Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  Gad and Ike ushered the two young women up the companion-way to the captain’s wardroom. The cook set the captain’s table with a gay red-and-white-checked cloth and soon placed before them heaping platters of fried chicken, coffee, and for dessert, a bowl of figs and grapes.

  “I’m so stuffed,” Esther said. “I can hardly move.”

  Raquela patted her stomach. “I haven’t tasted food this good in years. Especially not in Cyprus. Most of our food at the hospital comes in cans.”

  Gad beamed. “There’s plenty more aboard. And you’re always welcome.”

  The muted light in the wardroom cast a soft glow on his face. Raquela felt his presence, his outward gentleness and quiet inner strength. There was something electric about him. Magnetic. Mysterious.

  Eager to know more about the young sea captain, she said, “It’s hard to think you and Ike—you’re both so young—could have captained this whole incredible mission.”

  Gad spoke softly. “It’s a fascinating adventure. Would you like to hear about it?”

  Raquela nodded. Esther said emphatically, “You bet we do.”

  While they sat around the table, as the ship rolled gently at anchor, Gad began the tale of the unsung voyage of the two ships.

  In the summer of 1947 in New York City, three people, intimately involved in buying ships for the “illegal” immigration, found the United Fruit Company’s Pan York and Pan Crescent, called the two Pans because they had sailed under the flag of Panama.

  The three people were Rebecca Shulman, a Hadassah president; Morris Ginsberg, president of the American Foreign Steamship Corporation; and Dani Shind, one of the three top men of the “Mosad.” The Mosad le-Aliyah Bet, the Committee for Illegal Immigration, ran the whole operation; by this time they had already moved three hundred thousand Jews across Europe and had purchased one hundred thirteen ships. The two Pans were the first “big ships,” old, built in 1901, but cheap and fast.

  In the States the ships were repaired, and to help pay some of the Mosad’s skyrocketing costs, they were loaded with trucks and cars and regular cargo for ports in Europe.

  They discharged their cargo and prepared for their new assignment. The Pan Crescent sailed to Venice, where some two hundred Italian workmen undertook to make repairs. The Pan York waited in Marseille.

  The crews of the two Pans were made up of Italians, Spaniards, Palestinian Jews from the Palmach, and half a dozen Americans who had sailed on the Exodus.

  At last the work on the Pan Crescent was completed. The day she was scheduled to sail, a mine exploded in the engine room. An underwater plate blew out. Water rushed into the hold. The ship listed and began to settle in the sandy bottom. Ike and the handful of American and Palestinian Jews on board got the pumps working and emptied the water. Italians nailed up the huge crater with wooden boards, and the Pan Crescent rose from the dead.

  Investigation convinced the Mosad the British had sabotaged the vessel. The British Foreign Office had set up a special espionage office called “Illegal Jewish Immigration” and flung a network of agents around the globe to halt the march to Palestine—by any means, even sabotage.

  Gad was ordered to take on huge supplies of food and oil, and to stand by in Marseille until he could rendezvous with Ike.

  But Ike was having still more trouble.

  The Italians, pressured by the British agents, refused to sell him fuel. For three weeks he waited, and still no fuel. He decided to make the run with the scant oil left in his tanks. He ordered the engines fired. Under cover of darkness, the Pan Crescent slipped out of Venice.

  The two Pans now sailed for Constanza, in Romania, where they were to pick up their human cargo. British destroyers were instantly on their tail, as they moved down the Adriatic into the Mediterranean, then through the Aegean toward the Straits of Bosporus.

  Nearing Constanza, they were caught in a storm; the Black Sea lived up to the fearsome name the mariners had given it. Torrential rains tossed the ships like matchboxes in the sea.

  With his last drops of fuel, Ike navigated his ship through the wartime mines still floating outside the harbor. He joined Gad and the Pan York crew in Constanza.

  Here the two Pans were transformed for their historic mission. The planks Raquela and Esther had seen in the hold were nailed into place. Each of the fifteen thousand refugees was to be allowed the same area—the size of a coffin, six feet long, two feet wide, with forty inches between the bunks.

  “If they were to load the Queen Mary with this density,” Gad calculated, “they’d be able to take aboard one hundred sixty thousand people.”

  The afternoon light filtered through the Pan York’s porthole. Soon it was twilight, but Esther and Raquela did not move. Both Gad and Ike took turns telling them of the odyssey.

  Still in Constanza, workmen outfitted the ships with sinks and toilets, with bunks even on the decks, an infirmary, and the operating room. They took aboard more than fifty tons of bully beef, flour, powdered milk, powdered eggs, cans of fish and fruit juices, and forty tons of biscuits—almost all of it from the JDC.

  Bevin was enraged. He sent the British minister in Bucharest to Ana Pauker, Romania’s foreign minister and leader of its Communist party to try to halt the exodus.

  He was late. The Mosad had already seen Madame Pauker, and she had agreed to grant the fifteen thousand exit visas.

  The British minister brought more pressure. Madame Pauker compromised. She would not withdraw the visas. She would allow the fifteen thousand Jews to leave Romania, but she would not allow them to board the two Pans in Constanza.

  Swiftly, the Mosad dispatched a man to neighboring Bulgaria. The Bulgarians were friendly; they agreed to let the refugees enter Bulgaria by train from Romania and to sail from the port of Burgas.

  It was now December 1947, and bitter cold. In Romania the fifteen thousand people had sold all their belongings, packed their suitcases, used wood from some of their houses to keep warm, and waited for word. Months had passed, the timetable thrown out of kilter by the sabotage in Venice, by the fruitless wait for oil, and now by British pressure.

  Bevin, determined that these two ships—the largest refugee ships in history—must never sail, bore down on Washington. On Bucharest. On Jerusalem.

  Cables crossed the ocean. The leaders in Jerusalem were warned to stop the ships, with threats that they might lose sorely needed American aid in the next critical weeks and months.

  Ben-Gurion called into his office the man known only as “the Chief.” Shaul Avigour, the head of the Mosad, was a short stocky man with deep-set eyes, a high forehead, and the cool, quiet air of integrity. A farmer in Kibbutz Kinneret on the Sea of Galilee, the Chief had helped found the Haganah, built its intelligence service, bought arms, and had been saving refugees since the beginning of World War II.

  Ben-Gurion showed the Chief the cables.

  But even as they talked, nine special trains at nine railway stations began picking up people from the villages in the Carpathian Mountains, in northern Romania, from Cluj, from the Transylvanian Alps, and from towns and cities like Ploesti and Bucharest.

  A transport officer was in charge of each train; the people traveled in “platoons” of fifty, with a platoon leader, who was to remain their commander until they reached their destination. There were doctors, nurses, and orderlies to care for the sick, the pregnant women, and the newborn babies. The coaches were unheated. The people huddled together, with only their body heat for warmth.

  On one of the trains a baby was born, and in the freezing cold he died.

  The platoon commanders held a discussion: should the baby be buried as soon as the train arrived in Bulgaria, or buried at sea? It was decided to bury the baby in Bulgaria. But the burial was delayed. The trains were halted at the Romanian border on orders from Jerusalem.

  The pressures on the Executive of the Jewish Agency from Washington and London were intense. The vote on partition had been taken at the UN; the Arabs had stalked out of the
General Assembly and declared war on the Jews. With the shortage of arms and planes and men to fight back, the Agency needed every friend it could find abroad. The majority of the Jewish Agency voted to halt the ships.

  Ben-Gurion was still in a dilemma. He told the Chief, “Fly to New York. See Sharett (head of the Jewish Agency Delegation to the UN). Get the pulse. And then, decide what to do. When you and Sharett reach an agreement, I’ll abide by your decision.”

  The Chief flew to Paris and learned how critical their position was in Romania. He decided human needs outweighed political pressures. He did not fly to New York. Instead he telephoned his man in Bucharest. “I will let you sail—white or black.” It was their code for legal or illegal.

  The trains crossed the Romanian border.

  Ike and Gad were waiting in Burgas aboard their ships as the trains pulled in. The platoon commanders transferred their people onto the ships, and kept them together in the holds. Loading the fifteen thousand people took two and a half days.

  The Palmach commander in charge of the two ships was a young man in his late twenties, Yossi Har-el. Trained in warfare and sabotage, he had been Dr. Weizmann’s bodyguard.

  It was Christmas Day. Yossi, sailing aboard the flagship, the Pan York, with Gad as his captain, ordered the anchors raised. Fifteen thousand voices filled the port of Burgas singing “Hatikvah.”

  At dusk the ships began to move. Gad and Yossi stood at the wheel of the Pan York, the local pilot at their side. The pilot insisted only desperate men would dare steer through the eighty-mile-long channel infested with mines, in the dark of night.

  Nothing would stop them.

  The sun rose warm and welcome; they were safe, but not out of danger.

  They set their compasses for the Bosporus. Here they would have to face the Turks. Would Bevin succeed? Would the Turks turn them back?

  Turkish officials boarded the ships in the straits. Ike and Yossi filled the Turks’ pockets with money and gold watches.

  The pleased officials overlooked the overcrowding in the holds, approved the health and sanitation conditions, and stamped the papers.

  The ships sailed through the straits, and were immediately met by three British destroyers and three cruisers.

  Again, the cables, angrier than ever, passed between London, Washington, and Jerusalem. Bevin had failed to force the ships back to Turkey or to Burgas. Under no circumstance, even if there were violence and bloodshed, would he allow fifteen thousand Jews to enter Haifa.

  Washington pressured Sharett to find a compromise that would save lives and save face.

  A compromise was reached. The ships would sail directly to Cyprus. There would be no violence, no pulling people off in Haifa. And the refugees would go straight into the camps.

  Aboard the ships, using their public-address systems, the Palmach commanders explained to the refugees, “We are not going to Haifa. Our orders have been changed, to prevent bloodshed. We are sailing directly to Cyprus.”

  Cries of anger and frustration swept the decks and the holds.

  Men and women waved their fists in the air. The platoon commanders moved swiftly among their platoons, calming the people.

  “These orders are only to save our lives. To spare us being beaten and maybe killed in Haifa. We would be shipped to Cyprus anyway, in prison cages. This way, we shall go there in our own ships.”

  “Don’t you see?” one of the platoon leaders explained, “we’ve made our point. Fifteen thousand of us on two ships of Jews have won our battle against the British.”

  The people grew silent.

  New Year’s Eve. Nineteen forty-seven was drawing to a close. The two ships turned in the wind toward the prison island.

  And the next morning, New Year’s Day, 1948, they sailed into Famagusta.

  It was dark now in the wardroom. Raquela and Esther leaned back on the leather cushions, too exhilarated to talk, looking anew at the two young captains whose fire and guts and courage had brought the fifteen thousand people to Cyprus.

  Raquela glanced at her watch. “Heavens. It’s nearly eight o’clock. We have to get back to Nicosia.”

  “Why don’t you spend the night on the ship?” Gad said. “You two can have my cabin. I can sleep out here in the wardroom. And Ike can go back to the Pan Crescent.”

  “Why not?” Raquela said. “We still have two and a half days’ leave.” Esther agreed.

  The cook served a light supper; the two young women walked around the deck for a while with Gad and Ike, breathing in the fresh salt air.

  Ike said good-bye, then descended the ladder into a small boat, to return to the Pan Crescent. Gad led them to his cabin, wished them a good night’s sleep, and left.

  Esther and Raquela took off their dresses and, in their slips, stretched out on the captain’s bunks.

  Raquela lay on the bunk, reliving the day. Another first, she thought, and smiled, and fell asleep.

  SEVENTEEN

  FEBRUARY 4, 1948

  Lili burst into the maternity hut.

  “Raquela, a sailor handed me this newspaper. He said Captain Gee got it from someone who just flew in from Palestine and Captain Gee knew you’d want to see it.”

  It was a single sheet of newsprint.

  “What does it say?” Lili said, pressing Raquela. “Please read it to us.”

  The nurses and refugee aides clustered around her. Raquela’s eyes swept the headline. She read it aloud, trying to control her mounting panic: “‘Palestine Post press and offices destroyed; bomb and fire gut three buildings.’”

  She steadied herself and went on:

  “Just before eleven P.M. on Sunday, February first, a British-army truck loaded with dynamite pulled up in front of the Palestine Post building. The driver, an Arab, disappeared. Minutes later his truck exploded. Buildings and homes for blocks around have been shattered; even cafés on Zion Square have been blown wide open. Hundreds have been wounded in the blast.’”

  The date on the newspaper was February 2, 1948. In the middle of the night, on a private press—its own presses destroyed—the Post had printed the story of its own injuries.

  Lili begged, “Go on, please—read us the whole paper, Raquela. Every word.”

  Raquela was devouring the sheet. “I’ll read you column one. It’s written by an Englishman under the name of David Courtney.”

  The aides and nurses moved close; the women in the beds raised themselves to listen better.

  “‘The bomb in Hasolel Street for a moment closed the mouths of the messengers of the world, and shut off, as a telephone is shut off, the news from a score of capitals.’”

  Raquela looked up at the women. “Those capitals he’s talking about,” she said, “they’re the capitals of all the Arab countries that surround us—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq. Everybody who reads English in those countries reads the Palestine Post.

  Then she continued: “‘It did but throw into still sharper relief, and sound with still farther-reaching voice, the truth of this land and the sureness of its triumph.’”

  Slowly she reread the words in the silence of the hut: “‘…the truth of this land and the sureness of its triumph.’”

  The words seared her.

  Thoughts of the explosion made her frantic with fear. “What was happening in Jerusalem? Were Mama and Papa safe? Jacob and Yair, and their families? And Arik—was he safe on Mount Scopus?

  She hoarded every piece of news, hungering for details. The radio was instant, swift. Letters and newspapers took weeks; they were more informative than the radio, yet more terrifying.

  Papa had written soon after the November 29 vote on partition, telling her what the reaction was in Jerusalem. The joy and ecstasy had given way, almost overnight, to terror. The commercial center, a series of little shops and workrooms near the Jaffa Gate, had been blown up. Papa described how hundreds of Arabs had marched out of the Old City with guns and sticks and stones.

  Raquela trembled, reading his letter. W
as it an Arab replay? 1921. 1929. 1936. Now 1948. Memories of the little girl in the unfinished Yellin fortress-school made her hands sweat as she held the lined notepaper, reading how Papa had taken refuge in a hallway.

  When it seemed quiet, I peeked out. The whole area looked like a bombed-out city. Dead bodies and glass and broken timbers were strewn all over the streets. The Arabs did this—but how many British help them, we can only suspect. We know that British deserters are happily joining the mufti’s gangs in acts of terror.

  The British were writing their final epitaph in Palestine in violence and chaos.

  Each day the British machinery of government disintegrated further. The railways stopped running, except sporadically. Postal services became disorganized. Palestine was burning—its arsonists both Arabs and Englishmen. It was a tragedy, for the British had done much that was admirable in this land.

  They had changed it from a neglected Turkish outpost into a Westernized land with British courts of law, British police, the graceful amenities of British culture. They had made many friends among the Jewish and Arab populations. They had shepherded Palestine into the twentieth century.

  Statesmen like Balfour and Lloyd George, believers in the Bible and the prophecy, had laid the cornerstones for the Jewish national home.

  But the other face of British rule now showed itself naked and clear: political expediency in its most treacherous form; betrayal of the promise and the hope; surrender to the Arabs for their petroleum favors.

  Bevin dropped all pretenses. In these last days of Empire there would be no cooperation with the Jews. There would be no help in setting up the Jewish state.

  Immigration must be stopped at all costs, lest men of military age from the DP camps and Cyprus enter Palestine and join the Haganah forces to fight the Arabs. Even in the quota system of first in, first out, the British barred all able-bodied men from leaving the camps.

  One day Josh Leibner appeared in the maternity ward with Dr. and Mrs. Harden Ashkenazy. It was Dr. Ashkenazy who had refused to leave the Pan York until Josh had rescued his bag of surgical instruments before the British could confiscate it.