After years of incarceration and horror,
Degradation, prayer, and hope,
We crammed onto a creaking boat.
Crossed the sea to the promised land.

But the British intercepted our craft.
We set foot on that soil only to be forced
A hundred yards along to a prison ship
Which took us back to France.

We refused to disembark there
But were eventually driven out
And trucked to our former homeland.
Despair! But the following year

How we sang and laughed and wept
And began again to love life,
When we heard of a new government
That would welcome the likes of us.

Chris Short
November 2023

Based on an event from my birth-year 1947. The story of the ship Exodus which illegally brought displaced European Jews to Palestine, after the British Protectorate had put a stop to Jewish immigration as the conflict between Zionist immigrants and the Arab population was intensifying. The British returned the 4500 Exodus Jews to France but they refused to leave the ship and the French would not accept them under duress. The British took them to Hamburg and thence to refugee camps in the British controlled sectors of Germany. Some were able to get to Palestine eventually, especially after the State of Israel was declared and instantly recognised by USA in 1948. I wonder how many of them were sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian Arabs.