New Heavens (10 page)

One afternoon in February 1945, after returning from bombing and strafing an area around a bridge in the north, which was particularly heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns, Willie and I sat down with a glass of wine. (One of our Kittyhawks flew regularly to Sicily to bring back wine
in two drop tanks, cooled on the way by flying back at 20,000 feet. We made sure that this aircraft was always at the ready whatever the exigencies of the military situation.)

We were taking a sip of the sweet marsala wine when we were interrupted by the sound of firing from the direction of the coast. We walked down to the beach where infantrymen were practicing with anti-tank guns. They did not look like British troops, though they were dressed in British army battledress. They were speaking in a foreign language.

A tall blond officer shouted something to his men. The word he used was “Kadimah.” At that time I knew no Hebrew beyond the little that I had learned for my Bar Mitzvah some six years before, but I knew some other words from my time in the Habonim youth movement and recognized the word, which meant “forward.”

Strong emotions ran through me when I realized that Jewish soldiers from Palestine were fighting here beside me. As soon as the exercise ended, I approached the officer and introduced myself saying, “I heard you speaking Hebrew and understand that you are from Palestine.” He answered, “Yes, we are in the Jewish Brigade. What are you?” I replied, “I am a South African from a Zionist family with connections in Palestine and the Yishuv.”

We struck up an immediate bond, and when I visited their officers' mess that night, we talked about the war and our respective roles. They were part of the second battalion of the Jewish Brigade and were carrying out their final training before moving up to the front in Alfonsine not far ahead of us. Events prevented me from establishing contact again, but I heard much later in Israel that the same officer,
Danny Cornfeld, was again an officer, this time in the Israeli forces during the War of Independence. Neither of us could have guessed that we would be fighting together in the same armed force in Israel in a little more than two years.

Those of us on duty would sit around waiting for the signal to take off. We were galvanized into action when we heard the gaggle horn, an English hunting horn connected to the exhaust of a truck. When the engine was started it gave out a strident blast, enough to warn if any Germans were within five kilometers of us. We would then race to the field in our own truck, which was bizarrely equipped with a beautiful antique armchair upholstered in yellow silk. There were also other odd pieces of furniture “lifted” from houses in the area.

Not long afterward, I flew my mission to Venice and ended up in the sea.

LONDON AND FLYING STEEPLE CHASE

AFTER having had some exposure to Europe during my service, I felt that I needed to move on from South Africa to try my chances in the outside world. I decided to begin my studies at the London School of Economics.

London, despite its gaping war wounds, still maintained its proud image. The Londoners wore their threadbare and faded clothes with pride. At the London School of Economics (L.S.E.) the environment wasn't like the university I attended in Johannesburg. It is on Houghton Street on a city block, with virtually no campus life as I knew it. The students came in the morning for lectures and went home in the evening. There were occasional functions, usually political meetings with a strong bent toward the left.

L.S.E. seethed with political turmoil and was a center of socialist intellectualism in Europe. The makeup of the political organizations at the university showed this. There were
about a thousand members of the Soc-Soc or Socialist Society and less than a hundred members of the Conservative Society. Anything with a tinge of the right wing or belief in free enterprise was decried as fascist. Not being a political animal, I joined the marginal student Zionist society.

In the first winter, I went to Swedish Lapland for a skiing holiday. Having been neutral during the war, Sweden's shops had all the things not seen for years in England, and I was amazed at the luxury everywhere. The peacetime tempo and atmosphere and the absence of the shortages, which I had encountered in postwar England, were striking. While at the ski resort, I met a Swedish girl, and when we returned to Stockholm, she invited me to her parents' home. On the living room piano, there were many family photographs. Almost without exception the men in the photographs were in Swedish military uniform. Katerina explained that her uncle was one of the king's brothers. Two years later I was to meet him in Israel as Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the United Nations's mission in the Middle East. Shortly after his arrival, he was assassinated in Israel by the Stern Group.

Living in London was very stimulating, and though there was much to see and do, I started flying again. I discovered that as a former pilot in an RAF squadron, I could hire small aircraft at subsidized rates. I began to fly to France and Switzerland on weekends and on vacations from the university.

The Palestine Club was not far from Piccadilly Circus. One Sunday evening I went to the club and met up with a few Palestinian Jews. One of them was a tall gangly fellow
with blue eyes and a mischievous look. We soon discovered that we were the same age and had both been fighter pilots in the RAF during the war. He was Ezer Weizman, nephew of Chaim Weizmann. Ezer was studying aeronautical engineering at a polytechnic in London. We struck up a close friendship based on our common flying interests and our total commitment to Zionism.

I took Ezer with me on flights when I rented aircraft from the RAF flying club at Panshangar near Hatfield. Some of the flights were in a tiny Moth Minor with two open cockpits in tandem and others in an Auster Autocrat. I paid the princely sum of four pounds a day plus fuel and insurance and made several trips to France and Switzerland. One such flight was memorable and is an example of how not to do things.

I had planned to go to Arosa in Switzerland for a skiing holiday with a girlfriend and asked Ezer to come with me to fly the aircraft back to England while I stayed on. We flew to Lympne near the Channel coast to pass through customs and immigration formalities. The weather was bad, and the airlines were all grounded. But I pressed on, hoping that if we ran into difficulties we could either return or land somewhere. Shortly after takeoff, we ran into clouds and couldn't see the ground. Neither of us had instrument ratings and precious little instrument time, and we soon got into difficulties. The cloud was dense and dark, indicating that we were flying into a cumulonimbus storm cloud, the scourge of all pilots.

Immediately after we entered the cloud, turbulence began to throw us around the sky like a shuttlecock. Driving
rain interspersed with sheets of hail pounded on the thin windows of the tiny craft as we bounced, ducked, and dived. Mighty updrafts of air pressed us violently against our seats as we were lifted hundreds of feet at a time, followed by sickening plunges. I had difficulty controlling the aircraft as the airspeed increased at an alarming rate while I put the Auster into a climb, dumbfounding me completely. The more I pulled back on the stick to climb to reduce speed, the more the speed built up. The altimeter showed we were losing height at a terrifying rate.

Fortunately, we broke out of the cloud at 4,000 feet and were shaken to find that we were in a near-vertical dive. With hindsight, of course, it is simple to understand what happened. We had gotten into a spiral dive without realizing it, and I was tightening the spiral by pulling back on the stick. If we had had more instrument time and training, usually a low priority for fighter pilots, we would have known what was happening and could have solved the problem by first leveling our wings and then pulling the stick back to reduce the speed. It is difficult to describe the magnitude of the disorientation when flying in clouds without using instruments.

Shaken and embarrassed by our poor airmanship, we continued across the Channel en route to Lille in northern France to refuel. While over the middle of the Channel, the turbulence became so severe that the compass deviation card jumped out of its slot on to the floor. We picked up heavy icing, and with low clouds and near-zero visibility, we had difficulty finding Lille. When we eventually reached it and landed, we found that the field was closed to air traffic
and the main runway was barely visible. After all we had been through, there was no fuel available.

On the next leg, we spotted an airfield, and while circling noted a flag flying above the control tower. Neither of us recognized it. After landing we found that it was the Belgian flag, and the field was a military base at Courtrai. The air force men there were obliging, causing us no trouble for landing without permission. At that time shortly after World War II, there were very few small private airplanes flying from country to country, and we were invariably received with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. The military field had no fuel suitable for our aircraft and we left immediately.

At this time we were short of fuel and night was coming on; I was worried that we would soon be running out of daylight. We were without night flying equipment and instruments so I decided to continue as quickly as possible to Brussels. By the time we arrived there, it was almost dark. Shortly after landing, while taxiing to the dispersal area, we ran out of fuel and the engine stopped. That proved how extremely foolhardy we were in flying into the night without instruments or fuel.

I found the Shell agent and after refueling the Auster he obligingly smuggled us out of the airport in his van, for we were without visas. The following morning we left for Basle in Switzerland. The weather was still bad, but eventually we found our way. As we approached the field, I turned as usual into a left-hand circuit. However, seeing a large cloud reaching down to the ground close on the side of the field near the airport, I decided to do a right-hand circuit and
landed. There was no air traffic in the area. At the field there was only a skeleton staff, who were surprised to see a light plane flying when all large aircraft were grounded because of the weather. When we had settled down, I asked them whether they knew the reason for the cloud almost on the field and extending right down to the deck. They said, “Don't you know that cloud covers a mountain? This field has a mandatory right-hand pattern.” We must have used up about three lives on that reckless flight.

A new problem arose. I did not need a Swiss visa because of my South African passport, but Ezer was in trouble with his Palestinian passport and no visa. We explored every possibility and finally Ezer exclaimed, “My Uncle Chaim is here at the Zionist Congress! Let's try and get his help.” After inquiries, he telephoned Chaim Weizmann at the Drei Könige Hotel, the venue for the Zionist Congress, and he arranged entry for his nephew into Switzerland. We arrived at the hotel in our flying togs, looking scruffy and quite unlike the elegantly attired delegates at the congress.

Chaim Weizmann was kind to us, and I spent some time chatting with him. He seemed uneasy and asked me while pointing to delegates who were sitting at a nearby table, “Are they some of ours?” I did not understand who he was referring to, but it was later explained to me that he meant the Revisionist delegates who were the main opposition party to the mainstream Zionists. I heard later that as he advanced in years he became paranoid about the Revisionist opposition and in particular about their leader Menachem Begin.

After one night I took the train to Arosa and left Ezer to
fly the Auster back to England. On the way back, he got lost and after landing in a field to ask directions, he damaged a wing when he struck a fence during takeoff. He patched it up with adhesive tape and eventually got back to Pans-hangar in England.

My first confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust came when I went to the cinema in 1945 in London. Customary at that time, a long newsreel was shown before the main film. It started with some mundane news about the end of the war in Europe, and then without warning, a film appeared about the Nazi death camps. The pictures of the skeletal Jewish prisoners, the gas chambers, and the crematoria threw my mind into turmoil, and I walked the streets of London in a daze.

Deeply disturbed and feeling more Jewish than I had ever felt before, I tried to learn more about the Holocaust. I sought out survivors of the death camps to hear firsthand accounts of the atrocities. It was hard to learn many of the details, for understandably, the survivors were reluctant to recount their experiences. But by late 1945, information about the Holocaust was beginning to appear, and I delved deeply into the history of those years.

Initially, my search was to find out how millions of my race and religion had gone to the gas chambers, virtually without resistance. It took me a long time to understand the situation of the victims and the environment in which
they were living at the time. I began to understand how the cold, starving Jews were overwhelmed by the meetings with the apparently invincible members of the German master race.

I was shattered by the evidence of the cold, inhuman machinery of death, which was tacitly accepted in Europe, even by those who resisted the German armed forces. I will never understand how the rest of the world stood by and did virtually nothing to stop the mass murder of our people. It is common knowledge that this huge operation was known to the intelligence forces of the Allies early in the war. When I learned that the Allies bombed a synthetic rubber plant five kilometers from the ovens of Auschwitz, I became convinced that there could be no justification for the Allies not having at least bombed the gas chambers and ovens. The casualties that might have been caused to the inmates who were in any case destined to be gassed would have been a fraction of the total numbers of deaths. Even bombing the railway lines leading to the death camps might have saved many innocent people, and the announcement of these raids and their purpose might have stopped the seeming indifference by the Allies to what was happening.