“Exodus 1947” is a real-life “Mission Impossible” that starts with a broken-down, Chesapeake Bay steamer in Baltimore and ends with the birth of a new nation in Palestine.
Along the way, there’s a deadly blockade of British gunships, 4,500 refugees from Hitler’s European death camps, freedom fighters from the Haganah and the heroism of a crew of Jewish men in their 20s and 30s, many of whom had never even been to sea.
“Exodus 1947,” which is co-produced by Maryland Public Television and airs at 10 tomorrow night, is a documentary you don’t want to miss. Directed by New York filmmaker Robby Henson and narrated by CBS correspondent Morley Safer, it tells the real story that, in part, inspired Leon Uris’ best-seller “Exodus.”
Maybe you saw the 1960 Otto Preminger film version of the book with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. If you did, forget about it, and see this historical account, which will help you understand as well as feel the power of the movement that led to the founding of Israel.
“Exodus 1947” manages to tell that big story by never losing its focus on a small, rat-ridden rust-bucket called the President Warfield. The steamer, which sailed from Baltimore to Norfolk, Va., was once the “epitome of luxury on the Chesapeake,” we are told. But, by 1946, well past its prime after being used to transport troops to Normandy during the war, it’s headed for the scrap heap.
Enter David Ben-Gurion and agents of the Haganah — those Zionists, pressing for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, whom the British masters of Palestine considered terrorists.
Thousands of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were hoping to find new lives away from the ashes of Europe, and one of their best hopes was Palestine. But Britain enforced strict quotas on immigration so as not to anger the Arabs in the region who controlled the flow of British oil.
Tension mounted as Zionists bought ships and tried to use them to take refugees from Europe. Britain responded with a blockade to intercept the ships and pack the refugees off to detention camps in Cyprus.
One of those refugee ships was the Warfield, bought for $40,000 and docked at a deserted pier near Lancaster Street in Baltimore. In December 1946, the crew, under the leadership of Ike Aronowitz, a 22-year-old Haganah officer, arrived and started to get it ready for the voyage.
Director Henson uses home movies filmed by one of the crew members, as well as letters they wrote to family and friends, to re-create life aboard the Warfield. Even better, several of the crew are still alive, and we see them on-camera today talking about the journey.
From Baltimore to Norfolk, to the Azores and then France. In France, the real trouble started. Britain leaned on French authorities to try to stop the ship from leaving port, so the Warfield slipped away and sailed from one port to another until a secret loading of 4,500 refugees from various sites throughout Europe could be coordinated.
As one crew member puts it, “We were working like the underground railroad during the Civil War days.”
Six British gunships tailed the Warfield — now renamed Exodus 1947 by passengers and crew — all the way to the coast of Palestine. After days of cat-and-mouse, the warships started ramming the Warfield, and British troops boarded, killing three and wounding 146 before taking control.
But the seeds of British defeat were planted in that bloody victory and in the harsh measures taken by its foreign ministry against the refugees. Press coverage of the refugees sent back to Germany on British prison ships is said to have greatly influenced members of a United Nations committee then deciding the fate of Palestine.
“Exodus 1947” crams an incredible amount of emotion and information into just an hour of film. But its greatest accomplishment is that, in telling the story of this one little ship, it manages to suggest what it felt like to be a Jew in 1947 and not have a place that could be called safe harbor.
Pub Date: 7/05/97
