Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  “Let’s walk in the sand,” she said.

  They descended the few steps to the beach, took off their shoes and sat down. The Mediterranean was green-blue and inviting. Impulsively, Raquela jumped up and ran to the water’s edge. Carmi leaned back in the sand, watching her. She rolled her skirt around her thighs, waded into the water, letting the sea lap about her legs. She felt a sense of release; Carmi had not followed her. She was alone in the water—and free.

  Two soldiers approached her. “Shalom, motek”—Hi, Sweetheart.

  Raquela smiled, and the next moments were a blur of water splashing, of Carmi shouting at the soldiers, grabbing her arm, pulling her out of the sea. His mouth twitched angrily.

  “Why were you flirting with those soldiers?” he demanded.

  “Carmi, I was not flirting,” Raquela insisted.

  She was confused, torn by desire, need, anxiety. Was she really innocent? Had the soldiers detected something even she was not fully aware of?

  The energy drained from her, she said, “I think we’d better go back to Jerusalem, Carmi.”

  She wiped the sand from her feet, slipped into her shoes, and silently climbed the promenade steps. The sea lay behind them. Soon they were on the intercity bus, climbing the hills to Jerusalem. They hardly spoke; Raquela stared out the bus window, but she saw nothing. Carmi sat beside her, his handsome face sullen, anguished.

  They caught the bus to Mount Scopus. “Don’t go in yet,” Carmi pleaded. “Let’s walk to the university garden.”

  They sat on the stone bench, the turrets and towers and battlement walls below them washed in the afternoon haze.

  She heard herself saying, “Carmi. Let’s end it now, before we hurt each other too deeply. I can’t live with your jealousy, with someone who doesn’t trust me.”

  “Forgive me, Raquela.” He tried to embrace her.

  She drew away.

  “It’s only because I love you so much.” His lips trembled. “I know this weakness in my character. But I’ll change. I promise you.”

  Raquela searched his face. Her eyes moved toward the Jewish Brigade insignia on his sleeve. It would be so easy to accept his promise; to wait, always hoping he might change.

  “Carmi”—she shook her head sadly—“I’ve watched the surgeons operate. I’ve watched them take a knife and cut clean. That’s what we have to do. Cut it clean now, Carmi.”

  “Raquela, give me another chance. I can’t live without you. Please, Raquela.”

  She trembled, frightened by her own strength. She realized she was destroying her own dream.

  She would throw herself harder than ever into nursing. She would absorb, as never before, everything Arik and the hospital taught her. She shivered.

  “Carmi, for both our sakes, let’s say good-bye now.”

  He looked at her, his lips parched and white.

  He drew himself up to his full height, turned, and walked away.

  Raquela watched him disappear. She ran blindly back to the nursing school and up to her room. She flung herself on her bed and wept.

  NINE

  OCTOBER 1945

  Judith searched the published lists of survivors for news of her family. She haunted the halls of the Jewish Agency for people who might have information. She put ads in the newspapers in Palestine and in the camps for Displaced Persons in Germany, Austria, and Italy, where hundreds of thousands of homeless and stateless refugees were now being sheltered.

  WILL ANYONE WITH ANY INFORMATION CONCERNING THE STEINER FAMILY OF BRNO, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, PLEASE WRITE JUDITH STEINER, HADASSAH—HENRIETTA SZOLD SCHOOL OF NURSING, JERUSALEM, PALESTINE.

  One day she received a letter from Eva Grunberg, a school friend.

  Dear Judith,

  It is good to know that you are alive in our beloved Eretz Israel. I saw your ad on the wall newspaper in Zeilsheim, a DP camp near Frankfurt where I and thousands of other Jews are waiting. After the liberation, when the American Army freed me—I was working in a Nazi slave-labor camp—I went back to our home in Brno. I looked for my family. But they were all dead. Then I looked for the families of my friends. Judith, dear, it grieves me to tell you that your family, too, were all exterminated.

  Judith’s tears blotted the handwritten note. She shut her eyes in anguish. Six years of nightmares had become reality. Silently she screamed, It can’t be true. Someone must be alive.

  She forced herself to go on reading.

  The only one for whom I could find no witnesses and no records is your little brother Joseph.

  Joseph! He had just had his Bar Mitzvah when she left, in 1939.

  Was it possible that the miracle had happened? Could Joseph be alive, wandering somewhere across Europe?

  Judith was numb, torn between grief and a glimmer of hope.

  Raquela watched her go about her work, serious, never missing a day teaching or comforting other students and nurses who were now learning of their families’ fates. Raquela, longing to comfort her, invited her home on weekends, hoping Mama and Papa might give her the warmth, the sense of family, that she had lost.

  Late one Friday afternoon they were on bus 9, descending Mount Scopus into the Arab quarter of Sheikh Jarrah, when British police stopped the bus.

  “Everyone out!” the policemen commanded.

  They lined the men up separately from the women, searched the men for arms, and checked everyone’s ID card against a list they carried.

  The Arabs of Sheikh Jarrah poured out of their houses and shops to watch the drama on the street.

  The policemen pulled Judith aside. Her name seemed to match a name on their list. They searched her purse and questioned her at length. Raquela could not hear the questions. But anger choked in her throat. Had Judith not suffered enough?

  The war was nearly six months over in Europe, but in Palestine the White Paper War was escalating. The Mandatory Government passed severe emergency regulations. Anyone could be arrested for being a member of a group, if even a single person of that group had been arrested; it was collective guilt as well as guilt by association. Anyone could be detained and deported to one of the British prisons in Africa, without charges or a trial. Newspapers were censored. Radio broadcasts were censored. Civil liberties were dead.

  What were the police planning to do to Judith? Raquela stared at them in anger.

  Finally, Judith was released. “Case of mistaken identity,” she told Raquela.

  In the bus they spoke in whispers, knowing some of the passengers might be agents of the CID, British Counterintelligence.

  “They kept you so long I was sure they were going to arrest you,” Raquela said. “I was already planning how I would ask Jacob to get the Palmach to spring you out of jail.”

  The image of Palmach commandos breaking into jail to rescue her brought a smile to Judith’s face.

  They both had many friends in the Palmach, the spectacular striking force of the Haganah, established in the dark days of 1941 when Rommel was at the gates of Palestine.

  The British, grateful for their help, had trained hundreds of young men and women as guerrilla fighters. Arab-speaking Jews, like Moshe Dayan, had been sent, disguised as Arabs, on dangerous missions to help liberate Vichy-held Syria and Lebanon, and to Iraq to help quell the pro-Nazi uprising.

  In Europe during the war, it was these young Palmach boys and girls who had parachuted behind the Nazi lines to make contact with the anti-Nazi resistance, to bring word to the trapped Jews that they were not abandoned, that help was on the way.

  As soon as the war in Europe was over, the war against the White Paper escalated, and the Haganah was forced to go underground.

  The Friday-afternoon Sabbath peace descended on the treelined streets of Bet Hakerem as Raquela and Judith walked from the bus stop down the street. They entered the garden fragrant with autumn flowers.

  Raquela flung the door open, overjoyed to find that Jacob and Meira had come with their baby for the Shabbat meal.

  Everyone talked ge
ntly to Judith. They knew the tragedy had ebbed her strength. At the table they surrounded her, trying to assuage her agony and pain. Jacob, who knew the most about the tragedy in Europe because of his position in Shai, understood best how to comfort Judith.

  “The word is hope,” he said. “Never give it up. Keep searching; keep on putting those ads in the papers. And maybe your brother Joseph will turn up on our shores.”

  Judith’s eyes, wept out, filled again. But now she was smiling through her tears.

  “Let me tell you what’s happening in Europe,” he said. “A mass migration—such as the world has never seen. Spontaneous. The people who went to their old homes and couldn’t live there anymore are now migrating by the thousands back to Germany.”

  “Germany!” Raquela blurted. “How can they go back to Germany? The deathland.”

  Jacob nodded. “Yes, the deathland. Why Germany? Because the Americans are there, and the Americans are helping. The Displaced Persons camps are filling up every day with more survivors. And now, from the DP camps, the people are making their way almost instinctively, like lemmings; but they’re not going to their deaths; they’re coming here, to life, to Palestine.”

  “Someone has to help them,” Papa said. “Who’s helping?”

  “We are, Papa. The Haganah. We have two arms helping—on land and sea. The Bricha and the Mosad.”

  He explained that the Bricha—the word means “flight”—was a clandestine body of emissaries from Palestine with a large contingent of Jewish Brigade men still in Europe, who were guiding the mass movement across the frontiers.

  The Mosad le-Aliyah Bet—the Committee for Illegal Immigration—headed by top Haganah leaders, was in charge of buying boats, outfitting them, and getting the DPs onto the ships.

  Jacob turned to Judith, who hung on to his words as though they were a lifeline. “Nearly every able-bodied man and woman, boy and girl, in the DP camps wants to get on one of our boats. Maybe one of those boys will be Joseph.”

  Judith whispered, “Dear God, make it happen.”

  Now the ships were coming, slipping through the Mediterranean, landing on the coast in the dead of night. Haganah men and women waded into the water, helped the refugees jump off the ships, then rushed them into kibbutzim and towns along the coast. They hid them out until they could get them ID cards, give them a history and a past, and teach them the answers to give soldiers and police if they were stopped on the street or pulled off a bus at a sudden checkpoint. When the British caught wind of the operation, they sent naval vessels into the Mediterranean to halt the mass movement; they patrolled the coast of Palestine with planes, ships, and radar stations.

  Some of the little boats escaped the dragnet, but many were caught. The British pulled the people down, put them on trucks, and transported them to Athlit.

  An ancient and beautiful port, Athlit lay just below Haifa, on the Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages the Crusaders had built a strategic castle overlooking the natural harbor for the Knights of the Cross. The castle ruins were still standing. Here during the Arab riots of 1936-39 the British erected one of their chain of police stations, “Tegart Fortresses,” named for Sir James Tegart, the architect who had planned them. Now the British were adding a new chapter in Athlit’s history: a detention camp for the survivors of the fire in Europe.

  By the fall of 1945 the camp was already overflowing with more than two hundred refugees, captured, dragged off” the little “illegal” boats, herded into tents and barracks, and caged behind barbed wire: one more concentration camp in the wake of the tragedy and the passion. To the terrible roll call of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Maidanek, a new name was inscribed: Athlit. But this camp was on the soil of the Holy Land itself.

  In October 1945, again in the warm glow of the Sabbath candles, Jacob announced, “I’ve brought a stack of reports and papers. I’m going to tell you the newest story of Athlit.”

  And for the next hour, Raquela, Meira, Mama, and Papa sat spellbound, as Jacob told the story.

  Nahum Sarig, commander of the Palmach First Battalion in the north, waited in his underground command post in Bet Hashittah, his kibbutz in the valley of Jezreel.

  Two twenty-three-year-old Palmach commanders, in khaki shorts and shirts, entered.

  Sarig looked up from his desk. “Shalom, Yitzhak. Shalom, Nehemia.” He motioned them to sit down. One was a handsome fair, blue-eyed commander, Yitzhak Rabin; his dark-haired companion was Nehemia Schein.

  Sarig’s leathery face was tense; his eyes were hard. “We’ve just received secret information. The two hundred eight refugees in Athlit are to be deported to Eritrea.”

  A swift glance passed between Rabin and Schein. Eritrea, on the east coast of Africa, near Ethiopia, had been used by the British during the war to imprison members of the Irgun. They had called it Devil’s Island.

  Sarig went on: “Haganah headquarters in Jerusalem has ordered us to prevent the deportation.”

  He rose and began to pace the floor.

  “We have no intention of shedding blood—British, Arab, or Jewish. But we are prepared to pay the price, if need be, to overcome any opposition. Our objective must be measured by how many of the two hundred and eight refugees we set free. Alive.”

  The young commanders nodded silently.

  “We will assemble one hundred fifty Palmach men and women for the operation,” Sarig said.

  He spread a diagram of the Athlit detention camp on his desk, its entrances and exits carefully drawn. Code letters marked the refugees’ tents and barracks in the northern half of the camp and the buildings in the southern half where the soldiers and police were billeted. Surrounding Athlit were three British military camps and the Athlit police station filled with hundreds of soldiers and police. Next to the detailed sketch, he spread a map of the Athlit-Haifa area and the Carmel mountain range.

  Sarig began his briefing: “This action is against the British, but it has wider political and moral meaning. It is the first action by force undertaken by instructions from the Jewish Agency.” He had emphasized the words “by force.” All previous actions of the Haganah had been without arms.

  “There are three things we must calculate: how to release the people, how to transport them, and how to bring them to safety.”

  OCTOBER 10, 1945

  Just after dusk one hundred fifty Palmach men and women moved out from Kibbutz Bet Oren, at the top of Mount Carmel. The kibbutz was only four miles from Athlit, but the road wound around the mountain through deep crevices and rough terrain. In trucks the Palmachniks drove west, toward the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway.

  All forces were deployed. One group—under Amos Horev, who later became president of the Haifa Technion—hid at the side of the road, to secure the operation and block the highway in case of trouble.

  Another group huddled opposite the Tegart fortress-police station, to prevent the police from moving to the support of the guards inside the camp that lay a mile off the main road.

  Others, led by Rabin and Schein, waited for H-hour in the fields some forty yards outside the camp.

  One A.M.

  Inside the detention camp, young men and women “teachers” stirred in their bunks. They had been living in the camps as representatives of the Jewish Agency, holding classes for the imprisoned refugees; actually, they were the best athletes in the Palmach.

  Inside the double rows of barbed-wire fences that surrounded Athlit, six Arab guards stood watch around the perimeter. An Arab policeman, hearing noises, began to shout. A Palmach soldier clamped his hand over the policeman’s mouth.

  A second Arab raised his gun and fired. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still no fire. He examined his gun and flung it on the ground in anger. The pin in his rifle had been broken. That afternoon the “teachers” had broken the firing pins in all the police rifles.

  The “teachers” now gagged and tied up the six guards. Thirty more Arab and British police slept in the barracks, unaware.

  A flashlight
signaled to Rabin outside the camp. Armed with wire clippers and guns, Rabin’s Palmachniks cut the barbed wire and slipped into the camp. Behind Rabin’s group came Nehemia Schein’s.

  Rabin’s people were deployed all over the camp, prepared to use force if necessary, while Schein’s group headed straight for the tents and barracks.

  The refugees lay in their beds fully dressed. They had learned of the breakthrough one hour earlier. At the signal, they jumped out of bed and followed Schein’s young commandos out of the camp.

  Schein led them, not along the one-mile asphalt road to the highway but across the fields, out of sight of the police station and possible patrols.

  Meanwhile, hidden in darkness, Nahum Sarig’s group waited with trucks, east of the main road, to transport the refugees across Mount Carmel to Kibbutz Yagur, seven miles southeast of Haifa.

  The scheduled time for getting the people out of the camp, across the field, and into the trucks was thirty minutes.

  Rabin looked at his watch.

  H-hour plus fifteen minutes. All was well, Rabin could hear light footsteps as the people stole out of the barracks and tents.

  He saw a guard moving. Should he shoot him? Under the camp light he caught sight of the guard’s face. The guard seemed terrified. Shooting would wake the sleeping policemen. He did not shoot. The guard moved away.

  H-hour plus twenty minutes.

  Rabin waited. Would the guards wake?

  H-hour plus thirty minutes. Silence.

  Rabin ordered a swift last-minute search. Every refugee was out of the camp. Not one shot had been fired.

  Rabin and his Palmachniks, the last to leave the camp, moved stealthily through the gaps they had cut in the barbed wire and began running toward the trucks waiting east of the main highway.

  Halfway across the field, Rabin saw disaster.

  The men, women, and children were moving slowly, dragging sacks and pillowcases. They had refused to leave their pitiful possessions in the camp. The packs contained all that remained of their families, their homes, their history, their past.

  The timetable was broken. By now every refugee should have been safely across the highway and climbing into the trucks. If the British caught them, there would be bloodshed everywhere. The people, aware of the danger, began dropping their sacks and pillowcases; the fields were littered with all they had salvaged of their lives.