Extracts from:
A LONG WAY ROUND
The Story of Youth “Unusually spent”
By Ya’acov Friedler
Originally written in English. Translated to German and published in Germany as:
“Die leisen Abschiede, Geschichte einer Flucht”
Hagen 1993, 2. verbesserte Auflage 1994, 270 Seiten, broschiert
ISBN 3-922957-35-8
…
Chapter Twenty
There I started my last year of schooling before the matriculation examinations, once more a new boy, in a place I had never heard of and would indeed have found difficult to find on a map of not especially large scale. The classrooms of the Jewish Secondary School were located in a largish building on the village High Street, improbably called The Olde White House. Before the war it had housed an antiques shop, its owner and his family. It was of course, in keeping with its name, whitewashed. The owner had generously put it at the disposal of the school after the first building it had occupied in Shefford had been destroyed by a fire. All the schools I had attended in England had been boys’ schools. Oddly enough the strictly religious JSS, was coeducational though after lessons we were in some measure segregated. The younger boys, and most of the girls, were boarded in the upstairs rooms of the Olde White House, and some of the older boys were billeted with local families to sleep. We all had our meals, strictly kosher, in the White House.
I shared a room in one of the village homes with a boy from my own class, Solly Bornstein. He was a much more talented student than I was and in addition also an all rounder, excelling in Talmud study and sports, as well as in the regular subjects. He fell in the hills of Galilee, struck down by an enemy rifle bullet, fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, in the summer of 1948. He died before he had had a chance to see very much of the country he had gone to fight for. On arrival in Haifa port the volunteers on board the ship he had come on had been separated into two groups, veterans of the recent war in Europe who were sent to units where their military abilities could best be exploited, and the raw recruits with no fighting experience. Solly was one of the latter. They were taken straight to a military camp for rudimentary training and then immediately to one of the fronts where the woefully small and poorly armed Jewish army was fighting for the life of the reborn nation against the invading armies of seven Arab states. Solly was a refugee, from eastern Europe, and had arrived in England with his family just before the war. His father was a rabbi of great learning but a deformed little body. Solly one day confided to me that his father had deliberately inflicted his deformation on himself when still a very young man in Russia by staying up nights to carry around heavy weights suspended from his thin shoulders, in order to evade being pressed into military service with the armies of the Tsar. At that time the Tsar’s agents would force physically fit boys into the army for 20 years of service in far away Siberia, cut off from contacts with their families, and often losing their religion if they did not lose their lives. For religious Jews this was a fate worse than death, and not a few did as Solly’s father, preferring to suffer a lifetime with a deformed body to one without their God.
How different an apple from the parent tree Solly turned out to be. He voluntarily left a safe home in England to fight against the odds for his own people in Palestine. How tragic that he died before he could savour the achievement of Jewish independence we had been dreaming about. But I know he laid down his life willingly because he considered the revival of the Jewish nation in its own land more important than our individual lives. Some years later, upon his father’s death, the bereaved old man was buried next to him in Israel. Solly was a fine student, well above my own standard, and he had the added advantage of attending the same school continuously for six years. During the year we lived together he helped me a lot and I owe him much. My matriculation certificate belongs to him as well as to myself. He, not surprisingly, passed the matric in the first division…
… Solly (Friedler) persuaded us that he was the more dispensable and in April of 1948, a month before the Jewish leadership in Palestine declared the establishment of the State of Israel, he quietly joined the secret pipeline the Zionist organisation had set up to ferry young men to Palestine. It went through France which was as sympathetic to the Jewish cause as it was amenable to taking a dig at the British. He arrived in Haifa on board the freighter Pan York sailing from Marseilles crammed with volunteers, and displaced persons seeking a new home away from the Europe that had been turned into a giant graveyard for Jews by Hitler’s henchmen. He was sent straight to an army camp which the Hagana had taken over when the British left it. He and his colleagues were given three weeks of basic military training and then sent to the northern front in the Galilee.
The newly formed Israel Defence Forces were desperately short of men and equipment and the casualties among the poorly trained and armed men were heavy. There were neither time nor resources to give the volunteers proper training. They had to be sent to the many fronts to try and stem the advance of the invading Arab armies with little more than their bodies and motivation, the raw recruits helped along by the more experienced former soldiers of the Allied armies. As the pressure mounted, some of the young men were sent from the ships straight to the fronts without training and many of them died before they had seen anything of their new country. By a quirk of fate Solly’s unit included my old Shefford room mate Solly Bornstein, who had been among the first to go to the new State’s aid. They fought hard to stop the advance of the Arab Liberation Army, which had descended on the Galilee from Syria. Gradually they repulsed the invaders and threw them back across the border. My brother Solly came through the fighting unscathed. Solly Bornstein lost his life in one of their actions on a Galilee hill near Nazareth.
Chapter Twenty Two
In December of 1948 I went into the pipeline to follow my brother. Despite my poor eyesight I passed the perfunctory medical examination the Zionist organisation gave the volunteers, in a London synagogue, without difficulty. Young men were dying in their hundreds in Israel and as long as I could see at all I was fit enough. The shortage of men was so great that it would actually have been difficult to be found unfit. …
… I left for Paris two days before Christmas, and had no difficulty finding the little hotel near the Avenue de la Grande Armėe in central Paris, which served as the pipeline’s accommodation for volunteers on their way to Israel. …
… The day after Christmas we got instructions to take the overnight train to Marseilles where the Agency had set up a transit camp for volunteers and immigrants going to Israel. It was a very crowded journey and we had to stand up for a considerable part of the night, but it got us to Marseilles. We stayed in the camp until New Year waiting for the ship that was to take us to Haifa. She was the s.s. Negba, an old mixed passenger cargo liner purchased by the Zim company, the Israel national shipping firm, and was one of the first ships to fly the official flag of the new state, the blue Star of David between two parallel blue stripes on a white field. …
As soon as the ship was tied up the volunteers for the army were separated and we debarked first, to immediately be taken to a camp. I knew that father lived not very far from the port but I could not get permission to go and see him. I was told there was no time, that we must get to camp and start training without delay. As it happened we stood around in the port for several hours before the trucks that were to take us came along. The journey to the camp in central Israel took about two hours. It was a beautifully crisp and clear winter day of the kind only an Israeli winter can create if it is not raining. The open truck provided us with full vista sightseeing facilities, standing up around its sides. We were actually quite surprised to see long stretches of empty countryside, as we had been told that the country was tiny and had assumed it to be more or less totally built up. Never mind, we speculated, once the fighting would be over lots of houses would be built here to accommodate all the Jews who would flock to the new Jewish state, to be able for the first time in 2,000 years to live in our own country. The most profound and lasting impression on the trip was made by my first sight of real orange trees. We passed many citrus groves and the trees were already heavy with fruit for the winter harvest. So unlike the apple and pear trees I had been used to, the squat orange trees with their rash of bright oranges looked unreal, in addition to giving their fruit at what for us was the wrong season. Every stamp collector of the time was familiar with the orange tree on the postage stamps of the Orange Free State. It looked unreal, a sort of artist’s impression that was all right for a stamp. Now we were seeing real orange trees and they looked just so unreal. I have since seen very many orange, grapefruit, and lemon trees, but first impressions form opinions and they still look unreal to me.
We arrived at the camp at dusk and were immediately lined up in a dim corridor to be ushered, one by one, into a darkened room which was lit by a single candle, to take the oath of allegiance to the Army of Israel. The candle lit almost clandestine ceremony was an obvious hold over from the days when the Hagana, the army’s forerunner, was still officially illegal. Nonetheless the ceremony was very impressive. The army identification card I was issued, after I had taken the oath, bore the number 115429. The solemn, almost conspirational induction ceremony took the edge off our disappointment with the odd bits and pieces of khaki clothing we were issued, which fell short of adding up to a recognisable uniform. This new army we were joining was short not only of men but of uniforms too. Actually some word about this had got around in London and many of us had purchased khaki items, unfortunately mainly underwear, from the Army and Navy surplus stores before setting out to become soldiers of Israel. Not very many armies get volunteers who bring along their own uniforms, but as this was the first Jewish army since the days of the Maccabees, we made allowances. Indeed we joked a lot about how no two soldiers looked alike much less uniform. But when all was said and done khaki was the dominant, if not exclusive, colour in our ranks, and after all we had not volunteered for the clothing. Things were said to be worse in the navy, where on being asked whether he could swim a recruit was said to have exclaimed “I knew it, they haven’t got any ships.” We did not get much sleep that first night in Israel. The army was in a hurry to turn us into fighting men and kept us up for hours of night field training. …
… We were trained to use Czech made pre World War Two vintage rifles. They were heavy to carry and we got to fire them only once during our three weeks of training, five bullets each. There were not enough bullets to allow for proper fire practice. We also received some instructions in handling the Sten guns, a home made version of the very basic sub machine gun developed in England during the war. The Stens were so unreliable that they were almost as dangerous for the man who fired them as for his targets. We were allowed to fire them once, ten bullets of automatic fire. …
… By the time our basic training was completed the truce the U.N. had arranged between Israel and the Arabs had settled into an uneasy but lasting cease fire. We did not know it yet but the fighting, later to become known as Israel’s War of Independence, was over. The new situation made itself felt in our camp. Instead of being sent off to one of the fronts, as I had somewhat fearfully expected, I was assigned to the fledgling Israeli navy which had its base in Haifa. …
…. got the posting with the help of a cousin who had some string pulling powers with the authorities. I spent a few days in a naval transit camp and was then assigned to one of the few ships the navy had, to work as a fireman in her boiler room. The ship was the K 20, Hebrew for Combat Vessel 20. The “20” did not denote a serial number, as there were no 20 ships, or for that matter half as many in the navy. She was a small, ex British navy world war two corvette, which had been bought from surplus by the Jewish Agency after the war and converted into a clandestine immigration ship to smuggle Jews into Palestine. Loaded down to her gunwales with refugees from liberated Europe, she had been caught in the British blockade off the shores of Palestine confiscated and laid up in Haifa port. When the British left in May 1948, she was hurriedly repainted, renamed, and reconverted as a fighting ship. Not that she could do a lot of fighting. Her armaments were a couple of heavy machine guns and an old naval type gun, nicknamed “Napoleon Cannon” by her crew, who pretended to believe it was a relic from the old Emperor’s own navy, and for all I knew it might have been. Nevertheless the K 20 had given a good account of herself during the fighting, patrolling the country’s coast and helping bombard enemy shore positions and troop concentrations. I joined the ship with a group of new recruits from North Africa and Singapore and our first task was to clean and repaint her from top to bottom. The continuous service she had seen throughout the Independence War, not to mention her previous hardy history, had left their mark. When we had fitted her to put out to sea again, we were trained on the job. The cease fire held and was stabilised into an armistice negotiated between Israel and each of her Arab neighbours, at a conference on the island of Rhodes under the auspices of the United Nations. …
… A wave of euphoria swept the country and all of us were sure the cease fire would grow into peace. The sanguine attitude infected the armed forces too and in the autumn of 1949 it was decided to demobilise and reduce the army to a size commensurate with the small country’s needs and capacity. The volunteers who had come from abroad were encouraged to try out a kibbutz and I went to Doroth, on the edge of the Negev desert in the south of the country, where I had a distant relative. …
Our thanks to Eran Friedler, the son of Yaacov Friedler, for allowing us to publish
these extracts on the World Machal website.