Why I volunteered for Israel in 1948
Sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, it’s a daunting project to cover more than 50 years of one’s life in a few pages. But at once I feel transported 50 years back, 74, even.
My beloved parents came from Lemberg (Lvov), which at the time was an Austrian province. Despite this, in 1921 they were issued green identity cards in Paris by the police prefecture, at times bearing the note “Polish nationality,” and sometimes “nationality undetermined.”
That same year my parents were planning to leave for Palestine, following the lead of my mother’s nephew who had gone there in 1920. They had a bit of Austrian currency whose value was decreasing by the day. My father’s uncle, whom I was very fond of, and who had lived in Paris since 1905, advised them to ‘Hold off a few days before exchanging the money, it’ll go up!’ A few days later, my parents might as well have papered the walls of their hotel room with these now-worthless banknotes.
Thus my parents were fated to remain in France, and I came into the world in 1924 in Paris, in the rue Jules-César, near the Place de la Bastille, at a specific address like any other human being. I am imbued with this country, my birthplace, and although I remain one hundred percent Jewish, you could say I am a ‘titi Parisien‘, French through and through, with all the deep and contradictory feelings that go with it.
With the other neighborhood kids I played in the rue de la Verrerie, near the rue des Lombards. Though our religions were different we got along perfectly, and I have such good feelings when I remember those times.
My younger brother Isidore, born at Saint-Antoine hospital on 19th August 1930, was an exceptional pupil. While we both did well at school, he was more gifted. His marks always read: ‘Double zero for conduct,’ but 18/20 or 20/20 for all other subjects. I remember our parents’ delight when it came time to sign our report cards. We both went to the Saint-Merri Street school, in the Place Beaubourg, rue Brise-Miche to be precise. It was a name that provoked laughter in those days, though as a small child I didn’t get the pun: miche means bread but also buttocks. On the quays of the Seine, Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, we used to rummage through the huge piles of scrap metal opposite the statue of Etienne Marcel in search of ball bearings and other spare parts from which we made our own wooden sleds. With these we would race in pairs down the rue de Belleville. I still wonder how we managed it, because even in a car you have to be careful going down that hill.
We were poor, for without valid identity papers my father couldn’t find steady work, and even when he had his papers he couldn’t get permission to work, so as far as kesef (sorry, money) went, there wasn’t a lot. My father operated a machine making hats in a workshop in rue des Blancs Manteaux, where the boss paid starvation wages, but it was that or nothing, and in the February low season, he paid nothing until spring. Still, we weren’t particularly unfortunate. Though we often went hungry, our parents gave us so much family love and tenderness that in the worst moments of our lives, even in the face of death that was omnipresent from 1940 to 1945, and the Nazi camps and prisons, it was this family love that helped me endure in hope. I remember too the deadly riots of February 6th 1934, which far outdid those in May 1968.
But in 1936 everything changed for us. My father found a steady job and got valid identity papers. A while afterwards he set himself up as an itinerant merchant in Sartrouville, Maisons-Laffitte and the other market towns of our childhood. For one franc, the peanut vendor gave us a beret-full of them. But in retrospect, my parents only had four good years in all their existence, the years from 1936 to 1939.
In 1939, my father enlisted in an infantry regiment for foreign volunteers. Although he had filed his request for French citizenship, time passed without a response and then the war broke out. My father was mobilized in 1939, and fought in 1940. He was commended for his conduct on the front and demobilized in the unoccupied zone. He returned to Paris after crossing the demarcation line at Vierzon, riding by night on the undercarriage of a freight train.
He was arrested, by the French police on May 14th 1941 in the Place des Vosges, the Billet Vert roundup. They took him to Pithiviers (Loiret), and from there he was deported on June 25th 1942 via Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau, never to return, like 80,000 other Jews of France, gassed and incinerated in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Despite her request for citizenship, my mother was not French, but both my brother and I had acquired French nationality by declaration before a justice of the peace at our birth. Regardless, my mother, my little brother and I were arrested by the French police on July 16th 1942. It was a Thursday, when children were off school, so it was easier to find them. The weather was beautiful. It was 5 a.m. at our home on rue Notre Dame-de-Nazareth. Ever since, every day of my life, especially every night and in the early morning, I hear the shouts, the sobs, the walling of mothers and children woken before dawn, half-undressed: it was unbearable, and it happened in Paris. Plainclothes grand beret officers took us on foot to a garage in the rue de Bretagne, while everyone in the neighborhood looked on in stupefied silence. What was it like for them to see these women, these children, these infants, the old and the sick, led through the streets by policemen in and out of uniform?
From there we were taken in city buses to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where they used to hold the six-day Paris cycling race. After two days in the Vel d’Hiv’ spent in inhuman conditions, we were taken by bus to the Austerlitz station and from there to Beaune-la-Roland (Loiret). My mother was deported on August 5th 1942, my brother on August 21th 1942, two days after his twelfth birthday, and I went on September 2nd 1942. I still hear my mother’s cries, as she shouted, ‘My children, my children, what will become of them?’ While we, my brother and I, stood petrified, we watched our mother, our maman, being brutally dragged away by gendarmes as others pulled us off in the opposite direction.
It would take ten thousand pages and a thousand years to write down what I feel in my head, in my heart, and in my being. I spent time in seven concentration camps and eleven prisons in Germany. I escaped from the second concentration camp, Tzebinia (Upper Silesia) with three buddies from France, as the camp was still under construction and had not yet been electrified. After my recapture, for four months the SS and the Gestapo didn’t know I was Jewish, but when they found out I thought they would hang me. Instead, they sent me to Auschwitz and then to Buna-Monowitz. I have had an incredible and singular fate, like most of those who returned from that hell. Often I grip my head in my hands and ask myself if it wasn’t something I dreamed, and wonder how it could all have happened in the 20th century.
Somehow the souls of my parents, and of my little brother, must have been watching over me, for what Dante imagined and described in his ‘Inferno’ is nothing compared with the Nazi camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other Nazi camps.
We evacuated the camp on 18th January 1945. The long march through the snow was one that in principle could not be survived. I escaped from the freight car during a halt in the Czechoslovakian countryside, when the SS guarding us opened the doors a bit during an aerial machine-gun attack by the English and the Americans. At that moment the SS guard had climbed down from the train to hide in the trees along the railway tracks. He shot at me but missed. Some Czechs gave me refuge, risking their lives.
I was liberated on the 7th/8th May 1945 by American soldiers from Patton’s army. I came back to Paris on 28 th May 1945 in a freight car, an uncovered one. The same buses that had taken us from the Vel d’Hiv to Drancy took me from the Gare de l’Est, passing by the Hotel Lutetia, where occasionally a survivor would find a relative. I found no one.
I went on foot to 59 rue Notre Dame de Nazareth. I climbed to the second floor, and rang at the door on the right with little hope. But I said to myself, ‘Who knows, miracles can happen, after all I came back.’ Then the door opened, and the people there were strangers, and I cried. They were Jews, but they didn’t even offer to let me sleep there, in what was by rights my parents’ home, my home. I finally got my parents’ apartment back through legal proceedings in which I acted as my own lawyer.
It is terrible to be orphaned, and unbearable to know that your parents, brothers and sisters were gassed to death and burned. You have to be made of steel to live with that. Perhaps it’s your youth that preserves you, or telling yourself that you must survive so that Hitler, that murderous monster, won’t have beaten us, the survivors, totally.
I was barely 18 on July 16th 1942 and 21 in 1945. We often felt that for others we were simply in the way, or even objects of disgrace for having come back alive. Personally, I felt guilty to be alive, when my mother, my father, my little brother and all the rest had died. The sun was shining, and people often crossed the street to avoid hearing our stories, which seemed to them like tirades. Worse, they would ask, ‘How was it that you survived, when our family members perished?’ as if there was something wrong about making it back from hell.
It has taken until now, 50 years later, for survivors of the Shoah to be heard and sought out to speak of their sufferings, though of course there were kind people, exceptions, unfortunately, who had tried to share our pain, but very few. The fact is that ordinary life had returned in August 1944 with the Liberation, but we only came back in 1945, nine months later.
I joined a Zionist Movement and would have left on the “Altalena,” but there was no room. I decided in 1948 that since I didn’t much want to go on living, I would go to Israel to die. If I was going to die after the gas chambers, at least it would be for a reason, fighting for Israel, and as a way to get even for what had happened. How could I remain in Paris while other Jewish survivors were fighting for their lives?
So I enlisted, on the Avenue de la Grande Armée, and they sent me off to Marseille, where I had to wait what seemed like a long time without understanding what for. We left at dawn, boarding a ship called the “Atzmaut.” I still wonder how it stayed afloat those four days at sea. Off the coast of Crete, we all thought the ship was about to sink.
Early one morning, the “Atzmaut” halted, and as the sea mist slowly cleared we saw Haifa, magnificent in the sun. After a long moment when no one said a word, there was crying and shouting for joy. We were on a Jewish ship, in Jewish waters, facing a Jewish land. For 2000 years and more, millions of Jews, generation after generation, through pogroms, the Inquisition and the death camps of the 20th century, had dreamed and hoped for this unique moment, and here we were experiencing it. Through us, it was for them and generations to come that we were about to disembark and feel our feet touch a land of our own.
The army took me in hand and brought me to Atlit. The officer in charge of our group had no rank marked on his uniform. He said, ‘l’m Shlomo; just call me Shlomo.” Next was Tel Litwinsky and Lod, where I was given a Sten, but didn’t know how to use it because almost all my fellow Machalniks had rifles, including the one distributing the weapons. He just patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘ata bachur tov.’ (you are a good guy). Shlomo said, ‘Be careful, a Sten can go off by itself. Here’s where the bullets go, put in two extra, but avoid any abrupt move, it goes off by itself.’
When they asked for volunteers to stand guard at night, I raised my hand. I listened to the wind and the jackals howling. Jewish jackals! I took off my oversized English helmet. It was very dark at night and I was a little afraid of getting shot just standing there, even though I’d lived through awful moments in the camps. I think you can understand how I felt, and I’d like to see the person who’s never been afraid, I’d tip my hat to him. But at the same time I was happy and proud to be a soldier for Israel, and I still had my ‘idée fixe’ that if I was going to die, it would be for that ideal.
During the misdar (assembly), the mefaked (offïcer) who reviewed us to get to know us better saw that I had tears in my eyes, and asked me why I was crying. I told him that only three years earlier I had been in a Nazi concentration camp, about three kilometers from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the SS together with the capos used to count us as we lined up in the assembly yard. There we were nothing, not even human beings. Shouting all the time, they told us we were nothing but stücks, which in German means pieces, bits, things, not human beings. And here I am today, standing at attention to the Israeli flag, saluting it, my gaze fixed on the Star of David, thinking of my mother, my father, my little brother, all killed at Auschwitz, thinking of all of our six- million brothers and sisters, and also of all the Jews who came before us over the centuries, all those millions of souls. So the mefaked said to me, ‘Tomorrow you’ll raise the flag.’ I no longer wanted to die, and what’s more I bore a gun now, which I had finally gotten instead of the Sten.
At michlat (in trenches), lying on the ground facing the enemy, I pointed my rifle, and a private second-class told me, ‘Stay there and shoot if anyone comes, but whatever you do don’t shoot for no reason.’ I noticed it was a German Mauser rifle manufactured in Czechoslovakian Skoda Factories. Hagana agents had been there to acquire arms, but what sickened me was to see that the rifle was still engraved with a swastika that was impossible for me to remove.
Ben-Gurion came once to make a speech, and they gave him a wooden crate to stand on as he wasn’t tall. I couldn’t make anything of what he said in Hebrew, except Eretz Israel, Hayalim (soldiers), and Medinat Israel. He spoke loudly and vigorously, a real orator, and even without translation we understood that he was telling us to be strong and victorious. When he finished, we gave him an ovation, and I think if he had asked the twenty of us to attack at that moment against 200, we would have done it without a second’s hesitation. Besides, that’s what we had come for, and if we didn’t, who else would? Ben-Gurion was a true leader, like Menachem Begin, and now that I have rejoined the Machal, I pull myself up, stand a little straighter, the pain in my hips gone, feeling proud and transformed into a 20-year-old Mahalnik again. I remember the oath they had us swear to defend Israel, and even today feel a wave of emotion.
In Israel the flies stuck to our bodies, they literally ate us up in the intense heat, but I didn’t want to kill any Jewish flies. Can you imagine, the flies, the jackals, the scorpions and the weeds – all Jewish! Even if I sometimes met obnoxious guys who didn’t like Sarfatim (Frenchmen), the extraordinary people I met made up for the others, because in Israel I wasn’t a Jew any more, I was an Israeli, though the others called me the Sarfati, and on top of it I spoke Yiddish, which they couldn’t figure out. So I said to myself, ‘So what if he’s an asshole, I like him anyway because he’s in Israel and Jewish too, he too has chosen to live in this land, some of them are survivors, too, so I’ll even smile at the idiots.’
They sent us to Julis, and then to a deserted Beersheva, the place where the officers wore the bars on their shoulders and non-commissioned officers wore stripes on their arms. At some distance from Beersheva we sat in a refectory that was used as a canteen, with tables and benches where we all had to squeeze in tight to fit. I noticed a table set apart with two benches, and since there was only one person sitting there, I sat down across from the hayal to eat. While I just sat there, he motioned with his head a couple of times so I would get the message to sit with the other soldiers. I replied in Yiddish that I wasn’t meshugah (one of the few Yiddish/Hebrew words I knew, apart from swear words which you learn fast) enough to squeeze onto a full bench with the others when there was lots of room somewhere else, like on his bench, and he must be the crazy one to point me over there with the others. He just looked at me without saying anything, and must have noticed the camp number tattooed on my arm. That’s when I realized my mistake, since other soldiers started to arrive at the table and sat next to him, and I realized that I was sitting with the senior officers of the battalion. My pals were cracking up watching me looking sheepish. But I finished eating and left, saying shalom. After the meal, the battalion commander for it was him sitting opposite me, the one I had called meshugah, called me into his office, had me sit down, and spoke to me kindly in Yiddish as he was from Lithuania, a Litvak. He said that up until then, the soldiers had called their officers and sub-officers by their first names, but now we had to become an army like every other army in the world. That’s why we had to make this distinction, to maintain discipline. An ordinary soldier could no longer always give advice to a general. He said to me, ‘Look, do me a favor, when you leave here pretend you’ve been told off, so that the others get the message too, especially the French grumblers, even if they’re sometimes right to grumble.’ So I went out, and my buddies said, ‘So?’ and I said, ‘Did I ever get a dressing down!’ Later, when we were lined up in front of him at misdar, or somewhere else, you could see a gleam in our eyes, between him and me, which meant we were the only ones to know what really happened.
My Viennese lieutenant died in front of our eyes when he drove over a mine with his jeep while we were on patrol in the Negev. He was like all the other Israeli officers, they’d say ‘Follow me,’ always leading the way, and we knew it could have been any of us. We took it hard. He was a survivor from Austria named Zvi, and I’d never met a gentler guy.
I’ll remember all my life the first Independence Day parade of the Israeli army that day in May 1949, in Tel Aviv. I wound up in an armored vehicle, one of four, at the corner of Ben-Yehuda and Allenby streets, at Mograbi to be precise. The population of Israel was on the apartment roofs, and in the street too, of course. People threw us candies, chocolates and cigarettes. If the houses didn’t collapse, it must have been because they decided to hold together on purpose just to experience with us that unforgettable day. For thousands of years, believers or atheists all recited with the same fervor, ‘ Le shana ha’ba be’yerushalayim’ (Next year in Jerusalem), and we were the ones to be living through that day that a human being can only experience once in his life.
I was demobilized some time afterwards, and left Israel reluctantly, returning to France by way of Italy. When I left Paris, people had said, ‘So you’re going, good idea, anyway you’re alone, unlike my son who can’t go because he’s in school.’ By which they meant it’s natural that I should go off and get myself killed, since I had no family left. And when I came back, the same people told me, ‘What! You came back! Why didn’t you stay?’ It almost seemed as if they wanted to tell me off.
So I picked up the threads of my life. I can’t help thinking that fate was really watching over me, or perhaps the souls of my parents and of my little brother. One wonderful day, I met my wife Cécile. Like all of us, she too was a survivor. She had been hidden, and her father had died in Auschwitz. As soon as I saw her, my heart beat faster, it was the old story of Cupid and his arrow. After forty-five years, she’s still my true love! Like the poet says, ‘More than yesterday, and less than tomorrow.’
I often asked myself why we’d been left on earth, and why I, out of the millions of my brothers and sisters, had come back from the Nazi death camps: what kind of a life was it, to have experienced Auschwitz-Birkenau? But today I know that in spite of everything it was worth it to have survived, because I had known my father, my mother and my little brother. I often had guilt feelings about being a survivor, when my little brother, with all his brilliance, hadn’t lived. But every survivor, every camp inmate who returned, must have felt that, too.
To have met my wife was one of the most beautiful days of my life, and I hope that I have given her and continue to give her all the happiness she has given me, including the joy I felt the day our daughter entered the world. And thanks to her and her husband we have a terrific grandson, who knows now that I was sent to Auschwitz and that I fought for Israel? When he was three-and-a-half years old, he asked me, ‘Grand-père, what is that on your arm?’ In time he learned about it.
That 50th anniversary trip to Israel was great and memorable, from the highways, planes and ships to the trees and forests, all Jewish achievements. You see amazing things at every step, and if I had it to do over again we would go again, and we would be 20-years-old again. Indeed, when you see the young men, and especially the young women Israeli soldiers, you really do feel 20 again, like the Sarfati you once were.
The first time long ago, and every time since, when I go to the Wailing Wall, excuse me, the Western Wall, with my wife, I cry and kiss the wall, and I always kiss the Kotel as I place my messages there. The last time, I asked a friend from Machal to place one for me, and each time I say to myself that it is for my parents, my little brother, my wife’s father, and for the six million Jews who died during the war, as well as for the soldiers of Israel lost in all the wars and battles. There were generations of Jews who were unable to achieve their dreams to stand before the Wall to pray, to touch and kiss it, so when I’m there I realize that this life was worth living, just to witness these intense moments.
My mother always used to say to me, ‘You’ll be rich, my son’, you know how Jewish mothers are. For a long time I wondered what she meant by rich. Money can’t buy happiness, but it helps, and then I looked at my wife Cécile and I understood what my mother meant, for here was my wealth, a marvelous wife, since having a husband who is a survivor isn’t always fun. And my family and my new-found Machal friends and even others that I don’t know also add to my happiness.
To conclude, here is an anecdote from those times: A soldier on guard duty at night hears a noise and shouts, Mi shama? Or, Who goes there? No one answers, but a shadow approaches and the soldier standing guard prepares to shoot. But he has no gun, and can only use his outstretched arm as a substitute. At that moment his buddy calls out from the shadows, ‘It’s me!’ The other soldier says, ‘I could have killed you!’ His friend walks up to him and replies, ‘I couldn’t care less, you can’t touch me, I’m a tank!’ That story gives you a good picture of the mood of the times, at a particular moment.
The more I write, the younger I feel, and the more I know what it feels like to be twenty. You don’t need to be twenty to understand what it means, and like the song says, ‘Je ne regrette rien.” Or like a friend from India used to say, if we had it to do over we’d do it gladly, but the second time as generals, of course, if possible!
Shalom, and Shana Tova.
Source: Simon Drucker. Written in Paris in October 1998