Running the Palestine Blockade: The Last Voyage of the Paducah
- Book Review,
by Rudolph W. Patzert
From Publishers Weekly
In 1947 Patzert was the captain of the Paducah , one of the 60 ramshackle rescue ships enlisted by the Jewish underground to smuggle Holocaust survivors past the British blockade and into Palestine. The author was 35 years old, a New York City gentile. His orders--to sail his ship from Brooklyn to Bulgaria--supplied no clues to the purpose of his mission. The condition of the ship made the trip risky; its old steering system often broke down and the voyage was subject to harassment by British authorities and shakedowns from harbor officials, who charged Patzert with commanding an unseaworthy vessel. In Bulgaria he took on 1400 passengers and was thereafter shadowed by destroyers and reconnaissance planes. By the time the British took custody of the ship, off the Israeli coast, Patzert's identification with the Holocaust survivors who were his passengers was so strong that he adopted the name Mendel Levey and willingly joined them in a British internment camp. This unusually vivid memoir provides a fresh look at the massive migration of Jewish "illegals" to Palestine between the end of the war and the founding of the state of Israel; it is, as well, a suspenseful seafaring tale. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A riveting first book by Patzert, who was captain of one of ships that ran refugee European Jews into British-protected Palestine before Israeli independence; not just a sea story, but a moral adventure as well. Rudolph Patzert, a veteran seaman by the end of WW II, was looking for a ship to command. As he notes in the prologue, he had witnessed the anti-Semitism of the Nazis in Hamburg in 1934 as a young seaman. So, when asked to captain the Paducah, a converted gunboat bringing refugees from the DP camps of Europe to Palestine in May 1947, he had several good reasons for taking the assignment. He finds himself with a largely inexperienced crew and a balky, 45-year-old ship. But over the course of the voyage from Miami to New York, the Azores, Lisbon, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and finally to Bulgaria, where they take 1,388 refugees on board, the crew finds its sea legs and adjusts to the ship's idiosyncracies. And Patzert, a non-Jew, finds the reasons for his commitment to these battered, shattered people, survivors of the death camps and ghettos. When the ship reaches Palestine, all of its occupants are interned by the British, who attack the unarmed boat and its human cargo with dismaying ferocity; Patzert and his crew must masquerade as refugees themselves to avoid arrest. In the internment camps of Cyprus, he and his men share the horrid conditions inflicted on the already weak and weary Jews by the British Army, which only confirmed him in his conviction that the mission was just. Finally, he and some of his men are transferred to Palestine where they escape. In the book's epilogue, he tells what happened to some of them after Israel achieved independence. All of these events are recounted in a cool, measured prose that sweeps the reader along gently in its wake. Often exciting as an adventure tale, this is also a satisfying story of a modest man finding himself capable of the highest level of self-sacrifice. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Book News, Inc.
As much a tale of moral courage and political intrigue as a swiftly- moving sea adventure, this account by the captain of the Paducah, which ran refugee European Jews into British-protected Palestine before Israeli independence, covers the ship's six-month voyage, beginning in May, 1947. Patzert, his crew and the already-weakened exiles endured constant surveillance, uncharted mines, sabotage attempts, and capture during their final run into Palestine, followed by the brutal conditions of internment camp in Cyprus. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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