MEDICAL TEAM – GOLANI 14TH BATTALION
It is true that some newlyweds fight on their honeymoon, but not as much as Max and Hilde Goldberg did – when they fought on their honeymoon, it was with guns, tanks, and bombs.
No, this is not a Bonnie and Clyde story, this is about a doctor-and-nurse team who helped save many lives at the battle of Sejera, June 8-12, 1948, during Israel’s War of Independence. The heroic defense at Sejera (now Ilaniya) was achieved at great cost, and the outcome decided the fate of the Galilee.
Berlin-born Hilde Jacobsthal from Holland had been a member of the underground resistance in Belgium against the Nazis. Of her extended family, only her brother Joe, like her a member of the Belgian Resistance, had survived.
Before Max Goldberg of Switzerland came to Israel, he was a camp physician for the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration. He met Hilde, a nurse for the British Red Cross, at the liberated Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, where they were both attending to the survivors. A romance bloomed, and after completing their humanitarian mission, they married in Switzerland.
“We were barely married when Max and I were asked by members of the Haganah to come to Israel as a doctor-and-nurse team to provide the army with much-needed medical assistance,” Hilde Goldberg recalls. “We set sail from the French port of Marseilles on the Aliyah Bet, and embarked on our ‘honeymoon’ trip to Israel.”
When the couple arrived in Israel in April 1948, they were immediately sent to ‘boot camp.’ By the end of May both were sent to join the Golani Brigade’s 14th Battalion at Sejera, where their lives would change forever.
“The battle of Sejera started on June 8 and lasted for four days,” notes Max Goldberg. “Everyone in the hospital became very apathetic towards the situation, and everything we did was done matter-of-factly. We did our jobs, but in a strangely detached way.”
“The times we remember were not joyous – people were getting killed. It was important for the Israeli army to win the battle of Sejera in order to get control of the Galilee,” says Hilde Goldberg. But her memories of Sejera are filled with bloodshed, incessant gunshots and exploding bombs.
Hilde’s experiences and memories of the war were not enhanced by the fact that her husband of only a few months nearly lost his life when a mortar shell exploded in the field aid post, wounding him with shrapnel in his lungs. Hilde, a qualified pediatric nurse, was on duty as a paramedic at the Golani casualty clearing station on the premises of the Khadourie Agricultural School, a few kilometers south of Sejera, when her husband was brought in. A steady stream of blood flowed from his body, and recalls his wife, “I thought he was not going to make it. He lost a lot of blood. Thank God for penicillin, because if it wasn’t for that medicine, he never would have made it.”
“Max was truly one of the lucky ones,” she adds. “The same shell that wounded my husband killed his medical colleague, British volunteer Dr. Isaiah Morris, and wounded a number of nurses as well.”
Dr. Max and Hilde did not lack for anything in Switzerland, and neither did Dr. Isaiah Morris of London, recipient of the Military Cross for gallantry treating wounded under fire during the battles of the Rhine towards the end of the war. These volunteers did not have to come here, but they did.
During a 1990s visit to Israel, the pair were invited to attend a reunion with the rest of their brigade at the Golani Shraga base (previously known as Samaria), where they dined with the base’s current commander.
Later, the Goldbergs joined the other surviving members of their brigade and were recognized and remembered for their heroism in one of Israel’s most important battles.
“It has been a continuing source of satisfaction that I could help in some way to help in the foundation of the State of Israel,” says Max Goldberg. “Being able to participate in Israel’s War of Independence was one of the proudest moments of my life.” He also added: “It took a long time for this reunion to take place, but we were very excited about it.” Hilde Goldberg added: “Many soldiers were killed in the battles of 1948, and we must not forget that.”
During their period of service caring for and rehabilitating Bergen-Belsen camp survivors, one of their colleagues sent there by the Jewish Agency from Palestine was Reuma Schwartz, later to marry the IAF pilot Ezer Weizman, who eventually became president of the State of Israel. During visits to Israel, the Goldbergs were often guests of the presidential couple.
Author: Prepared by Joe Woolf from information provided by the Golani Brigade Memorial Museum, and from personal contacts when he had the privilege and pleasure of meeting the Goldbergs during their visit to the Golani Museum in the early 1990s, where he was employed as the English-speaking guide.