My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (23 page)

“When the Red Army arrived, I became the kitchen boy of a Russian brigade. The Russians were hungry for food, drink, and women. I watched them conquer, loot, and rape. I watched them drink and cry. When the war ended in 1945 I bade them farewell. I was thirteen and all alone again. I had no orientation whatsoever. I hadn’t gone to school, I had no historical perspective. I didn’t know where I was or who I was. And Europe was all refugees. Everywhere you went there were refugees, throngs of uprooted children looking for a home. But I had no home. My mother was murdered, my father was gone. The soldiers of the British army’s Jewish Brigade found me as they found others. They collected us and smuggled us first into Italy and then to Yugoslavia. But I was still at odds with myself. Who was I, what was I, where did I belong?

“The
Haganah
sailed from Zagreb to Haifa. The boat was filled with people who didn’t know each other. Everybody got sick, everybody vomited. When we approached shore I was not at all excited. It was another station on the journey, another ghetto. I knew they would go on hounding me the way they had been hounding me for the past five years. I would have to survive as I had been surviving for the past five years. And in order to survive, I would have to win hearts. Here, too, I would have to prove that there was something valuable in me, something that would make it worthwhile for them to keep me alive.”

Aharon Barak, who from 1995 until 2006 served as Israel’s chief justice, sits in his cozy office at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. He is a brilliant liberal jurist who reshaped Israeli jurisprudence and is admired worldwide. But I come to him in the same way I approached Sternhell and Appelfeld. I listen to his life story because I want to understand my
own. Listening to Barak, I try yet again to comprehend the Jewish-Israeli story of the twentieth century.

“When I was born in Lithuania in 1936, my name was Erik Brik,” Barak tells me. “My father was born into a rabbinical family, but he turned his back on all that. He went to the university, studied law, and became the head of the Zionist office in Kovno. My mother was a woman of outstanding intellect. She went to the university and then taught history, German, and Russian. Our home was modest but happy. With my parents I spoke Yiddish; with the Lithuanian nanny I spoke Lithuanian. I was an only child.

“I do not remember life before the Holocaust. Perhaps I have repressed it. So my first memory is of the Holocaust. The German Luftwaffe bombarded the city and soon after that we left home. We put a few of our belongings on a horse-drawn cart and we moved to the ghetto. My next memory is of the Germans arriving in the ghetto, rounding up the Jews and assembling them. A German officer divided everyone: right—left. Those to the right were sent home. Those to the left were sent to death. I was five or six years old. My memory is not clear and the context is not clear. I do not know what the historical truth is. But I remember machine guns mowing down Jews. I remember the Jews of my hometown being murdered en masse by the Nazis.

“Then came the Children’s Action. By the beginning of 1944 the Germans realized they would not win the war. But before defeat they wanted to kill as many Jews as they could. They decided to eliminate all Jewish children in the Kovno ghetto. I remember soldiers going from house to house, taking with them any boy or girl under twelve. I was eight. My mother ran home and held me tightly. She took me away and hid me. I was saved just in time.

“Now I had a problem. I was a Jewish boy living in the ghetto, but there should not be a living Jewish boy in the ghetto. So my parents dressed me up as a twelve-year-old: tall shoes, a hat, grown-up clothes. But we lived in fear that someone would see through the disguise and realize I was not an adolescent. One time a German officer realized I was not an adolescent. He looked at me, smiled, and turned away. Once again I was saved.

“My parents recognized that the ghetto was a death trap. Although it was highly dangerous, they decided to smuggle me out. My father was deputy manager of a sweatshop that sewed uniforms for the Wehrmacht. The uniforms from the sweatshop were placed in large canvas sacks and piled on horse-drawn carts. They put me into a sack, closed it, and threw it onto the cart. They put my sack on the top of the heap so that I wouldn’t suffocate. That was a big mistake: the cart driver sat on my sack. I was nearly crushed and had a hard time breathing. But the eight-year-old that I was did not utter a sound. After the longest half hour of my life I was thrown into a cowshed. Since I was raised in the ghetto I had never seen a cow. When at last the sack was opened, I felt the tongue of a fat, friendly animal licking my face.

“A few days later my father managed to smuggle my mother out of the ghetto and we were reunited. In early 1944 the Nazis were everywhere, and everywhere there were Nazi collaborators. But one Lithuanian family gave refuge to my mother and me. They built a double wall in one of the rooms of their cottage. My mother and I lived in the one and a half meters between the walls for six months. Only at night was I allowed to get out. To walk in the fields, to breathe fresh air. I even rode a horse. But during the long days I sat with my mother in the dark behind the wall as she taught me everything she knew: math, Latin, history.

“My father stayed in the Kovno ghetto until the end. The ghetto was burned to the ground and its inhabitants were exterminated, but my father survived, though his parents were murdered. Most of my mother’s family were also murdered. So when the war ended we were just three: my father, my mother, and me. After the Russians liberated Kovno, they arrested my father but they let him go. So it was clear that we had to flee. We escaped Kovno for Vilna, and Vilna for Grodno, and Grodno for Bucharest. From Bucharest we traveled in a train’s coal car to Budapest. From Budapest we went to Russian-held Austria, and then we fled to British-held Austria via a mountain pass. Throughout the journey we experienced anti-Semitism, humiliation, robbery. I remember drunken Russian soldiers taking my father’s wristwatch. They humiliated my father. They despised us. They treated us like dirt. For them we were the scum of the earth. I watched how both my parents fought tooth and nail so I could stay alive and we could keep our human
dignity. When we reached the British zone, we encountered soldiers of the Jewish Brigade. Here were soldiers with blue-and-white flags sewn onto the lapels of their uniforms, soldiers who spoke Hebrew, soldiers who actually cared for us and wanted to help us. You cannot imagine our excitement. Even now, when I tell you about it, I am all emotions. After all that had happened, Jewish soldiers were a dream. They were a messianic revelation.

“The Jewish Brigade took us to Milan, and from Milan we went to Rome. In Rome they put us up in a mansion previously owned by a fascist count. And suddenly, for the first time in my living memory, we were comfortable. We were taken care of and fed. We were treated as humans. And I went to school. I studied. My mother took me to town to see the opera. But what I loved most was the mansion’s cellar, which I discovered one day. There I found the count’s fancy clothes and swords and daggers. For the first time in my life I had a world of my own, a world of my own imagination. Left to myself I put on the count’s clothes and held his sword and imagined that I was a count, too. Not a Jew, but a count.

“Of the journey to Palestine I remember only the last night. Standing on deck, when we saw the lights of Haifa, my parents held me tight and we all cried. But when we disembarked in the morning it was all quick and efficient. From the port of Haifa we were taken to a rented apartment in Tel Aviv. Days later I was sent on my own to relatives in a Sharon Plain village to learn Hebrew. What struck me immediately was the scent of the soil, the orange groves, the Jewish farmers. A few days later, my aunt took me to an Atta workmen’s clothing store in the village of Hod Hasharon. She bought me a bell-shaped Israeli hat, khaki shirts, khaki trousers, and sandals. I had been in the country only a week. I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t know the land. But when I took off my old clothes I shed the past, the Diaspora, the ghetto. And when I stood in the Atta store in a khaki shirt, khaki trousers, and sandals, I was a new person. An Israeli.”

Louise Aynachi is different. She is a woman, she is from Iraq, she is not well known. But like Sternhell, Appelfeld, and Barak, she, too, experienced the great transformation that many Jews experienced in the 1940s
and 1950s. Listening to her in the living room of her daughter’s fancy apartment in North Tel Aviv, I hear another chapter of the Jewish-Israeli story of the twentieth century.

“For twenty-six hundred years, Jews lived between the Tigris and the Euphrates,” Aynachi tells me. “When the British established modern Iraq, they gave Jews equality and full rights. And when Iraq gained its independence in 1932, the Jews’ civic and economic rights were maintained. Of the hundred and thirty thousand Iraqi Jews, a hundred thousand lived in the capital, Baghdad, and played a major role in its commercial and intellectual life. Many of the big businesses were owned by Jews, and many of the leading intellectuals were Jews. Jews were also politically influential, and some of them served in parliament. My father was a senior executive at the national train company. My uncle was in parliament. In the Iraq in which I grew up in the 1930s, Jews were not servants but masters. In the modern quarter of Salhiya, on the banks of the Tigris, we lived a life of dignity, prosperity, and happiness.

“In the late 1930s there was a growing German influence in Iraq.
Mein Kampf
was translated into Arabic, and Nazi propaganda was distributed. The pro-Nazi Al-Futuwa youth movement was gaining ground and support. For the rising fascist forces, Jews were the collaborators of the British and the agents of imperialism. And yet, like the Jews of Germany, my family and my circle of friends in Baghdad refused to see what was coming. The Babylonian Diaspora was a perfect Diaspora, they said. It gave Jews what Jews had never had: equality and security, prosperity and prestige. No one could imagine that one day lightning would strike.

“On April 1, 1941, an anti-British military coup occurred. In May, the British put down the mutiny. A day after the British-supported king returned to the capital, nationalist soldiers and civilians, frustrated by the failure of the coup, took out their anger on a delegation of Jewish dignitaries who were on the Al Khurr Bridge on their way to greet the homecoming king. Immediately afterward, Jews were attacked in the Al Rusafa quarter and at Abu Sifyan. For thirty-six hours, pro-Nazi soldiers and youngsters wrought havoc on the Jews. They were joined by poor Baghdad Bedouins and policemen. On the holiday of Shavuot, hundreds of Jewish apartments were ruined and hundreds of Jewish businesses looted. Torah books were violated, synagogues
burned. Altogether, seven hundred Jews were wounded and one hundred and eighty murdered. Among the murdered were old men, mothers, and infants.

“When the news of the
farhud
, the pogrom, reached us, my father assembled the family and we all moved to my aunt’s home in central Baghdad. We locked ourselves in, terrified. We heard the mob closing in. We saw them waving knives and axes. We saw their eyes inflamed with hatred. The mob broke into neighboring Jewish homes. Women were raped, infants killed. There was literally blood in the streets. There were body parts in the streets. There was chaos. Peaceful Baghdad had suddenly gone mad. The world had shifted from its natural course. The impossible had happened.

“Our family was miraculously saved. For some unknown reason, the mob spared the house we were hiding in. So after the
farhud
ended, we tried to forget. We tried to act as if it had never happened. I married an affluent textile merchant, Naim Aynachi, and we brought three children into the world. Like my parents, we lived in an elegant villa on the banks of the Tigris. Life was as sweet as sweet could be.

“In May 1948, Israel was established. In July, the Iraqi government passed an anti-Zionist law. In September, a highly prominent Jewish businessman was hanged in Basra. Jewish government workers were fired in October. The law curtailing Jewish rights was passed in March 1950. There were threats and sporadic attacks. Now most young Jews in Baghdad no longer believed in the Jewish future of Baghdad. After the
farhud
, many of them became Zionists or Communists, and after the establishment of Israel they witnessed the rising tide of national Arab anti-Semitism wash over Iraq. They understood that twenty-six hundred years of Jewish life in Baghdad would not give them clemency. They knew that the Arab-Jewish honeymoon of the 1920s and 1930s was over. But my father’s family and my husband’s family still believed in the promise of Baghdad. With all their soul they clung to their happy memories of life by the Tigris.

“In 1950 things got worse. First Jews fled via Iran at the rate of a thousand a month. Then they fled in direct flights arranged by Israel at the rate of two or three thousand a month. In the spring of 1951, ten to fifteen thousand Jews fled Iraq each month. As the community collapsed, even my father and my husband realized there was no other way.
Against everything they believed in, my parents boarded a plane in March 1951. Against everything we believed in, my husband and I and our three children boarded a plane in June 1951. Exactly ten years after it took place, the
farhud
triumphed. On the wooden bench of a Mossad Skymaster I sat crying, watching the Baghdad I loved fade away. Two hours later the Skymaster landed in Lydda.”

Sternhell, Appelfeld, Barak, and Aynachi are just four of the 750,000 Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel between 1945 and 1951. Of that number, more than 90 percent arrived in the first three and a half years of the newly founded state. In forty-two months, the number of immigrants absorbed (685,000) surpassed the number of those absorbing them (655,000), a percentage comparable to what would happen if twenty-first-century America took in 350 million immigrants in three and a half years. The numbers were daunting and so was the challenge. In its first decade of existence, the Jewish state experienced a wave of immigration never experienced by any other state in modern times.