With more than 100 photographs by the author "The ship looked like a matchbox that had been splintered by a nutcracker. In the torn, square hole, as big as an open, blitzed barn, we could see a muddle of bedding, possessions, plumbing, broken pipes, overflowing toilets, half-naked men, women looking for children. Cabins were bashed in; railings were ripped off; the lifesaving rafts were dangling at crazy angles." On July 18, 1947, Ruth Gruber, an American journalist, waited on a wharf in Haifa as the Exodus 1947 limped into harbor. The evening before, Gruber had learned that this unarmed ship, with more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors crammed into a former tourist vessel designed for 400 passengers, had been rammed and boarded by the British Navy, which was determined to keep her desperate human cargo from finding refuge in Palestine. Now, though soldiers blockaded both exit and entry to the weary vessel, Gruber was determined to meet the refugees and hear their tales. For the next several months she pursued the emigres' stories, from Haifa to the prison camps on Cyprus (where she was misled by the British to believe the DPs would land, though they never did), to southern France, and, appallingly, back to Hamburg, Germany, where they were ultimately sent by the intractable British authorities. As the lone journalist covering this story, Gruber sent riveting dispatches and vivid photographs back to the New York and Paris Herald Tribune, which in turn sent them out to the rest of the world press. Gruber's relentless reporting and striking photographs shaped perceptions worldwide as to the situation of postwar Jewish refugees and of the British Mandate in Palestine, and arguably influenced the United Nations decision to finally create the State of Israel in 1948. In 1948, Gruber assembled her dispatches and thirty of her pictures into Destination Palestine, the book that became the basis for Leon Uris's bestselling novel Exodus and the film of the same name. In this revised and expanded edition, Gruber has included a new opening chapter of never-before-published material on the wretched DP camps of Europe, where the refugees were living before boarding the Exodus 1947; updated the fate of many of the passengers, describing how they smuggled themselves into Palestine--despite the myriad obstacles thrown up by the British authorities--even before the State of Israel was born; and selected seventy additional photographs from her personal archives. Bartley Crum's introduction to the original edition, retained here, likened Gruber's achievement to John Hersey's Hiroshima for its powerful compression of a momentous event, its vivid reportage, and its capacity to change the way people think about contemporary history.Exodus 1947is an enormously moving account by one of the twentieth century's most remarkable women, stirring and shocking us more than fifty years after that battered ship entered Haifa harbor.

<b>Ruth Gruber</b> was born in 1911, earned her Ph.D. at age twenty, and soon became a foreign correspondent. At twenty-three, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, she was the first journalist--man or woman--to report from the Soviet Arctic. In 1944, while she was working for Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, President Roosevelt sent Gruber on a covert mission to escort 1,000 World War II refugees in a secret convoy across the Atlantic to America. That mission resulted in her book Haven, which will be the basis of a major network television movie in 2000. Gruber has published fourteen books, including Raquela, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1978. Her Exodus photographs appeared in the 1997 Oscar-winning documentary The Long Way Home. In 1998 Gruber received a lifetime achievement award from the A

List of Photographs
Introduction
The DP Camps of Europe	p. 3
Haifa	p. 45
Cyprus	p. 101
Port-de-Bouc	p. 131
Hamburg	p. 181
Epilogue	p. 187
Afterword	p. 189
Acknowledgments	p. 191
Index	p. 195
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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Chapter One

The DP Camps of Europe

World War II was ending. The armies of liberation stormed Auschwitz and other death camps. Some of the soldiers vomited, others fainted, at the sight of the walking skeletons and the corpses piled up like stacks of wood.

In the world outside the camps, there were many who assumed that the survivors would rush out of the gates, breathe free air, and live happily ever after. Nothing was further from the truth.

Those who could stand on their feet, and those who were healed, tried to return to their own homes. But the ghosts of their lost families hung over the streets. When they knocked on the doors of their homes, neighbors or strangers stared at them: "What? Are you still alive? Why didn't they turn you into a bar of soap?" In Kielce, Poland, forty-two Jews who had returned home were murdered in a 1946 pogrom.

The darkest chapter of history was still not over.

They knew they could no longer live in the towns and villages and shtetls where they had lived. So they went west--to Germany, the death land, because the Americans were there and the Americans would help them get to Palestine.

They were DPs--displaced persons--a new category for stateless people on the run, housed in camps administered by UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. They were aided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (or the JDC, known widely as the Joint) and guarded by the U.S. Army. Some of these DP camps were former Nazi army camps, horse stables, even death camps. DPs now huddled together, eighteen and twenty sharing one room with no privacy; four and five people sleeping on the very wooden shelves on which millions had died. The camps were a temporary refuge of desperation and hope.

From the end of the war in May 1945 until the birth of Israel in May 1948, nearly seventy thousand Holocaust survivors found their way out of the DP camps, crossing borders in the dead of night, trekking through forests and across the Alps until they reached secret ports in southern France and southern Italy. Here they climbed onto a motley fleet of obsolete warships, U.S. Coast Guard cutters, leaky fishing boats, cargo vessels, icebreakers, banana carriers, a presidential yacht named the Mayflower , and a small American steamer they named Exodus 1947 --determined to reach the Promised Land they called Eretz Israel--the Land of Israel.

My life became entwined with refugees in 1944, when, as special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, I was sent on a secret mission to war-torn Italy to bring to America one thousand refugees from eighteen countries Hitler had overrun.

"You're going to be made a general," Ickes told me. "A simulated general."

"Me? A general!"

"You'll be flying in a military plane. If you're shot down and the Nazis capture you as a civilian, they can kill you as a spy. But as a general, according to the Geneva Convention, you have to be given shelter and food and kept alive."

I flew to Europe in an air force plane, with real generals who were curious to know what I was doing on their plane. I told them I couldn't say. My mission was top secret.

In April 1944, Adolf Eichmann began deporting Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz. Now it was July, and he had already shipped 550,000 to their deaths, while we were bringing 1,000 refugees to life in Oswego, New York. We sailed aboard an army transport ship, the Henry Gibbins , also carrying wounded American soldiers. Hunted by Nazi planes and U-boats, we were in a convoy protected by twenty-nine ships, sixteen of them warships.

Day and night, pacing the deck aboard the Henry Gibbins , the refugees told me their stories of courage; of terror; of hiding in tunnels, in sewers, in forests; of risking their lives to save others. Often, tears wiped out the words in my notebook. The bonding with the refugees became the defining moment of my life. I knew from then on that my life would be inextricably bound with refugees, with rescue and survival.

Late in 1945, with the war finally over, President Harry S Truman learned of the abominable conditions in the DP camps. He asked Britain's foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, to open the gates of Palestine to 100,000 DPs. Bevin, whose decimated country needed American aid, could not refuse the president. Instead, he suggested a new committee be formed, called the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. It was the eighteenth committee to study the problems of Palestine. Made up of six Americans selected by Truman, and six Englishmen selected by Bevin, the committee had judges, lawyers, historians, and editors. Bevin promised Truman that Britain would accept their report--if it was unanimous.

Early in January the telephone rang in my office. It was Ted Thackrey, the editor in chief of the New York Post and husband of Dorothy Schiff, who owned the paper.

"Ruth, I would like you to accompany the committee as our foreign correspondent. Will you do it?"

My heart began to pound at the thought that maybe I could do something for the Holocaust survivors. "Ted, I'd love to do it but I have to check with Ickes."

"Call me back," he said, "as soon as you get an answer."

I called Ickes's appointments secretary. I told her it was urgent. She called back and said, "The secretary will see you immediately."

Ickes looked up as I walked across his vast blue rug, and he motioned me to sit at the right side of his desk. I learned later that he had no hearing in his left ear.

I told him of Ted Thackrey's offer.

"I heard about that committee," he said, "but I need you here."

"Mr. Secretary," I said, "as long as you need me, I will stay."

Thackrey was adamant. "You are the one to do this job. You know Washington. The American members of the committee will need all the help you can give them. You know the problems of the refugees. I'm not giving up."

On January 21, 1946, Ickes sent for me and placed a letter in my hand. I felt my face redden as I read Thackrey's letter explaining to Ickes why he should grant me a leave of absence. Ickes looked at me. "What do you want me to do?"

"You know, Mr. Secretary, as long as you need me, I will stay. But this is a chance to do something for the Jews who survived and are still suffering."

"Thackrey was right and I was wrong. You must go. You are the one to do this job. I will help you with Ruth Shipley over at the passport division and the War Department. Just leave your letter of resignation with me. When I resign, I will accept your resignation."

He extended his hand. "Good luck. I think the Oswego experience--helping those refugees cross the Atlantic, helping them overcome their fears and suspicions, and then helping them learn to live in America--was the best preparation you could have had."

With help from Ickes and Thackrey, my army orders and my credentials as a foreign correspondent came swiftly. I took the train to Brooklyn and broke the news to my parents.

Two years earlier, when I had been sent by Secretary Ickes to bring the 1,000 refugees to America, my mother had tried to prevent me from going.

On a Friday afternoon in July 1944 she had rushed down from Brooklyn to Washington. "My crazy daughter," she greeted me. "Do I ever know where you are? Siberia? Alaska? Why do you have to go now?"

"Mom, I can't tell you. It's top secret. But maybe I can find your relatives in Poland and Russia."

It was not until the war was over that we learned, from one of my mother's relatives who had survived the massacre, that her aunts, uncles, and cousins had been driven from their homes in Poland. Led by a German officer on a white horse and beaten by German and Polish soldiers, the people of her shtetl, Beremlya in the Wolyn province, had been forced to march to the riverbank and strip naked. "Shoot!" the officer commanded, and shots splintered the air. Their bodies, riddled with bullets, were shoveled into the river.

Now, in January 1946, with peace in the world, my mother was as excited as I was that I was going to Europe. "Maybe," she said hopefully, "you can meet up with Irving in Germany. We're so proud of him." She loved telling how my brother, a captain in the army, had taken over a small hospital run by nuns in Bad Lippspringe and turned it into a 200-bed army hospital for POWs.

The next day I went to the New York Post , where Thackrey embraced me. "I had to write that letter to Ickes," he said. "I knew we had to have you over there. You're going to be our eyewitness to what's happening to those survivors."

I flew in an air force plane to London, where I was told to get an army uniform immediately. At the army post exchange (PX), I changed into a khaki skirt, shirt, tie, Eisenhower jacket, raincoat, heavy army shoes, stockings, and an army brimmed cap with the insignia U.S. WAR CORRESPONDENT. The uniform was my ID. I needed no papers to enter the Royal Empire Society building, where the twelve members of the Anglo-American committee were sitting around a horseshoe-shaped table surrounded by journalists from most of the world. One of the journalists, Gerold Frank of the Overseas News Agency (ONA), and I were to be the only correspondents attached to the committee. Other journalists later joined us wherever we stopped.

I listened to the speeches as the Jewish leaders talked of the need for a Jewish state to house the DPs, while the Arab leaders talked of closing the doors of Palestine to all immigrants. With a tight deadline of 120 days to travel throughout Europe and write a report, the committee decided to split into four subcommittees: one to Berlin, another to the British zone of Germany, the third to the French zone, and the fourth to the American zone. My assignment was to follow Bartley C. Crum, the liberal Republican lawyer from San Francisco. He was joined by two Englishmen, Richard Crossman, the noted journalist, editor, and Labour member of Parliament, and Sir Frederick Leggett, a labor conciliator. They were to visit the DP camps in Germany, travel to Czechoslovakia, and then meet with the whole committee in Vienna.

Just before we were to leave London, Dick Crossman became ill and stayed behind for several weeks. Since there were no civilian planes flying, we had army orders giving us permission to fly in military planes. We flew to Paris and then on to Frankfurt, headquarters of the U.S. Army in Germany. I had time to get to know Bartley Crum, who was serious, courageous, and prepared like a trained prizefighter to battle for his convictions. He preferred drinking to eating, and was so good looking that people often turned to stare at him on the German streets. He was determined to find a way to solve the problem of the DPs. Sir Frederick Leggett, a slender man with British reserve, seemed equally eager to find a solution to the problems we were about to face.

In Frankfurt, we were joined by Judge Simon H. Rifkind, a U.S. district court judge, and an adviser on Jewish affairs to General Eisenhower. Frankfurt, the city of Goethe, music, and culture, was in ruins. I was shocked to see houses without roofs, rubble everywhere. Our planes had crumbled this once beautiful city. But when I saw women parading around in elegant fur coats, I wondered if they had been pulled off Jewish women's backs.

The army entertained us in high style. I telephoned my brother, Irving, who was with his unit in Stuttgart, and invited him to join me with a group of army officers for dinner. He held us spellbound as he told us how he had searched for Otto and Frieda Herz, the Jewish family I had lived with as an exchange student in Cologne. The Herzes' daughter, Luisa, living in New York, had asked me if he could find her parents. She gave him several possible addresses. One of them was in Bilthoven, in Holland. Irving knocked on an iron gate, aware that people were staring through a window. He kept calling out in his mixed German and Dutch, "I'm looking for the family Herz."

Finally a woman opened the gate. "Who are you?" she demanded.

"I am Ruth's brother. I'm looking for the Herzes."

She said breathlessly, "Wait a minute."

She called up the stairs, "Otto, Frieda, come down."

Two frightened, emaciated people walked slowly down the stairs, came through the gate, and fell upon him.

Irving tried to smile. "I am coming right back," he said.

He ran to his truck, drove into town, filled the truck with fresh fruits and vegetables, hurried back to the Herzes, and gave them food they had not seen for years. They told him about the man who had taken them out of Amsterdam and hidden them in the attic of a farmhouse. He was Johannes Post, a genuine hero who had saved their lives but lost his own. He was shot while trying to save a Jewish girl.

On February 8, 1946, our subcommittee entered our first DP camp, Zeilsheim, in the American zone ten miles from Frankfurt. In army vehicles driven by U.S. soldiers, we were a small group: Bartley Crum, Sir Frederick Leggett, Judge Simon Rifkind, Major Ralph Strauss of the U.S. Army, Gerold Frank, and I.

In a driving rain, three thousand DPs stood before the administration building, calling out to us in accented English, "We want to go Palestine. We must go. We will go. It is our home."

With remarkable dignity and discipline, men, women, and children, some still wearing concentration-camp pajamas, paraded in front of us carrying banners: OPEN THE GATES OF PALESTINE. The people were living in slumlike, overcrowded barracks. Pasted on the front of the barracks were banners that bore such slogans as WE JEWISH CHILDREN WILL NO MORE STAY ON THIS BLOODY GROUND WHERE OUR PARENTS WERE KILLED. WE WILL GO HOME TO PALESTINE. We entered the office of Sylvan Nathan, the camp's UNRRA director and a former New York attorney, who told us solemnly, "In my opinion the entire camp wants to go to Palestine."

Outside again, children crowded around me, allowing me to take pictures. It seemed to me they had refugee eyes. They were orphans who had seen their parents murdered. They had seen the darkest side of life. Their eyes spoke of evil. A boy who looked about seven but who told me he was twelve, allowed me to hug him. I did not know who needed the hugging more, this beautiful boy who had no mother or father and who had no idea where his life would lead, or I, feeling his misery and loneliness. A woman came toward me and took my arm. "If rescue means life without a country or a future, then you should have let us burn in the crematoriums."

We visited the crowded living quarters, where four and five people slept together on wooden ledges stacked one atop the other. Crum walked beside me, looking angry. "The best thing to do is get rid of these DP camps as soon as possible. They are a disgrace."

The people waited patiently in the rain to say good-bye to us. They sang "Hatikvah"--their song of hope. We stood at attention as many of them wept. As our cars pulled away, someone shouted to us, "Don't waste time. Open the gates of Palestine."

In nearly every DP camp in Germany, from Bergen-Belsen in the north to Dachau near Munich in the south, we saw a banner hanging on the wall with a poem written by Beryl Katzenelsen, one of the Jewish leaders in Palestine:

With blood in our hearts

We'll crush every wall.

We'll allow no obstacles

But we'll fulfill our hopes.

In the Landsberg DP camp, a woman in a torn but spotless housedress motioned to me to come away from the men in the committee. "You are a woman," she said. "You will understand the blood in our hearts. My husband went up in flames. I was rescued six times from the flames. I need a home. That is my hope. To go to Palestine."

I listened in silence.

She went on. "Maybe God has sent you and those men with you to help us crush the walls that block us"--she said the words like a prayer--"from going home to Eretz Israel --the Land of Israel."

In Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Landsberg, Leipheim, Zeilsheim, Neu Freimann, and Stuttgart, the committee met first with the UNRRA officials and the representatives of the Joint. We learned of the problems, then toured the camps, sat with the DPs and listened carefully to their stories of how their families had been shot or burned or gassed, and then invariably asked the people, "Why do you want to go to Palestine? You know there is fighting. Arab riots. Why do you want to go there?"

A sixteen-year-old orphan in Bergen-Belsen gave us one of the most poignant answers. "Everybody has a home," he said. "The British have a home. The Americans. The Russians. The French. Only we don't have a home. Don't ask us. Ask the world."

The spirit that characterized almost every DP we talked to was a growing anxiety, an uncertainty of the future, a distrust of all humanity, and a resentment against the democratic world. "First they did nothing to save us," a man told us. "Now they do nothing to liberate us after liberation."

"That's just why we are here," Bartley said, then promised him, "We're going to find a way to get you out of here." The testimony that we were taking was becoming unbearably real. I made a silent prayer that we could fulfill his promise.

Landsberg, near Munich, the largest DP camp in Germany, held five thousand refugees, nearly all between the ages of twenty to thirty-five. They had been young and strong enough to survive as workers for the Nazis. There were almost no old people and fewer than a hundred children. The elderly and the children were always the first ones the Nazis selected for the gas chambers. Now the survivors improvised their own families--surrogate families where mother, father, and children might all be twenty-five years old. Later I learned that 120 of the young people we met in Landsberg were aboard the Exodus 1947 .

A young woman with purple numbers on her left forearm approached me. "Why are you here? Have you come to stare at us as if we were monkeys in the cage? Or have you come to help us get to Palestine?"

"If you can't get to Palestine," I asked her, "where else would you go?"

"The crematoriums."

One night I slipped away from the committee to attend the first wedding of DPs at Bad Tölz, the headquarters of the U.S. Third Army, twenty-five miles from Munich.

Memories of gas chambers, death marches, and ghetto shootings filled the tiny hall as a violinist played Mendelssohn's "Wedding March," and the bride, dressed in a secondhand ivory satin gown, walked slowly toward the flower-decked canopy.

Chaplain Paul Gorin of Chicago, senior Jewish chaplain of the Third Army, performed the marriage ceremony. This little community of forty-seven Jews, whose lives were miraculously saved when American forces rescued them from a death march, listened with tears to the chaplain's moving sermon on the beginning of a new life and hope. Outside, snow fell on the pine trees and pastel cottages.

After the ceremony, the bridegroom, Judah Balaban, thirty-eight, from Pabianice, near Lodz, Poland, said to me, "You probably are wondering why I am getting married now. I have had the greatest tragedy a person can have. I was a husband and already had a family of three sons. All were burned in the crematorium at Treblinka concentration camp in May 1942.

"There were fifty in my family. I am the only member alive. My bride is the sister of my dear wife. In her eyes I see my wife's face. All over my room hang pictures of my wife and dead children. She doesn't disturb them because it is her family too.

"I am taking care of her as my wife would have wanted. She too is alone in the world."

The next morning I described the wedding to Bartley Crum. "These people," Bartley said thoughtfully, "will get there if they have to walk all the way. Many may die on the way, but sheer willpower will get most of them there. The movement has all the aspects of a children's crusade. I have never seen such fervor in my life."

In Munich, a city in ruins, Dr. Zalman Grinberg, president of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews, told us how he had hidden his baby son in a barrel in the ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania. The Nazis were rounding up all of the children and either stabbing or asphyxiating them. He smuggled the baby out to a non-Jewish friend. The war was still on in 1945 when the doctor was put on a train from the concentration camp in Dachau, headed for Auschwitz.

U.S. planes strafed the train. The Germans shot most of the people in the train, then fled. Dr. Grinberg, unhurt, rounded up the survivors and led them for a day and a half to a German village, where he demanded to meet the burgomaster. "I am the medical representative of the International Red Cross," he said. "I have people with me who need medicine, food, and shelter. I request you to turn over to me all necessary facilities at once."

When the burgomaster looked indifferent, Dr. Grinberg said, "The Americans are twenty-four hours behind me. If you don't give me what I demand, you will be hanging by the neck five minutes after they arrive." The burgomaster fled, and Dr. Grinberg took over the hospital.

He was one of the lucky ones. When the war ended, his baby was returned to him and he was reunited with his wife. But the scars from what he had survived were still raw. "Nobody who has not lived through the bestiality of concentration camps can even begin to understand what happened in them." I listened closely, watching his handsome but emaciated face as he threw his words at us, each one a spear.

"We had no hope of coming back alive, but in our weak hours we tried to imagine how it would be if some percentage of us should become free. We pictured how the world would stand up to help us, to comfort us, to console us, and to assist us in reaching our goal of Palestine."

We left Germany, shaken by his story.

We were in Prague interviewing U.S. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt when he said, "You resigned from the Department of the Interior today."

I stared at him in amazement. "How do you know?"

"It came over the radio this morning. Ickes announced that he was resigning, and he accepted the letter of resignation you left with him."

I was sorry to leave Ickes, who, of all the Cabinet members, had fought the hardest to open the doors of America to refugees and, like everyone else, failed. But I was happy to be able to return to my first love, journalism.

From Prague, we set out for Vienna in a long convoy, but at the Czechoslovakian border, a guard halted us.

"Stop!" he shouted. "You're under arrest."

Judge Rifkind demanded to know the reason.

"We got a message from Prague to hold your convoy. They said you stole top secret papers from the government."

"Sheer madness--we just left the American ambassador in Prague. Telephone him and he'll clear everything up."

"Get out of your cars," the policeman ordered, "and we'll put you in the border guardhouse. We have only a field telephone and it takes quite a while to reach Prague by phone."

The guards were friendly, but their guns were fixed on us. In the freezing cold, they plied us with hot tea. We kept ourselves amused at the thought of being arrested while traveling with a district court judge. After several hours, the guard came in. "We got through finally," he said. "Yours is the wrong convoy. You're free to go."

Later the committee received an apology; it was explained that a U.S. military raiding party had stolen some documents that were needed for the Nuremberg trials.

We drove through snow-covered fields on the way to Vienna, reaching the city before any of the other subcommittees arrived. Bartley Crum suggested that Gerold Frank and I arrange a press conference for him. We gathered up all the foreign correspondents living in the press camp, and Bartley warned the press, "Unless the DP camps of Europe are cleaned out and the Jews are allowed to reestablish their lives, there will be mass suicides." The headlines shouted SUICIDE!

The next day Judge Joseph C. Hutcheson, the American chairman of the committee, and the British chairman, Sir John Singleton, Judge of the King's Bench in London, arrived in Vienna. Annoyed by the publicity Crum had received, they decided to hold their own press conference. "Everywhere we went," Judge Hutcheson said, "there was only one song: `Zum Palestine, Nach Palestine.' Ninety to one hundred percent of the Jews want to go to Palestine." The son of a Confederate captain, raised in strict Presbyterian tradition, the judge spoke to me in rich phrases. "In me there is an absolutely stout feeling that justice is right and injustice is wrong." He continued, "St. Paul's dictum, `Quench not the spirit, despise not prophesying, prove all things, hold fast that which is good,' is good enough for me or any man who calls himself liberal. I am exceedingly anxious that a just and final solution for the problem of the Jews in Europe and Palestine may be reached."

From Vienna we flew to Cairo and checked in at the famous Shepheard's Hotel. Palm trees waved outside my window. The sun flooded my room. After sleepless nights in Europe haunted by the images of the lonely orphans in the dark and ugly DP camps, I suddenly felt energy and light surge into my body. I didn't need sleep.

Swiftly, I climbed out of my army uniform, bathed in a huge bathtub, changed into a blue suit and a blue hat with a jaunty feather, and checked my oversize handbag to make sure there were enough notebooks, pens, and rolls of film to cover the day's sessions. With my Leica and Rolleiflex slung over my shoulder, I taxied to the elegant Mena House, where President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek had met during the war.

As the full committee assembled, guarded by police in red fezzes and soldiers with guns warning us to watch out for terrorists, we discovered that only Arabs were testifying. Bartley Crum decided to find out why. He soon learned that the chief rabbi and Catawi Pasha, one of the wealthiest men in Cairo, had been summoned to the palace by Egypt's monarch, King Farouk. They understood that it would be wiser not to testify.

The speeches boiled down to one argument: Palestine should be closed to the 100,000 DPs. These Jews who had survived the Holocaust were too Western. Egyptians were not pining to be westernized.

(Continues...)