Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  On May 30, Raquela and Moshe, listening to the radio at home in Bet Hakerem, heard Kol Israel: “Jordan has joined forces with Egypt and Syria. King Hussein, of Jordan, announced the military alliance was ‘…so that we can tread the proper road leading to the erasure of our shame and the liberation of Palestine.’”

  They turned to the Arab stations: “We will gouge out Dayan’s other eye…we must fight with the maximum of violence…not a single Jew will survive.”

  Raquela looked at Moshe’s face, his eyes raw with fatigue. He had been working day and night, preparing the medical center. Nearly all the civilian patients had been discharged to free beds for the casualties; Hadassah had set up an additional fifteen hundred beds in the hallways and wards.

  On June 3, General Moshe Dayan, called back into the cabinet to become minister of defense, held a press conference. “I do not expect and do not want anyone else to fight for us. Whatever can be done in the diplomatic way I would welcome and encourage, but if somehow it comes to real fighting, I would not like American or British boys to get killed here, and I do not think we need them.”

  No American or British boys. Good. But every single Israeli was ready.

  Time had no meaning, save that it was running out.

  Death and annihilation hung in the air. The Arabs were marching. Arab states thousands of miles away—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan—were joining Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, racing to the slaughter.

  Would this be a new Holocaust? Had Israel been born in 1948 only to be destroyed in 1967? Had the great “ingathering of all the peoples” brought them into one tiny land, the more easily to be massacred?

  These were the darkest days the people had known since Auschwitz.

  JUNE 5, 1967

  Raquela turned on the radio in the kitchen for the eight A.M. news.

  “This is Kol Israel broadcasting from Jerusalem. The military spokesman announces the Egyptians this morning launched a land-and-air attack.”

  “My God!” She gripped the arms of her chair.

  “Israel’s forces went into action to repel them.”

  Could they break out of the iron ring? Throw back the armies amassed on all their borders?

  The telephone rang. It was Moshe.

  “You’ve heard the news?” He was breathless.

  “Oh, Moshe. After all the tension, I feel like one of those springs children play with. The coils are out. Can you believe—I feel something strange, almost like relief.”

  “Where are the children?”

  “Jenny’s at the university. Vivi, Amnon, and Rafi are out somewhere filling sandbags.”

  “Try to get them together back in the house. To be with your parents close to the shelter. The war’s all in the Negev so far. We’re hoping Jerusalem will be spared.”

  “I’ll get the children right away. Then I’ll go right up to the hospital in Motza. If you get any news, call me there.”

  “Promise me you’ll drive carefully.” His voice dropped. “I could not live if—”

  “And you, Moshe…” She clutched the telephone. Would she ever hear his voice again?

  She found the children near the house, brought them to Mama and Papa. “Keep the radio on,” she told them. “Follow instructions to the letter.”

  She kissed them and drove through the city. The streets were almost empty. Would Jerusalem remain open? She turned on the news in her car.

  The radio was like a symbol of the world they lived in—in the very center of the dial was Kol Israel, surrounded on both ends by Arab stations. She tuned in Cairo Radio. The Egyptian commentator was exhorting, “Arise! Go forth into battle! The hour of glory is here.”

  A twist of the dial. Now it was Damascus Radio: “The time has come! Silence the enemy! Destroy him! Liberate Palestine!”

  Back to the center of the world, Kol Israel: music. Then the announcer: “Be calm. The next newscast will be at nine AM. ”

  Raquela made swift stops at the satellite hospitals in the hotels and the campus dormitory. They were all fully staffed, every nurse at her station. The hospital beds with white hospital sheets were ready.

  “Keep in touch with me at our headquarters in Motza,” she told the staffs, and raced back to her car.

  Again the radio dial; still no news on Kol Israel. She was growing frantic. Only music. “Be calm. Next newscast ten AM.” The quiet voice of General Chaim Herzog, the military commentator for Kol Israel, entered the car. “A new chapter in the wars of Israel has been opened.”

  His voice stilled the pulse beating in her head. He was explaining Israel’s blackout of news.

  “It is not always advisable to report on battles, for at times the enemy is interested to learn the facts of the situation no less than we are. Under the circumstances of unprecedented hysteria on the part of the Arabs, their false reporting and utter instability, it is advisable that they continue to believe their own false stories, up to a point. The fog of war hinders the enemy, and so let us leave him with it rather than dispel it.”

  The fog of war.

  It was a hard lesson learned from the Sinai campaign. In 1956, while Nasser was broadcasting “glorious victories” against Israel, his leaders were tuned into Kol Israel to learn the truth of his defeat. In 1967 Arab leaders would know only the fog of war.

  The broadcast went on. “The young people…the farm hoys, the Yeshiva students, the members of the youth movements, the boys of the immigrant townships, all are at this moment shoulder to shoulder fighting in the air, on the land, and on the sea for our right simply to live.”

  Our right simply to live…That’s all we ask…

  She heard a jolting explosion. Sirens shrieked. People raced off the streets into air-raid shelters and hallways. She heard shells exploding. She sped her car up the Hills of Judea toward Motza.

  Kol Israel at last was crackling with news. “Jordanians have opened fire on Jerusalem. Prime Minister Eshkol earlier sent a message to King Hussein through United Nations’ General Odd Bull. Eshkol’s message said: ‘We shall not initiate any action whatsoever against Jordan. However, should Jordan open hostilities, we shall react with all our might. And Hussein will have to bear the full responsibilities for all the consequences.‘ ”

  The commentator paused for a brief second. “Jordanian shells have hit the Hadassah hospital.”

  Raquela clamped her hand over her mouth. Not the hospital! Dear God, keep Moshe safe.

  She pressed her foot on the gas. At the convalescent home, she jumped out of the car and dashed inside. She picked up the phone. The lines were open. She reached Moshe. “Are you all right?”

  “We’re all okay.” Moshe’s voice had never been so welcome. “Most of the shells miraculously fell in the courtyard.”

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “Nobody.”

  She breathed relief. “The Chagall windows?”

  “Just a few tiny holes. Nothing serious. Where are you?” he asked anxiously. “Are you at Motza?”

  “Of course. But don’t worry about me.”

  “Listen, Raquela. I am worried. Promise me you won’t go out on the road like a cowboy before the ‘all clear’ sounds.”

  “You know I’ve got better sense than that.”

  “We’ll keep in touch all day.”

  Wherever the fighting, the war was only a telephone call away.

  Before noon, the whole length of Jerusalem was under Jordanian fire. The Arab Legionnaires were attacking the city and the Israeli towns along the West Bank with 25-pounders, 120mm mortars, and 155mm “Long Toms.”

  Two-twenty-five P.M. General Uzi Narkiss, short, slight, and unmilitary looking, counterattacked.

  The hospitals began filling up with wounded—the medical center at Ein Karem, the hospitals downtown, Raquela’s headquarters at Motza. Every few hours Moshe called her with news. The Israel Museum and several public buildings had been slightly damaged. The Knesset fortunately was not hit.

  In Haifa, Syrian planes attacked the b
ay area. Natanya was bombed by Iraqi war planes. At nine-fifteen P.M. Tel Aviv was hit; the long-range guns of the Arab Legion shelled Masaryk Square.

  Raquela spent the night at Motza. Every hour on the hour she turned on Kol Israel. Music. Still no news. She switched to the Arab stations. Nasser’s commanders were reporting fantastic victories. The Arabs were winning on every front. At the United Nations an emergency session at ten-twenty P.M. New York time was adjourned at ten-twenty-five P.M. The Soviet Union was silent. With the reports of the Arabs’ spectacular triumphs, no one pressed for a cease-fire.

  More wounded arrived at Motza. Raquela, assisting the doctors and nurses, helped admit paratroopers caught by Jordanian mortars.

  “I never saw such fighting,” one of the soldiers told her. “We had to break through five fences of barbed wire. The Jordanians had underground tunnels kilometers long. Trenches. Hundreds of bunkers and gun emplacements everywhere. Some of our tanks were set on fire. The crews burned alive.”

  One-thirty A.M. News at last on Kol Israel. Raquela, snatching a few moments of rest, sat up. General Yitzhak Rabin, chief of staff, was holding a press conference. Kol Israel was carrying it live. “The Israel Air Force has destroyed three hundred seventy-four enemy planes with a loss of only nineteen of our own. In eighty minutes Israel has destroyed Egypt’s entire air force. Our armor and troops have captured Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip; El Arish and Rafiah, along the Mediterranean, have fallen. Gaza is encircled.”

  Raquela telephoned the hospital. “Moshe, Moshe! We’re winning! All the Arab broadcasts today were lies.”

  “Marvelous, Raquela!” His voice still had the edge of sleep. “I had my radio on but I guess I was exhausted and dozing. What a day—to end like this.”

  The fog of battle had lifted.

  The next morning, Tuesday, June 6, Nasser and Hussein talked on the telephone; the call was monitored by the Israelis:

  Nasser: “We are fighting with all strength and we have battles going on on every front all night…God is with us…I will make an announcement and you will make an announcement and we will see to it that the Syrians make an announcement that American and British airplanes are taking part against us from aircraft carriers.”

  Hussein: “Good. All right.”

  Nasser: “A thousand thanks. Do not give up. We are with you with all our heart and we are flying our planes over Israel today; our planes are striking at Israel’s airfields since morning.”

  Nasser had concocted the story to vindicate his air force’s defeat. Israel alone could not possibly have inflicted such deadly damage; the United States and Britain must be helping. Hussein agreed to the myth-making.

  For Hussein’s own Arab Legion was being thrown back. Israeli paratroopers captured the Sheikh Jarrah quarter that for nineteen years had blocked the road to Mount Scopus. Now the paratroopers began circling the hills north of the Old City. They were young soldiers who had never seen the Western Wall, never walked the labyrinthine streets of old Jerusalem. Yet they knew the Old City. They knew it from their books, and their parents’ stories, and their Bible studies.

  Advancing toward the Old City, they fought in trenches, in rooms, on roofs, in cellars. Some of the Jordanians retreating from the front line took cover inside the buildings, and there was house-to-house fighting. There were heavy casualties everywhere.

  The Arab Legionnaires stationed on the parapets of the Old City wall, mowed down civilians. More than five hundred wounded and dying men, women, and children were rushed to the hospitals. Some nine hundred homes and apartments were damaged.

  In the wards at Motza, Raquela moved among the wounded, bringing them news of the battles for Jerusalem.

  A young officer, his chest heavily bandaged, called out to her. “Nurse, how soon can I get out of here?”

  “You’ve got a bullet lodged near your heart, Captain.”

  “It’s only a little hole. I’ve got to join my boys. I’ve got to be with them when we liberate the Old City.”

  Raquela spoke brusquely. “You’re staying right in this bed. You have been seriously wounded.”

  That night, after the captain fell asleep, Raquela removed his uniform and boots from the footlocker near his bed. She hid them in her office.

  Early Wednesday morning she made her rounds. The captain’s bed was empty.

  “Where is he?” she asked the private in the next bed.

  “He’s back at the front by now. He borrowed somebody else’s uniform. Look, nurse, don’t look so upset. We’d all do the same if we could.”

  After forty-eight hours, Raquela decided to drive to Ein Karem to see Moshe, then return home to be with the children and collapse for a few hours in her own bed.

  Nearing the semicircular hospital, she saw army helicopters landing in the hospital courtyard. Attendants rushed the wounded inside.

  She found Moshe in his office, on the telephone, talking to a doctor in the field. He finished his conversation, stood up, and embraced her. “What are you doing, driving here with all the shelling?”

  She clung to him, drawing strength from his body.

  “Don’t scold me. I drove carefully. But I had to see you.”

  “How can I scold you.” He kissed her. “But I’m not going to let you stay long. You’ve got to get some sleep.”

  “I’m heading straight home; first I had to convince myself you were all right.”

  Shrieks reverberated through the corridors. Raquela heard the words: “Mount Scopus! It’s freed!”

  “Moshe!” she screamed. “Scopus! We have Mount Scopus again!”

  Her mind was latticed with memories. Tears of joy rolled down her cheeks. Moshe held her shaking body; his own tears wet her hair.

  The vast entrance hall of the medical center began filling with people. They joined the throngs of doctors and nurses, laughing, weeping, repeating the words: Scopus…Scopus is freed. They locked arms and danced the hora; world-famous surgeons danced with porters; medical students from Africa and Asia who had refused to go home in the weeks of tension danced with their teachers.

  Doctors who had survived the concentration camps, nurses with Auschwitz numbers on their forearms, embraced Raquela; the hora grew faster and faster. Some of the older physicians dropped out of the circle, laughing, catching their breath, but Raquela kept on.

  Scopus was freed.

  Colonel Motta Gur, a brawny soldier who wrote children’s books at night when he relaxed, rode up front in a half-track, leading his paratroopers. He pushed the enemy until his column stood in the square outside the parapeted walls of the Old City.

  The Israel High Command had given orders to the troops not to damage any of the buildings or sites holy to the three religions. Many Jewish soldiers would lose their lives that buildings might live.

  Colonel Gur ordered his brigade to attack. They swept the crenellated wall and not a shot hit a single holy place.

  The heaviest casualties were among the commanders, who shouted to their men, “Follow me.” They were racing to see who would get into the Old City first. No one could stop the momentum now.

  The paratroopers broke their way into narrow streets that wound into blind alleys. They ran, crouching against the sides of deserted houses and shuttered kiosks.

  They reached the Western Wall.

  A soldier scrambled to the top of the Wall and raised the flag of Israel. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren blew the shofar—the ram’s horn—and the eerie notes te-kee-ya pierced the ears of the soldiers.

  Shortly after noon, all the generals and all the commanders who had fought for Jerusalem—Dayan, Rabin, Narkiss, Motta Gur—and hundreds of their soldiers came together at the Wall.

  All day and through the night the paratroopers, dirty, tired, their uniforms dusty and bloodstained, kept coming to the Wall, touching it, caressing it, kissing it, weeping. The Wall and their tears blended together.

  On Mount Zion the commander of another paratroop unit stopped his half-track on the little plaza in front
of the home of an elderly couple from South Africa, Albert and Pauline Rose.

  “We’re going into the Old City from this direction,” the commander told Mrs. Rose. “We’ve been selected. We’re to put the flag of Israel on the Tower of David. But we haven’t got a flag.”

  Pauline Rose climbed the stairs to her bedroom, pulled a sheet out of her cupboard, opened a tube of blue paint, and painted a star of David on the sheet. Then she hurried down to her garden, found a long stick, and attached the sheet to it.

  The paratroopers drove off, waving her flag. At the Citadel of David, they scaled the stone rampart and planted the homemade flag of Israel.

  The mystery of the Wall seemed to touch all the wounded; Raquela felt a new spirit in the satellite hospitals. In the wards she could hear soldiers humming “Jerusalem the Golden.” It had become the anthem of the war. Jerusalem was reunited.

  On the southern front the desert was ablaze. Israeli tanks and Soviet tanks, shelled from the ground, were blistering. The battle whipped up the sand, turning it into a blinding sea. The air was pierced with the noise of ammunition trucks’ exploding. Helicopters chugged above the desert, landing just long enough to pick up the wounded. Parachutists dropped out of the sky, bringing water and more ammunition. The temperature climbed to one hundred five degrees.

  Standing in the half-track with General Yeshayahu Gavish were his aides and liaison officers in constant radio communication with the units they represented: air force, armor, infantry, paratroops, artillery, engineer corps, medical corps, communications—all flying or plowing across the desert.

  Buses carrying the troops trekked through the desert, followed by private cars, taxis, station wagons, milk wagons, and delivery wagons. There had been no time to paint them with army colors. Children had been given the job of splashing them with mud, “not for camouflage,” General Arik Sharon explained, “but to make them look a little military.” It was just as well the mud didn’t stick. Looking down, the Israeli pilots could tell their troops from the Egyptians’ when they saw ice-cream trucks, hot-dog vans, and laundry wagons navigating the desert.