by Ruth Gruber
“Just give me some with a needle.”
She went to her bedroom and returned with a needle, through which she had pulled red thread.
“Here.” He lifted the back of her hemline and sewed a few stitches. “That will keep the evil eye away.”
At the dinner table in the little foyer, Papa said, “Dr. Weizmann appeared today before the UNSCOP committee. It must be heartbreaking for him—the nineteenth time he’s had to testify. Once he was so full of hope, and now—what must he be feeling?”
“Maybe we can hear some of his testimony,” Arik said, “before we leave for the concert.”
They took their coffee cups into the living room. Papa switched on the radio as the announcer described Dr. Chaim Weizmann being led by an aide to the semicircular mahogany table in the YMCA. Raquela and Arik took their customary seats on the sofa. She fluffed the brown taffeta skirt over her lap; it brushed Arik’s leg. The living room grew still. Raquela leaned forward, fascinated, as Dr. Weizmann’s voice came over the radio. Age and near blindness had not dimmed his wisdom or his wit. “What is a Jew?” he asked the committee, and then answered: “He is a man who has to offer an explanation of his existence. As soon as you have to offer an explanation, you are under suspicion.”
Arik whispered to Raquela, “The old man may be nearly blind, but his mind is nimble and graceful. He moves around those men like a ballet dancer.”
Raquela smiled. Dr. Weizmann went on. “Why, of all places, have the Jews chosen Palestine, a small country which has been neglected and derelict for centuries?”
She heard him talk of Moses and of the biblical promise. That’s why they had come. At different times. All through the ages. Four thousand years ago. This was the Land of Promise.
“I am old enough to warn you,” he was saying. “For us, the question is of survival, and it brooks no delay. All that you have seen here constitutes national progress. All of it we did with our own hands. Here in Palestine there were marshes, and we drained them. There were no houses, and we have built them. All that has been done here, from the modest cottage of the settler to the university on Mount Scopus, is the work of Jewish planning, Jewish genius, and of Jewish hands and muscles—not only of money and initiative.”
Reluctantly Arik stood up. “I wish we could stay and hear all of his testimony, but it’s getting late.”
They hurried into town. Inside the concert hall, Arik whispered, “It’s a lucky thing I sewed that red thread in your dress. Everybody’s turning around to look at you.”
Raquela beamed with secret pleasure as she settled herself into her seat.
The members of the orchestra took their places on the stage. The lights were dimmed. Arik placed his hand on her two hands, crossed in her lap, as they listened to Brahms and Beethoven. He took his hand away only long enough to let her applaud the performance.
After the concert they walked along Jaffa Road and entered a coffeeshop. Once again, women and men stared at Raquela’s dress. She overheard a woman at the next table whisper, “I wonder how it would look on me.”
But Raquela was no longer interested in the dress. She was agitated. She still had not resolved her conflict over Athlit.
“Arik,” she said, “we have carefully avoided discussing something very much on my mind.”
“I waited for you to bring it up,” he said.
“I wasn’t ready to talk about it.”
“Then you’ve made your decision?”
“Not yet. I’m in conflict, my teacher, my rebbe. What do you think?”
“I think you’ve given so much of yourself that you shouldn’t feel any guilt if you decide to stay in Jerusalem.”
“It’s not guilt that would make me go. It’s all that’s been happening since I came home. UNSCOP. Listening to Ben-Gurion the other day, and Dr. Weizmann tonight. Those Irgunist kids sentenced to be hanged. It makes me see Athlit in a different perspective.”
He nodded and waited for her to go on.
“We’re all part of the resistance. Even in the misery of Athlit, prisoners are asserting their right to a home for their babies. They need me to help bring those babies into the world. How can I let them down?”
“I’ll miss you, Raquela,” he said.
She put her hand to her throat to ease its choking.
The days seemed shorter now in Athlit; the weeks meshed. One morning, Dr. Carr entered the hospital. “I’ve just come from Haifa; they telephoned me from Jerusalem to give you a message. A friend of yours”—he opened a little notebook—“let me see, ah, here it is—her name is Judith Steiner—she’ll be here this afternoon.”
“Judith!” she exclaimed. “But I thought no visitors were allowed in Athlit.”
“She’s not coming as a visitor. She’s discovered her brother is here.”
So Judith’s little brother, Joseph, had survived. She shut her eyes. Thank God.
“We’re telling the guards,” Dr. Carr explained, “that she’s coming as a nurse to replace you for a little while. You looked rested when you came back; now you’re beginning to look weary again. It won’t hurt you to get a little rest.”
Late in the afternoon Judith arrived, wearing her nurse’s uniform. Raquela threw her arms around her. She noticed Judith was wearing dark sunglasses. Was it to hide her tears?
“Sit down for a few minutes, Judith. Let me get you a tranquilizer.”
Judith steadied herself in the chair. “I don’t know if I’ll even recognize him. I haven’t seen him for seven years. He was thirteen—” Her voice broke.
Raquela drew up a chair beside her.
Slowly Judith tried to regain her composure. “Everyone in Jerusalem sends you love. I phoned your parents; they’re fine. Dr. Brzezinski sends you special greetings. He wants to know when you’re coming back.”
“I’ve no idea. So long as they need me.…”
Judith nodded; her body was trembling. Raquela realized she was still too overwrought to move.
“Tell me what’s happening in Jerusalem,” Raquela said. “Athlit’s like a desert island. We’re cut off from the whole country.”
Judith answered slowly. “The tension is worse than ever. A few days ago—July thirteenth—the Irgun retaliated for the sentencing of the three boys. They picked up two British sergeants in Natanya and now have them hidden somewhere. They’ve threatened to hang the sergeants if the British hang the Irgun boys.”
“My God! And what are the British doing about it?”
“They’ve put Natanya under martial law. There’s no communication; no phones, no telegrams, no food can be brought in; nobody can enter or leave Natanya. They’ve got more than five thousand soldiers making a house-to-house search. And they haven’t found the sergeants yet.”
“Is UNSCOP doing anything about it? They’re still in Jerusalem. Can’t they do something?” Raquela demanded.
Judith had stopped trembling. “What can UNSCOP do? What can anyone do? The three Irgun boys are already in Acre—the prison they liberated. That’s where the British are planning to hang them.”
“They mustn’t hang them,” Raquela said, her teeth clenched. “If only UNSCOP can make the British see that they mustn’t hang them.”
Judith stood up. “I’m feeling better now, Raquela. Your tranquilizer is working.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” Raquela asked. “We can look for your brother together.”
Judith shook her head. “I must find him myself. Just tell me where to look.”
They went outside the hospital to the Walkover. “The men’s barracks are on this side.” She pointed to the right. “They’ve been kept together pretty much according to their countries of origin—Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs. Just ask the people where the Czechs are.”
Judith started down the Walkover. Raquela watched her stop several men. “Can you tell me where Joseph Steiner is?” Judith asked. A bit farther along, she saw Judith stop a young man. “I’m looking for Joseph Steiner.”
&n
bsp; “I am Joseph Steiner.”
The sister and brother embraced and wept.
Raquela slipped quietly back into the hospital.
FRIDAY JULY 18, 1947
Raquela was in the outpatient clinic when she heard a commotion. She stepped outside to see the whole camp on the Walkover, talking agitatedly.
“What’s happening?” she asked a man who seemed a little calmer than most of the others.
“Somebody just brought us news from the Haganah radio,” he said. “The biggest refugee ship in history is on its way to Haifa. They say forty-five hundred people are aboard.”
“Forty-five hundred! That’s more than the three thousand we have here in Athlit.” She looked at the man in disbelief.
“That’s right. Picture a whole Athlit and fifteen hundred more on a little ship on the high seas.”
Raquela moved along the Walkover. She heard people talking: “Maybe my cousin is aboard…” “Maybe my brother…” “My sister…”
The man she had first talked to sought her out. “You should know—the name of this ship is Exodus. Exodus 1947.”
She nodded. They were all people of the Exodus, all the survivors.
She had to know more; her patients in the outclinic would wait. She ran to the tent where Ruth Berman had once held office. But Ruth was no longer in Athlit; her tour of duty had ended. New Jewish Agency liaison people now sat in the tent, listening to a shortwave radio.
“You’re just in time,” a young man in a cool white shirt told her. “Kol Israel is picking up a broadcast that’s coming from the deck of the Exodus.”
The radio came alive. A voice with an American accent spoke urgently:
“This is the refugee ship Exodus 1947. Before dawn today we were attacked by five British destroyers and one cruiser at a distance of seventeen miles from the shores of Palestine, in international waters. The assailants immediately opened fire, threw gas bombs, and rammed our ship from three directions. On our deck there are one dead, five dying, and one hundred twenty wounded. The resistance continued for more than three hours. Owing to the severe losses and the condition of the ship, which is in danger of sinking, we were compelled to sail in the direction of Haifa, in order to save the forty-five hundred refugees on board from drowning.”
In the afternoon word came that the forty-five hundred were being dragged off the ship in Haifa. They were transferred to three prison ships. The British announced they were sending them to Cyprus. Two members of UNSCOP who were in Haifa had watched the refugees being pulled off the Exodus and herded onto the prison ships.
Days passed. The ships did not arrive in Cyprus.
The air in Athlit was charged with desperation. Raquela felt the new strain among the people: the Exodus people were missing. Where were the British taking them?
Finally, caged in the prison ships, the refugees were taken back to Port-de-Bouc, in the south of France, the port from which they had sailed for Palestine. But the people refused to come down from the prison ships. “We will come down only in Palestine,” they said, defying the British.
In Acre, in the middle of the night, the British woke the three young Irgunists to tell them they were to die at dawn. The boys asked to speak once to their parents. The request was denied them. Their parents were told, “You must be outside the prison walls at eight A.M. with a truck, and we shall deliver the bodies to you.”
The Irgun carried out its threat. They hanged the two sergeants from a tree in a woods near Natanya.
Listening to Kol Israel in the Jewish Agency tent, Raquela lowered her head. What did the world gain by having five young lives—Jewish and British—snuffed out?
“When would the hatred and agony end?
For three weeks Raquela waited restlessly with the prisoners of Athlit for news of the Exodus; the forty-five hundred people on the three prison ships still refused to leave their iron cages, even in the blistering heat of the south of France. Bevin tried to pressure the French into forcing the people off the ships. The French refused; Marseille, they said, was not Haifa; there would be no use of force in France’s waters; there would be no broken skulls.
Dr. Carr brought a newspaper from Haifa; Raquela read of an American journalist the French had smuggled aboard one of the prison ships, disguised as a nurse. She described the ships as “floating Auschwitzes.”
“There are a thousand orphans who came on the Exodus,” the journalist wrote. “Now on these prison ships, it is the children who keep morale high. There are schools in the iron cages; the children are learning the Hebrew language and literature and the Bible story of the ‘Exodus.’
“On one of the prison ships, the Empire Rival,” Raquela read, “the officer commanding the soldier-guards has ordered all books in Hebrew and Yiddish burned. Among the books is the Bible. These are the people of the Bible. They are the People of the Book and the Land, and on these prison ships both have been taken from them.”
People of the Book and the Land.
Would she have the strength, Raquela wondered, to go on as they did? What lay ahead for the people of the Exodus?
On August 22 she rushed out to the Walkover. The refugees were shaking the barbed wire, waving their fists, screaming curses at the guards.
“Haven’t you heard?” a man shouted to her. “The British are taking the people of the Exodus to Hamburg. To Germany.” His voice and face changed “They will fight back. They will get out of Germany. They will get on more ships. They will come home. Now you will see the birth of a Jewish state.”
In Geneva the members of UNSCOP continued their search for a solution. Their deadline was September 1. At five minutes before midnight on August 31, they signed their names, in alphabetical order, to their report. They recommended to the General Assembly of the United Nations that the British mandate be terminated and Palestine divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
All that fall, the debate raged at the UN, which met at Lake Success. Arab leaders denounced the recommendations; Jewish leaders declared that partition meant “a very heavy sacrifice”; they had been promised all of Palestine, yet reluctantly they would accept partition.
In Athlit, Raquela and the refugees waited.
Would the nations of the world accept UNSCOP’S recommendations?
Would there be a Jewish state and an Arab state where Jews and Arabs could live side by side, helping one another, in peace?
While the debate continued, Britain still held the Mandate, sending “illegals” to the prison camps of Athlit and even worse, to Cyprus. Athlit, at least, was on the soil of the Holy Land; Cyprus was more than two hundred miles away.
Early in November, Raquela’s replacement arrived. Raquela examined the new midwife with a critical eye. Young. Pink cheeked. Fresh. Naive. She too had come young, rosy faced, innocent. She would not frighten the young woman as she had been frightened.
She took her into the hospital and through the barracks, introducing her to the people. Soon word spread that Raquela was leaving. Men and women streamed into the hospital compound bearing gifts. A woman brought a small hand mirror she had saved; a man came with a wooden bird he had carved from an old crate. Raquela blinked back tears; the people were giving her their most precious possessions.
Back home in Jerusalem, Papa held her against his tall body, Mama kissed her. Raquela picked up the telephone. “Arik!” she shouted. “Arik, I’m home!”
FOURTEEN
NOVEMBER 1947
On Mount Scopus, Raquela returned to the routine she loved—delivering babies in the clean white delivery room.
Two weeks later Dr. Yassky sent her a message through Miss Landsmann: “Come see me as soon as you can.”
This time Raquela entered his office without trepidation. Miss Landsmann was sitting in the chair opposite his desk. Dr. Yassky stood up to greet Raquela.
“You must know how proud we at Hadassah are with the job you did in Athlit.”
He offered her a chair and returned to his desk. Raquela wat
ched him fit a cigarette into his black and silver cigarette holder. Had the busy chief called her to his office just to thank her?
He took a long puff and blew smoke into the air. “Now we have an even tougher assignment for you, Miss Levy.”
“What kind of assignment?”
“Cyprus.”
The word ripped through her like a blade. Her stomach hardened.
“There aren’t many young women I would ask to serve, Miss Levy, but Miss Landsmann has recommended you highly.” He paused. “I want you to know the truth. There are better facilities in Cyprus, I’m told, than you had in Athlit for delivering babies. But the place itself might be a lot tougher. This time I promise you—it will be for only six weeks.”
“Do I have to give you my answer immediately?”
“Perhaps you will want to discuss it with your parents and”—he hesitated—“with Dr. Brzezinski.”
She stood up. Arik was very much on her mind. They had spent a few evenings together; on Saturday they had walked, hand in hand, through the Old City. It felt good being with him, comfortable, yet something was missing. Was she to be forever his pupil? His favorite disciple? And nothing more? Words flowed easily between them. He seemed to want to talk of everything—of his admiration for her parents, of politics, of the fear and tension in Jerusalem, of the impending vote on Palestine at the UN—everything except how he felt about her. Still, she had told herself, I’m home now; there will be time to find out how he really feels.
Now there would be no time, if she went…
“I will let you know, Dr. Yassky,” she said.
She left his office and walked pensively down the stairs to the ground floor of the maternity wing. She knocked at Arik’s door. There was no answer. She entered, looked around at the familiar desk, the bookcase, the sofa bed, the long narrow windows Erich Mendelsohn had designed to keep out the hot summer sun and the cold winds of winter. It was winter; the room was heated, but she was shivering.
She stretched out on Arik’s sofa bed.
He came in after dark. “Raquela! What a pleasure. What can I offer you?” He opened the door of his closet. “Coffee? Wine? Chocolates? Here’s a whole box—unopened—a gift from a grateful new father.”
