Between 1938-1945, the dehumanizing detention camp in Atlit, Palestine served as a holding center for Jews who “illegally” immigrated into their own homeland. While Jews fled the vast Nazi-controlled territories throughout the world, the British, in an attempt to appease the Arabs, limited Jewish immigration to Palestine. Harkening back to the very recent atrocious conditions which Jews faced in concentration camps and ghettos, the British acted in quite an insensitive and cruel fashion. They were brought to “delousing” stations and “showers” in order to ensure they were free of any disease. As late as 1945, 40 Iraqi Jews, who had managed to find their way from the tumult of Iraq (Farhud of 1941) to the Jewish homeland, were captured and housed at Atlit.

Atlit was just one of numerous detention centers around Israel; Atlit was the most notorious. The British occupiers even sent Jews to 12 horrendous detention camps on the island of Cyprus. Between August 1946 and May 1948, the British occupiers forced more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors seeking to resettle in their homeland, Palestine, to those camps on Cyprus. The Holocaust survivors, many of whom were children, came on 39 boats from France, the Balkans, and Italy after spending time in deplorable-conditions displaced persons (DP) camps in Austria and Germany after the Holocaust.