Between 1945 and 1948, around 250,000 Jews fled Poland in particular, but also other east-European countries, mainly to the American Zone in Germany, where they acquired the status of DP. Their goal was also Palestine.
The Brichah (Hebrew = escape), a Zionist underground organisation founded by a group of holocaust survivors in Poland, organised escape and border crossings for these people. Lübeck was a node in the extensive network of the Brichah. Thereby, Benjamin Gruka, a Jewish member of the resistance in Poland, who lives today in Lübeck, played a significant role.
These groups of Jews arrived in Lübeck in transports of Germans expelled from former German areas in eastern Europe, having travelled to Stettin by train or ship.
These travel-exhausted individuals were accommodated and cared for in the synagogue in Lübeck, until, on the following day, they were taken to the DP Camp Belsen-Hohne, or into the American Zone. From here began the sea journey, in scapped freighters, generally via the Italian or French coasts, to Palestine.
These sea journeys were extremely perilous as the British navy attempted to prevent these freighters from entering British mandated Palestine territorial waters. Often the British navy forcefully boarded these ships on the high seas, and interned the refugees in camps on Cyprus or in Palestine itself.
Once having successfully broken the sea blockade these refugee ships were deliberately beached on the coast of Palestine. The last stretch to the beach was reached by swimming or in life boats.
In June 1947, several thousand Jews, including several Jews who had escaped via Lübeck, awaited a sea journey to Palestine. These refugees had no idea that they would soon be seeing Lübeck again.