“The refugees covered every inch of space. Sleeping quarters were any place they could find that was long enough to lie down…"

The Mediterranean Sea

January 10, 1947

2:00 p.m., Friday

“Chère famille, I am happy to report that I’m still alive and didn’t die after all, and neither did anyone else in the crew. Not only that, but I’ve also mastered the sea well enough to be able to crawl around the walls with greater speed and efficiency. And what’s more, I don’t have to wear my bathing suit anymore when I wash the pots and pans and dishes.”

I recently discovered this humorous letter while rummaging through my late father’s stamp collection. He had written it to his family over 75 years ago, at the age of 21, and mailed it from aboard the SS Ben Hecht (aka The Floating Yoyo, as he called it), a reconstructed sailing vessel traveling to Port-de-Bouc, France to pick up 600 Holocaust refugees, and from there bound for Palestine.

My father, Eli Freundlich, was born in 1925 on the Lower East Side. His parents had emigrated from Transylvania the year before, landing on Ellis Island. They were taken in (and married off) by relatives on the Lower East Side but eventually settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they raised their four children.

Anti-Semitism flourished in the rough-and-tumble streets of New York where my father grew up in the 20s and 30s. As a teen, Abba was active in various Jewish Zionist youth movements. One of the groups he belonged to was Betar, a Revisionist organization founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in 1923 in Riga, Latvia. The Betar group was closely affiliated with the Zionist paramilitary group, Irgun Zvai Leumi (Etzel) headed by Menachem Begin, which my father longed to join.

After serving in the American army in World War II, my father was anxious to do whatever he could to help free the Jews in Palestine from British and Arab hands. So when he heard that the SS Ben Hecht, under the control of the Betar/Irgun, was setting sail for Palestine, he volunteered as a crew member.

Decision made, he now faced a new problem: how to keep this plan a secret from his family. It had only been a year and a half since he’d returned from his World War II tour of duty in the Philippines, where he’d been stationed for eight months. (Before that he was stateside for four months in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he completed his army training.) He was enrolled as a student in Brooklyn College, and his parents, especially his mother, were hoping he’d stay put and settle down, perhaps even start thinking about marriage.

But Abba hadn’t finished doing his part for the Jewish people. True, the Holocaust had ended, but there were still hundreds of thousands of refugees stranded in Europe, many trying to get to Palestine.