by By Jon Land
But that wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was the boys lucky enough to draw white marbles were forced to escort their doomed friends up the gallows and fasten the noose around their throats as they stood on a stool. Then when the commander shot his pistol in the air they were to jerk the stools out from beneath their friends’ feet. To refuse, or delay, meant they would be shot on the spot along with their families.
Seven times David Wollchensky had reached into the box held by the grinning Nazi, and seven times, incredibly, he drew a white marble. Incredible, but not fortunate. Not when seven times his “luck” meant David had to lead another friend to his death upon the gallows. The Nazis would not allow the use of hoods, but he learned to avoid the eyes of his friends when he tightened the noose around their throats. Yanking the stool out was the hardest. Standing there as they kicked and thrashed. It took a few of them a very long time to die, and a part of David Wollchensky died up there with his friends every time.
By his sixth and seventh turns, it became a game for the Nazis to see if his luck would hold out. They cheered and applauded when he opened his hand to reveal a white marble yet again. The last two times he escorted friends to their death, a line of laughing Nazis slapped his back fondly on the way.
But he never wished for a black marble, not even once. He maintained his will to live by fantasizing what he would do to these Nazis once the war was over. His soul was already dead while his body lived on, and he would make good use of that body as soon as the opportunity presented itself down the road. By the seventh Sabbath, he felt nothing as he half carried a boy his own age to his death. Heard not his sobs, nor smelled his fear. Did not turn away from his twitching feet or hands clawing at the noose around his throat beneath his bulging eyes.
It was all fuel for David Wollchensky’s resolve, and after the seventh week that resolve took shape.
The depravity in the ghetto had reached a point where bodies were literally piling up in the gutters and needed to be hauled away on a daily basis. This unenviable task fell upon a team of Jews who grasped for anything that might keep them alive a little longer. They were provided with no gloves or sanitary equipment. Many who took on this duty, their immune systems already worn hopelessly down, caught any number of diseases from the corpses. Their reward thus became a slow death rather than a quick one.
On the morning after the seventh Sabbath, David was waiting outside in the street when the old open truck lumbered through the street, stopping every time it came to the husk of what had been a human being only a day or so earlier. After the truck passed his hiding place, David rushed to catch up and hurled himself to its bed amid the corpses. He hid among them, camouflaged by death, until the truck came to a huge flaming pit, again manned by more Jews, where the bodies were to be dumped. The Jews here wore makeshift masks to keep from passing out due to the stench. If they did pass out, the Nazi soldiers overseeing the operation would either shoot them or simply dump their unconscious bodies into the fire with the corpses.
David slid out and hid beneath the truck before the process of unloading the corpses began. He waited until most of the bodies had been tossed into the pit, so that the smoke would be at it thickest, before crawling out. He wormed on his stomach all the way into the woods and cried when he was well hidden amid the trees, because he was leaving the only home he had ever known. Only then did the enormity of the task he was taking on occur to him. But if God had not meant him to survive, He could have made sure David picked a black marble instead of a white one on any of seven different occasions. That belief gave David the faith needed to strengthen his resolve. It also kept him from ever looking back.
David would often tell Max Pearlman that the next few years formed a blurry patch in his memory. He remembered things in blotches, out of order chronologically to the point that he really could not say in which month, and sometimes even in which year, an event had happened.
A sense of order did not return to his thinking until he reached Palestine. He arrived with an early group of refugees before the British blockades, those that the Gideon had successfully avoided, were set up. He became a member of a secret army of Jews called the Palmach, dedicated to smuggling other refugees into the country and organizing them once they got there. By the time the Gideon dumped its lifeboats into the Mediterranean outside Caesarea, he had joined the Haganah, a group of Jewish resistance fighters who had extended their mandate to conducting operations against the British occupiers.
Max Pearlman realized early in their friendship that David Wollchenksy, having determined his dream of revenge against the Nazis of the ghetto would likely never be realized, had turned all his wrath upon the British in their stead. And when the British finally relinquished their mandate following Israel’s declaration of independence in May of 1948, David turned that same thirst for vengeance upon the Arabs who were so determined to deny the Jewish people the homeland that God, and the United Nations, had deeded them.
In the early days of their friendship, David’s determination drove Pearlman, Levy, and Rossovitch to master the skills needed to join him in the Haganah. The British occupation of Palestine, and their increasingly brutal repression of the resistance fighters, was too much for him to bear. He could not live through another ghetto, and with Jewish refugee camps springing up first in Palestine and then in Greece, his fuse burned down to its end. It was as though Wollchensky had lost his soul in the ghetto, and the attainment of a homeland was the only way he could see to get it back. Nothing would get in his way. He would rather die than face another internment aimed at breaking the spirit as well as the body.
For two weeks, the three friends who had come to Israel aboard the Gideon did nothing but drill and study the methods and tactics of the Haganah. They provided backup and cover on a number of operations and raids that included blowing up a British oil refinery before David told them they were ready to move to the front line. In fact, the four of them had been approved for a mission.
It was a relatively simple operation and should have required no violence at all. Many of the British officers were sympathetic to the Jews and did their best to covertly aid their cause whenever possible. David had made contact with one of these men, a major at a large weapons depot, who offered to “lose” six crates of rifles, ammunition, and grenades to David’s possession. The Haganah agreed to the plan and to provide backup in the hills surrounding the warehouse on the outskirts of Haifa.
The four friends drove to the warehouse in a covered supply truck stolen by another Haganah team months before, Max up front with David, Hyram Levy and Jacob Rossovitch in the back. David had flashed a forged letter of transfer for the weapons, which was just a formality since the major in charge was expecting them. Still, they wore pilfered British uniforms just in case, and David was under strict orders to abort the mission should anything be amiss.
“Trouble,” David said as he slid to a halt in front of the depot.
“What?” Pearlman asked.
David fixed his gaze on a British major striding purposefully in their direction. “That officer approaching us isn’t the man I’ve been dealing with.”
“Abort. You know our instructions if anything goes wrong, abort.”
“Too late,” David said, and he threw the big truck into reverse, backing it up toward the garage’s huge bay doors.
The British officer in charge had to leap out of the way to avoid being struck. “Hey!” he shouted, trotting after them. “Hold it, you bloody idiot! I said, hold it!”
David obliged only when the rear of the truck was in easy range of the bay. He started to open his door as the officer approached angrily, and Max Pearlman saw him cover his drawn pistol with the forged transfer order.
“Here you are, sir,” David said to the major in a perfect British accent, firing twice before the man’s hands had even closed on the paper.
Two more soldiers heard the shots and came running. David felled them with one shot each.
“Drag the oth
er two bodies under the truck!” David ordered Pearlman.
Max, aghast, stayed frozen in the passenger seat.
“Did you hear what I said? Do it!” And David leaped out to pull the major from view himself.
Max recovered enough to jump down and join David on the ground. “This mission was never approved, was it?” he said accusingly as Rossovitch and Levy dropped out of the truck’s rear. “This whole thing was your plan.”
“Shut up and do what I tell you!”
“You never spoke to any sympathetic British officer.”
“I said—”
“There’s no backup, is there? We’re on our own.”
“That’s right,” David rasped angrily. He grabbed Pearlman by his British uniform top and slammed him against the truck. “And you’d be dead now if it wasn’t for me. They would have buried you in the sand at Caesarea. So now you’re going to help me, and if you don’t like it, when we’re done you can go to hell.”
The hulking Rossovitch and diminutive Levy stood next to them with rifles in hand, transfixed.
“The two of you get the other bodies out of sight,” David ordered them. “Then take up their posts. Keep your faces down.” He swung back toward Pearlman. “Max, you and I will load the truck.”
There were far more than six crates inside the warehouse, but most of them were too heavy to manage in the brief time they had left. After hoisting eight into the rear of the truck left them sweating and gasping, Max began to plead with Wollchensky that they had enough. David reluctantly agreed and lowered the bay door behind them. Rossovitch and Levy took their places back in the truck’s now cluttered rear, but before they set off David popped open one of the crates and drew out a trio of machine guns. He passed them cut, along with magazines from another crate, and told his friends to be ready, this in spite of the fact that none of them had ever fired such a weapon or could even locate the safety until he pointed it out.
The alarm did not sound until they were within sight of the gate. David didn’t slow down, didn’t hesitate. He jammed one hand out the window and opened fire with his pistol while the other stayed glued to the wheel. Max leaned out his window and drew down on the guard with the machine gun, the kick from its initial spray driving his head up against the truck’s doorjamb.
Return fire shattered the windshield an instant before they crashed through the gate. Now Rossovitch’s and Levy’s bullets replaced theirs, blazing out the truck’s rear as it tore away from the British camp. They were long gone before the British could summon vehicles to take up the chase, and safely nestled inside a Haganah stronghold before an effective dragnet could be mounted.
David Wollchensky was reproached for his maverick operation, but congratulated for its results. Weapons were the most precious of all commodities for the fledgling Jewish underground, especially since those leaders with the most foresight could see a much more violent struggle coming in the days ahead.
After their unauthorized mission, the three young men who had come to Israel aboard the Gideon talked about parting ways from their reckless friend. This was their chance. But they didn’t take it. Wollchensky’s passion was contagious. Later Pearlman would see that passion as being rooted in the desire to atone for the seven deaths he believed himself responsible for. Like David, Max figured, they all had something if not to atone for, then at least to recover from. Wollchensky made them feel like they held the future in their own hands, after being so helpless against the past. So the four friends, together, would fight for the establishment of a Jewish state.
Whatever it took.
Wherever it led them.
* * * *
CHAPTER 11
T
hat was only the beginning, of course,” Pearlman said to Danielle. In spite of the tale’s brave and heroic text, he showed no joy in telling it. On the contrary, the process had seemed almost painful to him.
“I thought you were going to tell me about your friendship with Hyram Levy, Mr. Pearlman,” Danielle told him, as politely as she could.
“That voyage on the Gideon brought us together, but it was David Wollchensky who kept us together. Everything we became, our very identities in Israel, we owe to him. There was no going back after that raid on the British weapons depot, no turning away.”
“And does this have anything to do with what Hyram Levy has been calling you about these past few months?”
“It has everything to do with it, Pakad.” Pearlman shifted his chair closer to Danielle’s. “You haven’t gotten the autopsy results back yet, obviously.”
“Not the complete report, no,” she acknowledged, and her eyes wandered again to a man she could have sworn was Ben Kamal moving anxiously along the promenade as if he were looking for a lost child.
“I’ll save you the trouble of waiting,” Pearlman said grimly. “Hyram was dying of cancer. He never went to the doctor, but he knew all the same.” His voice drifted. “He always knew those kinds of things.”
“You stayed in touch with him all these years?”
“As I said, the story I just told you is only the beginning. The three of us survived all of the wars. If we’d had the time, we could have watched history forming around us.”
“You mean four.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said three, but with Wollchensky there were four of you.”
Pearlman’s shoulders drooped. His head sank toward his chest. “One of us did not make it all the way. But that’s another part of the story.”
“Is there a part which might help me learn who may have killed Hyram Levy?”
“Hyram outlived all of his enemies, Pakad, and most of his friends.”
“It only takes one, sir.”
Pearlman shrugged.
“I need to ask you something else,” Danielle said. This was probably a bad idea, but she couldn’t get the fact that Levy had jotted down her name and hospital room number out of her head. “Did Hyram Levy ever mention anything about me? It might have been about six weeks ago.”
“You?”
“Yes or no?”
“Not to me. Why would he?”
She ignored his question, regretted raising the issue in the first place. “Did you ever discuss anything that gave any indication that Levy thought he was in danger?”
Pearlman leaned even closer to her. “Tell me what else you’ve learned, and maybe I will remember something.”
Danielle decided not to hold back. “He knew his attacker. He was struck from close behind. There was no struggle.”
“And the shop?”
“Ransacked. The killer was looking for something.”
“Did he find it?”
“We don’t know yet, sir.”
“A diary, a journal, even a tape, perhaps?”
“What makes you ask?”
Pearlman smiled slightly. “How old are you, Pakad?”
“Thirty-two.”
“In forty years you will understand. The past two months, since Hyram knew he was dying, have been about the past. That’s what all our phone conversations were about. He was trying to come to terms with his life. You have children, of course.”
“No.” Danielle tried not to sound as uneasy as she felt.
“Oh.” Her answer had clearly surprised Pearlman. “Someday, yes?”
She smiled politely.
“Well, Hyram had run out of somedays. He had begun to question the choices he had made in his life, what he was leaving behind. Like I said, in forty years you will know. I think he may have been writing it all down, sorting things out. Making his peace with the world.”
“I understand. But why would someone kill him for such a journal?”
“I didn’t mean to suggest they did, Pakad. Only that there might be things written in such a journal that plenty of people would have reason never to want to see get out. Enemies and friends.”
“Any of them Palestinian, Mr. Pearlman? I ask because in his business he associated with a great number of Pales
tinians.”
“An interesting suspicion coming from someone with your reputation.”
“Reputation?”
Pearlman’s eyes scorned her. He smiled almost playfully. “Come now, Chief Inspector Barnea, do you think I would not have read your file before this meeting? I am aware of your being paired with a Palestinian counterpart on a rather crucial investigation two years ago.”
“And how did Hyram Levy feel about Palestinians, Mr. Pearlman?”
“You already know the answer to that. You told me so yourself.”
“I know Hyram Levy worked with Palestinians. I know he did business with Palestinians. But I don’t know how he felt about them.”