War: Death's Worst Enemy

July 1st, 1948.
         
“Rachel, wake up,” I heard someone whisper in my ear. “We’re here.”

         I didn’t know what was going on until my two-year old sister Hannah nudged me. “We here, we here!” she chanted. “Izeel!”

         I quickly opened my eyes, and she clapped and giggled at me. Even standing there in rags, holding her patched up bear with no nose and only one eye, she was the cutest little girl in the world. Dark brown curls hung just below her ears, her bangs slightly covering her hazel eyes. I wondered if I was that cute when I was her age. Probably not.

         “Smell that?” my brother Andrew asked. “That’s the smell of freedom.”

         He loved to say things like that. He felt it made him sound more professional, more like a soldier. I thought it made him sound corny.

         We shuffled off the ship with chattering Jews who had been unable to come home until now. They were like us. Andrew would always ask why we didn’t just go to Israel right after the Holocaust. Papa explained that the British issued a policy called the White Paper, which was made in 1939, and said that immigration to Palestine would be limited to 75,000 people in the first five years, and every five years after that, only 10,000 were allowed to immigrate.  That’s when Andrew would ask why we didn’t just hop on a boat and come over illegally, but Mama and Papa wouldn’t allow it. They weren’t about to risk us getting put into cages and treated like we were in a concentration camp. Papa had already been there, and he barely survived. When he came home, skin and bones, we cried tears of joy that he was alive.

         Why didn’t we go to a concentration camp? We were smuggled into Sweden by a family Papa knew way back when. He promised he would meet us there, for he had to go back and get our dog, but they got him before he had the chance. When the Great War was over, and he was freed from the camp, the Swedish family, whose name is impossible to remember, invited us to stay with them until we found our own home.

         Now we had that. It was beautiful despite the fact that people who looked awfully like rag dolls were surrounding me. It smelled no different, and looked no different, but felt a hell of a lot different. Better. There was something in the air that made me feel as if I should be spinning in circles with my little sisters, laughing as we fell to the ground. Andrew and I used to do that, but he’s 18 now, much too old for “silly children games”, as he likes to call them.

         We smiled as we got near the gate. I walked between Mama and Andrew, with Debbie holding Mama’s other hand, Papa behind us, and Hannah on his shoulders. They let us in, and we cried. We cried so hard that our eyes grew red and puffy, and stayed that way throughout the day.

         
July 9th, 1948

A week or so later, Papa and Andrew were sent to war. Mama, being the stubborn woman she was, refused to hide underground with the rest of the women, and signed up to be a nurse. As for me, I didn’t enjoy the idea of being with a bunch of whining children and crying women, so I signed up to help the nurses.

         Mama made me work in the back, organizing the supplies and bringing things to the nurses, since I had no medical experience whatsoever. I think Mama was a nurse at some point in her life, but if she had once told me, I forgot. I rarely got called to help with anything, because I was so young, but I tried with all my power when I was needed. These people did not deserve death. They didn’t live through the Holocaust, get beaten down, starve, or fight for their freedom just to die trying to keep it.

         I got myself worked up about the whole ordeal and accidentally knocked over a bottle of penicillin, which is used to prevent infections. It was sent crashing to the ground. The glass shattered, and I cringed. This wasn’t going to end up well.

         “What was that?” one of the older nurses, Mrs. Bernstein yelled from the far side of the next room. She was a short and stumpy woman with wild brown hair and tired brown eyes, but the fiercest voice. She could make Hitler cry if she wasn’t so terrified that the Nazis would kill her.

         “Um…” I couldn’t lie, because she’d find out eventually. “I accidentally knocked something over.” I tried to make myself sound as innocent as possible like I would when I was younger, hoping it would lessen the punishment.

         I bent over and started picking up the pieces when the door opened behind me and someone gasped. It was Mrs. Bernstein.

         “Do you know how much we need that?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips. I think she only did that to keep herself from punching someone.

         “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” I couldn’t look her in the eyes, so I stared at her shoes. She had scuffed up old black shoes that looked like they belonged in church they looked so nice. How could someone afford those? I quickly wiped the mental image of Mrs. Bernstein dressed in all black, creeping along the side of a building before picking the lock and strolling in. That would be preposterous.

         “What will happen if we need that and it’s not here? People could die!” She threw her hands up into the air, before placing them once again on her hips.

         I blinked back tears as the picture of a bloody man lay dying on one of the gray beds. One of the nurses is treating him, when another one comes and says, “There’s no more penicillin. I’m afraid we can do nothing more.” Then I thought of the man. His death awaiting him as his eyes look around confused and scared, for he doesn’t know what will happen to him. With his last final breath, he looks at me, and the guilt floods toward me, plowing down anything in its way.

         It’s as if I took a trip from reality, and when I came back, I was on my knees, head in hands, crying. After a moment, I get the guts to look up at Mrs. Bernstein. Her expression has softened, and her arms fall limb to her sides. She walks up to me and sits down, being careful not to sit in the mess.

         “Now don’t cry. I’m sure we’ve more than enough to go around.”

         I sniffle and nod. My knees are bleeding from kneeling in the glass, my head aches from crying, and my stomach hurts from thinking about how Papa and Andrew are our there in the war, where every day could be their last.

         “Here, let’s bandage you up. I’ll show you how to do it properly in case you ever need to.”

         I get up slowly, avoiding any other glass, and follow Mrs. Bernstein into the next room. It’s an old brown building that had survived the bombing in the first month of the war, with a few small windows, which are too depressing to look out of, a rock-tile floor, and rows of mattresses carefully lined up, about half of them with bandaged soldiers sleeping restlessly under gray sheets.

         I sit myself down on a chair next to one of the empty beds. It creaks as I put my weight on it.

         “Now then.” Mrs. Bernstein shows me how to bandage a minor wound, claiming it will be perfectly fine because I had kneeled in the penicillin as well as the glass. She was a sweet lady after all.

         “Do you have any family in the war?” I ask out of nowhere. She smiles a sad and tired smile, then sits down on the bed next to me.

         “My two sons are fighting.”

         I want to know more, but I don’t ask. I don’t want to see her cry, because that would just be a heartbreaking sight.

         “My Papa and brother are in the war.”

         “I’m sure they’ll all come back fine.”

         I wasn’t too reassured. Why should I be? Papa and Andrew were out there, among thousands of other Jews, fighting off Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan. Sure, during the four-week truce we made an air force, a navy, and a tank battalion , but what if it’s not enough? What if they did the same thing, and their armies were more powerful still? I wipe these thoughts from my mind and try to stay positive about the whole thing.

July 14th, 1948.

         I’m officially sick of the hospital. The bricks on the walls seem to swirl together because I stare at them so often, there’s no more organizing to do with the medicine cabinet, and strangely enough, there weren’t very many patients. The ones that were there scared me a bit, though. It’s strange, because if they weren’t bandaged or bleeding, then I probably would have no problem sitting down and having a normal conversation with them, but now that they are, there’s just something weird about them. It’s like they’re not quite whole people anymore, because they’re missing and arm, an eye, or some blood. I would occasionally be sent to give them food or water, but that was all the contact I made with them, a simple “here, have some food”, and a simple “thank you” back.

         “Rachel, I need you to look after the man in bed two while I get him a new bandage. He has a bullet wound and I need you to put pressure on the cloth over his wound,” Mama tells me. I nod, not knowing what else to do, and walk over to bed two, where a man lay, staring at the squares on the ceiling with one broken arm and a bloody rag over the other one.

         “Well hello there sweetie,” he says to me, and not knowing how to respond to that, I just smile. “The bullet hole is on my shoulder.”

         I hold the cloth over his shoulder and watch blood seep into each individual stitch, crawling up the cloth and under my hand.

         “I didn’t know they had such young nurses in the war,” the man says to me.

         “I’m helping my Mama, because I didn’t wanna go hide with the rest.”

         “That’s very noble of you. How long has your family been in Israel?”

         “Since the first of the month. My Mama, Papa, two sisters, and brother came over on the first ship we could find.” I have no idea why I am telling him this, but I am. It’s not quite as uncomfortable as I thought it would be.

         “I was lucky enough to be one of the first people to immigrate here. Before the White Paper and before Israel’s independence.”

         It was silent for a moment or two.

         “How did you get this?” I ask.

         He looks at his arm and chuckles. How could a man be in so much pain and still laugh and smile as if nothing was wrong?

         “I’m a little embarrassed, really. I stepped in front of my friend’s gun right as he decided to shoot an Arab. Luckily it only got my shoulder.”

         “What’s it like? Being out there in the war, I mean.” It was a question that had been on my mind for quite some time now.

         “It’s terrifying and exhilarating all at once. You’ve got adrenaline pumping through your veins and keeping you awake all night, just in case of a surprise attack on your camp, and you’re afraid to get close to those around you, because you’re afraid you’ll lose them. You feel good about it all, though, because you know that you’re fighting for the freedom of your country, and if you come home alive, you’ll be a big hero. At least that’s my case. I don’t know what everyone else is thinking, or else we would have gotten all the Arabs secrets already.” Another chuckle from him, followed by a sigh, making me wonder if his mind is as restless as mine, wondering what’s happening to everyone out there fighting, and how the war’s going.

         “What are the chances that my Papa and brother are coming back alive?”

         He looks a bit shocked that I would ask something like that, but then calms and smiles. I can feel his blood warm on my hand now, and wonder what’s taking Mama this long to find more bandages.

         “I’m sure they’ll come back fine. Perhaps a bit scratched up, but fine. Israel is winning now, didn’t you hear? It probably won’t be too long before they give up.”

         I feel so relieved as he tells me this. When Mrs. Bernstein told me they would be ok, I doubted her because who was she to say that? She wasn’t out there each day watching everyone fight and die. Now that an actual soldier was telling me this, though, I felt much better.

         Mama comes back, holding new bandages. “I’ve got your new bandages,” she says to the man.

         “Much thanks. Is this young lady yours?” I blush.

         “Why yes, she’s my daughter.”

         “She’s a fine young lady. I think the others would love to have someone talk to them, and she seems to be rather good at that.”

         Mama looks at me and smiles widely. “Well, I guess we have one more job for you, honey.”

         I take the bloody cloth off his arm and my heart seems to skip a beat as I look at the man’s wound. It’s not large, but it’s brutal, with blood blotched skin and under that, a bone showing at the end of a small hole. It made me shiver ever so slightly. I walked away and into the back room, where I proceeded to throw up in the toilet.

         “What’s wrong?” I didn’t need to look up to see Mrs. Bernstein.

         “It’s horrible.”

         “Are you squeamish with blood, after being here for a week?”

         “A bit. I just mean the whole thing,” I stare in the face of what was once my lunch, “everything about this war makes me queasy. Why can’t the Arabs just leave us alone?”

         I didn’t feel the need to throw up again, but I stayed there, on my knees, holding my hair away from my face and staring at the toilet seat, unable to look at the grotesque wounds outside or the crap in the toilet.

         “When Britain and France knew the Ottoman Empire would fall, Britain had promised both the Jews and the Arabs Palestine, which is now Israel. At the end of the war, the Jews got the land, and the Arabs felt deceived by the British and had a hate for the Jews who stole what they could have had. The British said that they could still live there, and they would be the majority, but Arabs didn’t like Jews, like a lot of people seemed to do in the world, so imagine how they felt when we had independence.  They must have been furious.”

         It made such perfect sense, and yet, it didn’t. Why did everyone seem to hate us? What was wrong with Jews?  Is there really such a difference between us and everyone else?
         
July 18th, 1948.

         Another truce has been made. I don’t know how long it will be for, but hopefully it will last longer than a month. I’ve been sitting and talking with the patients at the hospital, keeping them and me entertained. Sometimes I would sit and listen to their war stories, and sometimes I would tell them stories of my own.

         As I was eating lunch, I heard some of the nurses calling loudly to each other. I was afraid to look, because this had happened once before in the first week, and it wasn’t a good sign. Last time someone had an allergic reaction to the penicillin and started shaking violently. They had to kill him, to put it bluntly.

         My anxiety rose as I thought of all the men I knew in there. What if one of them died? My breathing rapidly rose as I decided I had to know what was going on, so I gathered up all my courage and left my lunch after taking only a bite. It was probably a good thing, though, because I could already feel my stomach churn as I watched the nurses panicking as they tended to…it was bed four, a young man only a few years older than me. He came in with a nasty infection in his right leg. It had to be amputated because the infection was too bad to treat and we didn’t want it to spread.

         It didn’t work, and now he was dying. Right in front of my eyes, and I was reminded of the first day I was here, when I spilled the bottle of penicillin. I thought of what I thought of that day, with the dying man in need of that which I just spilled. Now I think of how he could have used that before he came. If only he had gotten here earlier, I wouldn’t have to watch this. Right before he stopped breathing, I thought of what he told me last time we talked.



         I sit on the chair next to Gabriel’s bed, the same chair I was in when Mrs. Bernstein bandaged up my knees. Gabriel’s sitting up and reading me his dirt-covered book. He stops at the end of the book and sets it down on my lap.
         “I want you to have it,” he says.
         I pick it up and run my fingers over the torn cover. I can’t read well, but maybe Andrew can help me.
         “Thank you.”
         He smiles tiredly.
         “Are you ok?” I ask.
         “Yes. I’m perfect.”



         He must have known he wasn’t doing so well, or else he wouldn’t have looked so sad that day. I turned away, no longer able to watch.

         “I’m sorry sweetie,” Mama said.

         “You know what they say, war’s Death’s best friend,” another nurse said sadly.

         For all those people who say war is Death’s best friend, they’re wrong. Just think about it, who in their right mind would want to go around all day collecting peoples’ souls? As if every day life wasn’t enough, we had to throw in a bunch of guns, bombs and armored cars to help do the job. If you ask me, war is Death’s worst enemy.

July 20th, 1949.

         “Can you believe it Mama? The war’s over!” I skip in circles in the hospital, getting a few chuckles from my new friends. After Gabriel died, the others got better rather quickly. New people were brought in, and if there were any more deaths, I wasn’t notified. 

         The second truce ended October 15th, 1948. After that Israel launched a series of attacks on the Arabs. On February 24th, Israel and Egypt finally signed an armistice agreement, which is pretty much a peace treaty.  Lebanon signed an agreement on March 23rd, Transjordan on April 3rd, and Syria on July 20th. Today. Our side lost about 6,000 people, according to Mrs. Bernstein. The number is still climbing, sadly. 

         “Everything is perfect, now,” she says with her bright smile that I love so much.

         “Have you heard from Papa and Andrew yet? Are they ok?”

         “I’ve gotten word that Andrew’s in another hospital down south more, and Papa’s by his side making sure he’s ok.”

         I felt as though a two-ton weight had been taken off my back, knowing that my family was safe. Hannah and Debbie were going to meet us, and we would finally be together again. It’s amazing how much I missed them all. I still had to take care of the patients here, of course, but Andrew was going to be transferred to this hospital so we could be with him, and Papa would follow.

         Everything was perfect, just like Mama said.