Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment

by Arthur Koestler

  At 9.30 p.m., by the time the broadcast was resumed, a crowd had assembled in front of the District Commissioner’s Offices in Tel Aviv; they sang the anthem, stormed the District Offices, tore up the records of the Immigration and Land Registry Departments, threw the furniture through the windows, hoisted the Zionist flag and set fire to the building.

  At 10 p.m., by the time the British Police had succeeded in dispersing the rioters, the Central Immigration Department in Jerusalem was burning too; when the fire brigade arrived the building was gutted and the files containing the lists of illegal immigrants earmarked for deportation had been destroyed.

  At 11 p.m., by the time the Jerusalem fire had been put out, a new demonstration marched down Allenby Road in Tel Aviv and clashed with reinforced British Police. The Military Commander of the District imposed a curfew upon the town, and for the remaining hours of the night the country slept an uneasy sleep, until the Day of Visitation dawned.

  This was the name given to the day by the National Council of the Hebrew Community, who had chosen it from Isaiah:

  And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for help?

  To whom indeed? For a few days the Press and public opinion in Britain denounced the strangling of the National Home; American public figures protested against the “tearing up of a pact with the conscience of mankind”; there was the usual hue and cry as in the case of the Chinese, the Spaniards and the Czechs. Then all grew tired and quiet, and the law of universal indifference had its way; for the conscience of mankind is a diffuse kind of vapour which only rarely condenses into working steam.

  And so the Day of Visitation dawned.

  From early in the morning groups of boys and girls marched in military formation through Jerusalem. The Hebrew National Council, led by Glickstein, had proclaimed that it should be a day of protest with (orderly) processions, (peaceful) demonstrations and a complete stoppage of work (in all but the essential Government services). There was also to be a national registration of volunteers who were to pledge themselves to be ready for any emergency. The street walls and hoardings were plastered with posters bearing slogans like “We were here before the British and shall be here when they are gone” and “For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace and for Jerusalem’s sake will I not rest”.

  The formations converged towards the football ground of the Hebrew Secondary School in the new residential quarter of Rechavia. All wore khaki shorts, and their political affiliation was only expressed in the colour of their shirts. For once all hostile factions were marching together. They paraded on the football ground, before a blue-and-white national flag at half mast. Glickstein made a speech calling them to fight the new policy to the last drop of their blood, but without violence and disorder. Nobody quite knew what he meant but it did not matter. There were several thousands of them, tightly packed between the two goals of the football ground with its cropped dry grass burnt yellow by the sun; the heat, emotion and perspiration fused them together into one coloured lump with a collective odour, voice and impulse, ready for anything. At the end of the meeting the order was given out to march in close formation down Ben Yehuda Street to Zion Circus; but on leaving the stadium they found the street barred by a cordon of Police. At once the formation broke up and merged again into an amorphous clot, as when the molecular structure of a solid is melted down to a thick, semi-liquid mass; and as its internal heat increased this seething mass began to throw out bubbles which burst and disintegrated against the firm wall of the Police; it could be foreseen that in a minute or so the whole mass would boil over. Shouts went up and soared in shrill flutterings over the heads of the dense crowd of adolescents; behind them the smaller children pushed and shrieked in hysterical elation, ready to throw themselves upon the rifles and tommy-guns, which for them were but magnified models of tin. The hard-jawed policemen looked expressionlessly at this strange and vocal Eastern crowd which they over-towered by a head’s length and the like of which they had never seen before; then, at an order of their Commander, who had been calmly parleying with an agitated Glickstein, they gave way and watched the unruly crowd pass by—most of them with considerable relief and a few with regret. Behind their broken line the procession re-formed with cries of triumph and contempt; the blue-and-white streamers floated once more over their heads in the blazing sun, asking for refuge for their murdered kin, and for the Hebrew State.

  About the same hour, still before noon, a different crowd had assembled in the Synagogue of Yeshurun, the largest and most modern of the many prayer-houses in Jerusalem. They were all old or elderly people, about five thousand of them. Wrapped in their gold- and silver-spun praying scarves, the men stood in rows between the ascending grades of pews, alternately beating their chests and performing series of quick little bows, according to the text of their murmured prayers. The women, sitting apart in the gallery, looked down red-eyed and sobbing. While they mechanically recited the text, their thoughts roamed the brooding expanse of distant Europe, fastened on a brother’s house in Warsaw, a daughter married in Vienna, on children and grandchildren whom they would never see. For there were six millions of them caught and writhing in the rapidly tightening net between the Dniester and the Rhine; and now the Government had said that only seventy-five thousand of these would be allowed to escape—the rest, if they tried to jump, were to be thrown back into the net.

  “Blessed be the All-present, blessed be He; blessed who gave the Law to His people, blessed be He.”

  The aged rabbi conducting the service threw open the carved doors of the Holy of Holies at the back of the altar. Inside the shrine stood six tall, doll-shaped figures clad in heavy velvet tunics with lace embroidery. In place of the head each figure showed, emerging from the tunic, two pointed sticks hung with small silver bells. The rabbi bowed his knee, kissed the hem of the first figure’s velvet covering and took it into his arms. After him his aged attendants advanced one by one to the shrine, repeated the same ceremony and each lifted up one of the figures. Led by the rabbi, they formed into a procession and walked in single file round the synagogue. The silver bells tinkled thinly through the silence and the crowd pressed towards the procession to kiss the figures’ velvet hems; the women on the gallery and those men who could not get close enough blew kisses with their finger-tips. When the procession had completed its circle, the ram-horn was blown three times and the congregation answered in chorus the traditional words. Then the six figures were laid alongside each other on the altar and the rabbi and his attendants proceeded to undress them. When the bells were dismantled and the tunics taken off, each figure was seen to consist of an ancient and voluminous parchment scroll. Each scroll contained the handwritten text of the five books of Moses; they had been rescued, complete with their traditional velvet drapings and silver bells, from burnt-down synagogues in Germany. Each parchment was mounted in the traditional way on two parallel wooden spools about four feet long. The sticks on which the bells hung were the handles of these spools; by turning both in the same direction the parchment was wound from one spool to the other and could be read like a moving screen.

  The six aged men now proceeded to the altar and read in turn one specially selected verse from each of the saved scrolls. To find it some had to re-wind twenty or thirty yards of parchment, but they did it without hesitation, and found the verse with the ease of opening a book on a marked page. When the reading was over, the scrolls were dressed again and carried once more round the synagogue, the bells faintly audible over the sobs of the crowd; then they were replaced in the Holy of Holies and its door was closed.

  There was a silence while the congregation waited for the next canonical prayer, as laid down in the rigid rules of the service. But instead of intoning it the priest suddenly swerved round to face the crowd, and, lifting both arms above his head, in a thundering voice cried out the words of David’s psalm:

  “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which tea
cheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight. Bow thy heavens, O Lord, and come down: touch the mountains, and they shall smoke. Cast forth lightning, and scatter them: shoot out thine arrows, and destroy them. Rid me, and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children; whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their hand is falsehood. That our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth; that our daughters may be as the polished columns of a palace….”

  Facing the audience with his arms lifted up and tears running down his face, he stood in the poise of the ancient High Priests of Israel. Two attendants moved up to him from the right and the left, one holding the five-armed Maccabean candlestick with the candles aflame, the other a printed copy of the White Paper. He took the paper first and with a wrathful gesture of his narrow hands tore it up; then held the candles to it and let it go up in flames.

  It was an unorthodox and unheard-of thing to do; a roar broke from the crowd, which, after a few reverberations, shaped itself into the old incantation “Hear Israel, the Lord is God and God is one”. They said it thrice; then, as if a miracle had just been performed under their eyes, the men in the crowd fell into each other’s arms, shouting and crying with joy.

  They left the synagogue comforted, happily convinced that now all would be well. They clung to symbols as their fathers had done whose faith alone had enabled them to survive; and like their ancestors not so long ago, they believed in the power of the symbol to smite Pharaoh’s hosts and bring their children and grandchildren safely across the sea.

  Proudly carrying their flags and streamers, the other procession marched from the football ground to the centre of modern Jerusalem; when they reached Zion Circus they were disbanded by their leaders and told to go home. They were disappointed with this peaceful anticlimax, for all morning they had been exhorted to fight without being told whom or how; but it was luncheon-time and very hot, and they were tired and hungry, so they went home without demurring.

  In the afternoon, however, when it became cooler, they began to flock back. By five o’clock the crowd had become so dense in Zion Circus that all traffic had to be diverted.

  Zion Circus is a white, hot and dusty expanse of asphalt at the intersection of the town’s main artery, Jaffa Road, with the shopping centre of Eliezer Ben Yehuda Street. The houses are in concrete or Jerusalem stone, white or sulphur. When the sun is high, people without sun-glasses cross it with eyes, narrowed to slits. There are two cafés and a cinema. It is mainly frequented by Hebrews and on this day no Moslem ventured near it, except the Arab shoeblacks sitting in a row in the narrow shadow of the façades, and using their brushes as drumsticks on their wooden boxes to attract customers.

  The crowd shouted slogans and milled round the square between the Café Europe, Café Vienna and Zion Cinema, aimless, angry and frustrated. The Police had thrown a cordon across Jaffa Road to protect the District Commissioner’s Offices which were about a hundred yards down the road from the square, and this provoked the crowd whose only aim now became to break through the cordon and march to the District Offices. They pressed forward, were pushed back by the Police and re-formed, more defiant than ever.

  By 6 P.M. the Police had to make use of their batons and a score of people had to be carried across the square with blood-covered faces. This incensed the crowd even more and they began to throw stones and bricks at the Police, a few of whom were injured. The Police charged. For hours they had obeyed the order to stand put and face the jeering crowd with restraint; now they obeyed the order to charge, and they let fly. They attacked the crowd in groups, hitting out right and left, blind to age or sex, and the screams of their victims seemed only to increase their fury. As always when the jovial guardians of peace and order are turned loose, they were more savage than the mob, for in them brutality was paired with a good conscience. Where the crowd thinned out towards its fringes, they gave chase to single men and women running for shelter into side streets; but when they succeeded in grabbing one, a ring formed round them which tore the screaming victim from their hands, and they had to beat their way out of the ring to rejoin their panting colleagues. Several of them had their uniforms torn to shreds and a few lost their helmets and batons to the crowd.

  By 7 P.M. the crowd was smashing shop windows, among them those of a German restaurant and a British department store in Jaffa Road. The whole square was now a boiling cauldron with scuffling groups moving across it like bubbles. Then, with the fall of dusk, came a temporary lull.

  The first line of the Police had been broken, but the second stood firm, protecting the District Offices. They stood astride Jaffa Road at its intersection with a narrow side street called Queen Melisande Lane. They were armed with rifles, and though so far they had not been ordered to make use of them, the ominous dark hole of the muzzles kept the front of the crowd at a distance of about fifteen yards. Most of them had only arrived in the country a few weeks before and were rather bewildered by what they saw.

  Second from the right in the line stood young Constable Turner, a fair, good-looking lad from a village in Suffolk. Holding his rifle with a firm grip in the at-ease position, he looked at the undulating crowd before him with his wide-open, slightly bulging eyes. He had never before seen a mob behave like that and he did not know what all this shouting was about, except that one of the fellows had said that the Jews here wanted Independence, and he had added that if British rule wasn’t good enough for them, all they had to do was to buy their tickets and go home where they came from and see whether Hitler was better. That was fair enough. Not that he had any grudge against Jews, queer fish though they were; he had known one in the Force, from Whitechapel, who had been a very decent, regular fellow. And back home in Suffolk on embarkation leave he had listened to a sermon by the vicar against Hitler and Race, and how the poor blighters had their synagogues burnt down; so he had arrived in this country with pity for them and open-minded like.

  But on the other hand there was what the sergeant had said when he had given them a talk after debarkation—a regular eye-opener it had been, for the sarge knew what he was talking about, what with five years in the country and knowing the lingo and the ropes.

  “You’ll have to look out sharp,” he had said to them, “for this is a hot country. If there is no trouble with Johnny Arab, there is trouble with Moishe Jew. Johnny Arab is easy enough to get along with but he is excitable like, and when he gets excited he does a bit of shooting. He is a clean fighter though, who does most of his shooting in the open hills. Moishe Jew is a, different customer, all smiles into your face but sly. He likes planting time-bombs which go off when you don’t expect it, and ambushing in dark streets, gangster fashion. He’s also got helpers everywhere. Johnny Arab is quiet just now, but the Jew has something up his sleeve; so watch your step….”

  Constable Turner had been watching his step ever since, and if a Jewish shopkeeper or waiter talked to him, all smiles and “please” and “thank you”, he would just look at him and think that he knew what he knew.

  Just now they were all screaming again on the square like a lot of monkeys in the zoo. Having finished with the shop windows they were now smashing the telephone-boxes and street lamps. One after the other the lamps went out; then there was a flash like from a short-circuit and the rest of the lamps went out together. The square was plunged into sudden twilight, and as it grew darker the yelling and screaming increased. Young Constable Turner confessed to himself that he didn’t like it.

  In the first row of the crowd, directly opposite him, Turner had remarked an oddly dressed boy with black love-locks and black cotton stockings fixed with strings. He was pressing a velvet bag to his hips, the like of those they always carried on their way to the synagogue. The boy looked and behaved like a devil, yelling and gesticulating, and jumping up and down. Several times he was pushed forward by the pressure of the crowd almost into Turner’s arms, and then he elbowed himself back into the crowd, but he didn’t seem to be frightened. On the contrary, he was pulling faces
at Constable Turner. Turner tried to look the other way, but for some reason his gaze had always to return to the boy’s face. Just now the boy was sticking his tongue out at him—there could be no doubt about it though it was almost dark—and what with his dangling side-locks framing the dark-eyed face, and the long, pointed tongue sticking out, it was an ugly sight which almost gave one the creeps. Presently the boy started yelling at him, or rather chanting something in their lingo which Turner did not understand; nor did he guess that he, Turner, had sung those very same words himself, though in translation, back home in church. “Cast forth lightning and scatter them,” the boy yelled, dancing in a frenzy on his toes, “shoot out thine arrows, and deliver me from the hand of strange children.” Turner wished he could collar that boy, and give him a good shaking maybe, to teach him some manners. But just to stand and stare and dodge the stones thrown at you, with that grimacing devil under your nose, it kind of got you down. Well, that’s how it is, the policeman’s lot, always—or nearly.

  Now they’d started singing again, all together—their anthem or whatever it was—it sounded as if they meant to bring the houses down. And as they sang, they advanced. One could not properly see the crowd moving forward from the square, but one could see the pressure increase on those in front. They tried to hold their place, butting back with elbows and buttocks, but the pressure was too strong for them and a few lost their balance and fell, squirming on the asphalt while others tumbled over them; there were now less than ten yards of open space left and it was almost completely dark. Turner squinted at the faces of his fellow policemen; they stood rigid as if the whole show didn’t concern them. The mob was throwing stones again, not from the front, of course, but from further back where it was safe; Turner had to dodge a brick which came hurtling at him like shrapnel and missed his head by inches. And all the while the singing went on—part seemed to do the singing, part the throwing; now it swelled even more and there was a new violent push forward. Those in front were swept forward by a big wave, the whole dark mass was moving; then there was a shot followed by two others and the second man to Turner’s right gave out a yell and went down in a queer kind of spiralling slow-motion.