“And how do we do that?” Chaim asked.
“A postcard,” Hennes answered.
“A postcard?” I laughed.
Hennes said, “A postcard with only two words on it. A phrase none of us is likely to forget, so that should the day ever come when one of us receives this postcard, he will pause, look up to the heavens, and deeply reflect upon where he is and what he is doing.”
“And what two deadly words are we to fear?” I asked.
“Aurora Borealis,” he said.
Anonymous Man went on to recount his travels with Chaim across the war-torn carcass of Europe. Obstacle after obstacle—rugged terrain, hunger, thirst, and injury—impeded their journey.
The greatest obstacles, however, were always the human ones. They found nothing in nature as cruel, treacherous, or deceitful as their fellow man, who appeared at every corner ready, willing—even desirous, it seemed to him—to make their lives more miserable than they already were. Unpitied and unwanted, the enemy tossed them back and forth between borders; dumped them into one country, rounded them up and pitched them back again. For Chaim, this proved that his mission was the only way.
“You see,” he’d say each time we were threatened and chased away like dogs, “nobody wants the Jews. We aren’t even human to them. They wish Hitler had killed us all. We must have our own land. That’s the only answer to the Jewish ‘question!’”
Anonymous Man listened to his friend’s ravings, and commiserated. He didn’t disagree; he just thought it impossible. He too found Europe repulsive. The whole wretched continent stank like carrion to him, and the people who populated it were its maggots. He detested its villainous history and heaped scorn upon its sanctimonious culture.
But his disgust did not end at the borders of Europe. Every nation shared his contempt, even his own. He was certain that his motherland had known what was going on in the German concentration camps, and that they could have done any number of things to have stopped or slowed the slaughter, but chose to do nothing.
This journal was his angriest one yet. The hardships he suffered had rusted through the stoic armor he had meticulously hammered out and worn so self-confidently in the earlier journals.
Self-aware, Anonymous Man realized that he was sliding fast into misanthropy. He scolded himself for it, and tried to fortify his resistance to the temptation, but his daily life mocked what little hope and faith he had left in humankind. He wrote:
I grope for perspective. It is so easy to attribute more reality to pain and suffering and grief than to the good and beautiful. Pleasure, if it comes at all, is fleeting; pain endures. Beauty is ephemeral; ugly is forever. Joy dissolves immediately upon recognition; sorrow buries itself into the soul and sends out roots. I must constantly remind myself that I am tired, that I am sick; that these thoughts and feelings are the hobgoblins of my weariness, and that in my weariness I am but half-awake.
Eventually, Mr. A and Chaim found themselves on the island of Cyprus in a British detention camp.
There, the Zionist zeal was pervasive. The Jews were only a boat ride away from Palestine, but the British barred them from entering. In the detention camp Anonymous Man realized for the first time the magnitude of the network that had been strung together by the Zionists in their attempt to establish a homeland, a struggle that had been going on since 1862 when Moses Hess first published Rome and Jerusalem.
While detained, Mr. A listened to the intellectuals of the camp speak of other early Zionists and their works: Peretz Smolenskin, Rabbi Samuel Mohilever, Judah Pinsker, and Theodor Herzl.
He also learned of the new breed of militant Zionists called the Irgun, inspired by a man named Jabotinsky, whose underground had a firm foothold in the camp. Chaim needed no persuasion and embraced their philosophy with the same fervor his father once used to embrace the Jewish Torah. As for Anonymous Man:
So I have enlisted with my friend, though my passion is only lukewarm. I have neither his history nor his emotional commitment, and think it funny that my life should be so enmeshed with a people I had never given a moment’s thought to in my youth. The Jews are not my people, but through some strange alchemy my spirit had become theirs; their blood mine.
And yet, here I am, ready to fight with them, even die with them, for a cause I scarcely understand. Do I act from loneliness and desperation? Perhaps. They are the only friends I have left, and my loyalty is and always has been to my friends. Chaim says it’s my fate. I replied that I don’t believe in fate. “Fate does not need believers,” he rejoined. “It needs bodies.”
Bren and Sten
Summer/Fall, 1946
Anonymous Man and ten others slipped out of Cyprus on a wheezing Greek trawler, swam half a mile under a moonless night, and crawled out onto the beach at Sdot Yam, a small kibbutz on the coast of Palestine. Two weeks later the Irgun Tzvai Leumi led by Menachem Begin dynamited Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, the headquarters of the British. It was July 22nd, 1946, the first date that Anonymous Man ever bothered to note. Eighty British officers and men were killed; seventy others were wounded.
The Irgun attack was the result of pent-up outrage over the British White Paper of 1939. In compromise to the Arabs, the paper proposed that Jewish immigration to Palestine be limited to 15,000 a year for five years and then stopped altogether. The British also refused to admit 100,000 Jewish refugees, as proposed by United States President Truman. The holocaust now public knowledge, firsthand accounts of its horrors everywhere, and Jewish refugees continuing to suffer and with nowhere else to go, Jewish exasperation demanded action.
The British retaliated to the attack by disarming the Jews, boycotting their shops, making mass arrests, and by hanging Jewish leaders.
Far from shattering Jewish solidarity, however, British retribution only intensified it, breeding even greater public defiance. The hanging of Jewish leaders initiated an Irgun “law of talion”—the hanging of a British officer for a Jewish noncom, a higher British officer for a Jewish officer.
Anonymous Man found himself in the center of a battlefield very different from the one he had experienced in Europe. The terrain, the enemy, the men he fought alongside, and the conditions he served under—all were new and strange to him.
The war in Europe was a war between nations, the superpowers of the day, slugging it out on a colossal scale the world had never seen in all its blood-drenched days. The conflict in Palestine, in comparison, was a family feud in a far-off and forgotten land. Yet, though the theater was small, the struggle that took place in it was every bit as impassioned, and with an outcome that was certain to be far-reaching.
The Jews took the Arab threats of massacre seriously, and although a full-scale war had yet to be declared, Anonymous Man knew it was inevitable. He wrote:
…I can smell it [war] in the air. Like the pungent aroma of sautéing garlic it wafts through the streets and countryside, from the Negev to the Galilee, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Palestine is a pressure cooker whose seething stew the British lid cannot possibly keep contained. It’s going to blow, and there’s no telling who or what will remain.
Anonymous Man was typically sketchy about his dealings with the Jewish underground, but clearly his military experience and expertise was not overlooked by them.
I know how to do only one thing in this world, but that thing is highly valued by my friends here. My job is to teach what I know to as many people as I can in the shortest time possible.
His duties kept him constantly on the move, as the headings to his journal entries attested. He trained and organized fighters and refugees in Tiberias, Beer Sheva, Acre, Tel Aviv, Gaza, Negev, Yafo, Hadera, Jerusalem, and dozens of kibbutzim.
Also, since a trained soldier without a trigger to pull was little more than a moving target, when he wasn’t running from kibbutz to kibbutz helping to turn refugees into warriors, he was running guns and munitions to arm them for the showdown that they knew was coming. He was a man with a mission, and the journal reflected
an urgency that was absent from his previous writings.
In Europe, my part was that of a man doing his duty, a duty done like a hard day’s work. Here that’s not nearly enough. The Arab world outmans and outguns my friends a hundred to one. They threaten every day to annihilate the Jews and drive them into the sea. The world will let them do it too—turn its back and look away, just as it did in Europe. I can’t, and I won’t. Every minute I save, every mile I cover, every man and woman I train, every Bren and Sten [gun] I slap into their hands, matters.
Anonymous Man never spoke of politics and never resorted to name-calling. Fate and his conscience had placed him on the side of the Jews, and his fierce sense of loyalty kept him there. He mastered Hebrew and Arabic, and continued to pass himself off as a Jew, an irony he admitted enjoying, writing that his father was an anti-Semite who belonged to a posh Boston club where Jews were not admitted. It was his only reference to his family in six journals.
Although he sided with the Jews, admired them, and sympathized with their cause, only once had he considered converting. He mentioned the thought in passing one day to Chaim, the only person who knew his true identity. “Are you mad?” Chaim replied. “Haven’t you enough problems?”
Apparently, Anonymous Man could pass himself off as an Englishman as well. More than once he told of using a “borrowed” British uniform, credentials, and documents to get what or where he wanted. By all indications, spy could be added to his list of duties.
Much of the journal was filled with descriptions of the many kibbutzim that he visited. A number of them were little more than outposts—a few tents and a barbed wire fence, thrown up under the cover of night while the British slept. The young pioneers who settled these fledgling kibbutzim were intended to be a crucial first line of defense against an impending Arab invasion. Life was hard and Spartan-like, and the kibbutzniks worked the parched, thorny deserts, or drained the mosquito-infested swamps with their rifles across their backs, often the target practice of hostile Arabs.
Anonymous Man took a particular interest in the more established kibbutzim, some of which were founded more than twenty years earlier. He was impressed by their work ethic and self-reliance, and intrigued by their democratic and communal way of living. All meals were eaten together in a central dining room, cafeteria-style. No money was exchanged on the kibbutz and none was needed. In order to free the parents for work, the children of the kibbutz lived in separate quarters and were raised together like brothers and sisters. The youth of the kibbutz learned at an early age the meaning of responsibility. No job on the kibbutz was valued more than another, and all members shared equally both the burdens and the benefits of their labors.
Before Anonymous Man had experienced kibbutz life, references to the future were conspicuously few, as if he didn’t really believe he had a future, and that a wife and kids were something other people had, not him. But the green fields, peaceful gardens, and bucolic lifestyle of the kibbutz must have suited his romantic imagination because more than once he pictured himself settling permanently on one. He expressed the hope that someday he would be able to provide his own children with the same advantages that he thought kibbutz life offered—a natural, healthy environment, community, camaraderie, and a good education.
As promised, his friend Hennes continued to send his yearly New Year’s letter. Anonymous Man mentioned that Hennes had settled into a small boarding house in Stockholm and worked part-time in a bakery. He entered the university there and pursued his dream of becoming a scholar. The lad, Jason, whom he had brought with him to Sweden, was taken in by Hennes’ relatives, an elderly, childless couple who operated a small, but prospering ball bearing factory. Hennes inquired about Chaim and expressed his concern over the situation in Palestine, which he said he followed in the papers as closely as possible.
Anonymous Man answered his friend’s questions. He told him about Chaim, who had married another refugee shortly before they slipped out of Cyprus, and that Chaim was waiting for the day when she would join him on the kibbutz. Apparently she had wrangled passage to America, sponsored perhaps by some relative, and had departed in her final month of pregnancy. Mr. A wrote that Chaim was the brother he never had, and that Chaim considered him the unborn baby’s favorite uncle and legal guardian in case anything ever happened to him.
The journal ended with the frustrated British, who had even bigger problems in other parts of their wobbling empire, tossing Palestine onto the lap of the United Nations, bringing to a close their tumultuous twenty-six-year mandate. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13 for partition, creating both a Jewish and a Palestinian state with Jerusalem under a UN trusteeship. The Jews accepted the decision; the Arabs rejected it.
A Close Shave
“Guy,” she whispered.
I opened my sleep-sealed eyes and blinked Johanna into focus. She was peering in through the side of my curtain.
“Guy,” she whispered again, gently brushing the side of my cheek with the backs of her fingers. “We’re getting off at the next stop.”
The other end of the curtain parted and Noriko’s smiling face appeared.
“Ohaiyô,” she sang. “Sleep well?”
“No.”
“Then have some coffee. You’ve got to be on your toes.”
“Okay.”
“Is something wrong?” Johanna asked.
“Just scared, that’s all.”
Noriko squeezed my toes. “Daijoubu,” she said.
“Huh?”
“It’ll be okay,” Johanna said.
“No,” I said. “There’s nothing okay about any of this. Even if we get Doreen back, I still can’t forgive myself for the mess I’ve made of things. And if anything should happen to either of you… Ow!” I sat up and bumped my head on the ceiling of my bunk. “Don’t go,” I said, rubbing the hurt from my head. “Let me handle it alone. Really, I—”
“Guy,” Johanna said, “it’s no use trying to talk us out of it. We’ve committed ourselves and we won’t back out.”
“But why?”
“Because we’re your friends.”
“Stop it, would you? You hardly know me. And what you do know should tell you that I am not your friend.”
“Guy,” Noriko said, “we were friends before we ever met. We were friends the day we were born.”
“Oh, please,” I groaned. I snatched my pillow to my face and screamed into it with frustration.
Johanna said, “Someday you’ll understand.”
I shouted through clenched teeth, “There might not be a someday!”
We heard the sound of screeching train brakes. “We gotta go,” Johanna said. She kissed me and disappeared back out the curtain.
Noriko took my hand between hers. “Just stick to the plan.” Then she kissed me too and ducked out.
I pushed aside the curtain and watched the two girls make their way down the aisle and into the next cabin. I slid my feet onto the floor and sat nonplused at the edge of my bunk. The other passengers were still asleep with their curtains drawn closed, except for the ex-marine-looking dude. He was sitting up, leaning against the back of his bunk, acknowledging me with the corner of his mouth and a barely perceptible nod. The train pulled away from the small country station.
“Where’d your ladies go?” he asked in a gravelly voice.
I shrugged and looked away. I was in no mood to be sociable.
He laughed and tapped a pack of Marlboro on his palm. He deftly shook out a cigarette and lit it. He took a deep drag.
“Where ya from?”
“The States.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Arizona.”
“Long way from home, cowboy.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
He grinned. “Sweet things you were with.”
I ignored him and started arranging my belongings. I emptied all the stuff out of my daypack and crammed it into my big backpack so that I could use the daypack to carry
the journals.
“Strange the ladies would get off in the middle of nowhere like that,” he continued. “They don’t look like the travelin’ types, what with just a couple dinky daypacks between ‘em. Yeah, I’d say it’s funny, all right.”
I shook my head in annoyance and continued to ignore him.
“Yep,” he said, “I’d even call it suspicious.”
I zipped up my bags and turned to him. “People are trying to sleep, okay?” I said. “And I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
He smiled. His teeth were the color of dried mustard. “Sure you do, little buckaroo.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
Like all crazy people, he didn’t like being called crazy, and with the speed and agility of a maniac, he was out of his bunk and pinning me down in mine, a ten-inch hunting knife at my throat.
“You don’t follow instructions very well, do ya cowboy?” His eyes blazed and his breath stank.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, horrified.
“Those chicks, who do they work for?”
“They’re just friends—”
He pushed the flat side of the blade against my throat and I could feel the sharp edge at my Adam’s apple. “Lie to me again and I’ll kill you twice, boy. Who are they?”
Say Uncle Page 17