The Six-Day Hero (Israel)
Page 13
The days pass in a blurry daze. There are moments when I forget that Gideon died. I automatically think about telling him something, and then with a bitter, painful jolt, I remember. He’s gone. It makes me wonder how Mrs. Friedburg survived losing her whole family. How any of those Holocaust survivors found the strength to move past their grief. Maybe I will too one day. I don’t know.
The Wall
When I think back on that summer in 1967, I have a clear, vibrant memory of the first time I saw the Western Wall.
After we finished sitting shiva for Gideon, we went to the Old City.
My parents, Beni, and I, the four of us, joined thousands of other Jews, crying, laughing, cheering, carried along toward the holiest of holies. I walked on cobbled alleys that had seen three thousand years of passing feet. The Jordanians who lived there came out to meet us. They waved and smiled as we passed. Children approached us, smiling shyly and holding trays with key chains and necklaces for sale. Many people bought their goods, excited to be interacting with Jordanians for the first time in twenty years. It seemed as if, even though they’d lost the war, they were interested in us—curious about us. Maybe they were just pretending, but at that moment, I believed that they wanted to live in peace, just like us.
We avoided passing by the YMCA, the Alley of Death that took Gideon. Instead, we wound our way through the narrow, twisting streets. And suddenly, it was there in front of us. The tall, white wall that I had only seen in illustrations and photos. Each stone was massive, taller than a man, wider than a car. How the builders had moved such mammoth boulders two thousand years ago was beyond my understanding.
My mom and dad held hands as they approached. Later there would be a partition separating men from women. But in those first heady days after the war, there was nothing to divide the tens of thousands of people who came to touch, to pray, to see with their own eyes the miracle of a unified Jerusalem.
I remember my mom shaking, tears running unchecked down her face. I held onto Beni’s hand so we wouldn’t lose him in the massive crowd around us.
We approached the wall. It was so serene, unmoved by the struggle and the cost we had paid to come see it.
I touched a massive ancient stone, worn smooth. Someone next to me whispered the Shehechiyanu under his breath, a prayer of gratitude for experiencing something for the first time. But I didn’t want to say the Shehechiyanu.
Instead, I leaned my forehead against the pale wall of Jerusalem stone and said the Kaddish, the prayer for mourning.
At first it was only me saying it.
Then my parents’ voices joined in, and Beni’s. Then the man who had chanted Shehechiyanu added his voice. Then the couple next to him echoed our solemn prayer for the dead.
Because, as the soldier who had come to my door had said, we were not the only ones who had lost someone dear. In our small country, losing eight hundred young men was a hard blow. The whole nation was both celebrating and mourning. So more and more voices joined our Kaddish. Until the thousands of people who had come to the Western Wall chanted as one, our voices rumbling in the square, rising higher and higher. A prayer of sadness and hope, grief and faith.
Then we all said, “Amen.”
* * *
Afterward, my father said, “Come, let me show you where I used to live.”
We followed him through the ancient, narrow streets. The buildings were so close to each other that unless it was high noon, the sun couldn’t reach the street. My dad walked briskly through the shadowy lanes, confident of his way even though he hadn’t set foot there in nearly twenty years.
Beni and I swiveled our heads from side to side, trying to take it all in. Many Jordanians had tied white shirts or scarfs to their balconies and front doors, to let the Israeli soldiers know they had surrendered. People came out of their apartments and stood by their homes as we walked by. They smiled at us, waving.
“Ahlan,” my dad would say as we passed. “As-salamu ‘alaykum.”
“Wa ‘alaykum,” someone would say back.
Beni and I exchanged googly eyes. Abba spoke Arabic?
We walked for ten minutes before arriving at a plain white building with a heavy, ancient-looking wooden door.
“This was my house,” my dad said, sounding far away. “We lived on the second floor, my grandparents were on the first floor, and my aunt and uncle lived on the third floor.” He cleared his throat violently. My mom took his hand in hers. We all gazed at the scarred door. I tried to picture my dad as a young boy, scampering in and out of this building, running through these twisting, maze-like streets. What a different life he had lived.
“Where did your friend Daoud live?” I asked.
He blinked rapidly, as if waking from a dream. “Not far.” He smiled. “Let me show you.”
We walked for a few more minutes. Though I couldn’t tell the difference, my dad said we had left the Jewish Quarter and were now in the Muslim Quarter. A few streets away was a plain, three-story building, almost identical to the one my father grew up in, except for a wrought iron door decorated in curves and loops.
We stood there looking at the little house, not sure what to do.
Men in long white robes and head dresses passed us, eyeing us with uncertainty. Women wearing long black robes hurried by with heavy bags of groceries in their arms. We stood out in our shorts and sandals.
I thought about how my dad had said good-bye to his childhood friend nineteen years ago—probably the same way I’d said good-bye to Yossi. I didn’t know if I’d ever see Yossi again. I hoped so. I hoped his mother would be able to believe in Israel again. But if not . . . maybe nineteen years from now, I’d be in my dad’s position. Staring at Yossi’s old house, wondering what had happened to him.
“Maybe he still lives here,” I said. “You should knock.” My dad rapped against the door frame.
We waited and waited.
“Maybe they’re not home,” Beni said. And then we heard it, the turn of an old bolt. The inner door opened, and through the iron curves we saw a slim, middle-aged man with thinning hair. He had a worried look on his face that turned into puzzlement when he saw an Israeli family standing at his doorway.
“Yes?” he asked in Hebrew.
“Excuse me. Is there a man named Daoud who lives here?”
“Yes,” he said, his puzzlement growing. “I am Daoud.”
“I am Avner,” my dad said. “Do you remember me? It’s been a long time.”
Daoud’s face grew brighter and brighter as he fit the memory of his childhood friend over the older face of my dad standing in front of him.
“Avner!” he cried. “My old friend! I can’t believe it!”
He fumbled with the lock on the iron gate as he shouted something in rapid Arabic over his shoulder.
“Come in! Come in! I can’t believe this!”
The door swung open and the two men fell into a hug, swaying back and forth. Daoud touched my dad’s face, laughing in disbelief over the wrinkles. My dad teased him about the thinning hair.
A woman wearing a colorful headscarf came from the back of the house, wiping her hands on a towel.
She said something in Arabic, and none of us needed to speak the language to know she was welcoming us inside. The four of us entered the home of my father’s childhood friend.
Two girls and a young boy were inside, playing with a model train set. They froze at the sight of us. Beni and I edged closer to each other. The parents shooed us toward one another.
Before I knew it, a plate of cookies was put on a low end table and cups of sweet mint tea were poured for everyone.
The adults sat and talked for an hour. Daoud had lost his brother in the war. His parents’ new house had been destroyed. My parents told him about Gideon. I looked at them, the two sets of parents, and for one disorienting moment I couldn’t see the difference between them. Why had we fought each other? Why had we lost loved ones?
For one shining, hopeful afternoon, I thought it
was over. That we would all live in peace. That we would all be friends.
And why not? My family and I had just prayed at the Western Wall. We had scrawled little prayers on scraps of paper and stuffed them into the small spaces between the massive stones. There is a belief that prayers left at the wall will find their way to God’s ear. Thousands of slips of paper daily. Hundreds of thousands of prayers. And I think most of them are prayers for peace.
As Daoud and my father filled each other in on the past nineteen years of their lives, I thought, Why not peace?
Anything was possible.
Author’s Note
My father was an eighteen-year-old university student in Israel when the Six-Day War broke out in 1967. His parents were Holocaust survivors, scarred and wary of the evil in the world. They had barely escaped Europe with their lives. But my dad—a bright, ambitious young man who had lived in Israel since he was a toddler—was untroubled by history’s shadow. He scoffed at his dad’s worries of doom and destruction.
Everything changed in May 1967, when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser moved large armies into the desert. He demanded the United Nations leave Sinai, and they complied. President Nasser moved cannons to the southern tip of the Sinai, blocking the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships sailing to Israel. As Egypt amassed troops on its southern border, Syrian forces to the north went on high alert. Then Jordan, bordering Israel in the south and east, signed a treaty putting its military under Egyptian control.
Within weeks, Israel was surrounded by powerful enemies, its military outnumbered five to one. As fears grew in Israel, my dad suddenly respected his father’s worldview. If his young country couldn’t stop its enemies, no one else would either.
But unlike in the Second World War, this time the Jewish people had a military and a plan. The Israeli military destroyed the air forces of three nations in about six hours. It changed the course of the war and of history.
Acknowledgments
Many people helped me with this book. I wish to thank my parents, particularly my father, Gabriel Laufer, for sharing so vividly his experiences as an eighteen-year-old Israeli soldier in the Six-Day War. My aunt and uncle, Sara and Rafi Kornfeld, told me about their experiences as a young nurse (Sara) and soldier (Rafi) during that time. Sara and Yaakov Hassidim were children living in West Jerusalem, and their terrific descriptions of daily life, as well as of the dangers and drama of the Six-Day War, helped shape my vision of what it must have been like to live then. Mickey Obed, an activated soldier in the reserves, survived in a unit that took terrible losses in heavy fighting. He helped me understand what was happening on the front lines during the war. Katherine Janus Kahn was an American volunteer in Israel in 1967. She generously shared with me what the national mood was like and what inspired young men and women from around the world to come help a struggling, war-torn country.
Yetnayet Lemma made sure the details of Motti’s encounter with the Ethiopian priest were factually accurate. Any errors are my own.
I found the true story of Yoni Netanyahu particularly inspiring as I developed Gideon’s character. Yoni was a bright, talented young man who chose to dedicate himself to Israel’s defense and security at the cost of his own future. He served honorably and bravely in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, and died leading a successful rescue operation to save a plane full of passengers kidnapped by terrorists. To find out more about him, I recommend watching the documentary about his life, Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story.
While I read many books and articles about the Six-Day War, Michael Oren’s fantastic book Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East was incredibly valuable in helping me grasp the terror that preceded the war and the giddy relief that followed.
Thank you to fellow authors Caroline Hickey and Kristin Levine, who gave spot-on comments and suggestions that made this book better on a tight deadline.
A final thank you goes to Harold Grinspoon, who founded the PJ Library, a program dedicated to mailing free, high-quality children’s books about Jewish life to Jewish families.
About the Author
Sweet Lime Photography
Tammar Stein is the award-winning author of four young adult novels including Light Years, which was named a Sydney Taylor Notable Book of Jewish Content and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia with a degree in English Literature. She has lived on three continents, in four countries and five states. She lives in Virginia with her family.
The Six-Day Hero
Cover
Title Page
Before
Part I The Wait
Chapter One
Independence Day
Chapter Two
Winds of War
Chapter Three
Post Office War Cabinet
Chapter Four
No More Teachers
Chapter Five
Pit Stop
Chapter Six
No Sense of Direction
Chapter Seven
More Bad News
Chapter Eight
Drills
Chapter Nine
The Queen of Sheba
Chapter Ten
Irony
Part II The War
Chapter Eleven
June 5, 1967
Chapter Twelve
Fog of War
Chapter Thirteen
Day 2
Chapter Fourteen
Impossible Things
Chapter Fifteen
Too Late
Chapter Sixteen
Gideon
Chapter Seventeen
Explosion
Chapter Eighteen
Hero
Chapter Nineteen
Mourning
The Wall
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover