Immigration to Palestine

Text

“You know I was very Jewish growing up, but I didn’t know much of anything about Judaism or Zionism, that was until the army, the Russian Army came to liberate Poland. And this was when I was in the orphanage and many of the soldiers were Jewish and some were Zionists, and I learned a lot about the Holy Land and Palestine from them.” 

“Sleeping in a bed, with linen sheets, overlooking trees; I hadn’t seen a bed in years at this point, and they fed me this bowl of pea soup with pieces of bacon; I gulped it down like there was no tomorrow.” 

“And this group we all cross the Polish border and snuck into Czechoslovakia. We went into Prague. We stayed there for 5 weeks and continued to organize with Jews until we got more people. And from there we smuggled ourselves into the Russian side of Germany at nighttime.” 

“2600 people like herrings all packed on this freight ship that left France. The sea was rough, and we couldn’t go on deck in case the airplanes saw all these people on a cargo ship. And for two weeks we sailed until we came to Palestine and that’s when the British saw us there and knew what was happening. I counted 15 warships surrounding us and we put up a fight on the deck and the British were shooting tear gas and it was awful, I thought I was going to die. They took control of our ship and 20 people were injured and 4, maybe more were dead.” 

“I was in camp 65, which was a children’s camp for refugees in Cyprus that was surrounded by barbed wire. All around were British guards armed with machine guns.”