Raquela (2 page)

“Is no one stopping them?” Papa demanded. “The British? The Haganah?”

The Jews of Palestine had formed small groups to defend themselves. They called themselves the Haganah—the Hebrew word for “self-defense.”

“I saw some Haganah men with guns,” Zayda said. “Wherever they appeared, the Arabs ran away. And I saw some British policemen on horseback chasing them. But they were only a handful; the Arabs are thousands. They must have been brought into Jerusalem from all over the country. Nissim, take the family and hide. Now I have to leave. It'll be sundown soon. If I can't get a bus, I'll have to run all the way home to Mea Shearim.”

Zayda flew out of the garden gate.

“We have no time to waste,” Papa said. “We must go straight to the Seminar.” He looked out the gate, down Boulevard Street. “I see people running already. The news must be spreading fast. Ah, thank God, here are our boys.”

Twelve-year-old Jacob and nine-year-old Yair entered the garden. Jacob was a runner for the Haganah. He looked at Papa. “You've heard?”

Papa nodded.

Jacob caught his breath. “We're expecting trouble from Deir Yassin and Ein Karem.” These were nearby Arab villages. “I have five blocks; I have to tell the people to go to the Seminar immediately. I'll meet you up there.”

Papa held Raquela's hand. Mama and Yair hurried out with the two baskets each family kept ready for just this emergency—one filled with clothing, the other with food. They ran down their street, then turned into the circle and raced up the Street of the Circle to the David Yellin Seminar, a teachers' seminary and school.

Raquela had watched the Seminar rise, like a romantic castle, on the highest hill. Not yet completed, it cut the sky, a huge bird of honey-colored stone with three arches in front and two long wings folded back. Someday there would be broad entrance stairs; now there was a concrete incline, and, inside, wooden planks formed a slanted runway from floor to floor.

Looking up at the parapets, Raquela saw two seventeen-year-old boys she knew, holding rifles, scanning the road for Arabs.

Grasping Papa's hand tightly, she ran up the concrete incline with Mama and Yair trailing with the two baskets and a pile of blankets. The building was already filling up with people as they mounted the wooden plank to the second floor.

The neighbors had long ago decided that if trouble came, the Seminar would be their sanctuary. Taking a lesson from the American pioneers, they had built it like a fortress. Here they could stand together and defend themselves. Each family's space had been carefully staked out according to the number of
balatas
—eight-inch-square tiles—on the floor. Papa had been given space in the unfinished synagogue, where other families were already camping in little clusters.

Mama spread some blankets on the tiles and bedded Papa down. His tall, strong body was burning.

She took a swift survey of the narrow synagogue. Arched windows with no glass, no protection.
Cold balatas
, cold tiles. Jerusalem days could be broiling in August, but the nights were always cool, and sometimes freezing.

“I'm going home,” Mama announced, “to get more blankets and my warm featherbed quilt.”

“Tova, don't go. It's too dangerous out there.”

Raquela heard the anxiety in Papa's raspy throat.

“Don't worry, Nissim,” Mama said. “I'll be careful.”

Raquela clung to Mama's skirt. “Don't go, Mama. Don't go.”

“I must, child. Papa is sick. I don't want him getting sicker, lying on that cold floor with the wind coming in at night.”

“I'll give him my sweater. Give him my blanket. I can sleep on the tiles. Please, Mama, don't go.”

“I've got to, Raquela. And I'll bring back your crayons and your picture books.”

Raquela stumbled down the wooden plank after Mama. “Wait, Mama, don't go.” She followed Mama toward the door.

Papa called out, “Yair, go after Raquela. Get her back.”

Yair dragged her back into the fortress-school, still weeping.

Within half an hour, Mama was back, carrying blankets and a thick featherbed quilt. Through the open windows the family could see the sun beginning to sink behind the hills. Mama took two small candlesticks from one of her baskets, set them firmly on the white cloth she had spread on the tile floor, covered her eyes, and recited the Sabbath prayer.

More candles were lit in the little campsites all over the half-finished synagogue. The families joined in chanting the love song to the Sabbath, the poem that Jews all over the world sang at dusk:

O come, my friend, to meet the bride,
O come and welcome the Sabbath queen
.

The magic of Shabbat cast its familiar spell over the school. Raquela forgot the terror outside.

Shots rang out from the roof. A cascade of bullets rocked the building. Raquela hid under the blanket and squeezed herself into Papa's protective arms.

Instantly the women blew out the Sabbath candles. The sun was gone; the room was in total darkness. The families huddled together. Were they safe, even in their fortress-school?

Footsteps resounded on the wooden planks. The front door opened, and banged shut.

Mama whispered to Raquela, “Come, child. Get under the featherbed and try to sleep.”

Raquela lay with her eyes shut, but she could not sleep. From a family group next to theirs, she heard a woman weeping. “Did we move up here to Bet Hakerem to be slaughtered?”

“Sh-sh”—Raquela could almost see Mama trying to calm the woman—“don't talk that way. We came here for our children, to get away from the crowded city, to give them good air and room to grow in.”

“Good air!” the woman mocked. “Room to grow! They may never grow. We may all be killed.”

Raquela lay under the warm quilt, frozen with fear.

Raanan Weitz, one of the seventeen-year-old sentries, entered the synagogue. He was carrying a rifle and a flashlight.

“We've driven them off,” he announced.

Raquela, still awake, could hear little prayers of thanks going up around the room.

“We saw them from the roof,” Raanan explained. “A whole gang of Arabs coming across the wadi from Deir Yassin.”

Deir Yassin, an all-Arab village, was known to be a hotbed of fanatics. Playing on the rocks in Bet Hakerem, Raquela could look right across the riverbed to the Arab village she and her friends dreaded most.

Raanan tried to put the people's fears to rest. “We scared a whole bunch of them with our rifles, shooting from the roof. Then we ran down to make sure they hadn't penetrated Bet Hakerem. Sure enough, they had got into some of the gardens and were entering the houses.”

Raquela listened, her heart beating wildly, as Raanan went on.

“When they saw us, they beat it back across the wadi to Deir Yassin. We're safe now. You can all go to sleep.”

Saturday afternoon, flames lit the sky.

“Motza is burning!”

The words raced through the crowded halls. Everyone knew someone in Motza, the picturesque little resort village in the Hills of Judea.

An hour later, a young man entered the Seminar. He was taken immediately to Menachem Orshansky, a burly dark-mustached man who represented the Haganah in Bet Hakerem. The men and women of Bet Hakerem had not yet officially joined the Haganah. Orshansky, who had been an officer in the Russian army before the Revolution, had escaped from Russia, joined the Haganah, and now commanded the volunteers in Bet Hakerem's defense unit.

He called the people together in the auditorium. Papa, still feverish, insisted on going despite Mama's protests. The two hundred people—men, women, teenagers, toddlers, infants—assembled on the second floor. Raquela sat in Mama's lap.

Orshansky stood in front of the auditorium, lifting his hand for silence.

“We have a messenger from Haganah headquarters. They sent him to find out if Bet Hakerem needs help and to tell us what's happening in Jerusalem and Motza.”

The young man, scholarly-looking with thick glasses, stood next to Orshansky. “Jerusalem is secure!” he said.

Relief swept through the room.

“We were lucky in Jerusalem. We had not only the British police, who really tried to quell the riot, but also the Haganah. And we had a group of Oxford students—Christians—who happened to be in the Holy Land. When they saw what was happening, they asked the police for guns. Those English students were incredible. They helped save Jerusalem.”

“Thank God,” Papa said, in a hushed voice, to Mama. “But if only we could find out if my mother is safe.”

Raquela envisioned her grandmother, Señora Vavá, sitting on the windowsill, looking down at the Old City. Had Arab mobs, bursting out of the Jaffa Gate, broken into her grandmother's house, just outside the walls of the Old City, the way the Arabs of Deir Yassin had broken into Bet Hakerem? She felt numb. Señora Vavá had to be safe.

The people were murmuring, asking questions about what had happened in Jerusalem. Orshansky interrupted. “
Sheket
—quiet. Now we want to hear about Motza. Our messenger was there; let him tell you.

The bespectacled messenger began talking rapidly. Raquela tried to listen, though some of the words were unfamiliar to her.

“Yesterday, Friday morning, when the people of Motza heard about the riots in Jerusalem, a few of them said, ‘Let's go to Jerusalem and ask the Haganah for protection.' But they didn't go. Do you know why?”

The people shook their heads in silence.

“The sheikh of Colonia, the Arab village next to Motza, came himself on horseback and swore by Allah that if any Arabs came up from Jerusalem and attacked them, he would return with his own Arabs and defend them. Were they not his good friends? Did they not buy all his fruits? The people of Motza were reassured.”

Raquela saw Papa breathing hard.

The messenger's voice was the only sound in the crowded hall. “The Arabs did not come from Jerusalem. They came from Colonia. Yes, the sheikh himself was leading them. They knew all the houses. They broke down the doors. Murdering, looting, burning.”

Raquela burrowed into Mama's body. Mama tried to stand up, and whispered, “Let's go back to the synagogue, Raquela.” But Raquela seemed unable to move.

“They smashed their way into one of the rest homes, butchered the owner, his son, his two daughters, and two guests from Tel Aviv. One of them was Rabbi Solomon Schlacht, eighty-five years old.”

A cry ruptured the hall. Raquela put her hands over her ears.

“Where were the British?” Papa called out.

“Where were the British?” Orshansky mocked. “Where are the British in Bet Hakerem? True, they were in Jerusalem. But they're still trying to be ‘neutral.' They allow the Arabs to carry as many rifles as they want. We're arrested if they catch us with even a rusty old pistol.”

Papa's breath seemed strangled. Cold sweat gathered on his forehead.

The Haganah messenger went on: “Word came to headquarters that Motza was burning. A group of us jumped into a car and drove up the mountain to the village. The moment the Arabs saw our car, they fled down the ravines, carrying all the loot they had stolen. The minute they see our guns, they run. They attack only defenseless Jews.” His voice changed. He spoke slower now. “We tried to put out the fires. We went into the houses. Whole families were dead.” He paused, looking around the hall. “Do any of you know the Makleff family?”

Raquela saw the look of horror in Mama's eyes.

“I do,” Mama called out. “One of the girls was my classmate; we taught together.”

He looked straight at Mama. “The Makleff family have been murdered. Only Moti, their nine-year-old son, is alive. He hid under a bed and watched the massacre of his father, his mother, and his entire family.”
*

All night in the darkness the families sat in their makeshift compounds, talking. What was happening in other parts of Palestine? Were the Arabs rioting in the north? The west? The desert?

This was the second serious riot. The first one had started when a handful of Arab terrorists protested the Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration! On November 2, 1917, as the First World War I raged on, British prime minister Lloyd George, grateful to the Jews for their part in the war and sympathetic to the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland, authorized his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to proclaim to the world, “His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

The Balfour Declaration was celebrated with joy throughout the Jewish world; the dream of returning to the Promised Land, revived by the Viennese-Jewish playwright Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, was to be fulfilled. Both Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour were deeply religious men, steeped in the Bible. According to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the distinguished scientist, statesman, and leader, the two men “understood as a reality the concept of the Return. It appealed to their tradition and faith.”

The allies, meeting in San Remo, Italy, in 1920, had confirmed the pledge given in the Balfour Declaration. In the Middle East, once part of the Ottoman Empire, British and French rulers replaced the Turks, and in 1922 Great Britain was given the “mandate” by the League of Nations to administer Palestine and establish the “national home for the Jewish people.”

A small fringe of the Arab community went on a rampage, denouncing the Mandate. “There will be no Jewish homeland in Palestine!” they shouted. But they had little influence on the masses of Arabs who lived side by side with the Jews. For these Arabs the words “no Jewish homeland” had little meaning. Their own needs were crushing: to fight starvation, disease, blindness, to keep their babies alive. Under the Turkish rule there had been almost no medical care, and there were inadequate medical services under the British. Medical care came from their neighbors, the Jews, who were determined to wipe out the dread diseases and to keep Jews and Arabs alive.