CHAPTER SIXTEEN: British CID had a running acquaintance with the Aegean tramp steamer, Karpathos. They knew the instant the Karpathos was purchased in Salonika by the Mossad Aliyah Bet. They followed the movements of the eight-hundred-ton, forty-five-year-old tramp to Piraeus, the port of Athens where an American Aliyah Bet crew boarded her and sailed her to Genoa, Italy. They observed as the Karpathos was refitted into an immigrant runner and they knew the exact instant she left and sailed toward the Gulf of Lions.
The entire southern coast of France was alive with CID men. A twenty-four-hour watch was thrown around La Ciotat for signs of a large-scale movement. A dozen major and minor French officials were bribed. Pressure came from Whitehall to Paris to prevent the Karpathos from getting inside French territorial waters. But British pressure and bribes had no effect. French cooperation with Aliyah Bet remained solid. The Karpathos moved inside the three-mile zone.
The next stage of the game was set. A half-dozen trial runs were made from La Ciotat to trick and divert the British. Trucks were donated by the French teamsters and driven by French drivers. When the British were thoroughly confused, the real break was made. Sixteen hundred refugees, Karen’s section included, were sped out from La Ciotat to a secret rendezvous point along the coast. The entire area was blocked off from outside traffic by the French Army. The trucks unloaded the refugees on a quiet beach and they were transferred by rubber boats to the ancient Karpathos, which waited offshore.
The line of rubber boats moved back and forth all night. The strong hands of the American crew lifted the anxious escapees aboard. Palmach teams on board quickly moved each boatload to a predesignated section. A knapsack, a bottle of water, and an obsession to leave Europe was all the refugees had.
Karen’s children, the youngest, were boarded first and given a special position in the hold. They were placed below deck near the ladder which ran to the deck. She worked quickly to calm them down. Fortunately most of them were too numbed with excitement and exhaustion and fell right off to sleep. A few cried, but she was right there to comfort them.
An hour passed, and two and three, and the hold began to get crowded. On came the refugees until the hold was so packed there was scarcely an inch to move in any direction.
Then they began filling up the deck space topside and when that was crammed they flooded over onto the bridge.
Bill Fry, an American and captain of the ship, came down the ladder and looked over the crush of humanity in the hold and whistled. He was a stocky man with a stubbly beard and an unlit cigar butt clenched between his teeth.
“You know, the Boston fire department would raise hell if they ever saw a room like this,” Bill mumbled.
He stopped talking and began to listen. From the shadows a very sweet voice was singing a lullaby. He pushed his way down the ladder and stepped over the bodies and turned a flashlight on Karen, who was holding a little boy in her arms and singing him to sleep. For an instant he thought he was looking at the Madonna! He blinked his eyes. Karen looked up and motioned him to take the flashlight off her.
“Hey, kid … you speak English?” Bill’s gruff voice said.
“Yes.”
“Where is the section head of these kids?”
“I am the section head and I’ll thank you to lower your voice. I’ve had enough trouble getting them quieted down.”
“I’ll talk as loud as I want. I’m the captain. You ain’t no bigger than most of these kids.”
“If you run your ship as well as I run this section,” Karen snapped angrily, “then we will be in Palestine by morning.”
He scratched his bearded jaw and smiled. He certainly didn’t look like the dignified Danish ship’s captains, Karen thought, and he was only pretending to be hard.
“You’re a nice kid. If you need something you come up on the bridge and see me. And you be more respectful.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
“That’s all right. Just call me Bill. We’re all from the same tribe.”
Karen watched as he climbed the ladder, and she could see the first crack of daylight. The Karpathos was crammed with as many people as she could hold-sixteen hundred refugees, hanging from every inch of her. The half-rusted anchor creaked up and slapped against the sides of her wooden hulk. The forty-five-year-old engines coughed and sputtered and reluctantly churned into action. A fog bank enshrouded them as though God Himself were giving cover, and the old ship chugged away from the shores of France at her top speed of seven knots an hour. In a matter of moments she was beyond the three-mile zone and into the waters of no man’s land. The first round had been won by the Mossad Aliyah Bet! A blue and white Jewish flag was struck to the mast, and the Karpathos changed her name to the Star of David.
The boat bounced miserably. The lack of ventilation in the overjammed holds turned everyone pale. Karen worked with
the Palmach teams feeding lemons and applying compresses to stave off a major epidemic of vomiting. When lemons failed, she went to work quickly with the mop. She found that the best way to keep things quiet was to sing and invent games and tell funny stories.
She had the children under control but by noon the heat worsened and the air grew more rancid, and sobn the stench of sweat and vomit became unbearable in the semilit hold. Men stripped to shorts and women to their brassieres, and their bodies glistened with sweat. An outbreak of fainting began. Only the unconscious were taken up on deck. There was simply no room for the others.
Three doctors and four nurses, all refugees from La Ciotat, worked feverishly. “Get food into their stomachs,” they ordered. Karen coaxed, coddled, and shoved food down the mouths of her children. By evening she was passing out sedatives and giving sponge baths. She washed them sparingly, for water was very scarce.
At last the sun went down and a breath of air swept into the hold. Karen had worked herself into exhaustion, and her mind was too hazy to permit her to think sharply. She fell into only a half sleep with an instinctive reflex that brought her awake the second one of her children cried. She listened to every creak of the old ship as it labored for Palestine. Toward morning she dozed off completely into a thick dream-riddled sleep filled with annoying confusion.
A sudden roar brought her awake with a start. She looked up the ladder and it was daylight. Karen pushed her way up. Everyone was pointing to the sky where a huge four-engined bomber hovered over them.
“British! Lancaster Bomber!”
“Everyone return to your places and be calm,” the loudspeaker boomed.
Karen rushed back to the hold where the children were frightened and crying. She began singing at the top of her voice urging the children to follow:
Onward! Onward to Palestine
In happiness we throng, Onward! Onward to Palestine
Come join our happy song!
“Everyone keep calm,” the loudspeaker said, “there is no danger.”
By noontime a British cruiser, HMS Defiance, appeared on the horizon and bore down on the Star of David, blinker lights flashing. A sleek little destroyer, HMS Blakely, joined the Defiance. The two warships hovered about the old tramp as she chugged along.
“We have picked up our royal escort,” Bill Fry said over the loudspeaker.
By the rules of the game the contest was over. Mossad Aliyah Bet had gotten another ship out of Europe and onto the high seas. The British had sighted the vessel and were following it. The instant the Star of David entered the three-mile limit off Palestine she would be boarded by a British landing party and towed off to Haifa.
On the deck of the Star of David the refugees hooted at the warships and cursed Bevin. A large sign went up which read: hitler murdered us and the British won’t let us live! The Defiance and the Blakely paid no attention and did not, as hoped, miraculously disappear.