The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (5 page)

Still, Mustafa Khairi was a mayor in a land under foreign occupation and by definition needed to cooperate with the British authorities. Despite his self-image as a nationalist, he was known to oppose Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the rebel leader of the Arab Higher Committee. Sheikh Mustafa was for a time a member of the National Defense Party, which was aligned with Husseini's rivals, and considered to be "collaborators" with the Zionists.

As the rebellion accelerated anew, rumors began to spread that some Arab elites were cooperating with the British and the Zionists, even informing on the rebels by revealing details of operational plans. Equally incendiary were reports that many of these Arab "notables" had sold land to the new arrivals, prompting evictions of Arabs and the emergence of an angry class of landless peasants. In al-Ramla, townspeople told of a Jewish man from Tel Aviv who was making the rounds, trying to buy more land. It was said that another of Ahmad's uncles, the doctor Rasem Khairi, had angrily sent the man away. Shukri Taji, a cousin of Sheikh Mustafa's and one of the town's most prominent citizens, was said to be going door-to-door in al-Ramla, warning people not to sell their land. But even Taji himself, records would later indicate, had once sold land to Jews. As the reports of informants, collaborators, and land sellers grew, the insurgents killed hundreds of their own people, including, in late 1938, two municipal councillors in nearby Lydda.

According to British accounts, the mayor stood up to the fedayeen by resisting the taxes they demanded to fuel the Arab Rebellion. In October 1938, according to a British subcommissioner's report, Sheikh Mustafa, "the very able Mayor" of al-Ramla, "left the country" for Cairo "because of fear of assassination. . . . The loss of the Mayor will be keenly felt." The British, meanwhile, used the anger over the rebels' tax demands to recruit more informants from among the disgruntled.

Within a month Sheikh Mustafa returned to al-Ramla, pledging to try to stay out of nationalist politics and to focus on municipal affairs in the large stone building along the Jaffa-Jerusalem road.

In May 1939, it appeared to some Arabs that the sacrifices of their rebellion had brought a political victory. With British forces still heavily engaged with the rebels, and with the situation in Europe creating tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, the British government released its White Paper, accepting many of the demands of the Arab Rebellion. The British agreed to strictly limit Jewish immigration and to tighten restrictions on land sales in Palestine. Most important, the White Paper called for a single independent state. Many Arabs in Palestine saw in the White Paper a practical solution to their problem. But Hajj Amin al-Husseini, speaking for the Arab Higher Committee, rejected the White Paper. His word carried the day in Arab Palestine, even though it was made from exile: the ex-mufti had fled Palestine nearly two years earlier, wanted by the British at the height of the Arab rebellion. The ex-mufti's decision was unpopular with many Palestinian Arabs, who believed they had missed an opportunity.

The new British policy marked a sharp change from the Peel Commission plan of only two years earlier. The Wliite Paper was a major concession to the Arabs. For the Jews of Palestine, it was an abandonment of British support for a Jewish national homeland promised in the Balfour Declaration, at a time when the situation for Jews in Europe was growing more perilous. Within weeks, Jewish paramilitary squads were attacking British forces, planting explosives in Jerusalem's central post office, and carrying out attacks on civilians in Arab souks. The White Paper, it was clear, had shaken Jewish-British relations in Palestine. "Satan himself could not have created a more distressing and horrible nightmare," David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary.

By the turn of 1940, the British authorities had finally defeated the Arab Rebellion through what they called "severe countermeasures": tens of thousands jailed, thousands killed, hundreds executed, countless houses demolished, and key leaders, including the mufti, in exile. In the cities, Arab men had taken off their keffiyehs and replaced them once again with the fez. The Palestinian national movement was deeply divided and utterly unprepared for any future conflict.

Two years later, on February 16, 1942, newspaper headlines announced British defeats in Burma and Singapore at the hands of the Japanese. In the sands of Libya and Egypt, British forces had retreated three hundred miles in the face of a fresh assault from Nazi brigadier general Erwin Rommel. Stories of Nazi atrocities had begun to trickle out of Poland and Germany; Jews in Palestine were terrified that Rommel, should he reach his prize of the Suez Canal, would keep marching east toward Tel Aviv.

Compared with a few years earlier, the Holy Land was quiet. The British high commissioner's monthly telegram to the secretary of state for the colonies reported "no genuine political developments" among the Jews and "on the surface no political activity on the Arab side." The commissioner expressed concern over possible Arab recruiting efforts for a postwar conflict. He mused over the exile of Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The now ex-mufti had resumed his nationalist struggle against the British and the Zionists by taking up with the archenemy of the British Empire: Nazi Germany. The ex-mufti was now in Berlin.

In his February report on the state of Palestine, the high commissioner worried about a Jewish "pseudo-political terrorist gang known as the Stern group," which had begun carrying out assassinations. But mostly the commissioner advised London, "Public interest, both Arab and Jewish, has tended once again to concentrate more on the cost of living and the supply situation": food rationing, the price of yarn, the supply of shoes, and the number of meatless days per week.

In al-Ramla, Mayor Khairi was once again attending to his municipal duties, confronting black marketeers illegally hoarding foods to get around wartime rationing, and dealing with a failed well and subsequent shortage of water in the town. "The enemies of the Mayor," wrote the district commissioner, "are profiting by the shortage of water as well as of food to conduct a campaign against him."

There was, in other words, a lull in the battle for the future of Palestine. And on February 16, 1942, at least, Sheikh Mustafa Khairi could be distracted by something far more pleasant than water battles, political attacks, and the prospect of fresh violence in Palestine. His nephew Ahmad would become a father for the seventh time. For the first time, Zakia would give birth to a boy. He was born at home, with the help of a midwife. Zakia was happy and relieved.

"I don't believe it—my wife brings only girls into the world," Ahmad said, according to his daughter Khanom. "He sent one of the young men from the family to come to the house and unwrap my brother's clothes to see if he was really a boy."

Many Iambs were sacrificed as thanks. Relatives came from Gaza, and the entire Khairi clan celebrated with song and dance.

"It was a great occasion," Khanom recalled. "We finally had a brother."

They called the child Bashir.

Three

RESCUE

T
HE YOUNG JEWISH salesman walked quickly through the cold down a cobblestone street. Moshe Eshkenazi carried his black leather case full of fine socks, flannel underwear, and other factory samples as he made his rounds from shop to shop in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Suddenly he stopped. There in plain view, just at his feet, lay a wallet. It was in good condition, untouched, as if someone had only recently dropped it. Moshe stooped to pick it up. The wallet was filled with money—a small fortune to a struggling Jewish peddler trying to support his family in the Bulgaria of early 1943. During the war, it had become far more difficult for men like Moshe to ensure any security for their families, and for some men, the unexpected find would have been impossible to resist.

Moshe did not hesitate. He made the only decision possible for him. Taking the wallet to the police was the most natural thing in the world to do.

At the police station, the officer on duty was shocked to see the salesman with the yellow star bring in a billfold with its contents intact. He consulted with his fellow policemen, and soon Moshe was sent to another office, where he was introduced to a senior member of the force. The officer looked at his unusual visitor with curiosity: Moshe stood short and squat, with wavy black hair, a heavy brow, and a clear, steady gaze. Before long, the peddler and the veteran policeman found themselves deep in conversation, and in the coming days, they would develop a friendship. Moshe's daughter, Dalia, who grew up w th the story, was not yet born in 1943. She would never hear the specifics of these discussions—whether the two men talked about the war, Bulgaria s alliance with the Nazis, or the country's treatment of its Jews—but at some point the policeman decided to reveal a state secret.

"There is a plan to deport the Jews—soon," he told Moshe. "Settle your affairs, take your family away, and clear out of here." The officer's information, though lacking in some details, had come from senior Bulgarian authorities, and Moshe needed no further warning. His brother, Jacques, had already left the city and joined the Communist resistance in the hills. Moshe had no such intentions, but within days he and his wife, Solia, had gathered their things and were traveling east to her family's home in Sliven, near the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. There, they hoped, it would be safe.

Bulgaria in early 1943 was a monarchy aligned with the Axis powers. Hitler's reach into southeastern Europe had extended to the edge of the Balkans and beyond, where the kingdom of Boris III lay wedged between the Black Sea to the east and Turkey and Greece to the south. In the previous two years under Boris's rule, able-bodied Jewish men like Moshe, Jacques, and Solia's cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki, along with Communists and other dissidents, had spent the warmer months living in work camps, building roads and railways to fuel the wartime machine of the Axis.

By early 1943, with wind of terrible stories from elsewhere in Europe drifting over the borders, Bulgarian Jews had become increasingly unsettled. Already the rights of the country's forty-seven thousand Jews had been stripped by sweeping measures built on Germany's Nuremberg laws.

Moshe, Solia, and their families could not have known it then, but even as the young couple rode east through Bulgaria's Valley of the Roses and into the mountains of Sliven, a drama was unfolding that would determine the destiny of the nation's Jews. In the early days of March 1943, the actions of ordinary citizens and a handful of political and religious leaders would change the course of Bulgaria's history. At the center of the drama would be families like the Eshkenazis, clustered in small Jewish communities throughout the country. The central players would come from Kyustendil, a rail town near the western border with Macedonia, and Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city, where the roundup of the town's Jews would begin early on a frigid morning in March.

A little after midnight on March 9, 1943, the daughter of the rabbi of Plovdiv was sitting in the family den, reading Jack London. Her parents were asleep, and the house was quiet.

The doorbell rang. Susannah Shemuel Behar looked up from her reading.

In high school, Susannah had planned to go to the university and study astronomy. That was before life had changed for Bulgaria's Jews; it was before her father, racing to beat a curfew one night after presiding at a funeral, was jailed briefly for coming home ten minutes late.

Now Susannah was part of Bulgaria's underground anti-Fascist movement. She had joined the illegal Union of Young Workers and had friends in the Partizan resistance: Communists, roaming the bitter cold Rhodope Mountains with their five-shot Austrian rifles. Susannah and her girlfriends were inclined toward missions of subterfuge and mischief. When comrades set about torching a leather factory or sabotaging an assembly line of canned vegetables bound for Germany, Susannah would stand lookout. At night around town, she posted anti-Fascist flyers—"Stop the War!"; "Germans Out!"; "We Want Jobs!" This work was usually undertaken in mixed pairs so that if a policeman passed by, the co-conspirators could embrace and begin kissing to disguise their mission. At home, Susannah stashed the literature in a perfect hiding place: her father's Bible.

On the doorstep Susannah found Totka, the stout neighborhood bread seller. Susannah was alarmed: Totka was also the wife of a Plovdiv policeman. "Go wake up your father," the woman said.

A moment later, the bearded, soft-faced rabbi appeared in his nightclothes. "They're going to arrest your family soon," said the policeman's wife. "Give me your gold. I will keep it and return it to you."

Her father replied, "If we had gold, it would burn with us." Susannah knew what this meant. Her father had been telling her stories about Nazi Germany.

Totka left. An hour later, just after 2:00 A.M., the bell rang again and Susannah opened the door to find a policeman in black boots and a blue cloth coat with shiny silver buttons. He gave the Behars thirty minutes to collect a few belongings and walk to the yard of the Jewish school. From there, they would await further instructions.

Susannah's mother went into shock. She was unable to pack anything but a few coats and a little bread.

Susannah, her brother, and her parents shuffled along a narrow road in the heart of Jewish Plovdiv, past Susannah's friend Estrella's house, past the Benvenisti home. They were flanked by the uniformed policeman and a plainclothes officer. It was quiet but for their footsteps on the gravel. Susannah looked up to see Big Bear and Little Bear—Ursa Major and Ursa Minor—suspended in the clear early-morning sky. Her mother worried aloud about Susannah's two sisters in the capital; she wouldn't be able to tell them what was happening. Susannah barely heard her mother. She was thinking of something her father had said before they left the house. "If you have a chance," the rabbi told his daughter, "escape."

The Behars came to a cobblestone road known as Russian Boulevard. There, by chance, they encountered the servant to the Orthodox bishop of Plovdiv, hurrying to the church to light the stove. It was just before 3:00 A.M. "Where are you taking the family at this hour?" the servant asked the rabbi.

"Please go wake up Bishop Kiril," B»enyamin Behar responded urgently. "Tell him Plovdiv's rabbi has been arrested along with his whole family and is being held at the Jewish school. I expect more Jewish families will soon be arriving."

The servant took off at a sprint, the flaps of his coat rising in his wake. It looked to Susannah as if he were flying.

The same day, several hours to the east in the hill country of Sliven, Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi were waiting in silence and fear. Moshe had hoped that the warning of the policeman he had befriended in Sofia would help him find safe haven with Solia's family. These hopes had died when the family received a letter from the Bulgarian authorities: Solia's family was to pack twenty kilograms of food and clothing and be prepared for a journey. To where, it wasn't clear; but Solia, who had heard of atrocities elsewhere in Europe, had no illusions. Years later, recounting the events to her daughter, Dalia, she would vividly recall the feeling:
This is the end.

Hundreds of other Jewish families across Sliven, Plovdiv, and other Bulgarian cities had received similar orders. On March 9, 1943, it appeared that the fate of the Eshkenazis, of the Behars—of all of Bulgaria's Jews—was to be identical to that of the rest of European Jewry. Indeed, the path had seemed clear for at least two years, since the imposition of the anti-Jewish laws and Bulgaria's alliance with Hitler.

In 1941, King Boris, after struggling to remain neutral in World War II, had finally joined the Axis powers. This averted a German occupation but led to a pro-Fascist government. The Bulgarians who despised Jews the most were put directly in charge of their fate. The key figure was Aleksander Belev, former member of the Fascist Guardians of the Advancement of the Bulgarian National Spirit, or Ratnitsi. Belev was to be the principal authority on the "Jewish question" in Bulgaria. It was Belev who had traveled to Berlin to study the 1935 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, and the other Nuremberg racial laws, which would result in Bulgaria's 1941 Law for the Defense of the Nation.

With this law and others like it, the persecution of Bulgaria's Jews would formally begin, as their legal rights would be reduced to those of the Jews of Germany. "Jewish Residence" signs were required on every Jewish home. Jews were subject to strict curfews and were no longer permitted to be members of political parties or professional associations. Jews could not marry Gentiles, enter air raid shelters, or own cars, telephones, or radios. They were required to wear the yellow star.

Solia Eshkenazi's cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki, a strong, good-looking twenty-year-old, was sent to a work camp on the Serbian border. He ate daily rations of bean soup, with occasional supplements of sausages, bread, and
kashkavel
(Bulgarian yellow cheese) smuggled in by visiting family members, or brought by local villagers in exchange for medical treatment by Jewish doctor prisoners. The prisoners and the villagers, Yitzhaki recalled, shared the food with the guards. The prisoners spent their days crushing rocks and at night wrote letters home by the light of gas lanterns. In colder months, they had little warm clothing; under the primitive conditions, with limited access to medicines, sickness often spread quickly. Once, during a malaria outbreak, the prisoners tried a home cure: drinking the blood of turtles caught near the camp, after which the animals were roasted over a fire. "Under those circumstances, the roasted turtles were a delicacy!" Yitzhaki remarked. In the spring the prisoners put on a show: Offenbach's operetta
The Beautiful Helena.
"The veteran Bulgarian commander, proud of the talent in his camp, invited many other officers for the show," Yitzhaki remembered. "In comparison with what was happening in Europe, we were very lucky indeed."

Treatment in the camps was sometimes harsh—Yitzhaki once was threatened with a firing squad after his comrades inadvertently set a tent on fire—but Bulgaria was in fact different from the rest of Europe. With all the momentum pushing Bulgarian Jews toward annihilation, there was something pushing back. To many patriots across the fatherland, the pro-Fascist laws required a strong response; the laws were at odds with Bulgaria's history and identity.

In 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul sent ships to the Spanish port of Cadiz to welcome thousands of Jews into his empire. "They say that Ferdinand of Spain is a wise man, but he is a fool," declared Bayezid II. "For he takes his treasure and sends it all to me." Jews would soon spread across the Ottoman Empire, including in Bulgaria. There, in modest communities of horse-drawn carriages and quiet village squares, they would encounter less anti-Semitism, and in a milder form, than did Jews elsewhere in Europe. When Bulgaria struggled for its independence in the 1870s, Jews fought alongside their countrymen to shed the Ottoman "yoke"; Jews of Plovdiv gave shelter to the hero of the Bulgarian revolution, Vasil Levski. Levski, a kind of Bulgarian George Washington, outlined his own vision for a democratic Bulgaria: "brotherhood and absolute equality among all nationalities. Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, etc. will be equal in every respect. . . . " These words were later enshrined in the country's 1879 constitution, considered at the time to be one of the most progressive in Europe.

Six decades later, when Aleksander Belev helped draft the anti-Jewish laws for King Boris's pro-Fascist government, statements of protest and alarm came flooding in from nearly every sector of Bulgarian society. Letters and telegrams were sent to the king, the national parliament, and the prime minister's office from doctors, politicians, intellectuals, tailors, technicians, cobblers, tobacco workers, street vendors, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

We, the food workers from Plovdiv, are shocked by the existence of such reactionary laws, which will only divide the nation. . . .

We the textile workers, who work side by side with the Jewish workers, making goods for the Bulgarian people, and going through the injustices of life, we raise our voices in protest against the Law for the Defense of the Nation, which stands against the interests and ideals of the Bulgarian workers' society. . . .

We cannot understand who is going to win from the implementation of the Law for the Defense of the Nation. Not the Bulgarian craftsmen, to be sure. We protest this smashing of tradition. . . .

We the pastry workers from Plovdiv express our deep indignation . . . this bill sharply opposes all democratic understanding, which has always been part of the soul of the Bulgarian people.

The Bulgarian Communist Party, through its clandestine newspapers and underground radio station, issued repeated denunciations. "The fate of 50,000 Jews," declared an illegal Communist flyer, "is indissolubly connected with that of our people."

Former government ministers wrote to the parliament as well:

Poor Bulgaria! We are seven million people, yet we so fear the treachery of 45,000 Jews who hold no positions of responsibility at the national level that we need to pass exceptional laws to protect ourselves from them. And then what? . . . Gentlemen. Decide now! Will you stand behind the Constitution and the Bulgarian people in defense of freedom, or will you march in step with the political mercenaries and bring shame on yourselves as you undermine our country's life and future along the way? In the cities and in the countryside, they are all saying the same thing: "If only Levski. . . were here today . . . [he] would chase us down and flog us to make us understand [his] ideas and just what is this liberty in the name of which [he] died for Bulgaria. . . ."