Zion (2 page)

They all fell silent as the music on the radiogram was interrupted by the voice of the announcer on Radio Damascus. He read a prepared news item on the death camps the Britishers had claimed to have discovered in Germany and Poland. He said independent Arab observers now claimed these camps did not exist.

The announcer’s voice faded under the whine of the static: “. . . been reported ... an elaborate plan by the Zionist Satan . . . world sympathy for. . . Jewish invasion of Arab Palestine ...”

The bulletin ended with a report that three thousand Jewish immigrants had landed near Acre two nights before.

Izzat looked around the circle of grim faces, eyes glittering in the quickening dusk. No one present doubted that such a conspiracy was possible.

“You see,” Izzat said.

“But the pictures,” one of them protested. Photographs of the German gas ovens had been spread across the pages of
Falastine
for weeks at the end of summer. Back then they had been cause for celebration.

“Anyone can fake a picture,” Izzat said. “It is the easiest thing in the world. Besides, if these stories were really true, why is it that the Britishers and the Americans will not harbor the Jews themselves in their own countries? No, it is just a trick.”

The logic of the argument was inescapable.

“Tell us about your plan,” someone said.

Izzat leaned forward, drawing invisible maps on the carpet with the sweep of his forefinger. “Every morning at eight o’clock a bus leaves the Jaffa Gate for Tel Aviv. It is crammed with Jews, and it is never guarded. We shall ambush it and kill everyone. It will be easier than picking figs from a tree. There will be rich pickings afterwards.”

“What about the British?”

Izzat grinned. “Let me take care of the British.”

Silence. This sounded good; a great blow against the Jews, with little danger and the chance of some loot as well. They could hardly wait to get home and oil their guns.

“Show us your scar,” someone said.

Izzat lifted his robe and turned around. The purplish hole in the flesh of his buttock was livid against his skin.

“Tell us the story again!”

Izzat allowed himself to be persuaded. “It was the night we ambushed fifty horsemen from the
kibbutz
,” he began. “I killed a dozen that night, and cut off their balls! One of them lay beside his horse, pretending to be dead. As the Jews broke and ran, I chased them, and he shot me from behind - ”

“He was aiming for your brains, and he only just missed!”

Everyone turned. It was Zayyad.

Izzat dropped his robe and turned around, his face white with anger. “Do you come to lead us in our
jihad
, Abu Wagil?”

“What holy war? All that is holy to you is your ambition.”

“Palestine is what is holy to me! I only carry on the fight that was started by the great martyr, Wagil Hass’san, your son.” He pointed to the little shrine in the corner of the coffee house, and the yellowing portrait that hung there.

Zayyad studied the faces. Several of the men were from al-Naqb, the rest from his own village. Most of them were
fellaheen
or idiots like Tareq. “What are you all doing here?” No one answered him. My authority over them is ebbing away, he thought. I can smell their desperation, it clings to them like stale sweat. “The coffee house is shut. Go home!”

No one moved.

“All of you! Get out!"

They filtered out, slowly. Finally only Izzat remained.

“Why do they listen to idiots like you?” Zayyad said.

“They do not want to see their land stolen, their women raped and their children hoisted on bayonets.”

“You talk like the Mufti.”

“The Mufti talks for all of us.”

“The Mufti opens his mouth and the wind blows his tongue about.”

“What would you have us do, Abu Wagil? Stand by and let the Jews kick us into the desert?”

“One day we will fight. But to fight well, a people need good leaders, not murderers and opportunists in clerics’ robes. They need weapons that will not blow up in their hands. If you endanger this village I will cut off your toes one by one and ram them down your throat. Now get out!”

After Izzat had gone, he slumped on to the divan by the window.

Rishou, Rishou . . . what am I going to do?

SS Eretz Israel

The storm had eased enough for those with strength left to climb the swaying gangways to the deck. The sea still foamed and heaved. Netanel hung on to the rail, gulping in the freezing, salt air, closing his eyes against the giddying wretchedness that squeezed his guts like a fist.

When he opened his eyes he found himself staring at the gaunt, shrunken profile of Blockaltester Mendelssohn.

He was hanging onto the rail a few feet away, thinner and paler than Netanel remembered when he was overlord of Block SI, but there was no mistake - it was him. They stared at each other for the moment of mutual recognition and then both looked away.

Netanel was too stunned to react at first. Then shame and hatred came slowly back. I should denounce him! he thought. I will tell everyone on ship who he is and what he did at Auschwitz and they will take him and pitch him into the sea.

But then he thought: how can I denounce Mendelssohn when I am as guilty as he is? You forfeited the right to accuse anyone when you became a
kapo
. You have Mandelbaum’s blood under your fingernails. Your silence guarantees his.

He stared at the cold ocean, lost to his terrible remembrances. When he looked up again, the deck was empty and Mendelssohn was gone.

The storm rushed ahead; the decks were milling with people now, straining for their first glimpse of Palestine. Many of Netanel’s fellow travelers were survivors of the German death camps like himself, and the first sighting of their promised land had an almost mystical significance, like Noah’s vision of the rainbow after the flood.

There must be three or four hundred of us on deck now, Netanel decided. Only those too weakened by seasickness are still below. The faces around him were almost translucent in the greenish aura of the storm’s twilight. Despite the cold, some of the men were in their shirtsleeves, enjoying the bite of the air after the suffocating atmosphere of the holds. All of them had numbers tattooed on their wrists or forearms, stark against their marble-white skin.

The man next to him turned and grinned. Netanel could not guess at his age - thirty, forty, fifty, it was hard to tell with veterans of the wire. He was missing two teeth on one side of his mouth. “We are finally home,” he said in German.

“This year in Jerusalem,” Netanel said, paraphrasing the Passover prayer.

“You are German?”

“Before the war I lived near München. What about you?”

“Frankfurt. But I lived in Belgium since 1936. My parents sent me there to get me away from the Nazis. Can you believe it? Three years this couple looked after me. Nice people. He was a postman.”

“What happened?”

“His own brother betrayed him to the Gestapo. Can you believe it? I never found out what happened to them.”

Netanel glanced down at the man’s wrist. “Where did they send you?”

“Maidanek. Fifteen months I was there.” He pointed to the gap in his mouth. “A
kapo
knocked them out. Rifle butt. A Jew like me, and he did that. Can you believe it?” He held out his hand. “My name’s Chaim, everyone calls me Hymie. What’s yours?”

Netanel thought of his own cousin Chaim, frozen like a board on a flatcar somewhere in Poland. “Rosenberg. Netanel Rosenberg.”

“You know anyone in Palestine?”

Netanel shook his head.

“My cousin lives in Tel Aviv. He went there in ’34. His whole family. I told him he was crazy. How are you going to live in a place like that? I said. Those were my actual words. ‘How are you going to live in a place like that?’ Can you believe it?”

“No one could have seen what was coming.”

“His name’s Uri, Uri Aizenberg. He has a restaurant on Dizengoff Street. You should look him up. Maybe he can help you find a job.”

There was a shout, taken up by others, and everyone was pointing. A dull yellow streak had appeared on the eastern skyline, like a pencil line drawn across the horizon.

“Palestine,” Hymie said.

As they drew closer they could make out the sand-dunes at Akko Bay and the green-black of the pines on Mount Carmel. There slate grey thunderheads over Haifa. The sun dropped, and golden fingers pointed them the way home.

Then it was night, and they sailed on through the bitter dark, towards the glow of the Haifa refineries. The veterans of the wire filtered back to their holds to be warm and wait out the last few long hours in private contemplations. The ordeal was almost over.

Haifa

Three men and one woman were hunched over a table in a tiny room above a restaurant in HeHaluz Street. Rain slapped against the window, leaking under the pane to gather in a widening pool around their feet. The remains of a meal of omelet and salad was scattered around the table among the glasses.

Asher looked around at the others. “We’ve just had a signal from the captain of the Eretz Israel. He will land our guests at ten o’clock tonight near the village of Qiryat HaGefen.”

The man on Asher’s left, David Shapira, tapped the table with his forefinger. He was dressed in the khaki uniform of a sergeant in the Jewish Supernumerary Police. “The earlier the better. We must have them all hidden before dawn.”

The other man, Uri Ben-Carmel, spoke next. He was the local manager of the Egged Bus Company so he played a vital role in the Haganah’s plans. “I will have four buses standing by, and I have persuaded some of the Solel Boneh drivers to bring their trucks to the rendezvous point.”

“How many can you guarantee?” Asher asked him.

“At least six. There are three others, but . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. “They say they have families and they are worried.”

“What else have you arranged?”

“We have at least two dozen taxis. All good Haganah men.”

“What if something goes wrong?” the policeman asked. Asher told them about the telex they had intercepted from CID headquarters in Jerusalem.

“They will be waiting, then,” Shapira said.

Asher shrugged. “Yes, we have to assume that. But there is a Haganah team on board. They will ensure that the captain delivers his cargo to the beach, whatever happens. After that it’s up to us.”

Ben-Carmel took a swallow of vodka. “Even so, it will be almost impossible to get them into Haifa and Acre tonight. There will be roadblocks everywhere.”

“Yes. We may have to take most of them inland to the kibbutzim at Kfar Atta and Kfar Yassif.”

The others fell silent.

“We will have to arrange something else to keep the British occupied,” Asher said.

“What do you have in mind?” Shapira asked.

“Obviously, we need to stop the British getting to the rendezvous. But first we will have to ensure that they do not arrive in strength. That’s where we need you, Rebecca.”

Rebecca Orenstein nodded. She was a large- boned girl, with the faint shadow of a moustache on her upper lip. She wore khaki shorts and a denim blouse, and sat with her legs splayed and her arms folded on the table, like a man. “I have two dozen Palmachniks ready. You only have to give us the word.” The girls of the Haganah were treated as equals to the men; many were members of the
Palmach
, the organization’s elite military wing.

“What sort of armory do you have?”

“We have seven Sten guns, thirteen rifles, ten handguns and a two-inch mortar.”

“How many rounds for the mortar?”

“Only three I’m afraid, Ash.”

“Hand-grenades?”

“Perhaps a dozen.”

Asher gave her a rueful smile. “It’s enough. It’s better than throwing rocks.”

“We’ve done that as well.”

“All right. Uri, you’re in charge of the transport. Shapira, we’ll need you to arrange a few delays for the British between Haifa and the rendezvous. And you, Rebecca. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you and your
Palmachniks
to attack the British fort at En Josef.”

Chapter 3

SS Eretz Israel

Netanel lay in his hammock feeling the vibration of the engines through the hull and listening to the excited chatter of the people around him. Now they were so close, everyone had come alive. They had forgotten their despair during the storm.