Raquela (30 page)

Gad and Ike ushered the two young women up the companion-way to the captain's wardroom. The cook set the captain's table with a gay red-and-white-checked cloth and soon placed before them heaping platters of fried chicken, coffee, and for dessert, a bowl of figs and grapes.

“I'm so stuffed,” Esther said. “I can hardly move.”

Raquela patted her stomach. “I haven't tasted food this good in years. Especially not in Cyprus. Most of our food at the hospital comes in cans.”

Gad beamed. “There's plenty more aboard. And you're always welcome.”

The muted light in the wardroom cast a soft glow on his face. Raquela felt his presence, his outward gentleness and quiet inner strength. There was something electric about him. Magnetic. Mysterious.

Eager to know more about the young sea captain, she said, “It's hard to think you and Ike—you're both so young—could have captained this whole incredible mission.”

Gad spoke softly. “It's a fascinating adventure. Would you like to hear about it?”

Raquela nodded. Esther said emphatically, “You bet we do.”

While they sat around the table, as the ship rolled gently at anchor, Gad began the tale of the unsung voyage of the two ships.

In the summer of 1947 in New York City, three people, intimately involved in buying ships for the “illegal” immigration, found the United Fruit Company's
Pan York
and
Pan Crescent
, called the two
Pans
because they had sailed under the flag of Panama.

The three people were Rebecca Shulman, a Hadassah president; Morris Ginsberg, president of the American Foreign Steamship Corporation; and Dani Shind, one of the three top men of the “Mosad.” The Mosad le-Aliyah Bet, the Committee for Illegal Immigration, ran the whole operation; by this time they had already moved three hundred thousand Jews across Europe and had purchased one hundred thirteen ships. The two
Pans
were the first “big ships,” old, built in 1901, but cheap and fast.

In the States the ships were repaired, and to help pay some of the Mosad's skyrocketing costs, they were loaded with trucks and cars and regular cargo for ports in Europe.

They discharged their cargo and prepared for their new assignment. The
Pan Crescent
sailed to Venice, where some two hundred Italian workmen undertook to make repairs. The
Pan York
waited in Marseille.

The crews of the two
Pans
were made up of Italians, Spaniards, Palestinian Jews from the Palmach, and half a dozen Americans who had sailed on the
Exodus
.

At last the work on the
Pan Crescent
was completed. The day she was scheduled to sail, a mine exploded in the engine room. An underwater plate blew out. Water rushed into the hold. The ship listed and began to settle in the sandy bottom. Ike and the handful of American and Palestinian Jews on board got the pumps working and emptied the water. Italians nailed up the huge crater with wooden boards, and the
Pan Crescent
rose from the dead.

Investigation convinced the Mosad the British had sabotaged the vessel. The British Foreign Office had set up a special espionage office called “Illegal Jewish Immigration” and flung a network of agents around the globe to halt the march to Palestine—by any means, even sabotage.

Gad was ordered to take on huge supplies of food and oil, and to stand by in Marseille until he could rendezvous with Ike.

But Ike was having still more trouble.

The Italians, pressured by the British agents, refused to sell him fuel. For three weeks he waited, and still no fuel. He decided to make the run with the scant oil left in his tanks. He ordered the engines fired. Under cover of darkness, the
Pan Crescent
slipped out of Venice.

The two
Pans
now sailed for Constanza, in Romania, where they were to pick up their human cargo. British destroyers were instantly on their tail, as they moved down the Adriatic into the Mediterranean, then through the Aegean toward the Straits of Bosporus.

Nearing Constanza, they were caught in a storm; the Black Sea lived up to the fearsome name the mariners had given it. Torrential rains tossed the ships like matchboxes in the sea.

With his last drops of fuel, Ike navigated his ship through the wartime mines still floating outside the harbor. He joined Gad and the
Pan York
crew in Constanza.

Here the two
Pans
were transformed for their historic mission. The planks Raquela and Esther had seen in the hold were nailed into place. Each of the fifteen thousand refugees was to be allowed the same area—the size of a coffin, six feet long, two feet wide, with forty inches between the bunks.

“If they were to load the
Queen Mary
with this density,” Gad calculated, “they'd be able to take aboard one hundred sixty thousand people.”

The afternoon light filtered through the
Pan York's
porthole. Soon it was twilight, but Esther and Raquela did not move. Both Gad and Ike took turns telling them of the odyssey.

Still in Constanza, workmen outfitted the ships with sinks and toilets, with bunks even on the decks, an infirmary, and the operating room. They took aboard more than fifty tons of bully beef, flour, powdered milk, powdered eggs, cans of fish and fruit juices, and forty tons of biscuits—almost all of it from the JDC.

Bevin was enraged. He sent the British minister in Bucharest to Ana Pauker, Romania's foreign minister and leader of its Communist party to try to halt the exodus.

He was late. The Mosad had already seen Madame Pauker, and she had agreed to grant the fifteen thousand exit visas.

The British minister brought more pressure. Madame Pauker compromised. She would not withdraw the visas. She would allow the fifteen thousand Jews to leave Romania, but she would not allow them to board the two
Pans
in Constanza.

Swiftly, the Mosad dispatched a man to neighboring Bulgaria. The Bulgarians were friendly; they agreed to let the refugees enter Bulgaria by train from Romania and to sail from the port of Burgas.

It was now December 1947, and bitter cold. In Romania the fifteen thousand people had sold all their belongings, packed their suitcases, used wood from some of their houses to keep warm, and waited for word. Months had passed, the timetable thrown out of kilter by the sabotage in Venice, by the fruitless wait for oil, and now by British pressure.

Bevin, determined that these two ships—the largest refugee ships in history—must never sail, bore down on Washington. On Bucharest. On Jerusalem.

Cables crossed the ocean. The leaders in Jerusalem were warned to stop the ships, with threats that they might lose sorely needed American aid in the next critical weeks and months.

Ben-Gurion called into his office the man known only as “the Chief.” Shaul Avigour, the head of the Mosad, was a short stocky man with deep-set eyes, a high forehead, and the cool, quiet air of integrity. A farmer in Kibbutz Kinneret on the Sea of Galilee, the Chief had helped found the Haganah, built its intelligence service, bought arms, and had been saving refugees since the beginning of World War II.

Ben-Gurion showed the Chief the cables.

But even as they talked, nine special trains at nine railway stations began picking up people from the villages in the Carpathian Mountains, in northern Romania, from Cluj, from the Transylvanian Alps, and from towns and cities like Ploesti and Bucharest.

A transport officer was in charge of each train; the people traveled in “platoons” of fifty, with a platoon leader, who was to remain their commander until they reached their destination. There were doctors, nurses, and orderlies to care for the sick, the pregnant women, and the newborn babies. The coaches were unheated. The people huddled together, with only their body heat for warmth.

On one of the trains a baby was born, and in the freezing cold he died.

The platoon commanders held a discussion: should the baby be buried as soon as the train arrived in Bulgaria, or buried at sea? It was decided to bury the baby in Bulgaria. But the burial was delayed. The trains were halted at the Romanian border on orders from Jerusalem.

The pressures on the Executive of the Jewish Agency from Washington and London were intense. The vote on partition had been taken at the UN; the Arabs had stalked out of the General Assembly and declared war on the Jews. With the shortage of arms and planes and men to fight back, the Agency needed every friend it could find abroad. The majority of the Jewish Agency voted to halt the ships.

Ben-Gurion was still in a dilemma. He told the Chief, “Fly to New York. See Sharett (head of the Jewish Agency Delegation to the UN). Get the pulse. And then, decide what to do. When you and Sharett reach an agreement, I'll abide by your decision.”

The Chief flew to Paris and learned how critical their position was in Romania. He decided human needs outweighed political pressures. He did not fly to New York. Instead he telephoned his man in Bucharest. “I will let you sail—white or black.” It was their code for legal or illegal.

The trains crossed the Romanian border.

Ike and Gad were waiting in Burgas aboard their ships as the trains pulled in. The platoon commanders transferred their people onto the ships, and kept them together in the holds. Loading the fifteen thousand people took two and a half days.

The Palmach commander in charge of the two ships was a young man in his late twenties, Yossi Har-el. Trained in warfare and sabotage, he had been Dr. Weizmann's bodyguard.

It was Christmas Day. Yossi, sailing aboard the flagship, the
Pan York
, with Gad as his captain, ordered the anchors raised. Fifteen thousand voices filled the port of Burgas singing “Hatikvah.”

At dusk the ships began to move. Gad and Yossi stood at the wheel of the
Pan York
, the local pilot at their side. The pilot insisted only desperate men would dare steer through the eighty-mile-long channel infested with mines, in the dark of night.

Nothing would stop them.

The sun rose warm and welcome; they were safe, but not out of danger.

They set their compasses for the Bosporus. Here they would have to face the Turks. Would Bevin succeed? Would the Turks turn them back?

Turkish officials boarded the ships in the straits. Ike and Yossi filled the Turks' pockets with money and gold watches.

The pleased officials overlooked the overcrowding in the holds, approved the health and sanitation conditions, and stamped the papers.

The ships sailed through the straits, and were immediately met by three British destroyers and three cruisers.

Again, the cables, angrier than ever, passed between London, Washington, and Jerusalem. Bevin had failed to force the ships back to Turkey or to Burgas. Under no circumstance, even if there were violence and bloodshed, would he allow fifteen thousand Jews to enter Haifa.

Washington pressured Sharett to find a compromise that would save lives and save face.

A compromise was reached. The ships would sail directly to Cyprus. There would be no violence, no pulling people off in Haifa. And the refugees would go straight into the camps.

Aboard the ships, using their public-address systems, the Palmach commanders explained to the refugees, “
We are not going to Haifa. Our orders have been changed, to prevent bloodshed. We are sailing directly to Cyprus
.”

Cries of anger and frustration swept the decks and the holds.

Men and women waved their fists in the air. The platoon commanders moved swiftly among their platoons, calming the people.

“These orders are only to save our lives. To spare us being beaten and maybe killed in Haifa. We would be shipped to Cyprus anyway, in prison cages. This way, we shall go there in our own ships.”

“Don't you see?” one of the platoon leaders explained, “we've made our point. Fifteen thousand of us on two ships of Jews have won our battle against the British.”

The people grew silent.

New Year's Eve. Nineteen forty-seven was drawing to a close. The two ships turned in the wind toward the prison island.

And the next morning, New Year's Day, 1948, they sailed into Famagusta.

It was dark now in the wardroom. Raquela and Esther leaned back on the leather cushions, too exhilarated to talk, looking anew at the two young captains whose fire and guts and courage had brought the fifteen thousand people to Cyprus.

Raquela glanced at her watch. “Heavens. It's nearly eight o'clock. We have to get back to Nicosia.”

“Why don't you spend the night on the ship?” Gad said. “You two can have my cabin. I can sleep out here in the wardroom. And Ike can go back to the
Pan Crescent
.”

“Why not?” Raquela said. “We still have two and a half days' leave.” Esther agreed.

The cook served a light supper; the two young women walked around the deck for a while with Gad and Ike, breathing in the fresh salt air.

Ike said good-bye, then descended the ladder into a small boat, to return to the
Pan Crescent
. Gad led them to his cabin, wished them a good night's sleep, and left.

Esther and Raquela took off their dresses and, in their slips, stretched out on the captain's bunks.

Raquela lay on the bunk, reliving the day.
Another first
, she thought, and smiled, and fell asleep.

SEVENTEEN

FEBRUARY 4, 1948

L
ili burst into the maternity hut.

“Raquela, a sailor handed me this newspaper. He said Captain Gee got it from someone who just flew in from Palestine and Captain Gee knew you'd want to see it.”

It was a single sheet of newsprint.

“What does it say?” Lili said, pressing Raquela. “Please read it to us.”

The nurses and refugee aides clustered around her. Raquela's eyes swept the headline. She read it aloud, trying to control her mounting panic: “‘Palestine
Post
press and offices destroyed; bomb and fire gut three buildings.'”