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Inside Intel / Survivors, forgotten but now remembered

By Yossi Melman

On November 29, the 60th anniversary of the United Nations declaration establishing two states in the land of Palestine, the Palmach House in Ramat Aviv will dedicate a wing commemorating Holocaust survivors' role in the War of Independence. How did the survivors, who have been making headlines over their struggle for a decent government allowance, penetrate the bastion of the "men with the beautiful forelocks" - the Palmach-generation heroes like Uri who "walked through the fields" and Elik who "was born from the sea," as author Moshe Shamir described them?

The story begins about a year and a half ago. Yeshayahu (Shaike) Gavish, chair of the Palmach Generation Association and a former general, turned to Moshe Zanbar, the former Bank of Israel governor, requesting a donation of about $1 million for the Palmach Museum. When Zanbar, a Holocaust survivor, met with the veteran Palmachniks, the discussions went beyond financial issues and developed into a penetrating look at national memory.

Zanbar said that to his dying day, he would not forgive the country for two humiliations he experienced as a Holocaust survivor here: that he was called a coward, and that he and the other survivors who fought in the War of Independence were referred to as gahal - "recruits from abroad" - as opposed to mahal - "volunteers from abroad" - like the other Jews and non-Jews who fought in 1948.

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"Why did they call us 'recruits from abroad' while the 3,000 volunteers from Western countries were called 'volunteers from abroad'?" he asks with restrained anger. "If they were volunteers, how much more were we volunteers? We knew what death was. After we survived hell we decided to come to Palestine, where we had never set foot, where we had no relatives, and we endangered our lives for it. The pioneers sang: 'We came to the country to build and to be built in it.' We came to this country not in order to be built, but to build it. To live or to die for it."

Zanbar was born in 1926 in Hungary. After the Nazi occupation in 1944, Zanbar was forced into labor at the Dachau concentration camp. His parents were murdered in Auschwitz. After the war, he returned to Hungary and began studying economics at the university in Budapest. At some point he left school to volunteer for the Haganah, and a short time later he decided to immigrate to Palestine.

He illegally crossed through Austria, Germany and France, and from there sailed to Israel, a day before it declared its independence. A week after he arrived, he was sent to the battle of Latrun, where he was wounded, abandoned and considered missing. After he recovered, he managed to complete his studies at the Hebrew University in 1953, got hired at the Finance Ministry, and from 1971 to 1976, served as governor of the Bank of Israel. He went on to other public and private positions, including being a senior member of the Claims Committee, an international Jewish organization that works to compensate and return property to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, and chair of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel.

In that latter position he met fellow survivor Zvi Gil, a journalist for Israel Radio and one of the founders of Israeli television. Gil immigrated to Israel in 1945 and served in the Carmeli Brigade and in Military Intelligence. For 50 years he didn't speak about what he had experienced in the concentration camps. In 1996, under pressure from his wife and daughters, he finally wrote a book, "Gesher shel neyar" (A Paper Bridge), about his hometown in Poland and his experiences in the Holocaust.

"I compared myself to an archaeologist who digs up what he himself buried," he says. During the past decade, Gil has been active in various groups, including the Yad Vashem Council, which works to commemorate the Holocaust. "I concluded that this country and those responsible for its official documentation have allowed Holocaust survivors' role in the fight to establish the state to be forgotten."

In order to correct this historical injustice, Gil initiated a project designed to commemorate the survivors' contribution to the state. In fact, 40 to 50 percent of the people who served in the security forces of the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community) and the state between 1940 and 1948 were Holocaust survivors. They served in the Haganah, the right-wing paramilitary organizations Irgun and Lehi, the Palmach commandos and in the Israel Defense Forces.

An estimated one-third of the casualties in the War of Independence were Holocaust survivors. There are no precise figures, mainly because the IDF did not keep precise records, but also because new immigrants were hastily sent to war zones. The estimates come from Prof. Emanuel Sivan in his book "The 1948 Generation: Myth, Profile and Memory" (1991, Hebrew), and Prof. Hannah Yablonka in her book "Ahim Zarim" (Foreign Brothers, 1994), among others.

"You have to understand the historical context," says Yablonka, who is also active in Gil's project. "In January-April 1948 there was a feeling that the Yishuv would not survive the Arab attack. The youth, the fighters, the Palmach were the defensive shield. They also paid a heavy price in blood" - about 25 percent of the 6,000 people who fell in the war were Palmach fighters. "It's no wonder that in the Yishuv at that time, the youth of Eretz Israel were considered a huge national enterprise. It's enough to read Natan Alterman's poem 'Magash Hakesef' ('The Silver Platter'). And who described the ethos of their heroism after the war? They did. The writers of the 1948 generation. Was that arrogance? Not necessarily. It was more a matter of egocentrism - 'Only I knew how to tell about myself.'"

And why were the Holocaust survivor immigrants missing?

"Because of the unity of the native Israelis, who considered the Holocaust survivors strangers. In that sense, their attitude toward the new immigrants is no different from the current attitude toward recent arrivals. I don't think the exclusion and distancing was deliberate. I don't believe in conspiracies."

And yet they called them cowards and said that they went like sheep to the slaughter.

"The story of the Holocaust survivors in the War of Independence is a complex one. The expression 'like sheep to the slaughter' was actually brought to the country by the survivors. The first person to use it was Abba Kovner, in Vilna in 1942. He was actually referring to most of European Jewry, which did not resist being sent to its death. As far as calling them cowards, I'm not sure how widespread that was.

"The attitude toward gahal is the most distressing. In literature, the gahal members are nameless. Alterman wrote about 'someone from gahal,' and the play 'Be'Arvot Hanegev' (On the Plains of the Negev) by Yigal Mossensohn refers to Gahal Man A and Gahal Man B. This injustice must be corrected. Every IDF brigade has a monument, except for them."

Gavish says that the Palmach Generation Association gladly acceded to Zanbar's request, and thus the historical injustice will also be corrected: "The battles that led to the declaration of independence eroded the Palmach's strength," Gavish says. "After May, of the 4,600 Palmach fighters in three brigades, almost half were new immigrants who had survived the Holocaust. After a long delay we are placing them on the silver platter as well." At Yablonka's suggestion, the wing will be called "Holocaust Survivors in the War of Independence" and not the Gahal Memorial.

Gil, who has written to Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, hopes the IDF will also find proper ways to commemorate the survivors' role during Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations. Zanbar hopes to see veteran Holocaust survivors among the torch lighters at the Independence Day ceremony on Mount Herzl. Even if this is not fulfilled, he cannot conceal his satisfaction over the Palmach House wing, which he calls "the cowards' revenge."

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