A Tale of Love and Darkness (58 page)

The Miudovniks, whose son Grisha was serving somewhere with the Palmach, had fled from their home on the front line in Beit Yisrael, and they too had landed up in our apartment, along with various other families who crowded together in the little room that had been my room before the war. I regarded Mr. Miudovnik with awe, because it emerged that he was the man who had written the greenish book that we all used at Tachkemoni School:
Arithmetic for Third-Graders
by Matityahu Miudovnik.

Mr. Miudovnik went out one morning and did not return by evening. He did not come back the next day either. So his wife went to the municipal mortuary, had a good look around, and came back happy and reassured because her husband was not among the dead.

When Mr. Miudovnik did not return the next day either, my father began to joke, as he usually did when he wanted to banish silence or dispel gloom. Our dear Matya, he declared, has obviously found himself some fighting beauty in a khaki skirt and now he's her comrade in arms (this was his feeble attempt at a pun).

But after a quarter of an hour of this labored jollity Father suddenly turned serious and went off to the morgue himself, where, thanks
to a pair of his own socks that he had lent to Matityahu Miudovnik, he managed to identify the body that had been smashed by an artillery shell; Mrs. Miudovnik had failed to recognize it because the face was missing.

*My father's cousin Ariel Elitsedek wrote about his experiences in the War of Liberation in his book
The Thirsty Sword
(Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1950).

During the months of the siege, my mother, my father, and I slept on a mattress at the end of the corridor, and all night long processions of people clambered over us on their way to the toilet, which stank to high heaven because there was no water to flush it and because the window was blocked with sandbags. Every few minutes, when a shell landed, the whole hill shook, and the stone-built houses shuddered too. I was sometimes woken by the sound of bloodcurdling cries whenever one of the other sleepers in the apartment had a nightmare.

On February 1 a car bomb exploded outside the building of the English-language Jewish newspaper, the
Palestine Post.
The building was completely destroyed and suspicion fell on British policemen who had deserted to the Arab cause. On February 10 the defenders of Yemin Moshe managed to repel a heavy attack by semiregular Arab troops. On Sunday, February 22, at ten past six in the morning, an organization calling itself the "British Fascist Army" blew up three trucks loaded with dynamite in Ben Yehuda Street, in the heart of Jewish Jerusalem. Six-story buildings were reduced to rubble and a large part of the street was left in ruins. Fifty-two Jewish residents were killed in their homes, and some hundred and fifty were injured.

That day my shortsighted father went to the National Guard HQ that had been set up in a narrow lane off Zephaniah Street and offered to enlist. He had to admit that his previous military experience was limited to composing some illegal posters in English for the Irgun ("Shame on Perfidious Albion!," "Down with Nazi British repression!," and such).

On March 11 the American consul general's familiar car, with the consul general's Arab driver at the wheel, drove into the courtyard of the Jewish Agency building, the site of the offices of the Jewish organizations in Jerusalem and the country as a whole. Part of the building was destroyed and dozens of people were killed or injured. In the third week of March attempts to bring convoys of food and supplies up from the coast
failed: the siege grew worse, and the city was on the brink of starvation, short of water, and at risk of epidemic.

The schools in our area had been closed since mid-December 1947.We children from the third and fourth grades at Tachkemoni and the House of Education were assembled one morning in an empty apartment in Malachi Street. A suntanned youth casually dressed in khaki and smoking a cigarette, who was introduced to us only by his code name, Garibaldi, addressed us in very serious tones for some twenty minutes, with a kind of wry matter-of-factness that we had previously encountered only in grown-ups. Garibaldi gave us the task of searching all the yards and storage sheds for empty sacks ("We'll fill them with sand") and bottles ("Someone knows how to fill them with a cocktail that the enemy will find very tasty").

We were also taught to collect wild mallow, which we all called by its Arabic name,
khubeizeh
, on plots of wasteland or in neglected backyards. This
khubeizeh
helped relieve the horrors of starvation somewhat. Mothers boiled or fried it and then used it to make rissoles or puree, which was green like spinach but tasted much worse. We also had a lookout round: every hour during daylight two of us kids had to keep watch from a suitable rooftop in Obadiah Street on the British army camp in Schneller Barracks, and every now and then one of us ran to the operations room in the apartment on Malachi Street to tell Garibaldi or one of his adjutants what the Tommies were up to and whether there were any signs of preparations for departure.

The bigger boys, from the fourth and fifth grades, were taught by Garibaldi to carry messages between the various Haganah posts at the end of Zephaniah Street and around the Bukharian Quarter. My mother begged me to "show real maturity and give up these childish games," but I couldn't do as she wanted. I was particularly good at collecting bottles: in a single week I managed to collect 146 empty bottles and take them in boxes and sacks to HQ. Garibaldi himself gave me a slap on the back and shot me a sidelong glance. I record here exactly the words he spoke to me as he scratched the hair on his chest through his open shirt: "Very nice. We may hear more of you one day." Word for word. Fifty-three years have gone by, and I have not forgotten to this day.

MANY YEARS
later I discovered that a woman I knew as a child, Mrs. Abramski, Zerta, the wife of Yakov-David Abramski (both of them were frequent visitors to our home), kept a diary during those days. I vaguely remember that my mother sometimes sat on the floor in a corner of the corridor during bombardments, with an exercise book supported on a closed book on her knees, writing, ignoring the exploding shells and mortars and the bursts of machine-gun fire, deaf to the noise of a score of inmates who bickered all day long in our dark, smelly submarine, writing in her exercise book, indifferent to the Prophet Jeremiah's doom-laden mutterings and Uncle Joseph's lamentations, and the penetrating, babylike crying of an old woman whose mute daughter changed her wet diapers in front of all of us. I will never know what my mother was writing: no exercise book of hers has reached me. Maybe she burned them all before she killed herself. I do not have a single complete page in her handwriting.

In Zerta Abramski's diary I find written, among other things:

February 24,1948

I am weary ... so weary ... the storeroom full of belongings of the killed and injured ... Hardly anyone comes to claim these objects: there is no one to claim them, their owners are killed or lying wounded in the hospital. A man came in who had been wounded in the head and arm, but was able to walk. His wife had been killed. He found her clothes, her pictures, and some linen ... And these things that were bought with such love and joie de vivre are piled up in this basement ... And a young man, G., came in search of his belongings. He had lost his father and mother, his two brothers, and his sister in the Ben Yehuda Street car bombing. He himself escaped only because he did not sleep at home that night, he was on duty ... Incidentally: he was not interested in objects so much as in photographs. Among the hundreds of photographs ... that survived he was trying to find a few family photographs.

April 14, 1948

This morning they announced ... that for a coupon from the paraffin book (the head of the household's book) you can receive a quarter of
a chicken per family at certain designated butchers. Some ofmy neighbors asked me to collect their ration, ifI was in line anyway, as they had to work and could not wait in line. Yoni, my son, offered to keep me a place in line before he went to school, but I told him I would do it myself. I sent Yair off to kindergarten and went to "Geula," where the butcher was. I arrived at a quarter to eight and found a line of about six hundred people.

They said some people had arrived at three or four in the morning, because the rumor ofthe distribution ofchicken started to spread before it was dark. I had no desire to stand in line, but I had promised my neighbors to bring them their ration, and I didn't like to go home without it. I decided to "stand" like the rest.

While I was in line, it turned out that the "rumor" that had been circulating since yesterday had been confirmed: yes, a hundred Jews were burned alive yesterday near Sheikh Jarrah; they were in a convoy going up to Hadassah and the university. A hundred people. They included distinguished scientists and scholars, doctors and nurses, workers and students, clerks and patients.

It is hard to believe it. There are so many Jews in Jerusalem, and they were unable to save these hundred people who were facing death only a kilometer away ... They said the English would not let them. What is the point of a quarter of a chicken, if horrors like this happen in front of your very eyes? Yet people stood in line patiently. And all the time all you hear is: "The children are getting thin ... they haven't tasted meat for months ... there is no milk, there are no vegetables..."It is hard to stand in a line for six hours, yet it is worth it: there will be soup for the children ... What happened in Sheikh Jar-rah is terrible, but who knows what is awaiting us all here in Jerusalem ... The dead are dead, and the living go on living ... The line advances slowly. The "lucky ones" go home hugging their quarter of a chicken per family ... Eventually a funeral went past ... At two o'clock in the afternoon I received my ration and my neighbors' and I went home.*

***

*Zerta Abramski, "Excerpts from the Diary of a Woman from the Siege of Jerusalem, 1948," in
The Correspondence of Yakov-David Abramski
, edited and annotated by Shula Abramski (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 5751/1991), pp. 288-89.

My father was supposed to go up to Mount Scopus in that very convoy, on April 13,1948, in which seventy-seven doctors and nurses, professors and students were murdered and burned alive. He had been instructed by the National Guard, or perhaps by his superiors in the National Library, to go and lock up certain sections of the basement stores of the library, since Mount Scopus was cut off from the rest of the city. But the evening before he was due to go, he had a temperature, and the doctor absolutely forbade him to leave his bed. (He was shortsighted, and frail, and every time his temperature went up, his eyes clouded over until he was almost blind and he also lost his sense of balance.)

Four days after Irgun and Stern Gang forces captured the Arab village of Deir Yassin to the west of Jerusalem and butchered many of its inhabitants, armed Arabs attacked the convoy, which, at half past nine in the morning, was crossing Sheikh Jarrah on its way to Mount Scopus. The British secretary of state for the colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, had personally promised the representatives of the Jewish Agency that as long as the British army was in Jerusalem, it would guarantee the regular arrangement of convoys to relieve the skeleton presence guarding the hospital and the university. (Hadassah Hospital served not just the Jewish population but all the inhabitants of Jerusalem.)

There were two ambulances in the convoy, three buses whose windows had been reinforced with metal plates for fear of snipers, several trucks carrying supplies, including medical supplies, and two small cars. At the approach to Sheikh Jarrah stood a British police officer who signaled to the convoy, as usual, that the road was open and safe. In the heart of the Arab neighborhood, almost at the feet of the villa of the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi leader of the Palestinian Arabs, at a distance of 150 yards or so from Silwani Villa, the leading vehicle went over a land mine. Immediately a hail of fire assailed the convoy from both sides of the road, including hand grenades and Molotov cocktails. The firing continued right through the morning.

The attack took place less than two hundred yards away from the British military post whose task was to safeguard the road to the hospital. For several hours the British soldiers stood and watched the attack without lifting a finger. At 9:45 General Gordon H. A. MacMillan, the supreme commander of the British forces in Palestine, drove past without
stopping. (He later claimed, without batting an eye, that he had the impression the attack had ended.)

At one o'clock, and again an hour later, some British vehicles drove past without stopping. When the Jewish Agency liaison officer contacted British military headquarters and requested permission to send in the Haganah to evacuate the injured and the dying, he was informed that "the army is in control of the situation" and that HQ forbade the Haganah to intervene. Haganah rescue forces nevertheless attempted to assist the trapped convoy, both from the city and from Mount Scopus. They were prevented from approaching. At 1:45 p.m. the president of the Hebrew University, Professor Judah Leon Magnes, telephoned General MacMillan and asked for help. The answer was that "the army is trying to reach the scene, but a large battle has developed."

There was no fighting. By three o'clock two of the buses had caught fire and almost all the passengers, most of whom were already wounded or dying, were burned alive.

The seventy-seven dead included the director of the Hadassah Medical Organization, Professor Chaim Yassky, Professors Leonid Doljansky and Moshe Ben-David, who were among the founders of the Faculty of Medicine at the university, the physicist Dr. Guenther Wolfsohn, Professor Enzo Bonaventura, head of the Department of Psychology, Dr. Abraham Chaim Freimann, an expert on Jewish law, and Dr. Binyamin Klar, a linguist.

The Arab Higher Committee later issued an official statement in which the slaughter was described as a heroic exploit carried out "under the command of an Iraqi officer." The statement censured the British for their last-minute intervention and declared: "Had it not been for Army interference, not a single Jewish passenger would have remained alive."* It was only through a coincidence, because of his high temperature, and perhaps also because my mother knew how to curb his patriotic fervor, that my father was not among those who were burned to death in that convoy.