O Jerusalem!

by Larry Collins

  Men ran, fell, got up, stumbled over the dead and dying, turned to fire a round or two, collapsed. A deadening sense of lassitude spread through their ranks. The wounded begged the living to kill them.

  Others didn't get up. Asher Levi came on two immigrants collapsed side by side, a haunted expression in their eyes. "Leave us alone. We want to stay here," one of them mumbled. Levi resorted to the only tactic he thought might save them. He began to club them with his rifle butt until they staggered to their feet to escape his beating.

  At the promised haven of Beit Jiz, there was neither water nor transport nor Haganah men to greet the pitiful flock staggering back from Latrun. There was only another rank of Arab guns. The village had been occupied by the Arab irregulars, and their fire caused the last Jewish casualties of the retreat.

  It was two o'clock in the afternoon when the first survivors finally stumbled back to the buses they had left twelve hours before. All day Laskov and his half-tracks, dodging Arab shellfire, combed the blackened fields for the last survivors.

  In his headquarters, Captain Mahmoud Rousan thumbed through the dozens of identity cards recovered from his foes' bodies by Lieutenant Ayad's patrol. "They belong to Jews from every part of the world," the wondering Rousan noted, "who had come here to fight for this land of milk and honey."

  No one would ever know how many of those immigrants had purchased with their lives the right to enter their new country. In the confusion that had preceded the attack, there had been no time to compile accurate rosters for their companies. Officially, the Haganah would admit to seventy-five dead. Unofficially, its historians acknowledged years later that their losses had far exceeded that. The Legion claimed that eight hundred of the attackers had been killed, clearly an exaggerated figure, but they did capture 220 rifles. Their own losses were insignificant.

  Whatever the true figures, the immigrants of Shlomo Shamir's Seventh Brigade, assailed by a determined foe, by the khamsin and the barkaches, had suffered the bloodiest defeat an Israeli unit would receive in three wars with the Arabs.

  40

  ". . . REMEMBER ME ONLY IN HAPPINESS."

  THE CENTER of Amman was dense with the crowds. Clapping their hands in rhythm to their slogans, they danced from street to street chanting their army's victory. Their jubilant chorus gave the men in the hotel conference room opposite the Roman arena of ancient Philadelphia a pleasant pause. The triumph of Latrun was not the only Arab victory the members of the Arab League's Political Committee had to celebrate. The same day that Colonel Majali's men had turned back the Israelis at Latrun, the kibbutz of Yad Mordechai, after five days of heroic resistance, had fallen to the Egyptian Army. Only in the north, where the Israelis had driven the Syrians from Galilee, had the Arab armies suffered an important reverse.

  The sense of coming triumph did not dispose the Arab leaders to look with favor upon the paper presented to them by the League's secretary, Azzam Pasha: an appeal from the United Nations Security Council for a cease-fire within thirty-six hours.

  Since May 14 the United States had been seeking to get a cease-fire call through the Security Council. The American efforts had been persistently thwarted by Great Britain. Persuaded that the Arabs might be on the threshold of substantial gains, the British showed no disposition to hasten the end of the fighting. As one of Britain's senior diplomats told an American colleague, the situation "should be allowed to seek its own level for a while."

  Finally, on May 22, the United States and the Soviet Union had pushed a cease-fire appeal through the Security Council after British opposition had thwarted their plea for an "order" to stop fighting with severe sanctions if it wasn't followed.

  In Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion polled his military on the advisability of accepting it. Their arms situation had improved slightly. Five more Messerschmitts had been flown into Israel, and the first major shipment of arms to arrive by sea had reached Haifa harbor. Nonetheless, Ben-Gurion's advisers were unanimous: a cease-fire was much to be desired.

  Quite a different sentiment animated the Arab leaders meeting in Amman. Convinced that Jerusalem was about to fall to their forces, they categorically rejected the cease-fire appeal. Instead, the Arab leaders issued to the United Nations an ultimatum of their own: they gave the world body forty-eight hours to devise a new Palestine solution which would not include a Jewish state.

  In the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, the rabbis who four days earlier had begged their superiors to "shake the world and save our souls" urged the quarter's Haganah commander to surrender. "We have been saying psalms all the time, yet the battle continues," one of them sadly told Moshe Russnak. Clearly, it was God's will that they surrender.

  Russnak's situation was indeed desperate. Abdullah Tell's relentless pressure had deprived his men of position after position. The quarter's limited space had now been reduced to half its original dimensions. Their water was almost gone. The electricity supply had failed. The sewers no longer worked and it was impossible to collect garbage. In the May heat, the quarter's alleys were heavy with the stench of decomposing human excrement. An even worse smell, the putrefying odor of dead flesh, clung to every stone around the hospital. Unable to bury their dead, the quarter's doctors had ordered them wrapped in old sheets and stacked in a courtyard behind the hospital. Among them were Rabbi Yitzhak Orenstein and his wife. While their son and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, were fighting on the quarter's perimeter, the rabbi who had greeted Israel's birth May 14 with a shechiyanu had been killed with his wife by a shell falling on their home. Young Avraham Orenstein had been able to leave his post just long enough to say the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, over his father's body.

  In the hospital, even the last bottles of blood plasma had been lost when the power failed. There was no anesthetic left, and operations were performed without it by flashlight. The old vaulted rooms of Misgav Ladakh were crowded with over one hundred and fifty wounded, fighters and civilians alike. On one of those beds, her back torn open by a mortar fragment, was the English girl who had wanted so much to be a part of the Old City's defense, Esther Cailingold.

  Uprooted from their homes because the Arabs had either captured them or made life in them unbearable with shellfire, most of the quarter's seventeen hundred residents huddled together in three synagogues just inside the Haganah's lines. They cooked on the floor, slept on dirt-encrusted, vermin-filled old mattresses, weeping, praying or gazing off into space.

  Yet despite his grim situation, Russnak would not yield to the rabbis' pleas for surrender. Time and time again since May 18 he had been promised help, and time and time again it had failed to arrive. So categoric had been the promises made to him this morning, however, that Russnak was persuaded to hold on. Tonight, he told the rabbis, help had to arrive.

  Instead of reinforcements, it was a surprise sent by the Arabs that the next twenty-four hours would bring Russnak.

  Dissatisfied with the results being obtained by his artillery on the Mount of Olives, Abdullah Tell had decided to bring his guns to the heart of Jerusalem, where the penetrating effect of their shells would be devastating. Past the Stations of the Cross of the Via Dolorosa, using sandbags to smooth over stairways, Tell succeeded in moving two of his armored cars where only mules and goats had gone before, through the crooked alleyways of the Old City.

  Their appearance bewildered the Haganah's weary soldiers. "We didn't know what hit us, it was all new to us," Yehuda Choresh recalled. There was not a single antitank weapon in the quarter's depleted armory. Choresh and his comrades fled to the rooftops. There they threw their handful of Molotov cocktails at the cars, hoping that the narrow, rubble-filled passageways below would stop them.

  Thirty-three days after Passover, the Jewish feast of Lag B'Omer commemorates the miraculous halt of a plague sweeping Judea during the Roman wars and the last struggle of the Jewish people to wrest their independence from Rome. As that normally festive day dawned in the Jewish Quarter Thursday, May 27, it was c
lear both to its deeply religious inhabitants and to its exhausted defenders that only a similar miracle could save them.

  Taking a post-by-post survey of his perimeter, Moshe Russnak discovered that of the two hundred fighters with whom the struggle had begun and the eighty reinforcements who had come in with Gazit, thirty-five men remained unwounded. Together they had an average of ten bullets per man. There was no ammunition left for the Bren guns. Leah Vultz's factory had converted the last Players cigarette tin and tomato can in the quarter into her homemade grenades. Only one remained in her reserve and it would not leave its hiding place. Leah was determined to kill herself with it when the end came.

  Russnak's pitiful perimeter included the hospital, his headquarters and the three ancient synagogues, into whose cellars the demoralized residents were packed. Only one other major synagogue remained in Jewish hands, the Hurva, the principal temple of the Ashkenazim, considered the most beautiful in all Jerusalem and, indeed, all Palestine. As the dome of St. Peter's dominated the skyline of Rome, its graceful eighteenth-century parabola towered over the roofs of Old Jerusalem. Anxious to avoid the opprobrium of destroying it, Abdullah Tell had written Otto Lehner of the Red Cross forty-eight hours before to warn that unless the Haganah abandoned its positions in the synagogue and its adjoining courtyard, he would be forced to attack it.

  Russnak could not agree to his request. The Hurva was the key to the last stretch of ground he controlled. Once it fell, the Arabs would be fifteen yards from the seventeen hundred civilians he was defending. He would fight for it as long as he could.

  Even in the despair and filth of the crumbling quarter, the normal events of life went on. A woman gave birth to a baby girl and named her "Reinforcements," for that thought was uppermost in everybody's mind. The doctors at the hospital could spare her a bed just long enough to let her deliver her child. Then, carrying the new infant under her arm, she returned to the Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakai Synagogue and started cooking for her family.

  As he did every morning, Jacob Tangy, an orderly in the hospital, tagged with identity cards the shrouds wrapping the night's dead. Then, in the clean shirt he had saved for the occasion, Tangy ran to the cellar of the Gates of Heaven Yeshiva for a ceremony symbolizing life's continuance and, above all, in Tangy's mind, Jewish life in their shattered quarter. It was his wedding.

  His bride had arrived from her front-line post a few minutes before, just in time to change from her khaki uniform to a dress. By the light of a candle quivering from the shock of exploding shells, the two young people exchanged their vows, praying according to their Jewish marriage service that soon "there may be heard in the cities of Judah, in the streets of Jerusalem, the sound of joy and gladness."

  Abdullah Tell's company commanders were unanimous in their reports at their daily conference that morning: With one concerted push, the quarter would fall.

  There was no doubt in Tell's mind where the attack should be made. Confident that he had discharged his moral obligations in his unanswered letter to the Red Cross, he told his men, "Get the Hurva Synagogue by noon."

  "If we do," replied Captain Moussa, "promise us you will have tea in it this afternoon."

  "Insh' Allah! God willing!" said Tell.

  The destruction of the ancient synagogue would be the final achievement of Fawzi el Kutub's savage career.

  To blow his way through the walls surrounding it, he strapped to a ladder a 200-liter barrel filled with explosives. Four men, among them Nadi Dai'es, the coffee boy who had discovered Abdul Khader's body at Kastel, grabbed the ends of the ladder as though it were a stretcher. Pistol in hand, Fawzi led them across a fifty-yard strip of open ground to the base of the synagogue's courtyard wall. As they ran for cover, Fawzi waited an instant to make sure the fuse he lit with a cigarette was burning. Then he ran for shelter.

  The explosion blew a gaping hole in the synagogue wall. For forty-five minutes, a dozen Haganah soldiers kept the Legion from bursting through it, hurling every hand grenade they possessed into the breach. Finally their fire stopped and the Legionnaires burst in. They found a rare booty, a pile of rifles. For the first time, the quarter had had more arms than men. There simply had not been enough fighters to carry them away.

  The Legionnaires entered the synagogue itself and tried to scramble to the top of its dome to plant an Arab flag. Three of them were shot by Haganah snipers, but the fourth succeeded. Clearly visible in the New City, their flag over the skyline of the Old City signaled the Legion's triumph.

  With the capture of the Hurva, twenty-five percent of the territory remaining to the Haganah had fallen to the Arabs. Only one thing saved the quarter from annihilation. The captured area was full of shops, and a looting party was soon in full sway.

  Profiting from the respite the looting gave him, Russnak decided to make a desperate effort to reestablish a defense by taking back a small building on the flank of the synagogue. Called the Defense Club, its windows offered the Haganah a vantage point from which they might at least slow the Legion's advance.

  Russnak decided to get his best surviving fighter, Yitzhak the Bren Gunner, to lead the attack. He sent a dark-haired girl lieutenant with his order. "I can't," said Yitzhak, who had fought in almost all the quarter's battles. "All this means nothing now. In the end we'll surrender."

  "Yitzhak, it must be done," pleaded the girl. "The Arabs are only fifteen yards away. If you don't, they'll sweep everything away in an hour. There are women and children."

  Furious, resigned, the young Kurdish Jew got to his feet, called five men and left. Two minutes later he was dead. The quarter's last offensive was over.

  A few minutes later, a gigantic explosion shook Jerusalem. A thick cloud of red-gray dust billowed up from the heart of the Old City, darkening the horizon before the Jewish Quarter and sprinkling its alleys with a brick dust. As the smoke finally cleared, a thousand anguished Jewish voices began to chant in the basements of the three remaining synagogues Judaism's holiest prayer, the Shema Yisrael. It had been Fawzi el Kutub and not Abdullah Tell who had come to tea at the Hurva Synagogue. Using the last explosives left in his Turkish bath, Kutub had wreaked his final revenge on the neighbors against whom he had waged his lifetime's crusade. The skyline of Jerusalem had lost one of its great monuments. He had reduced what was left of the city's most precious synagogue to ruins.

  As if the destruction of their synagogue was the final act of their destiny, a strange reaction swept over the quarter's residents, now huddled in their dark cellars. They broke out the last few treasures they had been hiding. In every corner of the fetid, sweaty basements of the three synagogues still standing, people broke into their reserves of wine, sweets, chocolates, cigarettes, lentil soup, noodles. In a few moments the cellars were alive with the merriment of a gigantic feast of the damned.

  From his headquarters Russnak sent a clear warning to the New City: if help did not arrive that night it would be all over. But the only help to come over the wall that night was sent in the casing of a Davidka shell with its explosives removed. In it two Palmachniks put the one thing that might aid the beleaguered comrades they could not reach, bullets. On top they slipped a note reading: "Strength and courage. We are with you." Then they fired their Davidka.

  The shell fell inside the Arabs' lines.

  A few minutes past nine o'clock Friday, May 28, the telephone rang in Major Abdullah Tell's headquarters at Rawdah School. It was Captain Moussa. "Two rabbis," he said, "are coming out of the quarter with a white flag."

  Walking into Moussa's headquarters in the Armenian School of the Holy Translators, Tell found himself face to face with the first Jews he had ever met: the seventy-year-old Rabbi Reuven Hazan and the eighty-three-year-old Rabbi Zeev Mintzberg. As Jerusalem's Arab mayor had surrendered the city to the British with an old bedsheet thirty-one years earlier, the two had come to prepare their quarter's surrender to the Arab Legion.

  Their arrival climaxed a two-hour struggle inside the quarter. The Haganah had
thwarted with gunfire the rabbis' first effort to cross the battle line, wounding Hazan. Undaunted, they insisted that Russnak would have to kill them to stop them from going to the Arabs. "It makes no difference who kills us," Hazan declared. "The situation is hopeless."

  The hard-pressed Russnak summoned a meeting of his staff. The situation was indeed hopeless. The Legion was six yards away from the synagogue in which the residents huddled; the hospital was out of virtually every form of medicine. His men had ammunition for no more than another half hour. After that, seventeen hundred people would be at the mercy of the Arabs. Russnak decided to try to stall for time by talking. He authorized the two rabbis to ask for a cease-fire for the removal of the dead and wounded.

  Politely but firmly, Tell ordered Rabbi Hazan back to the quarter to bring Rabbi Weingarten and a representative of the Haganah. On his side, Russnak delayed as long as he dared, then ordered an Arabic-speaking officer, Shaul Tawil, back to Tell.

  Tell had meanwhile invited the Red Cross's Otto Lehner and the United Nations' Pablo de Azcarate to witness the proceedings. Azcarate was deeply moved. He found Tell "without a single word or gesture which could have humiliated or offended the defeated leader in any way," Tawil "calm, strong, showing not the slightest sign of submission or resentment." Tell was not prepared to enter discussions, however. His terms were simple. All able-bodied men would be taken prisoner. Women, children and the aged would be sent to the New City. The wounded, depending on the extent of their injuries, would be held prisoner or returned. Although he knew there were many women in the ranks of the Haganah, he would take no women prisoners. Tell dictated his terms to Nassib Boulos, a bilingual Arab correspondent of Time magazine; then he gave the Haganah until four o'clock to accept his offer.