Exodus - Leon Uris [85]
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 seem 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