The judge intoned, “Mr. Ungar, you stand before the court accused of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and the possession of a firearm and ammunition. These are capital offenses. How do you plead?”
Hugo had the sense of acceleration, a suffocating speed. The courtroom quickened, every second sliced to a sliver. How could he think at this pace? He looked over his shoulder to the crowd; was there going to be a rescue? Faces, white and blank, gazed back. He faced the judge, the police, his lawyer, and the bailiff. The judge’s face was the only one in the courtroom with wonder on it. What will you do, Hugo Ungar?
Time slowed. Hugo had to catch his balance. Every choice seemed wrong or impossible, to beg or scream, weep or disappear.
He felt closer to death than when he’d been minutes from it in Buchenwald. There, death would have been a release from a weary life. Tens of thousands around him had been on the same path. In this courtroom, death had found him alone and come marching. Facing it with no company was dreadful.
The judge folded his hands in a show of patience, to demonstrate that he was better than Hugo, safer, wealthier, powerful enough to keep his word. Hugo was small, the chains hurt his wrists and made his feet drag.
He held out his arms and let the shackles drip between them, to show them to the judge, to tell him, You are not better than me. You are not more powerful. We are in Palestine.
“Guilty.”
The lawyer said nothing on Hugo’s behalf.
The judge surveyed the precautions in his courtroom; he seemed to find them excessive. Twenty policemen guarded the courtroom, twenty soldiers patrolled outside. The Irgun wouldn’t come, Pinchus had made no threats in Hugo’s name. The judge shook his head, bewigged and grand, at his many protectors. The judge knew who Hugo was, a little fellow bound and famished and defiant.
The judge left Hugo to stand in the shifting of the gallery, the creaking benches. When he spoke, his chin rested in his hand.
“Before I pronounce sentence, I’m curious.”
Hugo’s shackles were quiet. He was not shaking.
“Can you guess how many lives would have been lost if you’d managed to blow up Citrus House?”
“No.”
“Do you know when the explosion was planned to go off, how much dynamite was to be used?”
“No.”
“Do you know anything about your mission besides driving a truck?”
“No.”
“As I suspected. You lack the character to even be a proper villain.”
The judge paused to allow Hugo the last seconds of his old life, to say farewell to that former man.
“Hugo Ungar, for your crimes against the Mandate of Palestine, I sentence you to hang by the neck until you are dead.” Because he would not, the judge added, “May God have mercy on you.”
Chapter 65
Rivkah
July 5
Massuot Yitzhak
The dark mule had been named Zipporah after Moses’s wife. Rivkah called her Zipp because she was slow.
Rivkah led the mule by the halter up from the quarry. In the groaning cart Zipp pulled a half-ton of cut stone. She champed at her bit and foamed around the lips. The morning sun beat on Rivkah’s back, on Zipp’s rump, and on the stony road. Rivkah swatted the animal’s flanks with a switch to keep her plodding.
Zipp’s long ears flicked up to face the white hill. Someone ran their way, raising dust. Something was wrong, urgent. Rivkah took her hands off the mule to have them ready.
Vince was the runner. She opened her arms; he could barely slow on the pebbly ground. Rivkah caught him from skidding past.
“What are you doing here? Is everything alright?”
Vince nodded against her cheek. Along with his greeting, his clasp had departure in it. Rivkah asked again, “Are you alright?”
He leaned away with hands on her waist. “I can’t stay long.”
“I’m happy to see you.” Rivkah touched his scratchy jaw. “Why are you here? Walk with me.”
She slipped her hand inside Zipp’s halter to move on. Vince reached to take the bridle for her, to do her chore. Rivkah patted down his wrist; it was alright if they had different lives. Vince put his hand to the small of her back, amusing Rivkah once more with how out of place he was on a farm.
“I came with UNSCOP.”
“They’re here?”
Walking up the hill, Vince’s long legs went too fast for Zipp and the load of stone. Rivkah kept the switch pattering on the mule’s flank.
“I’m covering the Committee on a tour of Palestine. Two weeks of open meetings in Jewish and Arab towns.”
“How’s it going?”
“The Jews talk for hours. The Arabs boycott.”
At the top of the hill, the sun streamed down on the kibbutz; heat mirages wavered off the roofs and the Committee’s buses. Settlers paused in the middle of their workday, with tools on their shoulders or in aprons, to gather around the Committee. Rivkah rolled down her pants legs, buttoned her tunic, and wiped her kerchief across her dusty face. Vince said, “You’re fine.”
He tugged Rivkah forward, Zipp behind her, and with the squeaky cart they advanced into Massuot Yitzhak. Mrs. Pappel waved them over to her conversation with a tall, pale man who shaded his eyes from the light.
Mrs. Pappel did not brew tea. The judge said he’d come to be of service to Massuot Yitzhak, not the other way around. Wearing a cream linen jacket and slacks, he sat on the porch with Mrs. Pappel and Rivkah. Vince stood aside.
Judge Sandström’s questions were dignified and dispassionate, a Nordic manner that cooled the noon shade. He asked Rivkah and Mrs. Pappel how they came to be in Palestine; they told their separate tales of Vienna, their losses, and the Patria. The judge said he was sorry for Sweden’s neutrality during the war and said that was the reason he’d accepted the job from the UN.
Mrs. Pappel asked how the Committee came to be in Massuot Yitzhak?
“I hope we are not an inconvenience.”
“It’s a small kibbutz. You’re an interruption, not an inconvenience.”
Sandström looked Vince’s way. “He convinced me.”
Rivkah asked, “What did he say?”
“That everything good in Palestine was here.”
Vince grinned at his shoes. The judge paid no more attention to him, fixed on Rivkah.
“Tell me about that. The good.”
She told of the kibbutz’s orchards and small fields, the work desalinating the soil, terracing it, turning back the desert. Animals and tractors did their share, the rest done by hand. The hilltop commanded vistas in all directions, clean breezes and deep-set stars. Massuot Yitzhak was cold and warm, everything in between. It repaid struggle and faith. If it were given a chance, it might last a thousand years.
“How many more settlers could you support here?”
Rivkah swept her arm across the vista. “You see what I see.”
Mrs. Pappel patted Rivkah’s knee. “If this girl can make rocks bloom, what else might she do?”
The judge, too, reached for Rivkah, pale fingertips on her wrist. “We must find a way to let her do it.”
Mrs. Pappel said, “You remind me of someone.”
The judge straightened, remembering to be distant. “Who might that be?”
“Mister Pinchus.”
“I’ve met your Mister Pinchus.”
Mrs. Pappel asked, “Does he look well?”
The judge let his curiosity be obvious. Mrs. Pappel did not back away and cocked her head for an answer.
“Quite well.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Some things difficult to believe. Much that wasn’t.”
“Can you tell us?”
“Pinchus says he is also fighting to free the Arabs from the British. He meant t
o give the impression that you and the Arabs might live in peace if there were an independent Jewish state. Do you agree?”
Mrs. Pappel nodded.
“You do?”
“Yes. After a war.”
The judge put his elbows to his knees. The mood on the porch turned secretive.
“Pinchus says if there is a war, the Jews will win. Is this so?”
“There is an Arab. He is our friend. He’s a powerful man and he would be a powerful enemy. But he’s part of a clan. There are six clans alone in his town, and there are a hundred Arab towns. They have no leaders in common. In the Negev, the Bedouin follow no one. This is why we will win.”
“You sound confident. So did Mister Pinchus.”
“I know what he knows.”
The judge laid out an open hand, a request for Mrs. Pappel to give him something he might take away, that he could tell, quietly like this, to others.
“And that is?”
“We have the guns.”
The judge’s hand closed around that. “You do?”
“In Kfar Etzion and Massuot Yitzhak. I have over five hundred. All hidden.”
“What do you mean, you have?”
“I’m Haganah.”
The judge looked to Vince, who shrugged. Rivkah had not told him of Mrs. Pappel’s status or her armory.
Mrs. Pappel had multiplied the number of her hidden weapons by twenty. She gestured to Rivkah.
“This girl’s sister is Palmach. What I’m saying is we are ready, in ways you will not see.”
The judge tapped the arm of his porch chair.
Rivkah wanted no more talk of war. She could not send the Judge away, so she excused herself; she had more stones to move. Mrs. Pappel had a way with powerful men. The judge would not mind Rivkah’s departure. She left the porch. Vince followed.
He stayed in her wake through the middle of the kibbutz. On a dozen porches, Committee diplomats spoke with more young settlers, asking what do you grow, what do you make, will you fight?
Zipporah and the cart had been emptied of their load. Rivkah took the halter to lead her back down to the quarry.
Vince asked, “Are you upset with me?” When she gave no answer, he said, “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
“I have to stay.”
“It won’t always be this way.” Vince bent to the road for a smooth, white pebble. “I’ll bring this back to you.”
He seemed to want to kiss her, but Rivkah shook the notion off. She walked the mule downhill to do her own work in the sun.
Chapter 66
JULY 19
HAIFA
BRITISH MANDATE OF PALESTINE
By Vincent Haas
Herald Tribune News Service
THE NIGHT BEFORE his ship, the Exodus 1947, was boarded by British Marines, American sailor Billy Bernstein told his crewmates he’d had a premonition that he would die.
Billy was not a somber man. Quite the opposite. He was a carrottop, cheerful Californian, a young veteran with the rest of his life ahead of him.
For the war, he left pre-med studies at Ohio State to join the Merchant Marine. After serving, he got accepted into the Naval Academy. But Billy put his life on hold to volunteer for Aliyah Bet, the underground effort to smuggle Jewish survivors of the European Holocaust by sea past the British blockade, into Palestine.
Billy took a berth as second mate on the President Warfield, a luxury steamer built in 1928 to ferry passengers and packages up and down the Chesapeake Bay. The vessel had room for 400 passengers. In 1942, the President Warfield was acquired by the British to serve as a troop transport. Britain gave her back to the Americans for the Normandy landings; she anchored off Omaha Beach as an accommodation ship.
Last November, the Aliyah Bet found and purchased her. The President Warfield was a perfect fit; built for the Chesapeake with a shallow draft, she could be refitted to hold 4,498 passengers on wooden racks not unlike what the Jews had escaped in the camps. Some dark night, at the eastern terminus of the Mediterranean, she’d be run aground in the shallows of some Palestine beach. Then, the refugees could wade ashore.
On July 11, the President Warfield departed the south of France, loaded with displaced persons from across Europe. The Jews carried the shards of their lives in sacks and battered valises. They hoped, but didn’t really expect, to reach Palestine on this try. Since the war’s end, the British have interdicted over a hundred thousand like them on sixty different Aliyah Bet ships. To date, little more than ten thousand survivors of the Nazi exterminations have made it without permits into Palestine. The Jews whom the British capture are being held at internment camps in Cyprus, with no promise of ever seeing their promised land, so long as Britain controls it.
All the Yanks on the President Warfield were American Jews like Billy, a dozen young men who, like him, lied to their mothers about where they were going.
For a week on the Mediterranean, their ship was trailed by two, then six British cruisers and destroyers, behemoths of guns, bullhorns and spotlights. The day before landfall, the crew and passengers of the President Warfield unveiled the ship’s new name. They unfurled a banner down her flank which read: Exodus 1947.
The next night, July 18, twenty miles off the sands of Bat Yam south of Gaza, the British warships made their move. They tried to cut Exodus off from approaching shore. They rammed her repeatedly, but the refugee ship would not be turned away. Rather than confront thousands of immigrants splashing to the beach and thousands more Palestinian Jews rushing from towns and kibbutzim to greet them, the British decided to board the Aliyah Bet ship at sea.
In darkness, two huge destroyers pulled alongside, starboard and port. They squeezed the Exodus, damaging her hull, while loudspeakers demanded she cut her engines. Planks were heaved into place. British Marines flooded onboard.
The Jews were prepared for a brawl. Stacks of canned goods and bags of potatoes waited on deck, even rocks from the ballast, to be flung at the boarding party. With fists and tins of beets, the refugees battled for four hours against guns, truncheons and tear gas, the longest fight yet of any Aliyah Bet ship against British Marines.
In the melee, two young Jewish passengers were killed, one shot in the head, the other in the stomach. Billy Bernstein manned the pilot house. He had nothing with which to defend it but a fire extinguisher. He sprayed and swung it at ten Marines who together bashed him with their truncheons until Billy fell, his skull crushed. He died within the hour.
The warships escorted the Exodus into Haifa harbor, where I stood on the pier alongside Judge Emil Sandström, chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. We watched British police and soldiers force the survivors of Europe’s concentration camps off their ship at bayonet point, watched the refugees get doused with delousing powders. Then 4,496 Jews were herded onto three prison ships. Most went quietly, spent and afraid. The few who kept up resistance took blows for it. The immigrants were not bound for detention on Cyprus but back to holding camps in Germany, to a Europe that had become, for them, a graveyard. The Judge remarked that if this was what Britain had to do to keep their rule in Palestine, it wasn’t worth it.
Two soldiers carried Billy Bernstein’s body on a stretcher past the judge and me, though we didn’t know who lay under the blanket. I followed the bearers, showed them my press credential, and asked who it was. They knew only that it was an American. I pulled back the cover to see a bloodied young redhead, his life given over.
I don’t know what Billy Bernstein’s death means. Senseless death seems to be the coinage of this struggle over Palestine. I do know he was an American, and for that I mark his passing. You can think what you want about a self-determining state for the Jews. But know that people of many nations, including ours, are dying for it. More than that, they’re being killed for it. Reporting from Haifa, Palestine.
C
hapter 67
Hugo
July 20
Jerusalem
The guard held the iron door open. Hugo asked, “Is this the same cell?”
The guard motioned him in. “It is.”
“I don’t want to go in there.”
“I can imagine. Come on, then.”
The guard put gentle pressure in Hugo’s back to guide him past the bars. Hugo stepped inside the white walls and black bars; behind, keys jangled to lock him into the cage where Barazani and Feinstein had blown themselves apart.
Hugo sat on the cot, then at the table, then set a chair in the barred window to see into the Russian Compound. Looking for evidence would be too macabre, but he could not stop examining spots on the floor or divots in the plaster.
The heat in the cell encased Hugo in a torpor that made him lie on the cot. Could he sleep? The adjacent cell was empty. Hugo wanted to be sent to Acre Prison, to be near Habib, Nakar, and Weiss. He didn’t know the three Irgunists personally, but their names were in the news. Their sentences had been confirmed by the British government; Hugo’s had not. They were scheduled to hang in two weeks. Hugo assumed they were courageous; it might be a help to be near them. He worried that he was not linked to them; being in different prisons made them even more separate.
Hugo fell into a sweaty doze. He awoke to the workings of a key into death row.
A thick-waisted guard came close. A .45 pistol rode his hip, heavier than standard issue, a man-stopper. The gut of his starched shirt halted an inch from the bars. Blue-eyed with busted capillaries in his cheeks, he said, “Get up.”
Hugo didn’t have to do it, had to submit to no one, but there was no point in exercising that fact at the moment. He arose. The guard backed off.
A smallish man entered the cell block. He wore a blue suit, a gold watch fob crossed his vest. He’d lost much of his hair and combed the rest over to pretend he had more.
He carried a paper sack and introduced himself as the warden. Hugo and the warden stood close enough to shake hands through the bars but did not.
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