The Bricha Movement

On a cold morning in early November 1944 a small group of Jewish partisans stood in a forest clearing near the Lithuanian town of Rokiskis, listening to one of their number explain a plan. The man speaking was Abba Kovner, twenty-six years old, a poet who had commanded the Jewish partisan unit that had operated in the Vilna forests since 1943 after the destruction of the Vilna ghetto. He was telling the dozen men and women around him that the war was almost over, that the killing of the Jews of Eastern Europe was almost complete, and that the Jewish survivors who would emerge from the woods, the camps, and the hiding places could not stay where they had survived. There would be nothing for them. The countries in which they had lived had become graveyards. The neighbours who had betrayed them, denounced them, and in many cases killed them, would still be there. The new Soviet authorities would not protect them and might in time turn against them. The survivors would have to leave. They would have to go to Eretz Israel. There was no other place that would take them in numbers, and no other place where they could begin again with the certainty that they would not have to leave a second time. The plan he was describing was an organisation that would smuggle the survivors out of Eastern Europe, across multiple borders, to the Mediterranean coast, and onto ships that would carry them to Palestine. The Hebrew word for the operation was Bricha. It meant flight or escape.

The Bricha became, over the next four years, the largest single clandestine population movement in postwar Europe. Approximately 250,000 Jewish survivors passed through its routes between 1944 and 1948. They moved out of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet zone of Germany, and the British zone of Germany; they moved through Austria, Italy, France, and the American zones; they were funnelled to the Mediterranean ports of Bari, Marseille, Sète, and La Spezia; they boarded the small chartered or purchased ships of the parallel Mossad LeAliyah Bet operation; they ran the British naval blockade in the eastern Mediterranean. Most reached Palestine eventually. Many were intercepted, held in the Cyprus camps, and reached Palestine after the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. The Bricha did not operate alone. It was the overland feeder system for the Aliyah Bet maritime operations. The Exodus 1947 voyage that did so much to make the British policy untenable depended for its passenger complement on the Bricha network that had brought 4,515 survivors from camps in Germany and Austria to the small French port of Sète in early July 1947. The Bricha was the upstream operation. The Aliyah Bet was the downstream operation. Together they moved a quarter of a million people.

The founding

Kovner’s Rokiskis meeting was the working start of the operation. The first formal organisation was set up at a conference of Jewish partisan and underground veterans at Lublin in January 1945, attended by approximately fifty figures including Kovner, the former Bialystok ghetto fighter Mordechai Roseman, the former Warsaw ghetto fighter Yitzhak Zuckerman (“Antek”), the former Bialystok-area partisan Chaika Grossman, and the former Vilna underground figure Ruzka Korczak. The Lublin conference produced an executive of approximately twelve people and an operational plan. The plan called for the establishment of way stations along the principal escape routes, the recruitment of paid and unpaid border guides, the production of forged transit documents, and the development of relationships with the various Allied military authorities through whose zones of occupation the operation would have to move people.

The Lublin executive’s most consequential single decision was to establish the operational headquarters in Lódz rather than Warsaw. Lódz was the larger of the two surviving Jewish concentrations in postwar Poland and was the centre of the Polish Jewish underground. The headquarters operated from an apartment block at 32 Sródmiejska Street under the cover of the Central Committee of Polish Jews. The executive included, in addition to the founding figures, the operational figures who had run Jewish refugee operations in Romania and Hungary during the war, including Moshe Yishai and Yehuda Arazi who had operated out of Bucharest under the cover of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

The routes

The Bricha operated initially through three principal routes. The northern route ran from Lódz through Stettin and the Soviet zone of Germany to the British zone. The central route ran from Lódz through Bratislava and Vienna to the American zone of Austria, and from there to Italy. The southern route ran from Lódz through Czechoslovakia, Austria, and into northern Italy at the small Brenner Pass crossing point. All three routes converged on the displaced-persons camps in the American zones of Germany and Austria, from which the survivors would be moved through to the Mediterranean ports.

The northern route became operationally less important after the closing of the Polish-Soviet zonal border in early 1946, and the central and southern routes carried most of the traffic from that point onwards. The most heavily used single crossing point in the entire system was the small Tatra Mountains pass between Polish Zakopane and Czechoslovak Tatranská Lomnica. The crossing was on a forest path at an altitude of approximately 1,400 metres. The Polish and Czechoslovak frontier guards on either side were generally cooperative; the Bricha had developed relationships with the local commanders that produced a working level of toleration, often supported by small payments in dollars or in cigarettes. The crossing was used by approximately 60,000 survivors over the period of the operation, in groups of typically forty to a hundred at a time, mostly at night.

The Brenner Pass crossing into northern Italy was the most operationally complex of the routes. It required the survivors to cross the Austrian-Italian border, which was at that period under joint Allied control with periodic Italian-Austrian frontier patrols, and then to make their way through the South Tyrol to the principal Italian transit camps at Tradate and Selvino. The Italian government, particularly under the post-1946 administrations, was generally cooperative with the operation. The Italian carabinieri were paid small bribes at multiple crossing points. The Italian Communist Party, which had substantial members of the Italian frontier forces, was sympathetic to the operation. The Italian Catholic clergy, particularly in Genoa and at La Spezia, provided substantial logistical support including warehousing and small-vessel chartering services.

The Kielce trigger

The Bricha’s busiest period was in the second half of 1946 and the first half of 1947, after the Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946. The Kielce pogrom was a mob attack on the surviving Jewish population of the Polish town of Kielce, instigated by a false rumour of a Jewish kidnapping of a Polish boy and supported in part by the local police and the local civilian militia. Approximately forty-two surviving Polish Jews were killed in a single afternoon. The pogrom established, for the surviving Polish Jewish population, that the survival of the Holocaust did not mean the end of antisemitic violence in Poland. The Bricha’s traffic increased dramatically in the weeks after Kielce. Approximately 100,000 Polish Jews left Poland through Bricha routes in the eighteen months following the pogrom. The Polish Jewish community shrank from approximately 200,000 in mid-1946 to under 100,000 by the end of 1947, and to fewer than 30,000 by the early 1950s.

(See the separate page Kielce 1946 in the Liberation section for the fuller treatment of the pogrom itself.)

The American zone

The Bricha’s relationship with the American zonal authorities in occupied Germany and Austria was the operationally decisive element of the system. The American occupation authorities, under General Joseph T. McNarney as commander in Germany and General Mark Clark in Austria, took the position from the spring of 1946 that the Jewish displaced-persons movement should not be obstructed. The American military authorities did not actively assist the Bricha, but they did not prevent it. Survivors arriving in the American zones from Eastern Europe were admitted to the American-administered displaced-persons camps without significant questioning of their entry routes. The American-administered camps were operated to United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration standards, which were substantially better than the British-administered camps in the British zone.

The American policy was a substantial change from the policy that had been applied in the immediate postwar months of 1945, under which Jewish survivors had been quartered alongside other displaced persons including, in some cases, Eastern European populations that had collaborated with the Germans. The change in policy was the result of the Earl Harrison report of August 1945, prepared at the request of President Truman, which had documented the conditions in the American-zone displaced-persons camps and had recommended specific changes including the separation of Jewish from non-Jewish populations, the appointment of Jewish administrators, and the cooperation of the American zonal authorities with the Jewish Agency for Palestine. The Truman administration adopted the recommendations. The change in American policy was the operational precondition for the success of the Bricha.

The Mossad LeAliyah Bet handover

The Bricha delivered survivors from Eastern Europe to the displaced-persons camps. The Mossad LeAliyah Bet took them from the camps to the ships. The two organisations had distinct command structures but coordinated closely on operational matters. The senior Mossad LeAliyah Bet figures included Shaul Avigur, the founder, and Ada Sereni, who ran the Italian operations. The Mossad operated a fleet of approximately seventy ships over the course of the postwar period, ranging from converted American military transports to small Italian fishing vessels. The largest single operation was the Exodus 1947 voyage; the most operationally successful in terms of survivors landed in Palestine were the smaller operations of 1945 to 1946 that ran into the smaller harbours of the Palestine coast before the British naval blockade had been fully reorganised.

The aggregate Mossad LeAliyah Bet figures were approximately 70,000 survivors landed in Palestine through the blockade between 1945 and 1948, of whom approximately 50,000 had been intercepted by the Royal Navy and held in the Cyprus camps until the establishment of the State of Israel had opened legal channels. The remaining 180,000 of the 250,000 Bricha movement passed through the displaced-persons camps in the American zones and reached Israel through legal channels after May 1948. The Bricha and the Mossad LeAliyah Bet were the connected operations that made the postwar movement of European Jewish survivors to Palestine possible.

The American Jewish funding

The Bricha was funded principally by the American Jewish community through three organisations: the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and the smaller World Jewish Congress. The aggregate funding flow over the period 1945 to 1948 was approximately seventy-five million dollars at the prevailing exchange rate. The Joint Distribution Committee provided most of the funding for the displaced-persons camps in the American zones. The Jewish Agency provided the operational funding for the Bricha and the Mossad LeAliyah Bet. The funding was channelled through banks in Switzerland, Italy, and the United States, and was largely opaque to Allied financial authorities.

The political support of the American Jewish community for the operation was substantial. The Truman administration was under sustained pressure from American Jewish organisations to admit larger numbers of Jewish survivors to the United States and to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The American Zionist movement, principally through the American Zionist Emergency Council under Abba Hillel Silver, ran a sustained lobbying campaign through 1946 and 1947. The campaign produced the Truman administration’s support for the United Nations partition resolution of November 1947. The connection between American Jewish political organisation, Truman administration policy, and the operational survival of the Bricha was direct.

The British position

The British government, in the displaced-persons camps in the British zone of Germany, took a substantially less cooperative position than the American zonal authorities. The British zonal administration, under successive military governors and after 1946 under the British High Commissioner Sir Brian Robertson, applied the Bevin policy of restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine to the displaced-persons populations under its control. Survivors in the British zone, including those who had reached the zone through Bricha routes, faced more obstacles to onward movement to the Mediterranean ports than those in the American zones. The British zonal authorities cooperated with the Aliyah Bet operations only reluctantly and frequently obstructed them.

The most consequential single example of the British zonal policy was the Pöppendorf and Am Stau camps near Lübeck, where the 4,515 passengers of the Exodus 1947 voyage were eventually held after their forced disembarkation at Hamburg in September 1947. The British zonal authorities had reluctantly accepted the survivors back from the Hamburg port operation, but had administered the camps to a standard that produced sustained Red Cross criticism. The conditions at Pöppendorf in particular were, on the Red Cross reports of October 1947, comparable to those of the worst of the Allied displaced-persons camps in the immediate postwar months. (See the separate page Pöppendorf and Am Stau, the British Detention Camps for the fuller treatment.)

The leadership figures

Abba Kovner, the originating figure, made several Bricha journeys himself in 1945 and 1946 before being arrested by the British in Egypt in late 1945 on a separate operation he had been conducting (the Nokmim revenge operation, which had planned to poison German prisoners of war in retaliation for the killing of European Jewry). He was held in British custody in Egypt and Palestine for several months before being released in 1946. He went on to a distinguished postwar career as one of Israel’s leading poets. He died at his kibbutz Ein HaHoresh in September 1987 at the age of seventy.

Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman, the former Warsaw ghetto fighter, who had been one of the senior figures in the Lublin executive, emigrated to Palestine in 1947 and helped to found Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot (the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz) in the western Galilee. He was a founding figure of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, the first Holocaust museum established anywhere in the world (1949). He died at the kibbutz in June 1981 at the age of sixty-six.

Mordechai Roseman, who had been the operational head of the Bricha in 1945 and 1946, emigrated to Israel in 1948 and worked in the new Israeli foreign intelligence services. He died in Tel Aviv in 1986 at the age of sixty-eight.

Ada Sereni, the Italian-side Mossad LeAliyah Bet operational figure and a member of the Italian Jewish community, returned to private life in Italy after 1948 and lived in Rome. Her husband Enzo Sereni had been killed at Dachau in November 1944 after parachuting into German-occupied Italy on a British Special Operations Executive mission. She died in Rome in October 1997 at the age of ninety-two.

What the Bricha shows

The Bricha was the largest single clandestine population movement undertaken by any non-state organisation in twentieth-century European history. It moved a quarter of a million people across multiple national borders, through the territories of nine separate states, in the face of opposition from one of the four Allied occupying powers, with funding raised principally from a foreign Jewish community on a different continent, in conditions of considerable physical and political risk. It produced, by the end of its operations in 1948, a substantial part of the founding population of the State of Israel.

The wider lesson of the Bricha is the lesson of organisational competence emerging from political destruction. The men and women who founded and ran the Bricha had survived the killing of European Jewry. They had emerged from the woods, the camps, the hiding places. They had organised themselves, within months of the killing, into a working operational structure that would move people, raise money, forge documents, manage relationships with multiple state authorities, and deliver outcomes at the scale of national policy. They had done it without state support, without significant external organisational backing in the early period, and against the active opposition of one of the major Allied powers. They had done it because they had concluded, on the evidence of what they had seen, that no one else would do it for them. The conclusion was correct. The operation was the proof.

See also

Sources

  • Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah, Random House, 1970
  • Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, University of California Press, 1998
  • Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons 1945 to 1951, Cornell University Press, 1989
  • Hanoch Bartov, The Brigade, Macdonald, 1968 (on the Jewish Brigade’s role in the early Bricha operations)
  • Aviva Halamish, The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine, Syracuse University Press, 1998
  • Earl G. Harrison, Report on Conditions in Displaced Persons Camps, U.S. Department of State, August 1945
  • Abba Kovner, My Little Sister and Selected Poems, Oberlin College Press, 1986 (with autobiographical material)
  • Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, University of California Press, 1993