Israel (74 page)

The Zionist establishment condemned the Jewish terrorists as “fascist nihilists stabbing Zionism in the back.” It reaffirmed the pledge of partnership with the British as well as official faith in diplomatic negotiation.

At the training camps the carefully screened volunteers studied lrgun ideology and the use and maintenance of weapons. The emphasis was on the British Bren submachine gun, stolen from armories. Those with the knack and
the nerve were taught how to make and use explosives. Taking to heart his mandate from Begin, Herschel supervised the training programs and continually traveled from camp to camp to institute revisions. Whenever he could, Herschel passed through the cities, eager to get a sense what was happening on the front line.

In the Jewish quarters all across Palestine the British had taken to making mass arrests. The schism between the Zionist establishment and the troublemakers widened.

Ben-Gurion informed Begin that a British-sponsored partition plan for a Jewish state was being jeopardized by the lrgun's operations and ordered Begin to submit his own operational plans to Haganah for prior approval.

Begin refused, not trusting British promises but questioning the British right to carve up Palestine. He was troubled by this animosity among Jews and attempted to put together a coalition between the more militant members of Haganah, the lrgun and LEHI, a radical gang. Unfortunately, LEHI's commander, a tough underground fighter named Yitzhak Shamir, refused the offer. The lrgun he trusted completely, but he would have nothing to do with Haganah.

Things went from bad to worse. Every day new arrivals to Palestine offered eyewitness accounts of the Nazis' atrocities, and each time the authorities brushed aside these accounts as pro-immigration propaganda. And so the lrgun training camps enjoyed an influx of volunteers.

In the fall of 1944 the British deported hundreds of lrgun and LEHI prisoners to concentration camps in East Africa. Remaining members began to draw up new battle plans designed to force the British to return the exiles. The Jewish Agency got wind of it and warned off Begin, threatening to “step in and finish the lrgun” if it should jeopardize the “fair deal” the British were promising the Zionist establishment at the war's end.

On November 6 in Cairo two youths, acting on orders
from LEHI, assassinated Baron Moyne, Resident British Minister in the Middle East. Lord Moyne was Churchill's close friend. In London Chaim Weizmann issued a statement that Moyne's death shocked and numbed him more than the loss of his own son, missing in action over Germany. In Jerusalem the Jewish Agency expressed outraged horror at the crime, while the Hebrew press called it an abominable deed.

In settlements, towns and cities all across Palestine the Jewish community prepared for a rumored retaliatory massacre, and Kol and the other supervisors suspended training operations in preparation for the firestorm.

Herschel returned to Tel Aviv and remained there through January. The British were everywhere, and their manhunt was proving to be uncannily successful. As no place could be considered safe, Herschel decided his best chance to evade capture was to lose himself in the city's multitudes.

He did not know the whereabouts of Begin and his high command. The lrgun had split into two- and three-man cells and everything was on a need-to-know basis. Gradually it became known that Haganah was working with the British to track down Irgunists, who were being tortured and deported.

The urge to retaliate was strong, but Begin's edict went out. There shall be no civil war. Suffer and wait.

And the lrgun was losing the deadly game of hide and seek.

Herschel Kol, alias Dov Katz, mounted the stairs to his room in a dilapidated apartment house off Dizengoff Road. He was returning from a visit to Jaffa and the old Glaser inn. Herschel did not dare linger there very long; CID men and regular police were stationed on every corner in the old port city to calm the jittery Arab population.

Herschel unlocked his door and stepped inside his digs. A British policeman, lounging on Herschel's bed, a revolver in his hand, nodded affably. Herschel was about to bolt when he felt the chilly kiss of another revolver against his ear.

“CID,” the man behind him said. “Herschel Kol, you are under arrest.”

They handcuffed him and led him downstairs to a windowless van. As they took him away Herschel wondered what it was going to be, back to Jerusalem Prison to serve out the rest of his sentence or deportation to a concentration camp in East Africa.

Either way, first there would be the interrogation and the torture. He still vividly remembered what they'd done to him after his first arrest.

The letter from home was postmarked December third, but it did not reach Danny Herodetzky until the second Monday morning in January. That kind of time lag for mail was usual for the military, Danny thought disgustedly as he huddled cross-legged on his bunk in the deserted barracks, his unopened letter on his lap and his extra blanket around his shoulders to ward off the morning chill. To be fair to the Army, however, his mail had been chasing him throughout his training. This latest letter from his father was addressed to him at the Army Air Corps Basic Flying School in Independence, Kansas. He'd graduated from there weeks ago and come to Eagle Pass, Texas, for advanced training.

The base was on the Rio Grande about a hundred miles north of Laredo. The grounds had long ago been cleared for airstrips, leaving the area nothing but a dark brown crust eternally baking beneath the Texas sun. In winter it was a pale ghost of itself but still one hell of a sun for a boy brought up in the canyons of New York City.

You didn't have to travel far to appreciate the rugged grandeur of the landscape, to marvel at the distant ocher buttes shimmering in the heat, at the yucca and mesquite and all their twisted prickly brother cacti.

This was a place tailor-made to satisfy the fantasy of the fellow who dreamed of mounting up and riding the range with Hopalong Cassidy, spurs on his heels and a six-gun on his hip.

The thing was, there was nobody like that around here. The men dreamed of flying single-engine fighters. They didn't want to ride; they wanted to soar through these flat gun-metal Texas skies with half a dozen fifty-cals spitting fire from beneath their eagles' wings.

It was just eleven. Danny was not scheduled for his training flight until the afternoon. He'd brought his letter back to the barracks because nobody was ever around here at this hour of the day. Danny liked to savor his mail from home; sometimes he even liked to read certain passages out loud to capture the inflections. A guy couldn't do something that screwy in front of the other cadets.

Your letter of November tenth reached home safely and I read it out loud to all my friends. When I got to the part where you described the air maneuvers you are learning, those twists and turns and so forth, they all clapped for you and said how brave you were.

Here's a good laugh. I'm sure you remember Leo Gorfine. He was here that day, and when I read aloud about how hard you found it to do an Immelmann loop in your airplane, Leo, who don't hear so good anymore, says, “Immelmann? Tell Danny I knew a fellow named Immelmann. He was a ragpicker on Hester Street.” Well, son, as you can
imagine, we all had a good laugh on him here at the store.

About the store, you wouldn't recognize it these days. Gone are the meat case and the dairy cooler. We kept the little freezer so after the war we can maybe sell ice cream, and we kept the cooler for soda pop. But we tore out the old produce bins and the shelves are mostly cleared. I say good riddance. All that points stuff was giving me a headache. Now where the produce used to be, I got a card table and plenty of comfortable chairs bought second hand. Shumel and the others sit and read the papers or play a card game. I sit in my rocker behind the counter in case somebody should come in for some cigarettes or gum—recently I got plenty of gum and tobacco to sell. A good sign this terrible war is about over. Anyway, if you saw me you'd laugh. I got a pretty easy life, you'd say, and I'd have to agree. Oh well, your father has worked pretty hard in his day, I guess.

Your sister is doing well at her job. She tells me she has a boyfriend—imagine that. Thank God, I say. But she won't tell me who it is. Well, she is entitled to her privacy. In answer to your question, I have not seen her apartment. She invites me plenty and offers to take me and bring me home in a taxi, but what we can't figure is how to get me up those four flights of stairs. In my younger days it would have been no big deal, son, but now I can't do it, I'm sorry to say. Maybe when you come home you can fly me in an airplane up there! What do you say?

Speaking of my health, I am feeling strong. It seems my heart attack was so long ago. Shumel (he sents his best regards, by the way) keeps an eye on me, I keep an eye on him, and we manage. About the you-know-what, I tell you it is a thing of the past for your father. I'll never touch another drop of you-know-what
except maybe a toast to my son when he comes home.

Well, I guess the big news is about the recent Presidential election. There was a little to-do about this being Roosevelt's fourth term, but all the kvetching came to nothing. Most voters felt like me, that FDR has done right, and you don't change horses in midstream. He's done all right against that bastard Hitler and those Japs so far. Mark my words, son, now that he's re-elected he will do something for the Jewish refugees, and all this tummel about how he is against us will vanish. He will act on the refugees' behalf. He must.

It wasn't until after you left us last summer that the newspapers began to let on about what the Russians discovered during their advance into Poland and that this horrible Majdanek extermination camp is only the beginning. They say to be prepared for what our own brave soldiers will discover as they push on into Germany.

It has taken me a long while to write about these things to you. I figured you had enough on your mind, but then I realized that you are probably reading the papers like everybody else. When I try to go to sleep at night I cannot because my mind dwells on the horror. During the day, in the store, I look at the old Coca-Cola clock on the wall, I straighten the stacks of Wrigley's Spearmint and I think my sane, familiar world is as unreal to the concentration camp victims as theirs is to me.

So I cheer on the Russians, and believe me, they are no saints either. I just wish the Stalin bastards and the Nazi bastards would kill each other off. Then at last the Jews could live in peace.

Anyway, FDR will fix things up for the poor refugees like he fixed up the Depression, just as soon
as he's done with our country's enemies. I'm praying that maybe it'll end before more young men (not mentioning any names) have to fight.

Danny carefully refolded the letter, slipped it back into its envelope and deposited it on top of the stack in a corner of his foot locker.

He began to gather up his flying gear prior to heading out to the airstrip. He put away his uniform and struggled into his overalls, boots and leather jacket. He paused a moment, as he always did, to ponder his goggles and snug leather helmet. Vivid boyhood memories of Smilin' Jack and Scorchy Smith reverberated within.

Then and now, Danny thought, I'm becoming what I want to be. Goggles and a helmet were the pilot's symbols, and they'd been issued to him by the United States Army.

Last summer Danny had reported to San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center, an enormous and bewildering complex. Right next door was the preflight school, but there were obstacles to be overcome before a would-be pilot could move over there.

Danny took a battery of physical and psychological exams and along with the others waited nervously for the results to be posted along with the dreaded G.D.O.—ground duty only—list. There were plenty of washouts. During this period of tests and endless marching drills the candidates were asked to list on a scale of one to ten their preferences for assignments: bombardier, navigator, pilot. Danny crossed out the first two categories and boldly underlined the last. He intended to be a fighter pilot, and he didn't figure he'd get there by being reticent about his intentions.

The first round of tests was over and the considerably
thinned ranks of recruits could officially call themselves aviation cadets. They were moved across the field to tackle nine weeks of preflight instruction.

Danny discovered that preflight was very much like boot camp, only worse. In addition to the physical drills, surprise inspections, guard duty and KP there was classroom work in science, math, and physics and on military protocol.

Danny worked hard, and when the numbers and facts began to blur together and failure tried to close in, he thought about himself in his fighter, skimming the tops-right off the clouds, and redoubled his efforts. He was smart. He could do it if he tried. His only real fear was that he would fail the physical tests—the high-altitude chamber, for instance. His brain would not betray him, but what about his body?

When the day for the altitude test came, Danny was shaking with nervousness. One of the technicians noticed and almost pulled him from the line, but he talked his way into the chamber, which very much resembled a huge steel oil drum turned on its side. He took his place on the hard wooden bench. His oxygen mask muffled his prayers.

Danny made it through the altitude test and a week later squeaked by on Morse code. Those two tests alone wiped out a fifth of his class.

The next stop was primary flying school, Girder Field near Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Danny arrived there in October and was issued his flying gear, sheepskin-lined leather pants, a jacket and a special helmet that would allow his flight instructor to communicate with him when they went up.

The Fairchild PT-19 was a big, beautiful brute with sleek, low laminated wooden wings, a fabric-covered fuselage, two open cockpits and a two-hundred horsepower six-cylinder Ranger engine. The cadets were given
a parachute procedure briefing and then a familiarization ride.