Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  Raquela had special permission to be out during curfew, as did all the doctors and nurses. After graduation, she had moved back home with Mama and Papa in Bet Hakerem. Whenever she had night duty, Hadassah’s eight-passenger station wagon called for her at home at 11 P.M. and then picked up fifteen more nurses. When the station wagon was halted at surprise checkpoints, the British soldiers stood baffled, as they watched white-aproned nurses jump out, one after the other, like performers in the circus.

  During the curfew, the streets were deserted, quiet as a graveyard. The nights were punctuated with explosions and gunshots. Guerrilla fighters planted bombs. Soldiers and police, frightened, fired at anything that moved, even shadows.

  But on Mount Scopus there was no curfew.

  Raquela and Arik spent all their free time together. Often, while he worked at his desk, she sat reading on his divan against the wall. Then, his work finished, he joined her. They read together. They walked around the garden, smelling the roses and oleanders, holding hands as they strolled among the Jerusalem pine and the spreading eucalyptus trees that shaded the garden.

  She felt happy and safe.

  Yet she had doubts about him. He was attentive, affectionate. He brought her gifts he made himself. He picked pansies in the hospital garden and arranged them, like a mosaic, in empty candy boxes. When a flu epidemic felled her for a week in the infirmary in the nursing school, he brought her a fresh rose every morning.

  Her roommate in the infirmary, Lea Gur-Aryeh, a short, bubbly student nurse, watched enviously.

  “You’re so lucky, Raquela. None of my boyfriends would even dream of bringing me a rose. He’s like somebody out of the old world.”

  Raquela nodded. But she was silent. Not once had he said he loved her. Until he said it, she would never be sure.…

  MARCH 1946

  Evening in Arik’s room. His desk, the coffee table, the floor, were strewn with newspapers, even the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune.

  Arik, at the desk, and Raquela, on the divan, sat tense. The radio in the bookcase was turned up. They sat glued to the words.

  Dr. Chaim Weizmann was testifying in Jerusalem’s handsome, towered YMCA.

  The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine had arrived in the Holy Land on March 7, 1946. Dr. Weizmann, president of both the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the World Zionist Organization, was the first witness.

  For the last two months Arik had clipped newspaper and magazine articles for Raquela as the committee listened to Jewish and Arab leaders in Washington, London, Vienna, and Cairo. With red pencil he had marked the stories of the subcommittees’ interviewing survivors in Europe and the DP camps. The reporters described the horror-filled faces of the committee as the survivors showed them pictures of their families. All burned. All dead.

  In every DP camp, the survivors told them, “Palestine was promised as our homeland. We want to go home.”

  Now the evening radio was broadcasting highlights of the morning testimony. Dr. Weizmann was talking. Raquela had seen the photos of this old, weary, nearly blind man. It was hard to believe those photos now as she listened to his voice. Strong. Passionate.

  “We warned you, gentlemen,” he said. “We warned you. We told you that the first flames that licked at the synagogues of Berlin would set fire, in time, to all the world.”

  Raquela heard him pause. He talked about the promises the Labour government had made. The room seemed to echo with the plea of the old man who had spent his life trusting the British government.

  His voice broke. “I ask you to follow the course of least injustice in determining the fate of Palestine.”

  Arik whispered, “The least injustice.”

  Raquela nodded, absorbed in the words that followed.

  “European Jewry cannot be expected to resettle on soil drenched with Jewish blood. Their only hope for survival lies in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The leaky boats in which our refugees come to Palestine are their Mayflowers, the Mayflowers of a whole generation.”

  The next witness was David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, the short stocky leader with a halo of white hair around his strong face.

  Ben-Gurion was discussing the Jewish state. It was not a new idea. Back in June 1937 the Royal Commission of Enquiry, meeting around the same huge semicircular table in the YMCA, had recommended partitioning Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion, with Weizmann and Moshe Sharett, had accepted the recommendation, believing even a small Jewish state would give the Jews a homeland. But the British government rejected the findings of its own commission and instead issued the White Paper in 1939.

  In May 1942 Ben-Gurion, visiting the United States, once again called for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth “integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.” It became known as the “Biltmore Program,” from the Biltmore Hotel in New York, where the extraordinary Zionist Conference took place.

  Now the committee was asking Ben-Gurion to define a “Jewish state.”

  His powerful voice blared through the radio. “By ‘Jewish state’ we mean Jewish independence. We mean Jewish safety and security. Complete independence, as for any other free people.”

  Ben-Gurion’s words were carried live throughout the country. There was new hope. This committee was different from all the others. It had six Americans—sitting with the six Englishmen. The Americans understood the meaning of a “free people.” The Americans would make a difference.

  After the hearings the committee flew to Lausanne, Switzerland, to write their report in the neutral repose of the Hôtel Beau Rivage. The twelve men strove for unanimity. They sincerely believed Bevin’s promise that if their report was unanimous, he would carry it out.

  It took a month of debates and compromises and soul searching. Some of the committee members had gone through a genuine conversion in the DP camps and in the Holy Land. They voted unanimously to accede to President Truman’s request: one hundred thousand DPs would be allowed to enter Palestine.

  Truman enthusiastically approved the report.

  Joy spread through the DP camps and Palestine. The suffering of the DPs would soon be ended.

  Almost overnight, the joy turned to bitterness.

  Prime Minister Clement Attlee, speaking in the House of Commons, announced that the Haganah and all private armies must be disarmed before any large-scale immigration could begin.

  The report of the eighteenth commission was scuttled.

  Palestine was burning.

  The Jewish Resistance Movement attacked the Tegart police fortresses. They organized mass demonstrations fighting the British army and police. On June 17 they blew up all the bridges on the borders of Palestine.

  Two weeks later the British decided to break the back of the Jewish Resistance Movement and, they hoped, to crush the Jewish will to establish a state.

  At four-fifteen A.M. on “Black Saturday,” June 29, Raquela, sleeping in her bedroom at Bet Hakerem, was awakened. Tanks and armored cars rumbled through the streets. In a country-wide military action soldiers burst into homes, searched attics and cellars, ripped up mattresses looking for ammunition, used dogs in kibbutzim to ferret out slicks, and arrested 2,600 men and women.

  The leaders of the country, men like Moshe Sharett and David HaCohen, the Haifa labor leader, were imprisoned in the police fortress at Latrun on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway. Others were kept behind barbed wire in a camp in Rafa, on the Mediterranean Sea. Still others were imprisoned in Athlit.

  David Ben-Gurion was in Paris, and he escaped.

  Golda Meir, who had already distinguished herself in the Palestine labor movement, was chosen as acting head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, to replace the imprisoned Sharett.

  Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, eluded the search.

  Dr. Weizmann, who was not arrested, held a press conference.

  In her room that night Raquela turned on the rad
io to hear Dr. Weizmann’s voice. “First the situation is allowed to deteriorate almost beyond hope,” she heard him say. “Then it is the victims of that deterioration that are punished.”

  She sat at the edge of her bed, helpless with anger.

  Dr. Weizmann, who had always talked of moderation—trust the British; cooperate with them; they are still our friends—now spoke bitterly.

  “Is it not a most grotesque state of affairs,” he asked, “that the mufti should be sitting in a palace in Egypt, enjoying freedom, while Moshe Sharett, who raised an army for Britain of more than twenty-five thousand men, is behind barbed wire at Latrun?”

  Too agitated to sleep, Raquela switched off the radio and put on a robe. She found Mama and Papa sitting in the living room, still listening to the broadcast.

  “We can’t sleep either,” Papa said. “Let’s have some tea.”

  “I’ll get it,” Raquela said.

  She busied herself in the little kitchen, fixing a tray with teacups and home-baked cookies.

  She returned just as the voice on the radio announced, “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a news flash.”

  She froze, clutching the tray.

  “A pogrom today in Kielce, Poland, has taken the lives of many Jews. Exact details are not yet known.”

  The broadcast was over. Papa switched off the radio and began to pace restlessly.

  “These are the Jews who went back to their homes in Poland. Not the DPs. These are the people who believed the propaganda. That the world had changed, that there is no more anti-Semitism.”

  Raquela poured the tea and handed the cup to Papa. “How can any Jew want to go back to such countries?”

  Papa shook his head.

  The Kielce pogrom started a new mass migration to the DP camps. More ships were outfitted to carry the DPs to the Holy Land. The struggle intensified.

  Fear and terror spread throughout the land.

  On July 22, 1946, the Irgun, with the approval of the Haganah, telephoned the offices of the British Government at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, warning them to evacuate immediately. The building was to be bombed.

  As the White Paper war continued, the southern wing of the hotel had become a fortress, housing military GHQ, the secretariat and the British civil government. Next to it were the British military police and headquarters for the Special Investigation Bureau, with soldiers and police on twenty-four-hour duty guarding the hotel, the offices, and the files kept by the British on the Jewish underground.

  The commander of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, was the object of a large and intense manhunt by the British, his clean-shaved, bespectacled face on every “wanted” billboard. Begin was posing as Reb Israel Sassover, a bearded scholar living in a small detached house on Joshua Bin-Nun Street in Tel Aviv, not far from the Yarkon River. He spent much of his time in a synagogue studying the Talmud and biblical commentaries.

  While his house and neighborhood were under constant surveillance by the British police, Begin and the Irgun planned the daring attack on the headquarters of the British rulers. At first, the Haganah command would not approve the plan. They feared an attack on the British headquarters would inflame the British to even more drastic repressive measures.

  But after Black Saturday, June 29, when the British had swooped down and arrested more of the leaders of the Haganah, the Palmach, and the Jewish Agency, the Haganah command approved Begin’s plan.

  Just before noon on July 22, Irgun men dressed as Arabs carried large metal milk cans into the “Regence Cafe” in the basement of the southern wing of the King David Hotel. Inside the milk cans were explosives manufactured by the Irgun operations chief “Giddy” (Amihai Paglin); they had a double mechanism—one to explode half an hour after they were delivered, the other to prevent the cans from being dismantled or removed.

  The next steps were carefully planned to prevent casualties. To clear the streets, a small firecracker was exploded opposite the hotel. As soon as the bearers of the milk cans were safely out of the hotel, a young woman “telephonist” made three calls. First she phoned the King David Hotel, warning that explosives were to go off in a short time. “Evacuate the whole building!” she shouted.

  Next she called the Palestine Post: “Bombs have been placed in the King David Hotel, and the people there have been told to evacuate the building.”

  Her third and final call was to the French consulate, right next to the hotel, telling them to open their windows to prevent shattering. They followed her instruction; the consulate was undamaged.

  Twenty-five minutes passed. Reporters from the Palestine Post had already reached the King David Hotel to cover the expected explosion. Yet, to the horror of the underground fighters, there was no evacuation from the hotel.

  Later the Haganah radio reported that Sir John Shaw, the chief secretary of the British administration, had refused to accept the telephone warning: “I give the orders here. I don’t take orders from Jews.”

  Twelve-thirty-seven P.M. The whole city seemed to shake. The entire southern wing exploded in the air. Ninety-one people were killed and forty-five injured.

  The British arrested 376 men and women, cordoned off the Old City, and sent twenty thousand troops on a house-to-house search to find Begin and the other leaders. Begins cover held.

  Palestine became an armed camp. The British were desperate. No more Jews must enter.

  But the illegal ships continued to sail.

  The patrols on the Mediterranean scoured the waters, found the ships, and imprisoned the people in Athlit. By August 1946 Athlit could hold no more.

  The British opened new camps on the island of Cyprus as more ships with refugees were captured on the high seas.

  Now there were two concentration camps after the war: Cyprus and Athlit.

  MARCH 1947

  Raquela was in the delivery room, helping a young mother onto the delivery table, when a nurse opened the door.

  “There was a telephone call for you. Dr. Yassky would like to see you as soon as you finish the delivery.”

  “Dr. Yassky!” Raquela turned. “Do you know what he wants?”

  “No idea.” The nurse shrugged her shoulders and closed the door.

  Raquela helped the young woman push her feet into the stirrups. What could Dr. Yassky want?

  She had been working as a registered nurse-midwife for a whole year—ever since graduation—and he had not once called her to his office. Mrs. Cantor or Miss Landsmann were always the intermediaries. He summoned the doctors; they summoned the nurses.

  But she had no more time to worry. Her patient was ready to deliver.

  Mazal tov. She placed the baby, washed and wide awake, in its mother’s arms. Then she cleaned up, changed into a fresh uniform, and hurried down the steps to the row of administrative offices off a narrow corridor on the main floor.

  Her mind was churning. What did Dr. Yassky want?

  To most of his staff, he was a remote, almost mythical figure. He was the boss, the director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization.

  Arik had told her stories of how Dr. Yassky and his dark-haired, dark-eyed wife, Fanny, had fled the Russian Revolution and come to Palestine in 1919. How appalled he had been by the sight of blind children in the Holy Land. Ninety-nine out of every hundred Arab children, forty out of every hundred Jewish children, had eyes scarred with the milky white film of trachoma which would blind them.

  He had become a school doctor in Haifa, treating trachoma with a copper-sulphate stick, steeling himself against the pupils screaming at him in pain, “You murderer.” He cured them. Henrietta Szold asked him to take the fight against blindness to the whole country. He became the itinerant ophthalmologist, traveling with a little cart and horse or on a donkey.

  Raquela relaxed and smiled a little, trying to picture Dr. Yassky, six feet tall, his legs dangling, sitting on the back of a donkey.

  But as she knocked on his door, her body grew tense again. She was entering the priva
te domain of the man Miss Szold had selected in 1931 to become the head of the Hadassah Medical Organization.

  “Come in.” She heard his voice.

  He was sitting behind his desk, a silver and black cigarette holder in his mouth. Even in his long white medical coat he looked austere. Formal. Aristocratic. His, the tight hand of authority.

  “Sit down, Miss Levy,” he recommended.

  She sat at the edge of the chair.

  “I hope the delivery was routine.”

  “It was a normal birth,” she said.

  He ground his cigarette in an ashtray and filled a pipe with tobacco.

  “I am sure you know about Athlit, Miss Levy.”

  She nodded. “The British will probably be shutting it down soon,” she said, “now they have much bigger camps—for tens of thousands—on Cyprus.”

  He focused his green eyes on her; she was struck by their sadness.

  “They’re not closing it. It’s full of refugees. Nearly three thousand. Many have been there a long time. They’ve asked us to send a midwife.”

  Raquela blurted, “A midwife in a concentration camp!”

  The sad eyes closed for a moment. “Even in a concentration camp, men and women find ways to be together.” He wafted smoke in the air. “You’re the youngest midwife in our hospital.” His austere face broke into a smile. “But even in this office I hear when a nurse is gifted. When she never complains. Willingly takes night shifts. When she is completely dedicated to the mothers and the babies she delivers.” He walked around the desk and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Can you imagine, Miss Levy, what it would mean to these survivors, still homeless nearly two years after the war, to see an attractive young woman from Jerusalem helping them bring a child into the world? It won’t be an easy job. We would like you to stay three or four weeks.” He looked at her face. “Will you accept it?”

  “When would you like me to go?”

  “The moment you’re ready.”

  She knocked at Arik’s door. The cries of infants filtered down the staircase.

  Arik was at his desk, reading. He looked up.

  “You’ve accepted,” he said.