Exodus - Leon Uris [169]
Ari was faced with the decision of deciding who got the visas and who didn’t. Each day he was the victim of threats or the object of bribes and desperate pleas. The Zionist rule of thumb was to get the children out. For five years the Jews had appealed to their German numbers to leave Germany.
Along with the children there were essential scientists, doctors, professionals, and artisans, the very cream of the society.
Ari and the Aliyah Bet were moving them in mere hundreds, while thousands were being trapped.
He decided on a desperate gamble in an attempt to get several thousand visas at one time. That way, Ari reckoned, he could at least move the “essentials” and many children out. He alerted Aliyah Bet in France to be prepared either to receive these thousands—or to expect his own disappearance to a concentration camp.
Ari then went into negotiations with high Nazis to sell them the idea of issuing exit permits in larger numbers. He argued with a strange but fascinating logic. Britain and Germany were both trying to win Arab favor; Ari pointed out that the more Jews who got to Palestine, the more embarrassed the British would be.
How paradoxical that the Aliyah Bet was teaming up with the Nazis in an effort against the British. Ari quickly had training farms set up in the Berlin area under Gestapo protection.
In addition to all the visas he could buy, steal, bribe, and otherwise wangle, Ari built an underground railroad right under the Germans’ noses for getting out the top-priority Jews; but these people, mostly scientists, escaped only in twos and threes. During the fear-filled summer of 1939 he worked around the clock as the time ran out.
Meanwhile in London, Barak Ben Canaan and the other negotiators worked the clock around too. They spoke to members of Parliament, Ministers, or anyone who would listen to them. But do what they might, the British would not budge from their immigration policy.
In mid-August, Ari received an urgent message from Aliyah Bet in France: LEAVE GERMANY AT ONCE.
Ari ignored the cable and continued his work, for each day now seemed a race against death.
Another cable came. This time it was a Haganah order for him to leave.
Ari gambled on just seventy-two hours more, for he was working on a stack of visas to get a trainload of children into Denmark.
A third cable came—and a fourth.
As the trainload of children crossed the Danish frontier, Ari Ben Canaan made his own escape. He left Germany forty-eight hours before Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled into Poland and ushered in World War II.
Ari and Barak Ben Canaan returned to Palestine from their separate missions. Both men were exhausted and both of them were crushed by despair.
At the outbreak of war it took only ten minutes for the Jewish leaders to announce their course of action. Ben Gurion urged the Yishuv to come forth for duty in the British Army to fight the common enemy.
There was additional encouragement from the Haganah which saw this as an opportunity to train its men legally.
General Haven-Hurst, the Palestine military commander, raised strong objections with the War Office about letting Palestinian Jews into the British Army. “If we train Jews now and give them combat experience we will only be spiting ourselves, for surely we will have to fight the very same Jews later on.”
Within a week after the war began one hundred and thirty thousand men and women—one out of four in the entire Yishuv—had signed up at Yishuv Central to volunteer for the British Army.
As for the Arabs, most of the Arab world looked upon the Germans as their “liberators” and waited for them.
It was impossible for the British to ignore the Yishuv’s offer. It was also impossible not to heed General Haven-Hurst’s warning. The War Office decided upon the middle road of accepting Palestinian Jews but keeping them out of front-line assignments so that they could not get actual