Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  Her mind was numb. Her only feeling was guilt. She refused to leave the hospital. Day and night, she sat beside Rafi’s crib.

  “I feel that as long as I’m close to him,” she told Arik, “he’ll live.”

  Arik watched her anxiously.

  Days passed. Weeks. Rafi showed little improvement.

  Raquela lost awareness of the world outside. Only Rafi existed. Only she could hold him magically to life.

  Arik brought her food; she took it listlessly, vaguely aware she had to take sustenance to keep Rafi alive.

  Arik sought out their friends. “Please go sit with Raquela at the hospital.” He urged them to fill the hours when he was operating or on call.

  “If she wants to talk, let her talk. If she wants to be silent, just sit with her and be silent, too. She’s basically strong and healthy. We’ve just got to support her during these terrible weeks. And wait.”

  Friends came. Judith Steiner. Shula Patt. Her brothers, Yair and Itzhak, came with their wives. Mama and Papa came and brought Amnon.

  They sat with her. But no one, not even Amnon, whom she adored, could comfort her.

  At last Rafi’s body began to respond; the liver cells were regenerating. The glucose was no longer fed into his body. Raquela fed him his milk formula in a bottle, a few drops at a time. Then, gradually, solid food. He began to put on weight.

  Rafi was winning his battle.

  Arik and Raquela took him home, to Palmach Street. She extended her leave of absence; her life had only one purpose now: to nurse Rafi until he was fully well, and to take care of four-year-old Amnon.

  The days were tolerable, but the nights were filled with dread. Every few hours, Raquela woke from sleep and jumped out of bed to check the crib and make sure Rafi was alive. She let Arik hold her in his arms, but she was too exhausted to make love.

  Two months later, Rafi was back in the hospital. His liver was inflamed again. He vomited. He screamed with excruciating pain.

  Drawn with anxiety, Raquela helped the nurse insert the intravenous needle into his hand. Arik and the pediatricians worked around the clock to save him.

  Raquela tormented herself with new guilt. “I didn’t take good enough care of him.”

  Arik tried to comfort her. “It’s a natural reaction for a mother to put all the blame on herself. But listen to me, honey, it’s not your fault. Give yourself the luxury of believing you’re a good mother. You are!”

  She tried to listen and believe.

  After a few weeks, the inflammation subsided, and the liver cells began their process of regeneration.

  Raquela brought him home, and soon the apartment on Palmach Street, once again bright and cheerful, hummed with the sounds of her little boys, and of Arik’s baritone voice, singing them to sleep each night.

  They were sitting in the kitchen, sipping coffee; the children were sound asleep. “How was your day today, Arik?” Raquela asked.

  “Two caesareans—an Arab woman and a Jewish woman, both with beautiful, healthy babies.”

  Raquela leaned toward him, her eyes sparkling. “And the women—beautiful, too?”

  “Of course. I saved them for their husbands.”

  He stood up, bent over to kiss her, and led her tenderly into the bedroom.

  Terror!

  The year 1955 was a year of terror. The long-tenuous borders were penetrated by terrorist gangs called fedayeen, Arabs recruited largely from Gaza, with bases in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The border settlements suffered most: children losing limbs by stepping on mines; men and women and babies indiscriminately killed by hand grenades and bullets; six children and their teacher murdered in Shafir, a southern farming village; a wedding party ambushed and murdered in Parish, west of Beersheba.

  Each evening Arik turned on the radio for the latest news of infiltration.

  The IDF—Israel Defense Forces—retaliated. Regular-army units attacked the bases from which the fedayeen infiltrated.

  The United Nations took note of the terrorist activities but reacted severely whenever Israel retaliated, censuring her for “atrocities.”

  From Radio Cairo, beamed to Jerusalem, Arik heard the voice of Gamal Abdel Nasser, threatening war. “Burn, murder, and destroy,” Nasser proclaimed to the Arab world. “Prepare for the great battle ahead.”

  Nasser had once been the hope for a democratic Egypt. In 1949, during the War of Independence, when he and his troops were surrounded by the Israel Army in the Negev, Nasser had convinced the Israelis that he, together with other idealistic officers, would overthrow the corrupt King Farouk and bring a friendly democratic state into being on the Nile. He had overthrown Farouk, but instead of democracy he had created dictatorship; instead of friendship he had created enmity.

  The Russians found him an eager ally. For years they had sought to gain a foothold in the Middle East. Now, in exchange for Egypt’s cotton, the Russians supplied Nasser with artillery and tanks, with submarines and MIGs, knowing full well they were to be used in the coming war against Israel.

  In June 1956, turning against England and France, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, their lifeline to their markets in Africa and the Orient. And he barred Israel’s ships from sailing through the Canal.

  Next, he placed a battery of naval guns on the shore of the Straits of Tiran, blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba, and cut off Israel’s southern port of Eilat, her window to Africa and Asia.

  On the borders he stepped up the daily raids of terror, extolling the fedayeen: “You have proved that you are heroes upon whom our entire country can depend. The spirit with which you enter the land of the enemy must be spread.”

  Visiting a colleague in the former Turkish harem that now housed the men’s ward of Hadassah, Arik saw orderlies wheeling in stretchers.

  “A new fedayeen attack!” the ambulance driver explained. “A group of archaeologists working on a dig in Ramat Rachel was attacked. Four are already dead. We’re bringing in more wounded.”

  Arik walked toward one of the wounded men. “One of my friends was on that dig.” He stopped. Only a few days before he and Raquela had met the quiet, gentle scholar whose daughter Aya had just married Golda Meir’s son Menachem.

  Now, Arik learned, his friend the scholar was one of the dead.

  October 22, 1956, Nasser concluded a military alliance with Syria and Jordan; the three armies were placed under Egyptian command. Their troops were amassed at Israel’s borders.

  Israel built air-raid shelters in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in the towns and kibbutzim. The border settlements were fortified. Older men and women were recruited and trained for civil defense.

  October 29, Israel dropped paratroopers inside the Sinai Peninsula. Under the command of General Moshe Dayan, the well-trained soldiers of the regular army pushed across the desert in tanks, armored vehicles, jeeps, ice-cream trucks, taxis, trucks, buses, and private cars.

  In one hundred hours, taking the world by surprise, they slashed into the Sinai, demolishing the fedayeen nests, knocking out Nassers Sinai army, one third of his total army of 150,000 men, capturing all the Russian hardware in Sinai and Gaza—millions of dollars’ worth of Stalin tanks, machine guns, artillery, and untold rounds of ammunition. More than thirty thousand Egyptian soldiers were found wandering in the desert, abandoned by their officers. Five thousand were taken prisoner. Many were found with Arabic translations of Hitler’s Mein Kampf’ in their knapsacks.

  One hundred seventy-two Israelis were killed, eight hundred wounded. Egypt took one Israeli prisoner, a pilot whose plane was shot down and who bailed out over Egyptian territory. He was exchanged for many of the five thousand Egyptian prisoners.

  Hadassah’s hospital in Beersheba became the receiving hospital for many of the wounded, some of them maimed for life.

  Britain and France were to have attacked the Canal Zone and invaded Egypt from the west at the same time that Israel’s troops crossed the desert from the east. But they waited too long. Two days late, they finally bombar
ded Egyptian airfields rimming the Canal. Dragging their feet, they succeeded in putting troops into the Canal Zone.

  Immediately the UN, led by the U.S. and the USSR, demanded that all British and French troops be withdrawn from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.

  Israel tried in vain at the UN to point out that this was the time to negotiate a genuine peace treaty with Nasser. But the Russians threatened rocket attacks. They sent Israel an ultimatum: if she did not withdraw, they would destroy her.

  Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sent another ultimatum, demanding withdrawal lest the U.S. support sanctions against her.

  With a heavy heart, Israel withdrew from the Canal Zone and the Sinai, but she refused to withdraw from the Straits of Tiran and the Gaza Strip without guarantees of security.

  During four and a half months of fruitless and frustrating debates at the UN, Israel tried to convince the world that without secure borders, her very existence was imperiled.

  Finally President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave Ben-Gurion his personal guarantee: the UN would station forces in Gaza so there would be no enemy troops amassed at Israel’s border and no fedayeen attacks. And the United States itself would guarantee Israel’s free access to the waterways.

  Conventional warfare dictated that after his defeat on the battlefield, Nasser would be forced to sit down, face-to-face, with his victor and sign a peace treaty.

  Instead the UN allowed Nasser to turn his military defeat into a diplomatic victory. He was not required to sit down with Israel. He was not required to make peace.

  Ben-Gurion, accepting the guarantees, ordered his troops to withdraw. “This is the blackest day of my life,” he said.

  He knew—as Arik and Raquela knew—as all of Israel knew—this would not be the last war for survival.

  TWENTY-SIX

  AUGUST 1960

  Raquela and Arik walked under the trees of the world-famous Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovoth, a massive lovely enclave of research buildings, homes, and beautiful gardens that lay between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

  They chatted with African ministers of government in tribal robes and velvet headdresses. They sipped cold drinks with leaders of Asia’s emerging nations—Burma, Nepal, Singapore. They shook hands with women in the exquisite gowns of Thailand and the Philippines. And when dinner was served, they dined at round tables with Nobel laureates who had come from Europe and the Americas to attend the first International Conference on Science in the Advancement of New States.

  Arik, his hair gray now, had entered his middle years with grace. He walked through the semitropical garden with the serene, composed look of a doctor at the height of his career.

  He held Raquela’s arm possessively, nodding to friends, smiling as he watched heads turn to look at his wife. At thirty-six, Raquela had learned the art of using clothes and color to set off her regal figure and to accent the beauty of her face—the uncanny mix of Eastern and Western Jewry that gave her face its strength and vulnerability. Wherever they walked, her presence was felt at the conference.

  Some one hundred twenty political leaders from forty countries on five continents had come to Rehovoth to meet Israel’s doctors, midwives, scientists, economists, farmers, educators—and to learn how Israel had solved the problems of new nationhood.

  Arik and Raquela had been asked to host some of the delegates who had come looking for ways to wipe out mother and child mortality.

  The Reverend Solomon B. Caulker, of Sierra Leone, was their first visitor. Brought to Arik’s office in Hadassah A, he was introduced to Arik and Raquela as vice-principal of the Furah Bay College, in Freetown, the oldest university south of the Sahara Desert. The handsome young black educator was also head of the department of philosophy, dean of the faculty of arts, and warden of students. He extended his hand majestically. His English was excellent.

  “I’ve come to you, Dr. and Mrs. Brzezinski,” he said, “because I need help. In Sierra Leone, eight out of every ten infants die before they are one year old. I’d like to know what suggestions you have for saving our babies. I cannot believe that nature, God—call it what you like—loves English children, or American children or Israeli children any more than African children.” He paused. His voice was edged with emotion. “Just the ordinary maintenance of health—that is what I need to learn from you and from Israel. I was born in a jungle village. Our average life expectancy is in the low thirties. Yours has gone up to the sixties and seventies. And most of our people die of leprosy, malaria, or, worst of all, undernourishment.”

  Raquela listened intently as the young leader unburdened himself. It seemed to her that his was the voice of Africa pleading for help from Israel for the crushing problems decimating his people.

  “Dr. Caulker, we’re here, ready to help you,” Arik assured him. “We’ll send our doctors and midwives to you in Sierra Leone. And we’ll take the young people you send us and train them to become doctors and nurses.”

  The African leader nodded. “Yes. That’s what we need. Our people still believe in magic and in witch doctors. How do we get rid of superstition? Is typhoid caused by someone who has bewitched you, or by drinking dirty water? Are your babies dying because someone who hates you has put sickness on them, or because you are not feeding them properly? I know that you, too, have suffered from colonialism and tyranny. And you had to struggle and shed blood for your freedom.”

  Struggle.

  Raquela thought of the thousands of immigrants breaking their way through the British blockade. Captured. Deported. Imprisoned in Athlit and Cyprus.

  And shed blood for your freedom.

  Two wars: 1948, 1956. More than six thousand young men and women dead. Raquela saw Aviad, the quadriplegic soldier in Tel Hashomer. The wasted limbs. The broken lives.

  Dr. Caulker was talking with urgency, with passion. “I think that’s why we feel such ties with you. We know you will help us because of your humanity. We are afraid of the big rich countries. We are not afraid of you. We know Israel will not exploit us.”

  “For sure,” Arik said. “There is a brotherhood in suffering.”

  They spent the next hour showing Dr. Caulker the delivery room and the maternity wards. He lingered longest in the nursery, walking from crib to crib, gently patting the tiny hands of Jewish and Arab babies.

  He looked at Raquela. “Someday we will have nurseries and sparkling delivery rooms like these. I want to give our children who now die like flies the chance to grow up like yours—without hunger, without disease. There’s a holy impatience in us.”

  Early the next morning Raquela and Arik returned to the International Conference at Rehovoth. As she moved through the lounge of the handsome Wix Auditorium, it seemed to her the lounge had come alive. Surely this was one of the most memorable events in Israel’s brief and hectic twelve-year history—this meeting of Africans and Asians in native garb, Israelis in shirtsleeves like Arik’s and summer dresses like hers, internationally famous scientists in Bermuda shorts.

  She felt a camaraderie, a friendship, in the air. And the excitement of creation—as if some powerful midwife were delivering not babies but new nations into the world.

  On the grounds Raquela greeted some of the young African women studying midwifery in the nursing school on the Street of the Prophets. They were highly motivated, determined to go back to their native villages in the jungles of Africa and teach what they had learned.

  The student nurses were part of Israel’s AID program, which sent more than five thousand experts into the developing countries and gave scholarships to more than five thousand trainees from the Third World who were now attending Israel’s universities, institutes, and medical schools.

  Midmorning, the formal discussions resumed. They covered the whole range of nationhood from birth through survival: hunger; medicine; the population explosion; water; inflation; radiation; politics; science; and, perhaps most important of all, international cooperation.

  Delegates from the Thi
rd World stood up and recounted how Israelis had come with their families, lived among them and taught them how to farm their land. How to irrigate their fields. How to raise chickens and process fish. How to wipe out diseases, reclaim their deserts, build kindergartens and schools, hospitals and hotels, shipping lines and airports.

  A tall African described how Professor Isaac C. Michaelson, Hadassah’s chief of ophthalmology, had established the first eye hospital in Liberia’s capital city, Monrovia.

  “Do you know what it means,” he said, “to be cured of blindness? To have your children healed of trachoma? People came not only from all over Liberia, but from Sierra Leone, Guinea, the Ivory Coast as well. No one was turned away.”

  Other countries, Raquela thought, buy friendship by giving guns and tanks and war planes. We give of our life experience and of ourselves.

  The conference was drawing to a close. The last speaker was the young Reverend Solomon Caulker:

  I came to this conference not really knowing whether there was any contribution Sierra Leone could make or how much I should be able to learn to take home. But I want to state now that these days we have spent here in Israel have become such great days in my life that I am quite sure I will never be the same person again when I return home.

  Raquela sat forward in her seat; he was the spokesman for all young nations, asking for help “to liberate the human spirit and to make us all stand up with pride and believe that we are members of the human race.”

  Applause filled the hall.

  Dr. Caulker was summing up: “When I came here ten days ago, it was night, it was dark, one couldn’t see far ahead. One was lonely.

  “When I leave here, it will be light.

  “Not only physically, but metaphorically, for I go home no longer feeling that we are isolated in our problems…we belong to a great program.

  “I say to all of you that when the new day dawns, as I see it dawning beyond the horizon, we shall be standing beside you to greet that dawn.”*

  JUNE 1961

  It was David Ben-Gurion who selected the site for the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, soon to open in Ein Karem, in the Hills of Judea.