Yom HaShoah interview: Holocaust survivor sent to Mauritius as a toddler, recalls journey to Mandate Palestine

"Just two weeks ago in the newspaper, there was a reportage of two pages about the heaven of Mauritius, the white sands and the trees and the fantastic hotels," Lily Leah Hirschman, now nearly 87, told Christian journalist Paul Calvert.

"The barracks [no longer] exist; they took them down. And the prisoners are still there..."

The Holocaust survivor remembers another life at what is now a beautiful holiday destination. For almost five years, she and her mother – a fellow survivor who fled Germany with her father in 1940 – lived in the roasting metal barracks reserved for Jewish refugees, their only luxury: a mosquito net.

Hirschman was born in 1938 in Freistadt Danzig, one of the many small states of Germany at that time. Her mother completed architectural studies, and her father qualified as an engineer, while Hitler’s grip on Germany grew stronger. They would later survive, not only the terror of the Nazis, but the Patria explosion in Haifa port (Lily and mother), and a mass shooting in Yugoslavia (father).

The family left Danzig when Hirschman was two years and four months old.

"On 1 September, 1939, the first gunshot of World War II was in Danzig... at 4 or 5 in the morning. I know that my parents heard it, so I assume that I heard it too," she said. "We left because of the Nazis that came and my parents couldn’t work. My mother had also her parents and two sisters, but they were eliminated somehow."

"There was a possibility that Eichmann would let people out for money at the time," Hirschman explained. "Hitler at that time wasn’t killing the Jews, but he wanted Germany to be ‘Judenrein,’ free of Jews." 

The toddler would not see her father until after the war because her parents took different escape routes. Mother and daughter were among many who were helped by a group called ‘Mossad l’Aliyah Bet,’ young Israelis who bought old ships and ferries, desperate to get Jewish people out of Europe to Palestine.

She and her mother traveled to the Romanian Port of Tulcea on the Black Sea. Hirschman said one of her first memories was of a big, brown, leather rucksack that her mother had hanging outside, ready to go.

The expectation was that fleeing Jews would leave "for two weeks, maybe go for the ship, and it takes another week to come to Palestine, and that’s the story, you know, [like] it was nothing."

The reality was very different. The European winter was approaching, and the arduous journey stretched over many weeks, beginning in mid-September and leading to an ominous event in November 1940, before yet another journey to an unknown island off the coast of East Africa.

The pair took the train to Bratislava, where they were joined by "many more people from Vienna, from Prague, from Bratislava, from Breno, and became a few thousand people," Hirschman said.

Because she was so young at the time, she recounts the story based on reports and firsthand accounts from other survivors.

"We got permission to leave, but we did not have a permission to enter," she explained. "We had no certificates to enter in Palestine where [it was] the British Mandate..."

At Tulcea, Israel's Mossad l’Aliyah Bet organized three ships, the Pacific, the Milos and the Atlantic. Hirschman and her mother were among some 1,800 refugees to board the Atlantic, a Danube River pleasure boat.

"Here, you see the boat, the people standing, there was no place," Hirschman said, pointing to a picture. "They were sleeping only on bunk beds like sardines, one next to the other in a few layers... Till now, I cannot be around people."

For a toilet, there was a hole in the side of the boat with a blanket hanging over it, but the wait in the queue could be hours. The grueling conditions caused some to jump overboard, and many others to die from illnesses.

Although British warships "helped" the Atlantic to reach Haifa safely, The policy directive from London was that the refugees could not remain in their ancestral homeland.

Outraged by the British plan to deport the refugees to Mauritius, members of the Haganah attempted to sabotage the Patria, aiming to cause a small engine explosion to prevent the ship from leaving.

"My mother, I remember [her] telling me, she waited from the Atlantic to move to this boat, and in the meantime," recalled Hirschman, "there was a big bomb explosion, and the Patria sank in 10 minutes, and about 257 drowned and some got alive out and [the British] left them in Palestine."

Despite the tragedy of the miscalculated ammunition, the British "decided they take us to Mauritius, whatever," said Hirschman. "They didn’t want to leave the people in Palestine... They were ‘akshanim,’ stubborn."

The Atlit Camp was, and still is, a depressing site, complete with barracks and barbed wire, but they were at least in their beloved ‘Eretz Israel.’ But after at least 10 or 11 days, Hirschman said, they were taken again to board new boats. 

"The people decided that they will be stubborn, but they won’t fight with guns, but when they came to take them, the women and the men were naked," Hirschman explained.

"And they thought that the British gentlemen will let them stay, but they threw on the blankets and took them into trucks and took us to another, I think, two ships."

The next voyage was about 16 days – through the Suez Canal to Mauritius. "I was two and a half years old," Hirschman said. "We arrived in Mauritius on December 25, 1940. It’s Christmas." 

Once on the island, the British separated the men and the women. The men, along boys above age 12, were housed in the prison after the existing inmates had been removed. The tiny cells had hammocks, orange boxes and mosquito nets, as Mauritius was rife with malaria and typhus.

The women and children were put into barracks with no separation between the "very simple" beds, and no privacy, Hirschman remembers from a "kind of a view" in her distant memory of barrack letter ‘C.’

She also recalls a dining room and three meals a day, and that after two years, the British commander relaxed the strict separation and curfew rules. After that, the many resourceful and intelligent Jewish refugees were able to contribute greatly to the life of the island.

"I made Kita Aleph (first year) at school in Mauritius," Hirschman said proudly, "and I have a certificate [from] the Boba Sen camp school that I learned in German very good in reading, and in writing."

After a long four years and eight months, the little German Jewish girl, darkened by the fierce heat of the tropics, finally made it to Israel, on Aug. 26 or 27, 1945.

Despite the harsh conditions, her studious beginnings resulted in her eventually working as a loyal secretary at Tel Aviv University for 30 years before later training to become a librarian at the law school.

Describing her father, she told Calvert: "He got out, he wasn’t wounded, he wasn’t shot... and he went all over Europe," after being taken off a ship by the Germans, and ordered into a pit in Yugoslavia where a mass shooting followed.

"When my father heard that we came to Palestine, he came also, a few months afterwards..."

And she keeps a prized possession: A stamp collection from Mauritius left to her by her father. In 1847, the islanders printed the very first mail stamps in the world and the oldest are worth a fortune.

"If I had one," joked the brave survivor, "I could buy Tel Aviv!"

Click below to listen to the full interview.