New Heavens

by Boris Senior

  Living in London was very stimulating, and though there was much to see and do, I started flying again. I discovered that as a former pilot in an RAF squadron, I could hire small aircraft at subsidized rates. I began to fly to France and Switzerland on weekends and on vacations from the university.

  The Palestine Club was not far from Piccadilly Circus. One Sunday evening I went to the club and met up with a few Palestinian Jews. One of them was a tall gangly fellow with blue eyes and a mischievous look. We soon discovered that we were the same age and had both been fighter pilots in the RAF during the war. He was Ezer Weizman, nephew of Chaim Weizmann. Ezer was studying aeronautical engineering at a polytechnic in London. We struck up a close friendship based on our common flying interests and our total commitment to Zionism.

  I took Ezer with me on flights when I rented aircraft from the RAF flying club at Panshangar near Hatfield. Some of the flights were in a tiny Moth Minor with two open cockpits in tandem and others in an Auster Autocrat. I paid the princely sum of four pounds a day plus fuel and insurance and made several trips to France and Switzerland. One such flight was memorable and is an example of how not to do things.

  I had planned to go to Arosa in Switzerland for a skiing holiday with a girlfriend and asked Ezer to come with me to fly the aircraft back to England while I stayed on. We flew to Lympne near the Channel coast to pass through customs and immigration formalities. The weather was bad, and the airlines were all grounded. But I pressed on, hoping that if we ran into difficulties we could either return or land somewhere. Shortly after takeoff, we ran into clouds and couldn’t see the ground. Neither of us had instrument ratings and precious little instrument time, and we soon got into difficulties. The cloud was dense and dark, indicating that we were flying into a cumulonimbus storm cloud, the scourge of all pilots.

  Immediately after we entered the cloud, turbulence began to throw us around the sky like a shuttlecock. Driving rain interspersed with sheets of hail pounded on the thin windows of the tiny craft as we bounced, ducked, and dived. Mighty updrafts of air pressed us violently against our seats as we were lifted hundreds of feet at a time, followed by sickening plunges. I had difficulty controlling the aircraft as the airspeed increased at an alarming rate while I put the Auster into a climb, dumbfounding me completely. The more I pulled back on the stick to climb to reduce speed, the more the speed built up. The altimeter showed we were losing height at a terrifying rate.

  Fortunately, we broke out of the cloud at 4,000 feet and were shaken to find that we were in a near-vertical dive. With hindsight, of course, it is simple to understand what happened. We had gotten into a spiral dive without realizing it, and I was tightening the spiral by pulling back on the stick. If we had had more instrument time and training, usually a low priority for fighter pilots, we would have known what was happening and could have solved the problem by first leveling our wings and then pulling the stick back to reduce the speed. It is difficult to describe the magnitude of the disorientation when flying in clouds without using instruments.

  Shaken and embarrassed by our poor airmanship, we continued across the Channel en route to Lille in northern France to refuel. While over the middle of the Channel, the turbulence became so severe that the compass deviation card jumped out of its slot on to the floor. We picked up heavy icing, and with low clouds and near-zero visibility, we had difficulty finding Lille. When we eventually reached it and landed, we found that the field was closed to air traffic and the main runway was barely visible. After all we had been through, there was no fuel available.

  On the next leg, we spotted an airfield, and while circling noted a flag flying above the control tower. Neither of us recognized it. After landing we found that it was the Belgian flag, and the field was a military base at Courtrai. The air force men there were obliging, causing us no trouble for landing without permission. At that time shortly after World War II, there were very few small private airplanes flying from country to country, and we were invariably received with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. The military field had no fuel suitable for our aircraft and we left immediately.

  At this time we were short of fuel and night was coming on; I was worried that we would soon be running out of daylight. We were without night flying equipment and instruments so I decided to continue as quickly as possible to Brussels. By the time we arrived there, it was almost dark. Shortly after landing, while taxiing to the dispersal area, we ran out of fuel and the engine stopped. That proved how extremely foolhardy we were in flying into the night without instruments or fuel.

  I found the Shell agent and after refueling the Auster he obligingly smuggled us out of the airport in his van, for we were without visas. The following morning we left for Basle in Switzerland. The weather was still bad, but eventually we found our way. As we approached the field, I turned as usual into a left-hand circuit. However, seeing a large cloud reaching down to the ground close on the side of the field near the airport, I decided to do a right-hand circuit and landed. There was no air traffic in the area. At the field there was only a skeleton staff, who were surprised to see a light plane flying when all large aircraft were grounded because of the weather. When we had settled down, I asked them whether they knew the reason for the cloud almost on the field and extending right down to the deck. They said, “Don’t you know that cloud covers a mountain? This field has a mandatory right-hand pattern.” We must have used up about three lives on that reckless flight.

  A new problem arose. I did not need a Swiss visa because of my South African passport, but Ezer was in trouble with his Palestinian passport and no visa. We explored every possibility and finally Ezer exclaimed, “My Uncle Chaim is here at the Zionist Congress! Let’s try and get his help.” After inquiries, he telephoned Chaim Weizmann at the Drei Könige Hotel, the venue for the Zionist Congress, and he arranged entry for his nephew into Switzerland. We arrived at the hotel in our flying togs, looking scruffy and quite unlike the elegantly attired delegates at the congress.

  Chaim Weizmann was kind to us, and I spent some time chatting with him. He seemed uneasy and asked me while pointing to delegates who were sitting at a nearby table, “Are they some of ours?” I did not understand who he was referring to, but it was later explained to me that he meant the Revisionist delegates who were the main opposition party to the mainstream Zionists. I heard later that as he advanced in years he became paranoid about the Revisionist opposition and in particular about their leader Menachem Begin.

  After one night I took the train to Arosa and left Ezer to fly the Auster back to England. On the way back, he got lost and after landing in a field to ask directions, he damaged a wing when he struck a fence during takeoff. He patched it up with adhesive tape and eventually got back to Pans-hangar in England.

  SAM BENNET

  My first confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust came when I went to the cinema in 1945 in London. Customary at that time, a long newsreel was shown before the main film. It started with some mundane news about the end of the war in Europe, and then without warning, a film appeared about the Nazi death camps. The pictures of the skeletal Jewish prisoners, the gas chambers, and the crematoria threw my mind into turmoil, and I walked the streets of London in a daze.

  Deeply disturbed and feeling more Jewish than I had ever felt before, I tried to learn more about the Holocaust. I sought out survivors of the death camps to hear firsthand accounts of the atrocities. It was hard to learn many of the details, for understandably, the survivors were reluctant to recount their experiences. But by late 1945, information about the Holocaust was beginning to appear, and I delved deeply into the history of those years.

  Initially, my search was to find out how millions of my race and religion had gone to the gas chambers, virtually without resistance. It took me a long time to understand the situation of the victims and the environment in which they were living at the time. I began to understand how the cold, starving Jews were overwhelmed by the meetings with the appare
ntly invincible members of the German master race.

  I was shattered by the evidence of the cold, inhuman machinery of death, which was tacitly accepted in Europe, even by those who resisted the German armed forces. I will never understand how the rest of the world stood by and did virtually nothing to stop the mass murder of our people. It is common knowledge that this huge operation was known to the intelligence forces of the Allies early in the war. When I learned that the Allies bombed a synthetic rubber plant five kilometers from the ovens of Auschwitz, I became convinced that there could be no justification for the Allies not having at least bombed the gas chambers and ovens. The casualties that might have been caused to the inmates who were in any case destined to be gassed would have been a fraction of the total numbers of deaths. Even bombing the railway lines leading to the death camps might have saved many innocent people, and the announcement of these raids and their purpose might have stopped the seeming indifference by the Allies to what was happening.

  I have no doubt that we Jewish pilots would have succeeded for we had sufficient fuel to reach Poland, and our bombing was accurate enough. Had the intelligence services of the Allies told us about the monstrous death factories, we could have substantially reduced the scale of the tragedy.

  Having been brought up in a civilized society without once having encountered organized cruelty or even overt anti-Semitism, I was traumatized by what I saw and heard. My naive trust in the innate goodness of humanity evaporated, and the world changed for me. Even more alarming, my belief in God was deeply shaken. If God is all-powerful, how could he have allowed the slaughter of more than a million and a half Jewish children?

  The horrors of the Holocaust were a turning point for me. From that time on, the course of my life changed completely and the Holocaust became the leitmotif of my life. Instead of being a run-of the-mill student who would have completed his studies and returned to his hometown and to the business and the protection of his family, I chose a completely different course. I had known in a general way that the Nazis were persecuting my people, and I had believed that there was some maltreatment. I never imagined the scope of the horror, however, that went on night and day for four years in an attempt to rid the world of anyone with Jewish blood. I was driven by an intense desire to exact revenge. It did not take me long to realize that there was no way for me to do so, years after the abominations, and that I must instead find some means for positive action on behalf of the Jews.

  My studies in the second year at university became trivial, irrelevant. I contacted the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association (UNRRA) and applied to go to the Continent to assist the so ineptly labeled “Displaced Persons,” who were the pitifully few survivors of the death camps. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t find any meaningful way in which to participate in their work.

  In a state of utmost desperation, I sought a way to react to the terrible happenings. It quickly became clear that the only course left was Zionism, to establish an independent state, a haven and homeland for the survivors of the camps and the last refuge in this world from animosity for Jews anywhere. The realization of the 2,000-year-old dream of the return to our own country could be the only fitting epitaph for our slaughtered people. I prepared myself for the struggle to create an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine.

  In the mood of despair in which I found myself in 1946, I approached in London an old friend of the family from Johannesburg, Samuel Katz. He was a slim, bespectacled man who bore a strong resemblance to his mentor in the Revisionist movement of Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. He was an intellectual and an authority on Jewish history and customs, particularly the history of political Zionism.

  Though creating the impression of a quiet, studious intellectual, he had always been a firebrand Zionist member of the Revisionist party. When the time came for overt action, he became an active member of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), the military arm of the party. He detested what he called the liberal attitude of the mainstream parties in Palestine such as the Mapai Labour Movement. He disliked Chaim Weizmann, referring to his approach as “another cow and another dunam” policy, meaning the gradual, peaceful, and orderly progress toward setting up an independent state. In view of what happened to the Jewish communities in the Holocaust, few would dispute the Irgun’s urgent activist policy of fighting with all means to ensure the immediate establishment of an independent state that would open its borders to Jews everywhere.

  Far away in sunny and peaceful South Africa, in more or less complete ignorance of what was happening to our brethren under the Nazis, my family and I had considered the Revisionists to be a committed but violent group, and I did not find enough common ground to support them.

  At the time, the British and society in general considered the Irgun Zvai Leumi as a dangerous terrorist organization. Despite my inner conflict and knowing that by joining the Irgun in an active role I would be crossing the line from the background in which I had been raised, I made a firm decision to espouse unreservedly by any means, however violent, the aim of founding an independent state that would shelter the remnants of the Jewish population of Europe. Though I realized this step might cost me dearly during the bitter struggle ahead, this about-face in my life was essential for my own peace of mind.

  With great secrecy, Katz introduced me to one of the Irgun activists in London. Having all my life been an Anglophile, educated for five years at a very British public school in Natal and having served as an officer in an RAF fighter squadron, I was torn between my allegiance to Britain and the Commonwealth. I took sides in what would clearly be a bitter struggle against Britain to achieve our goal. I joined the Irgun in England as an active member of the organization, knowing full well that this move would place me in direct conflict with the British government and possibly also the country of my birth. South Africa was at that time still a part of the British Commonwealth.

  Shortly after joining the Irgun, I was sent to Paris for training in underground tactics. My first meeting in Paris with the commanders of the Irgun was at the Lutetia Hotel on Boulevard Raspail, headquarters of the Irgun in Europe. Katz’s familiarity with the members whom I met reassured me somewhat after the tales that appeared daily in the British press about the bloodthirsty terrorists who comprised the Irgun fighters. Shortly after arriving in Paris, I was given a nom de guerre to be used in our Irgun activities. I became “Samuel Bennet.”

  “Benjamin” was the code name of the commander of Irgun Europe, and I discovered his real identity only many years later, Eliahu Lankin. He was unassuming, of medium height, and his spectacles gave him a studious air. He was soft-spoken, cultured, and gentle, the last person one would suspect of being a terrorist. Only the fact that in the middle of the European winter he was deeply sunburned gave a clue to his having escaped shortly before from Eritrea, where he had been deported by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine. The British often deported Palestinian Jews they suspected of being Irgun terrorists.

  Benjamin had escaped from Eritrea and spent days under the false floor of a bus traveling across Africa to Europe. In both Hebrew and English, he had a strong Russian accent. Years before he had escaped from Russian pogroms to Manchuria with his parents. Having been at school in Harbin, Manchuria, he spoke passably good Chinese and was for me a source of curiosity and pride in Chinese restaurants in Paris.

  He was assisted by a group of Jews from Palestine and eastern Europe. A few of them bore the blue numbers the Nazis had tattooed on the arms of all Jews who had been incarcerated in the death camps. They all had only one overwhelming aim: the creation of a Jewish homeland. Some of my Irgun compatriots were the only survivors of families murdered in the Holocaust and bore their own guilt for not having done anything to help.

  There were also a few Americans. One of the women was Ziporah, who acted as secretary and organized train and plane tickets. All of us were motivated by the principle of getting rid of the British rulers of our future homel
and as soon as possible. The only occasion on which I had a feeling of distaste was when one, an American called Rifkind, spoke of his admiration for the Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht’s public declaration that “he had a holiday in his heart” every time he heard that a British soldier was killed in Palestine.

  The French government conformed to its traditional attitude toward political refugees and its displeasure at the ousting of French influence by the British in the Middle East. The French were not only tolerant of the Irgun contingent but, when pressured by the British government to undertake action against the Irgun members in Paris, gave timely warnings to allow the hurried evacuation of a hotel and a move to another location.

  In Palestine considerable friction existed among the three underground groups. Sometimes the enmity boiled over into bitter struggles between the mainstream Haganah, the military arm of the more moderate labor-led factions, and the more extreme Irgun and Stern organizations. Among those of our group who had not been through the hell of the Nazi death camps were some Jewish Palestinians, who had from their earliest youth been members of the ultra-nationalist Revisionists and had been in conflict with the Haganah. One of the Jewish Palestinians in Paris with the Irgun was Eli Tavin, who maintained that he had been captured and tied to a bed for ten days by the Haganah after taking part in the Irgun bombing of the British embassy in Rome.

  We were taught how to make primitive bombs and time-delay fuses using a small acid container, which, after breaking, let the acid gradually penetrate a piece of camera film, detonating the explosive. One target was the commander of the British forces in Palestine, Gen. Evelyn Barker. He had brutally turned back the immigrant ships carrying concentration camp survivors seeking refuge and had confirmed death warrants to execute a number of Irgun fighters. The Irgun had also warned him that floggings, which were carried out by the British, and death sentences would incur like treatment for the occupying British administration. In addition, Barker had published an official order of the day to his troops in Palestine, “putting all Jewish businesses and private houses out of bounds … to punish the Jews in the manner which this race dislikes most by hitting them in their pockets.” This statement in particular helped to make him a target of the Irgun.