Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  Since August 1943 I had been on the move – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fürstengrube, the death march, Ahrensbök, Neustadt and Konstanz. And it was time to move on again.

  13

  The Land of Milk and Honey

  ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ was a slogan of the Zionist movement. If I hadn’t grown up with this idea buzzing around somewhere in the back of my head, Nathan and Hendla had. Because they were both older than me they had joined Gordonia in Bedzin, an organisation which seriously looked at the idea of Jews returning to their first homeland.

  I have read a lot about Zionism since I’ve had the leisure to do so and since I became a small part of it. ‘We are one people,’ Theodor Herzl wrote in my grandfather’s time, ‘our enemies have made us one whether we will or not … Affliction binds us together and thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a State and indeed, a model State. We possess all the requisite human and material resources.’

  Herzl was writing long before the Holocaust ripped away many of the human and material resources of the Jews but the heart of the idea of a Jewish homeland had not gone away. If anything, our collective experience in the years of the war had made the idea even more attractive, if not imperative. Survivors who went back to Poland to try to find their old lives found their houses occupied by someone else, their synagogues burnt down and their customs vanished. Some of them were beaten to death in the streets.

  The British papers were full of Palestinian news during 1947 and the opening months of 1948. Since the area had been taken by the British from the Turks during the First World War, the Biblical land that flowed with milk and honey had effectively been British. Brought up as I had been with stories of the Flood and Abraham and Isaac, and staring at their pictures on the walls of the Great Synagogue in Bedzin, I probably had a vague notion that the people still dressed like that and tended their flocks and that the whole place was just a beautiful, empty wilderness where no one else lived. The Nazis had probably viewed their proposed Jewish resettlement area in Madagascar in the same way. I knew perfectly well it couldn’t be like that and the newspaper headlines dispelled any notion of another Garden of Eden. Even so, the idea of an idyllic rural existence based on the kibbutz was one shared by millions of Jews all over the world.

  There were terrorist attacks carried out in March, mostly in the Jewish city of Tel Aviv as various hotheaded groups tried to force the British to pull out and to force the Arabs – whose home Palestine had been, of course, for centuries – to make room for the Jews. The Stern Gang and the Irgun organisation, some dressed as I had been in Neustadt in British Army uniforms, blew open prisons in Acre and bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. In the summer, the bodies of two British soldiers were found hanging in a eucalyptus grove near Haifa and, in a move that caught the imagination of the world, the Haganah ship Exodus 47, bringing 5,000 Jewish immigrants to Palestine, was boarded by the British. It was no Cap Arcona but there was fighting on board, tear gas was used against iron bars and food tins and three Jews died. The helmsman was beaten to death. The ship was turned back and its passengers taken to Cyprus, which was fast becoming one vast prison camp. From there, it moved on to France, but the passengers refused to get off and it ended up in, of all places, Hamburg.

  By September the British had decided enough was enough and agreed to pull out of Palestine. Two months later the blue and white Star of David flags flew over Jerusalem when the United Nations General Assembly agreed to the setting up of a Jewish state.

  What this meant of course was open war between the Jews and the Arabs, the first in a long series of conflicts that continues to scar the Middle East. The newspaper headlines of 17 January summed up the tit-for-tat killing that is still going on today. Just after midnight on the previous day, a food shop near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem was blown up by Arab terrorists. In reprisal, Haganah, the Jewish Defence Force, blew up a house and killed seven Arab children. Caught in the middle were the British who were trying to keep the lid on things by working with moderates on both sides. The trouble was that, as the death toll mounted, the number of moderates was falling daily.

  Since the British government had clamped down on immigration to Palestine in what had become such a troubled hot-spot, I had to be smuggled out of the country illegally, crossing the Channel first, then across France by train until I could get a ship from Marseilles.

  I couldn’t believe the heat in Palestine, even in April when I arrived. Poland never had sun like this and I’ve never sweated so much in my life, not even at the end of the Kamionka ghetto before they took us to Auschwitz. It wasn’t so much milk and honey as a parched, barren wilderness, with rocks, sand and more sand. Many of us volunteers from Northern Europe couldn’t take the heat and there were serious attacks of sunstroke and badly burned skin. For virtually all my time in Palestine I wore shorts and a hat of some kind was essential.

  By now my English was pretty good and I was billeted in the Telavinski camp, attached to a newly formed brigade, the 7th Armoured, which had a large English-speaking contingent and English-speaking leaders. Technically I was part of the organisation known as the Machal, one of 3,500 volunteers from forty-six countries. Many of us were camp survivors, drawn from all over Europe by our common experience and wanting to achieve something. Just staying alive had been an achievement in itself but I was twenty-one now and there seemed so much more to life than working as a tailor in the East End. If you look at photographs of the leaders in this war of liberation, as it came to be called, they are all young men, ready to take on the world. The photo of me on the dust jacket of this book was taken about this time and it represents a new Sam Pivnik. Gone is the scared, introverted boy of three years earlier. This version is a man, hard, steel-eyed, looking out into the middle distance of my future.

  There were only 250 of us English-speakers in my section of the Machal and two of them I palled up with in basic training were Herschel Margules and Max Wolinski. I didn’t know one end of a rifle from another, although I had seen plenty of them in use in the hands of the SS, and marching was a novelty too, about as far removed from the shambling of the death march or the shuffle to and from the Fürstengrube mine as it was possible to be.

  One of the commanders in the 72nd Battalion of the 7th Armoured Brigade was Captain David Appel and he impressed me as a great man, if only because he had far more to lose than most of us on account of his background. His real name was Thomas Bowden and he used David Appel as a sort of nom de guerre. He must have been one of the very few Englishmen who had seen the inside of a concentration camp because when he was captured during the war in Europe, letters from Jewish friends were found in his battledress pockets and on the assumption that he too was a Jew he was sent to Bergen-Belsen. He was married to an Israeli woman and that had kept him in the Middle East rather than going back to his family’s farmlands in Norfolk.

  Appel was looking for drivers. Today military historians will tell you that the Jews actually put more troops into the field than the Arabs in 1948 but it didn’t seem like that to us. It was David and Goliath and all we had was a metaphorical slingshot against the huge power of the enemy. We certainly didn’t have military experience and the advent of the Second World War had meant that very few of us could drive. Back in Bedzin only the seriously rich drove cars but I had learned how in Konstanz with Nathan and so I volunteered.

  I remember thinking how different all this was from the Appellplatz at Auschwitz-Birkenau or Fürstengrube where you never volunteered for anything. I told Captain Appel I could drive and he ordered me to the 79th Battalion where they needed drivers urgently. Here I stayed for the rest of my time in Palestine.

  At four o’clock on the afternoon of 14 May, hours before the British Mandate in the country came to an end, the leader of the Jewish Agency, David Ben-Gurion, announced that he was the first Prime Minister of a provisional government of the state of Israel. To millions of Jews worldwide, and especially the thousands
who had survived the Holocaust, it was music to our ears. That music became louder and more joyous as President Truman of the United States became the world’s first international leader to recognise the new state. Now all we had to do was fight for it.

  There was a world of difference between driving a civilian car and driving a half-track tank for the Mounted Infantry. My instructor was a man who later became a good friend: Sidney Friedman, a Sheffield lad from the British Armoured Corps. Sidney taught me how to rattle through the gears, squelch through mud, up sandy hills and down the other side, taking ravines as a matter of course. Four-wheel drive, two-wheel drive, heavy vehicles, light vehicles. I had to be able to roar along primitive roads, turn on a sixpence and tackle sand in all its manifestations – red hot to the touch and stinging the eyes and face when a desert storm blew up. I also had to be able to maintain the damned things, often spending hours under a bonnet in the striking cold of a Negev night, clanging away with spanners and hammers. If you worked on the engines during the day, the metal was too hot to touch and you were eaten alive by mosquitoes.

  I expect the regular armies of Europe would have been horrified if they could have seen our ramshackle outfit. Most of us didn’t have army boots so we wore our civilian shoes instead. We wore British tin hats and most of us had Arab headscarves to keep the eternal sand out of our mouths. This was a surreal situation. We were fighting a war for Israel, a war of liberation for the Jewish state, but relatively few of us were Jews and most people were like me, with only a smattering of Hebrew at our command. Our first commander in the 7th Armoured was Chaim Laskov, a Russian whose family had moved to Haifa in 1925. He had joined the British Army in 1940 as we were learning to cope with the German occupation in Bedzin and rose to become a major in the Jewish Brigade. For the last three years he had been heavily involved in the Aliyah Bet, which illegally brought Jewish immigrants to Palestine. There were rumours that he’d personally carried out the kind of vengeance I’d wanted to carry out on Max Schmidt, only he hadn’t bothered with the courts. In the weeks before I’d got to the Telavinski camp, Laskov had been training desperately needed officers before being given command of the 7th.

  While I was there, Laskov went back to recruiting with the rank of Major General and his place was taken by a relaxed Canadian called Ben Dunkelman, known in the desert as Benjamin Ben David. Like me, he was a tailor’s son, but he came from Toronto and had come, as Hendla had wanted to, to work on a kibbutz in Palestine when he was eighteen. He’d tried to join the Canadian Navy when war broke out but, of all the ironies, anti-Semitism meant that that wasn’t going to happen. So he’d joined the army instead and rose to the rank of major, dashing ashore in the crashing surf of Juno Beach in Normandy in the D-Day landings. Like Laskov, he hadn’t long been back in Palestine when he found himself in the middle of another war.

  Most of my mates in the 79th Battalion were ex-servicemen and once again I was the newbie, with less experience than the men around me. There were Americans, Canadians and South Africans and there was endless ribbing between the various nationalities. The Americans in particular would tease the South African Jews – ‘I see your house-boy hasn’t done a very good job on your shoes!’ Nobody took offence, if only because that sort of harmless racism had already replaced the kind that had killed millions in the camps.

  In that summer of 1948 I drove the third vehicle in our convoys along the roads into Jish, Safed and Galilee, liberating each town as we came to it. There were six of us in that wheeled tin can. I was crammed in the front next to the tank commander, with the litter of abandoned Syrian vehicles bobbing in front of my vision. Behind me were the gun crew with their anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns and their rapid-firing 20mm cannons. General Kaukji and his Syrians were holding a position near Galilee. The 7th was ordered to take it away from them and we did.

  Another of my umpteen lives was used up on the outskirts of Jish during this campaign. You get used to the noise in a half-track, but on this one day we ran into heavy artillery fire. I don’t know what happened because I was knocked out by the impact. All I remember was a devastating bang and then … blackness. When I came to, there was chaos, thick black smoke belching from the tank. I shook my head clear of the loud buzzing, trying to focus and make the two of everything I saw become one. Behind me one of my South African crew was lying dead by his gun and another was screaming as blood pumped from the ripped material where his left leg had been moments before. No war in the desert is pretty and the prospect of friends dying around me was precisely why I had kept to myself in the camps. When the surviving crew inspected the ripped vehicle, we realised that if the shells had struck two inches lower, the petrol tanks would have gone up, taking us all with them.

  By the end of May we were in battle at Latrun. This was the site of a medieval monastery just off the roads that run from Jerusalem to Jaffa and Gaza to Ramallah. It was a reminder that this was crusader territory and that East had faced West here for centuries. You can read all about the military manoeuvres in the weeks that followed for yourselves. I am no military historian and at the time of course all we were told was on a need-to-know basis. We were told to take the fortress of Latrun from the Arab Legion and that’s what we tried to do. The first step was Operation Bin Nun Alef, named after Joshua, son of Nun in the Bible who had conquered Canaan. With the 7th were the Alexandroni Brigade and we were under the command of Shlomo Shamir who had served with the British in the war in Europe.

  There were umpteen delays before Zero Hour finally happened and it wasn’t until the small hours of the morning on 25 May that the guns opened up. Our artillery didn’t have the range of the Arab guns and we had to fall back, without water and under murderous fire from the fort.

  The whole thing lasted two months – two months of sporadic fighting, manoeuvring, marching and countermarching. The history books will tell you that the Jordanians won and we lost, but it wasn’t that simple. We couldn’t take Latrun, but we did keep the road to Jerusalem open and that meant we could go on supplying the Jews there with weapons and equipment. Latrun to the Jews became what Dunkirk had been to the British. Dunkirk was a military disaster back in 1940 but if you listened to Winston Churchill (and millions did) it was a heroic victory for the British Army. In fact the whole of the war rested on this basis and the phrase ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ has become indelibly associated with all things traditionally British. So it was with Latrun. For Winston Churchill, read David Ben-Gurion. One hundred and sixty-eight Israeli soldiers died in these running fights, a fraction of the fatalities inflicted every day by even one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but the battle has become part of the myth of the formation of Israel and I was proud to have been part of it.

  In the standstill after Latrun while the United Nations organised a truce, we waited. The Arabs had promised to drive us into the sea and that hadn’t happened. If David hadn’t actually killed Goliath, at least the boy was still on his feet.

  When the war ended with a truce between Israel and Egypt in February 1949 we all breathed a sigh of relief. Ben-Gurion let those Arabs who had fled return to their homes and the roads to the kibbutzim in the Galilee region stayed open and free. I went to one of them, Kibbutz Dafna. The place had been founded in May 1939 by Jews from Poland and Lithuania. When I saw it, there was a great deal of bomb damage from the recent fighting, but the waters of the River Dan ensured a greenness that made the place a cool oasis of peace. It was here that I visited my cousin Zvi Wandasman, who I had last seen in Bedzin an eternity before.

  * * *

  I sometimes think I should have stayed in the Palestine that I, in a very small and unimportant way, had helped turn into Israel. It was a young country, with all the hopes and aspirations of a bright future, yet wedded to its past. Thousands of its first Jewish inhabitants were camp survivors like me. Now they faced a different enemy and one that was more persistent than the Nazis. They are fighting them still.

  14

  A Kind of Just
ice? A Kind of Peace?

  London, 1951. The Festival of Britain lit up the city’s skyline in what was supposed to be a ‘pat on the back’ for the people. Huge, prosperous-looking buildings sprang up along the South Bank, replacing the warehouses and little Victorian homes that Göring’s Luftwaffe had reduced to rubble. The cost was a then unbelievable £8 million. All I remember is that a cup of coffee cost ninepence!

  How I got back into England is one of those things I’d like to keep to myself. I’d been smuggled out illegally at a time when Britain was still fairly chaotic in the aftermath of war and getting back in was more difficult because everything had calmed down and normal service had been resumed. I travelled from Belgium to France and had to wait until the time was right to cross the Channel.

  For Nathan and me, our new lives began officially on 15 September 1953 when the London Gazette announced that we were aliens who had been given our naturalisation certificates. Slomo Pivnik and Nathan Pivnik were living in a house we were buying together in N16 and my occupation was given as tailor and cutter. All very humdrum, all very safe. You could say that the London Gazette’s announcement didn’t just mark the beginning of my new life, it marked the end of the old. But life isn’t that simple. I had undergone a sort of ‘resettlement in the West’ but I could never forget the ‘resettlement in the East’ and all that that meant. In the camps nobody dreamed, but I dreamed now and those dreams were often nightmares. Like I said, for some of us the war would never be over.