Underground to Palestine by I. F. Stone

Author:I. F. Stone [Stone, I. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, World, Holocaust, Political Science, Jews
ISBN: 9780394736204
Publisher: Uncommon Valor Press
Published: 2014-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

II

It was shortly after midnight Behind us, rising cliff-like from the narrow road along the beach, were the mountains of the Riviera, huge dark shapes against the sky. There were no lights along the road. All we had to see by was the faint glow of a cloudless, starry sky. We sat down to wait.

Shortly before one o’clock in the morning, far out to sea, we saw a tiny triangle of light moving toward us. The triangle was made up of three lights, one red, one green, one white; the fore, aft, and port lights of a ship moving in toward shore.

Slowly the triangle grew larger, but the ship remained invisible. It looked as if a ghost ship were moving slowly toward the beach.

About fifteen minutes later we saw a long line of twelve double headlights winding its way along the coast to the south of us.

“That,” the schliach said, “must be the first convoy.”

Pietro said that two convoys of twelve trucks each were to bring twelve hundred Chalutzim for the embarkation.

The first convoy had been scheduled to arrive at 1:00 in the morning, the second at 1:30. The ship was to come in and put down its gangplank at 1:00.

The five of us stood on the beach waiting. The schliach was signaling in Morse code to the boat with a flashlight. But for some reason the boat did not come into the inlet as planned.

The truck drove off in the darkness behind us. The Chalutzim quickly and quietly jumped off and ran down to wait on the shore. The twelve trucks drove rapidly away.

There was no noise but the crunch of gravel under hurrying feet. None of the Chalutzim spoke. When I walked over and whispered Sholom, my only greeting was an angry glare.

An hour passed with no sign of the other trucks. The boat remained about two hundred yards off shore.

I still don’t know what caused the ship’s delay, but knowing its officers I was not too surprised. For that ship was manned by about as odd a collection of seamen as ever sailed the seas. The oddest was an old man with a beard, a Jewish hobo who had become a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The captain and the first mate were professional sailors, and both were ex-Wobblies. They were buddies of many sea voyages and they had the unmistakable flavor of the old IWW — militant and individualistic.

The first mate was one of the seamen who pulled the Swastika off the Bremen in New York harbor in 1935.

Like many of the sailors I was to meet on these illegal ships, neither of these officers was Jewish by anything but the accident of birth. They had little Jewish upbringing and no Jewish education, and were, of course, not at all religious. But they had left families in America and taken the risk of long sentences in British prisons if caught. They said they were “sore as a –— boil” about the treatment the Jews had received in Europe.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.