A Tale of Love and Darkness

April 14, 1948

  This morning they announced ... that for a coupon from the paraffin book (the head of the household's book) you can receive a quarter of a chicken per family at certain designated butchers. Some ofmy neighbors asked me to collect their ration, ifI was in line anyway, as they had to work and could not wait in line. Yoni, my son, offered to keep me a place in line before he went to school, but I told him I would do it myself. I sent Yair off to kindergarten and went to "Geula," where the butcher was. I arrived at a quarter to eight and found a line of about six hundred people.

  They said some people had arrived at three or four in the morning, because the rumor ofthe distribution ofchicken started to spread before it was dark. I had no desire to stand in line, but I had promised my neighbors to bring them their ration, and I didn't like to go home without it. I decided to "stand" like the rest.

  While I was in line, it turned out that the "rumor" that had been circulating since yesterday had been confirmed: yes, a hundred Jews were burned alive yesterday near Sheikh Jarrah; they were in a convoy going up to Hadassah and the university. A hundred people. They included distinguished scientists and scholars, doctors and nurses, workers and students, clerks and patients.

  It is hard to believe it. There are so many Jews in Jerusalem, and they were unable to save these hundred people who were facing death only a kilometer away ... They said the English would not let them. What is the point of a quarter of a chicken, if horrors like this happen in front of your very eyes? Yet people stood in line patiently. And all the time all you hear is: "The children are getting thin ... they haven't tasted meat for months ... there is no milk, there are no vegetables..."It is hard to stand in a line for six hours, yet it is worth it: there will be soup for the children ... What happened in Sheikh Jar-rah is terrible, but who knows what is awaiting us all here in Jerusalem ... The dead are dead, and the living go on living ... The line advances slowly. The "lucky ones" go home hugging their quarter of a chicken per family ... Eventually a funeral went past ... At two o'clock in the afternoon I received my ration and my neighbors' and I went home.*

  ***

  *Zerta Abramski, "Excerpts from the Diary of a Woman from the Siege of Jerusalem, 1948," in The Correspondence of Yakov-David Abramski, edited and annotated by Shula Abramski (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 5751/1991), pp. 288-89.

  My father was supposed to go up to Mount Scopus in that very convoy, on April 13,1948, in which seventy-seven doctors and nurses, professors and students were murdered and burned alive. He had been instructed by the National Guard, or perhaps by his superiors in the National Library, to go and lock up certain sections of the basement stores of the library, since Mount Scopus was cut off from the rest of the city. But the evening before he was due to go, he had a temperature, and the doctor absolutely forbade him to leave his bed. (He was shortsighted, and frail, and every time his temperature went up, his eyes clouded over until he was almost blind and he also lost his sense of balance.)

  Four days after Irgun and Stern Gang forces captured the Arab village of Deir Yassin to the west of Jerusalem and butchered many of its inhabitants, armed Arabs attacked the convoy, which, at half past nine in the morning, was crossing Sheikh Jarrah on its way to Mount Scopus. The British secretary of state for the colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, had personally promised the representatives of the Jewish Agency that as long as the British army was in Jerusalem, it would guarantee the regular arrangement of convoys to relieve the skeleton presence guarding the hospital and the university. (Hadassah Hospital served not just the Jewish population but all the inhabitants of Jerusalem.)

  There were two ambulances in the convoy, three buses whose windows had been reinforced with metal plates for fear of snipers, several trucks carrying supplies, including medical supplies, and two small cars. At the approach to Sheikh Jarrah stood a British police officer who signaled to the convoy, as usual, that the road was open and safe. In the heart of the Arab neighborhood, almost at the feet of the villa of the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi leader of the Palestinian Arabs, at a distance of 150 yards or so from Silwani Villa, the leading vehicle went over a land mine. Immediately a hail of fire assailed the convoy from both sides of the road, including hand grenades and Molotov cocktails. The firing continued right through the morning.

  The attack took place less than two hundred yards away from the British military post whose task was to safeguard the road to the hospital. For several hours the British soldiers stood and watched the attack without lifting a finger. At 9:45 General Gordon H. A. MacMillan, the supreme commander of the British forces in Palestine, drove past without stopping. (He later claimed, without batting an eye, that he had the impression the attack had ended.)

  At one o'clock, and again an hour later, some British vehicles drove past without stopping. When the Jewish Agency liaison officer contacted British military headquarters and requested permission to send in the Haganah to evacuate the injured and the dying, he was informed that "the army is in control of the situation" and that HQ forbade the Haganah to intervene. Haganah rescue forces nevertheless attempted to assist the trapped convoy, both from the city and from Mount Scopus. They were prevented from approaching. At 1:45 p.m. the president of the Hebrew University, Professor Judah Leon Magnes, telephoned General MacMillan and asked for help. The answer was that "the army is trying to reach the scene, but a large battle has developed."

  There was no fighting. By three o'clock two of the buses had caught fire and almost all the passengers, most of whom were already wounded or dying, were burned alive.

  The seventy-seven dead included the director of the Hadassah Medical Organization, Professor Chaim Yassky, Professors Leonid Doljansky and Moshe Ben-David, who were among the founders of the Faculty of Medicine at the university, the physicist Dr. Guenther Wolfsohn, Professor Enzo Bonaventura, head of the Department of Psychology, Dr. Abraham Chaim Freimann, an expert on Jewish law, and Dr. Binyamin Klar, a linguist.

  The Arab Higher Committee later issued an official statement in which the slaughter was described as a heroic exploit carried out "under the command of an Iraqi officer." The statement censured the British for their last-minute intervention and declared: "Had it not been for Army interference, not a single Jewish passenger would have remained alive."* It was only through a coincidence, because of his high temperature, and perhaps also because my mother knew how to curb his patriotic fervor, that my father was not among those who were burned to death in that convoy.

  Not long after this massacre, the Haganah launched major offensives for the first time all over the country and threatened to take up arms against the British army if it dared to intervene. The main road from the coastal plain to Jerusalem was unblocked by means of a major offensive, then blocked again, then unblocked again, but the siege of Hebrew Jerusalem was renewed with the invasion by regular Arab armies. Through April and up to the middle of May, large Arab and mixed towns—Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Safed—as well as dozens of Arab villages in the north and the south were captured by the Haganah. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs lost their homes in those weeks and became refugees. Some of them have remained refugees to this day. Many fled, but many were driven out by force. Several thousand were killed.

  *Based on various sources, including Dov Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948 (London, 1962), p. 78.

  There may not have been anyone at the time in besieged Jewish Jerusalem who mourned the fate of the Palestinian refugees. The Jewish Quarter in the Old City, which had been inhabited continuously by Jews for thousands of years (with the exception of a single interruption after they were all massacred or expelled by the Crusaders in 1099), fell to the Trans-Jordanian Arab Legion, all its buildings were looted and razed and the residents were killed, expelled, or taken prisoner. The settlements in the Etzion bloc were also taken and destroyed, and their residents were killed or taken prisoner. Atarot, Neve Yaakov, Kaliya, and Beit Ha-Arava were evacuated and destroyed. The hundred thousand Jewi
sh inhabitants of Jerusalem feared that a similar fate awaited them. When the Voice of the Defender radio station announced the flight of the Arab residents from Talbieh and Katamon, I do not remember feeling sorry for Aisha and her brother. I merely extended, with my father, our matchstick frontier on the map of Jerusalem: the months of bombardment, hunger, and fear had hardened my heart. Where did Aisha go, with her little brother? To Nablus? Damascus? London? Or to the refugee camp at Deheisha? Today, if she is still alive, Aisha is a woman of sixty-five. And her little brother, whose foot I may have smashed, would be nearly sixty now. Perhaps I could set out to find them? To discover what happened to all the branches of the Silwani family, in London, South America, and Australia?

  But suppose I found Aisha, somewhere in the world, or the person who was once that sweet little boy: how would I introduce myself? What could I say? What could I really explain? What could I offer?

  Do they still remember? And if so, what do they remember? Or have the horrors they must have undergone since made them both forget the silly show-off in the tree?

  It wasn't all my fault. Not all of it. All I did was talk, and talk, and talk. Aisha is to blame, too. It was Aisha who said to me, Come on, let's see you climb a tree. If she hadn't urged me on, it would never have occurred to me to climb the tree, and her brother—

  It's gone forever. It can't be undone.

  At the National Guard post in Zephaniah Street my father was given a very old rifle and put on night-watch duty in the streets of Kerem Avraham. It was a heavy, black rifle, with all sorts of foreign words and initials engraved on its worn butt. Father eagerly attempted to decipher the writing even before turning to study the rifle itself. It may have been an Italian rifle from the First World War, or an ancient American carbine. Father felt it all over, scrabbled around, pushed and pulled without success, and eventually put it down on the floor and turned to check the magazine. Here he scored an immediate and dazzling success: he managed to extract the bullets. He brandished a handful of bullets in one hand and the empty magazine in the other, and waved them exultantly at my tiny form as I stood in the doorway, while he made some sort of joke about the narrow-mindedness of those who had tried to discourage Napoleon Bonaparte.

  But when he tried to press the bullets back into the magazine, his triumph turned to utter defeat: the bullets had got a whiff of freedom and obdurately refused to be reimprisoned. None of his stratagems and blandishments had the slightest effect. He tried to insert them the right way around and he tried them back to front, he tried doing it gently and he tried with all the force of his delicate scholar's fingers, he even tried putting them in alternately, one facing upward and the next downward and so on, but all in vain.

  Undeterred, my father tried to charm the bullets into the magazine by reciting poetry at them in a voice laden with pathos: he gave them selections from Polish patriotic poetry, as well as Ovid, Pushkin, and Lermontov, entire Hebrew love poems from medieval Spain—all in the original languages with a Russian accent, and all without success. In a final paroxysm of rage he declaimed from memory extracts from Homer in ancient Greek, the Nibelungenlied in German, Chaucer in Middle English, and, for I know, from the Kalevala in Saul Tchernikhowsky's Hebrew translation, from the epic of Gilgamesh, in every possible language and dialect. All in vain.

  Dejectedly, therefore, he wended his way back to the National Guard post in Zephaniah Street, with the heavy rifle in one hand, in the other the precious bullets in an embroidered bag originally intended for sandwiches, and in his pocket (pray God he did not forget it there) the empty magazine.

  At the National Guard post they took pity on him and quickly showed him how easy it was to load the bullets into the magazine, but they did not give him the weapon or the ammunition back. Not that day, or in the days that followed. Or ever. Instead he was given an electric lamp, a whistle, and an impressive armband bearing the motto "National Guard." Father came back home beside himself with joy. He explained to me the meaning of "National Guard," flashed his lamp on and off, blew and blew on his whistle, till Mother touched his shoulder lightly and said, That's enough now, Arieh? Please?

  At midnight between Friday, May 14, 1948, and Saturday, May 15, at the end of thirty years of the British Mandate, the state whose birth David Ben-Gurion had announced in Tel Aviv a few hours earlier came into being. After a gap of some nineteen hundred years, Uncle Joseph declared, Jewish rule was once more established here.

  But at one minute past midnight, without war being declared, the infantry columns, artillery, and armor of the regular Arab armies poured into the country, from Egypt to the south, Trans-Jordan and Iraq to the east, and Lebanon and Syria to the north. On Saturday morning Tel Aviv was bombed by Egyptian planes. The Arab Legion, the half-British army of the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and regular Iraqi troops, as well as armed Muslim volunteers from several other countries, had all been invited in by the British to seize key points around the country before the formal ending of the Mandate.

  The noose was tightening around us. The Trans-Jordanian Legion captured the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, cut off the highway to Tel Aviv and the coastal plain with massive forces, took control of the Arab districts of the city, stationed artillery on the hills around Jerusalem, and began a massive bombardment whose aim was to cause losses among the civilian population, break their spirit, and bring them to submission. King Abdullah, London's protégé, already saw himself as King of Jerusalem. The legion's gun batteries were commanded by British artillery officers.

  At the same time the Egyptian army was reaching the southern outskirts of Jerusalem and attacked the kibbutz of Ramat Rahel, which changed hands twice. Egyptian planes dropped fire bombs on Jerusalem and, among other things, destroyed the old people's home in Romema, not far from us. Egyptian mortars joined the Trans-Jordanian artillery in bombarding the civilian population. From a hill close to the Mar Elias Monastery the Egyptians pounded Jerusalem with 4.2 inch shells. Shells fell on the Jewish areas at a rate of one every two minutes, and the streets were raked by continuous rifle fire. Greta Gat, my piano-playing child sitter who always smelled of wet wool and washing soap, Aunt Greta, who used to drag me off to clothes shops with her, for whom my father used to compose his silly rhymes, went out on her veranda one morning to hang out her washing. A Jordanian sniper's bullet, they said, went in her ear and came out her eye. Zippora Yannai, Piri, my mother's shy friend who lived in Zephaniah Street, went out in the yard for a moment to fetch a floor cloth and a bucket and was killed on the spot by a direct hit from a shell.

  And I had a little tortoise. During the Passover holiday in 1947, some six months before the outbreak of war, Father joined some people from the Hebrew University for a day trip to Jerash in Trans-Jordan. He set off early in the morning, with a bag of sandwiches and a genuine army water bottle, which he wore proudly on his belt. He came back that evening, full of happy stories of the trip and the wonders of the large Roman theater, and he brought me a present of a little tortoise he found there "at the foot of an amazing Roman stone arch."

  Although he had no sense of humor and possibly had no clear idea of what a sense of humor was, my father always loved jokes, witticisms, and wordplay, and whenever he made anyone smile with his remarks, his face would light up with modest pride. Thus he decided to call the tortoise by the comical name of Abdullah-Gershon, in honor of the king of Trans-Jordan and the city of Jerash (Gerash in Hebrew). Whenever we had visitors, he would call the tortoise solemnly by his full name, like a master of ceremonies announcing the arrival of some duke or ambassador, and he was always amazed that everyone present did not double up with laughter. Consequently he felt it necessary to enlighten them as to the reasons for the two names. Perhaps he hoped that, not having found the joke funny before the explanation, they would find it hilarious afterward. Sometimes he was so enthusiastic or absentminded that he told the whole story to guests who had already heard it at least twice before and knew it backward.

  I loved that little t
ortoise, who used to crawl to my hideaway under the pomegranate bush every morning and eat lettuce leaves and juicy cucumber peel right out of my hand. He was not afraid of me and did not retract his head inside his shell, and while he was gobbling up his food, he would make funny movements with his head, as though he were nodding in agreement at what you were saying. He was like a certain bald professor from Rehavia, who also used to nod enthusiastically until you had finished talking, but then his approval turned to mockery, as he continued to nod at you while he tore your views to shreds.

  I used to stroke my tortoise's head with my finger while he ate, amazed at the similarity between his nose holes and his ear holes. In my heart of hearts, and behind Father's back, I secretly called him Mimi instead of Abdullah-Gershon.

  During the bombardment there were no cucumbers or lettuce leaves and I wasn't allowed out into the yard, but I still used to open the door sometimes and throw scraps of food out for Mimi. Sometimes I could see him in the distance, and sometimes he disappeared for several days on end.

  The day that Greta Gat and my mother's friend Piri Yannai were killed, my tortoise Mimi was killed too. He was sliced in half by a piece of shrapnel. When I tearfully asked Father if I could at least bury him under the pomegranate and put up a tombstone to remember him by, Father explained to me that I could not, mainly for reasons of hygiene. He told me he had already gotten rid of the remains. He refused to tell me where he had gotten rid of them, but he took the opportunity to give me a little lecture on the meaning of irony: our Abdullah-Gershon was an immigrant from the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, so it was ironic that the piece of shrapnel that killed him came from a shell fired from one of King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan's guns.