Raquela (31 page)

She steadied herself and went on:

“Just before eleven
P.M.
on Sunday, February first, a British-army truck loaded with dynamite pulled up in front of the
Palestine Post
building. The driver, an Arab, disappeared. Minutes later his truck exploded. Buildings and homes for blocks around have been shattered; even cafés on Zion Square have been blown wide open. Hundreds have been wounded in the blast.'”

The date on the newspaper was February 2, 1948. In the middle of the night, on a private press—its own presses destroyed—the
Post
had printed the story of its own injuries.

Lili begged, “Go on, please—read us the whole paper, Raquela. Every word.”

Raquela was devouring the sheet. “I'll read you column one. It's written by an Englishman under the name of David Courtney.”

The aides and nurses moved close; the women in the beds raised themselves to listen better.

“‘The bomb in Hasolel Street for a moment closed the mouths of the messengers of the world, and shut off, as a telephone is shut off, the news from a score of capitals.'”

Raquela looked up at the women. “Those capitals he's talking about,” she said, “they're the capitals of all the Arab countries that surround us—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq. Everybody who reads English in those countries reads the
Palestine Post
.

Then she continued: “‘It did but throw into still sharper relief, and sound with still farther-reaching voice, the truth of this land and the sureness of its triumph.'”

Slowly she reread the words in the silence of the hut: “‘…
the truth of this land and the sureness of its triumph
.'”

The words seared her.

Thoughts of the explosion made her frantic with fear. “What was happening in Jerusalem? Were Mama and Papa safe? Jacob and Yair, and their families? And Arik—was he safe on Mount Scopus?

She hoarded every piece of news, hungering for details. The radio was instant, swift. Letters and newspapers took weeks; they were more informative than the radio, yet more terrifying.

Papa had written soon after the November 29 vote on partition, telling her what the reaction was in Jerusalem. The joy and ecstasy had given way, almost overnight, to terror. The commercial center, a series of little shops and workrooms near the Jaffa Gate, had been blown up. Papa described how hundreds of Arabs had marched out of the Old City with guns and sticks and stones.

Raquela trembled, reading his letter. Was it an Arab replay? 1921. 1929. 1936. Now 1948. Memories of the little girl in the unfinished Yellin fortress-school made her hands sweat as she held the lined notepaper, reading how Papa had taken refuge in a hallway.

     When it seemed quiet, I peeked out. The whole area looked like a bombed-out city. Dead bodies and glass and broken timbers were strewn all over the streets. The Arabs did this—but how many British help them, we can only suspect. We know that British deserters are happily joining the mufti's gangs in acts of terror.

The British were writing their final epitaph in Palestine in violence and chaos.

Each day the British machinery of government disintegrated further. The railways stopped running, except sporadically. Postal services became disorganized. Palestine was burning—its arsonists both Arabs and Englishmen. It was a tragedy, for the British had done much that was admirable in this land.

They had changed it from a neglected Turkish outpost into a Westernized land with British courts of law, British police, the graceful amenities of British culture. They had made many friends among the Jewish and Arab populations. They had shepherded Palestine into the twentieth century.

Statesmen like Balfour and Lloyd George, believers in the Bible and the prophecy, had laid the cornerstones for the Jewish national home.

But the other face of British rule now showed itself naked and clear: political expediency in its most treacherous form; betrayal of the promise and the hope; surrender to the Arabs for their petroleum favors.

Bevin dropped all pretenses. In these last days of Empire there would be no cooperation with the Jews. There would be no help in setting up the Jewish state.

Immigration must be stopped at all costs, lest men of military age from the DP camps and Cyprus enter Palestine and join the Haganah forces to fight the Arabs. Even in the quota system of first in, first out, the British barred all able-bodied men from leaving the camps.

One day Josh Leibner appeared in the maternity ward with Dr. and Mrs. Harden Ashkenazy. It was Dr. Ashkenazy who had refused to leave the
Pan York
until Josh had rescued his bag of surgical instruments before the British could confiscate it.

Josh introduced Raquela. “Will you show Dr. Ashkenazy and his wife, Nina, around. I've got a few things to take care of in Nicosia.”

He turned to Dr. Ashkenazy. “I'll be back in a little while to take you to Caraolas.”

Dr. Ashkenazy's fame had spread throughout the hospital. Raquela had learned that the forty-year-old Bucharest brain surgeon had spent two years in Boston, working with the renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing.

“It must be terrible for you to be a refugee,” Raquela said, “to be idle here when you're so needed in Palestine.”

“It is,” he said. “It is terrible.”

Handsome and dignified even in their prison garb, the surgeon and his wife walked down the rows of beds in the arched huts, stopping to talk to each woman. Some of the women recognized him from Bucharest and the
Pan York. What a waste
, Raquela thought ruefully.
In all of the Middle East there is not one brain surgeon. How many head wounds, how many damaged brains, how many lives, could he be saving? Instead, here he is, waiting
.

Raquela offered her guests coffee. They sat around her potbelly stove, chatting. Dr. Ashkenazy leaned back in his chair. He was well built, with a face both strong and poetic, and eyes that seemed to penetrate the very walls and windows of the hut.

Through the window he watched the white diapers flapping against the barbed wire, like free-floating flags defying the prison.

“This must surely be the warmest, friendliest, most unusual maternity ward in any prison in the world,” he said.

His wife, Nina, laughed. It was obvious she adored him. In her twenties, she was slender and graceful, her features finely structured, her hair soft and blond.

“How long have you been here?” she asked Raquela.

“A few months—and a lifetime.”

Nina took her hand. “We don't have a salon in Caraolas—not exactly an interior decorator's dream—but we'd love to have you visit us in our tent.”

“Come soon,” Dr. Ashkenazy added. “Be our guest.”

More mail arrived: letters from Arik and her brother Jacob. She tore open Arik's letter first.

     We go up to Mount Scopus in convoys. Our patients come only when a convoy assembles in the morning. We wait downtown in a long line of trucks and ambulances until the British give us the all-clear sign telling us the road is safe. Then we race through the Arab quarter at Sheikh Jarrah…I miss you, Raquela. When are you coming back?

When? Maternity was overflowing. The two
Pans
had brought the equivalent of a whole town—judges and lawyers, doctors, nurses, rabbis, engineers, merchants and tradespeople, artists and writers, musicians, farmers, peasants—and countless pregnant women. How could she leave them?

Jacob's letter, written hurriedly in a few lines, assured her the family was well. “We're managing,” he wrote. “You have too much to do to be worrying about us.”

But were they managing? Did they have enough food?

From newspapers that Gad brought her she knew, as if she could feel it herself, that the Arabs had their hands around the throat of Jerusalem, trying to starve it to death.

The grocers' shelves were nearly empty. Women and children foraged in the hills and parks for grass to feed their families.

Water ran low. The cisterns were drying up. Men with horsedrawn water wagons brought meager rations to the Jerusalemites, who filled their pails and jugs and cans.

The battle was for the highway that climbed nearly three thousand feet from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Arabs held nine danger spots—a few on the coastal plain; the rest, the most treacherous, in the mountains. Hiding behind bushes, high over the winding snakelike road, the Arabs had an easy shooting gallery. The road was dubbed “the Murder Road.”

Jerusalem had to be saved. Food had to get through.

The Jews created “sandwiches”—thinly armored trucks and cars covered with two sheets of steel plate with a wall of wood between. The “sandwiches” traveled in convoys, with young Haganah men and women armed with Sten guns shooting back at the snipers.

Convoys broke through, but many were ambushed. The ditches along the highway were a graveyard of burned “sandwiches.”

Anxiety and worry crept under Raquela's skin. If only she could hear Mama's voice. And Arik's…
I miss you, Raquela
.

I After a long day's shift, Raquela decided to spend the evening with the Ashkenazys in the Caraolas camp. She threw her cape over a fresh uniform and taxied from the medical compound to Famagusta. The British soldiers guarding the gate glanced at her ID card and waved her in.

At night Caraolas looked like a gypsy camp. Bonfires made circles of light almost to the horizon. Around the fires sat the refugees. Having lost their families in Europe, they formed themselves into new “families”—most of the members twenty or thirty or forty years old.

The women, recognizing Raquela, invited her into their tents and metal huts where the infants she had delivered lay on blankets on the sand floor. She bent down to lift the babies, their faces amber and pink in the glow of candles burning in little cans.

She continued weaving her way through the camp toward a group of tents close to the seashore. Through the double walls of barbed wire she could see and smell the whitecaps of the Mediterranean lapping the dark beach.

She found the Ashkenazys' tent, close to the sea.

Nina jumped up from a rude wooden crate as Raquela entered. Dr. Ashkenazy offered her another crate. Nina lit a candle in an American tin can that had once held fruit and was now weighted down with sand.

In the candle glow Raquela saw two cots with neatly folded army blankets. Wooden crates served as chairs, and in the center of the sandy floor stood another crate set with two tin plates, two tin cups, and two crude tin spoons: regulation issue for prisoners.

Dr. Ashkenazy questioned Raquela closely about Jerusalem and the bombing of the
Palestine Post
. “I'm afraid the whole world will explode,” he said, “before we get to Palestine.”

A young Haganah man entered the tent. “Dr. Ashkenazy,” he said, “there's a meeting going on. It concerns you. Will you come with me?”

“Of course.”

He walked to the open flap. “Please stay with Nina until I come back,” he said to Raquela.

Nina looked worried. “The fate of a doctor's wife: he's always being called away.”

She lit a cigarette. “We almost didn't make it—coming here.”

Raquela leaned forward. She realized Nina needed to talk to calm her own fears.

“We had permission to go, but, you know, we couldn't take anything with us. We walked out of our apartment with ten kilos—about twenty-two pounds—of belongings. But there were my husband's instruments. He was chief of neurology at the Caritas Hospital, in Bucharest. We were sure there would be no instruments for brain surgery in this whole region. Fortunately, he had brought back two sets of everything from America. Finally we managed to get one set into a bag.”

“Then what was the problem getting out?” Raquela asked.

Nina puffed at her cigarette. “We were all assembled in a Jewish school in Bucharest. It was just before Christmas. They began calling the names; people went outside and got into buses to get on the special trains.”

Raquela nodded. Gad had told her about the trains.

Nina went on. “Our names were not called. We kept waiting. Then someone came and said, ‘The government has just decided not to allow Dr. Ashkenazy to leave. He is too important.'

“Everyone left. The two of us were all alone in the school. We took our bags and went to the Athenée Palast Hotel. My husband left me there and went to see Ana Pauker. He was allowed right into her office. She was sorry; she agreed it was not fair. We had exit visas. But it was a government decision, she said. ‘Don't worry'—she tried to make him feel better—‘we'll get you a new apartment, new furniture, everything.'

“He left her office and came back to the hotel. We didn't sleep all night. Who else could help us, when Ana Pauker herself—the boss of the Communist party running the government under young King Michael—seemed helpless?

“In the morning—it was Christmas morning—he said, ‘I'll go to see Theohari Georgescu.' He was an important government minister.

“‘You can't see him on Christmas morning,' I said.

“‘I'll try.' He went to the minister's office. He was told Georgescu was at Christmas Mass with King Michael.

“He decided to wait. He walked up and down on the snow-covered streets. The clock was ticking. Had the people all boarded the ships? Had the ships left? He paced the streets; I paced the hotel. They were the longest hours of our lives.

“Finally the minister drove up to the building, got out of his car, and saw my husband. At the age of six they had been schoolmates. Georgescu was the son of a poor worker. He recognized Harden; he had followed my husband's career all these years.

“‘What are you doing out here on Christmas morning?' he asked my husband.

“Quickly Harden told him what had happened.

“‘Come inside. Come up to my office.'

“At his desk, he said, ‘Tell me, Harden, why do
you
want to go to Palestine? '”