Exodus

In a different part of Cyprus, a Jewish man, David Ben Ami, is hiding beside a bay at nighttime with a Cypriot forest ranger, awaiting the arrival of a clandestine ally. After hours of waiting, they hear the telltale sounds of a boat stopping and a swimmer dropping into the water. Within a few minutes, they contact the new arrival, Ari Ben Canaan, a covert operative from Palestine and “the crack agent of the Mossad Aliyah Bet” (14).

Kitty meets Mark at a hotel and they take a walk along the harbor. As they walk, Kitty tries to process her grief over the loss of her husband and her young daughter, who passed away just after Tom’s death. She describes the experience of reaching rock bottom but then finding more to live for, which in her case was serving as a nurse in Europe in the wake of World War II—a cause that eventually brought her to a Greek orphanage, and thence to Cyprus.

Brigadier Bruce Sutherland of the British army receives a report from Major Fred Caldwell, informing him of what he learned of Mark Parker’s visit. Sutherland is a respected officer, but Caldwell also pities him for a personal crisis he has recently faced, in which Sutherland’s wife left him. Their conversation reveals that the British authorities are nervous about public attention being drawn to their handling of the refugee crisis on Cyprus, and are anxious for the political situation in the Palestine Mandate to be resolved.

Mark and Kitty continue their conversation, now touching on Kitty’s current work and the romantic interest she has received from several suitors, including a British officer who invited her to Cyprus. While on the island, she was taken to see the Jewish refugee camps, but declined to accept a job offer there.

Mark speculates that there’s something about the Jewish problem that is making the British nervous. He can see their destinies pointing toward Palestine, as a truly historic moment comes upon them: “Some people are out to resurrect a nation that has been dead for two thousand years. Nothing like that has ever happened before. What’s more, I think they’re going to do it” (21).

Ari Ben Canaan and David Ben Ami hold a meeting, along with Mandria, a Greek Cypriot aiding their cause. Ari represents Mossad Aliyah Bet, which works to smuggle Jews into Palestine, past the restrictions on Jewish immigration that the British are trying to enforce. David is part of the Palmach, another Jewish organization, and he has been in Cyprus for months, organizing the refugees for the life ahead of them in Palestine.

The conversation reveals that David is romantically attached to Ari’s sister Jordana, and that the conditions they face at home are challenging: “Every year we come to a crisis which is sure to wipe us out—then we go on to another crisis worse than the last” (25). They discuss a plan to break out 300 refugees at once, for which they need Mandria to secure them a ship.

Brigadier Sutherland enters a period of tortured self-reflection on the state of affairs in Cyprus and his own tattered life. He recalls the dissolution of his marriage, which began with his affair with Marina, a woman he met while stationed in Singapore, and ended with his wife Neddie later running away with another man. This drives him to further reflections, as he confronts memories of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which he helped liberate. He also thinks about his mother, who had a hidden Jewish heritage that he never quite understood and that he now suspects he is failing to honor.

David shows Ari around the refugee camps as they continue to plan for a mass escape. In order to make the plan work, they will need forged papers and passes, but the young refugee who is an expert on forging such documents, Dov Landau, is noncompliant until Ari talks to him.

Together with two other leaders of the Jewish resistance, Joab Yarkoni and Zev Gilboa, they set their plans in motion, with Ari revealing that he wants to release 300 children between 10 and 17 years old. Meanwhile, Mandria, their Cypriot ally, has managed to secure a ship, the Aphrodite, which they rechristen as the Exodus.

Mark and Kitty go driving to a scenic overlook and then back to the hotel. Despite the romantic power of the setting, their association remains merely friendly. Meanwhile, after making arrangements for their ship in the harbor, Ari goes to the hotel and finds Mark and Kitty there. Mark has met him before, though Kitty has not, and yet she feels an instantaneous attraction to him.

Ari offers Mark an inside scoop on a major story: The 300 refugee children they are preparing to put on the ship are part of a propaganda play, and when they run up against the British authorities seeking to prevent their escape to Palestine, it will drum up global sympathy for the Jewish position. Mark accepts the offer, willing to write a piece that will be published as soon as events are in motion. Ari also invites Kitty to take a role, believing she could be a sympathetic ally within the refugee camp, but she initially refuses. After a few days of consideration, however, she agrees to at least look over the camp.

On arriving at the refugee camp in Caraolos, Kitty is greeted by David Ben Ami, who starts showing her around. Ari is also at the camp, and he does not hesitate to point out to her the emotionally devastating effects of the Holocaust, still visible all around them. She, however, notes that the refugees are getting a high quality of care and prepares to leave, but is stopped by the sound of laughter coming from a tent where a young woman, Karen Clement, is reading to a group of children. Kitty feels an immediate connection to Karen, which stalls her resolution to leave Caraolos.

The narrative flashes back to 1938 in Cologne, Germany, to tell the story of Karen Clement. She is seven years old, the daughter of a well-known university professor. As Jews, their lives in Nazi Germany are becoming increasingly precarious, even though her father insists that their identity is German and that they will be safe.

Within a matter of months, the regime’s escalating hostility toward Jews convinces him otherwise. After deciding not to sign a Gestapo document repudiating his Jewish heritage, he seeks the help of the Mossad Aliyah Bet in Berlin, where he meets a young Ari Ben Canaan. Ari tells him he can only arrange passage for one child at that time, so they smuggle Karen out on a train bound for Denmark.

Karen Clement is welcomed into the home of a Danish family, the Hansens, and for the next few years she grows up in the peaceful town of Aalborg. Though at first she has contact with her family back in Germany, those letters eventually go silent as the Nazi regime expands its roundups of German Jews. Denmark itself falls to Nazi forces, but is permitted to continue its manner of living as a subjugated but uneasy ally.

Soon this arrangement falls apart, and tensions heighten to the point where the Hansens must move to Copenhagen, where Karen’s Jewish identity is not known. They keep Karen at home even when the rest of the country’s Jews are secreted away to safety in Sweden, and they manage to survive the last few months of the Nazi regime without major incident.

In 1945, with the war over, the Hansens seek information about what happened to Karen’s family, the Clements. Though raised as a Dane in a Christian environment, Karen has long wondered about and sought a sense of identity in her Jewish roots. When it becomes clear that information about the Jewish refugee situation across Europe is in hopeless disarray, Karen decides that she must go and seek out the truth for herself, so she says her farewells to her foster parents: “Karen Hansen Clement, aged fourteen, cast herself adrift in the stream of roamers of the backwash of war” (82).

Karen eventually winds up in La Ciotat, a refugee camp near Marseille, France, where she serves as a volunteer and begins hearing stories of the atrocities of the Holocaust. The hope of finding her family diminishes, but her sense of melancholy begins to dissipate as she finds her calling: “Then, as so often happens when one reaches the end of the line, there was a turning upward and she emerged into the light” (85). She begins working with children, where her natural vibrancy and compassion help restore their hope. Along the way, however, she receives confirmation that her mother and brothers are dead, and it is not until the end of 1945 that she hears a hopeful clue that her father might still be alive.

Evidence continues to point to Karen’s father being alive, but she has no knowledge of his whereabouts. All the Jews of Europe have their sights set on getting to Palestine, so she trains her destiny there, too, working alongside Mossad Aliyah Bet to get refugees from camps in France and Italy to Palestine: “Every seaport of Europe was covered by Mossad agents who used the money sent them by American Jews to purchase and refit boats to run the British blockade into Palestine” (89). Karen joins the Palmach, one of the Palestine-based groups of Jews aiding this illegal immigration, and is tasked with overseeing a large group of child refugees.

The ship meant to bear Karen and other refugees, the Karpathos, arrives in the French harbor and takes them onboard. After 1600 refugees are crammed into the hold, the captain, Bill Fry, takes it out onto the high seas and rechristens it Star of David. They are intercepted by British ships, which track their movements, and in the meantime, Karen must tend to the children in her care, who suffer from seasickness, cramped conditions, and the trauma of a life on the run. While the normal course of affairs would see them boarded and arrested as soon as they enter Palestine’s waters, Fry and the Palmach leaders develop a plan to take advantage of foggy conditions and beach the boat on the Palestinian coastline near Caesarea.

The Star of David successfully runs the British blockade by night and beaches itself on the coast, where Jewish fishermen and Palmach soldiers are ready to receive them. The majority of the Star of David’s passengers are able to reach land and safely disperse into Palestine, but some are captured by the British at the end, including Karen and Bill Fry, the ship’s captain.

They are brought to an internment camp near Haifa, and then deported to a new series of camps in Cyprus, which represents a change in the British policy of managing the refugees—keeping them interned further away from Palestine than before. There, Karen ends up working in the Caraolos camp, where she meets Kitty and tells the story of her life. Having heard that story, Kitty agrees to work for Ari Ben Canaan, provided that Karen stays in Caraolos with her.