Violins of Hope (10 page)

Of all the injustices the Jews had suffered, this was the worst. For those who, like Erich, had suffered in Dachau and Buchenwald only to endure captivity in Bratislava before making the arduous trek to the Promised Land, the thought of being deported was too much to bear. Everyone was crying. “At least let me die here,” pleaded one elderly refugee.
³¹

As Erich was being corralled toward the military transport, British soldiers repeatedly tried to steal his violin. Every time a soldier got close, Erich threw the instrument over a separation fence to detainees in the neighboring yard. Whenever a British soldier on the other side would try to seize the violin, it was thrown back to Erich. The British never got the instrument. Erich eventually disappeared into one of the trucks with the violin that had accompanied him from Vienna to Dachau, Buchenwald, Bratislava, and Atlit.

The Jews were taken back to Haifa, where they were put aboard two Dutch steamers that Great Britain had requisitioned to carry them to Mauritius.

The
Johan de Witt
and
Nieuw Zeeland
left Haifa on December 9, 1940, with Erich and 1,600 other Jewish refugees on board. Escorted by two British warships that zigzagged along while sweeping for mines, they sailed toward Port Said, Egypt. The Jews had still not been told where they were going, and had no way of seeing for themselves. The portholes were shut, and although the holds' hatches had been removed to compensate for the closed windows, the refugees were not allowed on deck. Their only clue that they were even under way was the drone of the engines.

The Dutch steamers were former luxury liners that had been converted into troop carriers. Both had several hundred cabins. These were left mostly empty except for a few that were occupied by elderly refugees, women with children, and Palestinian police officers. While the open dormitories in which the majority of the Jews traveled would have hardly qualified as luxurious, they represented a significant upgrade from the accommodations aboard the
Atlantic
. The Jews had hammocks for sleeping, shelves for storing their belongings, and even benches and tables where they could sit and eat.

By the third day of the voyage, the
Johan de Witt
and
Nieuw Zeeland
had passed through the Suez Canal and had reached the Red Sea. The refugees were finally allowed on deck, but only for limited times. Eventually, as the temperatures in the hold grew stifling, the Jews were permitted to not only sleep on the deck but also use the ships' swimming pools. The portholes and the hatches were left open during the day, but were closed at night for blackouts.

The ships arrived in Port Louis, Mauritius, on December 26, 1940, after two and a half weeks at sea. The Jews were immediately struck by the island's tropical beauty. “Mauritius, rising in the distance out of the calm Indian Ocean, appeared more and more enchanting the closer we approached,” one refugee later recalled. “The island, surrounded by lagoons of a blue I had never seen before, was fringed with thick green vegetation and tall, exotic coconut palms behind which rose hazy, purplish hills. Here was something new, something totally different from anything I'd ever known, so exciting I felt my pulse race; my eyes welled up with tears.”
³²

The Jews were taken by bus to the town of Beau Bassin. Along the way, they continued to be struck by the beauty of the island and the friendly welcome they received from its residents, who threw flowers as they passed by. The reception was more befitting to war heroes returning from battle than to destitute refugees.

It was therefore quite a shock when the buses reached their destination. “There we had the biggest surprise of our entire voyage, which had contained quite a few during the past four months,” one refugee recorded in his diary. “The bus stopped in front of a small one-story building. We crossed a porch and entered a large yard where we saw two enormous cellblocks, each 90 to 100 meters long, with barred windows—A PRISON!”
³³
This prison was to be their home for the next four and a half years.

The island of Mauritius was first visited by Arab sailors in the Middle Ages, but was rediscovered by Portuguese en route to India in 1507. It was later settled by the Dutch, who named the island after Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, and used as a naval base. It was the Dutch who discovered the now-extinct dodo bird on Mauritius. France took control of the island in the early eighteenth century, but lost it to England in the Napoleonic Wars. Great Britain had ruled the island and its valuable sugarcane fields ever since.

Five miles south of the Mauritian capital of Port Louis is the Beau Bassin Prison. A maximum-security compound that dates back to the nineteenth century, the prison was once the home to thieves and murderers. The British had planned to intern fascist political prisoners there during World War II. Instead, the prison grounds became home to 1,600 Jewish refugees.

By the time the Jews arrived at the Beau Bassin Prison, many were suffering from a variety of physical and mental illnesses, ranging from malnutrition, dysentery, and diarrhea to psychological exhaustion and depression from their yearlong ordeal. Initially, the most critical of these maladies was the typhoid fever that had gone untreated throughout their flight from Europe. As soon as the typhoid epidemic came under control, an outbreak of malaria took its place. Lacking adequate medical facilities and medication, twenty-eight refugees died within the first five weeks.

The males were confined to the Beau Bassin Prison. The men from Prague and Danzig moved into Block A, while Erich and the other men from Vienna occupied Block B. In each block, endless rows of heavy doors led to inhospitable cells. Each cell was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide and contained only a hammock, a shelf, and a barred window. There was no electricity. The men were, however, free to wander around the cell blocks. The door locks had been removed. The men were even able to enjoy a large prison yard that included trees, grass, and flower beds.

On the other side of the fifteen-foot stone wall that surrounded the prison was a hastily constructed camp for the women and children. The camp was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. When the refugees first arrived, the construction was still ongoing. The camp eventually included thirty wooden huts with corrugated iron roofs. Each hut could hold twenty-five to thirty women and children.

The refugees quickly fell into a predictable daily routine. They would rise at 7 a.m. to drink their morning tea and receive their daily ration of bread, margarine, and sugar. Lunch took place between 12:30 and 1 p.m., and often consisted of fresh meat, corned beef, or canned salmon, along with unfamiliar local ingredients such as sweet potatoes, dried beans, and breadfruit. At 7 p.m., the refugees would eat soup and jam for dinner. Between their meals, the Jews under the age of thirty-five would do light chores such as cooking, cleaning, gardening, and maintenance. It was not long before craftsmen opened workshops that provided their fellow refugees with essential items such as clothes, shoes, and custom-made furniture for their barracks. Eventually, the detainees even earned small allowances for their chores and wares, many of which were sold in Mauritius and abroad.

In their free time, the refugees engaged in a wide variety of educational, cultural, and social activities. They founded a school, where the children were taught English, German, Hebrew, religion, geography, history, mathematics, science, music, and art. The adults organized similar classes for themselves, and also studied Jewish history and Zionism. They read the local newspapers, as well as books and magazines that they received from the Mauritian police department and Jewish communities in Palestine and South Africa. They held literary and poetry competitions, as well as tournaments for cards and chess. For a while, they even published a daily newsletter,
Camp News
. Artists organized exhibitions, and playwrights and actors staged theatrical performances, puppet shows, children's plays, and musical revues. There were also dances, cabaret evenings, and Hanukkah parties. Such events helped to provide comfort and raise the morale of the detainees throughout their prolonged internment.

Not surprisingly, music played a major role in this vibrant cultural community. In February 1941, the residents of Mauritius donated pianos, violins, accordions, and other instruments to the refugees. Erich, of course, still had the violin that he had brought from Vienna. The musicians in the camp entertained themselves and their fellow detainees by transcribing Beethoven piano sonatas and performing them as string quartets. They repaid the generosity of their Mauritian benefactors by forming an orchestra that accompanied an amateur performance of Puccini's opera
La Bohème
in nearby Rose Hill that July. Twelve hundred detainees attended one of the performances. It was the first time many of them left the confines of the Beau Bassin Prison.

Erich and other refugee musicians regularly performed in the Beau Bassin Boys, a jazz orchestra formed by pianist and fellow detainee Fritz “Papa” Haas. In their first year in Mauritius, the Beau Bassin Boys provided the music for an English-language revue that consisted of songs, folk dances, and satirical poems about camp life. The vaudeville show was a big hit among those in attendance, which included the British commander of the camp and his wife, as well as members of the press. The Beau Bassin Boys were so popular in the prison camp that Papa Haas is often the first name that survivors recall when discussing their lives in Mauritius.

The popularity of the Beau Bassin Boys extended well beyond the prison walls. Their performances were broadcast over the radio and they were even allowed to leave the prison several times a week for performances. Dressed in matching white shirts and black pants, black bow ties with red cummerbunds, and white dinner jackets, the Beau Bassin Boys played at dances, weddings, and other official and festive events throughout Mauritius, including parties hosted by the island's governor. These performances gave the musicians their only moments of freedom. The frequent invitations to play elsewhere on the island provided precious opportunities to leave the Beau Bassin Prison.

When they first arrived in Mauritius, the Jews were not allowed to pass through the heavily guarded iron gate that separated the men from the women and children. These restrictions were gradually relaxed. Within the first year, married women were permitted to bring their children to visit their husbands during limited hours. Then all refugees were given the opportunity to intermingle for four hours a day in the recreation grounds that surrounded the prison. By the time the detainees finally left Mauritius in 1945, they were able to move freely between the men's prison and the women's camp.

Once the refugees were no longer separated by gender, old relationships were rekindled and new ones began. The September 13, 1942, issue of
Camp News
teasingly reported that Erich had “succumbed to family life” by marrying Ruth Rosenthal,
³⁴
whose family had left Danzig with financial assistance from relatives in the United States. The Beau Bassin Boys provided the music for Erich's wedding, which was one of thirty marriages that took place in the prison courtyard by the end of 1942. One year later, Erich's son Ze'ev became one of sixty Jewish children who were born in Mauritius.

Although Beau Bassin was nothing like a Nazi concentration camp, life within the prison was still dreary. Throughout their lengthy internment, the refugees yearned for freedom. They resented being sequestered behind prison walls, under the watchful eyes of a hundred members of the prison administration, staff, and guards. They felt oppressed by the limited opportunities to leave the camp. Worst of all was their frustration over having been stripped of their civil rights and incarcerated for an indefinite period of time with no opportunities to defend themselves or appeal their confinement through any legal system.

The refugees also continued to suffer from malaria. At some points during their detention, as many as 40 to 50 percent of them had the disease. While malaria was not the primary cause of many deaths, its chronic high fevers did fatally weaken the elderly and those with heart conditions. Lacking adequate medical care to deal with malaria and other illnesses such as malnutrition, dysentery, and cardiovascular diseases, 127 Jewish refugees died in Mauritius. This included Erich's father-in-law, who died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five.

It was not until January 1945—four years after the refugees had been brought to Mauritius—that the British government finally changed its mind about their immigration to Palestine. Bowing at last to international pressure, Great Britain decided to include the Mauritian detainees in the 10,300 emigrants who would be admitted into Palestine that year.

Given the difficulties of traveling during the war—several ships had been torpedoed near Mauritius—the British could not pledge that the relocation would be swift. In the end, eight months would transpire between when the British decided to send the refugees back to Palestine and when they were actually able to fulfill that promise. One plan was to give the Jews passage aboard a convoy of warships that would be passing through Mauritius in May. This was abandoned when a polio epidemic broke out on the island. The refugees were quarantined and their departure was canceled.

They would not get under way until August 11, 1945. By this time, World War II had ended and the Jews had learned of the horrible genocide that had claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends they had left behind in Europe. Out of the 1,581 Jewish refugees who had been on board the
Atlantic
, 1,307 were still living on Mauritius in 1945. In addition to those who had died, several dozen emigrants had left to fight in the war. The remaining refugees joined several hundred British soldiers who were returning from India aboard the RMS
Franconia
.