As “illegal immigrants”, the 1560 refugees were imprisoned for four-and-a-half years in the central prison of Beau Bassin before finally being permitted to enter Palestine.
One of the refugees was painter Anna Frank-Klein from Berlin. She spent some time teaching drawing at a school in Mauritius that was also attended by Mauritius-born Geneviève Pitot, who at that time was 10 years old.

During the 1990s, Geneviève Pitot, who later worked as a civil engineer in London and Frankfurt, wrote the story of the Jewish prisoners in Mauritius between 1940 and 1945 in memory of her drawing teacher. For this, she interviewed former prisoners and their descendants and sifted through archives in Israel and London. The English-language version of her book was published in 1998 by Editions Vizavi, Port Louis, Mauritius (reprinted in 2000 by Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland). In 1999, the author presented her archive to the German Exile Archive 1933–1945. It contains documents relating to her book, including reports by former prisoners, original drawings, and the original French manuscript. Geneviève Pitot died in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe in June 2002.

A German-language edition has now been published at the initiative of its editor Vincent C. Frank-Steiner, Basel, a son of Anna Frank-Klein; the publisher is Verlag Hentrich & Hentrich, Teetz and Berlin. The French manuscript was translated by Peter Köhler for this purpose. In his foreword, W. Michael Blumenthal describes the book as “an important contribution to the history of these times”: “It sheds light on an important aspect of the difficult birth of the state of Israel and on the almost superhuman efforts and setbacks that the penniless Jewish refugees had to endure as undesirable immigrants to foreign countries.”