The Gates of Zion (24 page)

“
Eeeeeeee-haaaaaaaaa!”
David shouted as Moshe scrambled to regain his seat. “Did you see that?” David climbed steeply and banked the little craft for a better look at the chaos below. “That’s the way, darlin’,” he cried, patting the instrument panel.

For a moment Moshe was reminded of Ehud stroking the
Ave Maria
, and he wondered at the madness of the men in this war. He peered down at the Arabs, who were pointing their rifles at the blue Piper.

Small explosions from their barrels showed that they were indeed firing at the plane as they struggled to pick themselves up from the dust. Spotting the Piper’s hawklike swoop, the bus had halted momentarily; then seeing the armored car move in behind, it had lurched forward toward the band and the roadblock.

“They can’t see the barricade!” Moshe cried.

As David circled the plane, he barely seemed to notice each time the dull thud of a bullet tore through the fuselage. “We gotta go again,”

he said, pushing the throttle forward and plunging into a dive steeper than the last. “Break up that little tea party.” He gritted his teeth as he struggled to control the tiny plane.

Again the ground and the enemy rose to meet them as they plummeted toward the rocks. The rattle of a machine gun burst from the armored vehicle, spraying the air around them and shattering the windshield.

Dust filled the cockpit as David pulled up at the last possible instant, leaving the ground littered with screaming, cursing Jihad Moquades, searching for their guns.

The bus inched toward the barricade. As it rounded the corner, the dull thump of two land mines blew out its tires. David climbed out of range of the shower of bullets and quickly surveyed the damage.

Wind was streaming into the cockpit, and he had a deep gash over his eye. Below them, the bus had crept to a lopsided halt, and the Arabs rushed toward it with their rifles raised in rage.

To David it looked like a scene from a Western movie when the hostile Indians circle the wagon train.

“Use the wireless,” urged Moshe. “Call Tel Aviv for help.”

“Are you kidding?” said David. “This thing barely has wings, let alone a radio. We’ll have to try to make it to Lydda and hope they can hold out long enough to get somebody out here.”

“Dive again! Chase them away!”

“The plane won’t take it. We’ll end up in pieces.” David struggled with the rudder and set course for Lydda Airfield.

Moshe slumped in the seat beside him. Once he looked back and glimpsed a pillar of black smoke rising from the horizon.

They flew the last fifteen miles in silence, Moshe certain that he could have run the distance faster than the crippled little aircraft was flying. He felt sick with the certainty that any help that could reach the bus would reach it too late.

That afternoon, Lydda Airfield was crowded with British officers and Jewish civilians waiting for word on the fate of the Jerusalem bus. David sipped coffee in the small waiting room as Moshe paced outside and listened to the crackle of the wireless on board the British armored car. When at last the news came, it was bad:
“No
survivors. Thirty-two dead, as near as we can make out.”

A bearded man beside David crumpled into silent sobs.

16

Kibbutz

Rachel stared at the slats of the bunk above her. Outside a child threw a ball against the wall of the barracks with a steady
thump, thump, thump
.

She stopped counting after 111 thumps.

A group of women—Dachau survivors—sat at the far end of the room near the stove and murmured as they cast furtive looks in her direction. Words like
traitor
and
whore
drifted down to her, and she wondered why they bothered to lower their voices at all. She knew she was the topic of their conversation. They had survived their ordeals and kept their lives without defying the law that called for death before loss of chastity. Rachel had saved her own life but sacrificed her soul in the bargain.

She sighed and glanced around the bleak interior of the makeshift kibbutz housing. It was clean, certainly―a far cry from the Displaced Persons camps or the filth of the concentration camps. But Rachel wondered if she would ever again sleep in a real bed or set her own table for supper. Would she ever comb her hair in front of a mirror that did not reflect the images of a dozen other women jostling in line?

Netanya Kibbutz was clean, and the food was good, but it was not home. For Rachel it could never be home―not as long as others spoke in hushed tones about the brand she bore on her arm. They called her a whore and turned their backs on her. Even those Sabras, the native Palestinian Jews, who smiled or spoke kindly to her, did so only out of pity, never seeing the person who lived beneath the indelible mark of the SS.

She got up and walked slowly, her eyes downcast, past the group of whispering women. “Oh, look,” one said just loud enough for her to hear, “the whore is finally out of bed.” The group snickered and passed the comment from one to another. Numb, Rachel glanced up and smiled sadly at a frail young woman who bounced a baby on her lap.

A sneer crossed the woman’s face and she called out to Rachel, “Business is bad since you came to Palestine, eh?” The group roared with laughter as Rachel turned her head away and hurried outside.

But their mockery followed her into the sunlight.

Young children ran through the neat rows of Quonset-hut barracks, enjoying a game of tag. One small boy fell headlong into her legs as he dodged his pursuer. He hit his chin on the ground with a thud and wailed loudly for his mother.

Rachel knelt to help him up. “Are you hurt?” she asked, brushing the dirt from his ragged trousers.

“Mama!” he howled. “I want my mama!”

“There, there.” She touched his curly hair and examined his chin.

“Only a scratch. Just a little scratch. You’ll be all right.” She smiled.

From behind her she heard a high-pitched shriek from the door of her barracks. “Samuel!”

Rachel turned to see the thin woman hand her baby to another woman and run toward her and the little boy. The boy saw his mother and wailed even more loudly, “Mama! She knocked me down. This lady tripped me and knocked me down!”

As angry women gathered around her, Rachel began defensively, “The boy fell into me as he was playing―”

“Get away from my son!” shrieked the mother. “Get your filthy Nazi hands off my son!”

“But I …” Rachel tried to speak, but the woman charged at her, knocking her to the ground, then spit on her. Grabbing the still-whimpering boy by the shoulders, she scurried back into the building.

Rachel wiped the spittle from her cheek and blinked hard to hold back the tears. A dozen other curious camp members looked on silently as she rose from the dirt. Then one by one they turned their backs on her and walked away with their arms about their children’s shoulders; they must not speak to her or even let her shadow fall upon them. Only one, a timid girl of eighteen or nineteen, dared break the silence. Brushing strands of dark hair out of her face, she stared at Rachel with wide brown eyes and whispered, “In the camp, we all did what we must to survive.” Her glance traveled, unbidden, to the tattoo on Rachel’s forearm. “But never that―never that.”

This place is still a death camp, and I am one of the living dead.

Selling her body to the enemy in exchange for life, Rachel had died to her people and lost her soul. She had only one hope left: That her grandfather was still alive and in Jerusalem, where she had last heard of him. She was not like the rest of these survivors, she told herself as she raised her chin and returned to her bunk and the tablet of writing paper beneath her pillow. She had family in Jerusalem.

She had a family, and the Jewish Agency would help her find her grandfather, a Yeshiva schoolteacher in the Old City. Then she would go home.

***

David had taken off, heading for Jerusalem, barely two hours earlier, leaving Moshe at the airfield. The bullet-marred hulk they had flown in had been shoved off to a small metal hangar at the edge of Lydda. Then a new plane, identical down to the I.D. numbers, had been pushed onto the runway for David to complete his run. Ten other identical planes, all numbered VAL 572, were stored in shacks bordering the dirt airstrips near kibbutzim around the country.

“If the British ever see two of the planes at the same time, they’ll think they are seeing double,” Michael had explained. “We don’t want anybody to know we’ve got an air force, y’know―even if it is only made up of Piper Cubs.”

The sun had just touched the rim of the horizon as the Swissair DC-4

taxied onto the runway at Lydda.
Now, that’s the kind of plane we
need,
thought Moshe as he watched Flight 442 lift off over the orange groves and head slowly toward the sea beyond Tel Aviv.

By air, Moshe knew, it was only seven hours from Tel Aviv to Paris, and another fifteen to New York. This time tomorrow, the priority-mail pouch he had sent to Zionist headquarters in New York would be in the capable hands of men who could make best use of its contents.

Fragments and photographs of the scroll would be shuttled off to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for dating. And Ellie’s photograph of the dying tailor of Princess Mary Avenue would be on the desk of the editor of
LIFE
magazine with a full explanation. The press would know what to do with it. He hoped that within the week the world would begin awakening to the fact that the death camps were not the end of the Jewish struggle for survival.

“God,” Moshe whispered as the airplane became a speck in the darkening sky, “speak for us.”

***

Captain Luke Thomas tugged at his waxed handlebar mustache as he studied Ellie’s photograph of Hassan during the riot. Finally he laid the picture down on Howard Moniger’s desk. “Is there nothing more you can tell me about this fellow?” he asked, glancing around the room at Howard, Ellie, and David.

“We figured
you
ought to be able to tell
us
something.” David’s eyes flashed with impatience.

“We have run a thorough check, Mr. Meyer. The man is not—and never has been—a member of the Palestine Police Force.”

“But the uniform … ,” Ellie began, leaning forward in the large leather chair.

“Unfortunately, Miss Warne—” the kindhearted captain tugged on his mustache again—“a uniform is a guarantee of nothing but a skilled tailor.”

“Is that so?” snapped David. “So who are you?”

Howard gave David a sharp look, then said to the captain, “Luke, I called you in on this simply because we are not sure what it is all about. Frankly, before we were confident that the man was not a member of the mandatory government, we didn’t want anyone else involved.”

“I understand, Howard.” Luke nodded. “These days it’s hard to know whom to trust. The entire command is split down the middle.

Just between us, the foreign minister has made a dreadful mess out of the whole thing.”

David interrupted, “So who is this guy, and why was he after Ellie? I mean, why her?”

Luke settled back in his chair and pulled out a large, dark, briar pipe, filling it carefully from a black leather pouch. “Miss Warne,” he began, ignoring David’s aggressiveness, “I have shown the man’s photograph to several of the Hadassah Hospital staff. No one remembers seeing him the night the boy was attacked. But Yacov himself says the voice sounded familiar. I have a hunch that the fellow in the ward and the man who followed you are one and the same.” Luke smiled at her and tamped his tobacco. “There is a connection.”

“But I told you I only met the boy on Partition night.”

“And the kid’s a pickpocket, not a government agent,” David interrupted again.

“We are not sure what he is at this point,” said Luke. “But at any rate, the children’s ward is under guard.” He struck a match and drew deeply on the pipe. “Perhaps you, too, should have a guard?”

“We are making arrangements for Ellie to leave for the States within the week, Luke,” Howard volunteered, casting a quick look at Ellie as she frowned and shifted uneasily in her chair. “Until she leaves, perhaps it would not be a bad idea.”

“But I―” Ellie protested.

“Miss Warne, it is no secret how your uncle feels about the establishment of a Jewish homeland here in Palestine. I must confess that I share his views, and I am not alone among the British officers here. This fellow—” he waved his smoking pipe at the photograph of Hassan―“we know is not one of us. We do not know, however, what he could possibly gain by following you. Is there anything you have not told us? any political involvement during your stay in Palestine?” Then he glanced up at Howard. “Or perhaps I should ask you, Howard? If this fellow is an Arab agent―and I suspect that is the only answer as to his identity―why would he be trailing your niece?”

“I am simply an archaeologist―right now, anyway. My political activism can be translated into nothing stronger at this point, if that’s what you are getting at. I am not a member of the Haganah. However, if you ask me again after the Mandate ends …” Howard smiled broadly.

“You and a quarter of the British soldiers stationed here, I’m afraid,”

said Luke. “And another half will join the Arab Legion.” He turned his gaze full on David, who was not smiling. “And how about you, Mr. Meyer?”

David grunted sardonically. “You know good and well I’m a pilot for the Jewish Agency,” he answered belligerently. “There’s nothing illegal in that.”

“No”―Luke struck another match―“nor in my asking.” Then his face grew serious and he stared intently at David. “You were the fellow who spotted the ambush of the bus yesterday. I read the dispatches. Ghastly!”

“You could say that.” David glared. “Listen, I don’t know what is going on with Ellie, but until we get her out of here …”

“I haven’t had contact with anyone even remotely connected to the Haganah, Captain Thomas,” she retorted, as if resentful even of David’s mention of her leaving. “But from what I have seen the last few weeks, I can tell you that if I had half a chance of doing anything to help them, I would not be returning to the States.”