Raquela (19 page)

While his house and neighborhood were under constant surveillance by the British police, Begin and the Irgun planned the daring attack on the headquarters of the British rulers. At first, the Haganah command would not approve the plan. They feared an attack on the British headquarters would inflame the British to even more drastic repressive measures.

But after Black Saturday, June 29, when the British had swooped down and arrested more of the leaders of the Haganah, the Palmach, and the Jewish Agency, the Haganah command approved Begin's plan.

Just before noon on July 22, Irgun men dressed as Arabs carried large metal milk cans into the “Regence Cafe” in the basement of the southern wing of the King David Hotel. Inside the milk cans were explosives manufactured by the Irgun operations chief “Giddy” (Amihai Paglin); they had a double mechanism—one to explode half an hour after they were delivered, the other to prevent the cans from being dismantled or removed.

The next steps were carefully planned to prevent casualties. To clear the streets, a small firecracker was exploded opposite the hotel. As soon as the bearers of the milk cans were safely out of the hotel, a young woman “telephonist” made three calls. First she phoned the King David Hotel, warning that explosives were to go off in a short time. “Evacuate the whole building!” she shouted.

Next she called the Palestine
Post
: “Bombs have been placed in the King David Hotel, and the people there have been told to evacuate the building.”

Her third and final call was to the French consulate, right next to the hotel, telling them to open their windows to prevent shattering. They followed her instruction; the consulate was undamaged.

Twenty-five minutes passed. Reporters from the Palestine
Post
had already reached the King David Hotel to cover the expected explosion. Yet, to the horror of the underground fighters, there was no evacuation from the hotel.

Later the Haganah radio reported that Sir John Shaw, the chief secretary of the British administration, had refused to accept the telephone warning: “I give the orders here. I don't take orders from Jews.”

Twelve-thirty-seven
P.M
. The whole city seemed to shake. The entire southern wing exploded in the air. Ninety-one people were killed and forty-five injured.

The British arrested 376 men and women, cordoned off the Old City, and sent twenty thousand troops on a house-to-house search to find Begin and the other leaders. Begins cover held.

Palestine became an armed camp. The British were desperate. No more Jews must enter.

But the illegal ships continued to sail.

The patrols on the Mediterranean scoured the waters, found the ships, and imprisoned the people in Athlit. By August 1946 Athlit could hold no more.

The British opened new camps on the island of Cyprus as more ships with refugees were captured on the high seas.

Now there were two concentration camps after the war: Cyprus and Athlit.

MARCH 1947

Raquela was in the delivery room, helping a young mother onto the delivery table, when a nurse opened the door.

“There was a telephone call for you. Dr. Yassky would like to see you as soon as you finish the delivery.”

“Dr. Yassky!” Raquela turned. “Do you know what he wants?”

“No idea.” The nurse shrugged her shoulders and closed the door.

Raquela helped the young woman push her feet into the stirrups. What could Dr. Yassky want?

She had been working as a registered nurse-midwife for a whole year—ever since graduation—and he had not once called her to his office. Mrs. Cantor or Miss Landsmann were always the intermediaries. He summoned the doctors; they summoned the nurses.

But she had no more time to worry. Her patient was ready to deliver.

Mazal tov
. She placed the baby, washed and wide awake, in its mother's arms. Then she cleaned up, changed into a fresh uniform, and hurried down the steps to the row of administrative offices off a narrow corridor on the main floor.

Her mind was churning. What did Dr. Yassky want?

To most of his staff, he was a remote, almost mythical figure. He was the boss, the director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization.

Arik had told her stories of how Dr. Yassky and his dark-haired, dark-eyed wife, Fanny, had fled the Russian Revolution and come to Palestine in 1919. How appalled he had been by the sight of blind children in the Holy Land. Ninety-nine out of every hundred Arab children, forty out of every hundred Jewish children, had eyes scarred with the milky white film of trachoma which would blind them.

He had become a school doctor in Haifa, treating trachoma with a copper-sulphate stick, steeling himself against the pupils screaming at him in pain, “You murderer.” He cured them. Henrietta Szold asked him to take the fight against blindness to the whole country. He became
the
itinerant ophthalmologist, traveling with a little cart and horse or on a donkey.

Raquela relaxed and smiled a little, trying to picture Dr. Yassky, six feet tall, his legs dangling, sitting on the back of a donkey.

But as she knocked on his door, her body grew tense again. She was entering the private domain of the man Miss Szold had selected in 1931 to become the head of the Hadassah Medical Organization.

“Come in.” She heard his voice.

He was sitting behind his desk, a silver and black cigarette holder in his mouth. Even in his long white medical coat he looked austere. Formal. Aristocratic. His, the tight hand of authority.

“Sit down, Miss Levy,” he recommended.

She sat at the edge of the chair.

“I hope the delivery was routine.”

“It was a normal birth,” she said.

He ground his cigarette in an ashtray and filled a pipe with tobacco.

“I am sure you know about Athlit, Miss Levy.”

She nodded. “The British will probably be shutting it down soon,” she said, “now they have much bigger camps—for tens of thousands—on Cyprus.”

He focused his green eyes on her; she was struck by their sadness.

“They're not closing it. It's full of refugees. Nearly three thousand. Many have been there a long time. They've asked us to send a midwife.”

Raquela blurted, “A midwife in a concentration camp!”

The sad eyes closed for a moment. “Even in a concentration camp, men and women find ways to be together.” He wafted smoke in the air. “You're the youngest midwife in our hospital.” His austere face broke into a smile. “But even in this office I hear when a nurse is gifted. When she never complains. Willingly takes night shifts. When she is completely dedicated to the mothers and the babies she delivers.” He walked around the desk and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Can you imagine, Miss Levy, what it would mean to these survivors, still homeless nearly two years after the war, to see an attractive young woman from Jerusalem helping them bring a child into the world? It won't be an easy job. We would like you to stay three or four weeks.” He looked at her face. “Will you accept it?”

“When would you like me to go?”

“The moment you're ready.”

She knocked at Arik's door. The cries of infants filtered down the staircase.

Arik was at his desk, reading. He looked up.

“You've accepted,” he said.

She stopped short at the door. “Then you knew?”

“Dr. Yassky asked my opinion. He knew all about you; his only hesitation was that you were so young.”

She walked slowly to the divan. He followed her and put his arms around her.

“It's good you're going,” he said. “Not only for the refugees, but for us.”

“Why?”

He took her face in his hands. “I've been monopolizing you. It's not right. You must have a chance to meet other men—younger men.”

She was frightened. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“I'm trying to protect you.”

“From what?”

“From me, Raquela. I'm too old for you.”

“Fourteen years isn't such a big gap.”
Why couldn't he see that?
“Your beloved Sholom Aleichem would find an
etza
,” she said. “He would see that I'm twenty-two going on thirty; and you're thirty-six going on—let's say—thirty-three. So you're only three years older than I am.”

He kissed her cheek.

“Let's not discuss it,” he said. “You're leaving on an important mission. You're going to be the first Hadassah nurse these refugees will have seen.” He paused. “A ninth-generation Jerusalemite—you're the fulfillment of all their dreams.”

They walked slowly, hand in hand, to the portico entrance to wait for the station wagon that would take her down the mountain, past Sheikh Jarrah, through the silent curfewed streets, to Bet Hakerem.

“
Le'hitraot
, Raquela,” he said.

“
Le'hitraot
,” she repeated. It was not good-bye; it was a hope that they would see each other again.

In a country where so many had experienced tragedy and loss,
le'hitraot
was an amulet, a rabbit's foot to clutch against destiny.

ELEVEN

APRIL 1947

A
t five-thirty in the morning, Bus 8 pulled up at the station in Bet Hakerem.

Mama and Papa kissed Raquela good-bye.

Papa blessed her. “
Behatzlaha
. May you succeed.”

She climbed into the bus in her nurse's uniform and set her light suitcase near her seat. She waved good-bye to Mama and Papa, sensing their mixture of worry and pride.

The darkness was lifting. Jerusalem took on its special shimmering light as the sun rose swiftly, a delicate pink glow warming the hills. The bus window was open. She heard the birds chattering as they darted in and out of the tall pines and eucalyptus, chirping busily, like people in the marketplace.

Bus 8 sped around the empty road, passing an occasional Arab or Jewish farmer. In all of Jerusalem, there were only a few private cars and, at this hour, there were none on the road. But British tanks and armored cars were already patrolling.

She disembarked at the Central Bus Station, then boarded an Egged intercity express bus to Haifa.

“Would it be possible,” she asked the driver, “to let me off near the camp at Athlit?”

He looked at her uniform. “For a young nurse going to that desecration—that dung heap—I'd even make a detour.”

She settled herself at a window seat, watching the bus fill up with Jews in open shirts and dark trousers and Arabs in long black gowns and
keffiyehs
. Police and soldiers guarded the terminal, searching for explosives, scanning every face for men and women “wanted as terrorists.” Raquela felt the tensions in the bus terminal like raw nerves under her skin.

For the cycle of violence and repression was spinning faster than ever. Repression begat violence. Violence and terror begat more repression.

The three underground groups had split apart, differing on how to fight the repression. The Haganah and Palmach, supported by most of the population, focused on immigration, on filling the “illegal” ships with “illegal” immigrants. The paramilitary Irgun declared open guerrilla warfare; they mined roads, blew up British installations, attacked the Tegart police fortresses. The Stern Group, the smallest and most militant, set the oil tanks in Haifa ablaze, hoping to prevent the British prison ships from sailing to Cyprus with the people captured on the illegal boats.

The British reacted with more house-to-house searches and wholesale arrests. The prisons in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and especially in Acre, on the northern coast, filled up with underground fighters. The Irgun broke into Acre to free their comrades. Two hundred prisoners escaped.

Meanwhile, the mufti and his followers sat back, watching the war between Britain and the Jews with satisfaction. And the violence and repression intensified.

Bevin finally threw up his hands; on February 15, 1947, he announced to Parliament that he was turning the Palestine problem over to the United Nations. After the revolt of the American colonies and Ireland, Palestine was the greatest political failure in the history of the Empire.

The soldiers and police in the Central Bus Station waved the bus on. They had found no terrorists.

Raquela, leaning back, relieved, watched the bus pull away from the station. Jerusalem, with its coils of barbed wire and dragon's-teeth pillboxes, lay behind them.

Now they were in the Jerusalem corridor, swerving around the hairpin curves.

Raquela looked down at the biblical valleys that fell away abruptly from the winding highway. Across were the barren stubbled Hills of Judea, with huge boulders bleached white, baking in the sun since the days the prophets had walked among them.

They descended to Bab-el-wad, the gateway to Jerusalem. A long graceful yellow building swept into view around a delicate slope. It was the Latrun Monastery, whose Trappist monks had taken a vow of silence and whose vineyards had made the monks famous. Raquela looked up above the monastery toward the Latrun Tegart police station and barbed-wire camp. She stared in anger. Here the British had imprisoned the Haganah leaders that “Black Saturday,” June 29, when she had heard the tanks rumbling through the streets of Bet Hakerem. They had held them for five long months.

Her mood followed the road. Ahead were the green and golden wheat fields of Ajalon, where Joshua had commanded, “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the Valley of Ajalon.”

She breathed in the peaceful air with the strong scent of orange blossoms.

What did Athlit look like? Would it be like this gently rolling land with fruit orchards, carob groves, and vines creating their own green roots as they stretched along the sticks planted in the soil?

Or would it look like that flat land and brick-red-clay earth of Hadera, the Jewish settlement they were now passing? Or Binyamina, whose rich orange groves and banana plantations lined the road, giving way to green vineyards?