the barbed wire was cut from the outside, and pulled open. Haganah soldiers climbed the watchtowers and bound and gagged the guards, and men, women, and children were roused and, used to surviving, gathered their meager belongings and set out on foot. The 208 people walked, and walked, and hiked through the night, up Mount Carmel, trying to get to a kibbutz called Beit Oren. The leaders suggested they leave their suitcases behind, to quicken the pace so they could beat the sunrise quickly approaching, but they were not simply bringing clothes or shoes that could be replaced, but precious memories, so the suitcases were kept.

They were not to the kibbutz by the time they heard cars approaching, and the escape looked like it was failing. But word had gotten out about what was happening. Bullhorns all over Haifa had called out in the night to wake up citizens and tell them that the prisoners from Atlit were in trouble, and all of Haifa—thousands of people—gathered around the Kibbutz. When the prisoners came out of the forest, they easily faded into the crowd, and the police officers still remember the effectiveness of the civil disobedience. Unless the British officers could arrest, or somehow eliminate, these thousands of citizens, and figure out who were legal and who were escaped refugees, they could not return them to the camp. They gave up after two hours, and the 208 people were saved from deportation and the consequential death that would have been imminent.

So many people have incredible stories about how they arrived in Israel. It is a race against time to gather their tales before that generation passes. Of course many of their children and grand-children know the stories by heart, but we all know what it is to see the story-teller’s face as they describe what they are reliving as they share it.

One boat came to Haifa, overflowing with refugees, but of course the port city was covered with soldiers barring the way. The people in Haifa threw a huge party, and all the girls went out and invited the men to the (was it a Christmas?) party…the boat had free entrance under the veil of darkness, but in the night a rock rose up under the hull and stranded them in the dark waves. People aboard tied together material to form a rope, and the passengers held on as they swam and pulled their way to shore. Two girls drowned, but hundreds survived. Tongue in cheek, they left a thank you letter to the soldiers who unknowingly opened the way for them. Years later, I think at a party of some sort, a former British soldier was telling about that night to a Jewish man, and explaining the good reason he had left his post. The Jewish man asked a few clarifying questions, and then grinning, told him that he had been one of the men on the boat that night, and thanked him for his new citizenship.

On another boat, a woman went into labor and the baby was turned in a complicating position. She needed surgery immediately or the baby and mom would both die. Having escaped notice by all the British ships and planes up till now, they decided to risk everything, and put out a call for help. Within five minutes a floating surgery unit came alongside the boat. Shortly after, the passengers on the dark boat heard over the PA the baby’s first cry, signaling the surgery had been a success. Decades later, a girl told about her extraordinary birth, and the captain of the cruise she was on, who had joined her table to greet his passengers, asked a few questions, and guessed her birth date. Then was pleased, and perhaps a bit astonished, to inform her that he had delivered her.

One of my friends told me about the boat her grandparents were on. The British navy was about to capture them, and the captain could not get them ashore safely in time. If they were caught on the sea, the passengers would be sent to Cyprus or beyond, instead of to a detention camp in the land, where they would eventually be released into what became Israel. He took a huge risk, and set the boat on fire! To save lives, the military then had to just rescue the people and take them ashore, instead of ordering the boat to turn around. Once in the land, they were able to stay. The creativity and risks of the tactics I hear in almost every story highlights the desperation and grasping at hope that has so defined that generation, and consequently their progeny.