passed through the Jablunkov Pass and assembled at the bottom, exhausted, feet bleeding, hungry, and in need of medical attention. A special train had been chartered by the Mos-sad Aliyah Bet. The escapees were taken aboard to waiting warmth, food, and attention. The first leg of the perilous journey was over.
When a Jew entered Palestine legally he surrendered his passport to the Aliyah Bet so that it could be used again. Five hundred such passports were distributed to the escapees from Auschwitz. In addition to the passports the Aliyah Bet had collected visas for Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and other South American countries. These “documents” would hold the British at bay for a while.
British CID got wind of the five hundred Jews who had crossed from Poland and relayed the news to the Foreign Office at Whitehall. Whitehall sent an urgent dispatch to the British ambassador in Prague to take the matter up with the Czech Foreign Minister, Masaryk, and have the train stopped. The British ambassador was granted an immediate meeting with Masaryk and demanded that the Jews be returned to Poland. He pointed out that the entire Mossad operation was illegal, contrary to Polish law, and had been sponsored by the Zionists in an effort to force the issue over Palestine.
Masaryk smiled. “I do not know much about oil pipelines, Mr. Ambassador,” he said, “but I do know about human pipelines.”
Masaryk was known to be outspoken in behalf of the Jews. The ambassador implied that British displeasure could be displayed in a more “practical” manner.
“Mr. Ambassador,” Masaryk said, “I will not comply with this or any other British threat. So long as I am Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia the borders of my country are open to the Jews with or without visas and with or without passports.”
The ambassador reported to Whitehall that the train could not be stopped. It rolled on toward Bratislava, the town where the borders of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria came together.
Again the British attempted to stop it, but this time it crossed into Austria under the personal protection of a sympathetic American military commander.
In Vienna the travelers stopped for much-needed rest and medical attention. They were issued clothing in a giant re-staging area that had been established by American Jews to help the European survivors.
In Italy, the next stop, the Mossad Aliyah Bet had the open cooperation of the public and the Italian officials, but
movement was hampered by the fact that the country was occupied by the British.
Paradoxically some of the British occupation forces consisted of units of Palestinian Jews. The Palestine Brigade of the British Army and its units stationed all over occupied Italy had long been considered model troops by the British command. Aliyah Bet agents from Palestine integrated with these units, and soon the Palestinian soldiers were busy establishing refugee camps, helping with illegal ships, and the like. For formal purposes the Palestine units were commanded by army officers, but for practical purposes the units were under the command of the Aliyah Bet and Palmach. Shimshon Bar Dror had been an army sergeant in one such unit and used his British army papers to travel back and forth to Poland to round up refugees.
It was springtime when Dov’s group of Auschwitz refugees embarked on another train that moved into the Austrian Alps and crossed into Italy through the Brenner Pass.
The train stopped near Lake Como outside Milan at a very isolated siding. Although the refugees had been warned that they would be met by men wearing British uniforms panic nearly broke out. The survivors could not comprehend men in fighting uniform wearing a Star of David on their arm. The Star of David had always been the insignia of the ghetto. No Jews, except in the ghetto uprisings, had fought under a Star of David for nearly two thousand years.
They debarked from the train apprehensively. The soldiers were kind and some spoke Yiddish and all spoke Hebrew and they were gentle but they seemed to be of a different breed of Jew.
A week after their arrival in Milan, Dov’s group of a hundred people were taken from a small camp in the dead of night. They were transported in British trucks driven by members of the Palestine Brigade. The convoy dashed to a secret rendezvous point along the coast where it met another three hundred refugees who had assembled from other camps. From nearby La Spezia harbor a tiny vessel moved out to meet them.
The ship dropped anchor offshore and was loaded by rubber boat. It sailed and got out of the three-mile limit and was soon trailed by the ever alert British Navy.
There was something baffling about the Gates of Zion. Unlike all the other refugee ships, this one was not heading for Palestine. Its course, instead, was toward the Gulf of Lions on the southern coast of France. Neither the British nor the refugees aboard the Gates of Zion had the slightest idea the vessel was a part of a gigantic plot.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Bill Fry sat at a table at Miller Brothers’ Restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland. He dropped a handful of oysterette crackers into a big steaming bowl of clam chowder and stirred it. He toyed with the soup for a moment but he had no appetite. “Jesus Christ,” he thought. “I wonder if I can get that piss-pot across the Atlantic Ocean.”
Bill Fry had earned a reputation as the most successful captain in the Mossad Aliyah Bet. His beaching of the Star of David at Caesarea had opened a new era in the illegal immigration war. It had forced the British to start the Cyprus detention camps. This had been a turning point, for the Mossad had run one shipload after another into Palestine as fast as the British turned them back, and now another crisis was brewing. Mossad Aliyah Bet had run in so many illegals that the camp in Cyprus was bursting.
Flushing with success and determined to break the British exclusion policy, the Mossad dreamed up a wild scheme and chose Bill Fry to execute it.
The largest of the illegal fleet to date had been his Star of David, which carried under two thousand passengers. Other ships carried from a few hundred to a thousand. The Mossad figured that if they could run the blockade with a ship holding upwards of five thousand refugees it would be a staggering blow for the British.
Bill was commissioned to find a ship that could do the job, outfit it, and take five thousand refugees from the big center at La Ciotat in southern France. It was felt that the ship should be purchased in the United States or South America where the British would not be suspicious. British CID simply had the European ports too well covered. Mossad agents covered South America while Bill himself searched the Gulf ports and the east coast. It became obvious that they weren’t going to get much of a ship for the money they had to spend. So Bill had taken a gamble and now he was worried. He had purchased an overaged, obsolete steamship which had seen service only on the Chesapeake Bay in an overnight run between Baltimore and Norfolk. The ship, the General Stonewall Jackson, an oversized pleasure cruiser, had never sailed the ocean. The only thing Bill could think of that was decent about the ship was that it had been bought cheap.
The white-coated waiter hovered over Bill’s table. “Is something wrong with the chowder, sir?”
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“Huh? Oh, hell no … it’s fine,” he mumbled, and shoved a spoonful into his mouth.
Had the purchase of the obsolete bay liner been a mistake? At this moment it was being fitted in Newport News, Virginia, to hold 6850 refugees.
Bill sighed. There was the other side of the picture. Suppose he could get seven thousand refugees out of Europe at one crack! It would just about explode the British policy!
Bill shoved the bowl of chowder away and asked for the check. He picked up the dead cigar butt from the ash tray and relit it and once again read the telegram from Newport News: THE JACKSON IS READY.
At Newport News the next day Bill assembled his crew of Palestinian Palmach and Aliyah Bet, American Jews, sympathetic Spanish Loyalists, Italians, and French. He inspected the ship and ran a short shakedown cruise around the lower bay, then revved up her engines and made for the Atlantic Ocean.