by Colin Smith
On that same day, no more than thirty miles away as even a sated crow flies, for some teenaged boys not required to herd goats it was the penultimate day of the school term and exams were over.
The heat was stickier there, humid. Compared to the dry easterly gusts coming to the Horns of Hattin from the desert lands across the River Jordan it felt like another country. Outside their classroom window the boys could hear the distant drone of an aircraft engine, a reminder of the delicious uncertainty that these days lingered over all events, reducing academic success or failure to its proper level. What was it: a patrolling Hurricane, an Italian or German raider trying to locate his target? You could never be sure.
One of these boys was Jacob Maeltzer, a short and stocky youth, the Benjamin and only child of a Swiss German Jew called Carl Maeltzer who normally earned his living as a journalist. But for almost a year now Maeltzer Senior had been on a roster of GSPJ’s - German Speaking Palestinian Jews - who for weeks at a time supplemented their incomes by working in Cairo for various British intelligence and propaganda units. Maeltzer’s immediate boss was the amiable young wireless wizard Captain Hare whom MI5’s Davison had so enjoyed baiting.
Facing the class was an intense looking young man with round rimmed spectacles and a thin Clark Gable moustache who was not all that much older than his pupils. Perhaps it was for this reason that, despite the heat, he was not wearing the open necked shirt favoured by the rest of the staff. Admittedly his linen jacket was hanging on the back a chair but the top button of his shirt was both secured and invisible under a floppy, maroon bow tie of some velvety material which seemed, despite an olive skin and dark hair, to hint at Mittel European antecedents.
Yet this was not the case. David Haratvi was Jacob Maeltzer’s half-brother. Their mother Sarah, a Ladino speaking Sephardi from Salonika, had married Jacob’s German speaking father shortly after the death of her first husband. David was her firstborn and almost ten years older than the sibling facing him in class. His father had spoken the same ancient Judeo-Spanish as his mother.
Haratvi was a popular teacher. His subject was history, particularly Jewish history, and he taught it well. History, as he was fond of telling his classes, was something they were all living. And though he wisely avoided the trap of trying to be one of the boys, his popularity had a lot to do with his ability to talk about day-to-day affairs in a manner that flattered their own assessment of their maturity.
“Because silence is filth, give up blood and soul,” Haratvi would allow them to catch him singing. And these were boys whose parents, in the main, had never allowed Jabotinsky’s Betar hymn into the house, had no truck with a Zionism that seemed to march to the same kind of drum that had so bewitched the German goyim. So alien were Haratvi’s sympathies to the various interpretations of socialist Zionism that generally prevailed in their homes that they exactly met the normal adolescent craving for forbidden fruit.
Perhaps even more so because Haifa was the most easy going city in the Mandate, a place where Arab and Jew had worked out a certain modus vivendi. Extremism was frowned on. Fires started during recent Axis air raids had linked Arabs and Jews in the same bucket chains. Yet when, before the raids started, persons unknown had exploded a homemade bomb among the Arab watermelon traders, mashing vendors and their fruit into the same fleshy gore, his pupils noted that, while other adults were outraged, Haratvi never mentioned it.
It was not so much that their teacher preached hatred. In some ways it was worse, for hatred is at least a form of recognition. For most of the time he acted as though the Arabs of Palestine did not exist. He edited them out of his vision. And when some crisis meant that he had to acknowledge their presence, assumed an air of indignation against this blot on the Zionist dream. He made plain his contempt for those American Zionists who talked from the safety of New York about, “a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world”.
What did it all mean? What structure? What democratic world? They were at the mercy of British bayonets and a British White Paper that had overturned Milord Balfour’s declaration and utterly rejected the idea of mass Jewish immigration to a Jewish homeland. Nor were the British or the Americans prepared to do anything about rescuing Jews from the Nazis. On the contrary there were newspaper reports of a wave of anti-Semitism sweeping America, of swastikas on synagogues and the like. If the British were defeated in Egypt’s western desert and Rommel entered Eretz Israel would the Jews do what they normally did and await Divine intervention? After all, they had been waiting for it for two thousand years. What was another pogrom? Or would they fight to show the world that iron had entered the soul of the Zionist redeemers?
Small wonder then that the boys convinced each other that their teacher was much more than he could safely admit. The more romantic ones would contrive to find him alone and announce they were willing to act. Nor were they ever disappointed. They were told that it was certain that their enthusiasm had been noted in the proper quarters and they must hold themselves ready. When their services were required they would be called upon. Until then, they should not tell anybody about this conversation- at which point they would bite their lower lips and seal the contract with a manly shaking of hands.
Some might go several days before whispering some of it to a best friend though Jacob was rarely consulted for he had long made it plain that he found any discussion of his half-brother embarrassing. And for a while there had been much to discuss for Haratvi had played a role, albeit a very peripheral one, in the school’s enduring mystery. A little over a year ago, not long before the British began their invasion of Vichy French Lebanon and Syria, a friend of Haratvi’s, another teacher, had disappeared.
Josef Lang taught mathematics. About ten years older than Haratvi, he was a lapsed kibbutznik from the Galilee who had rejected the communal interpretation of Zionism and much else he once held dear when he came out of Acre jail. During the Arab rebellion Lang had been one of the Haganah boys who managed to get into Wingate’s Special Night Squads. The Cromwellian Wingate was fully aware that all his Jewish volunteers were Haganah and far from caring he welcomed them because they knew what they fought for and loved what they knew. Lang, it seemed, was a natural soldier. He was one of those tall, gaunt, wiry men whose pale, slightly stooped exterior belied a physique that a minimum of training easily honed to a sinewy toughness. He had been good enough to be selected for the famous Non-commissioned-officer’s course at Ein Herod when Wingate took the podium and told them all, in Hebrew if you please, that they were going to be the backbone of the first Jewish army the world had seen for two thousand years.
For a while there had been a lot of warm hope in the air and then it evaporated like steam. Three months before Hitler invaded Poland Wingate had been sent packing back to England with a note in his passport declaring that under no circumstances should this officer, and never mind the Distinguished Service Order he had just been awarded, ever to be allowed to re-enter the Palestine Mandate. By then the Arab revolt being almost down to its last bullet. Even before his departure, the Night Squads had been disbanded as surplus to requirements.
But Haganah had not disbanded and whereas the Arabs of Palestine might still be hanged for possessing a gun men like Lang could not bring themselves to believe that, after all the blood they had shed and bled with Wingate, the British would not continue to turn a blind eye to Haganah’s training activities. Did they not have the right to fight the Nazis with them? At that point the war had been no more than a stalemate in France, bombers engaged in leaflet raids, and a few naval engagements. As for the Middle East, the Middle East was at peace. Half the Palestine Police had mutinied and were locked up in Acre jail because many of them were recently discharged regular soldiers still on the reserve and disgusted by the idea that they would remain in this backwater while their old regiments went off to war.
We know your game, the English told Lang and his friends. You want us to train and equip your army so you can
fight the Arabs, push them off their land in Palestine. And we won’t have this because it upsets all the other Arabs whom happen to be sitting on the oil we need to fight this war and all the ones after it. Besides, we’re not Wingate’s sort. By and large, we happen to prefer the Arabs to you: good chaps, chivalrous, not a bunch of bloody Polish gangsters.
Haganah carried on with its training programme. They found quiet spots to practise platoon attacks with a couple of imaginary light machine guns giving cover or showed recent recruits how to move at night the way Wingate had taught them. Then one pleasant late autumn afternoon, the training of Lang’s company was interrupted by a British army patrol that didn’t want to listen to any special pleading. When the Haganah commandeer in charge, who had been close to Wingate and thought he knew how to deal with the British, began to argue the toss a company sergeant-major gave him a kick up the arse he could feel almost sixty years later.
It was a foretaste of what was in store when they got them to the place where the Crusaders had once deflowered Arab princesses and used hot irons on their men. Deep behind the dank and monstrous blocks of the Acre fortress they really set to work on them. It happened in citadels within citadels. Places cut off from the smallest human kindness, reached through a series of echoing slams as daylight and hope was locked out and ancient rooms heard familiar screams. The Night Squad veterans couldn’t believe it. They were treating them just like they treated the Arabs. No different. Sometimes they used fists, sometimes those short British Bobbies’ truncheons, polished wood with a leather thong.
Once Lang had asked one of them: “Why are you doing this? We were comrades.”
And out of the shadows an Englishman had answered him, “You were never a comrade of mine chum.”
Then it had stopped and there were even apologies and that should have been the end of it. But whereas the others accepted their lot, never believed they would serve the long sentences that would be handed out, Lang brooded. He watched the man who had called him chum, he watched him like a cat. And when he pounced it was a couple of the other Jews who dragged him off because they didn’t want him to hang for it. Instead, the warders kept it quiet and if the governor knew about it he never let on while they arranged their own punishment: a long and private flogging with the birch normally used more sparingly on juvenile offenders. Rumours that he had been left strapped to a table, bloody and half-naked, to be raped by long term Arab trustees remained just that. Certainly nobody ever dared to ask Lang.
But when the Haganah men were pardoned and released there was no doubt that Lang’s politics had changed. He made it plain he could no longer accept a creed whose leadership still saw London as a source of hope and even chose to live there. He had left his kibbutz to those who still believed in the brotherhood of man, moved to Haifa with his widowed mother and got a job at the school. It was known he had fought in the Galilee with Wingate and subsequently been one of those who had spent some time in Acre jail. Yet these were hardly things even the most compliant citizens of Mandate Palestine could hold against a fellow Jew. On the contrary, most of them derived a vicarious pleasure from having this warrior, this latter day Maccabee among them. He also turned out to be a more than adequate teacher - which was as well because teachers were not in short supply in the Yishuv.
Haratvi hero-worshipped Lang with the same intensity that the boys hero-worshipped him. From the moment the newcomer first walked into the teachers’ common room Haratvi was up on his feet, pumping his hand and making sure he sat next to him on every conceivable occasion. Lang never lost his natural reserve and on subjects dear to Haratvi’s heart could be infuriatingly taciturn; but he tolerated the younger man’s overtures and at times even appeared to encourage them by agreeing to meetings out of school.
Of his own politics, all Lang had ever been heard to say since he got out of Acre jail was that he was a Zionist Jew living in Eretz Israel and nowadays, despite David Haratvi’s entreaties that something must be done, this was enough. If he was concerned that people might think that prison had left him a broken man then he didn’t show it. Some of his fellow teachers said that, after what he had been through, he deserved a quiet life and wished young Haratvi would leave him alone instead of behaving like some playful puppy always demanding a new game.
Then one day Lang vanished. “Gone, gone and never called his mother,” declared the Jewish detective-sergeant on the case after that distressed lady had almost convinced him that she had no idea where her son could be. No letter of resignation to the school; no word to anybody, not even, it seemed, to his colleague Haratvi whose monologues on the latest political developments he had borne with a tolerance that seemed to indicate at least some tepid acceptance of friendship.
After a while people began, in the absence of any other explanation, to suspect that he was dead despite the lack of a body. When the police made inquiries it turned out that Lang had last been seen in public sitting with Haratvi at a pavement café near the harbour. Yet Haratvi had not been able to assist the detective-sergeant, a worried looking man who had made it plain that he had better things to do with his time. The British had turned Palestine into one gigantic quartermaster’s stores. The pilfering was enormous. Mostly Arabs of course, sometimes with the help of one of those Tommies who believed that the war was a personal invitation from Mister Churchill to make his fortune. If some of them were as good at soldiering as they were at supplying the black market, said the detective, the Germans would have surrendered by now.
Quite so, agreed Haratvi. It was very worrying. Of course, he didn’t want to make too much of it but his friend had been very concerned about the military situation. Very worried about what was going to happen to the Jews in the Yishuv if the Germans came through Egypt and into Palestine. And it was well known that the Vichy territories a few miles to the north swarmed with Nazi agents - were there not Italian and German consulates in both Beirut and Damascus. Quite frankly he couldn’t imagine some of the Tommies he saw staggering about the streets, scrawny fellows with half their teeth out before they were twenty-five, taking on Nazi storm troopers. It depressed him and it depressed his friend even more.
Haratvi’s conversation with the detective had taken place only a few days before some of those same scrawny Tommies had begun the process that deprived Vichy France of its place in the Levant. And the detective, who as it happened knew Haratvi’s journalist stepfather a bit, had shrugged and said that, if it was suicide, he must have thrown himself in the sea wearing cast iron boots and even if he had he would probably have left some kind of note because that’s what suicides did. Had he any idea the number of people who simply went missing in Palestine every year? Any idea at all? Scores: Jews, Arabs, even the odd Englishman. Per head of population it was probably no more than Berlin or New York. And of course, things had got a lot worse since the war started and everything was disrupted. There were a lot of deserters too - not just British but from about every other country in their blasted Empire and then some. There were Indians trying to pass themselves off as Arabs, Poles pretending to be kibbutzniks, Frenchmen who wanted to kill Germans but not under British command, Cretan republicans prepared to kill Germans for anybody except the Greek royalists who ruled them.
You name it they’d got it. A criminal from every member of the League of Nations. Apparently, there were even missing some German and Italian residents who should have been interned! Not that he was suggesting that his friend was leading a life of crime. It wasn’t as though he had disappeared with the school’s Spitfire Fund was it? Not like the British deserters. As far as he could make out half of them had run off with the sergeants’ mess Christmas drinks kitty. Of course, the British Empire was run on strong drink, sniffed the detective who like many Jews drank only moderately and abhorred drunkenness. One of these days it was going to wake up with a very bad hangover, didn’t he agree? But Haratvi had kept a straight face and greeted this proposition with a look of blank incredulity. What? The sun go down on the British E
mpire? Was he serious?
The young teacher’s mind was on the British Empire now as he frittered away these last hours of the summer term before the exam results and the speeches that would come tomorrow. “Looks a bit unnatural doesn’t it, all those splotches of pink?” he was saying. All the boys had their Phillips atlases on their desks and Haratvi had invited them to open it at the double page that showed the world political map across a two-page double spread. “It’s almost as if our planet was suffering from high blood pressure or something.”
The teenagers laughed on cue. They knew in this wonderful interlude between the last of the wretched matriculation papers and the start of the long holiday in a world gone mad and going madder, Haratvi probably didn’t feel like teaching any more than they felt like being taught. Not the curriculum anyway. They examined the pink on the map. There was an awful lot of it. The British Empire and its self-governing white dominions - Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa - were all coloured the same choleric flush. So were its protectorates and condominiums and tiny islands whose outlines were obliterated by their names and whose inhabitants, or so they had heard, were not only convinced the world was flat but that Queen Victoria still ruled it. Palestine was the same colour though it was not officially a colony at all but a mandated territory handed over to British safe keeping by the League of Nations, an organisation about as useful as a three-legged donkey because the US Congress had kept America out of it.
“I was talking to an English officer of the Palestine police the other day,” said Haratvi then paused to allow his audience time to give each other some knowing looks. Hauled him in again had they? More questions about Lang? There was no other conceivable reason Haratvi would be talking to a British policeman. Some glanced in Jacob’s direction for confirmation; but he knew they would be doing this and continue to stare fixedly at his atlas, his chin cupped in his hands.