Raquela (6 page)

She scurried back to her bedroom and took a swift look at the simple iron bed, the books, the cut-out pictures on the wall. She said farewell to her childhood, picked up her suitcase, and ran out. At the table Papa still sat, deep in thought.

He stood up and embraced her. “May God go with you.”

She stooped to kiss Mama. But Mama was putting on her winter coat. “I'm coming with you,” Mama announced.

“Oh, no. I'm not a child, Mama. I'm eighteen years old.”

“Of course you're not a child. Who in these black years can be a child anymore? I want to see with my own eyes where you'll be spending the next three years of your life.”

Raquela was already putting her arms into her coat.

“Mama, please. I have to do this on my own.”

Papa placed his arm on Mama's shoulder.

“Tova,” he said gently. “Trust her.”

Mama slowly took off her coat. “But put a scarf on your head. Don't catch a cold your first day.”

Raquela smiled. “Good-bye, Mama.”

She turned to go. The wind leaned against the door.

She pushed it open. Mama and Papa stood at the door, watching her crunch through the fallen snow to the bus stop.

The world was white and silent. She looked at her watch; it was exactly seven o'clock. One hour to reach Mount Scopus—if the buses ran. Through the white fog she heard heavy tires skidding around the circle. She gripped her suitcase; the omen was good.

Bus 8 moved into sight, pulling up directly in front of her. The driver stepped down to wipe the streaked windshield.

Raquela lugged the suitcase up the steep stairs, slid it under the first seat and sat down next to the window. The driver clung desperately to the steering wheel, as if he were pinning the thick tires to the slippery road. Raquela held tight.

They were out of Bet Hakerem now, entering Romema from the west, its sidewalk coffeehouses deserted; then they were winding through the Jewish quarters. In the fresh snow, Mea Shearim looked like a winter
shtetl
in a Chagall painting.

Downtown, on King George Street, she stepped out to change buses. Luckily for her, Bus 9 pulled right up.

She slid her suitcase down the aisle. Bus 9 was jammed, most of its passengers Arab men in white
keffiyehs
. They watched her walk unsteadily until she found a seat at the rear.

Huddled against the window, cold and uneasy, she peered out as the bus skirted the walls of the Old City, dropped some of the Arabs in East Jerusalem, then lumbered up the road to Sheikh Jarrah, now the most dangerous quarter in all Jerusalem.

Here were the stone palaces, high and majestic behind stone fences, of the wealthiest Arab families, many of them leaders in the Arab riots. Here was the villa of the notorious terrorist leader, the mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, reviled and feared even by the other effendi families. But the mufti was not home; he was in Berlin, creating a Nazi-Arab axis, counseling with Hitler in his war office on the fine art and science of killing Jews and conquering the Middle East.

The bus stopped in Sheikh Jarrah; Raquela watched the Arab men draw their
keffiyehs
across their faces until only their eyes were visible. Then they lifted their long skirts over their western-style brown shoes as they descended into the snowstorm.

She tried to force herself to think of Aisha, but her mind refused to relinquish the still-vivid memory of the bus attack before her Bat Mitzvah, in 1936. For three years those attacks had continued, increasing in violence as the mufti's gangs plundered, attacked, murdered. Then, in 1939, the riots ended abruptly.

The mufti and his terrorists had achieved their goal: a spectacular capitulation from the British.

Nineteen thirty-nine: the year that Hitler sealed the borders of Germany; the year the Nazi dictator sent his Panzers blitzkrieging across Poland and Central Europe, trapping Jews, holding them for the kill; the year Great Britain issued its “White Paper.”

The White Paper. Henceforth, for the next five years, the number of Jews permitted to enter Palestine would be cut drastically. Then, in 1944, no Jews at all would be allowed to enter. Jews could no longer buy any land in Palestine. Nor could they settle the land they already owned.

The Arab terrorists could afford to wait until 1944. For the White Paper meant the end of the British promise to establish a Jewish homeland. And, perhaps, with a few more riots, the extinction of the Jewish community in Palestine.

The bus was taking a long time unloading Arabs in Sheikh Jarrah. Raquela looked down at her hands. Sunburned. Callused. She smiled. Even her cheeks still felt the sun and wind of the last eight months working on a farm.

Like high-school graduates all over Palestine too young to join the army, she had volunteered for “national service.” The farms were desperate for help. Fifty thousand Palestinian-Jewish men and women had joined the British army; one hundred thousand British troops were in Palestine. They needed food.

Mama and Papa had sent her off with their blessings when school ended the last day of June 1942. With her friend from school, Rena Geffen, who lived nearby, she traveled north to Tel Adashim, a
moshav
, a cooperative village in the center of the Jezreel Valley between Jewish Affulah and Arab Nazareth.

The young women could easily have been sisters: both tall, well shaped, with luminous dark eyes, they were two of the prettiest and most popular girls in the University High School. They were happy young women, open and ripe for adventure.

They had chosen Tel Adashim for their wartime service because Papa had friends there whom Raquela had met as a child.

Tel Adashim had a pastoral air: barns filled with cows and horses, chicken coops, Caterpillar tractors, small stucco farmhouses with pink tile roofs, eucalyptus trees lining the unpaved roads. The main thoroughfare was aptly called the Mud Street.

The girls woke every morning at six and spent most of the day picking apples, pears, plums, and grapes, and corn for the cattle. They spent three days in
meshek
, three days in
neshek. Meshek
was farming;
neshek
was training in defense. The Haganah used the synagogue as headquarters; Raquela and Rena trained with the young sons and daughters of the moshav. They were taken into the fields and taught to use old World War I British and Italian rifles. They learned how to use clubs in hand-to-hand combat in case of Arab riots. They hid their guns in the underground “slicks” where the Haganah cached its firearms, away from the prying eyes of the British patrols.

Evenings they danced and sang and visited; they were the “sophisticated” city girls from Jerusalem, sharing their experiences with the girls on the farm.

After eight months they returned to Jerusalem, their national service completed.

In the living room in Bet Hakerem, Raquela confronted Mama and Papa. “I'd like to become a nurse so I can go to the front.”

Mama reacted instantly. She was angry, dismayed. “What do you want to be a nurse for? Mess around with bedpans and sick people. All that blood. See people dying. Ugh! What does a girl with your talents want that for?”

Papa, who had been writing in his looseleaf diary, stood up from his desk and paced the room restlessly.

“We always thought,” he said, “that you were going to be a teacher.”

“Papa, I can't go to a teachers' seminary and take courses in education while boys are dying.”

“Teaching is important, too,” Papa said, “Even in wartime. Molding the minds of children is important for the future.”

“There may be no future if Hitler wins and comes to Palestine. I've got to do something about the war. If not nursing, then let me join the ATS.”

“The ATS!” Mama had burst into tears. “I have two sons in the army. I don't sleep nights worrying about Jacob and Yair. If you enter the army, too, there'll be no place for me to put my head.”

Raquela stared out of the snow-flecked window with relief; they had left Sheikh Jarrah. Looming ahead was the highest mountain in the Holy City, Mount Scopus.

There it was. Set back from the highway, surrounded by a pine grove, white, starkly beautiful: the Hadassah Hospital, a garden, the nursing school.

Somewhere she had read that Erich Mendelsohn, the hospital's German-Jewish architect, had written that he wanted to create something for eternity, something to fit into the eternal hills of Jerusalem “…in the light of the monumental austerity and serenity of the Bible.”

It was indeed serene, a monumental building of long white tiles that glistened like pristine marble; an open-columned portico with three white cupolas—Mendelsohn's trademark—topped the sweeping entrance.

The bus stopped opposite the nursing school. Raquela descended and stared up at the three-story building. It, too, was serene. Monumentally austere. She opened a glass door. A buxom, motherly woman with ink-black hair and lively dark eyes greeted her.

“
Shalom
. My goodness, your hand is freezing. Come in. What is your name?”

Raquela introduced herself.

“And my name is Mrs. Hannah Simonson,” the woman said in a high but pleasing voice, leading her into the foyer. “I'm the housemother. You're the first girl in our special wartime class to arrive. Take your coat off. Here, let me help you. My, you're soaking wet; we have to get you warmed up.”

Carefully, Raquela hung her wet coat on a rack and set her suitcase beside it.

Her teeth were chattering. Was it nerves?

She followed the housemother through the entrance hall into a luxuriant living room covered with Persian rugs. Glass doors led to a garden patio; jutting into the room was a grand piano, so highly polished Raquela could see her face in it; and scattered in little intimate circles were small tables and chairs catching the morning light through lace-curtained windows.

Mrs. Simonson waved her toward one of the little circles. “Do sit down and warm up, Miss Levy.”

Raquela perched herself at the edge of a chair while Mrs. Simon-son shuffled around the room. “In a minute, I'll go fetch your mother,” she said.

“My mother?” Raquela was bewildered.

Mrs. Simonson smiled; her pink cheeks rose above her lips like kneaded dough, dimpling. She shut her eyes when she smiled. “Not your real mother. Every freshman gets her own ‘mother.' She's a second- or third-year student who shows you around and helps you adjust to your new home and the nursing school.”

She went back to the foyer and called, “Judith, can you please come down.”

Then she returned. “Now, while we're waiting, let me begin with some of the things you ought to know. The first six months are a trial period. You'll be on probation.”

Probation
. The word sounded ominous.
Six months probation. I've got to make it
, she thought.
Prove to Mama and Papa they were wrong about nursing
.

Mama's angry words still pounded in her ears.

“But Mama,” she had held out. “It's my way of fighting the war.”

But how, living in Jerusalem, did one fight this war? Raquela had been caught, as were most Jews in Palestine, in a terrible dilemma.

In Europe, when the war broke out in 1939, England had been magnificent. She had been alone, saving Western civilization, her back against the wall, her cities bombed and burning, holding off Hitler's hordes.

France had collapsed. Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg had been over-run. Mussolini had joined forces with Hitler. Denmark fell, then Norway. The list seemed endless. The United States had not yet entered the war. And Hitler was confiscating the manpower, the factories, and the resources for his war machine from all the countries he had conquered.

The gallant British had to be helped by every able-bodied Jewish man and woman in Palestine.

Yet in Palestine itself, the hated White Paper, drastically restricting Jewish immigration, had become the law of the land. The name itself,
White Paper
, became the enemy, and the Haganah fought it like an enemy.

To save Jews who could still escape from countries Hitler had not yet swallowed—the eastern half of Poland, Hungary, Romania—the Haganah organized shiploads with hundreds of immigrants and beached them, under cover of night, on the coasts of Palestine. Safe at last from Hitler.

But the White Paper declared Jews “illegal.” Incredibly, the British diverted sorely needed troops and patrol boats to halt the “illegals.” It was an enigma. Britain was fighting on two fronts—the war against Hitler, in Europe, and the war Churchill later called the “sordid” war against the Jews, in Palestine.

The Jews were caught in a death struggle. Should they, too, fight on two fronts?
With
the British in Europe;
against
the British in Palestine?

David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Zionist Executive, solved the dilemma: “We shall fight the war as if there were no White Paper and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”

Jacob and Yair, with tens of thousands of others, men and women, rushed to join the British forces to fight the Nazis.

But still the British tried to be “neutral.”

Desperate for manpower, they agreed to let the Jews join—men in the regular forces and the RAF (Royal Air Force), women in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service)—provided that for each Jewish volunteer there would be an Arab volunteer. One hundred thirty thousand Jewish men and women of military age volunteered. But so few Arabs came forward that in the end, until December, 1941, when the United States entered the war, the only allies the British Commonwealth had in the Middle East were the Jewish men and women of Palestine.

Mrs. Simonson was talking. “Miss Levy.” She seemed aware Raquela's mind had wandered. “You may receive men visitors here in the lounge. No men are allowed above this first floor. And they must leave early. All lights in the dormitory must be out at ten
P.M.
And windows drawn with black muslin curtains for the blackout. Ah, here is your ‘mother.'”