by Ruth Gruber
She stopped short at the door. “Then you knew?”
“Dr. Yassky asked my opinion. He knew all about you; his only hesitation was that you were so young.”
She walked slowly to the divan. He followed her and put his arms around her.
“It’s good you’re going,” he said. “Not only for the refugees, but for us.”
“Why?”
He took her face in his hands. “I’ve been monopolizing you. It’s not right. You must have a chance to meet other men—younger men.”
She was frightened. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“I’m trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
“From me, Raquela. I’m too old for you.”
“Fourteen years isn’t such a big gap.” Why couldn’t he see that? “Your beloved Sholom Aleichem would find an etza,” she said. “He would see that I’m twenty-two going on thirty; and you’re thirty-six going on—let’s say—thirty-three. So you’re only three years older than I am.”
He kissed her cheek.
“Let’s not discuss it,” he said. “You’re leaving on an important mission. You’re going to be the first Hadassah nurse these refugees will have seen.” He paused. “A ninth-generation Jerusalemite—you’re the fulfillment of all their dreams.”
They walked slowly, hand in hand, to the portico entrance to wait for the station wagon that would take her down the mountain, past Sheikh Jarrah, through the silent curfewed streets, to Bet Hakerem.
“Le’hitraot, Raquela,” he said.
“Le’hitraot,” she repeated. It was not good-bye; it was a hope that they would see each other again.
In a country where so many had experienced tragedy and loss, le’hitraot was an amulet, a rabbit’s foot to clutch against destiny.
ELEVEN
APRIL 1947
At five-thirty in the morning, Bus 8 pulled up at the station in Bet Hakerem.
Mama and Papa kissed Raquela good-bye.
Papa blessed her. “Behatzlaha. May you succeed.”
She climbed into the bus in her nurse’s uniform and set her light suitcase near her seat. She waved good-bye to Mama and Papa, sensing their mixture of worry and pride.
The darkness was lifting. Jerusalem took on its special shimmering light as the sun rose swiftly, a delicate pink glow warming the hills. The bus window was open. She heard the birds chattering as they darted in and out of the tall pines and eucalyptus, chirping busily, like people in the marketplace.
Bus 8 sped around the empty road, passing an occasional Arab or Jewish farmer. In all of Jerusalem, there were only a few private cars and, at this hour, there were none on the road. But British tanks and armored cars were already patrolling.
She disembarked at the Central Bus Station, then boarded an Egged intercity express bus to Haifa.
“Would it be possible,” she asked the driver, “to let me off near the camp at Athlit?”
He looked at her uniform. “For a young nurse going to that desecration—that dung heap—I’d even make a detour.”
She settled herself at a window seat, watching the bus fill up with Jews in open shirts and dark trousers and Arabs in long black gowns and keffiyehs. Police and soldiers guarded the terminal, searching for explosives, scanning every face for men and women “wanted as terrorists.” Raquela felt the tensions in the bus terminal like raw nerves under her skin.
For the cycle of violence and repression was spinning faster than ever. Repression begat violence. Violence and terror begat more repression.
The three underground groups had split apart, differing on how to fight the repression. The Haganah and Palmach, supported by most of the population, focused on immigration, on filling the “illegal” ships with “illegal” immigrants. The paramilitary Irgun declared open guerrilla warfare; they mined roads, blew up British installations, attacked the Tegart police fortresses. The Stern Group, the smallest and most militant, set the oil tanks in Haifa ablaze, hoping to prevent the British prison ships from sailing to Cyprus with the people captured on the illegal boats.
The British reacted with more house-to-house searches and wholesale arrests. The prisons in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and especially in Acre, on the northern coast, filled up with underground fighters. The Irgun broke into Acre to free their comrades. Two hundred prisoners escaped.
Meanwhile, the mufti and his followers sat back, watching the war between Britain and the Jews with satisfaction. And the violence and repression intensified.
Bevin finally threw up his hands; on February 15, 1947, he announced to Parliament that he was turning the Palestine problem over to the United Nations. After the revolt of the American colonies and Ireland, Palestine was the greatest political failure in the history of the Empire.
The soldiers and police in the Central Bus Station waved the bus on. They had found no terrorists.
Raquela, leaning back, relieved, watched the bus pull away from the station. Jerusalem, with its coils of barbed wire and dragon’s-teeth pillboxes, lay behind them.
Now they were in the Jerusalem corridor, swerving around the hairpin curves.
Raquela looked down at the biblical valleys that fell away abruptly from the winding highway. Across were the barren stubbled Hills of Judea, with huge boulders bleached white, baking in the sun since the days the prophets had walked among them.
They descended to Bab-el-wad, the gateway to Jerusalem. A long graceful yellow building swept into view around a delicate slope. It was the Latrun Monastery, whose Trappist monks had taken a vow of silence and whose vineyards had made the monks famous. Raquela looked up above the monastery toward the Latrun Tegart police station and barbed-wire camp. She stared in anger. Here the British had imprisoned the Haganah leaders that “Black Saturday,” June 29, when she had heard the tanks rumbling through the streets of Bet Hakerem. They had held them for five long months.
Her mood followed the road. Ahead were the green and golden wheat fields of Ajalon, where Joshua had commanded, “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the Valley of Ajalon.”
She breathed in the peaceful air with the strong scent of orange blossoms.
What did Athlit look like? Would it be like this gently rolling land with fruit orchards, carob groves, and vines creating their own green roots as they stretched along the sticks planted in the soil?
Or would it look like that flat land and brick-red-clay earth of Hadera, the Jewish settlement they were now passing? Or Binyamina, whose rich orange groves and banana plantations lined the road, giving way to green vineyards?
The mountains of Carmel began to rise ahead, first bare-backed, like the wrinkled skin of dinosaurs, then covered with fir trees and boulders.
The driver called out, “Athlit,” and stopped. Raquela picked up her bag and cape and hurried down the steps.
Two doctors stood in front of a white ambulance on whose side she saw the words MAGEN DAVID ADOM. The shield of David. Palestine’s Jewish Red Cross.
The doctors introduced themselves—Dr. Mossberg, Jewish Agency doctor in charge of health services in the camp; Dr. Altman, eye, ear, nose, and throat man. Each day, they explained, a different specialist came to the prison camp from Haifa.
Raquela and the doctors climbed into the ambulance for the mile drive down the access road.
The prison camp loomed before her. Wooden watchtowers, manned by British soldiers, pierced the sky. Rows and rows of barbed wire stretched around an arid, dusty landscape of brown wooden barracks.
At a barbed-wire gate the doctors produced their identity cards. A British soldier studied Raquela’s ID card.
“You’re a bloody sight prettier than this picture, ma’am.”
A second soldier made his personal examination. “And a hell of a sight easier on the eye than those people inside.”
Raquela ignored their compliments. “May I enter now?”
“No need to get huffy, ma’am. It’s no fun sitting in this bloody heat guarding a bunc
h of illegal Jews.”
He stopped short, aware that the tall, attractive young nurse was also a Jew.
The gates were unlatched. Raquela followed the doctors, then stopped abruptly.
Hundreds and hundreds of people were milling together on a hot dirt road. Some were half naked; others wore tattered rags, like shipwrecks on an uncharted island. Only this was no island with tropical trees and lush green foliage. It looked more like the pictures she had seen of concentration camps transplanted onto a scrubby hillside.
Dirty brown wooden barracks stood in martial rows as far as she could see, interspersed here and there with army tents. No grass, no green. Even the tall scrawny palm trees looked dusty gray and threatening. The fronds sat atop gigantic trunks, sad, wilted, defeated, like the people she saw waiting to be released. To be liberated in the Promised Land.
At the right, near the entrance, Raquela saw the delousing station, with stalls where British soldiers were now delousing some people, spraying them from their heads to their toes with white DDT powder.
“The men and women are separated,” Dr. Mossberg told her. “The women are in the barracks at the left, down the main road; the men at the right. And over here, at the left, is the hospital compound.”
Each compound was surrounded by barbed wire. Camps within camps, Raquela thought dismally. Prisons within prisons. The British in their camp outside the perimeter. The women in their prison camp; the men in theirs. Even the whitewashed hospital was sealed off behind a tall barbed-wire fence with a wire gate through which they entered.
She felt as if a giant lock were being turned; she was trapped.
“This first hut,” Dr. Mossberg said as he led her into a white wooden barracks, “is the outpatient clinic. Here’s where you’ll find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of patients waiting for you at all hours of the day.”
She nodded dully. Some thirty people sat on camp chairs, their bare legs and thighs covered with open sores and impetigo. Flies and mosquitoes buzzed around them.
They led her through the four compartments of the hut: the patients waited in the first partition; they were treated in the second, gave birth in the third, and the fourth was the office of Dr. Herman Carr, the camp gynecologist.
She was in Dr. Carr’s office, waiting to meet him, when a middle-aged woman in nurse’s uniform burst in.
“I didn’t believe you were ever coming. Every day they told me I was getting a replacement. They kept telling me ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ I began to doubt you existed.”
“But it was only yesterday Dr. Yassky asked me to come.”
“Maybe everybody else turned him down. They must have heard what our life is like.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Let’s not waste any time. I’m due back at the British Government Hospital in Haifa. You’ll be the only midwife here. Is there anything you want me to tell you?”
“I’d like to see the delivery room and the equipment.”
“What kind of equipment?”
Raquela was flustered. “Well, I mean, I know you must have clamps and sputum tubes. What about sterilized sheets and towels?”
“Where do you think you are? Mount Scopus? Who has anything sterilized here? You’ll be lucky if you can get some sheets and towels from the government hospital. Then you’ll have to boil everything. At least there’s water.”
They entered the delivery room. Raquela saw a conventional white leather delivery table with stirrups. The midwife talked rapidly. “Here’s a sheet. The only time a woman sees a sheet in Athlit is in this room or in the hospital. But you’ll be able to sleep on a sheet—that’s on condition you ever have time to sleep.”
Raquela decided to ask no more questions. Nausea overcame her. The heat. The grueling bus trip. The filth. The dust. The dark throngs of people moving back and forth in the camp, like sheep in a pen. The look of hopelessness and despair.
She leaned against the delivery table to steady herself. The nurse-midwife looked worried. “You’re pale. Don’t you feel well?”
“I’ll be all right in a minute. I know you’re anxious to leave. Just show me where I’m to sleep.”
They walked out the back door past a second barracks painted white. “This is the hospital,” her guide explained. “You’ll have plenty of time to see this later.” They moved on to a third barracks, to the right of the hospital. This one was brown, like the barracks of the refugees, but it was partitioned into a chain of rooms—a dining room, kitchen, storage room for food, and three small bedrooms for the hospital staff.
“This is your room,” the midwife said. “You’re right next to the storage. Don’t worry about the food smells. You won’t have much time to enjoy them.”
Raquela set down her bag.
“I’ll just wash my hands,” she said, “and get right to work.”
“You’re sure you’re all right?” the midwife looked at her askance.
“Positively. Thank you.”
“You’re pretty young to be sent to this hell on earth. I hope you last.…”
She picked up her carpetbag and walked out.
Raquela washed her hands and face. Her hair felt like straw under her cap. Her once-starched uniform stuck to her body. She pulled off her white stockings and changed to ankle socks. At least her legs would be cool.
She hurried to the hospital and went from bed to bed, introducing herself, talking to the patients, learning what she could of their illnesses.
Lunch was at one o’clock. She entered the barracks dining room, already crowded. A compact young woman in a spotless white shirt and pleated black skirt put out her hand.
“Shalom,” she said. Her voice was crisp. “I’m Ruth Berman. I’m the Jewish Agency liaison officer between the British and the refugees. Welcome to Gan Eden” (The Garden of Eden).
Raquela smiled. “Gan Eden with barbed wire.”
“After a while you won’t notice the barbed wire. It’s the other things that will bother you. But why should I frighten you? You’ve got plenty of time to discover for yourself.”
Raquela found herself attracted to the efficient-looking woman with black curly hair, sharp dark eyes, and good strong features. Ruth talked in clipped phrases, like a British officer. She had joined the Haganah in Haifa before her eighteenth birthday and was one of the first women to volunteer for the British army in 1942. She had risen swiftly to junior commander in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, serving in Egypt.
“I suppose you’ve toured our camp facilities here?” Ruth asked Raquela.
“Some of them.”
“Consider yourself lucky. It’s pretty clean where you are in the hospital compound. And you’re apart from most of the sounds and smells.”
“And you? Where do you sleep?”
“In the delousing station.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“Not really. It’s the partition next to the room where the British delouse all the newcomers with DDT powder.”
“How do you breathe?”
“Who breathes?” She shrugged her shoulders. “When the DDT gets too much for me, I sleep outside, in a tent.”
Raquela nibbled at the army rations the British served the staff—bully beef, pea soup, white bread, and coffee—and then left to make rounds in the barracks.
Down the length of the camp was a long dirt road called the Walkover. Here hundreds of people milled together, talking, shouting; some hurried, some stood apathetic; the hubbub seemed to have a chain reaction, as if the noise fed upon itself.
Raquela walked among them. Some stared at her curiously: a new face; someone from the outside world. Others brushed past her, turned in on themselves. They seemed to Raquela like people from another planet.
She felt hot anger. These people had come through so much—the blue numbers of the death camps were on their arms as they moved around her on the Walkover. They had survived. They had come to the Holy Land. They were on the holy soil. Yet it was denied them.
No wonder some of them stared catatonically through the barbed wire. Where was reality? Here in the prison, or out there, just beyond the iron fence, in the Promised Land?
At seven, exhausted, Raquela returned to her room in the brown barracks.
From the top of her ankle socks to her skirt, her legs were blotched with mosquito bites. She was smearing them with calamine lotion when a woman wearing a tentlike sack made from an army blanket stood before her.
“My time has come,” she said.
“Come with me,” Raquela said. She led her through the compound to the first white wooden hut and into the delivery room.
She examined her on the delivery table.
“You still have time,” she said. How could she send a woman in labor back to one of the women’s overcrowded, broiling barracks?
“You can stay here,” Raquela said softly. “I’ll stay right here with you.
“I’m so worried. I’ve just arrived in Athlit.”
Raquela frowned. “I thought no new prisoners were brought here. I thought they were all transported to Cyprus.”
“Maybe so. I guess I’m special.”
“How’s that?” Raquela helped her descend from the high delivery table and tried to make her comfortable in a chair.
“We were on a small boat. The British captured us outside of Haifa. Soldiers and sailors came on board with guns and tear gas. We were empty-handed. Some of our people picked up cans of food to fight them off. Many were wounded by the soldiers; two of our best friends were killed. Then the British pulled us into Haifa.”
Raquela shook her head in silence.
The woman moved her heavy body in the chair. “On the dock the British began to load the people onto big ships. We knew they were taking us to Cyprus. My husband went to one of the officers. My husband”—she chuckled—“the SS couldn’t scare him; nothing scares him. He said to the officer, ‘My wife is due any minute. Do you want her to give birth on your prison ship? Can’t you be human? Send her to a decent hospital in Haifa!’ That’s why I’m special. They put us in a jeep and brought my husband and me to Athlit.”
Raquela brought the woman a cold drink. Her name was Pnina Kaczmarek; her husband was Gershon. Growing more relaxed as she talked, she told Raquela she was born in Czechoslovakia. When she was fourteen, the Nazis had deported her with her whole family to the death camp in Auschwitz. Children of fourteen were almost always sent, by the infamous Dr. Mengele, directly to the gas chambers. Pnina pretended to be sixteen. She was sent to the barracks with the women strong enough to work.
