THE PEOPLE ON THE BEACH

A painstakingly researched account of the seaborne refugee operations to deliver Jewish survivors of the Third Reich to what would become Israel.

Whitehouse, a journalist and historical adviser at Vienna-based Centropa, “an interactive database of Jewish memory,” impressively documents a moment in history when more than 1,000 Holocaust survivors gathered on a Ligurian beach and clambered aboard a rickety ship that was stuffed far beyond its capacity, sailing to the British Mandate of Palestine on a thankfully uneventful eight-day journey across the Mediterranean. The survivors braved Italian authorities, a British naval blockade, and an oddly hostile reception by those who reflexively believed that “they must have done some wrong in order to still be alive.” In order to effectively chronicle this and other tales of rescue, Whitehouse traveled to such critical sites as Berdychiv, where the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman “was shocked to discover the major role that his former Ukrainian neighbors had played in the murder of his mother, his relatives and the thousands who lost their lives”; tourist-packed Auschwitz, where “cars and coaches fill the carparks and locals quick to make a few zlotys try to divert day-trippers from the free parking to their private paying lots”; and Dachau, “not a place that lends much help to the road-trip historian.” During her journey interviewing survivors, relatives, archivists, and historians, Whitehouse learned about stories not often recounted elsewhere, including the work of avenging former prisoners who poisoned their interned erstwhile SS guards with arsenic-laced bread; of the Jewish Brigade of the British army, “a unit of soldiers who had effectively gone AWOL” to help Holocaust survivors escape to Palestine; and of Italian partisans and ordinary townspeople in helping overcrowded refugee ships sail, a story commemorated in Leon Uris’ novel Exodus.

An illuminating, welcome addition to the literature of the Holocaust and its aftermath.