1

Part Two: Who Are We?

Our story is the story of the Generation of the State, the generation forged during
the founding of the State of Israel. Two generations of Zionist life in the land of
Palestine had preceded ours: the Founding Generation, led by Ben-Gurion, and the
Palmach Generation, led by Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon. The iconic generals Yitzhak
Rabin and Ariel Sharon were also groomed in the Palmach days.

We are the Third Generation, born in the thirties and forties. One after another,
the pieces of our adolescent landscape unfolded with WWII and the Holocaust, the influx
of illegal refugees from occupied Europe, the struggle against the British, the War of
Independence, a still more earth-shaking wave of Mizrachi and Ashkenzi immigrants and
still further Arab attacks on the newborn state. After the Suez War, in the fifties, our
leaders claimed that the era of war had given way to the era of peace. We, of course,
took these claims seriously, though they had no basis in reality, so we never considered
the army our highest calling – as the Palmach generation had. We pursued other
interests, namely: science, business, sports and art. Beyond the communal life of the
nation, each of us delved into our own personal experience, and these individual
narratives will be presented in full, unvarnished and whole, as without them none of us
can truly be known. While the Hadassim tale deals in a miracle, the tales of its students
are sometimes quite difficult to bear. Some of our parents were murdered in the
Holocaust, while still others fell in the War of Independence. The remainder survived to
build the state, handing their flag down to us at the twilight of their days.

Part Two tells the story of that youthful lot, hailing from all over the world, which
first gathered together in Hadassim under one banner, and then charged toward their
futures with an energy that no other place could have given them.
2
 3

Chapter Three: Children of the Holocaust

A. The Seemingly Impossible

In order to create the conditions for true dialogue among Hadassim students, in
order to stir in them a life of creativity, Jeremiah and Rachel Shapirah determined that
students would be selected in equal numbers from three groups: Holocaust survivors,
children of broken or troubled homes, and lastly those children of a comparatively
privileged status – heirs of comfortable hearths and homes whose parents were simply
too busy to tend to them, for a variety of reasons. The three groups integrated well: the
rich kids grappled with new realities; the troubled kids were introduced to better realities,
and learned in their guts that they could succeed if they would only make the effort; and
the holocaust survivors encountered the new, versatile world of a versatile Israeli identity.
In the end, these children of the Holocaust became Israelis, while the troubled kids
ascended to the elite and the elite learned to live uncorrupted by their privileges.

Many of the kids in

Hadassim who’d lived through the
Holocaust were, in fact, the moral
and intellectual elite of our
generation. Not only had they been
better cultivated in the European
Diaspora, but their hard-won battles
for survival had endowed them with
moral and psychological virtues of
far greater reach. In order to
harness their latent strength,
however, they first needed a warm
and understanding home; they
needed friends who would keep
close to them rather than labeling
The first eight Holocaust children in August, them “soaps” -- a cruel jibe at
1947 their near-immolation at the
concentration camps – as was so
much the custom in the cities and Kibbutzim. They needed teachers who would also be
friends.

The children of the Holocaust were given all of these things in Hadassim. The
following are some of their stories, starting with Ephraim Shtinkler-Gat and ending with
Avigdor Shachan. The majority of their age group hadn’t survived, and those who did
 4

carried scars in their souls that compromised their full development. But in Hadassim,
Ephraim, Avigdor and their friends did the seemingly impossible.

B. A Child in the Closet

As his parents were being murdered in

1
Auschwitz, the five year old Ephraim Shtinkler-
Gatwould end up spending two years imprisoned
inside a coat-closet in a Polish family’s apartment.
It was in that closet that he ate, drank, grappled
with lice and breathed naphthalene – all without
so much as coughing or sneezing or uttering a
single word. He slept with his knees curled up in
a sitting position. Whole days and nights he
would spend in the dark, motionless, taking in the
conversations outside his little sanctuary, listening
to the family exchange words with SS agents who
would exterminate him within the span of seconds
if they but discovered him. These weren’t healthy
conditions for a five year old’s development, to
say the least. Our estimate is that most children
could not survive in such circumstances, and that
those who could would remain forever tortured.
Ephraim Shtinkler-Gat Not Ephraim.

Most families who risked their lives hiding Jewish children lived in crowded
conditions, often sharing a single room with friends, relatives and neighbors. The child, a
fugitive from Nazi justice, would usually be kept a secret even from most of these co-
inhabitants, as most of them would otherwise have run straight to the Gestapo for sheer
bigotry and material gain. Today, there’s hardly a father or a grandfather who would
believe that Ephraim sat still and silent over the course of those two years.

Though I’d already read about his background, I could hardly believe my own
ears when Ephraim recounted his story. As we sat together in my kitchen in 2005, on a
tempestuous winter night, I searched for any sign of a wounded and tortured soul, the
kind I would have expected from the war veterans I’d written about all these years. But I
found nothing of the kind. Instead, his casual smile evoked something entirely different –

1
He learned the precise date when his mother was sent to the gas chambers when
he visited the camp in later years.
 5

as if Hadassim had reduced his childhood trauma to an amusing memory. If this is what
happened, I thought to myself, our school’s success had indeed been unparalleled.

Ephraim came with the first eight Holocaust children in August, 1947. It was for
them that WIZO celebrated the founding of Hadassim on Normandy.
“It was worth the effort just for him,” Helena Glazer, president of World WIZO
told us after reading this chapter in her Tel Aviv office. As she turned page after page,
she kept whispering “Unbelievable, unbelievable…” as she wiped tears off her face.

And there were many like him to arrive at Hadassim.

He was a pale, blond child with brown eyes and Slavic

features – handsome, in short – who seemed to have emotionally
distanced himself from his past, who seemed ready to embrace life
(“we have everything to look forward to!”). It might have been his
DNA, it might have been the closet that been his abode, and it was
probably also the immediate influence of Rachel and Jeremiah’s
educational ideology, which encouraged us to embrace the future. He

Helena Glazer, president was alive by dint of his hair color and facial features, by dint
of World WIZO of a Polish family’s superstition -- that Jesus had commanded
them to save a Jewish boy at their doorstep from certain death.
He remained alive by sheer discipline and plenty of luck.

It occurred to me that luck – or fate, more precisely – was the name of the game
that God had played with us in the years 1939-1945. Though Einstein could never accept
notion that “God plays dice with the universe,” it became clear in the middle of the 20 th
century that our maker was doing just that – with a vengeance. The Holocaust finally
ended for Ephraim when he was seven years old, parentless, illiterate, his childhood so
far eviscerated. Yet he had gained incomparable survival insights. He’d conversed with
spiders, learning the lessons of endurance from them, learning to depend on his own
mind, to ignore open wounds and not to scratch the scarred-over ones. Hadassim taught
him to let the scars go.

Avinoam Kaplan was his first instructor. The first time Kaplan met with the eight
children he showed them a bunch of small animals, pulling them out of his pockets one
by one, including spiders. “These are my best friends,” Ephraim yelled out, and Kaplan
chuckled because he thought the boy was making some kind of a joke. Kaplan would
later tell us that he loved Ephraim as a son, and this is also one of Hadassim’s miracles:
teachers were to their students as parents.
 6

While we were serving in a paratrooper unit together, I once asked Ephraim how
he survived the Holocaust.

“That’s a long story,” he answered.

“Well, I have time.”

“Then use it for more constructive things.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“To make plans for your vacation.”

While we were growing up together, Ephraim thought it better not to tell his story,
that there were more “productive” things to be getting on with. Now, at the age of 68, his
edge softened a bit, he was more willing to explore his earliest trials. I was so grateful
that I wanted to hug him, but I was afraid that even that would cut the conversation off
very quickly.

Who would have believed that this Holocaust orphan could serve in one of the
finest battalions, that he could spill blood with his brothers in ‘67 and ‘73, that he would
go on to take a bachelor’s in chemistry and biology and master’s in botany (in Kaplan’s
footsteps), that he would then study computer science and attain a senior position within
the sophisticated Israeli aviation industry? It was men like Ephraim, born of the
Holocaust but bred in Hadassim, that allowed the Israeli state to endure the multiple
threats against her.

After our first interview with him, we called him to go over certain details
regarding his childhood survival. “How are you doing?” We asked.

“Couldn’t be better!”

Was he exaggerating? Was it possible he was merely hiding behind

psychological fortifications? To our eyes, Ephraim had always embodied the “nice
Israeli” archetype. We asked him how Hadassim had helped him, how he made the
transition to the “normal” Israeli persona.
 7

“We came into an atmosphere where the past was dead, where we were now
reborn in our true homeland. Almost nothing was said in Hadassim about the “thing” that
happened. During the Holocaust, everything was forbidden (except some very limited
things) but in Hadassim everything was permitted (except that which was forbidden). So
almost overnight we found ourselves in unadulterated freedom, something that even
normal children rarely experience. That freedom neutralized the otherwise inevitable
compulsions and fears -- of the unknown, of trying new things – that children of our
backgrounds would have. Unfortunately not many other survivors were so lucky. The
nurturing and encouragement we received at the get-go from our first counselor, Malka
Kashtan, helped us a great deal.”

It is astounding, and telling of Hadassim’s magic, that a Tel-Avivian bourgeoisie

accustomed to thrice-weekly hair-treatments from her mother became a mother in her
own right to these eight Polish children. Her care taught them that it was possible to
bond with fellow human beings, something they’d never learned in all their constant
dislocations before and after the war. Malka also looked after us, the native Israelis, for a
whole year, and was able to give many of those with troubled family backgrounds –
Gideon Ariel, Asher Barnea, Shula Druker, Esther Korkidi and others – the same level of
care and psychological security. The dialogic educational concept was given a personal
dimension through her. Sadly, at the age of eighty-four, her daily routine is now sealed
inside her house; having survived her husband and even her two daughters, she only
waits for her own death. We sense, with heavy hearts, that her kindnesses have gone
unrewarded.

Ephraim was born in 1938, in the city of Bielsko-Biala in West Galicia – the
birth-place of Arthur Schnabel, the same Jewish pianist whose performance of the
“Phoenix” Beethoven sonata so enraptured us on that magical Tikun Leil Shavuot night.
Dr. Michael Berkowtiz, an assistant of Theodor Herzl and the Hebrew translator of his
book Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), was a high-school religion instructor in
Bielsko-Biala in the years 1911-1934. He was one of the main transmitters for the Herzl
Effect on Judaism2 , and his influence in the city is crucial to understanding the story of
Ephraim Shtinkler-Gat.

The city of Bielsko-Biala was a fusion of two elements divided by the Biala
River. Jews had settled there from the 17th century; their population had exceeded 4000
by WWII, and Zionism had flourished there since the end of the 19 th century. Besides
Arthur Schnabel, other well-known Jews native to the city included Zelma Kurtz, one of
the more renowned European Divas tutored under Gustav Mahler’s baton in the Vienna
State Opera; Herman Freishler, director of the Vienna Volksoper; and Jan Smeterlin,
another accomplished pianist and Chopin interpreter. Thus, before the war Bielsko-Biala
was a city of great culture, its high cosmopolitan threshold touching on the life of Jews

2
Like the Normandy Effect
 8

and Poles equally, rich and poor. The baby Ephraim breathed it all in despite his modest
roots (his father was a blacksmith) and working-class heritage – a heritage that proved
potent indeed when it came time for him to survive in that wretched closet.

The Germans conquered the region encompassing Bielsko-Biala on the third day
of the war, and two weeks later they had already burned the synagogues and looted the
Jewish shops.3

Ephraim was the only child of Yaakov and

Sara. He has only one genuine memory of the
town: his father walking along with him as he
showed him how to ride a bike. In 1941, his family
moved to Zawiercie to live with his grandfather.
Ephraim remembers the train-ride – the depressed
passengers, their terror-stricken eyes longing to be
both invisible and blind.

The Shtinklers resided in the Jewish quarter

of Zawiercie. In 1942 the Jewish quarter was
converted into a ghetto, a kind of prelude to
extermination, whose inhabitants needed
permission to exit. Luckily Yaakov, a resourceful
Yaakov and Sara Shtinkler and self-sufficient man who by now owned his own
smithy in the Polish worker’s quarter, had such
permission. He’d also befriended the Novak’s, a family that lived above his workshop,
and did many of their house repairs for free. He told them all about his sharp-witted and
lively young son.

Ephraim’s father dedicated all his energy to save him. The Novak’s had fallen in
love with the boy before they even met him. Ephraim would soon learn that life and
death can hinge on the power of the tongue at these moments.

Ephraim told us his first memory of the Ghetto:

“My father and I were directed to one group, my mother to another, with a road
separating the two. My mother was chosen for the group that was to be exterminated.
But she found the strength to approach one of the officers and ask to be allowed to join us
and live, and he agreed, though it was probably a one in a million chance that he did.

3
Sources: Beit Hatfutzot, Community system and family names.
 9

Mother got an extension on her life, while the others were sent away to be swallowed up
by the earth. Not everything in life is black or white; there are hues of grey and dark
brown, and in hell the grey stands for light and brown can mean salvation.”

His second memory:

“We lived on the ground floor in the Ghetto. I remember

lying on the bed, surrounded by chairs to prevent me from falling or
bother my mom while she was doing house cleaning. I heard her
washing the floors and singing in Polish, ‘All the fish are sleeping in
the lake, though you are still awake…’ To this day I hum that song,
always picturing her luminous face. As she kept cleaning I
imagined to myself that she was a queen and that we would soon fly
off back to King Boris’ palace.”

Yaakov Shtinkler “Why didn’t your parents try to rebel?” We asked.

“I can’t really answer for my parents, but the kids were mesmerized by the
soldiers’ obvious power, their imposing and always neatly-ironed uniforms, their
organization and efficiency. They commanded, and everyone obeyed instinctively.”

“So the German were allowed to murder and people did nothing? How could you
let that happen?”

“All of us, the ‘good’ kids, we all believed that if we could do what was
demanded of us they would keep us alive. We felt guilty, like we had all done something
wrong; we never thought of hurling stones at them the way the Palestinians do today – we
lacked that sense of justice, the kind that motivates you for action. Guilt only allows for
resignation. We felt guilty, so we were powerless – and they were strong.”

I’ve always asked myself: Who is to blame for the inherent weakness that allowed
for the Jews to be eaten alive? What could bring on a sense of guilt that would let the
Nazis destroy with impunity? And the answer: Jewish leaders, ever busy poring over the
Torah and raising capital, had deserted their communities and come to Israel to build and
be built up into a nation-state. In that dire moment of history, European Jewry needed the
right leadership to fight guiltlessly and ferociously. Thus, what was tantamount to mass
suicide was both the price of Judaism and of Zionism. The occupation zones were
unlikely sources of rebellion in any case, given the general anti-Semitism of the native
 10

residents, who were at the very least going to be unwitting participants in the slaughter.
They would neither assist any uprising nor lift a finger to deter the Germans from brutal
retaliation, nor admit too many Jews into their partisan (resistance) fold in the
surrounding forests.

On the other hand, there were many individual acts of rebellion, many of them
life-saving. Ephraim’s life was preserved by such a rebellion, by his father’s. Shevach
Weiss, Metuka and Alex Orlander, Eliza Bar-Shwartzwald and Moshe Fromin were all
promised a new life in Israel by such rebellions.

In August 1943, there were six thousand Jews in the Zawiercie Ghetto. The
Germans eventually sent everyone they could get their hands on to Auschwitz, among
them Rabbi Shlomo Rabinovitch, the last great rabbi of the town. Rumors of the
liquidation began to spread the day before, specifically that the Germans were going to be
killing a certain number of the children.

Yaakov acted quickly to save his son. His own, quiet rebellion called for him to
enlist his new Polish friends. Franchise Novak agreed to send his two daughters Rosalia
and Wislava out to the Ghetto’s border at a pre-arranged time, where they would pretend
to busy themselves in games and wait for Ephraim.
Once they recognized him, in his prearranged clothes, it was
simply a matter of letting him into the game as casually as
possible. Then they slowly moved back toward the workshop,
careful not to alert any of the policemen – just two little girls
and an even younger boy, strolling and giggling innocently
together. It was a simple plan, and it worked brilliantly.

While the girls climbed back up to their apartment,

Ephraim locked himself inside the smithy, where the darkness
was complete. He sat on a lathe and softly hummed his
Franchise Novak mother’s song about the little fish sleeping in the lake, thinking
of his parents as knight and queen. The Novak felt so much
pity for the five year old, immersed in machinery and dust, that
they risked their own lives sneaking him up the serpentine
stairway up to their apartment. “There are Christians who want the Jews to suffer for the
murder of Jesus, and then there are those who wish them salvation. The Novak’s
belonged to the second group,” Ephraim told us.

The day after, when Yaakov confirmed that his son was alright, he decided to find
somewhere even safer for him and asked the Novak’s to keep him for another 24 hours.
Unfortunately, Yaakov didn’t know at that point that he didn’t have 24 hours: the
Germans chose the same day for their “liquidation,” and Yaakov and Sara Shtinkler were
 11

both sent to Auschwitz. Only eight Jews remained in the Zawiercie Ghetto, two of them
children. Ephraim was one of them.

[Ephraim]:

The entrance to the Novak’s house was through the kitchen, which led to
the sparsest living room. The only bathrooms were in the courtyard, and since
there weren’t any showers everyone was obliged to wash themselves in a large
bucket. The living room had enough room for one bed (and a closet), for the
parents, Franchisek and Genovepa, and two of the girls, while Genovepa’s mother
and her dwarf sister slept in the kitchen. So besides me, kindly relegated to the
eighty centimeters in the closet, there were six people altogether. I knew very
well that the Germans would kill me in an instant, that I had to keep quiet even to
the point of repressing the dimmest sneeze or cough, that the neighbors who
strolled in day and night could just as easily turn everyone over to the authorities.
That sustained condition dictated the next two years for me and my tiny capsule,
disconnected from day and night. Still, I began to experience something akin to
meditation, without either boredom or anxiety; I stopped asking when all of this
would end, when evening or the next meal would come.

Regardless, I was very attentive to all the goings-on in the apartment. I

tensed up whenever I heard a strange voice, or whenever a neighbor came by, and
I kept as silent as mouse. None of that had to be explained to me. I was only
allowed to relieve myself at night, when I would be rushed out of the closet to get
cleaned up and then pushed back inside just as quickly. On one occasion, they’d
taken me out to treat me for lice, when there was a sudden knock on the door that
sent me back into the closet trembling and naked. Wislava threw herself into the
bucket in my place, tearing her clothes off just in time for the neighbor to stroll in
complaining about being made to wait in the hallway.

As far as I was concerned, this situation could have gone on forever.

Franchisek took seriously ill after a short while, and no amount of cupping
his chest with hot glasses could help him without any other available level of care.
He lay dying on the bed surrounded by candlelight for four days, and I kept
breathlessly still in my little closet space as all manner of friends and neighbors
came in to say their goodbyes. Without a breadwinner, it was left to Rosalia and
Wislava to support the family, including me. So everyday they marched to the
nearby village, where they could get milk and eggs for cheap and then sell them
back for a profit in town. As young as they were, they still kept quiet about me –
even with their closest friends.
 12

Two months before the Russian occupation, the Nazis appropriated the
living room for two of its officers, and the family was moved into the kitchen,
where I soon joined them -- covered by the sliver of cloth that hung around the
dinner table. I sat there day and night on a low bench, where I could gaze at the
officers’ feet as they took their meals.

As Russian soldiers
replaced Germans, Ephraim
was finally allowed out of the
closet. He was every bit as
illiterate as the mythical boys
raised by Roman wolves, yet he
still had the gleam in his eye of
his native city’s culture, one
that remained with him always.
Genovepa, now a widow,

The closet smuggled him to her sister-

in-law’s in a nearby town for
two weeks. The Novak’s were afraid they had taken too great a risk even with their
neighbors’ lives, though Ephraim was now well-versed in the proper Christian prayers
and rituals and could probably pass for a common Polish boy.

He was now seven years old. After another several months, Genovepa met
another Jewish survivor, a factory owner, and told him about the boy she had hidden for
two years. When he came to visit, the man suggested that they send Ephraim to a Jewish
orphanage, and the boy was soon traveling the escape routes, stopping in one of the
refugee camps (where he briefly met Shevach Weiss) on the way to the children’s camp
in Furten, Germany. There, one of the instructors, Masha Zarivetch, promised him that
he would soon “reach Eretz Israel and be reborn in a new paradise.”

Masha and Eizik Zarivetch eventually came to live in Hadassim. On our first
Holocaust Memorial Day, Eizik told us all about life at the Furten camp, and one of the
other sabras (native Israelis) remarked, “So the Holocaust wasn’t so bad, then.” To
which Eizik replied, “Furten was heaven compared to what this boy had to endure,”
nodding toward Ephraim. He turned to him and asked if he might tell his story. Ephraim
looked up at him and went deathly silent.
 13

C. Kneeling at Mary’s Feet

Elisa Shwartzwald-Bar was one of the orphans to arrive with the first eight
children to Hadassim. She was born in 1938 in Lvov, the capital of Galicia,4 known as a
th
“Paragon of Beauty” in Jewish parlance. Jews had been in Lvov since the 13 century;
there were 150,000 of them there – a full third of the city’s population – up until the
Holocaust. When the war erupted, the Soviet Union annexed the city to the Soviet
Republic of Ukraine and took freely of its possessions, while the Germans would end up
taking the rest when they came in July of 1941.

Elisa was the single daughter of a wealthy and

established merchant family; she was two years old when the
Germans occupied the city. As she recounts her first memory
of it, “the Germans burst into the house and tore all the
pictures out of their frames, tossing everything into chaotic
piles and marking a bold X on every item worth looting.”
The family was thrown into the Ghetto in November, 1941,
and from that day her father, Randolph, did everything he
could to save her. For anyone who would doubt that a two
year old girl could remember these things, we answer that no
Elisa Shwartzwald-Bar one was left to recount them to her: her parents and remaining
close family were exterminated to the last man.

Elisa would go on to spend twelve years in Hadassim. “Hadassim’s strength

owed itself to people’s immense energies, far more than the usual, in every field.” As she
put it to us, remembering back fifty years, “They invested everything they had in us –
they didn’t hold back, they were absolutely reckless about it –
and asked nothing in return. They poured all their strength into
us. Life in a boarding school can be like that, it can serve as a
social laboratory for collective action. The combination of that
commitment with that environment had an indelible effect on
us.”

After graduating from a teachers’ seminary in Hadassim,

Elisa went on to do a bachelors in Bible Studies and Literature
and then a master’s in education at the Hebrew University.
Today she works at the Council for the Sheltered Child in Israel,
helping to rehabilitate some 550 children of broken homes, ages
Elisa Shwartzwald- K-3, 92% of whom passed exams in reading and math with
Bar better scores than the current 8 th grade national averages. “The

4
Current capital of Eastern Ukraine
 14

only relative I have left, a very distant one, used to tell me I’d end up as a seamstress.
But for Hadassim, he could easily have been proven right.”

Elisa remembers:

“Part of our family was smuggled out of the Ghetto to live with a Polish family.
They’d received a handsome sum from my father in exchange for housing us, but the
neighborhood Ukrainians, even more than the Germans, were always spying after
families that sheltered Jews, were always suspicious that someone buying extra groceries
could be a Jew-lover. So eventually the Poles threw us out, and we scattered about the
town at night, my aunt Berta and I, knocking on doors and looking for shelter. For a
while no one would let us in, and with fear ruling the streets, my aunt, in an act of
desperation, left me behind in one of the back rooms of the house we’d been thrown out
of. Fortunately, our Polish hosts discovered me in the morning and decided to keep me
anyway. They were too devout to get rid of me. Father would send them more money
from time to time, and eventually they saw that they could keep me openly – I was blond,
had blue eyes and spoke Polish well enough, so it was easy for them to pretend I was
their granddaughter.”

“Father made a few rare, nightly visits, always bringing more money and
occasionally leaving me brief notes. One of them read: ‘Remember that your name is
Elisa Shwartzwald, a Jew. Tell no one, but always remember.’ We lost contact toward
the end of the war, and I assume he was probably caught and murdered.

“During that period of shelter, I learned all the Christian practices and
accompanied my hosts to church. They even gave me their surname, though I can’t
remember it today. The only friends I had were the few mice who would eagerly await
my daily portion of yellow bread. I used to hide the leftovers underneath the sofa in the
bedroom, then lie in the dark and listen to them twitter about underneath as they ate it up.
I can hardly remember it ever being cold, really – I remember only the bountiful summer
gardens, the wonderful pea pods and poppies. The Germans came to the house from time
to time, but never suspected I could be a Jew. I was still very afraid, of the planes and
bombs, of the secret I had to carry with me that I hardly even understood.”

Only eight thousand remained of the original 150,000 Jews of Lvov after the
German occupation. The rest were dispensed with in the Janovsky and Belzec death
5
camps .

5
Belzec was one of the three extermination camps that were part of the
framework for the Reinhardt Operation (together with Treblinka and Sobibor), where at
least half a million of Jews were murdered.
 15

When the occupation had ended, Elisa’s caretakers kept expecting someone to
come for her, but they waited in vain. Despite everything, they’d never really bonded
with her; it was clear they had tended to her from religious and material motives. Now
they were desperate to escape west, away from the Soviet occupied zones, so they sent
Elisa to the Jewish community center where most of the effort to reunite families was
concentrated.

So there she was, a six year old girl sitting alone, listening to reams of Yiddish
gibberish passing wildly from one pathetic face to another, waiting politely for someone
in the crowd to recognize her. Finally, a woman came to her and asked, “Can you give
me any names of relatives? Any name you can think of.” Elisa gave her one name that
was familiar, ‘Mandel,’ and the lady sent a note on her behalf to the family listed under
that name. Elisa’s Polish caretaker took her to their address in the city, and as luck would
have it they identified her immediately. That was the last Elisa saw of her Polish hosts.

The Mandels were distant relatives, and they gladly adopted her. Curiously, she
continued to attend church in secret. When they asked where she was spending that time,
she told them she’d gone out to play. They had their own suspicions after a while,
though, and one day when she gave the same alibi they laughed and said, “Nah, you were
seen in church, kneeling at Mary’s feet and praying to the icons! Don’t you know you’re
Jewish? You don’t have to go there anymore.”

Soon enough, the Mandels were off wandering through Poland themselves to
escape from the Soviets. They finally stopped at Lignitz, where Elisa met Metuka.

Sixty years later, the little blond Jewish girl who knelt at Mary’s feet in a Polish
church is a senior officer of Israel’s educational system -- another Hadassim miracle.

D. “It is God’s Hand”

6
Alex Orlander was born in 1935, near Lvov in the town of Zolkiew in Eastern
Galicia. His sister, Metuka, was born four and half years later. Their mother, Rachel,
came from one of the richest families in the area, the Reitzfeld’s, who owned a nearby oil
and barley factory. Their father, Hirsh Leib, orphaned at a tender age, was a successful
fur manufacturer – and Zolkiew was the center for Poland’s fur industry, center of fur
manufacturing for the whole world. Hirsh’s aunt had adopted him and he had learned the
fur business from his cousin.

6
Currently Nesterov
 16

The big guns of the industry were all mostly Jews, in fact. Prior to the war, many
of them had taken their commerce to Paris, London and Brussels, quickly flourishing
there and maintaining their network throughout Europe. But Zolkiew remained the nexus
of activity in this line; its furs could be found in the most elegant shops in every capital of
the world. Metuka would certainly have enjoyed this facet of life herself – and Alex
would certainly have risen up in the business – were it not for the war.

Zolkiew was originally built as a fortress in the sixteenth century. There were
Jews there from the beginning, and by the 19th
century the Jewish community had built its
central synagogue there with contributions
from rich Spanish Jews. True to the city’s
origin, the synagogue was actually planned as a
citadel for Jews in times of invasion or war – a
prescient notion, no doubt, but one that fell
short of the right conclusion: a national
homeland in Israel. A “Soldier’s home” based
on a model of the Zolkiew synagogue was built
in Beer Sheva by David Tuvyahu, a former
Alex Orlander and is sister, Metuka resident of the Polish city, to keep the tradition
alive.

The composer of the Israeli national anthem, Naphtali Herz Imber, was born in
Zolkiew in 1856. The famous Yiddish poet Moshe Leib Halpern was born there thirty
years later. Zolkiew saw the birth of the Jewish-American poet, playwright and
chemistry Nobel laureate for 1981, Ronald Hoffmann in 1937. The city was home to
5000 Jews at the outset of the war. Nobody then believed – certainly not the Reitzfelds
or the Orlanders – that there was a safer or more pleasant place to live. Nevertheless, the
city was full of Zionist activity; Alex and his uncle Manek (Rachel’s brother) both tried
‫ר‬
‫ו‬‫י‬‫א‬1 incessantly to persuade their rich
grandfather of buying land in Eretz Israel
and directing some of his assets there. A conservative businessman par excellence, he
rejected the idea with a charitable smile. Sometimes it is the naïve, not the canny, who
are in the right.

The Orlanders lived comfortably in the countryside. Their estate at the city’s
periphery was ensconced in orchards and gardens. It was the ideal life that Rachel and
Hirsh Leib had wished for their children, one that Alex nostalgically pines for seventy
years later – the explosion of happy summers, the excitement of picking fruit off
neighbors’ trees. He was rather hyperactive as a child in Zolkiew, but the overspill of
energy became initiative as he became a man in Hadassim and an officer in the IDF.
 17

After the army he became a businessman, and he has remained a successful one –
affirming the tenacity of his grandfather’s genes.

The Reitzfelds had always lived in prosperity, and Rachel herself was a
benevolent and loving hostess and homemaker, always providing a joyful atmosphere.
Both she and Hirsh had believed that God would take care of them and theirs. It was an
infectious, steady loyalty to happiness, and even after sixty years, in spite of what they
endured in the Holocaust, Alex and Metuka, along with their children and grandchildren,
are still as optimistic and open-hearted, and just as generous with their guests. We
interviewed both of them several times for long hours, and we feel that their story is a
microcosm of Hadassim’s success. We felt that their story is Hadassim’s Success story.
Both of them have affirmed this last, and encouraged us to make clear that very little
would have been left of them without Hadassim.

Several days into the war, the Orlander’s welcomed

several relatives who were escaping from Krakow into their
home. Despite the nature of the visit, the atmosphere in the
house was stubbornly happy and even light. With the din of
war in the background, they actually played cards.

No one saw the writing on the wall; no one even spoke

of trying to escape, of finding real shelter from what history
had promised all these years. They’d all thought of Uncle
Manek, always harping about moving to Israel, as adorably
neurotic. Sure, the Soviet border wasn’t far, but the Russians
were easily dismissed as philistines, but the implications of the
combined German and Ukrainian attacks against the Jews of
Metuka Zolkiew, in September 1939, seems to have been utterly lost
on this family. It should have been clear what was waiting for
them if German and Ukrainian anti-Semitism would join forces.

The Germans turned the city over to the Soviets after only five days. “It was then
that the population really began to feel the war,” Alex remembers. Members of the
communist party, some of them Jews, readily handed the Russians the names of all
wealthy citizens; relatives denounced relatives, each hoping to bring about utopia.
Everyone of substantial wealth was arrested, and by June of 1940 most of them were
exiled in Uzbekistan. These included many members of the Reitzfeld family – the
grandfather, the aging pater familias, included.

This prefatory exile seemed catastrophic, of course. But in the end, many of the
exiled survived while most of those left behind in the city did not. With the Germans
 18

pressing against the Soviet Union in June 1941, many Jews fled east alongside the
Russians. But the Reitzfelds and Orlanders stayed in the city.

On June 28, the Germans occupied Zolkiew, and by the next day they had already
burned down its ancient synagogue. The mass abduction of Jews for forced labor began
after a month, once they were properly sealed and helpless – and still they didn’t realize
what was going on, not fully. “It was common to hear that the ‘barbarians’ who had
come in initially and exiled the rich were gone, that our German captors, the ‘civilized
Germans’ had taken their place, and once Romanian allies entered the city some people
thought we were saved. They [the Romanians] brought lemons with them, and we even
bought lemons from them in exchange for food! Then the Gestapo arrived, and slowly
rumors descended that they were going to kill Jews. As it turned out, there were no
murders in the city, and people continued their lives, but trains were passing through,
transporting Jews to the Belzec camp which wasn’t far. Some of them had been able to
jump from the trains, and they started telling stories of horrible cruelty and random
murder in the outlying villages. My cousin Clara and some of her friends knew first aid,
so they treated some of these people. Mother had just then bought a cow for the family,
so we’d have more milk for the kids.

“When the Germans began fighting Russia, Father was recruited into a Soviet
Polish unit, and we eventually heard that he’d died near Ternopol, eastward toward the
Soviet border.”

As German actions became frequent in the city, with Jews butchered in plain sight
and others sent to the extermination camps, sixteen people from the Patrontch, Melman
and Reitzfeld families holed up together under the Melman residence. But they refused
to have Rachel, Alex and Metuka with them for fear that the two year old Metuka
wouldn’t hold still and silent and that they would all be exposed. The three of them were
therefore forced to leave and move in with Aunt Cohen in the Ghetto at the end of 1941.

Overpopulation in the Ghetto eventually spread plague – typhoid fever – and the
rate was atrocious, with one tenth of the population succumbing every day. Cousin
Akiva lay dying right before our eyes, and then their mother’s condition began to
deteriorate as well. Aunt Sara snuck out of the Melmans’ hole and came into the Ghetto
temporarily to help her. Thankfully, Rachel soon recovered and the three of them moved
into the Ghetto center to avoid the epidemic.

Metuka: “On my fourth birthday, April 3, mother went out with uncle Joseph
searching for food, so that we would at least have something to eat on my birthday. My
eyes followed her from behind the shutters. Most of the Jews had already been murdered
at that point, or sent to the camps. Mother probably also intended to go and consult with
her family on how to rescue us from this inferno, but along the way suddenly German
 19

cars burst through the streets and started shooting in all directions. It was one of their
tricks: baiting with an announcement of food supplies, then switching once the Jews had
crawled out from their hiding places. They drew them in and then shot them wholesale.
This is what it meant, their ‘Judenrein’ – Jew cleansing. Some were killed right there in
the streets, while others, some 3000 of them, were taken to the Borek Forest to be shot to
death. The Germans left about sixty of them alive, my mother and uncle among them, to
‘clean’ the streets.

“Two days later, in the evening, mother and Joseph finally tried to come back to
our hiding place, but they were captured and executed almost immediately. I didn’t see
them hurt, but the sound of the bullets still pierce and echo in my ears to this day. Alex
and I were left alone in the attic. He was seven years old, and I four.”

David Maneck was still busy along with fifty or so others in cleaning the Ghetto
and carrying out corpses. After two days, he managed to sneak up the attic and tell the
two children that “Mama will be back in a few days,” and leave them some food. Several
days later, on a Sunday morning, he led them out to the Ghetto gates. He instructed Alex
to walk hand in hand with Metuka to his friend Igor Melman’s house, where they would
meet Valenti Back7 and ask for Aunt Sara.

So on they walked on the main road, and as it was indeed Sunday most of the
Poles and Ukrainians, who were quite religious, were busy praying inside their churches,
allowing for them to cross the city safely back to the Melman house. Metuka remembers
every little detail of this trip:

“People in all manner of austere clothes were walking past us in the other
direction; various higher-class Poles could be seen riding their carriages. I asked David
Maneck, years later, if any of this had really happened or I’d dreamt it all. He told me,
‘No, you weren’t dreaming at all. Your only chance of getting past the Gestapo was that
Sunday, when everyone was at church.’”

Valenti recognized Alex and Metuka as soon as he opened the door, and he was
genuinely shocked. It was only a year since he’d refused to have Rachel and her children
under his house, and her death was now clearly on his conscience. “What are you doing
here?” he asked tentatively.

“We know that Aunt Sara is here. Can we see her?”

7
As covered in the first chapter, the Germans turned the Melman house over to
the Back family during the occupation.
 20

Valenti pulled the children inside quickly, before any of the neighbors could
notice, and he repeated his warning to Alex that Metuka would not be allowed to stay –
that she couldn’t be trusted to stay silent. Alex already seemed to know what he would
say. “I’m almost a man now. I’ll leave and join the resistance in the forest, so she can
take my place. Please – just let her stay in the house.”

Valenti was expectedly moved by this. It was an astounding gesture, an unheard

of thing for a boy of seven. So he took them both into the attic, handed them toys
belonging to the Melman children, and then left them to talk to the family in the burrow.

“Are you willing to have these children?” The families then held a long
discussion, culminating in a disgraceful majority vote to the effect that it would be too
dangerous to take Alex and Metuka in – that they should be sent away. It was left to a
Pole of German ancestry – an unimaginable reversal of fate – to persuade them: “These
children found their way here from all the way back in the center of town; no one saw
them, no one harmed them. I tell you, it is God’s hand in this. Only God could decide to
allow them here, it is his command. Therefore, as the owner of the house I veto your
decision. They stay.” Then he brought Clara and Sara up to the attic, where they washed
the two children, cut their hair off and led them back down where they joined the other
dwellers. Their number had now grown to eighteen.

It was very soon afterwards that major catastrophe took place: a fire had spread
through some twenty houses, and whole blocks were incinerated, including the nearby oil
refinery. The Melman’s roof started burning, and as more and more smoke seeped into
the house the residents began to suffocate. While their lives were in danger inside, their
fates were equally vulnerable outside, where neighbors could easily spot them and report
them to the Gestapo. Luckily the house had extra underground sanctuary built at the start
of the war, and only a wall separated them from this additional space. As the smoke
grew denser everyone clawed harder at the wall, looking for a loose opening they could
pry through. One of the girls, a fourteen year old girl by the name of Manya, couldn’t
take the panic, and she decided to leave the house altogether. She ran upstairs and out to
the courtyard, where she cried back, “Father, I won’t be buried alive – I want to live!”
The fire was extinguished shortly thereafter, but for Manya it was too late. She had
already run out to the street from the courtyard, where some of her old peers from school
identified her. When the Gestapo got wind of it, she was arrested and taken to their
headquarters, where she was interrogated and tortured – but she revealed nothing about
the location of the burrow or its inhabitants. She died, of course, but her loyalty inspired
fierce rebellion in the other prisoners. “These soldiers are nothing but dogs – you can
talk, but they’ll murder you anyway…”

On July 10, 1942, two months after Alex and Metuka were accepted into the
burrow underneath the Melman house, the Germans ended their liquidation of the
 21

Zolkiew labor camp and finished off the remaining forty prisoners in the nearby forest.
The hunt continued for the last scattered remains of Zolkiew’s Jews, with the last victims
executed on the grounds of ancient Jewish cemetery. It was with this ultimate
desecration that the Nazis declared the city “Judenrein”.

The burrow and its dwellers, however, were still intact. There were four young
children there now, including Alex and Metuka. Clara entertained them by drawing
comical stick figures on newspapers, which they clipped out and goofed around with.
She taught Alex how to read Polish, and eventually began reading all the books the
families had brought down with them, along with those that Valenti occasionally
smuggled in.

As for Valenti, his incessant drinking became worrisome. He worked at a local

police station, so there was ample reason to suspect he could let something slip if he
wasn’t careful with his Vodka. He even had his colleagues over at the house for weekly
card games, in order to buy their trust. Local policemen and Gestapo men played gin and
drank to their hearts’ content while Alex and Metuka listened silently, inches below their
feet. Some of them would occasionally stay the night, and towards the end of the war the
authorities even appropriated part of the house for two of its soldiers. One of the latter
was in charge of the nearby train station that saw the transport of Jews to the Belzec
camp.

One of the things Valenti smuggled into the burrow was a globe, which the
children could use to follow the course of the war while listening to BBC broadcasts
through their ceiling. “Eretz Isreal was a frequent topic of discussion for us at the time,”
Metuka remembers. “Many of the adults argued bitterly about what the Jews might have
been able to do if they’d only had a state of their own prior to the war.”

On July 27, after days of constant bombardment, the Soviets finally entered the
city. Some of the bombs and shells had exploded very close to the Melman house.
Metuka describes it:

“Shells were blasting heavily outside, and many were dying. I remember thinking
how unbelievable it was that we could die now from some random explosion, after
having made it this far. The only thing I wanted and looked forward to was a big slice of
bread covered in butter and jam; it’s all I could picture to myself now.

“Suddenly, there was dead silence. Valenti knocked on the burrow entrance and
we let him in. ‘The Russian are here. You’re free…’
 22

“We were stunned. It just didn’t seem possible, it couldn’t be happening – and
we were hesitant to move at first. We waited another half-day to make sure it was really
safe enough. The adults could hardly even move, as their muscles had atrophied after all
this time. The light outside was piercing white. My eyes went straight to the Katopiski
flower – big and yellow, smooth as silk on the inside and shaped like a duck’s beak. I’d
hardly remembered that there could be something so beautiful out there in the world.”

Metuka, born and plucked away from her mother in springtime, had only
discovered the real wonders of spring at the age of five. And yet, she would go on to live
through eleven years of uninterrupted spring in the paradise of Hadassim. There she
blossomed like the flower she was destined to become, and took flight as the prima
ballerina of the dancing troupe. That was the nature of Hadassim: a school in the mold of
a rising Phoenix.

Only five thousand were left of what had originally been seventy-thousand Jews.
Ukrainian gangs now took to wandering the streets at night and fell upon the survivors,
while Russian soldiers could be seen taking freely and cruelly of defenseless women. It
was an expression of the new regime’s hostility, a regime that felt every bit as
comfortable dealing in violence. Mass expropriation of homes and possession, along
with implacable intolerance toward any criticism, was the order of the day.

Valenti couldn’t hold back his reams of obscenity at the soldiers who had come to
strip bare the Melman house. He was immediately arrested and sentenced to death, and
he fell to the ground pleading for his life. When his claims to have saved Jews during the
war fell on deaf ears, Metuka and Alex came running to help him. The commander’s
heart softened at such a display from the children, and Valenti was released. He
subsequently took his family west away from Soviet territory.

In 1945, when the whole region was formally annexed to the Soviet Union, Alex
and Metuka, along with the rest of the families, found their way to the city of Lignitz in
western Poland. There the families rehabilitated an oil factory, and their economic
situation improved quickly: Jews had once again proved their tenacity – their unbreakable
will to survive. They had an accountant by the name of Moshe Altshuler-Eshel who
eventually became treasurer of Hadassim.

Metuka: “We lived in a big apartment, and as more money came in we started
eating like crazy. Meanwhile, I kept hearing that mother was still in Russia and kept
expecting her to come back. It was really two years later that I realized she would never
return to me, and I actually started calling Aunt Sara ‘mother’.
 23

“Our building was solely occupied by Jews, and as I was the youngest I had no
one to play with. One day Elisa Bar and her relatives moved in. She was as thin as a
matchstick, with little blue eyes. She looked pallid green with malnutrition.
But it was great to have her with me, and we bonded immediately. We ended up
taking the escape routes through Europe together on the way to Eretz Israel, where we
grew up together in Hadassim.”

E. Wandering Through Uzbekistan

Moshe Frumin was born in 1940 in the city of Rovna, a northwestern Ukrainian city
formerly of the Polish region of Wohlin. At the beginning of WWII, the city’s
population numbered about 57,000, half of them Jews.

Moshe was one of our classmates. He was the only

son of Israel and Yehudit. His mother was the head
counselor for the village, and his Aunt Shoshanna was the
counselor in our unit in the ninth grade. As our experiences
in the village were often shared, Moshe and I grew very
close.

Israel Frumin was one of the founders of the

Gordonia8 youth movement and its leader in Poland. He
made his living as a tax broker, but most of his time was
Moshe Frumin spent in Zionist-pioneering activity. He’d been born into a
very rich family of porcelain factory owners in the town of
Kurtz; his grandfather was in the custom of sending every new model of the porcelain
series to his daughter (Moshe’s aunt) in Israel, where she had immigrated as an early
pioneer and settled in Rishon Le-Zion. Such was the family tradition.

The Frumin’s lived in a comfortable, two-story house. Throughout the years, they
hosted several meetings of international Zionist leaders including Moshe Sharet, head of
the political wing of the Jewish Agency (later the Israeli foreign and then prime minister)
and Pinchas Lavon (head of Gordonia and subsequently a defense minister). Emissaries
from Israel were frequent guests at their house. Prior to their marriage, Israel and
Yehudit spent four years with a Godronia unit that was later destined to join the Kibbutz
Mishmar Hasharon. In 1936, the leadership of Gordonia had arranged for their
immigration and told them they were free to marry, but the visas never reached them – at
the time, they were simply delayed because no replacement to head the Gordonia unit
could be found. In the meantime, Moshe was born.

8
Gordonia was a Zionist pioneering youth movement named after Aaron David
Gordon, a philosopher of Labor Zionism, who idealized physical labor
 24

Several days after WWII erupted the city of Rovna was conquered by the Soviet
Union. The German onslaught added thousands of refugees to the population, and as of
June 1941 there were 30,000 Jews in the city. The Soviet authorities dismantled all
Jewish institutions, including both schools and Zionist parties. Zionism moved
underground at that point, and Israel Frumin was naturally one of its main activists.

After Germany declared war on the Soviets, Israel hired a coachman to drive his
whole family east to Uzbekistan, where they would end up traveling from village to
village for three years.

Moshe: “I was three years old. My father had taken

ill, and I remember watching him on the carriage, waving
goodbye. I never saw him after that, and nobody ever
mentioned him again or told me what happened. My
grandfather also died then. When my uncle abandoned us,
the coachman ran away with our possessions.

“So my mother, grandmother, aunt and I were on our

Yehudit. the head own. We went from one village to another, from door to
counselor for the village, door. Sometimes we were turned away, and sometimes
we were shown extraordinary kindness – a glass of milk,
a warm bath. The better portion of time was spent fighting off the unbearable hunger.”

In 1943 they reached the Moyen Kolkhoz in Uzbekistan, close to Kuvasai. The
three women went out cotton picking, returning with bloodied hands. “They left me with
Frieda, my grandmother. We were famished, of course. I remember actually crying out
in hunger, and mother said, ‘When we come back you’ll have bread to eat, and you’ll eat
as much as you want.’ But I went to sleep hungry that night, too.

“The Uzbeks, being Moslems, have dietary restrictions similar to those of Jews.
One day I noticed a cow choking to death (rendering it untouchable by a Muslim) out in
the field, and then I immediately heard our neighbor yelling at all thirteen of her kids,
“Away! Get away from it, you dogs!” I was only three years old, but somehow I grasped
what was going on and I immediately took my grandmother by the hand and led her
toward the field, where we cut as much meat from the cow as we could carry back with
us. Then we buried all the pieces under the clay floor, which functioned as our
refrigerator, and this was enough to keep us alive for a while.
 25

“The situation improved a great deal when mother found a real job, as a research
assistant for an anti-communist agriculturalist exiled in Uzbekistan. There, on his
orchards, I could have as much fruit as I desired.

“We returned to Poland when the war ended, and from there we took the escape
routes all the way down to Eretz Israel.”

F. The Escape

In 1944, after the Ukraine was liberated by the Red Army, Jewish ex-resistance
fighters formed a survivor center in Rovna for young Zionists who wanted to settle in
Israel. These were joined by non-Zionists who were now shaken enough to view
immigration as mandatory – living on what now amounted to an immense Jewish
graveyard was no longer tenable. The kind of Soviet barbarity that drove their activities
underground effectively ruled out any normal life for them in Eastern Europe. When
they learned that Israeli agents were readying ships in Romania for mass immigration, the
underground Zionists of Rovna moved quickly to join those efforts. The “Escape
Movement” had begun.

Similar developments took place in the Lithuanian capital

of Vilna, without any connection to the Rovna group. Led by
Abba Kovner, Jewish partisan fighters left their forest dwellings
and joined with members of the Ghetto resistance, and together
they determined to gather as many survivors and escape to Israel.
News of the Romanian efforts reached them soon enough, and
they, too decided to head for the Black sea and sail to the
Promised Land. Leaders of the Rovna and Vilna groups knew
nothing of one another until they met in Romania. Unluckily,

Abba Kovner the KGB was ready for them there, and many were eventually
tried on charges of Zionism and the smuggling of Jews. The
“Escape” of Vilna and Rovna was blocked off.

Poland was liberated later that year. Many Jews who’d fled at the start of the war
and found themselves under Soviet rule – like the families of Alex, Metuka and Elisa --
now returned to Poland. But it was Israel they wanted now, above all.

Most were concentrated in Lublin and Cracow. They began heading for Romania
– by foot, by train or by car, almost all of them with false papers – as quickly as the war
allowed. (When the war was over, many were able to travel and escape through Italy,
Austria and Germany.) Illegal checkpoints were propping up faster than you could count
them on Poland’s, Romanian and Czech borders.
 26

All the while, none of these movements were coordinated either with the broad
spectrum of European Zionist groups or the ongoing rescue efforts from the Zionist
Organization in Israel.

The first organized framework for an overarching “escape” movement started

with Abba Kovner – a partisan fighter, poet and member of the left-wing Hashomer
Hatzair youth movement. On April 26, he inaugurated the Organization of Eastern
European Jewish Survivors, but it was dismantled through Ben-Gurion’s influence. The
wily politician was worried that his position would deteriorate without having control
over such an organization. More importantly, however, Ben-Gurion intended to use the
European refugee problem to his advantage, to bring about an Israeli state by exploiting
world pity for ailing European Jews. It was a political move that required dislocated
Eastern European Jews to remain dislocated, if only for the time being.

Once mass immigration efforts fell short in Romania, the wave quickly turned
westward toward Italy, where units of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army were
already stationed. The soldiers there established a central organization for the incoming
refugees, led by a coalition of various Zionist parties. By August 1945, 15,000 Jews had
arrived in Italy. But immigration into Israel was still technically illegal and strongly
curtailed, and a practical decision was made to direct the flow of refugees back into
Germany.

After the war, what had previously been a more or less spontaneous “escape”
movement was consolidated into one enormous and brazenly illegal organization, whose
bold aim would now be to move as many Eastern European Jews westward and thence to
Israel. The new organization was spearheaded by Shaul Avigur. The first Israeli
emissaries arrived in Europe in September 1945, helping to direct refugees through
several points in the Polish-Slovakian Mountains and through higher Silesia to the
Nachod district in Bohemia, or through Stettin to Berlin. Those escaping through
Czechoslovakia had to move through Prague into Bavaria, or else through Bratislava to
Vienna and thence to Salzburg. Though the Soviets had tightened their grip on Eastern
Europe, they usually let these movements proceed apace, sometimes even abetting them.
In other cases, however, they arrested refugees and hunted their organizers, condemning
them to years of torture and even death in the Gulag archipelago. So it might have been
capricious, but the standard Soviet attitude was: see no evil, hear no evil.

The British response to these developments, of course, was decidedly hostile.

Nevertheless, American forces eventually facilitated such rescue efforts. Whether it was
out of concern for public opinion, or whether it was the fact that American soldiers
weren’t going to fire at helpless refugees, the result was the same.
 27

The Jewish Brigade joined in this endeavor. Prominent among them was one
Moshe Zeiri, who directed an orphanage in Slavino, Italy. He subsequently became a
cultural coordinator at Hadassim. Many Holocaust survivors led the effort as well,
including one of our future teachers, Zeev Alon, as well as Masha and Eizik Zarivetch
and Yizhak Lerner -- all three destined to work at Hadassim.

In 1945, Jews in Poland began to flee in panicked waves when the blood libel
reared its ugly head throughout the countryside, stirring random murders of Jewish
refugees. Ten thousand Jewish Poles now penetrated en masse into Germany, including
those who had originally had every intention of resettling in their native cities. These
pogroms were more than enough to clarify, for those who needed it, that anti-Semitism
would not end with the fall of Nazi Germany9.

G. The Children’s Journey in Europe

Israeli emissaries of the “Escape” Organization

arrived in Poland in 1946. There, Holocaust survivors
were made to understand that British prohibitions on
settlement in Palestine made exceptions for children --
especially orphans. The emissaries proposed to take as
many children as possible with them to Israel, where they
would be brought up in the finest educational
establishments in the country. Relatives were promised
The Children’s Journey in that these children, who had miraculously survived the
Europe Holocaust, would arrive safe and sound in Israel within
two weeks. That was the beginning of the Israeli journeys
of Shevach, Metuka, Alex, Elisa and Ephraim.

But these promises turned out to be unfounded, and may even have been a
conscious deception. Who authorized them? Was it actual policy, or was it nothing more
than an improvisation on the part of a sabra who assumed it would somehow “work out”
in the end, come what may?

Documents exposed in recent years show that the World Zionist Organization
resisted any immigration initiatives outside of its designated purview.10 Its formal policy

9
Source: The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial institute website – center for
information about the Holocaust.
10
“…The [Zionist] Organization resisted in those days every form of illegal
immigration because it did not want to lose control of the immigration to Eretz Israel.
The socialist Zionist parties maintained that pioneers who will join agricultural work in
 28

was one of “selection” – the selection and salvation of people it specifically determined
as fit and skilled to serve a Jewish State. That meant the explicit abandonment of those it
deemed “unfit”. “Such selection is directed toward those young European men and
women who are trained for productive ends. …It would be giving the most dangerous
ammunition to Zion’s enemies to conspire in flooding Eretz Israel with the elderly or
undesirable…” 11

With the extermination of Jews at its peak – and there were those in Eretz Israel
who knew the full extent of it – with only a decimal of Warsaw’s Jews still alive after the
second liquidation of the Ghetto, Dr. Yitzhak Grinboym (leader of the Polish Zionist
movement between the wars and subsequently chief minister of internal affairs in Israel)
was faced with a dilemma: Jewish lives or Jewish settlement. He opted for settlement.
He opted not to save lives.

The following is the relevant protocol of the World

Zionist Organization’s directorate:

Yizhak Grinboym: “When I was asked [whether money

12
should be requested] from Keren Hayesod [to finance] the

The Children’s rescue of Diaspora Jews, I said no. And I’ll say no again! I’ve
Journey in Europe been disputing exactly this point for months now, with
someone who knows what he’s talking about! His name is
Rabbi Itche Meir Levine, and he always tells me the following: go and ask Keren
Haysod’s for money… ‘Couldn’t you suspend the work on Eretz Israel at a time like this,
when Jews are being massacred in the hundreds of thousands, in the millions? Spend the
money on them – no new settlements!…’ No, on the contrary, it must be said here today
that Zionism stands above everything else.”

Sofisky: “But surely even from a Zionist point of view we are obliged to steer part
of the budget toward any possible rescue efforts…”

collective frameworks must be brought to the country and the immigration of urban
merchant Jews must be avoided. Yitzhak Grinboym, the World Zionist Organization
appointee for immigration issues declared in a closed session held in Warsaw that he will
fight by all means the illegal tourism” – Yehuda Lapidot, The Illegal Immigration, The
Birth of an Underground, Jerusalem, 2002.
11
From a letter about the rescue policy of the official institutions, February the 1 st
1940 – Ben Hecht, Denial, Tel Aviv: 1970, pg 291, in Daat -Humanistic and Jewish
studies center, Hungarian Jewry’s Holocaust website.
12
Keren Hayesod is the central funding organization for Israel.
 29

Yosef Sprinzak [subsequently the first speaker of the Knesset]: “My handiwork is
13
drowning in the sea and here you talk to me about a Zionist program?”

Grinboym: “They’ll call me an anti-Semite, [they’ll say] I don’t want to save the
Diaspora…But I will never demand that from the organization’s budget, I won’t demand
it from what precious little we have. No, I won’t ask for a sum
of 300,000 [to save the European Jews]. I will never demand
that. And I think whoever demands it is committing an anti-
Zionist act 14.”

Some of the emissaries to the “escape” operation sent by

the Zionist Organization were unimpressed with the caliber of
refugees they encountered, so they acted to prevent or at least
delay their immigration. When they returned from their duties in
Poland early in 1946, some of them met with Ben-Gurion and
told him outright that it would be a disaster if all these survivors
Yizhak Grinboym were allowed to immigrate. “To have all this filth already
roaming the earth is bad enough…but you’ll have them here, in
15
Eretz Israel?!”

This kind of sentiment toward Holocaust survivors actually resonated widely with
the Zionist elite in Israel. To quote David Shlatiel, a Hagana
commander and a relative of Ben-Gurion: “That somebody was in a
[concentration] camp can’t be reason enough to have him in Eretz
Israel. Those who survived did so because they were egoistic and
cared primarily for themselves.”16 Shaltiel warned against these
“egoistic” people who would endanger the project of settlement.

The “escape” activists who drew a quarter-million refugees

into Western Europe put the Allied command in an impossible
situation. Had Britain opened Israel’s gates to a hundred-thousand

Yosef Sprinzak
13
A reference to God’s reprimand of the angels who sang while the Egyptians
were drowning, according to a Jewish narrative of the biblical story of exodus.
14
Tom Segev,The Seventh Million, pg. 89, in Daat’s website, Ghetto Warsaw
website, Historic aspects of the Holocaust: Epilogue:” What is more preferable, saving
or settlement?”
15
Edit Zartal, The Jews’ Gold Tel Aviv: Am Oved 1996 pg 418-419.
16
Zartal, pg 419
 30

of these refugees, they might well have placated Jewish demands without necessarily
risking Arab revolt. Israel’s Arabs were frightened and rather off balance when the
Germans lost. As it turned out, however, an inflexible British policy combined with
American sympathy for the Zionist cause spurred the rise of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.
In that context, the children of the “escape” operation and the myriad camps of uprooted
and suffering Jews all served as powerful ammunition in Ben-Gurion’s hands.

Metuka, Alex and Elisa were supposed to take several days to arrive in Israel. In
the end, their journey lasted about two years. At the same time, on the very same roads,
the Weiss and Frumin families -- together with a quarter-million Jews – were poring into
European escape routes. These children, these hundreds of thousands of human flesh and
misery, would serve as the diplomatic ammunition which Ben-Gurion would wield in
creating a Jewish state.

Alex: “My uncle, my adopted father, spent a great deal of money for our official
immigration. It turned out that the emissary’s commitment was unreliable at best. One
thing is certain: when they made their commitment to us they did so without authority,
and told us things that weren’t true. It’s been sixty years since then, and it’s still unclear
to me even now if it was simple fraud from the beginning, plain misfortune or else
wishful thinking on both sides.

Ultimately, Metuka, Alex and Elisa were herded onto a train with a hundred-fifty
other orphans and driven to the Polish-Czech border, but since they lacked passports, and
since all the states had long sealed their borders subsequent to the war, the children had to
wander around disguised as gypsies to avoid scrutiny. They waited till nightfall to cross
the border and found an unguarded section.

Metuka: “We traveled in military trucks left over from the war, and many were
clearly unreliable. We infiltrated borders in secret, always after excruciatingly tiring
journeys. Disease was rampant, especially severe ear infections. I can remember Elisa
walking in front of me through the forests, like a human skeleton, barely conscious from
all the pain and dripping with pus from infections. That was how we spent the European
winter. One day we took shelter in an abandoned military camp, and what did we see
there? Another orphan’s group -- wandering around Europe just like us. Another camp
we passed through in Esau, near Munich, was directed by a future teacher of ours in
Hadassim, Zeev Alon.

“We were finally able to rest for a relatively long stretch when we settled in the
Furten camp. Our counselor there was Masha Zarivetch, and her husband, Eizik was one
of the directors. And it was there that Ephraim Gat joined us. We awoke every morning
to a loud alarm; I used to lunge out of my bed in terror at the first sound of it. To this day
 31

I keep wandering how our counselors could have been so inconsiderate in this respect.
They could easily have used a gentler means to wake us up, given our war traumas.

“It was there that we were first taught a little bit of Hebrew and some math. We
would get packages every so often, with chocolate and toothpaste, and soap. Of course,
we exchanged the soap and toothpaste with the Germans in return for apples, plumes and
pears. “

Elisa: “In Furten we stayed in

these giant military halls. Sometimes
we’d go into the forest to pick
blueberries. I got pretty sick on one of
those trips, and they took me to a hospital
in Munich. I was left there by myself,
and became very frightened all of a
sudden to be alone around all those
Germans. I felt like I’d been abandoned

Furten there forever.”

Around the same time, Alex and Metuka’s relatives found their way to a refugee
camp in Austria. It was there that their aunt Sara learned that, far from being in Israel,
her niece and nephew were still out in the harsh cold of European winter. She realized
that her “escape” agent had made a fool out of her, and asked her brother Maneck (who
had just arrived back from Russia) to bring them back. But Maneck happened to arrive in
Furten the very same day that travel certificates arrived for the first group of children
(and their counselor) destined for Hadassim.

Metuka was supposed to be among those first eight children, but Maneck had no
way of knowing that by the time he dragged her off with him back to Germany. Alex
stayed in Furten and was eventually slated to join the famous “Exodus” ship to Israel.

The group of eight left with Masha Zarivetz the very next day. Their first stop
was in a sanatorium on the Warburg estate in Belkanza (near Hamburg) devoted to
prospective child-immigrants to Israel.

Elisa: “What kind of things would any clinician or psychologist look for in such
an institution? He might have asked whether there were warm beds, whether the
counselors showed affection – how often the kids were hugged, for example -- whether
the environment allowed for laughter and the freedom to say ‘no!’ He might have asked
whether the kids were finally allowed to cry and pour out their emotions after what
they’d seen, what kind of emotions were treated as normal.
 32

“Any health professional by today’s standards would have noted the presence of
these crucial factors at Belkanza. Most of us, aged five to nine, had managed to remain
intact through the war, but we still needed something to help us move on. They projected
onto us their own strange notions of what a ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ are supposed to be,
and there was still a pure instinct to dim our emotions in order to go through a kind of
intermediate, cleansing stage. We knew deep down that we would have to leave this
horrible period of our lives behind, even by repressing and running away from it. So we
basked in the light, we lived in the moment. The past would come to be seen as an era of
darkness, much too painful to delve into even if it could shed some light on our own
demons. In many ways this remains the case. How does one close Pandora’s Box once
it’s opened?

“There were other ways that Belkanza gave us a bridge to a real childhood. We
were taught Hebrew for the first time. They used an introductory booklet that showed all
the letters. The process was almost hypnotic for me; the sounds of the language were
completely new, with strange symbols indicating vowel sounds (nikud). None of it
matched the language and sounds that we knew, yet this was the first alphabet we’d really
seen. ‘What about the sounds I already know?’ I thought to myself. ‘Does Polish have
symbols like these?’ We didn’t ask those questions, so naturally they weren’t answered.
Then, some of it was just hilarious. ‘Why is the picture of the horse shown twice, only
the second time it’s called a ‘donkey’?’ Yet we were finally allowed to be children; we
were being taught in a classroom, we were looking at pictures, we were at the center of
attention. We were part of the human race again.

“The Belkanza team could probably have taught beyond this rudimentary level,
and there were indeed prizes handed out to those who accelerated their studies. I don’t
remember any harsh discipline or punishments, really. I do remember the gifts, of course
– the jump-rope, the little wooden dog that jerked every which way at the push of a
button. Those were all the possessions I had, for a while. The whole group of us wore
out that jump-rope completely. Then, finally, we were shipped off to France, and from
there to Israel.”17

H. Camp 55 in Cyprus

“Moshe Frumin, his mother and grandmother had crossed the Polish border into
Czechoslovakia and found their way to Italy through Germany and Austria. On their
arrival at the Milan train station, the seven year old Moshe suddenly found himself alone

17
Elisa Bar, editor Yizhak Tadmor Cherries on the Elba-The Story of the
Children’s house in Belkanza1946-1948, Publishing house Beit Yaar with Ghetto
Fighters House 1996, pg 139-140.
 33

with his grandmother. His mom had momentarily disappeared

among the crowds. Grandma Frieda was having more and more
difficulty even standing up, having strained her leg along the
journey. “We sat against a pole for a few minutes, and then
suddenly I wasn’t feeling very well. There was a small medical
office nearby with a children’s wing. There were some toys
laying around, the first I’d ever seen. A doctor came in to see
me. When he left, I turned to grandma and said, ‘Let’s get out
of here. We’ll never find mother if they hospitalize me.’ So we
came back to the train station, and suddenly I saw two young
men walking close to us wearing green ties – the Gordonia
emblem. I immediately grabbed one of them by the hand and

Moshe Frumin didn’t let go; I felt that my whole family’s destiny was on the
line. Though I was very young, I realized it wasn’t right that
our journey should stop in liberated Italy. I told him what we’d been through, and he told
me they’d actually been looking for us the whole time we were in the hospital. He said
to wait there for someone to pick us up, and eventually a man wearing a long black coat
arrived. He looked around to check that we were along, and then handed me a stack of
Italian liras and told me to take the train to the naval school of the ‘Schola Kadrona.’

“We arrived at the naval school, which was located inside a giant three-story
building, and were immediately shown to our beds. I ran down to the basement to bring
some mattresses, grappling with all the other refugees for an extra bed for mother when
she would join us. The director of the school had promised that my mom was on her
way, but she never showed up. After about a week we were finally told that she was
being held in jail cell on Via Unone St, and when we went there the police wouldn’t let
us near her. I could only see her from a distance, looking at us from behind the bars.”

At this point in the interview, Frumin’s voice was shaking slightly, and his eyes
filled with tears. As an artist, he has used his craft to overcome his separation from his
mother. The Pieta motif runs through his “Mother and Child” statues.

“Apparently she’d been arrested at a border crossing-station. So we went back to

the school, and soon afterwards mother was released and was able to join us, along with
aunt Shoshanna and her husband Yitzhak.”

From Milan we traveled to Bari, where we stepped onto a small fishing boat and
sailed into the heart of the summer sea and boarded a ship headed for Israel via Sicily.
We arrived at the coast of Haifa on July 7 th, 1945. Seven large British ships surrounded
the port entrance, and up above we could see three airplanes circling. It was as if
Holocaust survivors were suddenly the most terrifying enemies of the British Empire.
We were guided down toward the pier, where they registered all the passengers and
 34

stripped us of all our possessions. I tried in vain to hold on to my mandolin, a gift from
my uncle Yitzhak, as it had always symbolized freedom for me. They practically tore it
out of my hands. It was an important moment for me, because I realized then that
Germany’s enemies weren’t necessarily our allies. It wasn’t long before they packed us
onto a warship and sent us to Cyprus”

Sitting in Frumin’s studio near Akká, we gazed admiringly at his various

sculptures. One of them in particular caught our eye, a magnificent rendering of King
David’s lyre. The story was that young David’s lyre had tamed the savage breast of Saul.
Moshe had likewise cheated death more than once, and thus the lyre topic was clearly one
more articulation of his own narrative -- it was his way of internalizing his own
childhood struggles, of reclaiming the mandolin that the British had taken from him.

“In Cyprus, the British placed us in an Indian tent in a makeshift refugee camp,
referred to simply as camp 55. The inhabitants were organized on ideological lines, so
we were thrown in with the “Gordonia” group. When Moroccan Jews started arriving,
quarrels between them and the Poles became common. It was a reflection of times to
come, of Israel’s future social and ethnic divisions”

There was a couple at the camp, Shoshanna and Yitzhak Lerner. Shoshanna had
just given birth to a daughter, Lea, and the British allowed them entry to Israel. They
came to live in Hadassim at Rachel’s invitation – Yitzhak was her cousin – and he
became an official driver for the school.

“We only immigrated after statehood was declared. Initially we were sent to a
transit camp 89, near Pardes Hanna, but Yitzhak arrived to take us to Hadassim the very
next day. I was placed in the third grade together with Yakir Laufer and Moshe
Lieberman, and we were later joined by Metuka (who we called “the old lady”). Our
primary teacher was Bluma Katabursky, Rachel Shapirah’s sister. Mother was eventually
accepted there as a counselor.”

I. Aliyah Gimel

The British White Paper was issued in May 1939. It called for a unified
Palestinian State but put strict limits on Jewish immigration and land acquisition, and it
affirmed British commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine but precluded Jewish
statehood. Subsequent to this development, David Ben Gurion, head of the Jewish
settlement in Eretz Israel, initiated steps toward a third mass wave of immigration – the
Aliyah Gimmel – combined with an intelligent, clearly-defined revolt against the British
Mandate. Ships filled to the brim with immigrants would break through to the shores by
 35

force, bringing with them the young talent to fill

the ranks of Ben-Gurion’s army.18 He had began
to toy with the idea of an “immigrant’s revolt”
about a half-year earlier. In December of 1938,
he had spoken before members of the Zionist
General Council. “We need a new policy as well
as new tactics. We need to make it clear to the
British that we will no longer cooperate [with
her]. That would require your formal resignation,
and we would then need to organize a world conference in America and declare an open
war of immigration. This will ensure that we will take charge of the immigration efforts
ourselves, as well as confront England with the problem of having to use massive force
against such efforts. We can’t resort to the Arab’s terrorist means, but we can declare to
the whole world that Eretz Israel is ours…This is what it will mean to fight for the
political goal of our homeland.19”

In a May 31 meeting with members of the Maccabbi group, Ben-Gurion outlined

his plan to bring 100,000 new young immigrants into the country, young men with
military training, as well as thousands of machine guns. He indicated that fighter planes
might also be an important factor in eventually subduing the country. He met with the
General Council again the very next day: “If it comes to war, it is imperative that we
20
establish a Jewish military force capable of waging it. ”

In July 1945, the British Labor Party won the general election in England. The
new government, headed by Clement Attlee, rejected the Morrison Committee’s
recommendation for the immigration of 100,000 Jews, allowing instead for an
immigration rate of 1,500 per month. Ben-Gurion was in Paris when he heard about this,
and he immediately ordered (at the encouragement of Moshe Sneh, chief of Hagana
headquarters) his previous plans and designs into effect, calling for mass illegal
immigration (“Aliya Bet”) and acts of armed resistance (“Aliyah Gimel”). In the
beginning of October 1945, Dr. Sneh sent a message to Ben-Gurion in Paris: “The Jewish
settlement and the executive committee are behind you, but there won’t be any battle
without you.”21 In response, Ben-Gurion expounded the principles of the resistance in an
eight page revolutionary document. The second page contained the following: “The very

18
The idea is similar in spirit to Zeev Zabotinsky’s idea in the 1930s, of an
organized rebellion against the British by Jewish troops on the country’s ports.
19
Yoseph Heller, In the Fight for the State. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center,
1985, pg 249-254.
20
Yitzhak Avneri, the Immigration Rebellion – Ben Gurion’s Plan for Illegal
Immigration. Cathedra 44, Tamuz 1987, pg 144-145
21 th
Meaning, Terror. Ben Gurion’s Journal, October the 7 1945, Ben Gurion’s
Archive’s website in Sdeh-Boker.
 36

heart of it: Aliyah Gimel must be added to Aliyah Bet, as an armed resistance force that
will allow each unit to stand its ground against the security apparatus on sea or land.
Every caravan has to include troops with machine guns, revolvers and grenades.
Command of each Aliyah Gimel ship will be in the hands of a native Israeli boy.”

The third section included specific plans for activity in Europe: arms acquisition,
training, financing, communications, transfer, and recruitment efforts for Aliyah Bet and
Aliyah Gimmel. “Conditions dictate that central headquarters be in France.” Therefore,
“Ehud Avriel must be transferred to Paris immediately. He must arrive while I’m still
here, and additionally Shaul Avigur is to leave immediately for further consultations,
either in London or Paris.” The fourth section contains the following: “We shouldn’t
wait until there’s an official policy declaration from the British to initiate our revolt.22
We can’t even know if there’s going to be such a declaration. The only thing that counts
at this point is the ‘White Paper’. That in itself constitutes a declaration of war on our
people – who are tyrannized and stateless – so we must fight with every means at our
disposal.

In the seventh section Ben Gurion declared that it would be “a courageous and
considerably long war,” and he warned of overly optimistic expectations: “don’t hope for
a ‘last’ battle or expect a quick and easy victory.” The eighth section discusses “the
importance of propaganda for world opinion, something almost as important as the revolt
itself.” It was monumentally imperative for Ben-Gurion that public opinion would be on
Israel’s side; it was an essential component of the plan itself, and every strategy and tactic
had to reflect that priority. He believed that no Western government would support the
blocking of refugees into Eretz Israel if the right propaganda was implemented in
coordination with the right tactics. 23

Ben Gurion wasn’t satisfied with the course of planning to this point. His people
had arranged for the acquisition and storage of light weapons for Aliyah Gimmel, as well
as pursuing efforts to train young recruits in the use of such weapons. 24 Ben-Gurion had
met with friends from the old Arme Juive – the Jewish wing of the French Resistance in
WWII – and received assurances that they would help coordinate the plan of revolt. 25

22
Meaning - using terror strikes in conjunction with Aliyah Beit and Aliyah
Gimmel.
23
Zartal, 439-440.
24 th
Ben Gurion’s Journal, November the 8 , 1945.
25
Nahum Bogner, The Mutiny Boats –Haapala Ha'apala (Hebrew: ‫)העפלה‬, is a
Hebrew term used for the immigration by Jews to the British Mandate of Palestine in
violation of British restrictions against such immigration. It was also known as Aliya
Bet), [Link] Aviv published by the Ministry of Defense, 1993, pg 19.
 37

Ben-Gurion wasn’t in direct contact with the Hagana at the time. Until 1945,
Eliahu Golomb had been his sole contact with the organization, and when he died Ben-
Gurion was no longer connected to its goings-on. So at least from mid-1945 to August of
1946, Moshe Sneh directed the course of the Hagana, and he radicalized it, pushing for a
professional guerrilla and terror-strike force. The Hagana organization was officially
subordinated to the Palmach, but it nevertheless focused on terror attacks against the
British and on immigration for world-propaganda purposes, at the cost of preparing for an
ultimate war for independence. As leader of the Jewish Agency, which controlled the
Palmach, Ben-Gurion should have had oversight over activities at Hagana headquarters.
But the sympathies of the Palmach were largely with his political rivals, Tabenkin’s
people. When he finally realized that he had no control over the Palmach, and when he
subsequently failed at dismantling it, he attempted to turn things back his way by
activating cells in the Hagana who’d served in the British army. Most of his appeals
went unanswered, however. Those who did -- Nahum Golan and Israel Tal, for example
– got miserable results.26 Ben Gurion tried using encouraging words in his journal: “The
practical difficulties are immense, but it is not impossible. The salient feature is the iron
will of man.”27 Moshe Sneh and Israel Galili refused to cooperate with him on the
Aliyah Gimmel plan28.

Beginning in October 1945, while still in Paris, Ben Gurion decided to start new
defense organization, “Mishmeret Tzlechim” (“The Guards of Success”) which would be
entirely under his command and exclusively loyal -- something like a Sultan’s guard -- a
secret brotherhood of the most elite and committed Zionist sons. His journal describes
the desired profile of members of Mishmeret Tzlechim: men of both action and intellect,
dedicated to the worship of Israel and ready to lay down their lives for the organization.
The journal defines their specific enterprise: to unite the nation in the Diaspora, to
educate them in the principles of an integrated Israel and intensify their love of the land,
to establish underground networks wherever necessary, and finally to train pioneers for
settlement. The fourth section of the journal said that each accepted member of the
organization would have to swear allegiance to Jewish statehood, to the Hagana in Israel
and to the execution of his mission even at the cost of his own life. The fifth section
included the following: “Membership in the Guard is personal and covert. Loyalty to it
29
comes before loyalty to any other organization.”

Plans for Mishmeret Tzlechim show that Ben Gurion’s idea of a proper defense
organization in the 1940s was akin to those of Russian underground organizations in the

26
Bogner, 18.
27 rd
Ben Gurion’s Journal October the 3 2945
28
Ben Gurion Journal, pg 19
29
Zartal 442-444y
 38

th
19 century, as well as clandestine organizations during the Second Aliyah (the second
wave of immigration, 1904-1914): the “Bar Giora,” “Hashomer” (underground Jewish
defense and settlement organizations), “The Histadrut Minor” (the Israeli trade union
congress), The Jaffa Group (a secret security establishment for Tel Aviv and Jaffa), the
“Benei Pinchas” and “NILI” (secret, pro-British spy organization in WWI). His designs
drew much more from the Zionist past than they did from any modern systems or military
organizations.

For example, take the founding principles of the “Young Histadrut of Herzliah”
gymnasium (where Moshe Sharet was educated), formulated in 1913 : “Absolute
dedication and discipline; gearing young comrades to the spirit of the Histadrut; assisting
Histadrut members in their private life; maintaining secrecy regarding the Histadrut’s
30
activities and internal affairs.”

In October of 1945, Ben-Gurion visited the refugee camps of Dachau and Bergen-
Belzen. His intention was very practical: he wanted to find as many worthy recruits as
possible for Aliyah Gimmel operations. Several weeks later, when he informed the
elected assembly in Israel about this visit, he said nothing to them about his real plans:
“Today I bring brotherly regards from those who somehow managed to survive the gas
chambers, the various torments and agonies, the relentless abuse and insults. They have
asked me to convey two wishes on their behalf: the first one is for Jewish unity. For
those who suffered irrespective of ethnic and political differences. Their executioners
were indiscriminant. And the second wish: A Jewish state, the State of Israel. This is the
last will and testament of the millions of our saintly brothers who perished. We have
been decimated only for want of having a nation, for being a people without a homeland
or a state; liberty and justice will never find us if we can’t correct that historical
deformity in our people’s history.” 31

After his visit to the camps, Ben-Gurion met in Frankfurt with General
Eisenhower and his second in command, Brigadier General Walter Bedell-Smith. They
promised him that Eastern European Jews would have complete freedom to enter the
American occupied zones.32 In the memorandum he presented to the Jewish Agency in
November of the same year, Ben-Gurion wrote the following:

30
Uri Milstein, Yehuda in Blood and Fire, Bat-Yam; Levin-Epstein, Fourth
edition, 1978, pg 30.
31
David Ben Gurion, Bamaaracha He, pg 9
32
Yehuda Bauer,” The Power Formation in the Way to Jewish independence in
Eretz Israel”. Monthly Review 11, November1976.
 39

If we can concentrate a quarter-million of our people in the American Zone, that

would intensify American pressure [on the British], not financially, since that’s not as
crucial for them, but because the Americans don’t recognize any future for these people
anywhere but in Eretz Israel. 33

Professor Yehuda Bauer, the Holocaust researcher, noted that the Zionist
leadership was concerned that if Israel were closed off for too long Jewish refugees
would begin to look elsewhere for immigration. When the number of refugees in western
zones swelled to 300,000 Ben-Gurion’s predictions proved to be accurate. According to
Bauer, “A big reservoir of potential immigrants was under America’s protection, and the
American government was looking for ways to get rid of the hassle…The only alternative
they saw was Eretz Israel. For that, pressure on Britain was necessary. That was
34
therefore the crucial political determinant in those days, the crucial transition point.”

In December 6 th, 1945, when Ben-Gurion returned to Israel, the directorate of the
Jewish Agency came to a decision. “The current phase of the Zionist struggle
necessitates…in addition to the regular political and defensive actions, a special emphasis
in their distribution: A. The intensification of immigration from all countries; B.
Proactive defense of the sea-immigration efforts, including aggressive protection on the
coasts; C. The full consolidation and protection of European immigration, according to
Section B., spread over the whole Jewish Diaspora; D. Removal of all obstacles for
immigration to Israel”35

Ben-Gurion and his colleagues used the Jewish refugee problem for broader aim
of founding a state.36 Their strategy was based on the historical model of the “Haapala,”
the Hebrew term for illegal Jewish immigration during the British Mandate. They knew
that they wouldn’t necessarily succeed in getting all the refugees, but that they would
probably get those refugees onto the pages of every major newspaper in the West,
especially America. The refugees weren’t let in on this line of thinking, nor did most of
the “escape” agents know about it. Yehuda Arazi, head of the Italian branch of Mosad
Aliyah Beit (a branch of the Hagana that comprised the organizing body of illegal
immigration beginning in 1938) was aware of it. During a 1949 interview, he admitted

33
Bauer, there.
34
Bauer, ”The Power Formation in the Way to Jewish independence in Eretz
Israel”
35
David Ben Gurion, Internet.
36
In 1971 P. Kotler and G. Zaltzman published the essay: “Social Marketing: An
Approach to planning of social changes,” in the Journal of Marketing 35, pg 3-12. In my
view, Ben Gurion and his friends applied the principles of this theory intuitively, before
the scientists formulated them and before they became a vital instrument in the public
relations and persuasive communication fields.
 40

that he had seen the Holocaust survivors as “wonderful propaganda material…which no

earthly power could resist.”37

Since WWII, writers and journalists have written that the purpose of organized,
illicit Israeli immigration was giving a safe haven to as many survivors as possible – but
that isn’t true. The real purpose, in retrospect, was to secure a safe haven for a Jewish
state. Ben-Gurion’s maneuver was so successful that even today most Israelis buy into
the original explanation.38

In August of 1946, after the bombing of British secret police headquarters in

Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, Ben-Gurion made the decision to split the Hagana from
ETZEL and LECHI. His decision put the Hagana in an impossible situation: the other
two organizations kept upping the ante on terrorist attacks against the British, creating
frustration and envy for Palmach veterans who now sat on the sidelines. In 1946, no one
was telling the Hagana to ready for conventional war, and it was utterly incapable of it
then. The guerrilla cum terror approach was the order of the day.

But just then a dialectical switch began to surface among the Hagana elite: Moshe
Sneh, Israel Galili, Yitzhak Sade, Yigal Alon and others – all of whom had been pro-
terror strikes in 1946, had wanted to activate the Aliyha Bet branch of the Hagana to
intensify illicit immigration and who had sabotaged Ben-Gurion’s designs – these men
now turned the Aliah Beit into Aliah Gimmel. They did so specifically to get the
Palmach back into the action, to keep their reputation strong with the hardened young
settlers. Although it was Ben-Gurion who’d conceived the plan, he wasn’t the one to
implement it – that honor went to his opponents in the labor movement. Ben-Gurion still
had enough authority to stymie this development or steer it according to his original
design, but he chose not to do that. Ben-Gurion certainly had the authority to prevent this
development, or direct it according to his original plan, but he chose not to. The Aliyah
Beit was turned into an Aliyah Gimmel through the initiatives Yigal Alon, commander of
the Palmach, and David Nmeri, the contact man between the Palmach and the Mosad

37
Zartal, pg 276.
38
In August 10th 1997 for example The Haaretz newspaper published a letter of
ex Colonels Aaron Doron, Shlomo Gazit, Mordechai Rosman, head of the “Exodus’s
immigrants’ board, in the name of the immigrants’ board, the country’s organization of
Hagana’s members, and the PALMACH’s Generation board – following a screening of a
documentary film about the “Exodus” affair. In their letter they wrote about “The
struggle of the Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel, the struggle of the survivors who found
themselves wandering in Europe’s forsaken roads, and the demand of most of them to
have Israel’s gates open for them.” The presentation of the Jewish settlement’s political,
strategic and communicative calculations in the use of the illegal immigration operation
they named “slander against the Zionist movement, against the settlement in Israel and its
leadership and against Ben Gurion personally”.
 41

Aliyah Beit, who had been with the Palmach organization from the beginning. Both of
them had been raised in the Kibbutz Hameuchad (a left-wing Bolshevik group); both
were almost fanatical in their vision.

The pretext for switching the strategy of mass illicit immigration into outright
revolt was the British government’s decision, on August 7, 1946, to begin wholesale
expulsion of refugees from the country. The British operation’s codename was “Igloo.”
They were trying to block the entry of 2684 new immigrants who had arrived at the port
of Haifa on four ships earlier in the month. The Jewish National Council (the elected
governing board of Jews in the British Mandate) held an emergency session during which
Abraham Katzenelson said that if the refugees turned on the British at this point there
would be hundreds dead. 39 On August 8, Mosad Aliya Beit headquarters sent an order to
the commanders of five other refugee boats on their way to the coastline:

We suspect that the government will try to intercept and redirect you to another
location…Only stop in case of warning shots. If they try to board you outside territorial
waters you must put up some resistance, perhaps even sabotage the boats if they succeed
in gaining control…if they succeed in redirecting you to another port, you’ll have to put
up a fierce resistance, even to the point that they have to drag you out to the last man.40

On August 12, Nmeri sent a telegram from Haifa to Mosad Headquarters in Tel
Aviv, begging for permission to act forcefully. “It cannot end like this, with crying and
impotent cursing, but with action. Orders must be issued…we can’t just sit around and
make preparations. If they’re allowed to be tossed back into the sea then no one will ever
forgive us.”41

Because all the senior leaders of the Zionist movement were in Paris or in the
Latroon prison camp at the time, Nmeri and his activists managed to blackmail those
42
temporarily in charge for permission to engage in violent actions.

The historian Edit Zartal wrote, “Yigal Alon was the most fanatic of the
participants in the refugee-boat crisis. That issue was prominent on the agenda for
months; ever since the “Exodus” affair in August 1946, for longer than a year, Alon
demanded to carry on the resistance, always looking to radicalize it further. He was also

39
Bogner, 57.
40
Bogner, 55.
41
The Archives of the history of the Hagana, 14/231 – from Freedom to My
Country, 12 August 1946
42
Bogner, 58-59
 42

demanding authority for Palmach to carry on independently, with his choice of

commander, of course.43

During the fifties, Alon bragged that he had thought of every possible operation
and resistance strategy, including strikes on British naval bases in Israel and other
Mediterranean ports, though allegedly that plan was only accepted in small part. It was
apparently limited only to resisting mass deportations as well as few isolated strikes on
British navy vehicles. The orders for Palmach sailors were now harsh and crystal clear:
“Any refugee boat captured by an enemy ship will not allow the enemy on deck [sailors
were already ordered to seal off their ship-decks with wire-fences, sand bags,
etc.]…refugees should be organized for their own defense against possible expulsion.
Passive resistence is preferable, but ammunition must be available since violent action
can’t be ruled out…All refugees, save women, children and the elderly must take part in
their own defense.”44

A Palmach bulletin from January 1947 noted that the true purpose of helping the
refugee confront his British oppressors was to transform his self-image, from passive
victim to a heroic, self-determining human being. But such notions are testimony of the
monumentally arrogant attitude of Eretz Israel towards its refugees – that it was somehow
proper to throw them into a blood-bath in order to forge a new man and a new image.45

The first confrontation occurred on the “Yagur,” a boat intercepted on August

11th , 1946. Moshe Mark was the commander on board:

“There were many women on deck, many of them

pregnant. Almost everyone was half naked. The soldiers were
dragging women by their hair and feet, and the women
scratched and clawed and hit back with what they could…The
Yagur struggle lasted about three hours. One of the women was
seriously wounded and lost her pregnancy on account of it.”46

The second big clash involving a refugee boat was the ship “Henrietta Sold,”
bearing 536 immigrants. Here, again, there were many pregnant women on board, as

43
Zartal, 296.
44
Zrubabel Gilead and Mati Meged (editors), The PALMACH BOOK Hakibbutz
Hameuchad, 1987.
45
Zartal, 296-297
46
Bogner pg 60.
 43

47
well as 28 infants and 180 children aged two to sixteen. On September 22, 1946 a
veritable battle took place on the deck of the “Palmach,” a refugee-ship bearing 615
immigrants. When the British attempted to board the “Palmach,” they were met by a
brutal hail of rocks and metal, anything these ferociously prepared refugees could get
their hands on. In response, the British used water jets and tear gas. Eventually they
even opened fire with light ammunition, killing Yoni Dov Schwartz, and wounding
thirty-one other passengers and accompanying sailors. Among the latter was Moshe
Rabinovitz, the Palmach commander on board and the only member of the organization
wounded during this period of transformation from Aliah Beit to Aliyah Gimmel.
According to him, Schwartz probably drowned when he fell overboard, rather than dying
from his bullet-wounds. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion mentioned him side by side with
Trumpeldor in an October 1946 letter to Abba Hillel Silver, turning him into a new
martyr for the Zionist cause. 48

On November 28, another significant battle took place, this one on the ship
“Knesset Israel.” There were a total of 3850 immigrants on board; 1500 of them were
young boys, many of them orphans. As with the “Henrietta Sold,” these refugees were
well prepared to fight for their lives with any scrap of metal or stone, and the struggle
lasted over three hours. Eizik Rosenbaum, a sixteen year old boy, was killed and dozens
were wounded, but on the other side there were thirty soldiers seriously wounded.
Quoting the report of the commander on board, Yosi Harel:

“I think that somebody owes me an explanation: without any actual fighting on

the shore, why must the immigrants fight these battles in the sea? These people are all
that remains of six million exterminated Jews; they’ve already endured a hell that hardly
anyone could imagine. Why must they be the victims yet again? No, it must be declared
to them openly that they should not resist, that every further resistance spills even more
needless blood; that it’s not acceptable they do the fighting while those on the land sit
idly by. It has to be one way or the other, a full fight or nothing: the current situation is
49
simply unacceptable.”

It wasn’t only Yosi Harel that complained about sending these Holocaust
survivors to the battlefront while most of the Jewish settlement did nothing substantial
against the British. On December 12th, 1946, the newspaper “Davar” published a poem
by Nathan Alterman addressed to the Knesset:

47
Bogner, pg 60.
48
Bogner, 109, Zartal, 293.
49
Bogner, 113-126
 44

“In response to the story headlined, “The Knesset Israel’s refugee resistance
collapsed in smoke bombs,” this poem tells the story of a girl refugee as she scrambles
around for a breath of clean air:

“But suddenly she remembered that she is nothing if not the community!
I commanded her: Stand up![…]
Don’t move! Even when the soldiers come for you
Don’t go willingly!
Resist!
Resist!
[…] And yet she might still reckon with me:
What part of it was given to her
And what part of it I took for myself […]
And she will say, speaking for all of her young friends,
That the settlement cannot demand of her
That which it does not demand from itself and its children”

Beyond these ethical issues, the transformation of Aliyah Bet to Aliyah Gimmel
focused the Palmach commanders on demonstrating their capacity for violence, which,
though it may have helped along the political process, did great harm to preparation for
full out war upon the declaration of Jewish statehood. The involvement of the Palmach
in stirring a spirit of resistance against expulsion, as well as the organization of a naval
“Intifada” of women and children, solidified and radicalized the ideological wing of
Hagana’s recruits at the expense of its military professionalism. It allowed many of the
Palmach that weren’t involved in illicit immigration efforts to stand idle and atrophy
during the crucial run-up to the War of Independence.

J. Exodus

In the summer of 1947, the twelve year old Alex Orlander was moved along with
some of his Furten peers to Marseille in Southern France. There began his ascendancy as
a “soldier” of the Aliyah Gimel in its struggle on the refugee ship “Exodus”.

Alex: “4500 people were compressed into the ship, where we lay in as miserable a
condition as I’d already known in the burrow underneath Valenti Back’s house. The only
difference was that the ship had four floors instead of one. So it was incredibly crowded.
It was appalling. And yet, there wasn’t one moment when I was sad. We had plenty of
food: canned food from America; vegetables and baguettes from France. I experienced
 45

horrible seasickness as we were rounding Crete, and I pretty much lay there like a corpse
for two days. When we reached the Haifa port we threw our cans at the British -- and
they responded with smoke grenades. Our superiors told us to ‘Piss in the handkerchiefs
and use them to your eyes. It’ll protect you from the gas..’ This only helped to a certain
point, but it still showed me something important about the knack of Israelis for
improvising.

“The battle lasted several hours, until the British finally captured the ship and
forced us to board a few other ships. For next three months we moved aimlessly from
one side of the Mediterranean to the other, essentially marooned at sea. The French
government offered us citizenship at one point, but we were intent on nothing short of
Aliyah. We were finally forced to land in Hamburg, where I was able to see my sister, at
least.”

Metuka had stayed in a refugee camp in Germany, along with her relatives, and
she’d never heard that Alex had left on board the “Exodus” in the first place. All of them
found out about it the same day, when they read in the newspaper that “Sigismund
Orlander” had been on the illegal refugee ship. Maneck quickly left for Hamburg, where
he spotted the twelve year old Alex in the middle of a football game. He “kidnapped”
him in short order and reunited him with the family.

Together they spent 1949 in a transitional camp in the mountains of Marseille. A

week before they left on board the ship “Negba” en route to Israel, God decided to test
Metuka – so she believed, at least – when she injured her head and developed a serious
infection. There was a definite possibility that she would have to miss the departure to
France, as she needed serious treatment at a hospital. Fortunately, however, she was able
to have surgery in time for the voyage. She had to wear a bandage on her head, and in
order to treat the infection the Ship’s Dr. said she would need to shave off all her hair.
She burst out crying at this; it brought back the trauma of having to stay bald when they
all lived in the burrow under the Melmann’s home. Aunt Sara pleaded with the nurse to
leave her hair intact.

They were in Haifa within a week’s time, staying in the Shaar Haliyah camp for
three months before moving to a transitional camp in Netanya.

[Metuka]:

When we found out that there was a spot for us in the Netanya camp, we
were naïve enough to picture it as a quaint little village. We had no idea what was
waiting for us. We loaded our possessions onto a truck and left for Netanya’s
shores, near Avichail. It was an especially hot day. Our hearts fell when we
 46

finally arrived there, where a vista was revealed of endless lines tents, half-naked
savages, piles of half-eaten and overripe watermelon on the sidewalks, flies, filthy
children running around barefoot with military-style kitchenware…

At that point the truck driver turned to us and said, “This is your new
home.” Mother burst into tears, refusing to get out of her seat. The adults looked
around and began discussing their options when the driver shouted, “Look! You
aren’t the only people who need my services today. Get off the bus already!”

My dad tried to comfort mother. “Look, Selka, it’s not so terrible…It’ll be

okay, let’s get off the bus, everyone’s Jewish here…”

“I don’t understand…get off what? Where?” She was clearly unhinged

by all this.

A policeman wearing a tight uniform was walking passed us, and father
looked at me with a playful gleam in his eye and said, “Selka, look! A Jewish
policeman!” Obviously this wasn’t something any of us were accustomed to
seeing…

So we finally got off the bus. There really wasn’t much of a choice.

After a few days, we received a visit from Moshe Eshel Altshuler, the
accountant for my parents’ oil company in Lignitz. He’d also immigrated to
Israel, eventually ending up doing accounting work for Hadassim. When he
found us, he took one look at our tent and said, “Listen, Selka: I can’t really help
you, but the children have a right to be educated properly. They’re orphans,
Holocaust children. I can get them enrolled at Hadassim.”

She remembered how the “escape” emissaries had taken us from her and
what had happened then. “It’s the same thing all over again, someone wants to
take them from me. Well I won’t let that happen, I promise you. I can’t even
believe you would ask such a thing of me. If you ever want to see me again you
won’t ask it -- I’m never letting them go.”

But Moshe insisted. “Selka, this isn’t like any institution you knew of in
Poland. It’s not an orphanage. The children are treated well and left free. It’s
something completely different.”
 47

She started crying. “After everything we’ve been through, surviving the
war together…and now you want to take them away from us?!”

Moshe saw how difficult it was for her. So he made a more tentative
proposition: “How about this, then: I’ll come with the car on Saturday. All of
you can come with me and see the place for yourselves, and then you can decide.
And if you say no, I won’t suggest it again.”

So on Saturday we all drove together to see Hadassim for the first time.
I’ll never forget my first glimpse of the place: a blooming garden sprawling
through the entrance. As someone who went through the Holocaust as a child,
spending over a year suspended underground and later enduring the endless
winding roads and the endless series of filthy camps, this was the first time I saw
such beauty – a place filled with nothing but flourishing gardens and vivid grass.
It was the peak of summertime then, and the Dahlia and Zinnia flowers were in
full bloom. The buildings were new and clean, the dining hall was charming and
comfortable. We encountered all sorts of children moving about as they pleased -
- the sense of freedom was palpable. It was just…Paradise. I prayed in my heart
that mother would let us stay here. “Only until we get an apartment of our own,
Metuka. But in the meantime you can stay,” she said.

It was relief to hear that from her. As it turned out, this “meanwhile”
continued uninterrupted for eleven years. I entered the place when I was ten and
graduated from the Hadassim Teacher Seminary when I was twenty one.

Back at the transit camp in Netanya, Moshe had asked me if I’d be

interested to see Elisa again. She was staying at seashore resort at the time. “Of
course,” I told him happily. When he took me to meet her, I wore a special dress
for the occasion, with glittery shoes and bows, the full gamut. I was so excited to
see her that I even tried a new hairdo. When we approached the shore, I saw a
whole camp of tents and across from them a bunch of children kicking a football
around. We asked to see Elisa, and soon enough a very tall, tanned, wildly curly-
haired girl was walking toward me in her sandals. I could only recognize her by
her eyes, she’d changed so much. It was the shock of my life: here was the ugly
duckling, the green-tinged skeleton dripping ooze and sadness that I’d known
only two years ago. She was utterly resurrected. We walked side by side; she
was the epitome of the sabra girl, and I stood for the Diaspora. We kissed and
embraced, and in my heart I told myself: in Hadassim, I’ll learn to become like
her.
 48

K. “Master, You and Your Family Won’t Go With The Other Jews”

Yehudit Lorber joined our ninth grade class in 1954.

Every new girl attracted attention. But there was something else
quite mysterious about this one. We’d encountered one another
without knowing it five years ago. My father, Abraham, was the
assistant director for a transitional settlement in Raanana, and
Yehudit had lived there for a few years. I’d visited there many
times, always making an effort to help all the new young
immigrants adjust to Israeli life, to help them discover their
identity in their new homeland. So when I met Yehudit in
Hadassim I felt like we were already friends somehow.

When I interviewed her in 2006, I felt something similar,

like we’d never really said goodbye in the first place. I wanted to
Yehudit Lorber keep that relation with her. The dialogical bond we’d begun at
the transitional camp, one that continued throughout our years in
Hadassim, had survived all the way to the 2005 battle reconstruction event that I’d
organized for the people who form the subject of this book. Now, sitting together in her
sophisticated Tel Aviv apartment, we held a long, Buberian “I-Thou” dialogue.
Yehudit’s music conversed with my philosophical ideas, just as Pythagoras had
envisioned 2,600 years ago.

Yehudit was a real beauty, but her passion for reading also astonished us. I read a
lot too, of course, and we often competed on who could read farther and deeper into a
text. I remember, in particular, a conversation we had on War and Peace. I was claiming
that the hero was Pier, and she claimed it was Natasha. I was very interested in the
50
character of Kutuzov, and she in old Prince Bolkonsky. It was springtime evening, and
we were sitting together on the balcony of unit five. I told her that I was used to
conversing with flowers, and she told me that she conversed with the stars. We laughed
without really knowing why. Maybe it was because we both loved purely but weren’t
mature enough just yet to admit it. By my eyes, Yehudit was a sabra girl par excellence,
but I didn’t know then that she had lived through the Holocaust. I didn’t know it until
she told me her story in March of 2006. I regretted deeply that I’d never conversed with
her about that experience when we knew each other in Hadassim. I wanted to ask her
now whether repressing that experience had allowed her to rise anew, like the Phoenix of
the Beethoven Sonata, or whether it had relegated part of her inner self to a psychic
prison-cell. But I didn’t dare bring that up at this point, not even when we were safe in
the year 2006. I figured that the year was still young, that we might still to talk in the

50
Prince Mikhail Illarionovitch Kutuzov, (1745-1813) a Russian General
considered to be a national hero and the one who saved Russia from Napoleon Bonaparte.
 49

coming months. According to Buber, writing is an act of dialogue too, and I know that
she will be reading these lines.

Yehudit was born in 1939 to a wealthy family in the city of

Kushitza. She was the daughter of Esther and Moshe Lorber, and
a sister to Aaron and Shraga. Kushitza is the second largest city in
Slovakia, and until the end of WWI it belonged to the Austro-
Hungraian Empire. A major center of commerce and agriculture,
it was also the location of the Slovakian Supreme Court and the
seat of an Archbishop. It was tied to the republic of
Czechoslovakia in 1918, following the war. By the outbreak of the

Yehudit Lorber next war, it was a home for 15,000 Jews, equally divided among
reformed, orthodox, Zionist and assimilated Jews.

In November 1938, a year before the war, parts of Slovakia were annexed to
Hungary, Kushitza among them. Unfortunately that meant the immediate imposition of
Hungary’s anti-Semitic laws and regulations; every facet of public Jewish life was closed
down. Jewish organizations continued to function underground, and young Jews began
escaping to Eretz Israel via the Romanian port of Constanta. In 1940, Slovakian and
Polish Jewish refugees began arriving in Kushitza.

Two years later, with the beginning of mass deportation of Slovakian Jews to the
Polish death camps, a new wave of refugees again poured through the city. It was March
1944, and the Nazis had invaded Hungary. Jews were immediately carted off along with
their property, and in April 28 a Ghetto was officially designated for the consolidation of
the remaining Jewish population. All of them were eventually taken from there and
forced to work in a brick and construction factory, and shortly thereafter a typhoid plague
erupted, no doubt spurred on by the crowded conditions. That was just a prelude, of
course. It wasn’t long until the first group of them would be herded aboard trains and
sent to Auschwitz. By June 7, most of the city was thoroughly “cleansed”.

Moshe Lorber owned a big lumber mill. A special trail was built between his
wooden warehouse and the train station, where train specially assigned to his mill cut
across the forests of Romania. The mill continued to function under his ownership and
management, employing dozens of workers, until the Germans arrived in 1944 and
imposed direct control. Moshe was an upright and beloved manager, always paying on
time every Sunday; his workers would have walked through fire and water to help him.

The liquidation and transfer of Kushitza’s Jews directly to Auschwitz happened

on a Sunday. Esther packed all of their clothes, money and jewellery and intended to
arrive at the train station along with the rest of the family at the appointed time. Moshe
left the house for the mill on the same hour. When she asked him where he was going, he
 50

answered that he was going to see his workers and pay them as usual. Esther was
concerned that he was taking a big chance, that the family would be separated from each
other if he left at this point. But Moshe insisted on going anyway.

Just as he was locking up his office, two of his workers approached him. “Master,
the workers have decided not to let you go. We can’t let you and your family go with the
rest of the Jews. We want to protect you.”

Yehudit: “I was four years old then. Papa and the workers all came home and
dressed me in peasant clothes, and they assigned one of the workers to me, Uri Oravetz.
He told me that if we’re stopped on the way I should say that I’m his daughter, Agnes,
and that we’re returning from Sunday prayer. We walked together -- Uri, mother and I --
hand in hand, just like any Christian family walking home through the town from church.
My two brothers walked behind me together with the other worker, and Papa walked
parallel to us, on the other side of the road. He was very well known in the city, but
somehow people ignored him as they passed us. It seems as if the whole city had
conspired to save us.

“We arrived at a Gypsy neighborhood on the outskirts of town. As we

approached one of the houses, an old gypsy woman was standing at her porch. When she
noticed we were coming in her direction she suddenly signaled for us to stop, like she
knew something was happening. It turned out that there was a policeman patrolling near
her house. She signaled us again when he was gone so we could continue. Finally we
arrived at the Oravetz’ residence, a small house with one room, a kitchen, and a little
warehouse in the backyard next to the pig-shed. They were a family of five. Their
neighbor across the fence was a Nazi, and his sons had long since been serving in the
military. There was a long-standing hatred between the two houses.

“One of our cousins soon joined us, so that made six of us, altogether. The
Oravetz family gave us the living room, while they took the kitchen. Our parents slept on
the bed and we on the floor. My aunt and her husband joined us after two days, but the
woman of the house initially refused to accept them, fearing that our food would run out.
My father calmed her down, saying that from the German point of view it didn’t matter
how many people she was hiding. As far as food was concerned, he gave her a big stack
of money.

“We hid in that house for ten months, and our situation deteriorated more as time
went by. The Germans would make thorough searches of the neighborhood, and they
showed no mercy for Jew-loving gentiles. They would hang them to death without a
second’s thought. Father gave Oravetz money to buy lumber from our old mill, and we
used it to build a wall across the main room, covering it with wall-paper for safe measure.
We left a small opening at the center. There was a little bench built into the wooden wall
 51

in the small adjacent room, and moved in there to hide. One day there were loud knocks
on the door. A policeman had come to ask some questions, and while he was at it he
asked why one of the doors was locked in the middle of the day. She told him that her
daughter had been out buying groceries, and that she didn’t want her sister meddling with
her notebooks in the meantime. We sat there behind the door through the whole
conversation, frozen like stones. I literally put my fist in my mouth at some point,
terrified that I would cry and possibly ruin everything. There was another search, this
one in the middle of the night. Father had left the bag containing his tefillin and the
prayer shawl on the bed, but somehow the policemen didn’t notice it there in the dark.

“Soon after that, Oravetz was conscripted into the army, and his son started hiding
with us to avoid the same fate. Oravetz would occasionally sneak out from his base in
the middle of the night and bring us some meat. He used to get drunk so often that father
was worried he might unwittingly give us away. When he mentioned this to Oravetz, the
old bear just patted his cheek and said, ‘Moshe – you I’ll never surrender…’”

The Red Army finally liberated Kushitza in February of 1945. The Lorbers
decided to return to their house, joining the maid they had originally asked to look after
everything. The woman had grown comfortable with her new property in their ten month
absence, however, and she steadily refused to give back many of the valuables. Then
came Friday: Esther lit the candles and the family performed the Kiddush, sitting for
dinner in their now emptier house. Suddenly the door opened, and a drunk Russian
soldier barged in and decided to loot everything in sight – alcohol, gold watches,
whatever. He grabbed my brother and reached into his pocket, but he hurt himself
somehow. When he saw that his hand was bleeding he took his gun and pointed it at my
brother. We yelled for one of our neighbors who knew Russian, and luckily he was able
to calm him down. He poured the soldier some coffee, and slowly the man sobered up
and even joined us at the dinner table.

Then he noticed the candles. “Jews?” he asked. They nodded.

The soldier smiled. He said he remembered some Yiddish and told them about
his grandmother, and how he used to watch her lighting Friday night candles.
After dinner he asked them if they had any problems, if he could help with
anything. Within ten minutes the servant turned up at the house with all their valuables.

Yehudit: “A few days later, the Russian general Yegorov knocked on our front
door. He’d brought several officers and soldiers with him, and was looking for my
cousin Katia, who was staying in our house now that the war was over. Her parents had
died during the war, and she had joined the partisans in the forests and committed several
outstanding acts of heroism. So Yegorov was here to present her with her metal, in
 52

person. They performed the formal ritual in our house, and we were absolutely brimming
with pride that one of our own was being recognized for brave acts against the Nazis.

Yehudit was in a brief state of shock after they came out of hiding. She was
suddenly afraid of strangers, and eventually even refused to leave her bedroom. This
went on for ten months. “All I did was play with my rag dolls. I’d sit them down next to
one another and tell them children’s stories. When I finally overcame my fears, I started
going to a Slovak school and stayed there till fourth grade.”

After the Soviets finished capturing Czechoslovakia, they took the keys to the
mill away from Moshe, telling him that from now on he was just like every other simple
worker. That was the day he decided to move his family to Israel. He sent his sons there
first, but they were deported to Cyprus. They finally managed to immigrate during the
War of Independence. Yehudit and her parents got there in May 1949.

Yehudit: “We arrived on Haifa’s shore on Independence Day. There were lights
everywhere and music glaring in the streets; people were standing up and crying on the
deck. I didn’t really understand what was going on. Adults didn’t really communicate
well with their children in those days. We were told nothing. It caused a strange
frustration. The very next day we were greeted by the coastguard; two handsome, tanned
and sculpted young sabras came on board, bringing us peanuts, fresh bread and chocolate,
hard boiled eggs – and bundles of whole oranges! They were a delicacy in Europe, so
much so that you could expect to have maybe one a year, if you were lucky. My stomach
almost exploded from the orange binge in those first few weeks, but it’s still my favorite
fruit to this day. From the port we went directly to camp Shaar Haliyah. My uncle
who’d been here for years picked us up and brought us to the transitional camp in
Raanana.

“In Raanana we were assigned a shared tent with a bachelor neighbor. When I
saw how poor the beds were I burst into tears. It was difficult for me to adjust from a
spacious and comfortable home back in Europe to this crowded, miserable tent we were
given. But my father would have none of it, and slapped me right across the face – the
only time I was ever literally jolted back to reality. Starting at that moment I never
complained again, even though we continued to live in the same camp for the next year
and a half until we upgraded to a tin hut. I began attending a religious school, Yavne,
which was close to the camp. I was the only new immigrant in a class full of Sabras,
with no knowledge of the language or any social skills.

“Having kippas on their heads didn’t take anything away from the boys’ cruelty.
So the adjustment was quite hard on me, but by the end of the year I was one of the three
outstanding students in the class. I studied like crazy. After another year, my family
moved into a slightly better place, and the year after that papa finally bought an
 53

apartment in a venerable immigrants’ quarter with some of the money he’d been able to
smuggle from Slovakia.”

“It was hard for me to assimilate into the Sabra world. That was a process I only
got a handle on in Hadassim. My best friend there was Nurit Gantz – we arrived there
together. My parents thought it was catastrophic that I was moving to that school. ‘How
could a child live away from home like that?’ they kept saying. But for me, Hadassim
was the euphoric freedom I needed; it was a marked contrast from the loving yet stifling
embrace of my family.”

I knew Nurit myself in Raanana, in kindergarten and the first grade. I played the
“great priest” for the Shavuot celebrations in Malka’s kindergarten, and Nurit was one of
the dancers. The three of us, Nurit, Yehudit and I comprised the Raanana posse in
Hadassim.

In Hadassim, Yehudit drank and got drunk to her heart’s content from the wide
spaces, from milking cows and volunteering as a nurse assistant. She excelled in musical
study, as the only violinist in her class to perform in Gil Aldema’s orchestra. But she
could also challenge the smartest of us in literature, displaying a unique literary
sensibility, an ability to expound deeply into a text. At the age of seventeen, she seemed
perfectly able to climb all the way up to the stars. Everything was within her reach. But
then her loving father died, and suddenly the repressed shadow of the Holocaust reared
its ugly head. She regressed further and further into the choking bosom of family love, a
love that disguises the survivors’ permanent terror of death. Her family had survived the
Holocaust, but they had paid for it with a covenant, a victim’s covenant.

Yehudit: “I received word that my father was in the

hospital upon returning to Hadassim from a weekend vacation.
The next day, when I went to school as usual, I got a call from
the office that I was to return home immediately. It infuriates
me to this day that they didn’t at least offer to drive me home or
accompany me. They let me leave alone by foot and wait for a
bus, all while my father lay dying. When I got back to Raanana
Yehudit Lorber and a husband of one of my cousins was waiting for me. He didn’t
GIDEON tell me the truth; he just said that father wasn’t well. We walked
back to my neighborhood, and it’s only there I finally discovered
he was dead. It’s not a happy memory.

“I’m not certain I’ve clarified the full meaning of implications for my life of
having studied at Hadassim. I’ve said a lot about the sense of freedom there, but beyond
everything else I also learned that freedom comes with taking responsibility for my life,
which requires a knack for making tough decisions. So it transpired that, after my
 54

father’s death, I came to realize that scholarship wasn’t an option for me, so I turned to
something more practical, like nursing. My grades in junior year were already enough
for that field, so at the end of the year I left Hadassim and began my studies at the
Beilinson Hospital Nursing School. I transformed myself from a dependent person to a
person my family could depend on…I started supporting my widowed mother. In
retrospect, the course I took was the right one from every possible angle. Whatever I’ve
missed in formal education, I can still catch up now that I’m retired and have enough
time to study a broad spectrum in many fields. And that’s a very satisfying life! And
instead of two diplomas, I have two wonderful children – the source of my pride and
happiness.

L. One with a Big Ass and the Other a Dwarf

Hadassim also welcomed a couple of Europeans who had spent their wartime
years in far better circumstances than others. Their first years were spent under German
control, but their parents weren’t murdered and they endured the war without any serious
traumas. These were Yoseph Tanner from Romania, Rachel Basan- Margalit from
Bulgaria and Albert Benveniste from Greece. Yoseph Tanner felt uncomfortable with the
manuscript version of this chapter, and he told us why: “I don’t belong with the
Holocaust survivors.” On the contrary, we think that Yoseph, Rachel and Albert indeed
belong with this group, except the reasons they were saved, along with their families,
were the special circumstances of their lands of origin. From our point of view – from
the point of view of the Sabra – Yoseph, Rachel and Albert all come from that one
historical experience – the Holocaust.

The day I arrived at Hadassim with my mother, I saw

Yoseph Tanner there with his mother, too. Tanner’s first
memory of Hadassim: “Two girls playing with marbles, one

Yoseph Tanner with a big ass and the other tiny as a dwarf. The one with the
big ass was Gila Hellman (of blessed memory), and the dwarf
was Zafrira Shimel-Hauber.”

My own first memory of Hadassim was my interview with Drora Aharoni, the
executive assistant, in the office at the village entrance. Rachel Shapirah had told Drora
that “The poet Rachel’s niece will arrive today, and she’s bringing her son. I have to be
at the WIZO directorate in Tel Aviv, so you should interview him and find out what he’s
about.” I remember walking into Drora’s office with my mom. She looked surprisingly
like my sixth grade teacher, Sara Hashiloni. I had loved Sara to the point of tears, and I’d
even started to consider the question, at the time, of whether love was really one
continuity, of whether every individual love could just be a different embodiment of one,
single love. And it turned out that Love would be a central theme in Hadassim. We were
geared and educated to love, and we did.
 55

Drora asked why I wanted to choose Hadassim. She smiled a very soft, kind
smile at me. She still had the same smile when I interviewed her for this book, fifty-three
years later. She still remembered me as the grandson of the poet Rachel’s sister on his
first day at Hadassim. Of course, when my mother was asked why she thought I should
be at this school, her answer was unhesitant: she and my father were simply overloaded
with work and couldn’t dedicate enough time to me. After all, they already had to work
extra to finance my brother’s studies in the U.S. At that point Drora turned to me with
some eagerness. She wanted to know what I had to say. I answered her that I wanted to
accumulate different experiences. I had already experienced enough urban school life,
and now wanted to experience studying in a boarding school in the country.

“Well, besides experiencing things you’ll also need to study,” Drora replied.

“But studying is the most fascinating kind of experience for me,” I told her.

After interviewing her for this book, and being impressed by her acute memory, I
asked myself if she might still remember my answer. I speculated that she very well
might. After all, in the eyes of the teachers at Hadassim I was an anarchistic kid. Today,
some of them see me as contentious. My tenacity for myth-breaking is unpleasant for
them.

My second memory of Hadassim is tied to Yoseph Tanner: Drora pointed me and

my mother to a room in Unit 3, where I was destined to stay. I was surprised by the look
of the long, flowing purple drapes. Our home in Yad Eliyahu didn’t have any curtains,
only wooden shades -- My parents belonged to the intellectual labor class of the third
immigration wave. These drapes looked slightly bourgeois to me, similar to ones I’d
seen in Northern Tel Aviv. I put my suitcase on the bed and looked up. Right above one
of the beds hung a poster of the world discus champion. Drora mentioned that Gideon
slept there. “Why should I care who sleeps there?” I thought to myself. “Judging by the
poster, he doesn’t deserve my attention. Probably some dumb ape!” I’d only hung one
poster in my life, of course, of Albert Einstein – sticking out his tongue.

I opened up my suitcase to start piling my things, and just then another student
arrived. It was Yoseph Tanner, along with his mother. He was rather quiet, I thought.
Definitely inhibited, as his eyes looked pretty sad. “A recent immigrant,” I thought to
myself. The two mothers in the room started conversing in Yiddish. My mother told his
all about Rachel and Jeremiah, their work in Ben Shemen, the character of the studies in
Hadassim and its unique qualities. Tanner’s mom said that she had had to find a
boarding school for him, because they were already sharing a house in Jalil with two
more families, and because he didn’t have any friends to play with. She wanted him to
be around kids he could learn Hebrew from. Tanner and I were looking each other
 56

without saying a word. He was older than me, taller and wider. I wondered to myself
whether he was worth talking to.

Tanner would subsequently fill me in on his first impression of me: “You struck
me as a typical Sabra - rough, lacking the European kind of manners, very laid back and
frank.”

A short while later, Gideon Ariel, Chilli and Yakir Laufer came in very noisily.
It’s hard to say if I was really interested in this group. Gideon didn’t say a word, not a
squeak. He kept completely silent. Chilli told a joke, and Yakir was holding a lizard in
his hand. The two mothers had left, and Tanner and I were left with these older kids. I
couldn’t have known then that I would be writing a book with Gideon – in fifty-two
years.

Yoseph Tanner was born in 1938 in the city of Alba Julia, Transylvania (in
central Romania), to Max and Clara Tanner. His grandfather, Berl, was a rich farmer.
He owned a big wine-cellar and vineyard spread over 300 dunams, and he also grew
flowers, wheat and barley, and exported their produce far and wide, especially to Austria.
The earth in the region of Transylvania was a good fit for wine grapes. So Berl
specialized in their growth at Alba Julia, and the European rich stood in lines and waited
for their portions. Nonetheless the Tanners were genuine Zionists. They trained pioneers
for settlement on their farm, and they longed for immigration to Eretz Israel.

Young Yoseph lived with his parents in their comfortable, sprawling house by the
farm. He studied in a Jewish kindergarten and school, although they weren’t taught in
Hebrew. At the start of the war, the Tanners’ property was expropriated by the state
when Romania allied with Germany. They were allowed to share their house with other
residents, and his father was conscripted to do heavy labor as the family managed to
persevere with its savings. When the Red Army approached the city, the family took a
carriage to one of the outlying neighborhood villages, where they leased an apartment
and waited for the storm to pass.

Their property was promptly returned to them after the war. After a short period
the Communists finally took complete control of Romania, at which time it applied the
full gamut of communist policies: mass expropriations, forced communal residencies, and
the breakdown of the family as means of righting the historical wrongs of the
bourgeoisies. This only sped up the Tanners’ immigration plans, and in 1950 they finally
did move to Israel, staying with a relative for a year at first. The father found work as a
street sweeper in Ramat Gan and Givaataim. Subsequently they moved to live in Jalil,
where Max could work at the airport and Clara could commute to Ramat Aviv, where she
worked in a hotel. That’s where she met and befriended Yehudit Schwabe, and they used
to meet there often for coffee with the rest of her Yekke girlfriends. Yehudit was the one
 57

to suggest to Clara that Yoseph be sent to Hadassim. She took the whole family to visit
the village. They took to it immediately, and Yoseph Tanner was allowed to join in our
story.

M. The Russians were Crueler than the Germans

Rachel Basan was born into a family of wealthy cheese makers in Sliven,
Bulgaria. The parents, Raphael and Regina, were cultivated Zionists who spoke many
languages, including Hebrew. According to the historian Martin Gilbert, a miracle
descended on 48,000 or so Jews who lived in Bulgaria: they were spared the
extermination camps, even after it had looked like they were all doomed. The Bulgarian
government had indeed ordered the expulsion of the Jews, and a small number of them
had already been transported to various camps. But the Bulgarian people reacted harshly
to the expulsion order, including many intellectuals and church figures, and the
government eventually caved to pressure and reversed their decision.
In northern Bulgaria, peasants had forced trains to stop by
throwing their own bodies on the tracks. The King himself
intervened. Despite his German roots (he was a member of the
Coburg family), he fiercely challenged anti-Semitic policies and
confronted the Nazis. The liberation of the Jews of Bulgaria, on
March 10, 1944, in known and celebrated in Bulgaria as “The
Miracle of the Jewish people.”51.

Rachel Basan: “We lived in a three-story private villa on

Sliven’s main road, overlooking a huge courtyard and garden. There
was a girl’s school facing our house which the German’s eventually
appropriated for their headquarters. There were always two soldiers
The parents, Raphael standing guard at the gate, and every so often they took to washing
and Regina their faces in the courtyard fountain and walking around half naked.
They were especially careful about maintain cleanliness. I used to
taunt and amuse them during wintertime, asking them whether it ‘frustrated’ them to have
to stand in the cold. They called me ‘Baba.’

“One day the order finally came down for us to collect our things and present
ourselves at the ‘collection station’ – the designated location where Jews were expected
to surrender their lives and herded, like cattle, onto the trains destined for Auschwitz.
The Jews had readied themselves for such an order. When the time came, my parents
helped us (my sister, Simcha, and I) prepare for the trip, and then we left the house with
our suitcases. We gave our house keys to one of our neighbors before walking toward

51
Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust- A History of the Jews of Europe During the
Second World War. An Owl book, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1987, p. 547.
 58

the collection station at the school. The Germans were separating parents from their
children, preparing to haul them off in separate groups, when they received a
countermanding order and released us. My girlfriend’s grandmother jumped up and
down on the street corner and yelling ‘We’re staying! We’re staying...’”

“But when the Russians freed Bulgaria from Germany’s

grip, the situation actually deteriorated. At least in Bulgaria, the
Russians were even crueler than the Germans. That alone was the
precursor for the mass immigration of Bulgarian Jews to Israel in
1949. My family had already left in 1948; we were actually
among the first 34 people who received travel certificates from the
Mandate government.”

The Basan family arrived in Israel during the War of

Independence. They came in without any of their previous wealth,
Rachel Basan and quickly settled in the Beit-Olim (“Immigrant Residence”) in
Pardes Hanna, while Rachel and her sister were sent to Kibbutz
Ramat Rachel (just south of Jerusalem) to be integrated. Once the war intensified, they
were sent to the “Onim” institution, near Kfar Sabba, along with the rest of the children.
They returned to Ramat Rachel after the war, but the Kibbutz now refused to keep the
“outsider,” immigrant kids. Simcha was then sent to “Shfeya” while Rachel was sent to a
girl’s agricultural school in Ein Kerem, in Jerusalem. Being one of the younger girls in
the school, she moved in with the director, Rachel Yanait Ben-Tzvi. She was soon
moved again, this time to Shfeya, before finally settling in Hadassim.
Rachel: “I became very close with the Dotan family, often babysitting for them.
The two Dotan daughters had subscriptions to the children’s newsletter Haaretz Shelanu
(“Our Country”), which included a correspondence section for stamp collectors. One of
the kids in our class submitted a letter to Haaretz Shelanu that read, ‘My name is Shalom
Dotan, and I’m ten years old. I live in Hadassim and enjoy stamp collecting.’

“About a month later, Shalom Dotan came to class with two huge boxes full of
letters, and he said, ‘I haven’t been able to verify which of you rascals sent that letter, but
I know that any of you would be happy to pull of that kind of prank. So, here’s
something for you all to ponder: people who request responses to their ads tend to expect
some responses. Each of you, therefore, will send a letter in response to every single one
of these here letters, at your own expense.”

It was an instructive lesson in vengeance, of the cleverest sort. I’ve always

adored Shalom Dotan since then; his dialogic mentality, his sensitivity to the children
who had innocently sent in responses to the prank ad, absolutely captured my heart. But
on the other hand, the prank itself showed how deeply ingrained our class had become
with the dialogic frame of reference.
 59

N. False Papers

Albert Benveniste was born in Salonika, Greece in 1940, the offspring of two
ancient and aristocratic Sephardic families: Benveniste, on his father’s side, and Gattegno
from his mother’s. Until WWII, the Jewish community was
70,000 strong in Salonika; it was an important and long-
standing center of the Jewish Diaspora on the Mediterranean,
rooted in centuries of cultural contribution. Salonika was part
of the Ottoman Empire until the end of WWI, a polyglot and
pluralistic oasis in which diverse communities enjoyed a
52
healthy degree of autonomy. It was a community whose
collective consciousness was untouched by the European brand
of anti-Semitism, and it was tragically unprepared for the ruin
that the Germans brought with them when they reached
Salonika in the middle of the 20th century. The Nazis injected

Albert Benveniste this innocent Jewish community with their horrors, wholesale
and unvarnished; ancient, venerable synagogues were burned to
the ground, and the Jews were driven along with their bibles and books into the ovens of
Auschwitz.

The half-year old baby Benveniste and his family were only spared these horrors
by one man’s crucial decision. The Greek minister of internal affairs offered the
Benveniste family a chance to adopt false papers under Christian names (an offer
allegedly extended to all the Jews, though apparently few of them understood it was
necessary), and Albert’s maternal grandfather, Vital Cohen, gratefully accepted. The
identity switch obliged them to leave the Jewish community and live clandestinely, on the
periphery of Athens, under their Christian names. Albert’s Christianized name was Takis
Vamvas.

Thus, Albert remembers the war years as a peaceful time. The family stayed in a
private house in the suburbs. He fondly recollects playing under a pistachio tree with a
group of friends and coming home with sticky fingers and mangled, dirty clothes -- to his
mother’s evident disgust. With the end of WWII, however, a terrible civil war broke out
between the communists and nationalists. His parents intended to immigrate to Israel (his
father was supposed to work for DUBEK, as he was friends with Martin Gehl) so when
Albert was done with elementary school, rather than having him start high school in
Greece, they sent him to Hadassim, so that at least one member of the family would
speak Hebrew. He joined us there in 1952, when he was twelve years old.

52
Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, Christians and Jews In the Ottoman
Empire: The Function Of A Plural Society. Homes & Meir Publishers, 1982.
 60

Albert spoke Seven languages: Greek, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese,

Italian and Ladino. Now he added Hebrew to the list. “The teachers there were simply
wonderful, and I absolutely adored living there. If anyone says that he hasn’t felt the
impact of Hadassim, then he’s insane.”
As the deal with Dubek didn’t work out, his parents brought him back to Greece.
He’s made a life for himself in France, where he works in the tourism business.

O. ”Kid, what do you see through that window glass?”

Avigdor Shachan survived the Holocaust of the Jews of Transnistria (in the region
of Bessarabia). A celebrated poet and author, philosopher and master of the Kabbalah, an
educator and military historian, he survived the depths of hell only to expose it in all of
its grim details to the rest of the world, documenting for the first time the extent of the
Bessarabian Holocaust. Thus, his story is greater even than ours. The nucleus of his
narrative is the Immovable Mover; his is the secret behind the struggle against the angel
of death. His own words will testify here:

“I was born in 1934 in the Bessarabian city of Chutin.

My parents moved 70 kms east to the village of Comarov when I
was only a year old. My mother’s parents had lived in that
village since its inception: my maternal grandfather, Rabbi
Mordechai Forman, his wife Liba, along with his eight sons and
daughters. My father was a merchant, and in keeping with
traditions back then my family also kept a small shop, which my
mother managed. My only sister, Miriam, was born three years
after me. She was both a sister and a friend; together we
organized a wedding ceremony for the cat and the goat out in the
courtyard. We put a lot of effort into dressing them both up for
Avigdor Shachan the occasion, but the cat ran away after lapping up the
ceremonial food, leaving the goat alone on the altar.
“Our days in Comarov were the happiest that we had before life in Israel. When I
turned three, my grandfather, wrapped up in his beard and the Tallith as a rabbi should
be, dragged me to the village Heder [traditional Jewish elementary school]. I remember
vividly how he led me there through the garden beds, his gray beard tickling my cheek
throughout. He introduced me to the teacher and left, but not before giving the children
some sweets that he had brought with him. When I went back to the Heder a few days
later, I had a bad feeling about going in. I knocked on the door, just to prove that I had
been there, and ran back home. When my mother saw me she lunged for me with her
dough-stained hands and yelled at me. I mumbled something to the effect that there
wasn’t any school that day. To this day the cries that issued from her still ring in my
ears. ‘Yankle!’ – short for father’s name – ‘Take him back to the Heder immediately!’
 61

He was a little more sympathetic, and he smiled at me and said, ‘I never liked going to
the Heder myself….maybe we can let him stay home, just today…’ When she heard that
she immediately ran to wash her hands in the sink, gripped my hand and dragged me
back to the Heder with all her might. And it wasn’t a short walk, either. When we got
there she stormed in and yelled, to everyone, ‘My son lied to me – he said there weren’t
any lessons today!’

“Then, like a fiery tempest, she walked out forcefully and left me there, blushing
like a tomato. I still feel that same blushing and trembling shame today when I remember
it, but I’ve ever missed a single day of school or work after that, not for any reason.

“I remember learning the Hebrew Alphabet, which I loved from the first time it
was shown to me. I imagined the letters were birds nesting inside me, buried there from
the beginning of time. When finally unleashed they allowed me to fly far above. I still
feel that way about the Hebrew script; I can’t even pass by a Hebrew book without
peering into it.

“In June 1940, forty-eight hours after the Soviets issued Romania an ultimatum to
evacuate Bessarabia (which was Russian territory before 1919), the Red Army invaded.
The Zionist left tended to greet Russian soldiers with flowers and cheer, as heroes and
liberators. That rather warm reception would haunt the Jews when, only a year later in
June 1941, the Romanians’ ‘liberating’ army (flanked by Germany) reinvaded in full
force, turning the grounds of Bessarabia into a theatre of rape and murder, leaving 50,000
Jewish corpses in their wake.

“When the Red Army had originally entered Bessarabia and installed their
communist regime, it closed down all the Jewish schools (the only disseminators of
Hebrew) and forbade all religious rituals. I had only recently been given permission to
begin the study of the Mishna [Codified Jewish Law] and Gemara [Commentary on
Jewish Law – both texts together constitute the Talmud]. With the Heder forced to close
shop, however, and with the tutors now afraid to visit any of the villages, my mother
decided that we would move to Chutin, my father’s birthplace, where we would be close
to his family and old friends. The idea didn’t excite him at all, but mother kept nagging
with the idea that her ‘genius’ son (as my tutor had nicknamed me) needed the
clandestine home schooling that was available there. Once he’d had enough of it, he
arranged to rent a house in his old town, and soon we were off. We had to leave all of
our possessions in the old village in order to avert suspicion from the local communist
union.”

“The house that we rented in Chutin stood on the main avenue of the town, a very
noisy location. I hated having to move there from the village, as I’d preferred the old
atmosphere a great deal. Indeed, on the very night of our arrival, my parents woke us all
 62

up, wrapped us in covers, and we all ran outside terrified. The streets were filled with
people looking up at the flying ‘stars,’ as bomber planes assembled on their way to the
Ukraine, letting loose in the far distance, the bombs echoing all the way across the
Dniester.

“The next day I began nagging and crying to my parents about going home –
meaning back to our village in Comarov. My father could hardly stand to hear it, and
eventually all my begging seemed to work when he harnessed the carriage back on the
horses. Then he said something about how it was impossible to ride back, that we would
have to go by foot, but it turned out that he was just trying to calm me down. He was
also looking for a basement we could use for shelter. We finally left the house; father
closed the heavy gate to our house, and we walked out into the main street. We only
managed to pass a short distance when we saw a Ukrainian man up about fifty steps
ahead of us. He was carrying water buckets tied to a pole that he carried on his
shoulders, when all of a sudden we heard the hissing sound of shell. And then, just like
that, the man’s head was no longer on his shoulders and his body drooped and fell to the
ground. Father led us into a nearby house and we found ourselves walking down the
steps to a basement full of people overwhelmed with fright. Minutes later, someone was
yelling outside that the city’s four corners were on fire. We ran outside to see it for
ourselves, and indeed Chutin was burning. The whole Jewish section of town was built of
connected housing blocks, all sharing one long roof made of wood or tin. Once the fire
caught on edge of the roof, it spread very quickly through the whole length of the street,
scorching the building units with manic abandon. The tin roofs were the most vulnerable
and dangerous, because they would collapse in very short order, reeling off the buildings
and sending little roof-morsels flying down on the street like mini-bombs.

“Father yelled for us to follow him and we ran

back toward our house. When we finally got there father
struggled hard to open the heavy entrance gate, and he
finally managed to climb over it and leap down onto the
carriage he’d harnessed to the horses on the other side.
We could hear him yelling at the horses to plow into the
fence, finally managing to bring it down and then
roaring for us to climb onto it. The whole city was
aflame, with smoke rising and filling the streets from
Avigdor Shachan and his sister every corner.

“Father stirred the horses through the blazing hot streets, with piles of tin roof
falling all around us. Lost in the chaos, parents and relatives ran around in search of their
children, many of whom were just trying to escape the hellish fire. Many people
screamed to be let on the carriage as we passed close to them, and father couldn’t refuse
these people, many of whom were childhood friends. By the end, there were thirteen
men, women and children riding with us, including one of father’s friends, “Shorty”
Meirke. Shorty’s wife and children had already fled the town days earlier, and he had
 63

remained, not wanting to desert his small shop. There was a Red Army soldier with us
on the carriage, a Jew, who hadn’t been able to get to the bridge in time to cross over to
the Ukraine.”

“My father struggled to maneuver the carriage through the burning streets, getting
as far as he could before the path ahead was too severely blocked and the openings too
narrow. At that point he stopped and jumped down, telling us to hold on as strongly as
we could, and began pulling frantically on the harness and whipping the horses with all
his might. Eventually we were able to get about five kilometers away from the city, at
which point we stopped near one of the houses in a Christian village. Within minutes, a
man came out and embraced my father. I found out that this man was the son of the
house’s owners, a couple who had known my father well before they died. My father and
this man were both clearly shaken by what was happening to the city of their youth. We
were invited to stay in the house until the danger had passed; the flames towering over
the city landscape were so ferocious, visible from any point thirty kilometers away, that
people still spoke of that night in the ghastliest terms for the next few decades.

“The house we stayed at that night was eminently peaceful, surrounded as it was
by a small courtyard lined with fruit trees. That evening, my father offered some of his
own clothes to the soldier who’d joined us as we fled the city; he told the boy that it was
too dangerous to keep his uniform. The next morning, creeping smoke was still
emanating from every corner of the dying city, and we stood around the carriage and
gazed almost unwillingly at the carnage. Suddenly, around ten o’clock, we saw Shorty
moving towards us on the road ahead; no one had noticed that he’d left, but apparently
he’d snuck out of the courtyard earlier and walked back to the smoldering city. He was
very excited now, and he explained that the Germans occupiers were apparently behaving
quite generously, even treating the children to chocolate. In short, he thought we should
go back.

“We turned to look at my father to gauge his reaction. He climbed onto the
carriage and reached for Shorty’s suitcase, then climbed back down and handed it to him.
He told him that we would stay.

“But Shorty’s reaction astonished me: ‘I won’t go alone; I won’t let everyone risk
their lives here. You brought us here and now you’re going to take us back…We’re in
danger here…’ Then an argument began, where everyone took Shorty’s side while father
insisted on his position -- he was a rock. A long time has passed since then, but I always
recall this scene when I’m confronted with a dilemma. Everyone was certain that we had
to choose, that the wrong choice meant death, so the argument only got louder, even
scary. Finally my mother whispered to her husband: ‘If everyone wants to go back, let’s
go back…’ At that point my father’s face turned completely pale and trembled with rage.
Finally he said, in hushed voice, ‘Good, let’s go back, then. You’ve forced me to go.
Now everyone onto the carriage!!’ And then he jumped back up and started grabbing the
 64

harness. The German scouts who had been watching all this from the treetop chose
precisely that moment to jump down, catching us off our guard; two of them aimed their
rifles at my father, while the third talked into his radio and reported that they’d found a
group of Russian spies who were trying to escape across the Dniester. One of them
forced my father off the carriage and grabbed the harness, and the other two ordered the
rest of us to follow them back toward the front. All of this happened very quickly, and
we could do nothing but follow them in abject obedience while shaking in fear. My sister
walked and leaned against my mother, and I walked close to my father and the two
soldiers behind us. The Jewish soldier leaned toward my father and whispered something
in his ear. It turned out that father had put the Red Army uniform on the carriage, instead
of throwing it away…”

“We reached the front. Lines and lines of German soldiers lying in makeshift
ditches…our captors lying down against the carriage next to us…their commander
issuing incessant orders, asking his superiors what he should do about us…shells
exploding all around us.

“Suddenly, soviet planes appeared over the horizon and began their
bombardment, and craters began appearing all around. Then one of the intelligence
officers who was coming toward us was hit. When the air raid was over, we looked
around and saw that the soldiers who’d dragged us toward the front were gone. We’d
remained alone on the front, a lone ‘unit’ separate from the others, all the while still
leaning back and kneeling up against the carriage that had taken us through the whole
journey. And now Shorty was gone, too.

“Hours passed. More German units ran passed us, covering their heads and
hugging whatever ditch they could to protect themselves from the relentless beating of
shells, covering their ears to protect from the macabre noise of earth-shattering
explosions and dying soldiers. As soon as there appeared to be a short respite, soldiers
would line up and continue forward in disciplined fashion.

“In the evening a thin rain started coming down on the empty field. We were still
alone. Suddenly two soldiers approached us, a major and a private. The officer stopped
next to the carriage and asked what we were doing. Father started explaining that he used
to be in the Romanian military and that we were escaping the fire and didn’t know where
to go. He told the officer that other soldiers had warned us to stay where we were.

“The officer responded, ‘You were a sergeant major and you still don’t know
what to do?! Put your family on the carriage and go away from here…’
 65

“My father urged the horses back toward the dark and deformed city. At the
entrance to the city center stood a soldier that was visibly shaken and wet, trembling from
cold, and when he saw us passing by he gestured for my father to stop. Father told us to
hold tight as we accelerated through the street to avoid him, and we finally arrived at the
house of a relative. We walked downstairs to the basement, where there were other
people hiding out, a whole plethora of the city’s Jews. We found Shorty there, too. The
next morning the Jews of the city were ordered to assemble in the Hebrew Gymnasium.
Hundreds of us were crowded into the two-story building, where we were herded into the
classrooms. We were locked inside.

“We stood there pressed tightly against one another -- one block of meat. I found
myself pushed into the window sill, and my legs flung out helplessly as I tried to grab
onto the window frame.

“Hours passed and we were still standing. Then suddenly the doors opened and a
Romanian soldier came in and told everyone he was authorized to move all the Rabbis
and other community leaders to a more hospitable room, and he also promised to find
someplace more comfortable for a few others who could join them.

“A buzz spread through the crowd, and some people began arguing heatedly.
Everyone knew that this announcement meant that two groups were being
separated here, that one group was doomed and the other wasn’t. But which group was
which? Many people thought that the rabbis wouldn’t be touched – it simply couldn’t
happen -- so they decided to sneak out with them. Mother looked at my father, searching
him for an answer. So he answered: “We’re staying here.” And so it was, our own brand
of Russian roulette: one group stayed, one group left.

“Just then, a group of people marched through the courtyard downstairs. Some
were in black uniforms, others wore plain clothes, and both were accompanied by an
armed Romanian guard unit. Then the courtyard was empty. One of the young men
who’d stayed with us suddenly decided it was better to leave with the others, and ran to
the door. I didn’t get a look at his eyes, but I glimpsed his sleek raincoat and his elegant
black hat. Just as he stepped out to the corridor, however, he stopped, as if considering
what to do; then he started taking a couple of steps back. A Romanian officer arrived
just then and saw him hesitating. He decided to let the young man make a final decision,
gesturing at the group of “notables” that had chosen to leave. The boy chose to go with
them.

“This same group of ‘notables’ was taken to the shores of a lake near the city, one
later known ‘the lake of bad waters.’ All forty-two of them were murdered there…
 66

“A few years later, I found myself back in Chutin after returning from
Transnistria. I was already eleven. I went for a visit to the ‘lake of bad waters’ with a
group of my fellow Chutin survivors, to see where those Jewish men had stood, to see
things through their eyes, and to honor them by digging up their sacred bones so we
could burry them in the Jewish cemetery -- as was only just. Looking through the piles, I
came upon what I thought were the bones that belonged to that boy, with the sleek gray
raincoat and sporty hat. I was eight years old when I first saw that boy, standing there in
the corridor outside the classroom, vacillating over his life or death bet. Ever since then,
I never hesitate when I’m confronted with a difficult choice. I think carefully, and decide
quickly.”

“By nighttime we’d been released from the school building, and looking through
our dark windows we could see dozens upon dozens of Ukrainian carriages wading
through town. Right before dawn the next day, we were ordered into the streets. The
elderly were being placed in carriages so they’d be more comfortable – that’s what the
soldiers said. Several hours later these defenseless old men and women were shot and
buried in the forests. Our years-long journey had begun, a journey of agony to
Transnistria.

“Trembling and wading through the heavy snow and freezing frost, we arrived in
the village of Popovitz, near the town of Kopaigorod in Transnistria. So named by Hitler
himself, it was a zone between the Dniester and the Bog rivers. The Romanian
authorities used it to built Ghettos for the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina – as well as
its own Jews. They assigned these prisoners to sundry deserted warehouses, pig sheds,
and houses of already liquidated Ukrainian Jews. The empty house we took had a big
entrance hall and two small rooms on the right side. Since we’d gotten there first, my
father chose the bigger room for us, where there was a wooden table in addition to a big
bed and two small chairs. The bed linen was still spread out neatly on the bed – a sizable
featherbed with a big pillow and a thick comforter. Soon the house was crowded with
deportees. By the next day, however, two were already dead, and many would soon
follow; until our liberation by the Red Army, 180 would die there – men, women, the old
and the young. They either starved or froze to death, and with every death there was
room for newcomers. Bodies were carried away every morning as a matter of course;
they were left in the snow at the entrance, since the far hill in the distance, the only other
suitable location, was impossible to reach, and too bitterly frozen for a mass grave.

“The family that settled on the big bed in our house died very soon, one by one,
and still others came to replace them. They, too, were dragged off in the snow in due
time. People in the house became accustomed to referring to people by numbers and
signs, since the dead were simply too many. It was only natural, of course; we hardly
knew each other before any of this torture had beset us and entwined us together.
Remembering these signs and numbers became tremendously important; perhaps even
the main concern in the house. We became suddenly anxious if we forgot to count
 67

someone, as it was a sign that no one would remember us when our own day would
come.

“Among those we counted as dead – I would carry them in memory for years,
until they became a part of me – was a family of three. All my years in this land of the
living haven’t obscured the death of these people from me; I still hear their anguish.

“It was still our first winter in Transnistria, several months after we first arrived at
this ‘Death House,’ which was our nickname for it. A heavy storm was running wild,
and we’d already burned all the furniture in the house in order to keep warm in the
preceding weeks. Only one chair was left, and I can’t really say I know why it survived.
It was on that day, around noon, that the entrance door to the main room suddenly flew
open, and in came a young man wearing a beautiful blue coat and a gray hat, followed by
a woman with a sterling gray coat and wearing a handkerchief on her head. She carried
something else with her – a three year old chubby girl. My attention turned to the girl’s
orange coat, and the small peaked hat on her head. The man shut the door behind him
and the three of them scanned the room, taking note of several people on the floor who
were clearly dying. The other squatters observed these newcomers with cold
indifference, the frank indifference that can only follow from knowing that the person
you’re looking at is practically dead already. The ritual of counting all the dead was
almost the only time people in the ‘Death House’ conversed with one another; there was
no energy left for talking, and there was nothing to say – everything was already set,
determined, written down – and only the Angel of Death was free.

“It wasn’t surprising, then, that the three standing at the entrance weren’t greeted
with warm hugs and sunshine, or even a single word of acknowledgment. After turning a
few times to look at the room with the big empty bed, the man pointed toward it and the
woman followed him. No one could resist settling in that bed. They sat on the edge at
first. The man sighed and covered his face with his hands, and the three of them just
stayed silent. After a while, the woman laid the girl down and then took her place next to
her; the young man continued to sit at the edge and cover his face for long hours. Finally
he pulled up the blanket, took his shoes off and lay next to his wife and daughter. They
stayed like that for three days, one long embrace. On the fourth day the man suddenly
rose up and sat back on the edge; he put his shoes on and then whispered something in his
wife’s ear. ‘No, don’t go…’ we heard her cry softly under the covers.

’I have to go. I’ll sell the hat and return.’

“He walked out, careful not to step on anyone in the entrance hall. He reached the
door and stopped, glancing at the people in the room and on the bed, and left.
 68

“Under the only window in the big room lay the ‘Old Professor,’ a Ukrainian Jew
with a most mysterious personality. We didn’t really know where he was from or how he
came to be with us. One of the residents had heard secretly that the old man was a
renowned psychology professor at an important university in Moscow, and that his son
was a senior officer in the Red Army. The old man was pale-faced and short, with long
silvery hair and a white beard that added nobility to his gentlemanly visage. ‘The
Professor’ was respected by all the residents. All of us in the house belonged to a single
class: the deathly hungry, the frozen, the psychically withdrawn. Nevertheless, when we
looked at this man it was always with reverence. On rare occasions the professor would
grace us with a brief utterance, long enough to reveal deep insight. When the first dead
man lay in the center room, and all us had turned our heads away, the professor was the
one to carry him outside and burry him in the snow with his bare hands, returning to his
seat without saying a word. And thus he treated all of our dead, all those who departed
for a better world than the one they knew in the ‘Dead House’.”

“And now, when the young man with the blue coat and sporty cap shut the door
behind him, the professor whispered, ‘That’s the last you’ll see of him.’ Everyone heard
this but the wife and daughter, both still locked in an embrace under the bed cover.

“The husband wasn’t back by evening. He wasn’t back the next day, either. The
next night, the house was shaken by a soul-shattering cry – and all of the world’s grief
was condensed into one. Never have I heard the like, not before or after. The woman’s
grief descended to silence, and she began mumbling something to her daughter,
mumbling the same syllables over and over, kissing her and pressing her to her chest.

‘The infant is dead, too,’ the professor whispered from the darkness.

All night the woman held her daughter, whispering stories to her.

“Four days after her husband had gone, the woman was still mumbling stories in a
tired, hoarse voice. When afternoon came, the professor rose gently and approached the
woman.

‘Give me the child…’ he said.

‘My child is asleep and I must not wake her up,’ she told him.

The professor didn’t move. ‘Give me the child,’ he repeated softly. His voice
was gently pleading, genuinely sorrowful.
 69

‘I won’t give up my daughter. She is asleep. It’s wrong to wake her…’ Her
voice seemed firm, but with every word it began to trail off into nothingness.

The professor wouldn’t budge. ‘It is not comfortable for her to sleep here…Give
her to me and I will lay her outside in the snow. She’ll feel warmer in the snow…’

‘I won’t surrender her…I will not…I will not give her to anyone,’ her voice grew
dimmer and dimmer.

The Professor knelt over her on the bed, moved his hands to her protective arms,
gently gripped the child and then pulled her away.

‘Let me just say goodbye to her.’ She embraced her daughter once more, putting
her lips to her baby girl’s face. He pulled her away for the last time and slowly turned
toward the door. When she heard the door shut, when her girl was finally taken from her,
she uttered a final, anguished, deafening scream.

The Professor returned and lay down on his spot. His steps were weaker now.
Around midnight, one final excruciating scream radiated through the house, and we all
covered our heads and waited.

‘She’s dead,’ whispered the professor.

In the morning, with his last rays of energy, he walked toward the woman on the
bed. He took her corpse and carried it outside, leaving it amongst the others. He stayed
out there for a long time. When he finally returned to his sack under the window, he
looked up toward the ceiling. Then, with his eyes pressed shut and his face twisted in
eviscerated grief, he muttered ‘I put them to sleep, embraced in each other’s
arms…When the snow will melt, I pray that you burry them as I laid them…’

The same evening, two men dragged the professor’s frozen body out the door.
When they returned they said, ‘We lay him together with them…’

On an evening in March, 1944, an unfamiliar man appeared in our house in

Popovitz, Transnistria. He told us that he was a partisan fighter, and that he knew that the
Red Army was getting nearer to us. From that day we began seeing the German army
preparing to withdraw, loading up their trucks outside the village. The rumor in those
 70

days was that a withdrawing German army tended to kill the Jews in its custody. Several
days passed and another bad rumor spread in the ghetto: An action was planned for our
village the next day. Most of the men panicked. My father had recently managed to get
his hands on some skis, and I used to sneak out of the ghetto to use them. On one such
occasion I met several Ukrainian boys. That was right after president Roosevelt had
announced on the radio that whoever assisted in the murder of Jews would be punished
after the war. It was already after the battle of Stalingrad, where the Germans were dealt
an overwhelming defeat, so many Ukrainians in the region began to change their attitude.
They often smiled, even offered food – all to ensure an alibi for themselves in case the
Russians would return.”

“On the day the rumored Action was supposed to happen, my father and I were
walking together, when he suddenly pulled me aside. ‘My son, you are almost eleven
years old. An Action is about to happen in our Ghetto. Quickly, put on your coat; take
your skis and get yourself out of here. And remember, my boy: if you hear gunshots, it
means we’re being executed. If that happens you should get away as fast as you can, and
join the partisan fighters…and then after the war, do everything you can in order to reach
Eretz Israel…’

“When he saw that I wasn’t hurrying to do as he said, he picked up the skis and
forced them into my hands, pushing me away. I got a few hundred feet away from the
village when suddenly a group of Ukrainian boys noticed me. They looked like they
were whispering to each other, then they approached me. ‘Vitia!’ – that was my Russian
name --‘Let’s do some skiing! Come play with us!’

“‘Let’s compete!’ I responded. They’d already started down toward the fields,
and I sped up to get to them. I was happy when they pulled up near the village. They
stopped at the slope and said, ‘Let’s see who can go faster,’ and started quick-sliding with
me following close behind. The slope kept getting longer and steeper than I expected,
and I didn’t notice it when they slowed down to let me pass. Suddenly I found myself
hovering in the air over an abyss of a wide riverbed. I pulled my legs in and pressed my
eyes shut, landing on the edge of the riverbed. When I recovered, I checked myself for
injuries. Meanwhile, my Ukrainian buddies stood above me on the rock and mocked me,
then they left after they’d finished amusing themselves. I started to climb up but the
rocks only got taller and less manageable, and then it sounded like an animal was
howling somewhere close by. I was still slipping on the rocks, and my tears began
freezing on my cheeks. Finally I managed to climb up all the way to the top, but the sun
had already set, and I wouldn’t be able to find the village now.”

“It was dark, and the snow was shining bright to the end of the horizon. I
continued downhill until I noticed sparks rising up with chimney smoke ahead, so I
turned in that direction. It was my village, Popovitz. I approached the small church near
my house, and stopped to check if there were any life signs coming from there. I’d never
 71

seen the house like that before, at night from the outside. The silence was frightening. I
went around it and observed from a distance; it was still completely dark, still not a sound
came from it. My legs felt weak as I approached the window to peer inside: I could see
absolutely nothing through the frozen glass. I turned to the door and opened it carefully;
I saw everyone there lying in the big entrance hall exactly as they were when I left.”

“Two weeks later, Red Army entered our village. We were astonished to see our
liberators, as they were nothing more than infantry battalion of boys. Children, even.
They just passed through the village, and adult soldiers followed in their tracks, passing
through on their way to Kopaigorod and from there to Mogilev on the Dniester. A
communist board was installed in the village, and it called on everyone to enlist in the
party. My father was one of the people to do so. When they gathered all the new party
members in the village square, they arranged for an orchestra. The enlisted men lined up
in three rows, with the orchestra marching before them. The rows marched forward all
the way to Kupaigorod, where women appeared on the side of the road, accompanying
the men, singing and crying out. Their cries mixed together with the melodies, and as I
walked alongside my father I put my hand in his.”

“When I we got far enough from the village, my father begged me to go home. I
began crying, and refused to leave him. He stood up straight, gave me a brisk hug and
whispered close to my ear, ‘Now you’re the man in the house…Take care of the
family…’

“Several days later my mother rented a house with a Ukrainian woman, a mother
with two children. In exchange for some clothes – which the Ukrainians craved – she
was able to secure a coachman who could take us to Mogilev. It was a spring morning
and still quite cold, with my sister along with the Ukrainian and her two children on the
carriage, and my mother and I walking after them. As we started to move farther from
the ‘Death House,’ my mother turned to me and commanded the following: ‘You must
tell everything you saw here…Promise me that…’ I promised it without even knowing
what it would mean for me, because as it happens this promise moved in parallel with the
course of my life.”

The spirit that dictated the course of his life, over and beyond his mother’s
commandment, is the thing we began this story with, the beginning of the beginning - the
Immoveable Mover. It was that spirit within him that can explain his struggle with the
angel of death. The initial arena of this spiritual struggle was the house in Transnistria --
the “Death House” -- where Avigdor’s spirit allowed him to interface in a truly
meaningful dialogue with the “Professor,” an interaction that shaped the rest of his life.

Avigdor: “I was already eight or nine when we lived in that house, an old child,
mentally mature. It was only a year or two before that I’d studied Chumash and Rashi [a
 72

classical Jewish commentator], and a little bit of Mishna. So it’s not as if I came to the
house as an ignorant child and then suddenly met the ‘Professor’ by chance.

“I was always inclined toward solitude and daydreaming, and from the first time I
met this man I worshipped him. It was the bond of death between us – the bond that held
between all of us at the ‘Death House’. There was a man who lived there who had three
kilos of gold, as rumor had it. He was originally from Tschernovitz, had traveled to the
U.S. and made a lot of money before returning to Tschernovitz to get married. He’d
brought all his gold and possessions back with him, only the war caught up to him too.
He lost all his loved ones in the agonizing journey, and all of his gold lost its value in
Transnistria – the Ukrainians didn’t differentiate between gold and their own yellow
metal. We all knew that he had gold, and we knew he was dying. He knew it, too.
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ he told us. ‘I already threw all my gold in the river, since it
couldn’t even buy me a meal.’ No amount of gold would have made us like this man, but
on the other hand the professor was accorded the same reverence as any heroic
personage, because he took leadership in the toughest situations, he was willing to lead in
confrontation with death. He would say in one sentence what someone else needed an
hour of conversation to say. He had a keen perceptiveness, an immediate, synaptic
insight into the people he met. The entire house had only one unbroken chair, and I used
to stand on it and admire the eerie geometrical beauty of the ice crystals on the window
glass. I could spent whole days doing that, for hours at a time. I’d play imaginary
games, pretending to change the color of the ice to yellow, or imagining that I was one of
King David’s soldiers during his escape from Saul, training with the sword and spear, or
imagining the course of the lost tribes [of Israel]. And the Professor lay there on his sack,
looked up at me and said, ‘Child, what do you see in the glass?’ And I answered, “King
Saul and the ten tribes…’
“And then he told me, ‘Come, I’ll show you something.’ There was a pile of
papers at the entrance, and he said, ‘Bring me some of those pages.’ This man could grab
my attention like it was nothing. Apparently he wasn’t just a psychology professor, but
also one of the greatest graphologists in the world. So I brought him a few pages and sat
down next to him as he began his lesson. ‘Every human being has different hand-writing
because his character is different; his personal qualities are expressed in his every
gesture. I can show you how this is true when it comes to writing.’

“Years later, when I served in the army reserves, people would fight with each
other over access to my handwriting analysis. I’d read a person’s handwriting and
decipher the man’s character or locate where a man’s disease was located. One time a
father of a girlfriend of mine had died, and she asked me over to her house so I could
look at someone’s handwriting. I arrived there for tea-time, a common custom then.
There was an older couple there, and the husband was rather elegantly dressed, with a
nice suite and a tie – quite unusual in those simple times. I had no idea the whole
situation was orchestrated from the start. They asked me to decipher a piece of
handwriting; I said that its owner had a tumor in his brain, and the older gentleman in the
suit asked me several times if I was certain about this. I told him I was, and said I was
 73

willing to bet on it. Suddenly, I felt like somehow I’d caused this man some
embarrassment, and the atmosphere wasn’t so friendly. I only found out later that the
sample I had diagnosed belonged to my girlfriend’s father, and that the man with the suit
had been his doctor – and he’d failed to diagnose her father’s tumor at the time.”

“There was another time when I had a friend who worked for a graphologist, a
German doctor. She used to write down his analysis. One day she brought along with
her, and I was able to decipher in condensed form what took him up to three pages. He
offered me partnership with him, though I refused. Years after that I was in Mexico as
director of a Yeshiva where I was also a Kabbalah professor, and there was a graphology
professor there who wanted me to do a doctorate in his field. I refused, because
graphology was only one aspect of my life. The field in its earlier stage was deep and
essential, not merely technical as it is today. The ‘professor’ had given me knowledge
that was essential and holistic, a completely different method from the current one. Once
there were principles, and the study of the principles enabled their proper application.

“The Professor’s influence on my life was immense: his behavior was calm and
his attitude pure; he always spoke in a highly essentialized way, which always impressed
me. ‘Always see what the person is in his real nature…look, this one here: he’s
frivolous…’ People were dying everywhere and here he was rejuvenating them,
practically bringing them back to life right in front of my eyes. His influence on me was
also very intuitive and spiritual. He showed me a great deal of respect even when I was
only a child. Subsequently I thought he’d consider me as someone who could continue
his life work. But he would say, ‘Let me teach you, and then when all of you get out of
here you’ll have a profession in life.’ “He had beauty, nobility, gentleness. He would
talk to you face to face. And that’s the way I deal with my students. I learned it from
him.

“He had a tremendous impact on me spiritually, and I can also say that he
transformed my personality: I’m very hot-headed and excitable by nature, but through
him I learned how to control and guide it. The professor was a human being of
extraordinary character. I intend to write a book that describes his death, one that shows
that his soul was allowed entry into Jerusalem. I’ve been holding on to this story for
many years now.”

“Where can wisdom be found?” asked the author of The Book of Job, and we
don’t have the answer. Yet we are certain that the wisdom of young Shachan was
crystallized in his Jungian play, in his journeys within, and in his early observations of
the ice crystals in the window glass, where he was magically beyond the grasp of an
otherwise omnipresent death. My path crossed with Shachan’s several times throughout
my life: in Hadassim, in the army, in the Academy and then in writing this book. The
man has always embodied for me the generational wisdom and mystery of Judaism, a
mystery which Zionism and especially Sabra culture tried to purge from the cultural
 74

conversation. What I wanted from Shachan was only a modest pinch of that mystery and
wisdom, as I craved to reconnect with Judaism. For his part, he was willing to show me
everything. At the time, however, I wasn’t willing to process his brand of wisdom unless
I could benefit from it in some way. It’s only now that I’ve traveled together with
Gideon in a journey into the souls of my generation and genealogy, that I’ve grasped
something of Shachan’s wisdom. It’s a Wisdom that Shachan offers with his seeming
slowness, since haste is borne of the devil.

Shachan was the first man interviewed for this book. We sat together in my
study, and he astonished me with details of his story and the level of his insights. What
we have taken from him, and what we’ve begun to understand about the character of the
“professor,” has allowed us to interpret the educational marvel of Hadassim.
75