The Road to the People on the Beach

To scan the first pages of

The People on the Beach is to be drawn into a Holocaust story with all the hallmarks of a compelling thriller.

But because much of what Rosie Whitehouse writes has been documented elsewhere, her book’s immense power lies not only in her effort to find remaining survivors but in the highly personal and conversational tone in which her material is penned.

Whitehouse, an award-winning ‘road trip historian’, here employs her investigative skills to trace, meet and interview the ageing remnant of more than 1,200 refugees, who in June 1946 had entered Mandate Palestine as illegal immigrants after a voyage from Italy on the Josiah Wedgwood, a converted Canadian corvette disguised as a banana boat.

Such is her attention to detail, the author’s travels take her to Vado Ligure, the secluded north Italian port from where the Wedgwood sailed and where she chats to an elderly fisherman working on his nets and extracts vital details of the incident from his fading memory.

She uses a similar technique when meeting survivors in Israel; painting vividly entertaining portraits of their homes, their characters and their warm hospitality.

Then there are painful accounts of visiting Poland and the Ukraine; meeting some of their barely existent Jewish communities and walking through the Sosenki pine forest (the scene of the second ‘Babi Yar’) with its recently vandalised memorial.

Next comes the half-forgotten and cosmetically disguised former death camp at Sobibor; also the house, Whitehouse believes, that is wrongly marked as having belonged to Israeli laureate, Amos Oz’s maternal family in Rovno and then on to Auschwitz and its grey mass of often wholly uncomprehending tourists.

Whitehouse, in private life the wife and mother of foreign correspondents, Tim Judah and Ben Judah, discussed her book earlier this week with another journalist, Mancunian Gita Conn during a Zoom-streamed event hosted by the Menorah Cheshire Reform Synagogue’s ARK group.

The event attracted about 70 people.

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“Like Clay in the Hands of the Potter”

It is perhaps pertinent to conclude here by examining the man for whom the refugees’ ship was named and who is still memorialised via street names in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa and also at Gan Yoshiya, a moshav in central Israel with almost one thousand members.

 

Colonel (later, Baron) Josiah Wedgwood, the great-great-grandson of the celebrated Staffordshire potter, was a highly complex individual and an outstandingly gallant old-school English gentleman who agreed to take the blame and so faced undue public opprobrium in an adultery case after his first wife left and later divorced him.

Although recalled generally as both a Liberal and Labour politician, the international Jewish community will forever regard Lord Wedgwood as a fearless, devoted Christian Zionist following his initial contact with the Zion Mule Corps while serving during World War I.

It was about a year later, he said, that he began to learn about Zionism as ‘a creed’.

Col Wedgwood first visited Palestine in October 1926 and subsequently challenged the British Mandatory government's policies there, accusing the administration of hindering the country's social and economic development.

In 1942, during the height of World War II and so the Holocaust, he wrote the preface to a booklet, Stop Them Now, the first English language public report about the non-stop destruction of the Jews in Nazi Europe.

In it he wrote:

"The Huns and the Mongols, Tamerlane with his mountains of skulls, all these demons of long ago were patterns of chivalry compared with the pureblooded devils into which Hitler has converted Germans”.

Baron Wedgwood died in 1943 and three years later the HMCS Beauharnois was renamed as an Aliyah Bet (illegal immigration) ship in his honour. Later still, it became part of the Israel Navy, named INS Wedgwood (K-18).

© Natalie Wood (05 February 2021)