Raquela (49 page)

Instead the UN allowed Nasser to turn his military defeat into a diplomatic victory. He was not required to sit down with Israel. He was not required to make peace.

Ben-Gurion, accepting the guarantees, ordered his troops to withdraw. “This is the blackest day of my life,” he said.

He knew—as Arik and Raquela knew—as all of Israel knew—this would not be the last war for survival.

TWENTY-SIX

AUGUST 1960

R
aquela and Arik walked under the trees of the world-famous Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovoth, a massive lovely enclave of research buildings, homes, and beautiful gardens that lay between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

They chatted with African ministers of government in tribal robes and velvet headdresses. They sipped cold drinks with leaders of Asia's emerging nations—Burma, Nepal, Singapore. They shook hands with women in the exquisite gowns of Thailand and the Philippines. And when dinner was served, they dined at round tables with Nobel laureates who had come from Europe and the Americas to attend the first International Conference on Science in the Advancement of New States.

Arik, his hair gray now, had entered his middle years with grace. He walked through the semitropical garden with the serene, composed look of a doctor at the height of his career.

He held Raquela's arm possessively, nodding to friends, smiling as he watched heads turn to look at his wife. At thirty-six, Raquela had learned the art of using clothes and color to set off her regal figure and to accent the beauty of her face—the uncanny mix of Eastern and Western Jewry that gave her face its strength and vulnerability. Wherever they walked, her presence was felt at the conference.

Some one hundred twenty political leaders from forty countries on five continents had come to Rehovoth to meet Israel's doctors, midwives, scientists, economists, farmers, educators—and to learn how Israel had solved the problems of new nationhood.

Arik and Raquela had been asked to host some of the delegates who had come looking for ways to wipe out mother and child mortality.

The Reverend Solomon B. Caulker, of Sierra Leone, was their first visitor. Brought to Arik's office in Hadassah A, he was introduced to Arik and Raquela as vice-principal of the Furah Bay College, in Freetown, the oldest university south of the Sahara Desert. The handsome young black educator was also head of the department of philosophy, dean of the faculty of arts, and warden of students. He extended his hand majestically. His English was excellent.

“I've come to you, Dr. and Mrs. Brzezinski,” he said, “because I need help. In Sierra Leone, eight out of every ten infants die before they are one year old. I'd like to know what suggestions you have for saving our babies. I cannot believe that nature, God—call it what you like—loves English children, or American children or Israeli children any more than African children.” He paused. His voice was edged with emotion. “Just the ordinary maintenance of health—that is what I need to learn from you and from Israel. I was born in a jungle village. Our average life expectancy is in the low thirties. Yours has gone up to the sixties and seventies. And most of our people die of leprosy, malaria, or, worst of all, undernourishment.”

Raquela listened intently as the young leader unburdened himself. It seemed to her that his was the voice of Africa pleading for help from Israel for the crushing problems decimating his people.

“Dr. Caulker, we're here, ready to help you,” Arik assured him. “We'll send our doctors and midwives to you in Sierra Leone. And we'll take the young people you send us and train them to become doctors and nurses.”

The African leader nodded. “Yes. That's what we need. Our people still believe in magic and in witch doctors. How do we get rid of superstition? Is typhoid caused by someone who has bewitched you, or by drinking dirty water? Are your babies dying because someone who hates you has put sickness on them, or because you are not feeding them properly? I know that you, too, have suffered from colonialism and tyranny. And you had to struggle and shed blood for your freedom.”

Struggle
.

Raquela thought of the thousands of immigrants breaking their way through the British blockade. Captured. Deported. Imprisoned in Athlit and Cyprus.

And shed blood for your freedom
.

Two wars: 1948, 1956. More than six thousand young men and women dead. Raquela saw Aviad, the quadriplegic soldier in Tel Hashomer. The wasted limbs. The broken lives.

Dr. Caulker was talking with urgency, with passion. “I think that's why we feel such ties with you. We know you will help us because of your humanity. We are afraid of the big rich countries. We are not afraid of you. We know Israel will not exploit us.”

“For sure,” Arik said. “There is a brotherhood in suffering.”

They spent the next hour showing Dr. Caulker the delivery room and the maternity wards. He lingered longest in the nursery, walking from crib to crib, gently patting the tiny hands of Jewish and Arab babies.

He looked at Raquela. “Someday we will have nurseries and sparkling delivery rooms like these. I want to give our children who now die like flies the chance to grow up like yours—without hunger, without disease. There's a holy impatience in us.”

Early the next morning Raquela and Arik returned to the International Conference at Rehovoth. As she moved through the lounge of the handsome Wix Auditorium, it seemed to her the lounge had come alive. Surely this was one of the most memorable events in Israel's brief and hectic twelve-year history—this meeting of Africans and Asians in native garb, Israelis in shirtsleeves like Arik's and summer dresses like hers, internationally famous scientists in Bermuda shorts.

She felt a camaraderie, a friendship, in the air. And the excitement of creation—as if some powerful midwife were delivering not babies but new nations into the world.

On the grounds Raquela greeted some of the young African women studying midwifery in the nursing school on the Street of the Prophets. They were highly motivated, determined to go back to their native villages in the jungles of Africa and teach what they had learned.

The student nurses were part of Israel's
AID
program, which sent more than five thousand experts into the developing countries and gave scholarships to more than five thousand trainees from the Third World who were now attending Israel's universities, institutes, and medical schools.

Midmorning, the formal discussions resumed. They covered the whole range of nationhood from birth through survival: hunger; medicine; the population explosion; water; inflation; radiation; politics; science; and, perhaps most important of all, international cooperation.

Delegates from the Third World stood up and recounted how Israelis had come with their families, lived among them and taught them how to farm their land. How to irrigate their fields. How to raise chickens and process fish. How to wipe out diseases, reclaim their deserts, build kindergartens and schools, hospitals and hotels, shipping lines and airports.

A tall African described how Professor Isaac C. Michaelson, Hadassah's chief of ophthalmology, had established the first eye hospital in Liberia's capital city, Monrovia.

“Do you know what it means,” he said, “to be cured of blindness? To have your children healed of trachoma? People came not only from all over Liberia, but from Sierra Leone, Guinea, the Ivory Coast as well. No one was turned away.”

Other countries
, Raquela thought,
buy friendship by giving guns and tanks and war planes. We give of our life experience and of ourselves
.

The conference was drawing to a close. The last speaker was the young Reverend Solomon Caulker:

I came to this conference not really knowing whether there was any contribution Sierra Leone could make or how much I should be able to learn to take home. But I want to state now that these days we have spent here in Israel have become such great days in my life that I am quite sure I will never be the same person again when I return home
.

Raquela sat forward in her seat; he was the spokesman for all young nations, asking for help “to liberate the human spirit and to make us all stand up with pride and believe that we are members of the human race.”

Applause filled the hall.

Dr. Caulker was summing up: “When I came here ten days ago, it was night, it was dark, one couldn't see far ahead. One was lonely.

“When I leave here, it will be light.

“Not only physically, but metaphorically, for I go home no longer feeling that we are isolated in our problems…we belong to a great program.

“I say to all of you that when the new day dawns, as I see it dawning beyond the horizon, we shall be standing beside you to greet that dawn.”
*

JUNE 1961

It was David Ben-Gurion who selected the site for the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, soon to open in Ein Karem, in the Hills of Judea.

Standing on a mountain plateau overlooking the valley of Sorek, where once Delilah had won Samson's heart, Ben-Gurion looked at the craggy mountains bowling around him. He saw miles of empty land.

“Magnificent!” he said. “Build here. Jerusalem will grow toward the hospital.”

Now the center was finished—a huge complex of buildings of honey-hued Jerusalem stone and red and white brick. The four-hundred-twenty-bed hospital was a semicircular fortress. In case of war, three floors were built underground with connecting tunnels, equipped to be converted instantly into emergency units.

The Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, unique in the Middle East, held the hospital, the medical school, the nursing school, the dental school—and later there would be the Institute of Oncology for cancer treatment and research.

As his gift to the people of Israel, Marc Chagall created twelve stained-glass windows, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, to be installed in the hospital synagogue.

Moving day to Ein Karem was June 6, 1961.

Raquela and Arik drove to Hadassah A, to help transfer the maternity patients. Young women soldiers carried out the infants.

The convoy with doctors, nurses, and three hundred patients set off from downtown Jerusalem to the fortress hospital in the Hills of Judea south and west of Jerusalem.

Twenty army ambulances flew blue satin pennants with gold letters bearing the names of Hadassah chapters in America that had raised extra money for this historic day.

Behind the ambulances, Raquela drove Arik in their car. Like a joyous, triumphant parade, the convoy moved down Jaffa Road with people waving and shouting on the streets. Then they turned into the broad expanse of Herzl Boulevard in Bet Hakerem, and snaked up and down the mountains along the newly built Henrietta Szold Road.

Raquela drove in silence. Dr. Yassky and the ill-fated convoy to Mount Scopus flooded her mind as the convoy approached the hospital that would supplement Scopus. Would Ein Karem be safe?

At the hospital she helped move the patients into flower-decked wards, while around her the radial corridors and huge elevators filled up as 254 doctors, 514 nurses, and the staff of 1,352 moved into their offices.

Late in the afternoon, she stood with Arik in the broad courtyard in front of the hospital, watching the sun change the colors of the mountains blue, then pink and mauve.

“It's so peaceful here,” she said. “This whole panorama.”

He put his arms around her and kissed her.

“This is my dream,” he said. “That you and our boys will have a long life. That we can work in this new center. We've got the tools we need. If only—if only there will be no more war.”

She stayed in his arms, resting her head against his shoulder.

Then she lifted her head. Her eyes were glistening. “We have so much to live for.”

She looked at the majestic hills, darkening as the sun disappeared behind them. “Dear God, let there be peace.”

Arik pushed open the apartment door. They had moved to a spacious third-floor apartment on Hameyasdim Street in Bet Hakerem. “Raquela, the grant has come through!”

She hurried toward him as he handed her the letter. She leaned against the door, her face glowing with pleasure. The National Institutes of Health of the U.S. government was happy to inform Dr. Brzezinski he had been awarded a grant for a five-year project to study the problems of toxemia in pregnancy.

Under the controlled, scientific conditions in Israel, and with his long experience, his study could provide inestimably valuable information not only for saving lives in Israel but also for saving lives in the United States and in the rest of the world.

“I knew,” she said. “I knew some day you'd be famous. It's recognition you deserve.”

He put his hands on her shoulder.

“I want you to help me set up the program. Together we can get this project off the ground.”

“I will, Arik. I want to work with you on this.”

It was a good time to begin their five-year study, for the borders of Israel were relatively peaceful in 1962.

Nasser was preoccupied. He was busy waging unsuccessful warfare in Yemen, siding with the rebels against the ruling monarch, the Imam of Yemen.

He had had a number of failures after his defeat in Sinai. In 1958 he had joined with Syria to form the United Arab Republic, using the guns and arms his Russian patrons had given him—to replace the hardware he had lost to Israel in 1956. He was embarking on adventures in the Arab world.

First he sought to overthrow the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Jordan.

President Eisenhower, outraged by Nasser, whose head he had saved after Suez, now ordered U.S. Marines into Lebanon. The United States saved Lebanon.

Next Nasser turned against King Hussein, grandson of Jordan's King Abdullah, who had been assassinated for having begun peace negotiations with Israel. Ridiculing Hussein as “the Hashemite harlot…the treacherous dwarf,” Nasser instigated subversive acts in Jordan so threatening that Great Britain sent in troops, and the United States rushed supplies with permission from Israel to use her air space. This time three nations—England, the United States, and Israel—saved Jordan.