Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Hanan Akavia and his wife, Miriam, who suffered as teenagers the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, neither weighing more than 25 kilos when they left, were both separately brought to Sweden, where they met, after the liberation of Bergen Belsen.
Hanan Akavia cites: "Sweden chose the weakest and sickest. Nothing was demanded of us. They sanitised us... dressed us, checked us, fed us vitamins and cod liver oil and sent us to pretty localities, most of us to hospitals."
"If I had not been saved by Sweden I cannot imagine how I would have survived. It meant recovery, a new life."

On July 15, 1945, Miriam Weinfeld and Hanan Jakobovicz arrived in Haifa, with a Youth Aliyah group on a boat from Marseille.

Tom Segev cites: "Miriam Weinfeld felt shunned by the young people at Degania Bet. Although she did not speak Hebrew, their cliquishness hurt; she sensed arrogance, sometimes even mockery and hostility. The older members were more welcoming; they tried to adopt the new couple, but did not know how to make life easier for them. She sensed in their kindness guilt, even shame. She wanted to be asked about herself; her story was the only thing she had to contribute to her relationship with the new country. But no one asked.
.... Often, the stories were simply not believed. (p. 155) "
"A few days after he came home from his mission to Hungary, paratrooper Yoel Palgi went to a veterans´ club in Tel Aviv. It was June 1945. Everyone received him warmly and with admiration, he later wrote. They all
wanted to hear what had happened over there. But no one was interested in accounts of Jewish suffering. They wanted a different story, about the few who had fought like lions. “Everywhere I turned” Palgi wrote, “the question was fired at me: why did the Jews not rebel? Why did they go like lambs to the slaughter? Suddenly I realized that we were ashamed of those who were tortured, shot, burned. There is a kind of general agreement that the Holocaust dead were worthless people. Unconsciously, we have accepted the Nazi view that the Jews were subhuman."
"... History is playing a bitter joke on us: have we ourselves put the six million on trial?”

In 1948, Hanan Jakobovicz and Miriam joined a group of young refuges who came to Israel from Sverige, and established kibbutz Nachsholim., and stayed there for 6 years.