ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Atlantic Drift is a 2002 documentary by Michel Daëron. He documents the wanderings of a Nazi-initiated and approved refugee company of Jews starting in 1940 from Austria over the Danube, the Mediterranean Sea up to the then English-administered island of Mauritius with the steamship Atlantic. The original target was the Mandate territory of Palestine. The stay in Palestine was denied to the refugees.

Content
The DDSG ships Helios, Melk, Uranus and Schönbrunn leave Vienna and Bratislava on or around 3 September with more than 4000 refugees on board. The destination is the Black Sea to transfer to the sea-going Atlantic, Pacific and Milos for the further journey towards Palestine. The journey should take ten days. On September 11, 1940, they reached Tulcea (Romania), and in 1829 people transferred to the Greek cargo ship Atlantic. On the Atlantic, the journey takes three months. Initially, the Atlantic damaged in a storm and had to call the Bulgarian port of Varna for repair work. In the port of Heraklion on Crete there was another longer stay.

Not until the 23rd In November, the ship was able to depart from Cyprus, with British military as an accompanying command on board. In Haifa Bay, those arriving expected the MS Patria, a former French luxury liner that the British had requisitioned. The passengers of the two ships Milos and Pacific had already been taken there. On board the MS Patria there was a bomb attack, possibly to prevent his departure, in which and in the following panic several hundred people died. The ship sank. The British Colonial Office finally deported the Atlantic refugees who had been apprehended at Limassol from the coast of Palestine to Mauritius and imprisoned them there for five years in a former Napoleonic prison in the Beau Basin a few kilometres south of Port Louis.

At the time of film production, there were more than 100 survivors of this journey and the detention period there, some of whom were involved. The eyewitnesses report in the film about the living conditions, diseases, hunger and death on this flight from Hitler. The frame story is the journey of a survivor with her adult son to the grave of his father in Mauritius.

Awards
The film was invited to 23 festivals and screened in Toronto, Montreal, London, São Paulo, Ft. Lauderdale, at the Forum of the Berlinale 2002, the FIPA Biarritz and the Diagonale Graz.

See also:
German exile in the time of National Socialism
On emigration forced by the Nazi state: Central Office for Jewish emigration in Vienna
Ha’avara Agreement (German Reich), 5th Alija, Alija Bet, Hebrew words for the epochs, Treaties for the immigration of Jews from Europe to the British Mandate Palestine from 1933
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