Exactly 80 years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated the remaining 7,000 prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The largest of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz saw the murder of 1.1 million civilians in the span of five years. In total, the lives of six million innocent men, women and children who loved and were loved, were cruelly ended due to hate. But that is not the entire story.
Holocaust lessons tend to start from events beforehand — the rise of antisemitism and fascism in Europe, pogroms, Kristallnacht — then continue on to concentration camps and end with liberation. However, that is not the end of the Holocaust story. While my article last year on Holocaust Remembrance Day focused on books about heroes who helped during the horror, this year we will focus on one film, Exodus, and the heroes who emerged afterward.
As the Allied forces swept across Europe, they found 60,000 surviving Jews across the camps — though many could not be saved despite medical care. Simultaneously, thousands of hidden Jews discarded fake identities or emerged from hiding. All of those who survived found an irrevocably altered world. Though the Nazis were defeated, hate was not. Survivors, tens of thousands of them only children, found themselves without possessions, homes and knowledge of the locations or conditions of their families. Many were left without any family remaining. Some survivors returned to find strangers in their homes and continued hostility made their former countries entirely inhospitable. By 1946, around 250,000 survivors had ended up in displaced persons camps. After each expulsion and pogrom in history, Jewish survivors had to pick up the pieces and carry on, but this time was slightly different.
Throughout the history of the Jewish people, from expulsion from the land of Israel in 70 C.E. by the Roman Empire up to the 1940s, Jews longed to return to their ancestral homeland. Though a small Jewish presence remained in the Holy Land for all the centuries of the Jewish diaspora, most were blocked from returning by the empires who colonized Israel throughout the centuries (Byzantines, Persians, Crusaders, Ottomans, British again). However, after the Shoah — the Hebrew word for the Holocaust — there was nowhere to go. Europe was not an option after the massacre of almost all European Jewry, and the U.S. had strict immigration policies. Survivors were done with running, hiding and fleeing from country to country and being told to go back to places they had never been from. The displaced Jews decided that after thousands of years of persecution, the only place they could ever be safe was in their native homeland.
Of course, this was not allowed, as the land of Israel was now British-occupied Palestine, the name imposed by the Romans after Jewish exile. However, Jewish survivors were determined — many tried to enter illegally and ended up in British detention camps on the island of Cyprus. Such attempts include the story of Exodus 1947, which was dramatized in the 1960 film Exodus based on the novel of the same name by Leon Uris. Exodus 1947 was a refugee ship that attempted to bring 4,500 Jewish refugees from displaced persons camps in Germany to Palestine. The ship was intercepted by the British and held on the ocean for over a month, and ultimately, the passengers were forced to return. However, their dedication captured the world’s attention and helped convince the UN to create the modern state of Israel in 1948. After the partition, 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, with two-thirds coming from DP camps. A 2024 demographic report by the Claims Conference showed that of the 245,000 Holocaust survivors alive globally, 49 percent reside in Israel.
When people today ignore the important reasons for the existence of Israel, they discredit the legacy of Holocaust survivors and victims. Israel is a haven for Jewish life, including half the world’s Holocaust survivors, and it is also the legacy of those who were lost. This is seen in a quote from Exodus, where a passenger encourages everyone to stay strong by saying: “Stay here, go back? Nonsense. Did we escape for just ourselves alone? No. We’ve done it for hundreds of thousands of Jews all over Europe who couldn’t get out.”
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Exodus is a charming old movie with transatlantic accents and stunning real locations in Cyprus and Israel, all coupled with beautiful music. It won an Oscar and Grammy for its score. It is also lengthy — stopping at intermission is enough to get the picture of Israel’s importance for those affected by the Holocaust. Though fictional, Exodus does the real story justice; its funny moments, love stories and passionate politics keep it from being too gut-wrenching. Exodus is especially exceptional in capturing the spirit of the Jewish people. The characters are traumatized, but they are strong, determined and quick to take action. They agree with and respect each other but also disagree and squabble. Exodus is a Holocaust film filled not with victims but with heroes that are real.
The film follows Katherine “Kitty” Fremont, a non-Jewish American nurse visiting Cyprus. When she learns of the detention camps of Jewish survivors, she decides to volunteer. There she finds a community of intellectuals and abandoned children, all detained people who were unwanted in Europe and abandoned by countries that refused those fleeing the danger. Kitty follows the Jews onto the “Exodus,” where she meets Ari Ben Canaan, a Palestinian-born Jew who is part of the Haganah, the early version of the Israeli Defense Forces. Exodus shows the Zionist rationale through the eyes of someone uninvolved who originally disliked Jews. Kitty learns of Israel’s importance to the Jewish people and sees firsthand the difficulty and beauty of a land that is sacred to many. Jewish-Arab relationships in Israel are shown in the film and they, like today, are peaceful and cooperative at times while also being incredibly tumultuous at others.
For those who love Israel, the scene of Holocaust survivors raising the Israeli flag on the Exodus as “Hatikvah” plays in the background is indescribably powerful. For everyone, the film shows an important point: the Holocaust story does not end in 1945, and it has not ended at all, because Holocaust survivors and their descendants fought, and continue to fight, for their legacy — a peaceful and safe homeland in Israel. So as the international community mourns the lives lost, we also remember the heroes who survived and the sacrifices of those who would have loved to see their efforts lead to a happy ending.
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Jenna Ledley is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected].