Dr. Stanley Levin, part of a group of nine which included Dov and Elsie Judah, Reuben and Bat-Ami Joffe, Colin and Saada. Gluckman and their two children, had been stranded in Cyprus during the hectic days of the declaration of Israel’s Independence. The pilot of their plane, after leaving Wadi Halfa for Haifa, had landed at Nicosia and had refused to continue the journey because of the fighting in Palestine. However, by bribing a British pilot working for the Iraq Petroleum Company, they were flown to Haifa in his Beechcraft plane.
After their arrival in Israel, Dr. Frankel called at the Olympic Hotel and drove Stanley Levin to the little village of Kfar Shmaryahu. A tower and a school had been built on a hillock, and there a new battalion composed of recently arrived young men from D.P. camps was being formed. The recruits, originally from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, were training with sticks. Levin was fast becoming accustomed to shocks. The bombing of the Palgi Hotel, where his group had spent their first night in Tel Aviv only a few days earlier, was still fresh in his mind.
Dr. Frankel guided Levin to the tents, introducing him to Yocheved, who had until then been in charge of medical matters. “Your battalion ‘doctor,’” Frankel announced. Yocheved, a seventh generation sabra, had served as a nurse with the British Army in Egypt and Italy, and Levin was thankful she could speak a little English. The ten orderlies were young men, patently unfit for the army.
“Equipment?” Levin asked. The answer was a modestly-sized green box, containing a few bandages, small splints, scissors, scalpel, forceps, a few syringes, needles and a little primus to heat up and sterilize the instruments. The battalion’s medical corps was sans blood, sans plasma, sans intravenous fluids.
Dr. Levin could be forgiven his wry smile. At the Johannesburg Children’s Hospital before his departure, his colleagues, shrewdly guessing what lay behind his sudden announcement of departure abroad to “visit a sick member of his family,” had over the next ten days given him as much equipment as possible. The memory of sophisticated medical practice now belonged in another world. “Organize a 10-bed sick bay,” said Dr. Frankel as he left.
By the end of the day, the doctor, the nurse, the sergeant and the orderlies had done just that. Three spick-and-span schoolrooms equipped with beds, mattresses and blankets, were evidence of a thorough day’s work.
On 20th May the battalion was given orders to move south to Tel Litwinsky. A few guns were handed around and the convoys moved off. The hospital was left behind.
Levin’s job started again. The British had done their worst, stripping the Tel Litwinsky camp of everything, even its light bulbs and switches. Levin and his unit, arriving in the evening, took over a small building that had served as a hospital. The next day, his orderlies scrubbed the place, and a sick bay was again set up. Twenty-four hours later, the unit received an order to move south to the Egyptian front. While packing, Levin learned that the building next to his short-lived hospital, not ten yards away, had been used for storing the battalion’s ammunition, which said a lot about the camp’s confusion and lack of military organization.
Newspaper reporters looked over the screen into the operating room; a doctor in bathing trunks was bending over a wounded man on the operating table; Yocheved the nurse was preparing the instruments and anesthetics.
The newsmen stared hard. The orderlies had told them that Dr. Stanley Levin had now been on his feet for thirty-six hours. This was his 40th case.
Levin was then ordered to leave for Gedera. They reached the village on the way to the Egyptian front. Here, the beginnings of this hospital were as modest as those which Levin had established at Kfar Shmaryahu, then at Tel Litwinsky. He had commandeered a double-storey house in the centre of the village, which turned out to be inhabited by a senile woman of eighty whose deceased husband farmer had willed the home to the Keren Hayesod on condition that the institution would not move the woman out in her lifetime. Levin, conscious of the tragedy of old age, put up with the woman blundering into the rooms, and crawling into every bed, but later he succeeded in placing her elsewhere in the village.
The house had six rooms, a stable, and a garden, and if its transformation was swift; this was because war, though a desecration of the human spirit, also provides occasions for great dedication, and people rise above themselves and reach the intangible state of group loyalty. This is what happened as doctor, nurse and ten orderlies fused into a team. With the start of the ten-day fighting, the first batch of the Givati Brigade’s casualties arrived.
The team was not unprepared. The house had been cleaned, the admission and operating rooms and the wards had been designated. The untrained orderlies had been transformed: one became cook, another washed up, a third was taught to give injections, a fourth handled admissions, a fifth signed in the cases with names and numbers. Levin and Yocheved shared the tasks of instruction. Yocheved made herself responsible for the wards, guiding the cook and impressing on him the need for cleanliness.
The casualties were many. Levin, on his own, could not do major thoracic or abdominal surgery. His task narrowed to attending to shrapnel and penetrating wounds, and after Yocheved became a skilled anesthetist, even for amputations. Major surgical cases were sent to Tel Aviv and other base-hospitals.
During that early period, Levin instructed some of his orderlies to “follow the troops” in the hospital’s ambulance. The orderlies were thus behind the Israeli units that took Lydda and Ramle, and even managed to bring back an icebox, old-fashioned operating tables, blankets, sheets and pajamas. The hospital was to grow in size to accommodate 100 beds.
Dr. Stanley Levin’s hospital in Gedera, with its 100 beds, was located in three different places: the original double-storey home, the hall in the heart of the village, and in a large tent in the settlement’s park. Apart from a South African, Dr. Bernard Bloch, who shared the labors for one month with Levin, the handful of other doctors sent to assist Levin proved inadequate – elderly and medically inept. Levin assigned them to giving anesthetics, but Yocheved was more competent than they were at the job.
A warm human side developed in the hospital, initiated by Yocheved, who encouraged the orderlies to have their wives come down for weekends. The women took charge of the kitchen and taught their husbands how to cook. The hospital acquired a culinary as well as a medical reputation, the testimony being the number of southern front officers who found cause to “drop in.” Other visitors were South African doctors posted in the region: Jack Medalie, Barnett, Treisman, Charlie Shubitz and Mendel Klaff.
Needless to say, Stanley Levin fell in love with his nurse. Or perhaps the truth was in Yocheved’s later account. “I was the first girl he met here. I had to keep him, so I married him.” The ceremony took place under a canopy on the roof of the double-storey house. The pole-holders were four orderlies who held up the canopy with borrowed bayonets.
Dr. Levin performed 500 operations during the first 6 months of the war and his hospital handled 5,000 cases.
When author Henry Katzew was preparing his manuscript for “South Africa’s 800” in the l970s, Dr. Stanley Levin was head of the Pediatrics Postgraduate Faculty of Tel Aviv University’s Medical School, and taught undergraduate students at the Hebrew University’s Medical School. He was also head of the Kupat Cholim [HMO] Pediatrics Committee. He was a member of several European and international research and clinical societies, and in addition published some 70 papers on research and various clinical fields.
Researcher’s note: Dr. Stanley Levin’s brother Basil Levin was also a Machalnik – link to Basil Levin story.
Source: Excerpts from Henry Katzew’s book “South Africa’s 800” and historical comment by researcher Joe Woolf.