The Shield: a novel

by Nachman Kataczinsky PhD

  ***

  Avigdor Mizrahi woke up late. He had been tired and nobody disturbed him, so he slept until ten in the morning. He felt rested and ready for work, but it seemed that the Prime Minister of Great Britain was not in a hurry to see him.

  After a shower and late breakfast, Mizrahi called in the butler and inquired about his schedule for the day. The P.M. could see him at nine in the evening; otherwise his day was free, which was just as well. He needed to hire a secretary and other staff, set up contacts and arrange for living quarters, office space and transportation.

  One of the options that had been considered by the Foreign Ministry and historians in Israel was to approach an operative of the Jewish Agency in London for this kind of help. It was decided to postpone contacts with the Agency until later. The Agency was under constant surveillance by the British and other intelligence services and posed a high exposure risk which would severely harm the rescue operations in Nazi occupied Europe.

  The butler assured him that last night’s limousine was available for his use, so he decided to take a ride. He told the chauffeur to take him to the nearest synagogue, which seemed to surprise the chauffeur but elicited no other response except a “Yes, Sir.”

  After a short drive the limo stopped in front of the Bevis Marks synagogue.

  “Sir, I will wait around the corner,” said the driver apologetically. “There is no parking in the front.” Mizrahi nodded and got out of the car.

  He tried the front door of the old building and, to his surprise, it was open. Inside, the synagogue reminded him of the old Sephardic one in Amsterdam. After a couple of minutes of looking around a bearded man in his sixties emerged from somewhere in the back.

  “Welcome to the Bevis Marks synagogue. I am the caretaker, Shlomo Sassoon.”

  “My name is Avigdor Mizrahi, from Palestine. I just arrived in London.”

  “Can I help you in any way?”

  "I need you to give the following message to Abraham Herz: 'Your uncle is very sick and requires surgery. Please contact the doctor as soon as possible.' "

  Shlomo Sassoon looked at Mizrahi for several minutes before asking "How long has the uncle been ill?"

  "Almost two weeks" Answered Mizrahi.

  "How soon do you need to do whatever it is you are going to do? That is unless you insist on dealing with Herz."

  "As soon as I have a real estate agent and some other contacts."

  After more than an hour of conversation, Mizrahi had the contacts he needed. He thanked the older man and departed. He was glad that someone bothered to record the story about the secret codes their father used while conveying messages between Palestine and London and that the story was preserved in the archives. He still had a couple of hours before his meeting with Churchill and decided to use the time to explore London on foot. Realizing he should have done so earlier, he sent the limousine away and walked back to his temporary residence at 10 King Charles Street in Westminster.

  Chapter 8

  The Ministerial Committee on Absorption and Infrastructure, now known as the Development Committee, was in session. The Absorption Minister chaired the meeting: “I would like to go over our preparations to deal with the five or six million people that will start pouring in fairly soon. My ministry is trying to hire thousands of new employees, but with the current labor market we’ve had only limited success so far. We have difficulty finding Yiddish-speakers, which we need since that’s the most common language of the European Jews. We found some, but not enough. We do have people who are fluent in the other languages. I think we’ll manage communications.” He looked at his colleagues, “Who is going next?”

  The Infrastructure Minister volunteered: “We are well on the way with temporary accommodations. We’ll put people up in old army barracks that we are renovating and in mobile homes but mostly in tent cities. We’ve done most of the surveying and will start earth-moving in a couple of days, with roads and plumbing to follow. I believe that we will be on schedule, assuming the first shipments come in about a month.”

  “Why not use the available hotel rooms?” asked the Absorption Minister.

  The Tourism Minister answered. “The hotels are fairly full right now and there hasn’t been any decision what to do with the tourists - We can’t just throw them out.” He hesitated. “I do have a list of available rooms. I wonder if we should assign them on a first-come basis or use some kind of gradation system for the new immigrants?”

  The Absorption Minister was shaking his head: “No, no, no! No systems and no discrimination. It will be strictly first come/first serve. By the way,” he looked like a thought just dawned on him, “our immediate problem may not be as big but much more complicated than anticipated.

  “Consider the fact that a high percentage of our current population are descendants of holocaust survivors. I am sure that many of them will be delighted to offer hospitality to their lost families. Very few will have houses big enough to house all of their extended family, but some of the close relatives may be housed with families. That’s the good news. The bad is more complicated: we still have live survivors – how will they react to meeting themselves and their families? Since many of the newcomers will have family here I am sure that there will be problems with claims of preferential treatment. We need to resolve these problems early, but I am not optimistic that we will be able to do much – human nature is not easily amenable to modification.”

  He looked at the Education Minister: “We need an intensive education program in order to successfully integrate these people into our society.”

  The Education Minister nodded, “Don’t worry. We’ll be ready. The Ministry of Defense has agreed to provide soldiers to serve as instructors of both modern life and Hebrew, just like they did when the state was first established. We are training some of them already. We’ll be ready.”

  The committee kept at its work planning details and coordinating. This was a big job, larger than any previous immigration wave, and no one wanted to repeat past mistakes. The million Jews from the former Soviet Union had been absorbed over several years, a process that hadn’t been easy for anyone. Now more than five times that number – almost doubling the current population - was expected to arrive within less than a year. It was not just almost doubling the population, but doubling it with people who, even if highly educated, were almost a century out of date. Where to find jobs for everybody? Where to house them? What about health care? The Israeli leadership was struggling with all these questions. Soon the general public would have to struggle with them as well.

  ***

  “I have no idea why anybody would listen to these rumors.” Zalman Gurevich was excited and shouting. “Since before the Germans came we heard of atrocities in the part of Poland they occupied. The Germans have been here for almost a week and we are okay. And still the rumors!”

  “What do you mean ‘okay’? We are still alive, but this may be a very temporary condition judging by what they did in Poland” Jacob Hirshson, his friend and neighbor, responded. “Didn’t they give your grocery store to a Lithuanian already? Don’t you have to wear this yellow star on your clothes all the time? Don’t you have to step down into the gutter every time a German passes you on the street? Do they pay you for the work you do in the factory every day? Who knows what else they will do to us. It’s early days yet. Mark my word, it’ll get worse. I'm sorry I gave in to my mother and sister and stayed here. If we’d left on the day the war began, we could have gone to Russia – anything is better than the Nazis.”

  The two friends were having their nightly discussion in Hirshson’s kitchen in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The town had been occupied by Germans on the third day after attacking the Soviet Union and conditions worsened every day. Confusing and conflicting rumors circulated. Some said all the Jews were to be moved into a ghetto; others claimed there was to be deportation to Palestine. One thing was sure: Jews were singled out and separated from the general population.

&n
bsp; Zalman was adamant. “I am not going anywhere even if they offer my family passage to Palestine. Why would we go to a land of sand and camels? I have bread here - why should I go search for crumbs? Anyway, the Germans are okay. They were civil enough in the First World War, much better than the crazy Cossacks or the Lithuanians who slaughter us every so often. Besides, they need us to run their factories. As long as we do as we’re told, they’ll make sure we have food. There’s nothing to fear.”

  As far as Zalman was concerned, this was the end of the discussion. The rumors came from Polish refugees in town, whom he considered Galicianers and therefore untrustworthy. Why listen to their talk of all the calamities that could possibly befall his family?

  Jacob did not agree. He believed the refugees’ stories of shootings, starvation and crowded ghettos. The dentist that escaped from Warsaw with his family, for instance, had no reason to lie, so Jacob expected the Germans would sooner or later start behaving the same way here. He was an experienced businessman, young and with a degree in engineering. At the moment he had no alternative to living with the Nazis, so he waited. But if the rumor about Palestine was true, he was ready to go at a moment’s notice, whatever his mother and sister said. He also realized that the rumors about Palestine might be just a German deception to make the Jews docile and go peacefully to wherever they wanted them to go. It would have been much easier to make a decision if more information were available, and not from the Germans.

  ***

  Nitzan Liebler was slightly worried. His telephone conversation with the Managing Director of Israel Aircraft Industries was informative, but the information was not what he wanted to hear. The Minister of Defense needed a second spy satellite over Western Europe. He wanted it to have the capability to detect submarines in addition to the high resolution imaging. Itamar Herz, the Aircraft Industries Managing Director Nitzan spoke to, was quite adamant about the projected timetable: “Nitzan, there is not much I can do. We don’t have enough engineers to make the design changes. I could do it in a week, if you get the Armaments Development Authority to assist us with the magnetic field sensors, but then there’s the shortage of machinists and assembly personnel. This is not new. We had manpower problems before the Event. They haven’t gotten any better.”

  “Calm down, Itamar.” Liebler understood the problems which, indeed, were not new. “I’ll get the Armaments Development Authority to give you all the help you need. There is no instant cure to the manpower issues but since the tourism business is going to be slow for a while, I expect that you’ll be able to find trainees to fill your vacancies. There is also a good chance that we’ll get an infusion of people with at least basic mechanical and electrical skills – It will be fairly easy to train them for your needs. In the meantime we have an emergency. So how long until we have another satellite in orbit?”

  “Like I said, we can finish the design in a week, build the thing in another week, and launch it several days later. By the way, I appreciate your discussing our Shavit launcher problem with the General Manager of the Israel Military Industries. That lit a fire under him and now the parts are being produced at a very nice rate.”

  “Maybe I will have to light a little fire under you too,” Liebler said, “since you’re asking for almost three weeks to launch that stupid satellite. I need it in less than two! Shall I ask the Armaments Authority to take over the project?”

  “You have to give me priorities, Nitzan. We can’t prepare all those passenger jets for mass transport, re-start the turbine blades plant in Bet-Shemesh, and set up titanium production all at the same time. We don’t have enough people! You either have to postpone one of the other projects or wait three weeks.”

  “OK, don’t get all excited,” Liebler said. “You can ease up on the passenger planes for a couple of weeks and titanium production can wait a bit as well. Will that do it?”

  “You have a deal,” Itamar responded.

  ***

  Avigdor Mizrahi walked over to 10 Downing Street - a short walk from his house. According to the butler, the lodgings had been assigned because it was so close to the P.M. A passageway through an internal courtyard connecting the two properties made the trip discreet as well.

  Churchill was having tea when Mizrahi was shown into the sitting room. He accepted both a cup of tea and an armchair opposite the PM.

  "It’s a great honor to meet you, sir. You’ve been my hero since I was in grade school."

  "You don't look that old," Churchill said.

  “Since I haven’t been born yet, it’s a miracle I’m here at all.”

  "So it is true that your whole country was transported here from the future. It is the state of Israel - a Jewish state?" Churchill sucked on his cigar.

  “Indeed it is. We succeeded in establishing it despite the fervent opposition of Britain.”

  “Not my opposition, Mr. Mizrahi. I’ve always supported the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine.”

  “Mr. Prime Minister, the 1939 White Paper prohibiting Jewish immigration to Palestine cost our people millions of lives without providing any benefits to Britain – the Arabs supported the Axis and kicked you out of the region anyway. This was one of those historical mistakes that are predictable but done anyway.” Mizrahi sipped his tea. “As a show of good will, we ask that a full and complete annulment of the 1939 White Paper be issued immediately. If Britain demonstrates to the world her support for our cause, we can more easily support yours.

  “We are going to transport millions of Jews into Israel very soon. Britain could be very helpful in this process” - Mizrahi leaned forward - “especially as many of the ships doing the transporting will be German. A safe passage from the Royal Navy would really simplify things for us. We will also need to use some of your troop transports to help us out in this matter. This shouldn’t impose too much of a stress on the Empire, since they are idle anyway.”

  “The Germans have agreed to move the Jews under their control to Palestine using their own resources? How did you convince them?”

  “Oh, we can be very persuasive. I assure you that we did not compromise with the Nazis on anything – That’s not in our nature. We also do not believe in appeasement – If you have a mortal enemy the only way to deal with them is to annihilate them completely. That is the most humane way and the only way to a lasting peace.”

  Mizrahi smiled a predatory smile. “The Nazis had a demonstration of what will happen if they cross us, or try to cheat, and even they are not crazy enough to do that. But I am digressing. We can help you immensely in this war.”

  Churchill puffed on his cigar for a while without saying anything. What a strange twist of fate, putting this small group of oppressed people in a position of such great power. He suspected that Mizrahi, and the government that sent him, knew everything about Britain’s problems both present and future. Better be very careful, he thought.

  “So you’d like us to annul the 1939 White Paper, give German ships safe passage and contribute some of our own troop carriers. Is there anything else?”

  “Mr. Prime Minister, we need to feed the close to seven million people that will be arriving in Israel soon. We also need energy. In exchange for our assistance in the war, we expect Britain to supply us, for a while, with food and oil. We want Britain to cede control of Kuwait to Israel. There are also a number of smaller issues, but these are the main ones.”

  Churchill smiled. “Mr. Mizrahi, you want a lot from us, especially considering the serious shortage of food in England and our difficulties exporting coal.”

  “Not really,” responded Mizrahi. “The food shortage and problems exporting coal both have a common root: German submarines. Right now you are losing more shipping than you can build and it will become even worse. We can help you to help us and yourselves.”

  Churchill put down his cigar and leaned forward: “How do you propose to solve this bloody submarine problem?”

  “Simple. We can pinpoint the position of every German vessel anywhere.
If you attack only the wolf packs as they gather to sink your convoys, it shouldn’t take long to sink most of the German U boat fleet or scare them into staying in port.”

  “That will help us in the short run, but I was hoping for more from your people, Mr. Mizrahi. The Grant and Sherman tanks the Americans give us would have been useless if it wasn’t for the quantities. We are being beaten by German armor - How about giving us some of your wonder weapons which so impressed General Wilson?”

  “Mr. Prime Minister,” Mizrahi said slowly, “if we sign an agreement tonight, tank guns and ammunition shipments will start tomorrow, including drawings and instructions on how to install them. You could retrofit your existing tanks and kill any German tank, including models you have not yet heard about. It is more reasonable to improve the tanks you already have. New tank guns will give you a decisive advantage on the battlefield and be useful as soon as they are installed. And that’s just one example of the kind of upgrades we can provide. As our relationship develops and mutual trust is built, we will be able to help you more.”

  “Mr. Mizrahi, I am glad we met tonight. I will present your proposal to the Cabinet tomorrow. If they decide to accept your ideas in principle, we will work out the details over the next several days. It would be helpful if you could put your proposal in writing, so the Cabinet can have all the details without relying on my somewhat defective memory.