A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [64]
A car was waiting at the Kortrijk train station to drive them over the French border. A pre-arranged hand signal was flashed at the French customs agent, and they drove through without being asked a question. The car drove the boys to Lille, where they boarded a train to Paris. A taxi at the Gare du Nord took them to another orphanage, where they slept. The next night, they were put on another train for Marseilles, and from there they went to the nearby town of Cassis, where there was a Jewish sports camp. What would a Jewish sports camp be doing on the Mediterranean coast in late 1946? There Isaac and three hundred others received their first military training. Then they boarded a ship for Palestine. At the port a French official was handed a stack of fifteen passports for the entire group of three hundred. The official did not seem troubled by this discrepancy, and with an appropriately bored expression he stamped the passports one at a time until he had been through the pile about a dozen times and decided that was enough stamps. The French had never liked the British Mandate for Palestine and did little to obstruct either Jewish Zionists or Arab anti-2'ionists from operating in the area.
A few months later, the British agreed to give up the Mandate, and on November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted by a margin of three votes for a partitioning of the area, thereby creating the State of Israel. It was a small state that lacked defendable borders, and the Arabs vowed to drive the Jews out by force of arms. Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League, promised to wage “a war of extermination.” As has so often happened since, his words, perfectly chosen to arouse his Arab constituency, also served to better mobilize his adversaries. Young European Jews like Isaac Lipschits were not going to sit tight and hope for the best in another war of extermination. That had been their parents’ mistake. The Haganah was frantically bringing in survivors from Europe. By the end of 1947, about forty thousand recruits were ready or in training, although they had only rifles, Sten guns, and machine guns. After the British abandoned the Mandate, the Haganah could bring in thousands more. It needed fighters. The Arabs had also recruited a Liberation Army, but in addition had almost thirty thousand regular army troops from Arab states.
Isaac, along with seventeen others from the Amsterdam orphanage, was assigned to a Dutch-speaking border unit. Its commander, who came from the northern Dutch town of Groningen, had served as a demolitions expert in the British Army during the war. Alex was left in the hands of an organization called the Youth Aliyah, which was placing children in homes and even operating entire villages. Aaron Waks was working for this same organization in DP camps.
While fighting on the border, Isaac lost track of his brother. When the Arab-Israeli war was over, he and a friend traveled through Israel looking for Alex. Now Isaac began to reflect on what he had done. The Germans had forced Alex to separate from his father and mother when he was two years old. Then when he was seven and had another father and mother, Isaac had done the same thing to him. Isaac was starting to feel guilty when he thought of Alex alone in this ungentle new country. You ask a seven-year-old if he wants to take a trip with you and leave forever. What a question. It was crazy. Along with guilt came panic: What if something had happened to him? More than a thousand Jews had already been killed.
Isaac served on the Israeli border for thirteen months. Then, unaccustomed to the lack of water in the desert, his kidneys gave out. This young survivors’ country intended to keep its forces at a lean fighting weight. Isaac was told that Israel did not need kidney cases, and he was sent back to Holland to recuperate.
But before he left,