O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  They leaped over the sandbag barricades set up in the middle of the street while, behind them, hastily called-up reinforcements jumped into doorways and shop windows and onto rooftops. Little boys scurried after them carrying boxes of Leah Vultz's homemade grenades. From a nearby roof, other children called corrections to a grenade launcher set up in a courtyard below, their nervous, high-pitched cries cutting through the roar of the firing like the shriek of seagulls over the pounding of a heavy surf.

  Mordechai Gazit joined the reserves heading for the Street of the Jews. With one of his new command's most able fighters, a curly-haired Kurdish Jew nicknamed Yitzhak the Bren Gunner, he led a successful counterattack.

  Then Gazit climbed up the tile roof of a Talmud Torah* to watch the Legion's retreat. As he did, one of his girl soldiers called out, "Don't go there!"

  It was too late. A sniper's shot hit the quarter's new commander full in the chest. Staggering under the blow, Gazit saw blood spurting from his chest like water from a hose. As he began to lose consciousness, an anguished thought slipped through the young diplomat's mind: Was he simply fainting or was he living the very last moments in his life?

  As he had been taught in his machine-gunner's course, Carmi Charny's first action after his night's firing was to break down and clean his new Beza machine gun. Its parts were scattered around a bedroom opposite Fink's Restaurant when Charny received an urgent message: Get the gun to Sheikh Jarrah, the Legion was attacking.

  Imitating the movements of the machine-gun expert who had helped him the night before, Charny tried to reassemble his gun. It was hopeless. Every ten minutes a frantic knock on the door reminded him to hurry. Unwilling to expose the gun's state, Charny answered each frantic appeal with the promise that the Beza was almost ready. Finally Charny was forced to open the bedroom door and admit that the Beza was in pieces. Once again the American was obliged to send out an embarrassed call for help to the city's Red Army arms expert.

  Yosef Nevo had urgent need for Charny's gun. Since he obviously did not have the forces to hold a line all along Mea Shearim, he had decided on a gamble and the machine gun figured prominently in it. Betting that the Legion would continue to advance its armor first and its infantry second, Nevo decided to prepare for an armored assault. The Legion had two logical axes of attack. One was across an open field from the Police Training School to the neighborhood of Sanhedria, at the northern end of Mea Shearim. It was the shortest route and the one that would lead most directly to the heart of Jewish Jerusalem. The other was through Sheikh Jarrah, up to the vital intersection commanded by the Mandelbaum house, leading into Mea Shearim. Over that route the advancing Legion would have only one exposed flank, and it was there that Nevo guessed they would attack. He decided to divide his forces between Sanhedria and Mandelbaum, with his best weapons at the second position. His center he would leave virtually unprotected.

  At Mandelbaum, his force consisted of Jacob Ben-Ur and the teenage soldiers of the Gadna who had greeted the Sabbath of May 14 in their improvised synagogue. Nevo ordered them to smash holes in the second-story windows of the house so that they could hurl Molotov cocktails on the cars. Under cover of darkness, he would conceal the most effective part of his miserable "armored force," two armored cars, a pair of bazookas and a Davidka, in hidden positions dominating the intersection. He also instructed the Gadna to mine a pair of houses on St. George Road below their positions. By blowing them up after a few cars had passed, Nevo hoped to split the lead vehicles off from the rest of an attack force. At Sanhedria, Nevo posted a pair of machine guns. If the Legion chose to attack them, he told his gunners, they would just have to hold out until he could get help to them. As for Charny and his Beza, he would be Nevo's central reserve, to be brought out once the Legion had committed itself.

  By midnight, most of Nevo's preparations were completed. He briefed his men by candlelight in the cellar of his Tipat Chalav headquarters. Nevo had two concerns: that the Legion would throw its infantry against his almost undefended center or launch a two-pronged attack against Sanhedria and Mandelbaum. In either case, the result was easy to predict. They would break through.

  He did not reveal his fears to his subordinates. Listening to him, Carmi Charny marveled at how calm and assured he seemed to be. There was, Charny knew, "an air of dread and fear" hanging over them all that night. Nevo's tranquil air, he reasoned, must be "the calm of despair."

  Well before first light, the Legion's mortars began to methodically work over Mea Shearim once again. The quarter's residents who had returned to their homes after Nevo's intervention the day before showed signs of renewed panic. Some began to flee the neighborhood without even waiting for the dawn. Trying to catch a few hours' sleep in the cellar of his headquarters, Nevo was awakened by the first explosions. Lying in the darkness, he realized that the providential pause the Legion had offered him was over. They would be on him with the sunrise.

  In the hills above Mea Shearim, Major John Buchanan, Slade's replacement, assembled his men for a new push into the city. In the lead armored car, Lieutenant Mohammed Negib fidgeted nervously. An artillery observer, Negib was urgently needed in the center of the city to help correct the army's mortar fire. Negib's driver, Mohammed Abdallah, shared his impatience. A Bedouin from northern Transjordan, Abdallah had never been to Jerusalem. The route he was to take into the city, however, had been clearly set out for him. After the hairpin turn at the base of Sheikh Jarrah, he would go straight down Nablus Road to Damascus Gate.

  Nevo watched the cars move slowly, ponderously, down the hill into Sheikh Jarrah "as though they had all the time in the world." "The bastards are trying to frighten us," he thought. "They think they're unbeatable." Fright, in any event, was the effect they had on the thirty men Nevo had held with him at Tipat Chalav as a reserve. Some of them shook so badly that they couldn't stand up. All refused to leave the safety of the headquarters cellar.

  Nevo pulled out his pistol and pointed it at the first man. "Get out of here before I count three or I shoot," he warned. As he began to count, the trembling man started out the door.

  When all the men were outside, Nevo ordered them to attention and gave them a loud oration. Then, in the cellar, Carmi Charny heard their shaking voices begin to sing "Hatikvah." As their song gained in strength, Nevo marched them off singing to their positions.

  When he came back, he announced to Charny, "O.K., it's your turn now."

  Charny felt his mouth go dry and his knees shake as he stood up. Carrying his heavy machine gun on his back, the aspiring poet followed Nevo. Behind him, two friends hauled belts of cartridges for the gun. Nevo took them to a rock-strewn field at the edge of Mea Shearim. Three hundred yards ahead was a road and, looming behind it, the Police Training School. "Crawl out into that field as far as you can go and pick a rock to give you some cover," Nevo ordered. "When you open fire, give them long bursts. Make them think you've got all the ammunition in the world."

  Charny tried not to think. He was terribly frightened, and each forward movement seemed to demand an immense ration of willpower. At the barbed-wire fence marking the entry into the field, he paused to catch his breath. "Keep moving," Nevo shouted. He crawled on. As he neared the rock outcropping on which he had decided to place his weapon, he passed a line of riflemen lying in the fields. One was a friend. They nodded shalom. Hands trembling and his breath coming in quick, nervous gulps, Charny set up his gun. When he had finished, he turned to look at his friend. He was lying on his back, his mouth hanging open, his head torn asunder as though it had been parted by a meat ax.

  At that horrible image, a strange change came over the terrified Charny. Looking at his dead friend, he thought, "That's it. That's the worst that can happen." Suddenly he became totally calm and detached, as cool and rational as if he were preparing to write a dissertation on the Law.

  Two Legion armored cars pulled out of the advancing line and began to swing down a dirt track some fifty yards from Charny's gun. They were so cl
ose that he could see the trademarks on their tires. As Nevo had ordered, he opened fire in long bursts as though his Beza were a Sten gun. "Wholly, fanatically, concentrated," he watched his rounds hitting the car and its tires.

  Not far away, on the second floor of the Mandelbaum house, one of the Gadna teenagers cried, "There they are!"

  The young men who six days earlier had been praying that peace might descend on Jerusalem clutched their bottles of Molotov cocktails and pressed their backs to the wall of the house. Jacob Ben-Ur started to count as one by one the Legion armored cars slid into view on the road through Sheikh Jarrah. In a chorus of growing awe, the boys around him began to repeat each number after him. As the count mounted past ten, someone asked, "How many shells do they have for the bazooka downstairs?"

  "Three," someone replied.

  "No," came another, more satisfying answer. "Seven." Ben-Ur's count continued until he had reached the terrifying total of seventeen Legion armored cars.

  Mishka Rabinovitch, a twenty-eight-year-old Russian-born veteran of the British Army, crouched with the bazooka behind a pile of stones, looking down St. George Road. Rabinovitch had his seven shells, but the Haganah was deprived that morning of one of its prime assets, the accuracy of its best gunner. A few days earlier, the premature explosion of a Davidka shell had torn off part of Rabinovitch's right hand. To answer Nevo's call, he had fled the hospital.

  If he couldn't shoot his bazooka, he could at least aim it. Peering through its lens, he sighted on a sign fifty yards down St. George Road reading "Jerusalem—one kilometer." Turning to the young Pole beside him, he whispered, "When 'Jerusalem—one kilometer' disappears behind the first car, fire."

  Nevo, from his headquarters' roof, watched the "slow, maddeningly confident march forward" of the cars. The line advanced to the intersection of St. George Road and Nablus Road. There was a moment of hesitation. Then Nevo felt his throat go taut. The column was moving up St. George Road, straight into his trap.

  Eliyahu, the young Pole next to Rabinovitch, watched the lead car creep slowly toward his bazooka. That car should not in fact have been in the gunsight of his weapon. It was there because in his haste to get into the Holy City, the Bedouin driving the lead car, Mohammad Abdallah, had taken the wrong turn. The imposing line of cars moving into town that morning was not supposed to conquer Jewish Jerusalem. Buchanan's orders to his men were to reach Damascus Gate and establish a continuous Arab line from Sheikh Jarrah to the Old City walls.

  Rabinovitch held his breath as the youth slowly squeezed his trigger. The rocket leaped forward. Hit head on, the lead car was tossed to the side of the road. At that instant, Nevo noted with satisfaction, "all hell broke loose." The youth's shot unleashed the action which Nevo had been expecting but which the Legion had not planned for. Half a dozen cars moved to attack in aid of the crippled vehicle.

  Inside, Lieutenant Negib, the artillery forward observer on his way to Damascus Gate, was dead. Mohammed Abdallah too had paid a terrible price for turning right instead of heading straight down Nablus Road. He pulled himself from his car and huddled for an instant behind his turret. From a nearby hotel window, British journalist Eric Downton watched his mates calling to him to jump to the ground and run. Then Abdallah, a grotesque dwarf with both legs reduced to bloody stumps by the bazooka shell, slid down the car to die in the street.

  In the British Daimler armored car he had helped to steal a few weeks earlier, Reuven Tamir watched the other Legion cars moving up behind the smoking vehicle. He closed his eyes and fired his cannon. When he opened them, he saw only a hole in the house down the street. He fired again with no more luck. With the third shot, he shouted in triumph. Flames were gushing from the turret of a second armored car.

  An intense battle swirled around the Mandelbaum house. Anxious to help their comrades, the Legion infantry rushed forward. When their red-and-white kaffiyehs moved into view, the teenagers of the Gadna hurled their remaining Molotov cocktails. From one window, Jacob Ben-Ur fired their sole machine gun. From another, his fiancée, Sarah Milstein, the daughter of a devoutly orthodox family, caught the figure of an advancing Legionnaire in her gunsight. She had never fired a weapon at a living thing. She was a nurse by training. "I can't kill him," she thought. She fired at the pavement at his feet. The Legionnaire turned and fled. Sarah lowered her rifle with a sigh of relief.

  Surprised by the ferocity of the resistance to an attack they had not planned to make, the Legionnaires drew back to regroup and resume their original line of advance. At the sight of their cars withdrawing, a series of triumphant shouts echoed from the Mandelbaum house.

  Nevo too watched with satisfaction. John Glubb's army had paid dearly for stumbling into his trap. Two cars were knocked out near Nevo's positions at Mandelbaum; a third, crippled by Carmi Charny's fire, lay farther down the road.

  The news of the victory spread through Jerusalem in minutes. Its psychological importance was enormous. A group of Gadna teenagers had turned back the enemy the city feared most—the armored cars of the Arab Legion. The relief, the reassurance their action brought the city would be of incalculable importance in the days ahead. Its impact could be measured in the manner in which Naomi Nevo heard the news. A friend rushed up to her, weeping for joy, and threw her arms around Naomi's neck. "Naomi, Naomi," she cried, "Yosef has saved Jerusalem!"

  36

  "TAKE LATRUN."

  STUDIOUSLY IGNORING THE CRASH of the Arab Legion artillery fire in the streets outside, Dov Joseph continued his sermon to the men around him in one of the Jewish Agency's conference rooms.

  "Idleness is the source of depression," he warned. "People should be encouraged to lead normal lives insofar as possible." He wanted civilians to continue going to their offices, shopping and otherwise living as they usually did. Despite the fact that Jerusalem was now under daily shellfire and they had nothing to sell anyway, Joseph decreed that food shops would remain open every day from eight to four. To keep people informed, they should publish a daily news bulletin. It would be called The Voice of the Defender.

  No one gave a more convincing display of determined normalcy than the Canadian lawyer become Jewish Jerusalem's civilian chief. His cufflinks were fastened, his shoes were brushed, his tie was precisely knotted; only his soiled shirt betrayed the strain under which they all lived. In a Jerusalem short of water, it had not been laundered for a fortnight. Tenacious, taciturn, as sparing of his words as he was unsparing of his energies, Joseph was a dedicated, demanding leader who set an example he expected all around him to follow. He was, as one of his subordinates would observe, a man who "truly put Jerusalem above his highest joys."

  Nothing escaped him. If a truck driver wanted five gallons of gasoline, Joseph wanted to know why. If a bakery was ten loaves short in its day's production, Joseph demanded an explanation. His day began with a phone call from Avraham Picker, his food expert, at 4 A.M. At seven o'clock, Joseph was in his office. His staff consisted of a personal assistant and two secretaries. Keeping up with him, one of them recalled, was "terribly hard." He never showed a sign of weakness, and he tolerated none in his subordinates.

  Once, one of his exhausted secretaries began to doze as he dictated. "Mr. Joseph," she begged, "if you don't give me a little rest, I'll faint."

  "If you do," he replied, "I'll throw water on you and we'll go on."

  Half an hour after the daily food distribution was completed, Joseph entered the day's outlay himself on the chart in the orange folder he kept locked in his desk. There was no identifying label on its cover. No one else had access to the grim knowledge it contained, and Joseph had arranged his organization so that very few people knew the real state of the city's food supply. Like his employees, Joseph lived on the daily ration furnished by the Agency canteen, a sandwich of marmalade and halvah, and a cup of weak tea. The working day which began at four in the morning ended close to midnight with Joseph working alone in his office by the light of a single, battery-powered bulb.

&n
bsp; Whenever he had a free moment, Joseph would walk through the city, repeating over and over again a phrase that had become his personal psalm: "Yihiyeh tov. It will be all right." Above all, in his dedicated pursuit of normalcy he urged his fellows to sit down three times a day in front of an unwashed plate and go through at least the motions of eating a meal.

  The little that Joseph was able to put on those plates was an indication of how abnormal in fact the situation in Jerusalem was. The ration of the citizens of Jewish Jerusalem by May 20 amounted to nine hundred calories a day, just over half the daily ration of the Japanese civilian population in the last year of World War II, only two hundred calories more than the daily ration at the concentration camp of Bergen Belsen, about the equivalent of the ration given the inmates of Japan's prisoner-of-war camps.

  The Arab shelling and the search for food were the city's preoccupations. By day the streets were deserted and, as Joseph observed, "a great stillness pervaded the city." Without electric current, its nights were dark and gloomy. To minimize both the effects of the Arab shelling and evaporation, the water ration was distributed in the middle of the night; nevertheless, six volunteer water carriers would be killed by shellfire during the siege. There was even a black market in water, at $2.65 a quart.

  The Café Vienna was the city's trading exchange. Cigarettes were its currency, and by May 20 one cigarette was worth a loaf of bread, two cans of sardines or one can of herring. There were strange windfalls. One factory happened to have a supply of glucose. It was mixed with water to make a kind of energy-giving candy for the children.

  Each Jerusalemite would have his special memory of these tragic days. For Ziporah Borowsky it was her return from a trip to downtown Jerusalem to pick up the one egg each that was allotted to her and her fellow students in a Bet Hakerem boardinghouse. Chosen by a lottery so that only one person would be exposed to Arab shellfire, she fell with her precious bundle on the boardinghouse steps. She promptly scraped up the broken eggs and converted them into a muddy omelette.