By Jessica Ravitz CNN
UPDATED: 09:38 AM EDT 09.30.09
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN)
By the end of World War II in April 1945, with about two-thirds of European Jewry wiped out, Jewish survivors stepped out of the darkness in search of a place to call home.
About 250,000 were considered displaced persons, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A growing number of Jews -- before, during and especially after the war -- dreamt of helping to build a Jewish homeland in what was, at the time, British-controlled Palestine.
"Getting out of Europe, for a lot of people, felt like getting out of a graveyard," said bestselling author Anita Diamant, whose newest book focuses on this period. "Palestine was like over the rainbow, practically. It was somewhere that they knew they were wanted, at least by the Jewish community in Palestine, and it was a way to start over again in a completely new world."
Immigration quotas, however, meant that the more than 100,000 Jews who arrived between 1945 and 1948, when Israel was declared a state, did so illegally. Most of those who were captured were sent to internment camps in places like Cyprus.
But some Jewish prisoners ended up at a camp in Palestine called Atlit, located on the Mediterranean coast near the city of Haifa. Living in barracks and peering through barbed wire, these Holocaust survivors lived in limbo between their past and their future.
"Nobody else wanted them, so they wanted to go to Palestine," Diamant said. "There was this bottleneck. It was a big problem for the British, and it was also a public relations nightmare for the British."
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