Roni Mikel-Arieli. Jewish Social Studies. Volume 27, Issue 3, Fall 2022.
In December 1940, 1,580 Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-controlled Europe survived a long journey to Haifa only to be deported by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to the British colony of Mauritius. Using this case study, this article explores British perceptions of the Jewish Question during World War II. It builds on a transnational archive that includes British colonial records from Britain, Palestine, and Mauritius, together with memoirs, letters, diaries, and oral testimonies from the Jewish detainees and the local Mauritians who remember them. In doing so, it asks three interconnected questions: How did the British authorities perceive the Jews deported to Mauritius? How did the deportees perceive Mauritius, their new destination, and its local population? And how were the detainees received and perceived by Mauritians? This three-pronged inquiry invites an exploration of the ambiguity of attitudes toward Jewish refugees inside and outside British colonial frames.
This article is part of a larger project that uncovers a traumatic human story situated at the intersection of major forces and events—the Holocaust, World War II, Jewish displacement, British imperialism, and modern Zionism—and yet it remains relegated to the margins of history. It focuses on the journey of 1,580 Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-controlled Europe in late 1940, survived a long voyage to Haifa, and then were deported by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to the British colony of Mauritius. The detainees spent four years and seven months in the Beau Bassin prison before leaving the island in August 1945. With the deportees’ departure, the site and the story all but disappeared from collective memory.
In July 2020, almost 80 years after the deportation, the first official acknowledgement of the detainees’ suffering was delivered by the British government. A letter written by Lord (Tariq) Ahmad of Wimbledon, minister of state for South Asia and the Commonwealth, and the prime minister’s special representative on preventing sexual violence in conflict, was delivered to Mr. Owen Griffiths, chairman of the Beau Bassin Jewish Detainees Memorial and Information Centre at the St. Martin Jewish cemetery in Mauritius. This letter recognized the suffering endured by European Jews who fled persecution in Nazioccupied Europe and paid tribute to the important work of the Beau Bassin Jewish Detainees Memorial and Information Centre. The letter was vaguely worded, however, stating that “there are open questions about whether things could have been done differently, such as the 1939 White Paper, which capped the number of visas issued to Jews wanting to go to the British Mandate of Palestine.”
In its vagueness, the letter offers a glimpse of British perceptions of the place and people whose marginality is an essential part of the story. The place is the British colony of Mauritius, and the people are the 1,580 Jewish refugees who were deported there. This article is an attempt to explore these perceptions through an in-depth examination of the intersection between the history of British imperialism, Jewish displacement, and the Indian Ocean during World War II. It builds on a transnational archive that includes British colonial records from Britain, the British Mandate of Palestine, and Mauritius, together with memoirs, personal letters, diaries, and oral testimonies from the Jewish detainees and the local Mauritians who remember them. In so doing, it asks three interconnected questions: How did the British authorities perceive the Jewish immigrants deported to Mauritius? How did the Jewish deportees perceive Mauritius, their new faraway destination, and its local population? And how were the detainees received and perceived by local communities in Mauritius? This three-pronged inquiry invites an exploration of the ambiguous place of Jewish refugees inside and outside British colonial frames.
Historical Background
Our little-known episode begins when three ships—Pacific, Milos, and Atlantic—set sail for a long voyage from Tulcea, Romania to the port of Haifa in the British Mandate of Palestine carrying 3,500 Jewish refugees. These ships were chartered on September 4, 1940 by the Committee for Jewish Overseas Transports under the leadership of Austrian Jewish financial adviser Berthold Storfer and with the consent and cooperation of the German authorities. These refugees included groups from the Jewish communities of Vienna, Prague, Brno, Berlin, Munich, and Danzig, who came from all streams of Judaism and had different affinities to Zionism.
British control over Palestine was established at the end of World War I, when the November 1917 Balfour Declaration, which pledged support for the formation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, was incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922. Mandate authorities were British bureaucrats headed by a high commissioner who oversaw the entire population. The local Jewish community (the Yishuv) formed the Jewish Agency as its governing body, representing Jewish interests. At first, the Mandate did not include a distinct limitation on immigration into Palestine and only maintained that Jewish immigration “cannot be so great in volume as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals.” As Daila Ofer argues, however, “the issue of immigration was a central source of friction among the British authorities, the Yishuv, and the Arab community.” Thus, the White Paper of (1930) was passed to provide a more specific official immigration policy, still focusing on Palestine’s economic capacity.
Almost a decade later, the 1939 White Paper was drafted to advance a new interpretation of the Balfour Declaration’s Jewish national home in the form of the existing Jewish community in Palestine. A binational model advocated by this policy envisioned the Arab majority’s eventual rule of Palestine with Jews as active participants in government institutions. Thus, it enforced a strict immigration quota for Jews entering Palestine to keep the population balance exactly as it was, with the Arabs as the majority and the Jews as the minority. As Lauren Elise Apter argues, these immigration quotas were meant to provide a solution for the recent increased flow of European Jews into Palestine following the worsening situation of Jews in the expanding Nazi Reich, and as a direct response to the Arab revolt of 1936-39. It was aimed at “keep[ing] Palestine quiet, and therefore to pacify Arab states in the region.”
Following the outbreak of World War II, the (1939) White Paper presented a paradox for the Zionist leadership in Palestine and abroad. While European Jews were ready to embark on illegal transports and risk their lives on long voyages, Zionist bodies such as the Labor Zionist Mossad Le’aliyah Bet and the revisionist Merkaz Le’aliyah did not wish to appear as supporters of illegal actions or be accused of collaborating with the Nazis. In fact, Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization, had always been openly critical of illegal immigration into Palestine because he believed that it would harm the relationship between the Jews and the British.
This ambivalence may explain why, when the Atlantic’s passengers finally reached the Haifa port, they were met with a cold reception from Jewish representatives. Thirteen-year-old Arie Leopold Keller, who arrived in Palestine with his mother from Danzig, wrote in his diary:
On November 24, at dawn, we saw the mountains of Sula (Lebanon) and then Mount Carmel, and all of us streamed to the deck and sang “Ha-tikvah” with great emotion…. The Jews we came into contact with, especially the officials, looked at the illegal immigrant ship with indifference and cynicism. It seemed as if their paperwork was more important to them than the fate of the people…. More than the behaviour of the British, which after all, we were able to understand, the attitude of the Yishuv depressed us, and we felt helpless.
To implement the new British policy, the passengers of the Milos and Pacific, who arrived in Haifa in early November, were transferred to the Patria—a former French ship that had been turned over to the British. Although the conditions on the Patria were far better than on their previous ships, it soon became clear to the refugees that they were aboard a floating prison. Only about ten days later, on November 15, a smuggled message from the underground military organization of the Yishuv, the Haganah, indicated the Mandate authorities’ intention to deport all the refugees to a British colony. When the Atlantic passengers arrived in Haifa on November 24, 134 women and children were transferred to the Patria as well, while the others awaited transfer the next morning. Seeking to stop the deportation, the Haganah decided to sabotage the ship, and on November 25 at 9 a.m., a bomb smuggled onto the Patria exploded, causing the tragic deaths of more than 260 Jewish refugees.
Ten-year-old Oscar Langsam, who arrived from Danzig with his mother and three-year-old brother, witnessed the Patria sinking from the deck of the Atlantic. “I was standing in line with my mother Ester and little brother Herman, waiting for the ferry to take us from the Atlantic to the Patria when I heard an explosion and saw how the Patria tilted sideways and began to sink quite quickly.” Indeed, a secret telegram from the British high commissioner for Jerusalem, Harold MacMichael, to the Colonial Office in London at 3:30 that afternoon stated. “at 9:05 hours today [an] explosion occurred in [the] PATRIA forward of the engine room blowing [a] large hole in the starboard side.” MacMichael reported that it took the ship about 15 minutes to sink, with 1,835 illegal immigrants and 37 crew members on board. More than 260 Jewish refugees and two British policemen lost their lives in this traumatic disaster.
The Jewish Question in the British Colonial Imagination
The growing influx of German Jews into Britain after Hitler gained power in 1933 came amid mass unemployment, which generated hostility toward outsiders. This further posed a challenge for a British government determined to maintain rigid control of immigration. The British government insisted that an increase in the number of Jewish refugees could encourage local antisemitism. Indeed, as Tony Kushner argues, with the arrival of 60,000 Jewish refugees after Kristallnacht, the British public became aware of a potential Jewish problem in Britain. Refugees were perceived as both a major threat to unemployment and a source of increased local antisemitism. While Kushner maintains that the government was not antisemitic in its policies, he points to some governmental officials who held antisemitic views and who tended to influence the government’s response to the Jewish question.
With the declaration of war, entry of Jewish refugees into Britain was effectively halted. Louise London argues that what stood behind this action was the claim, made in some government circles, that the Germans would only allow departure to “persons whose entry into other countries was desired for reasons connected with the war.” This notion was particularly prominent in the Colonial and Dominions Offices as well as in the British Home Office, which perceived the arriving Jews as a fifth column and possible enemy aliens.
Similarly, a memorandum prepared by the Colonial and Foreign Offices in early 1940 described the influx of Jewish refugees into Palestine as. “not primarily a refugee movement … [but rather] an organized invasion of Palestine for political motives, which exploits the facts of the refugee problem and unscrupulously uses the humanitarian appeal of the latter to justify itself.” As the following paragraphs will demonstrate, this view was adopted by the Colonial Office and shaped its attitude toward the refugees who arrived in Palestine in November 1940.
On October 15, 1940, a week after the Atlantic, the Milos, and the Pacific set sail from Romania to Palestine, an urgent telegram was sent from MacMichael to Sir Bede Clifford, the British governor of Mauritius. In response to a request to accommodate a considerable number of illegal immigrants in an internment camp, the governor stated that he could currently accept 1,500 passengers, with an additional 2,500 in six months.
A few days later, MacMichael stressed that the problem of admitting illegal immigration into Palestine should be viewed not as a problem of local politics but “primarily as a problem of war.” At the time, Italian forces in Libya threatened British forces in Egypt; Italy’s success in East Africa in August was followed by the Greco-Italian War, which began in late October, with the Italians attacking Greece from Albania; Vichy France controlled Syria and Lebanon; and the region was surrounded with Axis forces. It is therefore not surprising that a telegram, sent by Lord Lloyd, then secretary of state for the colonies, to the prime minister’s office in London, perceived the situation in the Middle East after the outbreak of the war as explosive and the Jewish refugees not merely as illegal immigrants but as a possible threat owing to their places of origin: Nazi-occupied countries. It stated:
All these immigrants now come from enemy or enemy occupied countries. We have no check whatever over them. There are indications that the Axis powers are encouraging the movement, not only because it is exceedingly embarrassing to us (in view of its inflammatory effect upon Arab sentiment) but also because it affords an opportunity of introducing enemy agents into Palestine and the Middle East. In times like these we cannot afford to take risks or to allow our authority to be openly flouted. It is unnecessary to emphasise how doubly grave this would be in view of the Syrian situation.
The telegram went on to mention that arrangements were made for 1,760 refugees to “be shipped at the earliest possible moment to Mauritius, where provision can be made for their detention during the period of the war.”
Although the Colonial Office as well as the high commissioner for Jerusalem repeatedly referred to the Jewish refugees as an immediate threat to the Middle East, the British government and particularly the Foreign Office often proclaimed that such allegations were baseless. This tension can be detected in a telegram sent by the prime minister’s office in London to the Colonial Office, which stressed that the arriving immigrants were refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution. And yet, as historian Bernard Wasserstein has stated, this tension did not lead to any alteration to the White Paper policy, an issue on which the offices were generally prepared to collaborate. Therefore, it is hardly a surprise that in response to the aforementioned telegram, Winston Churchill stated, “[P]rovided these refugees are not sent back to the torments from which they have escaped and are decently treated in Mauritius, I agree.”
In an urgent request to the governor of Trinidad on November 14, Lord Lloyd argued that the British government was facing an urgent problem of the “disposal of [a] considerable number of Jews from Central Europe who are expected shortly to reach [the] Palestine coast with a view to illegal entry.” He stated that the governor of Mauritius had already agreed to assist with accommodation for a considerable number of people and asked if Trinidad could also contribute to the war effort by accommodating additional illegal immigrants. The refugees were described as:
Jewish internees [that] would have to be kept under restraint and this would involve the camp being surrounded by barbed wire and the provision of guards. They would probably consist of persons of both sexes with a proportion of children and would-be nationals of Central and Southern European states and might include enemy agents.
The requirement for a guarded camp implies that the Jews were not viewed as refugees who had escaped Nazi persecution but as criminals in need of restraint and detention.
Although the colonial authorities’ correspondence with their crown colonies reflected an unequivocal position regarding the identity of the immigrants and the degree of their dangerousness, a somewhat different description was presented in the Palestinian press. On November 20, an official announcement regarding the British intentions to deport the new arrivals stated:
There can be no doubt that these persons must be classed as illegal immigrants, that is to say, persons seeking to enter Palestine against what is well known to be the law of the country. H[is] M[ajesty’s] G[overnment] are not lacking in sympathy for refugees from territories under German control. But they are responsible for the administration of Palestine and are bound to see to it that the laws of the country are not openly flouted. Moreover, they can only regard a revival of illegal Jewish immigration at the present juncture as likely to affect the local situation most adversely, and to prove a serious menace to British interests in the Middle East.
This announcement can be interpreted as an effort to alleviate the expected outcry of protest in the Yishuv regarding the planned deportation. It referred to the passengers of the Milos and the Pacific as refugees, without mentioning the alleged possibility that among them were German enemy agents. Still, the announcement stressed the illegality of their action and its possible effect on the local situation. Therefore, it stated that the arriving immigrants should “be deported to a British colony as soon as arrangements of safe transport and building accommodation can be made and shall be detained there for the duration of the war” and that “similar action will be taken in the case of any further parties who may succeed in reaching Palestine with a view to illegal entry.”
On the very day that the official announcement was published in the Palestine Post, the prime minister’s office sent an urgent telegram, in which Churchill stated:
I had never contemplated the Jewish refugees being interned in Mauritius in a camp surrounded by barbed wire and guards. It is very unlikely that these refugees would include enemy agents, and I should expect that the Jewish authorities themselves, as Weizmann can assure you, would be the most efficient and vigilant purges in this respect.
Nevertheless, Lord Lloyd insisted that “Prima facie, [the Jewish immigrants] are ‘enemy aliens,’ and that fact cannot be lost sight of.” He emphasized,
I wish I could agree with you that there is little risk of enemy agents being included in their number. All my information leads me to the contrary opinion. There is evidence to show that these voyages are organized and financed by Jewish agencies with the active assistance of the German authorities. Without such assistance the traffic could not be carried on at all. Is it indeed likely that the Nazis would neglect so good an opportunity of getting their agents into the Middle East?
Lord Lloyd further stated that “the intention of the government to remove these refugees from Haifa to a British colony has now been officially announced in Palestine,” making its revocation seem “a surrender to Jewish agitation,” which, in turn, would encourage additional illegal immigrants to arrive in Palestine and would have dramatic effects on the political situation in the Middle East.
Leaving the British government with little choice, the prime minister’s office accepted the deportation plan. However, it also emphasized that while “internment in Mauritius is not so conspicuous…. One cannot in any case contemplate, as the telegram to Trinidad does, a British Dachau on the doorstep of America.” This telegram not only provides an indication of the British intention to establish a concentration camp for the Jewish refugees in Mauritius, but also demonstrates the marginalization of the Indian Ocean in the British colonial imagination. As the telegram states, the British point of reference was America, and Mauritius was conceived as invisible because of its geographical distance, compared to Trinidad with its proximity to America.
This confidential correspondence occurred in the weeks and days before the Patria disaster. As previously mentioned, as early as November 15, rumors regarding the planned deportation to Mauritius had reached Milos and Pacific passengers who were already aboard the Patria, and the official announcement became public five days later, on November 20. Therefore, when Lord Lloyd reported to the prime minister on the sinking of the Patria on the afternoon of November 25, he imagined two possible scenarios. The first was that “the outrage was planned by enemy authority in order to prevent the frustration of their illegal operation.” This reiterated the idea that among the refugees on the Patria were Nazi enemy agents who were frustrated by the possible deportation, which allegedly damaged their plans to infiltrate the British Mandate of Palestine. The second scenario was that “the revisionist section of the Jewish organizations has taken this extreme step in order to prevent these would-be immigrants from being removed to a British colony.”
Eventually, the British government decided to allow the 1,581 Patria survivors to stay in Palestine, which elicited harsh criticism from military commanders and bureaucrats in the region. Middle East Command Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell wrote to the War Office:
From [a] military point of view, it is disastrous. It will be spread all over [the] Arab world that Jews have again successfully challenged [the] decision of [the] British government and that [the] policy of White Paper is being reversed. This will gravely increase [the] prospect of widespread disorders in Palestine necessitating increased military commitments, will greatly enhance influence of Mufti, will rouse mistrust of us in Syria and increase anti-British propaganda and fifth column activities in Egypt.
This view was strongly supported by Miles Wedderburn Lampson, then high commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan, who argued that General Wavell’s appeal was justified, and that the “effect on opinion here [in Egypt] can only be harmful.”
These two appeals, which reflected the military situation in the region as a main reason for their authors’ stand in favor of the deportation, were also met with rejection from the prime minister’s office. This emphasized the cabinet’s position that in light of the sufferings of Patria survivors, it would be necessary on compassionate grounds not to immediately subject them to the hazards of the sea. The prime minister’s office also stated, however, that the “cabinet agreed that future consignments of illegal immigrants should be sent to Mauritius provided that tolerable conditions can be arranged for them there.”
British Colonial Violence: Inspection, Incarceration, and Deportation
As mentioned, most of the Atlantic passengers witnessed the tragic sinking of the Patria from the deck of their ship. Ten days later, on December 5, the last passenger left the Atlantic. While some of the young men on board were sent to a jail in Acre, others were transferred to a section of the Atlit camp, separated by wire fences from the Patria survivors. Simon Thieberg, a refugee from Vienna, recalled:
When we arrived there [in Haifa] the British took us in a camp and interrogated us. One of the interrogators made a remark—”we can treat you like the Nazis treat you”—because it was war and they thought maybe there were spies among us … Some of the youngsters including me were sent to Acre, where members of the Irgun were imprisoned, too, under strict conditions. We were held there for seven days and were later reunited with our fellow [Atlantic] passengers in Atlit … The British colonial police treated us like enemies, especially the young ones.
Those who arrived in the Atlit camp recounted somewhat different treatment by the British police. Aaron Zwergbaum, a young lawyer with Zionist leanings who came from Prague, wrote in his diary:
All indications are that our stay is going to be a long one. Blankets and cutlery are handed out, interrogations—as yet superficial—are conducted, personal details are taken down, and after two days the luggage is handed out … Unfortunately, it is quite impossible to establish any contact with the people from outside. We can talk across the fence with the Patria people and are happy to see many acquaintances.
Indeed, the transfer of the Atlantic passengers to the Atlit camp gave the refugees a sense of relief. Now on Palestine soil, the possibility of deportation seemed impossible. Previous illegal immigrants such as passengers of the Hilda, which arrived in Haifa in January 1940, and Sakarya passengers who arrived a month later, were also held on board for several days before they were transferred to Atlit and were eventually released and permitted to stay in Palestine. The Atlantic passengers were hoping for a similar fate.
But on December 8, 1940 at noon, rumors spread throughout the Atlit camp that the Atlantic passengers would soon be deported to a British colony. Langsam recalled:
The Haganah passed on to us an order to make passive resistance against the deportation. Everyone should remain naked in their bed and not pack their belongings. British soldiers were called to break the resistance, they started with the men’s huts and used brutal force. The resistance of the men broke, and they started to go naked, some only with a blanket on them, to the lorries that were to take them to the deportation ships. The women saw the men walking and followed suit.
The violent deportation was also described by Moshe Sharett, then head of the Jewish Agency’s political department in Jerusalem, who stated: “A terrible act was committed in Atlit of which we haven’t experienced before…. I say: the Atlit disaster could have happened even without the Patria disaster, even if the Patria was already on its way to Mauritius.”
The refugees were not only violently transferred from Atlit to the Haifa port, but also escorted by a military convoy and had to go through what the British authorities referred to as a “customs examination,” during which watches, glasses, and other personal belongings were confiscated. Josef Deutsch, who was 21 years old when he was deported to Mauritius, wrote in his memoirs: “Naked and barefoot we arrived, wrapped in blankets, we had nothing which could be subject to custom, nevertheless, wristwatches, gold rings, and money were taken away from us. The last belongings which the Nazis allowed us to take with us were stolen there or were confiscated.”
The refugees were placed on two Dutch ships—the Newzealand and the Johan de Witt—to be deported to Mauritius. Their recollections reveal that even during the 17-day journey to the Indian Ocean, the British policemen who escorted them treated them suspiciously and in a demeaning way. Zwergbaum wrote in his diary:
During the first days the refugees were kept in the holds of the ships which were unbearably hot…. On one of the ships headed to Mauritius, the men’s hair was cropped close, not for hygienic reasons but to annoy and humiliate them…. On the same ship they were not permitted to celebrate the festival of Hanukkah because the police commander claimed that this holiday was already over.
Avraham Talmi, a young refugee from Prague, added that in the holds of the ships the refugees slept in hammocks and had no privacy. He recalled:
We were crowded like fish, and if anyone had to go to the bathroom, he had to ask for permission. Then a British policeman had to escort him to the bathroom, and we had to leave the door open so that the policeman will see that we are not doing anything criminal.
These descriptions were confirmed two years later during a British parliamentary debate on the Palestine police. Testimony by a British officer on the brutal behavior of the British policemen during the deportation explained:
The baggage of these “undesirable” people was ruthlessly looted upon the quayside with the pretext that they were being searched for implements of sabotage. The authorities were deliberately wreaking a spitefulness upon these people, for they were still smarting from the Patria inquiry…. Some of the police officers who traveled with the party misconducted themselves on board of the ship. That is not a complaint from a Jew. It comes from a man who is not only English but not even a Zionist.
These descriptions also suggest that the deportation was a product of an essentialist view of the Jewish refugees as potential enemy agents, merely because of their Central European citizenship. Similar experiences were shared by Jewish refugees who were deported from Britain to Canada in July 1940, together with German prisoners of war and a small group of Italian civilian internees. Historian Andrea Strutz argues that conditions on deportation ships were difficult mainly due to the treatment of the refugees by the Canadian army, “which believed that dangerous ‘enemy aliens’ had arrived.” Indeed, the deportation to Canada was based on security fears about enemy aliens in Britain and much less about public opinion. Therefore, once security fears were allayed, the refugees were permitted to return to Britain. However, this was not the case for the refugees deported to Mauritius.
Detained in Mauritius: Between the Colonized and the Colonizer
Located off the eastern coast of Africa, Mauritius Island in the Indian Ocean was once the capital of French power in the east, and the base from which corsairs pursued British merchantmen as they plied their trade between India and Europe. British imperial control of the island was established after a British invasion in 1810 and ended on March 12, 1968, when Mauritius became independent. During World War II, two-thirds of the local population was of Indo-Pakistani origin, most of which descended from indentured laborers brought to work in the sugar industry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One-fourth of the island’s population was of Creole origin (mixed French and African descent), while a small number had Chinese origins, and there was an even smaller, yet powerful, Franco-Mauritian elite. Mauritius played a central role in British strategic planning, and during World War II, local troops were recruited for service overseas. The eastern fleet guarded the Indian Ocean, and a base for British naval forces was established on the island.
During the voyage, misinformation spread among the refugees, most of whom had never heard of Mauritius. In his memoirs, Josef Adler, a young Czechoslovakian refugee, recalled:
Some of the experts among the refugees started telling stories on the island that were far from reality. They told us that lions and monkeys were wandering around freely. The ships finally entered Port Louis at night and on the next day we saw the city and the island and were pleasantly surprised to see a train of buses and cars, when we imagined a jungle.
Zwergbaum also wrote in his diary that as the refugees entered Port Louis, “officers came aboard, and now already we saw that the country was much more civilized than we had imagined, as far as we had even known where it was on the map.” He stated that as the refugees were disembarked and put on buses, “it was overwhelming to see how friendly, even enthusiastically, we were greeted by the Coloreds. What a contrast, remembering what we had suffered under Whites in Europe!” These impressions provide a glimpse into Jewish perceptions of the island and its inhabitants. Whereas the refugees had imagined exotic jungles in a far-off land, they were surprised to find signs of progress and modernity.
The refugees arrived in Mauritius on December 26, 1940, comprising some 849 men, 635 women, and 96 children. They were defined by the local colonial authorities as “European Detainees,” and “ordinances” were established to legislate their detention and legal status and to prevent contact between them and the local population, an offence that carried a two-year prison sentence. These ordinances reflected the desire to separate the detainees and the local population “in the traditional pattern of divide and rule that British colonialism implemented globally across the empire.” Although the refugees were deported as punishment for breaking British colonial rules by illegally entering Palestine, they were still Europeans, and their Europeanness challenged the colonial social order and created an in-between status—one that was not entirely identical to that of the colonized nor that of the colonizer.
The liminal position of some European communities living in colonial societies is the subject of several studies by postcolonial theorists. Ann Laura Stoler, for example, rethought colonial categories by observing different kinds of European communities in colonial spaces. She argued against the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, which perceives colonizers and their communities as a unified elite, pointing to poor whites as an example of “unfit” Europeans. Isabel Hofmeyr also rejected the binary between colonized and colonizer and argued that “at every turn, the Indian Ocean complicates binaries, moving us away from the simplicities of the resistant local and the dominating global and toward a historically deep archive of competing universalisms.”
Hofmeyr’s statement is crucial to understanding British colonial perceptions of Jewish detention in Mauritius. In the late (1930) s, Mauritius saw industrial and labor unrest, which was followed by local strikes and riots among Creole intellectuals and artisans as well as Indo-Mauritians. These developments were spurred by the war, however, and the colonial authorities saw the need to exile their opponents or detain them. Sir Bede Clifford’s radio announcement of the coming of war to his colony on September 3, 1939, while describing Mauritius as “a remote island in the Indian Ocean,” did not contribute to the recruitment of the local population to the war effort. Thus, it is not unexpected that many of the testimonies of the refugees mention the warm reception they received from the Indo and Creole populations on the island, interpreting it as an act of colonial resistance.
Zwergbaum wrote in his diary, “when the refugees were driven to their destination camp in buses, natives lined the road greeting and cheering them. It was not clear whether the natives extended this unexpected welcome because they regarded them as enemies of their masters, or because they sympathized with the refugees.” Amnon Klein, who escaped from Vienna with his mother when he was (12) years old, interpreted the warm welcome the refugees received in a similar vein. He recalled, “The local population threw flowers on the road as we passed on our way to the camp. Apparently, they thought that we were German prisoners, and it turned out that they hated the British so much that they preferred the Germans over them.” These testimonies, when read alongside the local ban on contact between the detainees and the local population, are significant for our inquiry into British perceptions of the Jewish refugees because they reveal the ways in which the refugees were presented by the British authorities to the local population. Given the persecution they experienced in Europe and British officials referring to them as enemy agents, the refugees were introduced as political prisoners from enemy lands upon their arrival on Mauritius.
The deportation of European Jews who escaped Nazi persecution to a remote British colony and their internment in a detention camp demonstrates the complex ways in which the Holocaust intersected with British imperialism. The first annual report written by camp commander H. J. Armitage described the detainees as “European Jews who, seeking refuges from their Nazi oppressors, were attempting to enter Palestine as illegal immigrants.” By stressing the illegality of their entry to Palestine, the report emphasized the punitive aspects of their detention in Mauritius.
This attitude was also reflected in a telegram sent to the South African Jewish Board of Deputies on January 11, 1941 in response to the Jewish community’s request to help improve the conditions in the camp. The Colonial Office rejected the request, stating that “these Jews are, after all, under detention for an offence against the laws of Palestine, and the conditions of their detention should be sufficiently punitive to continue to act as a deterrent to other Jews in eastern Europe who may be considering following their example.” This reply left no room for doubt; the Jewish refugees detained in Mauritius were prisoners, obligated to adhere to a clear disciplinary policy. They were not free people.
The Beau Bassin camp was a local prison converted into a camp, and the high walls of the central compound ensured the separation between two sections of the camp: men were accommodated in the prison cells, while women and children were brought to a compound that housed specially built huts. Henry Wellisch, a refugee from Vienna, was 18 years old when he was deported to Mauritius with his parents. He wrote in his memoirs:
My father and I occupied two adjacent cells on the top floor of the cell block. The narrow cells, without electric light, were furnished with a narrow bed and had only a small iron-barred high-up window. The cells were not locked, and we could freely move around within the prison complex; however, men were never allowed in the women’s camp and vice versa.
The first annual official report, written by Zwergbaum as the detainees’ representative in January (1942), similarly emphasized that the detainees “were very depressed to have been taken to a prison at all, and it was a very depressing feeling when the barred doors and gates closed behind us.” He stressed that the two main hardships of the detainees’ internment were “the lack of freedom, and the impossibility of leading a normal family and sex life.” Only in July (1942), following a long, furious struggle on the part of the detainees, a new routine order arrived, granting wives permission to visit the men’s camp during daytime. And yet as the war progressed, an air protection rule was issued in the camp stating that “detainees were separated according to sex when seeking shelter, in order to maintain decency even in the face of death.”
Interestingly, official reports written by British colonial authorities in Mauritius gave a somewhat different picture of conditions. The report authored by the camp commander stated that the detainees were accommodated in “stone buildings” with “separate cubicles” as well as “small wooden huts.” Another report, signed by Sydney Moody, then colonial secretary in Mauritius, on behalf of an assigned Visiting Committee, similarly stated:
The 1,580 detainees are housed in stone buildings and small wooden huts. It has been possible to arrange separate cubicles in the stone buildings for the use of almost half of the total number of detainees; most of the remainder have been accommodated in huts which have been partitioned to enable groups of three or more to live together.
These reports did not mention the complete separation between men and women and children, nor the fact that the stone buildings were a prison compound and the “separate cubicles” prison cells. This factual omission cannot be perceived as unintentional.
It is important to note that the Visiting Committee, established on January 10, 1941 according to a directive by the governor of Mauritius, was to act as “the solid conscience in all matters relative to the welfare of the detainees who have been entrusted to the charge of the government of Mauritius.” Committee members were described as “the eyes, the ears, and the critical faculty of the public”; however, the directive emphasized that “in case questions of Imperial or local [issues] may be involved it would be desirable that the colonial secretary would be consulted by the joint chairmen before formal recommendations [are] made.” Thus, it is doubtful that the committee was neutral and completely detached from the local colonial authorities. Moreover, both Armitage and the committee’s reports were public. Sent to the British prime minister’s office in London, to the British parliament, and to international Jewish institutions, these reports were highly selective in the facts they presented, depicting an overwhelmingly positive picture of camp life, while sometimes ignoring, distorting, or marginalizing the many negative aspects of detention.
An important aspect of camp restrictions was the censorship of private letters. The detainees, most of whom had left family members behind, were anxious to receive news from their loved ones. Zwergbaum wrote in his “first-year report”:
Here, the letters we received are the milestones. Mail is more important to us than ever before. Letters are really the nicest events that can happen. The post functions reliably, but slowly. If one considers that there is a submarine war, it is surprising that so few ships are lost.
Siegfried Klatzo, a refugee from Danzig, oversaw mail at the camp on behalf of the detainees. He recalled:
Every letter had to comprise a maximum of two sheets, written on one side only, and to be handed over open for inspection by the censors…. We regularly received our mail from abroad, also parcels. I took the mail from the camp commander and distributed it to the various blocks. Recipients of parcels, however, had to take delivery personally in the head office where parcels were handed over in the presence of a high official.
Because the detainees spoke several languages, a special unit was established at the Colonial Censorship Department, where all letters were carefully inspected. People from the local population who spoke European languages were recruited to the unit, and accordingly, the refugees were only allowed to write their letters in English, German, or French. This was another indication of how the local authorities harbored suspicions of the detainees, based on their Central European nationalities.
Alongside the empathetic reception the refugees received from the Creole and Indo populations on the island, the local press associated with the French elite followed the medical conditions in the camp with great interest. It is important to note that the Franco-Mauritian elite was a powerful minority in Mauritius because it retained control over the sugar industry even under the British Crown, which, in turn, gained effective cooperation from the powerful minority. Therefore, its positions were usually in line with that of the British colonizers.
Most press reports focused on the plight of the refugees and highlighted the hardships of the journey to explain their precarious medical condition. Reports on the number of sick and dead were always accompanied by reminders of the dangers posed to public health. Thus it is not surprising that on January 30, 1941, the conservative newspaper Le Mauricien carefully reported that anxiety ran high among the public, while emphasizing the admirable measures taken by the British government in Mauritius on the matter:
There has been an abnormal number of deaths among the detainees since their arrival. The public is thus concerned about the current situation and eventual future consequences. We cannot blame the government for the measures taken to prepare the camp at Beau Bassin…. No one had, unfortunately, previewed that typhoid fever would affect the detainees, nor the conditions which resulted from an extremely rainy season. We must tackle the situation as it is now.
Indeed, the refugees arrived on the island in poor health. In his diary, Keller wrote, “When we arrived in Mauritius, many of us were sick and weak. Every day we had to bury at least one deceased person.” This was also reflected in monthly reports issued by the Mauritius Government House to the secretary of state for the colonies during the first year of detention, which included lists of detainees who died in detention and their cause of death, age, and nationality. These lists reveal that, although in most cases the cause of death was typhoid, there were some deaths from malaria, and these cases increased as time passed. Though the authorities were able to explain the typhoid outbreak as a result of the poor sanitary conditions on the ships that brought the refugees to Palestine and later to Mauritius, the first cases of malaria were detected in the camp two weeks after the refugees arrived on the island, and therefore served as an indication of the lack of proper preventive care provided by the local colonial authorities.
This issue was also mentioned in a letter published in Le Mauricien calling for “a sound and efficient medical organization” to be set up inside the camp. The letter suggested that the camp hospital would be occupied by doctors among the detainees. It also stressed that the doctors would require training by local doctors “working in hospitals and who are used to treat[ing] typhoid and malaria cases,” suggesting the prevalence of these epidemics on the island, regardless of the arrival of the refugees. The letter further proclaimed, “more than it is dangerous for the detainees, the situation poses danger for the inhabitants of the immediate vicinity of the camp at Beau Bassin and no one knows if the epidemic could extend further.” The letter sheds light on the vulnerability of the refugees. At no point did the letter deal with the punitive aspect of their imprisonment, and their arrest was never questioned. Moreover, like most local press reports, the letter did not focus on the refugees’ right to health services and instead emphasized the danger posed to the public, thus strengthening the British portrayal of the refugees as “others,” while bolstering social fears of them.
It is important to note that on January 9, 1941, all camp residents received their first inoculation against typhoid. A few weeks after the refugees arrived, the prison church and several huts were converted into a hospital, but these were insufficient for the many sick detainees. Zwergbaum’s first annual report as a representative of the detainees stated:
The health conditions could certainly not be called good if an average of 10 percent of people are kept in hospital…. Right at the beginning of our stay here there was a typhus epidemic, to which can be attributed the majority of our 54 deaths…. Toward the end of the year, not only light cases of dysentery but also heavy cases occurred, so that we closed the year with strict quarantine measures…. It also needs to be mentioned that we were only sparsely equipped with medicine, and that sometimes even items like Vaseline and iodine were out of stock.
These conditions were omitted from the Visiting Committee’s report, issued in May 1941, and were only carefully mentioned on the margins of the camp commander’s first annual report in October 1941.
The distortion of the reality of camp life by the colonial authorities also applied to the self-governing institutions of the detainees. When the detainees arrived, a Detainment Area Committee was formed to deal with all matters concerning social, cultural, and religious life in the camp. The camp was divided into four national groups (Austria, Danzig, Czechoslovakia, and all other nationalities), and each group had to elect two national leaders (a man and a woman) as its representatives on the Detainment Area Committee. Armitage’s report mentioned the good conduct and discipline of the detainees and described their full cooperation with camp authorities. It noted that “the Detainment Area Committee has proved of great assistance to the camp administration by acting as agent de liaison between the detainees of the camp authorities.” This was the exact wording used in the Visiting Committee report five months earlier, and here too, the descriptions were not at all accurate.
Compared to the official reports that described the Detainment Area Committee as an “agent de liaison” between detainees and camp authorities, Zwergbaum’s report emphasized that the committee “only had a consulting but not a decision-making function,” which was only used by the British authorities as “a facade, alibi, or scapegoat toward outsiders.” The report described the committee as a “comedy of self-administration” and stated that most people did not volunteer for this task and tried to avoid taking part in camp politics.
Not knowing the English language was the best political capital for those who screamed the most, for this meant that they were never in a position to have to defend at the top what they had so vigorously discussed down below. Later, it became evident that language proficiencies were not so important, as the representatives did not have anything to say anyway.
And yet it is important to note that the camp regime was not brutal, and the refugees maintained a relatively rich cultural and social life behind the prison gates. There were two active synagogues, schools, adult education centers, youth movements, theater groups, a Zionist association, a library, a camp newspaper, coffee shops, and a soccer team. These activities were made possible mainly through the material aid supplied by the South African Jewish community and not by colonial authorities on the island. In early 1939, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, together with the Council of German Jewry in London, formed the Council for Refugee Settlement to render relief to Jewish refugees arriving in southern Africa. As soon as the news regarding the deportation to Mauritius reached South Africa, the council included camp inhabitants in the sphere of its activities and dispatched several shipments of clothing, books, and money, as well as other gifts and sources of comfort for the detainees. An additional important donation arrived in February 1941, when local Mauritians donated musical instruments to the detainees, and a jazz orchestra—the Beau Bassin Boys—was formed. The Beau Bassin Boys were highly successful, and by the end of 1941, they were the first detainees to obtain permission to work outside the camp, where they performed at local parties, weddings, and public events.
As far as possible, all work in connection with the camp was performed by the detainees. Some (400) detainees were employed as doctors, nurses, kitchen staff, bakers, shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, and gardeners. This policy served two purposes: first, it kept the detainees busy and productive, and therefore “loyal to the British Empire.” Second, it helped to save the colonial authorities money because most detainees inside the camp did not get paid for their work. Rachel Springmann-Ribak, who was deported to Mauritius with her parents and grandmother when she was 3 years old, wrote in her memoirs, “Mother was a teacher and taught at the camp school. Dad was an expert in sewing men’s suits and probably could not find employment in his profession. So, he worked in the kitchen and would tell me jokingly that he is now an expert at peeling carrots and potatoes.”
In a highly colonial manner, as described in Armitage’s report, “every advantage is being taken of the detainees’ presence in the island to train local craftsmen and to promote local industries.” In addition to the workshop established inside the camp, in late 1941 some skilled detainees received temporary permits to work outside the camp and assisted in the local manufacture of soap, perfumes, cosmetics, and toys, while others were employed as music, art, and language teachers at local primary schools. Thus, the total separation imposed between the detainees and the local community as part of the imperial policy was partially removed so that the colony benefited from the detainees’ skills.
Among these detainees was Anna Frank Klein, a German painter who received a permit to work as an art teacher at a local high school. The only significant research on the deportation to Mauritius was published in the 1998 book, The Mauritian Shekel by Genevieve Pitot, a French Mauritian who lived in Germany, but as a child, was a student of Klein’s in Mauritius. (100) In Pitot’s preface to her book she stated:
I was just ten years old when the refugees arrived in Mauritius in December 1940. Eighteen months later, when the strict detention regiment had been relaxed, school was privileged to have an art teacher, Mrs. Anne Frank [Klein], who came from the camp at Beau Bassin. For us, her students, she was Madame Frank. After about a year, her lessons ceased abruptly because the camp was again tightly closed—for security reasons. I never saw her again.
Marie-Claude Souchon, a Mauritian French woman, also recalled Madam Frank from the war days. In an interview in January 2019, she remembered how at the end of 1942, when she was nine years old, her father asked Frank to paint a portrait of his two daughters. “We were told that the Jews could now earn their living, earn a little money, and so my father paid Anna to paint our portraits,” she stated. In another interview from January 2019, Francoise Briottet, also a Mauritian French woman, told of a public exhibition of refugees’ art held in Curepipe during their detention. Briottet stated that her father insisted that all family members purchase at least one artwork to help the refugees, while he purchased a painting by Czech-Jewish refugee Peretz Beda Mayer, a prominent painter and graphic artist.
Beda Mayer, together with the artist Fritz Haendel, was recruited by Armitage to prepare wooden printing blocks carrying public notices for the colonial authorities. One such notice was meant to encourage the local population to work a five-day week. He stated, “Our posters showed a smiling Creole man who gained the benefits of work, compared with his lazy, slouching brother who didn’t … Here we were, designing posters to encourage Mauritian productivity, while who knew what was happening to our people at the other end of the world?”
This new reality not only increased the number of encounters between the detainees and the local population on the island, but also created separate economic classes in the camp. While detainees who received permits to work outside the camp got paid for their work, some employed in the workshops as well as all the medical staff, gardeners, and teachers working inside the camp remained uncompensated. As Zwergbaum wrote in his report: “Thus, the camp took on a capitalist development. Even those who had at first believed in collective ideals were disappointed, and many Chaluzim [halutsim (pioneers)] developed considerable commercial talents. The camp was therefore no Kwutzah [kvutza (group)], it was also no kehillah, but a mere forced community out of necessity, and nothing more.”
Gradual improvements in camp conditions after the first year of internment included some visits to town. Josef Deutsch wrote in his memoir: “The outings started with a half day permission, for ten people daily, with a separation of the single men from the single women. Then came the outings to the seaside, approximately once a week and mostly for elder people.” He also stressed that after every outing, “camp inmates were searched, even until the last days, when entering the camp.” Tensions between the productive exploitation of the prisoners on the one hand, and security restrictions on the other, persisted.
In August 1943, a reversal of the somewhat liberal policy was enforced. In his third-year report, Zwergbaum writes:
In the night of August 8 our camp was suddenly surrounded by military personnel, and our people were torn from their sleep by a totally unusual roll call. All connections to the outside world were severed. After several days, during which we had been reassured that these measures were only temporary, and we had called upon our people to remain calm … we were then confronted with the facts: all excursions into the city, visits to the cinema, and outside world had been terminated, and the number of guards in the camp itself was increased many times.
Later it was revealed that on August 4, the British cargo steamer Dalfram was on its way from Lourenco Marques and Durban for Aden and Alexandria via Mauritius, when it was torpedoed by German submarine U-181 and sank east of Madagascar. The final straw came three days later, on August 7, when the British steam merchant Umvuma was attacked by the Germans only 10 miles southwest of Port Louise.
The refugees were not informed of these events and were not given any explanation for the sudden change in policy. Moreover, drastic measures taken by the camp authorities following the sinking of the ships caused rumors to spread among the local population. Pitot wrote in her book:
Some imaginations knew no bounds. It was said that a guard had killed one of the detainees who was trying to climb over the prison wall. Soon the story was that five detainees, convicted of espionage, had been put before a firing squad. It was said that communication radios had been found in the pockets of some of them. Music lovers said that they had noticed strange notes during the last concerts that had been broadcast. And what about the peculiar way they tuned their instruments—it was surely a code!
The authorities did nothing to dispel these rumors and instead declared that the new restrictions were security measures that could not be lifted. Zwergbaum wrote, “Nothing harmed the camp atmosphere more than these restrictions, especially among those who liked to think. Their severity seemed twice as intense, since they had been so unexpected.”
The lifting of all restrictions of August 1943 occurred only at the end of July 1944, when a more liberal attitude became increasingly prevalent within the camp: during the day, men were allowed to visit the women’s camp without carrying passes; passes for married women to visit the men’s camp were extended; the detainees were allowed to take short visits to town once every five weeks; and the seaside excursions were also retained. On February 21, 1945, Sir Bede Clifford, the governor of Mauritius, informed the detainees’ leadership that the British authorities had decided to allow the Jewish refugees to enter Palestine. However, it took another six months before the refugees left the island. The only remaining evidence of Jewish presence on the island is the St. Martin Jewish cemetery, where 126 refugees who died during their detention are buried.
Conclusions
Owing to their European nationality, the Jewish refugees deported to Mauritius posed a challenge to British imperial beliefs about the significance of race and nationality to colonial legislation. Neither colonized nor colonizers, the refugees were defined as “European Detainees,” and while interned in a prison and treated in a punitive manner, they were certainly considered effective for the colonized society because of their European nationality, skills, and characteristics. As Zwergbaum described it, “a mutual game of hide-and-seek was played between the authorities and ourselves. Once we would be friends and allies, unhappy refugees, and then again, we were treated like enemies and suspicious elements.”
The Jewish deportation to Mauritius does not belong to the canon of events and places commonly connected with the Holocaust, and the Indian Ocean is far from the central sites of the Holocaust in Europe. Moreover, this Jewish exile happened in late 1940, before the Wannsee Conference, on a different continent and under a different regime—that of the British Empire. Nevertheless, this forgotten and under-studied episode demonstrates the complex ways in which the Holocaust intersects with British imperialism. As this article has demonstrated, the deportation to Mauritius was the direct result of the implementation of London’s colonial policies, based on the perceptions of colonial officials. These distorted perceptions were also evident in the policies and attitudes of colonial authorities in Mauritius. Observing such distortions is crucial for understanding British imperial policy toward the Jewish question and the Zionist movement.