by Ruth Gruber
Josh introduced Raquela. “Will you show Dr. Ashkenazy and his wife, Nina, around. I’ve got a few things to take care of in Nicosia.”
He turned to Dr. Ashkenazy. “I’ll be back in a little while to take you to Caraolas.”
Dr. Ashkenazy’s fame had spread throughout the hospital. Raquela had learned that the forty-year-old Bucharest brain surgeon had spent two years in Boston, working with the renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing.
“It must be terrible for you to be a refugee,” Raquela said, “to be idle here when you’re so needed in Palestine.”
“It is,” he said. “It is terrible.”
Handsome and dignified even in their prison garb, the surgeon and his wife walked down the rows of beds in the arched huts, stopping to talk to each woman. Some of the women recognized him from Bucharest and the Pan York. What a waste, Raquela thought ruefully. In all of the Middle East there is not one brain surgeon. How many head wounds, how many damaged brains, how many lives, could he be saving? Instead, here he is, waiting.
Raquela offered her guests coffee. They sat around her potbelly stove, chatting. Dr. Ashkenazy leaned back in his chair. He was well built, with a face both strong and poetic, and eyes that seemed to penetrate the very walls and windows of the hut.
Through the window he watched the white diapers flapping against the barbed wire, like free-floating flags defying the prison.
“This must surely be the warmest, friendliest, most unusual maternity ward in any prison in the world,” he said.
His wife, Nina, laughed. It was obvious she adored him. In her twenties, she was slender and graceful, her features finely structured, her hair soft and blond.
“How long have you been here?” she asked Raquela.
“A few months—and a lifetime.”
Nina took her hand. “We don’t have a salon in Caraolas—not exactly an interior decorator’s dream—but we’d love to have you visit us in our tent.”
“Come soon,” Dr. Ashkenazy added. “Be our guest.”
More mail arrived: letters from Arik and her brother Jacob. She tore open Arik’s letter first.
We go up to Mount Scopus in convoys. Our patients come only when a convoy assembles in the morning. We wait downtown in a long line of trucks and ambulances until the British give us the all-clear sign telling us the road is safe. Then we race through the Arab quarter at Sheikh Jarrah…I miss you, Raquela. When are you coming back?
When? Maternity was overflowing. The two Pans had brought the equivalent of a whole town—judges and lawyers, doctors, nurses, rabbis, engineers, merchants and tradespeople, artists and writers, musicians, farmers, peasants—and countless pregnant women. How could she leave them?
Jacob’s letter, written hurriedly in a few lines, assured her the family was well. “We’re managing,” he wrote. “You have too much to do to be worrying about us.”
But were they managing? Did they have enough food?
From newspapers that Gad brought her she knew, as if she could feel it herself, that the Arabs had their hands around the throat of Jerusalem, trying to starve it to death.
The grocers’ shelves were nearly empty. Women and children foraged in the hills and parks for grass to feed their families.
Water ran low. The cisterns were drying up. Men with horsedrawn water wagons brought meager rations to the Jerusalemites, who filled their pails and jugs and cans.
The battle was for the highway that climbed nearly three thousand feet from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Arabs held nine danger spots—a few on the coastal plain; the rest, the most treacherous, in the mountains. Hiding behind bushes, high over the winding snakelike road, the Arabs had an easy shooting gallery. The road was dubbed “the Murder Road.”
Jerusalem had to be saved. Food had to get through.
The Jews created “sandwiches”—thinly armored trucks and cars covered with two sheets of steel plate with a wall of wood between. The “sandwiches” traveled in convoys, with young Haganah men and women armed with Sten guns shooting back at the snipers.
Convoys broke through, but many were ambushed. The ditches along the highway were a graveyard of burned “sandwiches.”
Anxiety and worry crept under Raquela’s skin. If only she could hear Mama’s voice. And Arik’s…I miss you, Raquela.
I After a long day’s shift, Raquela decided to spend the evening with the Ashkenazys in the Caraolas camp. She threw her cape over a fresh uniform and taxied from the medical compound to Famagusta. The British soldiers guarding the gate glanced at her ID card and waved her in.
At night Caraolas looked like a gypsy camp. Bonfires made circles of light almost to the horizon. Around the fires sat the refugees. Having lost their families in Europe, they formed themselves into new “families”—most of the members twenty or thirty or forty years old.
The women, recognizing Raquela, invited her into their tents and metal huts where the infants she had delivered lay on blankets on the sand floor. She bent down to lift the babies, their faces amber and pink in the glow of candles burning in little cans.
She continued weaving her way through the camp toward a group of tents close to the seashore. Through the double walls of barbed wire she could see and smell the whitecaps of the Mediterranean lapping the dark beach.
She found the Ashkenazys’ tent, close to the sea.
Nina jumped up from a rude wooden crate as Raquela entered. Dr. Ashkenazy offered her another crate. Nina lit a candle in an American tin can that had once held fruit and was now weighted down with sand.
In the candle glow Raquela saw two cots with neatly folded army blankets. Wooden crates served as chairs, and in the center of the sandy floor stood another crate set with two tin plates, two tin cups, and two crude tin spoons: regulation issue for prisoners.
Dr. Ashkenazy questioned Raquela closely about Jerusalem and the bombing of the Palestine Post. “I’m afraid the whole world will explode,” he said, “before we get to Palestine.”
A young Haganah man entered the tent. “Dr. Ashkenazy,” he said, “there’s a meeting going on. It concerns you. Will you come with me?”
“Of course.”
He walked to the open flap. “Please stay with Nina until I come back,” he said to Raquela.
Nina looked worried. “The fate of a doctor’s wife: he’s always being called away.”
She lit a cigarette. “We almost didn’t make it—coming here.”
Raquela leaned forward. She realized Nina needed to talk to calm her own fears.
“We had permission to go, but, you know, we couldn’t take anything with us. We walked out of our apartment with ten kilos—about twenty-two pounds—of belongings. But there were my husband’s instruments. He was chief of neurology at the Caritas Hospital, in Bucharest. We were sure there would be no instruments for brain surgery in this whole region. Fortunately, he had brought back two sets of everything from America. Finally we managed to get one set into a bag.”
“Then what was the problem getting out?” Raquela asked.
Nina puffed at her cigarette. “We were all assembled in a Jewish school in Bucharest. It was just before Christmas. They began calling the names; people went outside and got into buses to get on the special trains.”
Raquela nodded. Gad had told her about the trains.
Nina went on. “Our names were not called. We kept waiting. Then someone came and said, ‘The government has just decided not to allow Dr. Ashkenazy to leave. He is too important.’
“Everyone left. The two of us were all alone in the school. We took our bags and went to the Athenée Palast Hotel. My husband left me there and went to see Ana Pauker. He was allowed right into her office. She was sorry; she agreed it was not fair. We had exit visas. But it was a government decision, she said. ‘Don’t worry’—she tried to make him feel better—‘we’ll get you a new apartment, new furniture, everything.’
“He left her office and came back to the hotel. We didn’t sleep all night. Who else could he
lp us, when Ana Pauker herself—the boss of the Communist party running the government under young King Michael—seemed helpless?
“In the morning—it was Christmas morning—he said, ‘I’ll go to see Theohari Georgescu.’ He was an important government minister.
“‘You can’t see him on Christmas morning,’ I said.
“‘I’ll try.’ He went to the minister’s office. He was told Georgescu was at Christmas Mass with King Michael.
“He decided to wait. He walked up and down on the snow-covered streets. The clock was ticking. Had the people all boarded the ships? Had the ships left? He paced the streets; I paced the hotel. They were the longest hours of our lives.
“Finally the minister drove up to the building, got out of his car, and saw my husband. At the age of six they had been schoolmates. Georgescu was the son of a poor worker. He recognized Harden; he had followed my husband’s career all these years.
“‘What are you doing out here on Christmas morning?’ he asked my husband.
“Quickly Harden told him what had happened.
“‘Come inside. Come up to my office.’
“At his desk, he said, ‘Tell me, Harden, why do you want to go to Palestine? ’”
Why indeed, Raquela wondered? Giving up everything—job, apartment, security, his great skill recognized by his own government? Going to a land he had never seen, a land in turmoil.
She thought of Gerda, Lili, Henya—the women with Auschwitz numbers on their left arms. They had lost everything—husbands, children, homes. They had no options. Dr. Ashkenazy had a choice. Why had he chosen this route of sacrifice and suffering?
“What did your husband tell the minister?” Raquela asked.
Nina’s tapered fingers struck a match in the tent’s semidarkness. She lit another cigarette. “He said, ‘I want to be in my own country.’”
The words hung in the tent like Nina’s puffs of smoke. I want to be in my own country.
“My husband was shocked by Georgescu’s answer: ‘Listen to me, Harden, it isn’t worth your while going there. There will never be peace in the Middle East. We—and the Russians—will see to it. There will never be peace.’”
Raquela put her hands to her forehead. Never be peace! Must we always have enemies? The Romans. The Crusaders. The Spaniards. The Germans. The British. The Arabs. Now the Communists.
Only the sound of the waves outside the barbed wire broke the stillness. The two women sat in the tent, silent. Nina went on.
“My husband was desperate. He has a passion for freedom. When Georgescu saw that he could not lessen Harden’s determination, he called his secretary to come in. ‘Give Dr. Ashkenazy and his wife a slip of paper with permission to leave. I will sign it.’ We caught the very last train. When we pulled into Burgas, we saw these two ships; every porthole was lit up; the decks, the gangplanks, strung with lights. Snow on the docks. It was a fairy tale.
“Almost everybody on the ships had heard that we were barred—the only ones of the fifteen thousand who were held up. The story must have gone from mouth to mouth. Because now there was a collective shout. Fifteen thousand people seemed to be shouting in one voice, welcoming us aboard.”
Raquela pulled her cape around her.
“You can’t imagine how happy we were on that ship,” Nina said.
“On those terrible planks—in that hold?” Raquela gasped.
“Sure, they were terrible. Horrible. But I tell you, I’ve taken elegant cruises in my life, and never, on any cruise, was the spirit so high. We were ecstatic. Happy beyond belief. We didn’t care what the ship was like, that we had almost no clothes and had left behind everything we owned. It was like Paradise. We were free.”
A shadow fell across the tent flap. Dr. Ashkenazy entered.
“Nina.” He spoke rapidly. “The meeting was about us. The refugee committee voted to let us leave immediately. Two kind people—the Schwartzes—gave up their certificates so we can go right to Palestine.”
Nina threw her arms around her husband. “When do we go, Harden?”
Tomorrow.
Raquela stood up, tears in her eyes. The great surgeon would soon be in her homeland. Healing the wounded. Performing the most delicate of all procedures: brain surgery.
She shook Dr. Ashkenazy’s hand and embraced Nina. “Can I be of any help?” she asked. “I can change shifts with a friend at the hospital and come back tomorrow if you need me.”
“I would like that,” Nina said. “Come back.”
Dr. Ashkenazy put his hand on her shoulder. “The British must not know we’re leaving.”
“I understand,” Raquela said. To let the famous brain surgeon into Palestine would mean helping the Jews. The British would sooner throw him in jail.
The next morning Raquela returned to Caraolas. She accompanied Nina and Dr. Ashkenazy as they returned their two blankets, tin plates, tin cups, and tin spoons to the camp depot. The refugee in charge gave them a receipt.
All over the camp, people stood up as the trio approached, to say farewell.
An elderly man took Dr. Ashkenazy’s hand. “I am a rabbi,” he said. “God give you strength to save our people.”
“What about your instruments?” Raquela asked.
“Josh Leibner has already got them past the British. They’ll be waiting for us aboard the ship.”
Raquela helped them carry their bags to the barbed-wire entrance gate. “Your reception committee.” She nodded in the direction of the British officers sitting at a table just outside the gate.
Nina whispered hoarsely, “Harden, look. The same officers who interrogated us when we came off the Pan York six weeks ago. What if they recognize us?”
“Don’t worry. They see hundreds of people.”
They walked through the gate; Raquela, showing her ID card, waited at the side. Seven hundred fifty people stood in line. Finally it was the Ashkenazys’ turn.
At the officers’ table a second lieutenant with an antlerlike red mustache looked up at Dr. Ashkenazy.
“Your name?”
“Yakov Schwartz.”
“Your receipt for returning the camp equipment?”
Dr. Ashkenazy handed him the paper he had just received. The lieutenant stamped and signed it.
“Move along. Next, please.”
Dr. Ashkenazy waited. “She’s my wife. I’d like to wait for her.”
“Keep moving…Your name?” The second lieutenant looked up at Nina.
“Rivka Schwartz.”
He stared. “What did you say your name was?”
“Rivka Schwartz.”
“You sure you didn’t pass through here a few weeks ago?”
Raquela and Dr. Ashkenazy looked at each other. Nina was calm. Pretending not to hear, she repeated, “Rivka Schwartz.”
The second lieutenant stroked his mustache slowly. Raquela saw him wink.
“Good luck, Mrs.…”—he paused significantly—“Mrs. Schwartz.”
He stamped and signed her paper. Nina hurried to her husband’s side.
Raquela accompanied them and the 748 other refugees traveling in lorries to the dock.
A graceful white yacht waited at anchor. It was the Kedma, the Mosad’s ship for “legal” immigration. Raquela looked at it longingly.
She kissed Nina good-bye and shook Dr. Ashkenazy’s hand. “I know how busy you’ll be the minute you land,” she said, “but if you get to Mount Scopus, if you meet a doctor—his name is Brzezinski—give him my…my regards.”
“Be glad to,” Dr. Ashkenazy said. “We’ll look for you in the Promised Land.”
With the rest of the day free, Raquela rode back to camp in a lorry. The sound of an accordion and people singing filled the air. A group of refugees sat a few yards from the watchtower.
“Raquela, come join us.” The accordionist, Adi Baum, beckoned to her. He was a constant visitor in Maternity, where he came to play his accordion for the mothers and their babies. Young, skinny, with a shock of curly brown
hair and dark eyes, Adi had been a chef on the Pan York. Now, inside the camps, his culinary accomplishments no longer needed, he became a musical director. He set up an orchestra of talented musicians, composed music, and arranged concerts for the refugees.
“Sit down, Raquela,” he said. “We need you.”
She tried to read his face. Why would an accordionist need her?
She sat next to him in the sand.
In a low voice he said, “Four young men are making a break for it through the tunnels. We want to divert the soldiers up there in the watchtower. We want to keep them looking down here at us, not outside the barbed wire when the boys surface.”
The tunnels were the biggest secret in Cyprus.
There were two reasons for the tunnels: to smuggle out young men of military age; and to smuggle in Haganah teachers, from Palestine, with guns, for drilling the refugees.
In all the camps young men and women were training to be soldiers, to join the Haganah the moment they arrived in Palestine. When British officers came upon groups openly drilling in a compound, the British were told, “It’s physical culture, the only way to keep up morale.”
Seven tunnels were built; Haganah and refugee engineers worked out the techniques. In the floors of carefully selected tents and metal huts they sank shafts seven or eight feet into the ground. Since sand runs and earth collapses, they shored up some of their shafts with pieces of wood from broken-up crates.
Now they began mining horizontally. A human conveyor belt of men and women passed the dirt back in baskets. Then a pulley lifted the basket up the shaft.
Other refugees quickly “broadcast” the dirt, spreading it in front of the huts and tents, planting it with vegetables and flowers.
The English soldiers in their watchtowers were oblivious of the refugees digging their escape routes. The prisoners used old-fashioned bellows to pump fresh air down the shafts to keep from suffocating. The tunnels varied in length, depending on the distance to the barbed wire and the spot chosen for the exit. They were just wide enough for a man to crawl through: about three feet wide and three or four feet high. Finally, they built the exit shaft, digging from the bottom up and surfacing in areas concealed by trees or bushes or hidden in a farmer’s field. Here the refugees climbed up, then lay on the ground, hiding until Haganah men slipped them into cabs, drove them to the dock, and put them on little fishing boats or rowed them out to the Kedma.