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Text originally published in 1946 under the same title.
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UNDERGROUND TO PALESTINE
by
I. F. Stone
FIRST EDITION
IN EXPLANATION
This is a story of personal adventure. I was the first newspaperman to travel the Jewish underground in Europe and to arrive in Palestine on a so-called illegal boat. But this is more than the narrative of a journalistic escapade. I am an American and I am also and inescapablythe world being what it isa Jew. I was born in the United States. My parents were born in Russia. Had they not emigrated at the turn of the century to America, I might have gone to the gas chambers in Eastern Europe. I might have been a DP, ragged and homeless like those with whom I traveled. I did not go to join them as a tourist in search of the picturesque, nor even as a newspaperman merely in search of a good story, but as a kinsman, fulfilling a moral obligation to my brothers. I wanted in my own way, as a journalist, to provide a picture of their trials and their aspirations in the hope that good people, Jewish and non-Jewish, might be moved to help them.
I have not faked and I have not fictionalized except to hide the names of persons and places. I have not glossed over the unpleasant. My comrades of the voyage would be dishonored by anything less than the truth. I hope that, however inadequately, I may also have provided a record of some value to history. The clandestine exodus of the Jews from post-war Europe is the greatest in the history of a wandering peoplegreater than the exodus from Egypt or from Spainbecause their sufferings under Hitler were greater than any our ancestors ever underwent before. We know comparatively little of the emigration from Egypt or of what went on aboard those tragic ships out of Spain which Columbus may have passed in 1492 on his way to a new world. This narrative may fill a humble gap in the annals of the current emigration. It was a privilege to take part in that emigration. I only wish I had the power to portray what I saw against the background of the world situation today. The plight of the Jews may be a minor affair. But world indifference to that plight is of spiritual significance for the future of us all.
I can only record as a reporter what I saw and heard, traveling with the least fortunate but the bravest of my people.
SUMMONS TO ADVENTURE
I
I was in the press gallery at Hunter College in the Bronx when the call came. It was April, 1946. The Security Council of the United Nations was in session. The floodlighted scene below me seemed unreal, like the setting for a playperhaps a play about the fumbling of the peace. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Britains representative at that horseshoe-shaped council tablea small man, dapper and correctwas making a professionally astringent argument designed to prevent action against Franco. An usher tapped me on the shoulder and said I was wanted on the phone.
The interruption was not so irrelevant as it seemed at first. In Sir Alexanders subtle apologetics for a Fascist dictator, I had seen one aspect of the Empires post-war policy. I was soon to see another. When I picked up the phone in one of the booths in the big press room in the basement, I heard the voice of an American I had met the preceding November in Palestine.
How would you like to meet some boys who volunteered to serve as seamen for the illegal immigration? he asked me. Neither of us realized on what a journey that question was to send me.
Of course I was interested. I had reason to believe that the man who phoned me was in close touch with the leaders of the Haganah , the Jewish peoples militia of Palestine. I had heard many stories of its exploits during the war, when the Haganah directed underground rescue work in Hitler Europe. In April, 1946, a year after the liberation, the Haganah was back at much the same job, though under altered circumstances. The cruelty of the Nazis had given way to the indifference of the victors; the concentration camps had become DP camps. The Jews in them were still homeless.
Earl Harrison of Philadelphia had returned eight months before from a special tour of these camps to report at the White House, We seem to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them. President Truman had asked the British government to open the doors of Palestine to the 100,000 Jews in the displaced persons camps of Germany and Austria before winter came, but the only result was an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. It was spring and the committee had yet to make its report. A trickle of 1500 a month was entering Palestine legally under the limited immigration quota granted by the British, but the one hope of the rest was still the Aliyah Beth .
Aliyah is a Hebrew word which may be translated as immigration, though its connotations are richer. Literally, the word means an up-going, as to a high place; its associations are those of the pilgrimage. Beth in this context means second, and distinguishes this immigration from the one allowed by the British. Aliyah Beth is the Palestinian term for what the British call the illegal immigration; the difference goes deeper than terminology.
This is a subject on which the British do not see eye to eye with the Jews. The Colonial Office looks back to the White Paper of 1939. Under its terms the doors of Palestine should be shut tight against further Jewish immigration, But to the Jews Palestine is stillas in the Bible Eretz Israel , the land of Israel. To them the British are another of those historic vexations like the Assyrians and the Romans. From the Jewish point of view the White Paper is a violation of the Balfour Declaration; the whole affairthe 1917 promise and the 1939 breaking of ita bit of latter-day presumption. For is it not written, of an older covenant with Abraham, And He said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it....Unto thy seed have I given this land?
