The ship’s official destination is South America, but after a violent storm in the Bay of Biscay and emergency repairs in an Algerian port, the Ulua puts in at an unguarded beach outside Taranto in southern Italy and under cover of darkness takes seven hundred more Jewish survivors on board. With over 1,350 passengers crowded above and below deck, the ship approaches Palestine on February 27, 1947, level with Haifa. There she’s sighted by British reconnaissance aircraft, and two British minesweepers attempt to force her to stop. The Ulua responds by hoisting a “Jewish” flag and making for the coast at full speed. Along the sides of the ship, passengers push out wooden beams and sit in the lifeboats to obstruct boarding. Two British naval officers and ten seamen nonetheless succeed in boarding by the stern, but the swell in the wake of the ship sweeps their boat away, and when their tear gas runs out, they’re overpowered by the passengers and forced to jump overboard. At the next attempt, twenty-seven soldiers get themselves aboard and fire warning shots over the passengers’ heads while the Ulua steams toward the coast at twelve knots, reaching land just south of Haifa with the British soldiers still literally clinging on and within sight of a British army base at the foot of Mount Carmel. Nine passengers manage to swim ashore and get away; the rest are taken to Haifa and then transferred to a British internment camp on Cyprus.
Thus ended the journey onward for 650 individuals, some of whom might well have had their pictures taken on sunny jetties and rocky shores in the land of the vast forests, momentarily thinking they were in paradise, but to whom the idea of staying on had remained alien, perhaps even frightening. None of them could possibly have been unaware of the risks of such a voyage. The illegal conveyance of Jewish survivors to Palestine on defective, undersized, and overloaded ships was a high-risk enterprise that could end well or in disaster, or in a British internment camp on Cyprus, or sometimes in a British internment camp in Germany.
Yes, this must not be forgotten, the British had the gall to do even that. In the summer of 1947, four thousand Jewish survivors of the much mythologized Exodus were taken to a camp in Poppendorf, just outside Lübeck, after having come within sight of the coast of Palestine. Nobody could be unaware of the fact that this was how the journey onward could end. The picture of Jewish survivors being taken back to a camp in Germany was published the world over, even on the front page of Stockholms Läns och Södertälje Tidning on September 13, 1947.
Maybe someone shows you the picture — someone who already knows who you are and where you’ve come from.
But there I go, anticipating your life.
It’s so easy to do, and so unnecessary.
Time enough for that.
The place is still Alingsås, the time is the summer of 1946, and you’re still waiting for an answer that’s tarrying, and in the land of the vast forests there’s a debate going on about what to do with people like you. It can no longer be assumed that people like you can move on. That much has become obvious.
But it can’t be assumed that you can stay, either. In the land of the vast forests, the inhabitants aren’t used to the idea of thousands of people with wildly foreign languages and cultures suddenly taking up residence behind the Co-op at the forest edge. Only recently, even a dozen was unthinkable; jobs would be stolen, cultures destroyed, and the pure Swedish breed contaminated. Such views have not vanished completely, even if a deepening blush of shame now attends them. It may seem astonishing that such views persist at all, given that the land of the vast forests is crying out for people to man its unscathed cotton mills and truck factories. But xenophobia is old and ingrained, while the hunger for labor is new. On September 15, 1945, an editorial in the Dagens Nyheter sounds a note of warning about letting “the Polish-Jewish refugees” stay on:
If they hear that Sweden feels obliged to let them stay permanently, they will presumably be more than delighted. But the social workers who counsel them must beware of fostering that idea. It does not chime in with the authorities’ intentions, nor does it harmonize with opinion in informed Swedish Jewish circles. On the contrary, those circles urge caution in equating these herds [italics added] with the stateless group of the prewar years. They are concerned that the former will be indiscriminately let loose on the labor market. They also maintain that there should be careful checks on their conduct and a critical assessment of their professed demands.
Clarifying the position and future prospects of these groups is a matter of urgency. No doubt it will at least prove necessary to introduce a reasonable waiting time with provisional solutions, a waiting time that may well prove quite difficult. We are not used to dealing with people so alien to Swedish attitudes and standards. The feat of humanitarian rescue is worthy of honor. The rescue work that still remains may prove harder, above all because it must seek to extract the individuals from the mass.
Does it surprise you that such things are written? Or does it merely confirm what you already know or suspect about the land of the vast forests? I’m trying to understand why, over time, so many of you want to leave again, not because you’re forced to but because you want to, in fact long to, and reading lines like these helps me understand a little better.
Strangely enough, there’s some uncertainty about how many of you ultimately stay on. The Swedish historian Svante Hansson, who in 2004 published the most thorough investigation of the matter so far, concludes that it must be investigated still further, since you’re such a difficult group to keep track of. From his own findings, he estimates that in 1951 at least five thousand Jewish survivors still remain in Sweden, although the true total is probably considerably higher because no one knows exactly how many of the survivors marry Swedish citizens and thereby disappear early on from the register of stateless persons. He notes that Jewish survivors continue to leave Sweden for many years. By 1955, only 3,600 of the 1945 survivors are estimated to remain. Between 1945 and 1955, a total of 8,782 persons continue their journey with support from the Jewish community in Sweden. In 1946, there are few countries to which they can go, Palestine and the United States being all but closed to Jewish immigration, South America far away and complicated, Australia far away and expensive, Europe as closed as before the war.
In the beginning nearly all of you want to move on, but as answers fail to arrive and onward journeys have to be postponed, the land of the vast forests and labor-hungry factories takes hold of you, one by one. A temporary stay has to be extended for an indefinite period, and in an indefinite period there are many decisions that must be made and many things that must happen without anyone’s really having made a decision about them.
In the end, a decision must be made as to whether Sweden is to be the last stop on the road from Auschwitz and the place to start life anew.
In the early years, it’s the labor hunger that decides where a new life can make its beginnings. These are the years when Sweden is transformed from a country convinced it can’t tolerate too many “aliens” to a country crying out for them. By 1948, a hundred thousand “aliens” have been granted Swedish residence permits, of whom “almost all are fully employed in the labor market.” This last part is carefully recorded on July 31, 1948, on the front page of my newspaper of record throughout this narrative, Stockholms Läns och Södertälje Tidning, and immediately clarified with “no one granted a residence permit here has the right just to drift aimlessly.” The director of the State Aliens Commission, Nils Hagelin, is also keen to clarify: “Work is the best medicine for those who come from war-torn countries and find it hard to cope with orderly conditions.… That is how they will most rapidly become part of society, and there are very few who abuse our hospitality by making trouble.”