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| The Wedgwood arriving in Haifa, 1 July 1946. (Donated to the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum, Haifa by Brigadier General Nir Maor/ Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0) |
In the early hours of June 19, 1946, the Wedgwood, a former Canadian naval ship disguised as a banana boat, stole quietly away from Vado on the coast of the Italian Riviera.
But the ship wasn’t carrying fruit; onboard instead were over 1,000 Holocaust survivors secretly bound for Mandate Palestine. Conditions aboard the grossly overcrowded corvette were dire — water was rationed and sanitation poor — and before reaching its destination, the ship would have to run the naval blockade Britain had imposed to impede Jewish immigration.
The largely unknown story of the Wedgwood and its passengers is the subject of a new book — “The People On The Beach: Journeys to Freedom After the Holocaust” — by British journalist and author Rosie Whitehouse.
The Wedgwood was just one of many unheralded ships which, in the years between the end of World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, carried thousands of Holocaust survivors from the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea to Palestine.
After delivering its precious cargo, the flower-class corvette would return to battle, serving extensively as a gunship in the Israeli Navy — including during the 1948 battle for independence — before being retired in 1954.
“This is more than just the story of one boat; it is an account of that biblical exodus,” writes Whitehouse. “It looks at why so many Holocaust survivors felt they could not return to or remain in the places where their families had lived for generations, and how Zionism offered them a future.”
Whitehouse came across a reference to the Wedgwood while updating her travel guide to Liguria in northwestern Italy. That chance discovery sparked a four-year quest to find out how the survivors came to be on the beach at Vado. It took her across Central and Eastern Europe — to Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland and Bavaria — and over the Alps into Italy.
Whitehouse’s journey led her to death camps and the sites of appalling Nazi atrocities. But it also revealed the extraordinary daring, creativity and, at times, sheer chutzpah of those who made possible the Wedgwood’s voyage and that of the countless other ships which ferried the survivors to their promised land. Among them were an American army chaplain, a young doctor who had survived the camps, Jewish Brigade soldiers and secret agents dispatched by the Haganah, the main Jewish paramilitary organization in pre-state Israel.
“This was a massive Jewish rescue mission, Jews saving Jews,” Whitehouse says in an interview with The Times of Israel.
THANKS SO MUCH,, IT MEANS THE WORLD TO US IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMESֱ
