Chapter VII - “The sole route to survival”

Summary

London's concessions

Following the sinking of the Struma Great Britain's immigration policy underwent a certain relaxation. In the Colonial Office the place of the principled Lord Moyne was taken by the more liberal Robert Arthur Gascoyne-Cecil, Viscount Cranborne. London still categorically opposed Aliyah Bet and based its policy on MacDonald's “White Paper,” yet it desisted from deporting illegal immigrants, and in May of 1942 the government agreed to admit and gradually release all refugees from Europe who got to Palestine on their own. Immigrants upon arrival were to be interned and if they did not constitute a “threat to the security of the Mandate,” they could gradually be settled in Palestine, according to the immigration quotas. This procedure was applied to, among others, those passengers of the Darien who had been held at Atlit for eighteen months. Given Great Britain's extremely delicate position in the Middle East, the government tried not to overly publicize these resolutions.

At the beginning of July 1943 the Colonial Office lifted the ban on emigration to the Mandate by Jews from enemy-occupied countries, while those refugees who had managed to reach Turkey under their own power (the British never defined the meaning of the expression) could count on obtaining a Palestinian visa. According to data from the Jewish Agency office in Istanbul, this visa was issued in the course of 1944 to a total of 6,869 Jews from European countries, the largest numbers of whom came from Romania (4,433 persons) and Bulgaria (1,392), with smaller groups from Greece (599) and Hungary (163).