The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  “A bit of a polish, sir.”

  “So, tell us, are there lots of Zionists in Romania – terrorists, too, perhaps?”

  Like a zoologist bringing a reallive orangutan to his class, Mr. Hogden had me, the son of a native Zionist Romanian, as his exhibit. He knew of my mother’s origins because, to my everlasting mortification, she had once introduced herself to him in her heavily-accented English at a parents’ evening.

  “Now show us on the map exactly where your mother comes from,” he sneered.

  I had no idea where my mum came from, exactly. I knew about der heim – the old homestead, in a place called Negresht – but I didn’t have a clue where Negresht was.

  “Stop idling,” snapped Hogden. “You’re keeping the class waiting.” And to drive the point home he swished his cane this way and that over my head.

  To this day I cannot fully explain what happened next. All I know is that my humiliation and despair yielded unexpectedly to an irresistible surge of courage. “Geh in drerd, sir,” I blurted out.

  “Gay in what?” hissed Hogden.

  “Geh in drerd, sir,” I repeated intrepidly.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s the name of my mother’s village, sir.”

  “Is it? And where exactly is it? Show us on the map.”

  “Here, sir,” said I, pointing to the Carpathian Mountains.

  He peered over my shoulder: “I can’t see any Gay-in-something.”

  “No sir. It’s a small village, too small for this map.”

  Hogden gazed intently at the Carpathian Mountains. “What did you say the name was again?”

  “Geh in drerd, sir.”

  The bigot stroked his chin and mused out loud, “Ah yes, of course. The name has a distinctive Latin ring to it, which is most characteristic of the Romanian language whose origins are largely Latin. What are the origins of the Romanian language, boys?”

  “Largely Latin, sir.”

  At which point the bell rang, causing Hogden to gather up his belongings and make his exit, causing me to feel a huge rush of jubilation. For I had just given this anti-Semite his comeuppance. “Geh in drerd ” is Yiddish for “Go to hell,” and as far as I was concerned, I had feathered and tarred him good and proper.

  Perhaps it was because I had by this time discovered a religious Zionist youth movement called Bnei Akiva – Akiva’s children, named after the ancient scholar-warrior hero of the Jewish war of freedom against the Romans – that I dared be so impudent and bold. Today, when every value is contested and contestable, some readers might find it difficult to understand how, after the Holocaust, one such as me could become besotted to the point of almost mystical worship, with the idea that a new sort of religious Jew was called for, a scholar-peasant-fighter dedicated to building Utopia in the Promised Land through the establishment of religious kibbutz settlements to redeem the barren wastes and hasten the day of national freedom.

  The romance of it so seized my imagination that a week or so later, when I graduated high school, I joined a training farm in the English countryside to ready myself for a life of pioneering and toil on the soil of Eretz Yisrael. And being such an exemplary devotee of this Bnei Akiva ideal, I was selected to travel to Jerusalem to attend a year-long course for cadres of Zionist activists at The Institute for Overseas Youth Leaders, commonly known as the Machon. It was a time when visas to Palestine were so hard to come by that, in obtaining one, I decided in my own mind I would not come back.

  Came the day of departure, Monday the third of November, 1947, and I found myself waving farewell to an adoring family while listening to the most beautiful melody a young man heading for adventure can possibly hear: the steamy puff and jerk of the train pulling out of the railway station. I was eighteen, and I was on my way to Marseille to board a ship called the Aegean Star bound for Palestine.

  As the train gently gathered pace and the waving hands of my brothers and sisters vanished from view, my excitement was suddenly moderated by melancholy – a stab of emotion that left me unstrung. It was a strange and nervous unease. I was leaving home, possibly for good. God knows when I would see my family again, not least my mother, who was bedridden with cancer. I opened the notebook which I had bought as a diary, and spontaneously scribbled on its first page:

  I went in to say good bye to Mammy. She is so sick. Dear God, I pray You fervently to return Mammy to normal health speedily. I saw this morning when I said good bye her true and noble character. She cried a little but in spite of her bad health she held me tight and blessed me with a courage that is only common to my mother. I got a lump in my throat but quelled it down. I then took my leave of Daddy. I owe him more than I can pay to him. He has provided for me handsomely, more than another father would have done. Please God, bless my dear mother and father, for they deserve to be blessed.

  And so I take my leave. It is a beautiful November morning. While I sit here I am overcome with a feeling of love and gratitude for my whole family. Please God, keep them safe. At the pit of my stomach there exists some inexplicable feeling. It is not excitement; it is a deep appreciation for your loved ones.

  On arrival in London I purchased for myself a watch with the money given to me as a present from my brothers and sisters.

  The author at the Machon (Institute for Overseas Youth Leaders),

  Jerusalem, November 1947

  Chapter 2

  Desperate Hopes and Savage Defiance

  The Aegean Star was a rusting steamship captained by a Greek mariner who strutted about in immaculate starched whites emblazoned with gold-braided cuffs, collar, and shoulders. From his bridge, he looked down his nose upon a cobbled, messy wharf bustling with pre-departure activity – winches, cranes, stevedores, crates, barrels, sacks, and teams of blue-smocked porters, rank with garlic, heaving passenger trunks up the gangway. A convoy of dilapidated yellow and green motor buses chugged into view, disgorging a procession of gray, matchstick women, men, and children, ill-clad and disheveled.

  Without any spoken command, they arranged themselves in line in front of trestle tables manned by uniformed French officials, huddling one behind the other with the myopic, soup-kitchen stare of the downcast, long conditioned to obeying roll calls. Most of them, having no passports, clutched International Red Cross documents attesting to their stateless, refugee status as Holocaust survivors. Thick-muscled stewards herded them toward steerage, while the captain scrutinized them from above with a mean eye; resentful, perhaps, at having to make a living off Jewish charity money by transporting these Holocaust survivors from a place they were not welcome to a place they were not wanted.

  “Hear this,” he shouted at them in guttural English through a megaphone. “All passengers without valid entry certificates for Palestine travel on my ship at their own risk and responsibility. If, on arrival at Haifa, any one of you is arrested by the British authorities, you will obey their orders and disembark from my ship without resistance.” And then, with extra bite, “There will be no disorder on my ship.”

  The refugees looked up at the captain passively, apparently accustomed to metallic voices barking at them through loudspeakers in languages they did not understand. I, wanting to get a closer look, descended to the lower deck and stumbled into a Yiddish babble of befuddled survivors trying to make sense of what the captain had just said.

  “Vos zugt der admiral? ” – What’s the admiral talking about? – asked a young ultra-Orthodox boy of a neighbor.

  “Zol her ge’in brechen a fus,” – Let him break a leg – snickered the neighbor in reply.

  The Aegean Star was an old tub. She throbbed, quivered, and rolled as she moved across the Mediterranean, so that only the most intrepid risked the shipboard games. By far the most bracing of these was a ping-pong tournament on the lower stern deck, where the steerage refugees had set up a warped table. Here, between rusting anchor chains, lines of gray laundry, and cast-off deckchairs, two undersized teenagers who looked like invali
ds but played like combatants bashed the ball this way and that, their faces harsh, their stances tense, their strokes deadly.

  One was the ultra-Orthodox lad. He was a yeshiva boy who looked about my age, and was dressed traditionally. Whenever he thrust forward in an offensive burst, his bekeshe[1] flung open to reveal wildly swinging ritual fringes tucked into his black pantaloons. And when he laid out his strokes passionately, his long, tightly-curled peyot [2] flew over his shoulders like a horse’s reins. Planted on his head was a black velvet pie hat, from the back of which protruded a white crocheted yarmulke. Deep scars parted both his eyebrows, and his beard was as flimsy as candy floss. His grimy garb hung loosely on his body and made him look like an emaciated scarecrow.

  Yiddish-jabbering admirers crowded around him when he won the game hands down, but he burrowed straight through them to plant himself in front of me as if sporting for a fight. He did a long, slow slide with his eyes, fanned his sweat with his bat, and insolently asked, “Where are you from, macher [hotshot]? You’re not one of us. You’re not steerage. Who are you?”

  I gave him my name, and told him I was from Manchester, England, en route to a study course in Jerusalem. He gave me his name, Yossel Kolowitz, and told me he was from Auschwitz, Poland, en route to volunteer for Menachem Begin’s army, the Irgun. “The Irgun is going to drive the British out of Palestine,” he bragged. And then, with a cocky smirk, as if to say, I can make mincemeat out of you any time, he goaded, “I bet you can’t play chess.”

  “I bet you I can.”

  “Then I’ll take you on. And I’ll bet I can smash you in less than ten moves. Want to try?” He spoke with the phony confidence of an unsure youth pretending to be sure of himself.

  Half an hour later, as I was setting up the chessmen in my cabin, he walked in without a knock. “I’ve brought us some nosh,” he said, retrieving a golden melon from under his bekeshe. “I got it from your first class kitchen.”

  “You stole it?” I was appalled.

  Dismissing my censure, he chuckled, “Deception is my secret weapon, hotshot. It’s how I survived Auschwitz.” He rolled up his sleeves to reveal a turquoise death camp number tattooed into the chalky skin of his arm, and from a sheaf tucked inside his belt he produced a stiletto. As he sliced the lean blade into the thick melon flesh I caught sight of an SS emblem embedded in the knife’s bone handle.

  “I’m black,” he announced. “I’m always black. You go first.”

  We played three games in almost total silence, and each time he finished me off in quick moves.

  “It’s my Talmudic training,” he boasted. “Keeps my mind razor sharp. In Auschwitz I studied Talmud in my head. Played chess in my head, too. Played in the cabaret as well.”

  “Cabaret?”

  “Sure, the Auschwitz cabaret.”

  Like a wily showman, he presented a gruesome tale about how his father had been a badchan – a traditional Yiddish wedding entertainer – and how he had picked up sufficient tricks of the trade to amuse the suffering Jews in the rat-filled Auschwitz blocs with jokes, mimicry, and stunts. One day, just before Christmas, he was hustled away by some guards. Expecting to be shot, or hanged, or maybe just tortured to death, he found himself instead being escorted to the office of the camp commandant, where he was told that his one-man performances had been noticed and that, henceforth, he would be given kitchen duties to fatten him up in time for the commandant’s Christmas party.

  “What a party that was!” cooed Yossel, grinning in a crooked sort of way. “What a show I put on!”

  He was, he said, by turns, mimic, ventriloquist, magician, and comic. He did so well he was ordered to expand his repertoire for the further entertainment of the executioners.

  “You keep us laughing and you keep on living,” was the deal.

  “But trust my luck,” he went on lamely, “I came down with dysentery and was kicked out of the kitchen. A few days later I became so hunger-crazed that I sneaked back in and stole some scraps. An SS guard caught me, and bashed me across the brow with his rifle butt. And that’s how I got these.” He was pointing to his scarred eyebrows. “And then, on the day I was liberated, a Russian soldier shot that guard dead and that’s how I got this.”

  Brandishing the Nazi knife in one hand, he ran the other through his shiny peyot, stroking and curling them with an automatic motion, and while he was doing this his features collapsed into a terrible sadness, and he whimpered, “You want to know what happened to my family in Auschwitz? They gassed my father, and my mother, and my brother, and my two sisters. There’s no one left in my whole family but me.”

  The hush that followed was all the louder for Yossel’s muffled sobs mingling with the thump and throb of the ship’s engines and the sounds of the sea. I shivered. He had lived a nightmare beyond anything I could comprehend.

  When our glances finally met he smiled in a cold, mirthless way and, all posturing gone, said he wanted to share a deep confidence. He was hell-bent on joining the Irgun because back in Poland his father had been a staunch supporter of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin. From his father he had learned that only the Irgun’s militant methods would succeed in driving the British out of Palestine. However, he had two uncles he must first meet. Both had offered him a home. The trouble was he didn’t know which one to choose.

  “Read these,” he said, extracting two well-thumbed letters from his pocket.

  The first was from his father’s brother, a yeshiva scholar in Meah Shearim, Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. It was written in a Hebrew script as impeccable as that of a Torah scroll, every word delicately realized.

  “Your murdered parents,” wrote his uncle, “lived for one thing – to rear you and your brother and your sisters as honorable, knowledgeable, and God-fearing Jews. Now you, Yossel, as the sole surviving member of your family, will surely wish to perpetuate their memory by building in Jerusalem a home of your own that will be a bastion of Torah and Yiddishkeit. In their name, Yossel, I stretch out my hand to you, I embrace you as my own son, and I ask you to come to where you belong. Please join us in Jerusalem.”

  The second letter was from his mother’s brother, a member of a secular kibbutz called Mishmar HaEmek in the Jezreel Valley. It said: “Yossel, it’s time to rid yourself of that old ghetto mentality, with its mumbo-jumbo texts and Talmud-obsessed rabbis whose anti-Zionist fanaticism ensnared thousands and thousands of Jews in the death trap of Nazi Europe. Start afresh, Yossel. Transform yourself into a new Jew. Forget the past with its religious superstitions. Be free. Get rid of that yeshiva garb. Join us. We are a kibbutz of socialist ideals. You belong here.”

  “Nu – what do you think?” Yossel asked, his fretful eyes holding mine.

  What was I supposed to say? I stared blankly up at him and he stared darkly down at me, stroking, curling, and recurling his peyot. Finally, I babbled, “I’m not the person for this.”

  Yossel Kolowitz hurriedly rose and made for the cabin door, furious at himself at having wasted his time confiding in someone as lacking as me. There, at the door, he swung around and, in that put-on swagger of his, snarled, “I’m going to do something that will shock you, hotshot. I’ve no papers, no passport. I’m an illegal. And I’m not going to let the British catch me and put me behind barbed wire. I’ve spent too much of my life in concentration camps already. So when we get to Haifa I’m jumping ship.”

  I tried to hide a thick swallow. “And where will you go? To which uncle?”

  “Who knows? All I do know is I’m going to learn how to use a gun and join the Irgun.” With that, he slammed the cabin door, causing me to shudder inwardly, wondering what might become of an orphan so haunted as he.

  At the end of its five-day journey, the Aegean Star approached the Palestine shore and we all crowded the rails, soaking up the view of Haifa. The faces of the steerage passengers were particularly radiant. One began to sing, hesitantly at first until, bit by bit, his song swelled and multiplied until virtually the who
le vessel was alive with the stirring stanzas of the Zionist anthem of hope, “Hatikva”:

  As long as within the heart

  A Jewish soul yearns,

  And forward, toward the east,

  An eye turns to Zion,

  Our hope is not yet lost,

  Our hope of two thousand years

  To be a free people in our land,

  The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

  Survivors who thought they had no tears left, sobbed.

  When the Aegean Star heaved to the dock, a battalion of British soldiers dressed in safari-like uniforms, red berets on their heads, trotted to their positions alongside the ship. They looked invincible. Behind them stood clusters of British policemen in starched uniforms, brassy parade-ground belts, navy-blue peaked caps, and burnished boots. With the cool confidence of jailers taking the measure of a convict transport, they scanned the Holocaust survivors crowding the ship’s lower railing, picking out the illegals by the looks on their faces.

  A gangplank was heaved out from a metal door in the belly of the ship, and a British officer barked an order that sent a contingent of the red-bereted paratroopers running up it with short springy steps, rifles at the ready. Then a clipped upper-class English voice, authoritative yet reasonable, declared over the captain’s megaphone:

  “Attention all passengers! Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please! Regular ticketed passengers will be so kind as to assemble in the main dining hall for passport inspection. Steerage passengers who have valid papers of entry into Palestine will be so kind as to remain in the stern section until escorted to the main deck for document inspection. Other passengers who do not have valid certificates of entry into Palestine will be so kind as to wait in the steerage section until all other passengers have disembarked. Your fullest cooperation will be appreciated. Thank you.”