"Af-Al-Pi-Chen" Illegal Immigration Ship
On the 27th of September 1997, a 78 year-old Israeli
presented himself at the Clandestine Immigration & Naval Museum near Haifa, bearing a
wreath and a simple poem he had penned:
"I salute the 'Af-Al-Pi-Chen' and all her sister ships – including those that went down...for on
Israel’s 50th Independence Day, each and every one should go down in history
as an oniyah lochemet – an ‘embattled ship’ – whose battles
contributed immeasurably to the establishment of the state."
Five decades after immigrating to Israel,
Chanoch Touner, a Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust, had come to pay homage to the ship that had meant to bring him to the
land of Israel fifty years earlier - the 42 meter-long vessel called the "Af-Al-Pi-Chen" (Despite it All).
The "Af-Al-Pi-Chen" – a World War II landing craft – is the only remnant of the 116 ships of all
shapes and sizes that tried to run the British blockade in order to bring well
over 100,000 Jewish refugees to the shores of Mandatory
Palestine. The ship, retired from the Israeli navy, was scheduled to be
sold for scrap in 1962 when Yosef Almog, a senior naval officer, realized that
the "Af-Al-Pi-Chen" was nearly all that was left of a heroic episode in
the history of the State of Israel.
The hulk was hauled up on shore, cut into sections and
reassembled at the foot of Mount Carmel – a major engineering feat in the
1960s. By 1969, the "Af-Al-Pi-Chen" had become part of a museum under
Almog’s directorship, commemorating the protracted "battle of
wills" waged with British authorities over the right to Jewish
immigration. Part of the ship has been refitted with 50 cm. wide berths
squeezed into the cramped belly of the ship; other parts of the ship, and the
adjacent pavilion, display memorabilia from the period - ship models, historic
photos, newspaper accounts and mementos from other "illegal"
immigrant ships.
The section of the museum on clandestine immigration
portrays the story of the fateful years 1933-1948 – the rise of Hitler to power, World War II, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel –
a period when an "underground railroad" helped thousands of Jewish
refugees reach the European Mediterranean coast, where fishing trawlers,
river boats and former warships, secretly purchased by the Zionist movement,
rendezvoused with the refugees and furtively sailed them across the
Mediterranean towards British-controlled Palestine.
Some ships succeeded in slipping through the British naval
blockade, unloading their human cargo on desolate beaches or in proximity to
Jewish population centers, where the newcomers mixed with locals to prevent
detection. Several ships sank in tragic circumstances. Many were apprehended
and forcefully boarded by British sailors as they approached the coast of the
Land of Israel – the ships impounded and the passengers sent to detention
camps, first to Atlit south of Haifa, and, after the war, to Cyprus or
Mauritius. Some were returned to Europe.
The museum graphically displays how, in the aftermath of
the war, the confrontation between British soldiers and concentration camp
survivors became a moral issue which influenced worldwide public opinion.
Af-Al-Pi-Chen was neither the first nor the last vessel
to sail between 1934 and 1948. Nor was she the smallest or the largest. "Af-Al-Pi-Chen"’s
voyage was not marked by triumph like that of the Tiger Hill, run
aground on the Tel Aviv beach – whose passengers mixed with the crowd on the
beach and thus escaped detention. Nor was she stricken by tragedy like the Struma – torpedoed by a German U boat in 1942, with only one survivor and hundreds
of casualties.
Nor was "Af-Al-Pi-Chen" the most famous ship. This
distinction belongs to the Exodus
1947 – whose mid-summer voyage inspired author Leon Uris’ best
selling historical novel and the 1960s Hollywood box office hit Exodus.
In an attempt to break the spirit of those on board, the British sent the
4,530 Jewish DPs back to Europe. Press
reports of the fate of the Exodus, however, dramatized the plight of
the surviving European Jews. The passengers steadfastly resisted deportation
and then adamantly refused to disembark in Europe. Within weeks of the Exodus passengers’ forced disembarkment in Germany after weeks in stifling holds,
the "Af-Al-Pi-Chen" sailed from Italy down the Adriatic Sea with its 435
passengers - one of them Chanoch Touner – giving notice to the British that
despite all obstacles, illegal immigration would continue.
Like many other ships, "Af-Al-Pi-Chen" was sighted by
British vessels west of Port Said and was forcibly boarded by two British
destroyers and sent to Cyprus. A British collaborator, Betty Fiedler – a
beautiful woman who mixed among the immigrants – charmed both passengers and
crew while signaling British navel vessels with a flashlight and identifying
crew members for British authorities to arrest, before "disappearing into
the bulwarks" during disembarkment. In the wake of her actions, the "Af-Al-Pi-Chen" suffered an armed attack by British seamen, and resisted with its only weapons
– a barrage of tin cans. One of the refugees, Noach Goldfarb, was shot and
killed, and seven others were injured.
Chanoch Touner arrived in Israel after almost a year in a
internment camp in Cyprus.
Today, he lives in Kiryat Ata near Haifa. Although retired,
Touner – a grandfather of three – is still active in the Civil Guard in
his community and works part-time in R&D and quality control in a rubber
factory in Haifa Bay. Like untold thousands of "illegal" immigrants,
he has subsequently rebuilt his life in the State of Israel, becoming part to
the mosaic of the nation he tried so hard to reach fifty years ago.
Sources: Israel Magazine-On-Web, January 1998, Israeli
Foreign Ministry |