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Jewish-American Sailor, 90, Recalls Cyprus Internment
(AP-ABC News) Menelaos Hadjicostis - Seventy years later, Murray Greenfield, 90, can still remember the anger he felt when he was locked up behind double rows of barbed wire fences and under armed guard together with hundreds of Jewish Holocaust survivors in a British detention camp in Cyprus. After a three-year stint in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, Greenfield was among a crew of volunteers aboard the Hatikva, a rickety, decades-old icebreaker that was pressed into service to ferry 1,500 Jews to Palestine, ruled by Britain. Some 250 American sailors had volunteered to help Jews sail to Palestine aboard 10 surplus World War II vessels purchased with secret donations from Jewish Americans, he said. More than 50,000 Jews were interned in Cyprus during 1945-1948. Greenfield said he always intended to return to New York City, but his three months in the camp changed him. "The people I met were so enthusiastic, so positive. They were creating a state, a whole new thing."