Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  Basements and cellars were converted to operating rooms, and when the sporadic electricity gave out or the high-tension lines were damaged, Arik and the other surgeons operated and Raquela and the midwives delivered babies by flashlight.

  Each day gruesome casualties were rushed to the operating rooms, young men whose arms and legs and pieces of their faces were blown off. Many of the soldiers were new immigrants; some went directly into the army from the ships ferried by Gad and Ike and other captains. Straight out of the DP camps, these men had little or no training; everything was strange to them—the language, the customs, the climate, the terrain. Some could barely understand their commanders’ orders. The fighting was brutal; thousands of young men lost their lives.

  Yet, the tide of battle was turning.

  The Israelis had a secret weapon—Ein Brent, “no alternative.” Against all the predictions that the armies of fifty million Arabs would slaughter the Jews within a few days, the Jews were routing the Arabs.

  In the center of the country, Colonel Moshe Dayan, who had lost an eye on a reconnaissance mission for the British in Syria during World War II, led a special commando unit of jeeps and halftracks and a captured Jordanian tank his men had nicknamed “the Tiger.” Dayan, who believed in speed, mobility, and the element of surprise, astonished the enemy by racing his crack commandos through the Arab lines and capturing the vital Lydda Airport, then speeding through the towns of Lydda and Ramie. The well-trained troops of the Arab Legion fled back toward the West Bank; the local populace surrendered.

  In the north, Kaukji’s Iraqis and mercenaries were headquartered in Nazareth. Using diversionary tactics, the Israel Army confounded the enemy. Kaukji and his mercenaries took flight, and at six-fifteen on July 16, the notables of Nazareth surrendered. Not a single church or religious shrine had been harmed. As dusk fell on Nazareth, monks and priests and parishioners prayed near the Grotto site where the angel Gabriel had announced to Mary, “And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.”

  In the south, King Farouk, of Egypt, insanely jealous of Abdullah, sent his army across the Sinai Desert into the Negev to get his piece of the Israel pie.

  The strategic center of the Negev was Kibbutz Negba, a square green oasis of three hundred fifty people in the midst of the rolling yellow desert. It lay near the crossroads of the vital Majdal-Faluja road from Gaza to Jerusalem and the Julis-Kaukaba road from Tel Aviv to the Negev. Whoever controlled those roads controlled the gateways to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

  The British, who had realized the strategic importance of Negba as far back as 1941, had built a Tegart fortress-police station called “Iraq Suweidan” nearby. Nothing had been more welcome then; building it had given Negba’s people protection against Arab thieves and brigands and a fortress against a possible Nazi invasion of Palestine through Egypt.

  But on May 14,1948, the day of Israel’s birth, the Iraq Suweidan Police Station was taken over by the Moslem Brotherhood, the irregular Egyptian forces, who handed it over to the Egyptian army.

  The Egyptians immediately took control of the friendly neighboring Arab villages and captured two Jewish colonies near Negba, Nirim and Yad Mordekhai, leaving Negba surrounded by hostile Arabs and cut off from the vital crossroads. To the beleaguered Jews, it seemed obvious that the Arabs were planning a blitzkrieg drive on Tel Aviv. If Negba fell, the whole southern front would crumble, and the heart of the new state would be punctured.

  The Israel High Command sent orders: “Hold Negba until your last bullet and your last man.”

  The Egyptians shelled Negba with cannons and mortars all through May, waiting for the kibbutz to surrender. A new style of life began in the settlement. The people moved out of their houses, into the underground warrens. With no heavy weapons to start an offensive, they fought back with homemade Molotov cocktails—soda bottles filled with gasoline and a fuse—keeping the enemy at bay. Finally, toward the end of May, reinforcements arrived—three-inch mortars and one antitank Piat with ten shells—to hold off the Egyptian army.

  On June 2 Arab tanks, fanning out from the Iraq Suweidan Police Station, opened fire against Negba. The kibbutz was ruptured with explosions—every house was demolished. Four Arab planes roared overhead, crackling the air with machine-gun fire.

  A key machine-gun crew in the trenches covering the barbed-wire entrance to Negba was short of ammunition. Negba’s commander, Kuba Wayland, turned to eighteen-year-old Tzigane Hartman, his prettiest runner, who had been one of the parentless children in Cyprus. Her parents had been burned by the Nazis. Could Kuba send Tzigane into the foray to carry ammunition?

  But Tzigane was the only one he could spare. She carried the ammunition through the trenches, crouching, listening for Arab fire, discerning its direction, and making her way through in the opposite direction. Kuba sighed with relief when Tzigane returned to headquarters alive.

  In the middle of the morning, twenty-four Arab tanks moved toward the settlement. The first row pushed through the outer barbed-wire fence. One tank broke through the two inner fences and was almost on top of one of the trenches when Tamara Weinfeld, one of the original settlers, tossed her Molotov cocktail. Flames encircled the tank. The Arabs were killed.

  From their posts in other corners of the kibbutz, the men and women opened flank fire on the Arabs. The Egyptian infantry were caught in the middle, unable to advance on the village, unable to retreat to the police station.

  At two in the afternoon, the Arabs withdrew, ending the first tank battle for Negba. The handful of settlers had held out against more than a thousand Arabs equipped with tanks and planes and cannons.

  The first truce began. Negba was in ruins, every house shattered; the children’s home, which housed more than a hundred children, had been blasted open. Yet, there was no time to rebuild; every moment had to be used to dig more underground hospital space and more trenches, to store water, food, and ammunition in preparation for the second round.

  On July 9 the month-long truce ended. The Egyptians rushed to the offensive and captured Hill 113, which lay a mile west of Negba and overlooked the entire colony.

  On July 12 the Egyptians coordinated a massive attack: a barrage of artillery followed by a row of tanks, then artillery with a cover of Spitfires, and a final row of tanks and troops.

  The Egyptians’ fire cut the telephone wires. A chain of runners rushed through the trenches, relaying messages and commands. Tzigane’s red sandals flew through the ditches.

  From the watchman on the water tower, she relayed the disastrous news that the Egyptians had captured another strategic area, Hill 110. Negba’s last road to Tel Aviv was cut off. The kibbutz was caught in an iron ring.

  Thirty-two Egyptian tanks maneuvered about, searching for a weak point in the village’s defenses. But Negba had set up antitank minefields. Seven Egyptian tanks were blown up. All the men inside were killed.

  Egyptian infantry surged down the road; Israel’s machine-gun fire mowed down the soldiers. The sounds of the wounded and dying on both sides carried above the noise of the bullets.

  The posts around the village were filled with wounded men and women and others fainting from exhaustion. The human telephone system was disrupted; Tzigane and all the runners were sent to man the guns.

  Three more waves of infantry poured down upon the village and were repulsed. At three-thirty in the afternoon, the watchman on the water tower saw fresh troops of a fourth wave rushing down from Hill 113. He heard them shouting, “Alai-hum, alai-hum,” “Seize them, seize them.”

  Commander Kuba Wayland ran to the hospital shelter and spoke to the wounded, who were lying on slabs built against walls of earth.

  “The enemy are pushing through. If they conquer us, they will slaughter us all. Whoever can move, pick up a gun and go to posts three and five.”

  The sick and wounded, with bandages around their heads and limbs, pulled themselves off the underground ledges and crawled through t
he trenches to feed the machine guns.

  At four o’clock the tide ebbed. But all the next day, the Arabs shelled Negba from every angle of the encirclement. That night, the Israelis attacked Hill 110. The Arabs surrendered. Their ammunition—four Bren carriers and two pieces of heavy artillery—lay in Israeli hands. The ring was broken.

  On the night of July 13, Negba, still under immobilizing artillery fire, emerged from its trenches. The offensive began.

  In a radial pattern, three units from Negba attacked the semicircle of Arabs surrounding them. The Israelis were thrown back.

  Colonel Moshe Dayan, with his commando unit of jeeps, halftracks, and “the Tiger,” was rushed south. The commandos cut the vital Majdal-Faluja road and overwhelmed the Arabs surrounding the kibbutz.

  Negba was saved. “The lesson we learned,” Kuba Wayland told his exhausted but exhilarated comrades, “is that if you love your soil, if you never leave it, they cannot conquer you.”

  Dayan drove to an army hospital to visit his wounded commandos. He found two with severe eye wounds, their eyes bandaged, their faces drawn with pain.

  Remembering his own feelings when he had lost his eye on a mission for the British, Dayan stopped at their bedside to cheer them up.

  “Boys,” he said, “for all that’s worth seeing in this wretched world, one eye is enough.”

  In Jerusalem the Israeli army sought desperately to recapture the Old City.

  They had already breached the New Gate; a few more hours, they felt, and they could drive out the Arab Legion. They were forced by the UN to halt. The second truce, ordered by the Security Council, went into effect July 18 at seven P.M.

  Reluctantly the Israelis agreed.

  Nine tenths of Jerusalem was now in Israeli hands, though the Old City and East Jerusalem flew the flag of the Arab Legion. Mount Scopus held, but the Arabs controlled Sheikh Jarrah and the road to Scopus.

  Bone weary, Raquela had little time to be with Arik or to think of Gad. For the second truce brought as little respite as the first. The shelling and sniping and bombing continued, and the hospitals overflowed. Raquela nursed wounded in the hospital and took care of her new brother, Itzhak, when she could get home.

  July. August. September. Hardly a day or night went by without shells and mortars splitting the air of Jerusalem. Tracer bullets streaked across the sky. Civilians were caught in the deadly range of machine-gun bullets.

  The UN mediator, Count Bernadotte, recommended to the UN that Israel, winning on nearly every front, hand over Jerusalem and the Negev to the Arabs in exchange for peace. Outraged, three men, wearing soldiers’ uniforms and Afrika Korps caps, assassinated Bernadotte on September 17.

  He was rushed to Hadassah A and died within minutes, before the surgeons could remove the bullets. The Jewish community recoiled with shock and horror.

  The provisional government of Israel issued an ultimatum: the dissident groups must disband. Four days later, the Irgun accepted the ultimatum, the leaders of the Stern Group were arrested. In the aftermath of the tragedy the new state was united.

  October 10, the second truce ended. The battlefields were blazing again. On October 15, the Arab Legion launched a dawn attack on Mount Zion, just outside the Old City wall, the biblical mountain with King David’s tomb and the room of the Last Supper.

  The battle was mercifully short; the Israel Army was determined to hold every inch of Jerusalem. They drove the Legion back to its old lines.

  In Hadassah A, Raquela prepared a brutally wounded young soldier for surgery.

  “Nurse,” he pleaded, “lift me up. Let me take one last look at my Jerusalem.”

  Ben-Gurion faced a dilemma: whether to drive the Arab Legion out of the Old City and off the “West Bank or the Egyptians out of the Negev.

  Steeped in the Bible, Ben-Gurion, always a dreamer and prophet, saw the Negev as Israel’s future. Here in the empty desert were Solomon’s copper mines, gold and minerals, and, maybe, oil. He opted for the Negev.

  The Egyptians controlled the road that cut the country in half. Under Yigal Allon, the Palmach commander, the Israel Army went on the offensive and with the air force and navy attacked King Farouk’s legions.

  They cleared the roads, took command of the sky, and on the Mediterranean, near Gaza, sank the Emir Farouk, the flagship of the Egyptian navy.

  Four A.M., October 21, they entered Beersheba.

  Eight A.M., the Egyptians raised a white flag on the roof of the police station.

  Nine-fifteen A.M., ancient Beersheba, where Abraham had dug his wells, was captured. It would become the capital of the Negev, Ben-Gurion’s dream.

  October 31, the UN Security Council proclaimed the third cease-fire. Just before the deadline, Kaukji’s Arab Liberation Army and his mercenaries were routed. The entire Galilee was open.

  There was no stopping now; both sides breached the truce.

  On November 9 the Israelis encircled the Egyptian stronghold in the Negev, called “the Faluja Pocket.” Among the Egyptian soldiers was a young major named Gamal Abdel Nasser.

  On November 30, 1948, Colonel Moshe Dayan, now commander of the army in Jerusalem, and Colonel Abdullah el-Tel, the representative of all the Arab forces, met in Government House, on the Hill of Evil Counsel. Under the supervision of the UN Truce Commission, they signed an agreement for a “complete and sincere” cease-fire in the Jerusalem area.

  On the first quiet Shabbat of the “sincere truce,” Arik asked Raquela to go walking. They could walk freely at last; no more huddling against walls, no more dodging in and out of doorways to escape bullets and mortars.

  The day was warm and balmy; thousands of people thronged the streets in Shabbat clothes. Young fathers, still in uniform, wheeled their babies in carriages. Young mothers walked proudly, clutching their husbands’ arms, as if they were telling themselves, He’s mine; he’s alive; he’s whole.

  But the joy in Jerusalem was tempered. Six thousand young men and women had died to give birth to Israel. And the Old City where Raquela and Arik had spent so many Shabbat mornings was denied them.

  Instead they walked through the quiet streets of Bet Hakerem. Finally, in a tree-shaded playground where they could watch children playing, they rested on a wooden bench.

  “I’ve neglected you all these months, Raquela,” Arik said.

  “Nonsense, Arik. Many times in that operating room, when I saw your eyes red from no sleep, I was afraid you might collapse. God knows where you found the strength to go on operating.”

  “And where did you find your strength? Don’t think I was blind, Raquela.”

  He took her hand and caressed it.

  His warm hand sent currents of electricity through her body.

  “We can be together again,” he was saying. “Take up where we were before you went to Cyprus.”

  Where we were. But Cyprus had changed her. And Gad had entered her life. Do you ever go back to where you were?

  Gad had promised to find her when the war was over. All these months of the fighting, she’d had no word. Was he still ferrying refugees from Europe—coming in now at the rate of ten thousand a month? Where was he now?

  She looked at Arik. Impulsively she stroked his cheek. She loved this man; she loved his strength, his gift for saving lives. The Jerusalem sunlight seemed to come from behind his eyes, deepening their compassion.

  And Gad? Memories of the Pan York, of the moonlit sea, of the snow in Troodos, and of the nocturnal swim kaleidoscoped in her mind.

  In her bedroom at home that night, she stared at herself in the mirror. Look at yourself, Raquela. Look at your own strengths and weaknesses. What is it you want? What is it you need? What’s best for Arik? What’s best for Gad? What’s best for you?

  She tossed on her bed, unable to find answers, unable to sleep.

  * * *

  *King Abdullah was the grandfather of the late King Hussein of Jordan.

  TWENTY-ONE

  FEBRUARY 1949

  At long last
the gates of Cyprus opened.

  Late in December 1948 with Israel now seven months old, Britain had ended its private war against the Jews and recognized the Jewish state.

  A month later the restless, angry men on Cyprus, deprived of the right to fight for their nation, were allowed to leave. The first shipload left Famagusta on January 24, 1949, aboard an Israeli passenger ship, the Galila.

  Raquela devoured the newspaper photos of the throngs of people meeting the men in Haifa. Flags and banners. Young wives, middle-aged mothers, weeping with joy as they embraced their men.

  Early in February Raquela was in the nursery in Hadassah A when a cable was brought to her.

  BRINGING HOME LAST REFUGEES FROM CYPRUS. CAN YOU MEET ME TONIGHT AT JEWISH AGENCY OFFICE ON HAIFA DOCK? GAD.

  She folded the cable carefully and tucked it into her pocket. She asked a nurse to cover for her, wrapped her cape around her shoulders, and walked out of the hospital toward the post office.

  The streets were crowded with people holding umbrellas, lashed by the rain and a fierce wind. She walked blindly, trying to think.

  This was the moment of reckoning.

  She could go to her superior and say, “I’ve worked without rest. I need a few days off—to go out of town.”

  She would see Gad again; she saw him now, tanned, blue-eyed, in his white captain’s uniform, standing at the wheel. She could feel his kisses on her lips.

  She sat down on a park bench near City Hall, hardly aware that the rain was drenching her hair and her cape.