Atlit
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independence and the newer arrivals. “We were called Sabonim, the ‘soaps,’ because the Germans…” Mayer can’t finish the sentence. “It turned out that this was never true,” he says, dismissing the rumor that Germans made soap out of Jewish fat during the Shoah. Even so, Mayer says, he wouldn’t change his history. “I saw the world when there was no Israel; now there is an Israel, this is a momentous miracle.” After 1946, most illegal immigrants were diverted to camps in Cyprus rather than Atlit, which was closed permanently in 1948. The disinfection building, barracks and other facilities sat abandoned. In the 1970s, when the land was slated for development, a group of students physically blocked the bulldozers’ path. The camp was saved and partially restored as a heritage site. Thanks to SPIHS, Atlit’s buildings, photographs, and artifacts were preserved and opened to the public. The site features an interactive experience aboard the restored Galina ship, a replica of a ship that carried Jewish immigrants to Israel. A new project is bringing a replica from Haiti of an airplane that was used in 1947 by the Haganah for a heroic operation that brought illegal immigrants to Israel from Baghdad. Today, the Atlit Detainee Camp has taken on a broader role, and development of the site continues with JNF’s assistance, mainly focusing on developing the massive online database of journeys, artwork and heroes (en.maapilim.org.il). Staff is racing against time to collect testimonies and record stories like Mayer’s before they’re lost. He still returns to Atlit to share his experiences. “I want to show the people who come there the longing to come to Israel at a time when you couldn’t cross the sea. “The Holocaust is not only about those who were killed; it’s about those who were uprooted. Atlit is a symbol of the madness of the world.”
19 JNF.org
itzchak Mayer is a successful man. He served as Israeli ambassador to Belgium and Switzerland and now, in his early 80s, continues to write and teach. But behind Mayer’s accomplishments are bleak memories: fleeing Belgium and France during World War II, and finally, in 1946, his arrest in Israel, at age twelve. His first glimpse of Israel was of armed officers and barbed wire. At the British detention camp at Atlit, just south of Haifa, Mayer passed through the disinfection building with its cavernous, sinister shower room. “We were all to be sprayed with DDT,” he recalled. “We were a kind of a disease, a walking disease. It was so reminiscent of Europe. Atlit had the look of a little concentration camp. The soldiers, the barracks, the guns.” Born in Belgium in 1934, Mayer fled to France with his family in 1940. When the Nazis arrested his father, it was up to Mayer, then eight, to speak to the Gestapo, since his mother’s papers were forged and she did not speak French. Mayer’s father was taken to Auschwitz and his pregnant mother smuggled her sons through freezing snow to Switzerland. After the war, the British allowed only 100,000 Jews to enter Palestine annually. Mayer and his brother received immigration papers, but his mother and the baby didn’t. “My brother and I were legal,” he said. “My mother and little brother were deemed criminals.” The family returned to France to wait. “There were thousands of people… all uprooted from the camps of Europe. They had no belongings, the old people looked broken.” But there was also hope. “The young people were dancing at night. They wore uniforms of the youth movements that still exist to this day: Bnei Akiva, Dror.” Finally, a ship arrived with room for 600 legal immigrants. Thousands more boarded without papers. “There were children in suitcases, smuggled in.” Halfway to Palestine, organizers had the passengers cast their lot in together. “Everybody had to throw their certificate into baskets. We all became illegal immigrants, the certificates were confiscated, thrown into the sea.” When the ship arrived in Haifa, British buses herded the refugees straight to Atlit. “These people came from Buchenwald, from Majdaneck, Ravensbruck. Here they arrive into Eretz Yisrael… and they are taken into a camp.” But even there, on either side of the barbed-wire walls, “stood thousands of Israelis, shouting names… Maybe somebody survived the war, somebody survived the extermination camps. They were standing there shouting names… this is where my mother heard, ‘Winkler, Winkler!’ She found her sister, who had arrived five years before.” Though Israel then was a land built by immigrants, there was sometimes rivalry between Jews who had fought for
By Jennifer Tzivia MacLeod
ISRAEL’S PATHWAY TO INDEPENDENCE
Journey to Freedom