Raquela (18 page)

“Excuse me,” she said to Mama and Papa. “I've got to go up and change. Dr. Brzezinski has asked me to dinner.”

Mama nodded. “We're going home now. Good-bye, Dr. Brzezinski.”

He bowed slightly again and kissed her hand.

Hesse's Restaurant was up a flight of stairs in downtown Jerusalem, near Zion Square. It was elegant, with white tablecloths and flower vases. At least half the graduates had come to celebrate with their families or their boyfriends.

Each graduate looked up, smiling, as Raquela and Arik greeted her. A waiter in a black jacket and black bow tie led them to a table in the far corner against the wall.

They ordered shish kebab and a bottle of red wine.

Arik raised his glass. “To you, my dear. To a brilliant future as a midwife.”

Raquela's eyes shone. She clinked her glass against his. “And to you, Arik. To my teacher.”

They sipped the wine slowly, watching each other's faces.

It seemed to her he was looking at her differently, now that she was a graduate. Was graduation a kind of climax? An end, and a beginning? Arik had taken a volume of Sholom Aleichem from his coat pocket and was thumbing through the pages. “This is the story I was looking for,” she heard him say. “Listen to this: ‘You've got to stay alive even if it kills you.' That's Sholom Aleichem's philosophy,” he said. “And it works for me, too. It tickles my patients.”

She laughed, watching his face radiate love for the Yiddish writer.

“‘You may as well laugh,' Sholom Aleichem says. ‘Even if you don't see the joke, laugh on credit. You may see the joke later, and if not, you're that much to the good.'”

She chuckled.

She wanted to tell him how she felt.

He would always be her teacher, in everything: in medicine, literature, politics, life. She wanted to be open with him. But now he was entering her life in a new way. And she could not talk.

Was it possible to fall in love with a man fourteen—nearly fifteen—years older than she?

She looked again at his face. It seemed to her it was the kindest face in the world. She had a yearning to know him better.

The next weeks gave her ample time. For whenever shootings and explosions made it too dangerous to get back to town, the doctors and nurses stayed for days on Mount Scopus. The hospital became a haven. A small city within the city, with its own special quality of life and healing.

The Holy Land became a police state. The British brought in more troops, until there were one hundred thousand soldiers. Some of the Black and Tan policemen, who had once suppressed the Irish, were sent to Palestine to keep order.

Jerusalem was hacked into ugly forbidden barriers, with streets and roads blocked off by great rusted coils of barbed wire. Hotels and office buildings were guarded by concrete pillboxes dubbed “dragon's teeth.” Tanks and armored cars patrolled the streets.

Curfew was imposed from seven at night to five in the morning. Anyone caught on the streets without permission could be arrested or shot on the spot.

Raquela had special permission to be out during curfew, as did all the doctors and nurses. After graduation, she had moved back home with Mama and Papa in Bet Hakerem. Whenever she had night duty, Hadassah's eight-passenger station wagon called for her at home at 11
P.M
. and then picked up fifteen more nurses. When the station wagon was halted at surprise checkpoints, the British soldiers stood baffled, as they watched white-aproned nurses jump out, one after the other, like performers in the circus.

During the curfew, the streets were deserted, quiet as a graveyard. The nights were punctuated with explosions and gunshots. Guerrilla fighters planted bombs. Soldiers and police, frightened, fired at anything that moved, even shadows.

But on Mount Scopus there was no curfew.

Raquela and Arik spent all their free time together. Often, while he worked at his desk, she sat reading on his divan against the wall. Then, his work finished, he joined her. They read together. They walked around the garden, smelling the roses and oleanders, holding hands as they strolled among the Jerusalem pine and the spreading eucalyptus trees that shaded the garden.

She felt happy and safe.

Yet she had doubts about him. He was attentive, affectionate. He brought her gifts he made himself. He picked pansies in the hospital garden and arranged them, like a mosaic, in empty candy boxes. When a flu epidemic felled her for a week in the infirmary in the nursing school, he brought her a fresh rose every morning.

Her roommate in the infirmary, Lea Gur-Aryeh, a short, bubbly student nurse, watched enviously.

“You're so lucky, Raquela. None of my boyfriends would even dream of bringing me a rose. He's like somebody out of the old world.”

Raquela nodded. But she was silent. Not once had he said he loved her. Until he said it, she would never be sure.…

MARCH 1946

Evening in Arik's room. His desk, the coffee table, the floor, were strewn with newspapers, even the Paris edition of the New York
Herald Tribune
.

Arik, at the desk, and Raquela, on the divan, sat tense. The radio in the bookcase was turned up. They sat glued to the words.

Dr. Chaim Weizmann was testifying in Jerusalem's handsome, towered YMCA.

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine had arrived in the Holy Land on March 7, 1946. Dr. Weizmann, president of both the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the World Zionist Organization, was the first witness.

For the last two months Arik had clipped newspaper and magazine articles for Raquela as the committee listened to Jewish and Arab leaders in Washington, London, Vienna, and Cairo. With red pencil he had marked the stories of the subcommittees' interviewing survivors in Europe and the DP camps. The reporters described the horror-filled faces of the committee as the survivors showed them pictures of their families. All burned. All dead.

In every DP camp, the survivors told them, “Palestine was promised as our homeland. We want to go home.”

Now the evening radio was broadcasting highlights of the morning testimony. Dr. Weizmann was talking. Raquela had seen the photos of this old, weary, nearly blind man. It was hard to believe those photos now as she listened to his voice. Strong. Passionate.

“
We warned you, gentlemen
,” he said. “
We warned you. We told you that the first flames that licked at the synagogues of Berlin would set fire, in time, to all the world
.”

Raquela heard him pause. He talked about the promises the Labour government had made. The room seemed to echo with the plea of the old man who had spent his life trusting the British government.

His voice broke. “
I ask you to follow the course of least injustice in determining the fate of Palestine
.”

Arik whispered, “The least injustice.”

Raquela nodded, absorbed in the words that followed.

“
European Jewry cannot be expected to resettle on soil drenched with Jewish blood. Their only hope for survival lies in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. The leaky boats in which our refugees come to Palestine are their Mayflowers, the Mayflowers of a whole generation
.”

The next witness was David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, the short stocky leader with a halo of white hair around his strong face.

Ben-Gurion was discussing the Jewish state. It was not a new idea. Back in June 1937 the Royal Commission of Enquiry, meeting around the same huge semicircular table in the YMCA, had recommended partitioning Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion, with Weizmann and Moshe Sharett, had accepted the recommendation, believing even a small Jewish state would give the Jews a homeland. But the British government rejected the findings of its own commission and instead issued the White Paper in 1939.

In May 1942 Ben-Gurion, visiting the United States, once again called for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth “integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.” It became known as the “Biltmore Program,” from the Biltmore Hotel in New York, where the extraordinary Zionist Conference took place.

Now the committee was asking Ben-Gurion to define a “Jewish state.”

His powerful voice blared through the radio. “
By ‘Jewish state' we mean Jewish independence. We mean Jewish safety and security. Complete independence, as for any other free people
.”

Ben-Gurion's words were carried live throughout the country. There was new hope. This committee was different from all the others. It had six Americans—sitting with the six Englishmen. The Americans understood the meaning of a “free people.” The Americans would make a difference.

After the hearings the committee flew to Lausanne, Switzerland, to write their report in the neutral repose of the Hôtel Beau Rivage. The twelve men strove for unanimity. They sincerely believed Bevin's promise that if their report was unanimous, he would carry it out.

It took a month of debates and compromises and soul searching. Some of the committee members had gone through a genuine conversion in the DP camps and in the Holy Land. They voted unanimously to accede to President Truman's request: one hundred thousand DPs would be allowed to enter Palestine.

Truman enthusiastically approved the report.

Joy spread through the DP camps and Palestine. The suffering of the DPs would soon be ended.

Almost overnight, the joy turned to bitterness.

Prime Minister Clement Attlee, speaking in the House of Commons, announced that the Haganah and all private armies must be disarmed before any large-scale immigration could begin.

The report of the eighteenth commission was scuttled.

Palestine was burning.

The Jewish Resistance Movement attacked the Tegart police fortresses. They organized mass demonstrations fighting the British army and police. On June 17 they blew up all the bridges on the borders of Palestine.

Two weeks later the British decided to break the back of the Jewish Resistance Movement and, they hoped, to crush the Jewish will to establish a state.

At four-fifteen
A.M
. on “Black Saturday,” June 29, Raquela, sleeping in her bedroom at Bet Hakerem, was awakened. Tanks and armored cars rumbled through the streets. In a country-wide military action soldiers burst into homes, searched attics and cellars, ripped up mattresses looking for ammunition, used dogs in kibbutzim to ferret out slicks, and arrested 2,600 men and women.

The leaders of the country, men like Moshe Sharett and David HaCohen, the Haifa labor leader, were imprisoned in the police fortress at Latrun on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway. Others were kept behind barbed wire in a camp in Rafa, on the Mediterranean Sea. Still others were imprisoned in Athlit.

David Ben-Gurion was in Paris, and he escaped.

Golda Meir, who had already distinguished herself in the Palestine labor movement, was chosen as acting head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, to replace the imprisoned Sharett.

Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, eluded the search.

Dr. Weizmann, who was not arrested, held a press conference.

In her room that night Raquela turned on the radio to hear Dr. Weizmann's voice. “
First the situation is allowed to deteriorate almost beyond hope
,” she heard him say. “
Then it is the victims of that deterioration that are punished
.”

She sat at the edge of her bed, helpless with anger.

Dr. Weizmann, who had always talked of moderation—trust the British; cooperate with them; they are still our friends—now spoke bitterly.

“
Is it not a most grotesque state of affairs
,” he asked, “
that the mufti should be sitting in a palace in Egypt, enjoying freedom, while Moshe Sharett, who raised an army for Britain of more than twenty-five thousand men, is behind barbed wire at Latrun?
”

Too agitated to sleep, Raquela switched off the radio and put on a robe. She found Mama and Papa sitting in the living room, still listening to the broadcast.

“We can't sleep either,” Papa said. “Let's have some tea.”

“I'll get it,” Raquela said.

She busied herself in the little kitchen, fixing a tray with teacups and home-baked cookies.

She returned just as the voice on the radio announced, “
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a news flash
.”

She froze, clutching the tray.

“
A pogrom today in Kielce, Poland, has taken the lives of many Jews. Exact details are not yet known
.”

The broadcast was over. Papa switched off the radio and began to pace restlessly.

“These are the Jews who went back to their homes in Poland. Not the DPs. These are the people who believed the propaganda. That the world had changed, that there is no more anti-Semitism.”

Raquela poured the tea and handed the cup to Papa. “How can any Jew want to go back to such countries?”

Papa shook his head.

The Kielce pogrom started a new mass migration to the DP camps. More ships were outfitted to carry the DPs to the Holy Land. The struggle intensified.

Fear and terror spread throughout the land.

On July 22, 1946, the Irgun, with the approval of the Haganah, telephoned the offices of the British Government at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, warning them to evacuate immediately. The building was to be bombed.

As the White Paper war continued, the southern wing of the hotel had become a fortress, housing military GHQ, the secretariat and the British civil government. Next to it were the British military police and headquarters for the Special Investigation Bureau, with soldiers and police on twenty-four-hour duty guarding the hotel, the offices, and the files kept by the British on the Jewish underground.

The commander of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, was the object of a large and intense manhunt by the British, his clean-shaved, bespectacled face on every “wanted” billboard. Begin was posing as Reb Israel Sassover, a bearded scholar living in a small detached house on Joshua Bin-Nun Street in Tel Aviv, not far from the Yarkon River. He spent much of his time in a synagogue studying the Talmud and biblical commentaries.