While they had been talking, a phenomenon had occurred which was to shatter any hope Russnak still had of prolonging negotiations on until nightfall. The residents huddling in the cellars of Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakai Synagogue had learned of the surrender delegation. Shrieking shouts of joy and thanksgiving, they rushed past their Haganah guards into the street. Within minutes, Arabs and Jews who had been killing each other hours before were embracing in the street, old friends greeted each other with tears of relief, the Legionnaires moved out of their posts and began to mingle with the men of the Haganah, Jewish shopkeepers opened their stores. Bitterly, Russnak noted that some of them who had given his men a glass of water begrudgingly were offering cakes and coffee to the Arabs. Seeing the two peoples so completely intermingled, Russnak realized that surrender was already an accomplished fact. It only remained to perform the act that would consecrate it.
Sadly Russnak smoked his last cigarette in his candle-lit office, then assembled his officers. All except the representative of the Irgun agreed to surrender. Armed by their votes, Russnak put on an Australian battle blouse and a beret, strapped an old Parabellum to his waist, and set off to surrender to his Arab foes the oldest patch of Jewish soil in the world.
Their shoes brushed, their uniforms straightened, the thirty-odd Haganah men who had survived unscathed lined up in three ranks on one side of the courtyard designated by Tell for the surrender ceremony. Opposite them, the residents had begun to assemble children, sacks of clothes, scraps of furniture with which to remember their homes.
Surveying the pitiful lines of his foes, Tell told Russnak, "If I had known you were so few we would have come after you with sticks, not guns." Then, seeing the worry on the faces of the residents, Tell realized they all feared they would be the victims of another massacre. He began to move down their ranks, quietly seeking with a gesture or a word to reassure them. In the hospital, one of his officers read in the eyes of the wounded "the terrified conviction that we would massacre them all." The United Press's Samir Souki, picking his way through that same roomful of misery, nauseated by the terrible stench of death, heard a voice calling his name. Looking down, he recognized a taxicab driver he knew, trembling with fear of a coming massacre. Souki stooped down and offered him a cigarette and the assurance that all would be well.
Their fears would indeed prove unfounded. Tell's only victims would be Arab, not Jewish—looters who had thrown themselves with too much haste on the booty.
The shortest, saddest exile in modern Jewish history began just before sunset. Two by two, some thirteen hundred residents of the Jewish Quarter started over the five hundred yards separating them from Zion Gate and the New City. Their departure marked the end of almost two thousand years of continuous Jewish residence—interrupted only by a sixty-year period in the sixteenth century—inside the Old Walls of Jerusalem. Abandoned behind them was the ruined wall over which they and so many generations before them had been sorrowing sentinels. As the villagers of Hebron had uprooted the orchards of Kfar Etzion to eradicate the last traces of Jewish settlement from their hills, so the last vestiges of Jewish residence inside Jerusalem's walls would be effaced from their ancient quarter. As the refugees passed through Zion Gate, sparks from the first of their fired buildings sputtered into the sky.
Tell's Legionnaires offered them the protection of their bodies along the narrow passageways and staircases so familiar to them, holding back the excited Arab crowds. They helped the aged, carried bundles or children for overburdened women. They drove back the excited mob with their rifle butts, arrested those who tried to pelt the Jews with stones, and, on one occasion, fired over the crowd's head to hold them back.
Some of those people abandoning their homes had never been outside the Old City. One 100-year-old man had left it ninety years earlier to look at the first houses built outside its walls; he had never left since. Saddest sight of all were the bearded old men, leaving a lifetime of study behind them. Some, fortunate enough to pass their own homes on their way into exile, stopped to reverently kiss the mezuza, the blessed inscription on the lintel of their front door.
At the gate, an elderly rabbi suddenly burst from the lines and thrust a three-foot-high package into the hands of Antoine Albina, a Christian Arab. "It is something holy from the synagogue," he said. "I give it to you. It is a trust." It was a seven-hundred-year-old Torah twenty-three yards long, written on gazelle parchment. Albina would keep it for eleven years, until he was able to hand it over to the first rabbi to visit Arab Jerusalem in a decade.*
On the other side of the city, a desperate rush was under way to prepare to receive the refugees. Having decided to lodge them in the homes abandoned by the Arabs in Katamon, Dov Joseph sent his assistant Chaim Haller to scour the neighborhood for sheets and blankets. In one Catholic home, Haller found an enormous hoard of candles. Realizing how much it would mean to those orthodox refugees to have a Sabbath candle to light their new homes, Haller took them all, vowing not to reveal their unsanctified origins to their recipients.
Until well into the evening, the sad procession continued through Zion Gate, the flames of their burning quarter illuminating their faces. Masha Weingarten thought, "It is the end of my life." Her father insisted on leaving with the prisoners, carrying off with him into captivity in Amman the key to Zion Gate given him by a British officer only a fortnight earlier.
Avraham Orenstein and his sister went to the home in which their parents had been killed. "It was full of books, full of childhood memories" for Avraham. He wanted to take something, some souvenir of his dead parents, but he couldn't think of anything. Sarah picked up "some silly object." Then they parted, she heading to the New City, he to prison camp with 293 others.
From a street corner near Zion Gate, the man who had led so many destructive forays against their quarter watched the last Jewish refugees leave. All his life Fawzi el Kutub had been used to seeing Jews in the streets of his native Old Jerusalem. Suddenly he understood that he was seeing them there for the last time. Their pathetic parade was the final triumph of the strange and vicious career he had begun twelve years earlier, only a few yards from the doorway in which he now stood, hurling a homemade hand grenade at a Jewish bus.
Among the last people through the gate was Leah Vultz. The Legion had not given her cause to use her final grenade.
Looking at the flames of the quarter she had fought so hard to defend, she thought of "the Jews of Spain leaving their burning ghettoes." Bitterly she cried to the first man on the other side, "Jews! You remained here, and we had to surrender."
As night fell, only the quarter's 153 wounded remained in the Old City, crowded in their wretched hospital, waiting for the inspection by a team of doctors to determine which of them would be returned to the New City and which would go to prison camp. Soon the fires raging in the looted quarter began to creep up on their sanctuary. Persuaded that the hour of their massacre had come, the wounded saw a company of Legionnaires march into the building. They had come, however, to carry their injured enemies to the safety of the nearby Armenian Patriarchate.
At his headquarters, Abdullah Tell received the final accolade of his triumphant day. It was a telephone call from Amman. Warm and paternal, the King personally congratulated the young officer he had sent to the city ten days before.
Beyond the Old City walls, Chaim Haller went from room to room trying to comfort the refugees in their strange New City surroundings. They were "totally shattered." But, to his astonishment, he discovered it was not the closeness of their brush with death, nor the loss of the only homes most of them had ever had, that had so totally demoralized them. The cause of their deep grief was the fact that it was Friday evening and in riding from Zion Gate to Katamon most of them had desecrated the Sabbath for the first time in their lives.
Haller offered them the only comfort he could. Into the hands of those devastated men and women he pressed the candles blessed by the priests of another faith rooted in the soil of Jerusalem. T
ears in his eyes, he watched their faces as they lit them, overjoyed to have honored at least one Sabbath commandment after having violated so many others.
Racked by a high fever, in terrible agony, Esther Cailingold lay dying this Sabbath eve on the floor of the second story of the Armenian monastery with the rest of the wounded. There was no morphine left to ease her pain, and the wounded man beside her saw one of the orderlies bend over and offer the only sedative he had, a cigarette. She lifted her hand and started to take it. Then her hand fell back.
"No," she whispered. "Shabbat."
They were her last words. A few minutes later she lapsed into a final coma. Under her pillow was a letter she had written to her parents five days earlier anticipating the possibility of her death in the fighting enveloping the quarter. It was the only legacy the English girl would leave.
DEAR MUMMY AND DADDY,
I am writing to beg you that whatever may have happened to me, you will make the effort to take it in the spirit I want. We had a difficult fight. I have tasted hell but it has been worthwhile because I am convinced the end will see a Jewish state and all our longings. I have lived my life fully, and very sweet it has been to be here in our land . . . I hope one day soon you will all come and enjoy the fruits of that for which we are fighting. Be happy and remember me only in happiness.
Shalom.
ESTHER
The red-bearded giant lying on the floor beside her wept as her labored breathing slowly faded away. Outside the monastery, the flames of the burning quarter for which she had died reddened the night sky and sent streams of sparks dancing skyward like a whirl of snowflakes caught in a beam of light. Stretched out in the darkness, Shar Yeshuv Cohen thought of a Biblical line he had often chanted as a boy. He began to sing it now, over and over again, softly at first, then stronger, until finally it rolled from his pallet with all the power of his deep bass voice. The other wounded lying around him in the darkness took it up, too. Gradually building in strength, it became a proud, defiant roar, reverberating through the vaulted chamber of the monastery.
"Out of blood and fire Judea will fall," they sang, "and out of blood and fire it will be reborn."
41
"GOOD NIGHT AND GOODBYE FROM JERUSALEM"
CAPTAIN EMILE JUMEAN studied the twenty-five selected targets on the 1:25,000-scale British Army map on the floor of an unfinished schoolhouse three miles north of Jerusalem. From his schoolhouse the Arab Legion officer commanded the force which now represented the most immediate military threat to Jewish Jerusalem, twelve 25-pounder field guns. The meticulous Arab officer had designated each of their targets with a code name. Notre-Dame was "Whiskey," after the favored liquor of its former Scots residents. The Jewish Agency was "Flower." The Schneller School was "Diamond."
Major Abdullah Tell had hoped to follow the conquest of the Old City with a push into New Jerusalem. Mindful of the losses he had incurred at Notre-Dame, Glubb categorically rejected his suggestion. Angrily, Tell decided to rely on Jumean's guns to obtain the result he wanted to secure himself. By pounding the city daily he hoped to disrupt its existence, to make civilian life unbearable, and finally to force its surrender.
Jumean spread his guns on three key hilltops controlled by a trio of observers: one on a rooftop in Sheikh Jarrah, one on a minaret in Nebi Samuel and one in a house on the Mount of Olives. In addition to his own guns, he also controlled a pair of Iraqi six-inch howitzers on Nebi Samuel. With an allotment of ten shells a gun a day, he could hurl almost 150 rounds into Jerusalem's confined New City every twenty-four hours, enough to make life hell for its inhabitants.
It was a weapon against which the Jews were helpless. Jumean's cannons were far beyond the reach of the Haganah. The city was to be saved, ironically, by an old British ordinance promulgated in 1920 by Sir Ronald Storrs. It required all new homes in Jerusalem to be built of stone to preserve its special character. But no ordinance could save the lives of its Jewish residents. As day after day Jumean's shells whistled into its streets, Jerusalem's casualty toll mounted until, at the end, it would represent, on a proportional basis, five times the toll suffered by London in the worst year of the Blitz.
The only reply the Haganah could offer was in an abandoned brewery in Givat Shaul. Eliahu Sochaczever, who had carried off the Menorah Club's Turkish cannon, had installed a small explosive plant in its precincts. His treasure was a store of chlorate KCL 63 that had been used as a weed killer. By a complex electrolysis system, he had managed to break down its elements, which, mixed with organic materials, gave him a homemade Cheddite to pack the city's mines, grenades and Davidka shells.* As Sochaczever labored early one morning a religious Jew, a blanket around his shoulders like a prayer shawl, stumbled into his laboratory. Seeing Sochaczever's Davidka shells, he kissed and blessed each one.
David Shaltiel was forced to hoard those precious shells with the parsimony of a miser. As each day dragged by with the road to the sea closed, his ammunition reserve dwindled. No one in his command was allowed to fire a three-inch mortar or a Davidka without his personal approval. Occasionally, when one of his units asked for cover fire, Shaltiel waited until an Arab shell had fallen near its positions, then informed his men it had been one of their own rounds. His machine guns and Brens could not be used on automatic fire without clearance from headquarters. At Notre-Dame the defenders were forbidden to fire at targets more than a hundred yards away. One night, ammunition reserves at Notre-Dame were down to five rounds per man.
Throughout the command there was an absolute ban on discussing the situation by radio or telephone, in case the Arabs were intercepting their communications. The few cases of rifle ammunition reaching the city by Piper Cub were jealously seized by Shaltiel's arms expert, a portly Yemenite cheesemaker named Yaffe. He hid their reserves in a series of hiding places known only to him and to the Jerusalem commander. Their final "iron ration" was locked in the basement of the Jewish Agency, to be used only in the last resort. How close they were to breaking into it was revealed to Yitzhak Levi on May 29, the day after the Old City's surrender. That morning, their ammunition report showed there were eight three-inch mortar shells and a reported average of forty rounds of ammunition per rifle left to the city.
That crucial situation was overshadowed in the public eye by the other shortages which affected everybody in the city—those of food and water. The gesture of General Jones's departing British communications officer in assigning to the city the code name "Cod" had been singularly appropriate. Jerusalem reeked of one of the rare commodities in Dov Joseph's warehouses, dried fish. The critical lack of food touched everybody. At Notre-Dame, Netanel Lorch almost came to blows with a fellow officer in arguing whether a looted sausage should be left at a position or whether it should leave with its departing occupants. Shaltiel had to tell his men, who ocasionally fainted from hunger at their posts, that their rations were minimal because "Jerusalem has been besieged for two months and our reserves are critically low. . . . You must remember," he said, "Jerusalem's elderly, her women and children, are hungry, too."
There were all kinds of improvisations. With the khubeiza gone, some people tried to make a kind of spinach by boiling grape leaves. A common dish was crushed matzo sprinkled with oil, spread on more matzo and called "monkey fat." Ruth Erlik grew radishes on her windowsill, watering them with the last of her water ration after it had been passed through its four traditional stages. Mrs. Joseph Rivlin, a distinguished hostess, offered her occasional callers a cup of water passed through her ancient samovar, hoping that somehow the memory of the gallons of tea it had boiled over the years would leave an imprint upon it. Because the shelling made food distribution difficult, the meager bread ration was often stale. Mothers with babies had to soften it with water so that their children could eat it. The city was filled with sick infants for whom the hospitals, overflowing with wounded, had no room.
Dov Joseph asked Ben-Gurion if there was any possibility of airlifting supplies. Ben-Gurion replied they
might be able to fly in three tons a week. Joseph exploded. "Jerusalem's minimum needs to keep the population alive for a week are 140 tons of flour, three tons of powdered eggs, ten tons of powdered milk, ten tons of smoked or salted fish and ten tons of yellow cheese," he cabled Ben-Gurion. "The three tons which you suggeest will solve nothing whatsoever."
Anguished, Ben-Gurion replied in a cable addressed to the city. "Help will come . . . The moral effort as well as the physical effort of the Army will save and liberate our capital. Courage and strength."
The other shortages plaguing the city were equally vexatious. Without fuel for trucks, there was no garbage collection. Waste rotted in the May heat all over the city, and, with the Arab shelling, burning it was a hazardous procedure. The tinkling bell of the waterman announcing the arrival of the water ration became unforgettable music to every Jerusalemite. The hospitals faced one shortage after another. Clinics designed to handle fifty or sixty patients had four or five times that number as the Arab shelling began to take a frightening toll. Dizzy with hunger, Professor Edward Joseph and his assistants performed an average of twenty-one abdominal operations a day, working twenty-four hours nonstop, then sleeping eight.
Cigarettes had disappeared. Even Shaltiel, a chain smoker, had none. One night his adjutant, Yeshurun Schiff, found a treasure, three butts, in the street. He ran to Shaltiel's room at Greta Ascher's boardinghouse. Like schoolboys, the two officers cut them apart and rolled their tobacco into one precious smoke.
In the midst of all the problems besetting Jerusalem, there were still determined islands of normalcy. Kol Jerusalem, the radio station, broadcast regular news bulletins in Hebrew, Arabic, English and French.
The most famous members of its staff were the thirty musicians in its orchestra. Although there was no current for their broadcasts, they insisted on continuing their Tuesday concerts, playing in the streets outside their studio for anyone brave enough to defy the Arabs' shelling. If it became too intense, they simply moved inside and continued to play by candlelight.
O Jerusalem! Page 60