THE STORY OF my parents’ escape from Switzerland and into combat in Israel is such a good yarn, and so full of brave, sometimes foolhardy exploits, that we children have always accepted it wholesale: idealistic Jews, incompetent Arabs and all. But in recent years it has been harder to separate the heroism of those days and the justice of the cause, though the heroism was real, and the cause had considerable justice, from the myths about the perfect behavior and conscience of Jewish fighters. At this moment, with the advent of new forms of terror, Jews and Palestinians have grown further apart than ever, and the hope of reconciliation seems to have perished in unceasing violence. Perhaps as a result, the heroic myths of the past have come up for re-examination by Israeli historians, among others. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Israel enjoyed a brief prestige in the eyes of the world, unparalleled since. In 1960, Paul Newman played Ari ben Canaan in the film version of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, which was itself a sentimentalized rendering of the War of Independence of 1948. The Six-Day War of 1967, the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the raid at Entebbe of 1976 had earned almost universal compassion and admiration. In those days, it was easier to think of Israel as David and the Arab world as Goliath than it has been since the two intifadas have so changed the terms of the conflict. It is difficult for Jews scattered around the world, and indeed, for many Israelis, to watch Israel struggle to maintain its good name in an always hostile world, difficult to imagine a way of life fraught with so much fear and violence; difficult to acknowledge that anti-Semitism is on the rise once more, and that the very existence of the state of Israel could be questioned as it has not been previously.

Max and Hilde could foresee none of these developments, of course, as they prepared for their trip to what was still Palestine. Their departure, which had been kept secret from all but family, must have caused my Basel grandparents pain. In early spring of 1948, the young people set out on their adventure, following instructions from the Haganah, the underground Jewish defense force in Palestine. Their luggage was to travel separately while Max and Hilde took a bus to a mountainous and unguarded spot on the French border. There they strolled and kissed their way from Switzerland across the frontier, posing as a courting couple on an afternoon walk, but looking out all the while for observers and for landmarks of their arrival in France. They were supposed to saunter over to the railway station and casually board a train for the next town and from that town, where their luggage and tickets would be provided, to Marseille, but they overdid the strolling and kissing and barely made the train. They dashed down the platform and leapt into the carriage cheered on by the passengers. My father writes: “We certainly seemed to have blown our cover.”

Nevertheless they had a smooth trip to Marseille, where they tried once more to be inconspicuous. They had been told how to get surreptitiously to Camp d’Arénas, the illegal training camp of the Haganah, but a taxi driver soon sized them up and said, “Ah oui, le camp des juifs.” (“Oh yes, the Jewish camp.”) The supposed secrecy of the operation was further eroded when General de Gaulle came to Marseille to give a speech. It was a tense period, police reinforcements were brought in, and because they were short of space, the Jewish residents were told to vacate half the camp to accommodate the police for two weeks. My parents say that the French authorities simply pretended that the Jews weren’t there, and everyone got along.

My father describes the weeks in the camp with some amusement. The arrivals were housed in barracks of forty people on army cots, but the married couples among the volunteers could use the bathhouse together when it was their turn in the schedule, which, my father writes, “was an opportunity for marital behavior that met the legal definition of sex”. Most people at the camp were Moroccan and Bulgarian, and a few of the volunteers were professional adventurers, non-Jews who went wherever a war was brewing. There was a lot of marching and drilling – without weapons, which the French had forbidden – and much laughter, my father says, because some volunteers seemed unable to tell left from right, and always took off in the wrong direction.

But it was rumored that the camp had the best forgers in Europe working on the documents the volunteers needed to sneak into Palestine. Upon their arrival, Max and Hilde had handed over all their passports and identification papers, and soon they acquired different names, passports, and family members. Max had become a single Frenchman who was on his way to New Zealand with a stop in Haifa. Hilde had a new nationality, a new husband, and a visa for Turkey. In April, they took a bus to the port of Marseille and boarded a ramshackle ship of about 1500 tons called, providentially, Providence. They spent ten uncomfortable days on board, preferring to escape their hot and overcrowded cabin in the bowels of the ship by sleeping on deck under the Mediterranean stars, and lulled, my father writes, by the “thumping of the ship’s engines and the rush of the waves. The problem was that the crew started to hose down the deck at four in the morning and often we had to beat a hasty retreat…but this seemed a small price to pay for the wonderful feeling of lying under the illuminated sky in the gentle air of the night”. The members of the crew were mostly unkempt Vietnamese, my father continues. “There were all kinds of narrow alleyways leading to mysterious doors and everything seemed to be covered in some kind of decrepit rusty patina from which moisture emanated in unhealthy mists”. Helped by generally good weather, an unlimited supply of Algerian red wine and the excitement of being underway at last, the young passengers didn’t worry too much about hygiene, heat, or overcrowding. An officer of the ship approached Hilde with an offer of hot showers to which, it seemed to her, “there were unstated conditions attached which she was not prepared to meet”, so one shower was negotiated with Max keeping watch outside the door.

Until they were intercepted on the seventh day of the voyage by two British gunships about twenty miles off the coast of Palestine, Max and Hilde had been more entertained than anxious. Only three weeks remained of the British mandate before Israel became an independent state, and the passengers no longer seriously worried that they would be turned back. The internment camps on Cyprus, so important in the tale of the Exodus, had already been closed. But British troops could still harass prospective immigrants, and in this they succeeded. The Providence was detained for three days, the ship rolling and heaving in place in a relatively quiet sea, and Max’s seasickness took over. He and many others spent most of their days hanging over the rails, but not Hilde, who has always been a good sailor. At the end of the three days, British officers boarded the ship to announce that it had been given permission to land, not at the obvious harbor at Haifa but at Akko, ten miles further north.

For the first time, the travelers caught a glimpse of the old-new country of Palestine, so soon to become Israel. They cheered and wept as Mount Carmel rose before them, the white houses of Haifa on its flanks glittering in the sun; they passed the dunes of the bay and the massive Crusader fortress of Akko – another site featured in Exodus – which the British had used as a prison for the rebellious leaders of the Haganah and its terrorist rival, the Irgun. The young passengers scrambled down rope ladders into small boats, and ten minutes later they were in Israel. They were hurried onto a long line of waiting buses, because their hosts didn’t want to wait until the British changed their minds again, and off they went through a desolate desert landscape. My father remembers that the driver of their bus stopped among orange groves – pardessim, in Hebrew, from which the English word Paradise is partly derived – and picked an orange for each passenger. Gradually the long line of buses got shorter, as each group of emigrants was taken to a different destination. Max and Hilde were delivered to Tel Litwinsky, a huge military camp that had been taken over by the Haganah just a few days before.

Tel Litwinsky had been used as a rest and retraining camp for the British Eighth Army during the North African campaign in World War II, but now it was in chaos, because the British had left in haste and without much concern for their successors. The Jewish soldiers there were veterans of the Eighth Army and of the Jewish Brigade, which had fought in Italy in 1943 and had sustained great losses at Monte Cassino. True to British principle in the lands they occupied, the Jewish soldiers from the settlements in Palestine – in contrast to Jewish fighters from Britain itself – could join only as enlisted men, and none of them had been permitted to rise higher than the rank of sergeant. Nonetheless, many of these veterans of World War II became essential officers in the new Israeli army.

My father reports that my parents’ arrival at Tel Litwinsky, together with the several weeks following, became a blur of registration, form-filling and office-visiting. During that period, David Ben-Gurion had declared Israel an independent state (on May 14, 1948), and the next day five Arab countries – Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan – began their invasion. The new state had to be organized and the new army mustered. For freshly arrived volunteers like Max and Hilde, that meant a lot of running around. There were not enough weapons; there were not enough training manuals, and the forming army relied on a mix of what had been left behind by the British and on the guerrilla techniques developed within Palestine by the Haganah, Palmach, and other underground defense organizations.

My father says that Israel was a rude awakening for him. When he met medical people who had already lived in Palestine for some years, their usual greeting was: “You came from Switzerland? Here? To this Levantine dump? You must be crazy!” This, he writes, was a shock to his “incompletely suppressed sense of doing something heroic”. People were badly behaved in public. They pushed, they shoved, they hadn’t learned queueing from their British occupiers, they didn’t help old people or the disabled, they hadn’t learned table manners, or common expressions like “please” and “thank you”. It was not quite what Max and Hilde had expected back in Basel, when Max had shaken his fist at the elders of the community in a glow of defiance. They visited Paula, Max’s older sister, and her growing family in a dusty settlement near the seaside town of Netanya, and that was another shock. It was a rough life for people who had been bred in the cities of Europe, even if they had escaped the worst of Europe over the ten previous years.

In early June 1948, Max and Hilde reported to Afula, a town in the Galilee, the north-central region of Israel, where they were to join the 14th Battalion of the Golani Regiment (later Brigade). After another dusty bus trip through a semi-arid countryside dotted with Arab villages, Max and Hilde arrived in the midst of a short but intense air raid. Iraqi planes, they were told, bombed often but inaccurately, because they released their bombs too high up. Sirens screamed, shells exploded all around them, and then as abruptly stopped.

The headquarters of the Battalion were at the Kadoorie School, the best-known agricultural training institute in Palestine. Yitzhak Rabin had been a student there ten years before. The school was nestled in the hills near Nazareth. Almost directly opposite rose Mount Tabor, where so much of the biblical Book of Judges takes place, its rounded height now crowned with a monastery. The campus of the school was beautifully planted with lush trees and flowers, giving it the appearance of a semitropical resort, my father says, but on June 6, the night following Max and Hilde’s arrival, the water tower was shelled and destroyed. The main building had already been designated as an infirmary for lightly wounded soldiers; Hilde and other nurses immediately began to set it up.

The officers of the battalion were sober and business-like. Most of them had been raised on kibbutzim, the socialist farming communes of Jewish Palestine, and had been trained secretly in the Haganah and the Palmach, the military organizations which had originated there. Max was handed a stack of old British army manuals on organizing hospitals and field stations under combat, and that was the extent of his training as a military medical officer. He was introduced to his medical sergeant, Amichai ben Dror, who was barely out of his teens but could interpret English and Hebrew, and whose energy and initiative proved invaluable in combat. When Max and Hilde met Amichai again in 1995 on a trip to Israel, their friendship resumed as warmly as it had begun on that June day in 1948.

By now the war had intensified. The Arab siege of Jerusalem had begun with fierce fighting and casualties. Among the most notorious and crucial incidents were the first battles for the police station at Latrun, on the Jerusalem road. Egyptian troops had moved into the Negev desert in the south, and had laid siege to a kibbutz, Yad Mordechai, which was composed almost entirely of survivors from Poland, particularly from the Warsaw Ghetto. So far the defenders of the kibbutz were holding back the Egyptian invaders. Other units of the Golani regiment had already been sent to the defense of kibbutzim on the eastern borders of Palestine, along the Jordan south of the Sea of Galilee. There, tank units of the Jordanian army had crossed the river and were trying to break into the valley of Jezreel. These were the battles depicted in Exodus, later on settlers at the kibbutz of Degania held the tanks off with homemade Molotov cocktails until the regular units arrived.

The task assigned to my parents’ battalion was to halt further incursions by the combined Arab forces in their area. Their commander, Chaim ben Yakov, explained that a force consisting of Syrian and Iraqi troops and irregulars from Jordan were fanning out from Nazareth toward a T-shaped intersection of two roads: the one going north from Afula, and the east-west road which connected Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, to Haifa, on the coast. If the Arab forces captured the intersection, Jewish territory would be sliced in half; all settlements east and north of that point would be cut off, and the entire territory of Galilee could be lost.

There was a settlement called Sejera near the intersection, just across the road from the Arab village of Lubia, which was now full of snipers who could shoot directly onto the road and into Sejera. My parents’ battalion had been told to occupy Sejera and establish headquarters on its highest point. From there, they could survey the eastern hills near Nazareth and much of the surrounding territory. Their base was to be an old Turkish farm built on the highest hill in the village. It consisted of two sprawling stone courtyards, with wooden galleries running around the second story on the inside walls, and a flat roof with a two-foot stone parapet around the top.

Sejera was a well-known village in Jewish Palestine, with an interesting history of its own. It was here that the earliest Zionist settlers, mostly Russian students, conceived of the collective settlements which later became known as kibbutzim. When David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, arrived as an immigrant from Russia, he took a job as a night watchman at that very farm. Now the thick stone walls of the farm were reinforced with sandbags, and one of the larger rooms was set aside as a front-line surgery for wounded soldiers.

The high command had decided that Lubia should be taken as well. My father says that when you stood at the bottom of the village road, where it connected with the Afula road near the crucial intersection, Lubia looked quite formidable. Like Sejera, it was perched on a steep, rocky hill overlooking the roads below. The attack was to take place the next night, June 7. Toward evening on that day, my father says, the chief medical officer of the Golani regiment arrived at the Kadoorie School. He was Isaiah Morris, an English doctor who had been in the British Army during the war, had taken part in the invasion of Normandy and in the bloodiest of the fighting there, in an area known as the pocket of the Falaise, and had now volunteered to serve in this new war. The doctors agreed that they were already short of bandages, disinfectant, syringes, and morphine and other painkillers, and Dr Morris took off for headquarters in search of more supplies. In the early hours of June 8, Max said goodbye to Hilde and began the short trip to Sejera, only fifteen minutes away by jeep. Once a driver came within sight of the village of Lubia, and even more dangerously, when he took the left turn up the hill between the two villages, he drew fire from the rifles and machine guns stationed there. But they made it into Sejera, where there were already wounded, mostly settlers from the town surrounded by weeping women. Amichai went off with a squad of soldiers, but returned with many more dead than wounded.

The attack on Lubia had gone terribly wrong. Arab forces had infiltrated the town the night before, and the Haganah soldiers, who had expected an easy conquest once the snipers were overpowered, were met instead by overpowering gunfire. Iraqi planes began to attack as well. Trenches had been hastily dug by the side of the road the day before, and soldiers had to jump into them whenever the bombs dropped. There were no air raid sirens here. Indeed, most of the volunteers had been thrown into battle so hastily that there had been no time to issue uniforms or even helmets. Thin-skinned, balding Max didn’t even have a hat, and he was still dressed in his grey wool trousers from Switzerland, despite the intense heat. The soldiers of Sejera had to be ingenious with their equipment. The roof of the Turkish farm had only two defenders armed with light submachine guns. They ran crouching back and forth behind the parapet, to give the enemy the impression that there was a battery of machine guns there. The armored cars and tanks were mostly fakes got up to look like the real thing, and marks inside showed passengers where they had to keep their heads down. So soldiers had to use their wits as well as their rather limited arsenal of weapons. The incessant, deafening noise seems to have been an element of terror in itself, quite apart from the random death it brought.

My father says now that he noticed a weird sort of detachment in himself when he first came under fire. He wasn’t frightened, but super-alert and calm, and he carried out his duties almost automatically, like a robot. It was a good thing, because his first day in combat was especially terrible. The Haganah soldiers had to retreat from Lubia, Arab troops stationed themselves near the Afula road, and three Iraqi tanks rumbled down from the north and stationed themselves about 500 yards from the road into Sejera. Of the 200 troops assigned to the assault on Lubia, forty had been killed and about 100 wounded. My father says that during that day he had seen dead soldiers everywhere. Many were students from the Technion, the MIT of Israel, who had been hastily recruited. Ignorant but courageous, they had marched straight up the hill into certain death. The medical personnel were moved into the farm where, their commander told them, they would be surrounded, in effect, by the massing Arab troops below. Going down the road to Afula, under the noses of the Iraqi tanks and the soldiers stationed there, would be extremely hazardous; yet it had to be risked. Wounded soldiers had to be evacuated, either to the infirmary at the Kadoorie School or to the big hospital in Afula.

During the night of June 8, the medical team moved up the hill to the Turkish farm in Sejera. By then, Dr Morris had arrived with supplies. It was obvious that there would be heavy casualties when fighting broke out again, and he decided to stay to help Max. As dawn came up over the hills after the very active and noisy early hours of June 9, my father crept up to the roof for a look around. As he gazed west in the direction of Nazareth, his detachment left him and, for the first time, he experienced the cold clutch of fear. “The hills looked as if snow had fallen during the night,” he writes, because they were so crowded with Arab soldiers in their white garments and kaffiyas. They were no more than half a mile away. Bullets whizzed by, he ducked, and then, he says, “all hell broke loose”. Shells exploded all around, mostly mortars, but bigger ones too, inside as well as outside the two courtyards, and then the wounded began pouring in. When Max returned to the makeshift operating room inside the farm, he had to work frantically. The soldiers had been dug in around the perimeter of the farm and had been hit at very close range. They had terrible head wounds, shredded limbs, and other severe injuries, and Max was restricted mostly to amputations, control of the bleeding, and pain relief. “The infernal noise of explosions went on and on,” my father writes in his account of that night:

Occasionally there was a pause and we thought that the attack might have stopped. Then it resumed with the same ferocity. In our room with Dr Morris and three Army nurses, we were constantly busy. There was a lot of pain all around, many moaned, some cried out. Orderlies ran in and out with stretchers, using every letup in the firing to get wounded soldiers into the personnel carriers and drive them off. Finally we had so many wounded that we ordered up a specially fitted bus. It arrived and was loaded; we sent it back under escort of some armored personnel carriers and one fake tank. Later Amichai came back up to tell me that two of the soldiers had died on the bus, one of them bleeding uncontrollably from the stump of his severed leg.

We had a soldier come in with a head wound. There was an entry hole but no exit hole, so the bullet was still in his brain; he was quiet, slightly somnolent. The bullet didn’t seem to have destroyed any vital areas, but the head wound was bleeding profusely. Isaiah Morris was bandaging the patient’s head, I fastened the strips when they came to an end; he needed another bandage. I turned to the left to pick up a roll from the equipment table, then there was a loud explosion, everything went dark, I was thrown to the floor, out of the corner of my eye I saw Morris sink to the floor, there were cries of pain from the nurses and soldiers. A bright fountain of blood was gushing from my arm. I was calm, dissociated. I pulled some rag from a small table, I wrapped it around my arm as tightly as I could. I had intense pain in my chest and my right abdomen. I thought I might have a liver injury. I got up and dragged myself out of the room and as quickly as I could I limped around the corner to the battalion commander’s bunker and shouted that we had been hit and that I thought Dr Morris was dead. Then I seem to have fainted. Amichai told me just recently that I woke up when there was a lull in the bombing and that I said: “Does this silence mean I’m in Paradise?” I don’t remember this.

But I remember lying on the floor of a small armored car, which had a number of fake armored plates marked with large chalk crosses which indicated that they were not steel but plywood, and would offer us no protection. The driver’s windshield was almost totally closed in by two armored plates, he was looking through maybe an inch of open space. We rumbled down the road and started on the right turn toward Afula, when we began to be hit by intense gunfire, especially on the roof, and suddenly, my heart stood still, the motor stopped. The driver said, I think the motor got hit. The fire intensified and I thought: could it be that I escaped the bomb up on the hill only to be killed being evacuated? It was the first time since the early morning that I felt deep fear; my dreamlike detachment, again, was gone. And suddenly the motor coughed, it began to wheeze asthmatically and we inched forward, turned the corner and were safe, out of range of the Iraqi guns. We came to the gate of the Kadoorie School and the driver asked one of the soldiers to call Hilde down. She came down and she was very shocked, but by this time I felt o.k., having gotten some morphine, but very weak. She still remembers that I said to her: “Hello, Hildchen, how are you?”

My mother says that she, too, was working frantically behind the lines when word came that the front-line operating room in Sejera had been hit by an Iraqi mortar. Everyone inside was killed or wounded, she was told. One of the doctors was dead – either the Swiss or the English one. Hilde thought “not again”, and stopped breathing, more or less, as she waited for news. She was summoned to come down to the makeshift ambulance at the gate, where Max’s white face looked out at her from the darkness inside. When he smiled and asked her how she was, she felt as if the oxygen had returned to her lungs. She hopped into the ambulance and they continued to the large hospital at Afula, which was so choked with wounded that the lawn in front was filled with soldiers on stretchers.

Max got even better care than he might have expected during his stay. About a half hour after his arrival, a young woman doctor wandered through the rows of stretchers calling his name. She turned out to be his former Hebrew teacher from Basel, and they had a good chat over the next few days as she tended his wounds. These included considerable shrapnel in Max’s arms and lungs. Some fragments had sliced through the radial artery of his right arm when it caused the spectacular bleeding my father remembered. The shrapnel in his lungs, and some of the rest, too, has remained to this day, since removal would have been too difficult. Penicillin had only come into use at the end of World War II and was still scarce, but fortunately it was available for Max. As for the surprising reunion with Hannah, the doctor, my parents learned in later years that Israel is a country that specializes in miraculous reunions. When I was fifteen, we hired a taxi to take us to Nazareth, and our driver turned out to have been my father’s ambulance driver in 1948. At the airport, returning to New York, we met Josef Rosensaft. My parents encountered many more such revenants on subsequent trips.

Max had several visitors. The battalion commander came the next day and told him that they had been able to hold the farm, despite heavy losses. He informed Max that he had been injured several hours after a UN ceasefire had been declared and accepted by both sides. A few hours after the catastrophic mortar had plunged into the makeshift surgical theater, the fighting around Sejera had stopped. The Chief Medical Officer of the Army, Dr Schieber (later Hebraicized as Shaba), visited Max because he was the first doctor injured after the official start of the war (a fine distinction, since many doctors and nurses had already died in Arab ambushes in Jerusalem before war had been declared). And about three days into his stay, an exuberant man aged about seventy-five came to Max’s bedside. He was sorry that Max had been wounded, he said, but those wounds had changed his own fortunes. He was a retired doctor who had been languishing in the Jewish settlement of Yavneh, near Tiberias. The Army had called him in as a temporary replacement when Max had been put out of service. Working again made him feel reborn, he told Max, and he felt thirty years younger. His hormones had begun to flow again. His blood coursed more quickly through his veins. He was able to make love to his wife again. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” he exulted as he wrung Max’s hand.

The irony of this rejuvenation did not escape Max, who reflected sadly that Dr. Morris had died and that 45% of their battalion had been either killed or wounded. But Sejera had not fallen. It would remain one of the pivotal battles in that war. I’ve been told that schoolchildren in Israel still learn about in their textbooks. Hilde helped Hannah care for Max as long as she could; after about ten days she returned to the unit. Max was discharged sometime in early August. After a brief furlough in Netanya with Paula, Max and Hilde reported to their battalion’s new location, Camp Mansoura at the foot of Mount Carmel. Max had been wounded on June 9. By now it was late August. Another ceasefire was in effect, and there was relative calm for a while.

My parents have always insisted that I was conceived one stifling hot night “in an affirmation of life” in the barracks at Mansoura. The second ceasefire bought them some time to observe and reflect. They learned that the Haganah had begun to punish followers of the extremist leaders Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. These were soldiers who had enlisted in the Haganah but wouldn’t swear allegiance to the new state because they favored conquest of territories beyond the UN boundaries. Their Haganah officers imprisoned them for this disloyalty in the hottest cellars of the hot barracks. The soldiers capitulated after a day or two, but tensions between the two groups had always been high and remained so well into the lifetime of the fledgling state. The issue of boundaries and Arab rights has been traumatic ever since.

The Golani Regiment continued its conquests in the Galilee in a series of battles. Max and Hilde found themselves in better accommodations. For a brief period of a few weeks, they were quartered in a co-operative farming village called Merchavia. They had a room with a farming family from Poland, where they were fairly comfortable. “Every morning,” my father writes, the farmer’s wife called out to her husband Mottel in Yiddish: “‘Have you milked the cows already.’ This was not a question but a command.”

Despite the idyllic peace of these days, military work was going forward. Max and Hilde set up a clinic for soldiers in Merchavia, where Hilde was chief nurse and Max the medical officer. Each morning my father and his assistant, Amichai, traveled to Megiddo, at the southern perimeter of the area the Golani Regiment occupied, to see to soldiers there. My father writes:

Even under war conditions I appreciated the fact that Megiddo was the biblical Armaggedon and even more that the excavations of fortifications and stables were said to be from Solomonic times. The excavations were done by the British in the thirties, and their outhouses still carried signs: Natives and British. We had an infirmary with stretchers on large marble slabs that were excavated and were said to be part of King Solomon’s stables. It gave the work special excitement.

The road to Megiddo, however, was problematic. It was a straight road traversing the whole valley, and was under fire from Arab forces still holding the Mountain of Moab just to our east. The technique was to rev up the engine of the Army truck, then drive at breakneck speed while sinking down as low in the cabin as was possible without losing sight of the road. We got a few bullets to the chassis, but nothing serious happened. In the meantime, Hilde was treating soldiers in the infirmary; while before she had been able to tolerate the various ailments – festering wounds, accident injuries, slow-healing gunshot wounds and infections of various kinds, especially of the feet – she became queasy and one morning somebody came running: “Doctor, doctor, the nurse has fainted.” She had morning sickness. She was pregnant.

Although they were technically in the war’s second ceasefire period, which had stretched from mid-July into the as yet unforeseeable future, skirmishes and even major battles continued. The army had become much better equipped in the weeks since the battle of Sejera. There, the defenders had two light machine guns and a few mortars in the way of heavy weaponry; now, modern rifles, machine guns, ammunition and other supplies arrived daily from the Skoda Works in what was then Czechoslovakia.

The Israeli air force, until the late summer of 1948, had consisted largely of little single-engine Cessnas. The settlers nicknamed them Primuses because they made a sputtering noise like the primus kerosene heaters in Israeli houses. Now American fighter and bomber planes had arrived. They had been bought as war surplus in the United States and had been smuggled out of the country in dangerous night flights. Supplemented by fighters from Czechoslovakia, they changed the balance of power in the air. There weren’t many, my father writes, “but those few went a long way.”

Meanwhile, the fledgling state had gained some advantages. The Egyptian army had been halted for the moment at Yad Mordechai, the Polish survivors’ kibbutz in the Negev desert to the south. The road to Jerusalem had reopened and a wider corridor had been established there. The Golani brigade had conquered the whole of Galilee, including the vital city of Nazareth.

By now it was early September of 1948, and Max and Hilde moved with their battalion of the Golani brigade to Emek Beit She’an, a subtropical valley south of the Sea of Galilee. It stretched from the Jordanian border to the hills surrounding the large town of Jenin (now part of the Palestinian Authority). During the day the soldiers rested in the shade of the orange groves, because Arab troops still held Mount Moab and their snipers shot at anything that moved in the valley below. The commander of the battalion had a little talk with Max and Hilde. The regiment was about to engage in a dangerous maneuver, and he wanted to evacuate Hilde. Max agreed, but Hilde refused to consider that option. “She was going to stay with me. She had almost lost me already and she was not going to lose me again,” my father writes. The men capitulated, and she stayed.

Meanwhile, negotiations to establish the boundaries of the new state and to bring the war to an end continued in Jerusalem. The UN mediator, Count Bernadotte of Sweden, hoped to get the new state to give up the Negev and the Arab towns of Lod and Ramallah in exchange for an extended chunk of western Galilee. There was much turmoil in Israel over this prospect; the Israeli government, under David Ben-Gurion, was torn between negotiation and further military conquest to make the return of land more difficult. The terrorist organizations, especially the Irgun under Menachem Begin, refused all compromise. Most affected, of course, were the soldiers in the field, who were often ordered to run desperate, last-minute missions before final negotiations began.

In Emek Beit She’an, the commander of the battalion met his officers at 8 p.m. on the evening of September 17 and read out the new orders from Jerusalem. A major action was to begin at midnight. Troops were to advance from Netanya east, from Megiddo south, and from Beit She’an west, with the goal of taking the west bank of the Jordan north of Jerusalem. That was still a weak point, from which, it was thought, Arab troops could break through and make a run for the Mediterranean. Their own battalion had been assigned the task of blocking Jordanian relief efforts from the east while advancing on the road from Beit She’an to Jenin, on their west. My father writes:

The fighting went on. The Egyptians launched another offensive in the Negev, and it looked as if the Golani Brigade would be shifted south to meet them. As Hilde’s morning sickness got worse, Max and Hilde began to wonder about her ability to continue serving in the army, and beyond that, about the future of their newly expanding family. The Golani command found her a position in an infirmary in a convent on the summit of Mount Carmel, a beautiful spot where she had light duties. And after much tortured discussion, Max and Hilde decided that they should return to Switzerland, so that my mother could have her baby under the best possible conditions and so they would have time to think about what to do next. Hilde suffered from the heat as well as from morning sickness, and could not imagine a life in a climate where, at the best of times, she could barely function.

The Commander of the Northern Front, whom they had to see to obtain permission to leave the army, was a former Russian officer with a shaved head. He was a formidable figure who looked like General Timoshenko, the fabled leader of the Eastern Russian front during World War II. When they went to his headquarters in Haifa, the commander asked how far along Hilde was. They told him three and a half months. He laughed uproariously and shouted, “Some pregnancy! My wife is eight months pregnant!” “The relevance of this remark,” my father adds, “has never been revealed to us, since his wife was not a soldier in the army.” But he agreed to discharge both Max and Hilde, and in a few weeks the papers had come through. While their documents were being processed, the war had largely ended. A final ceasefire had been agreed on, though, as usual, last-minute skirmishes continued in the southern part of the country. As a result, my father adds: “before the Golani took part in the defeat of the Egyptians (Golani units were the first to reach Eilat on the Red Sea), the Golani Brigade held a huge, wonderful victory celebration”. Max and Hilde made the last rounds of their relatives in Israel, the Polish Consulate gave Max a new Polish passport, and in late December 1948 they left on what my father describes as “an adventurous flight to Geneva on an old DC-9 via Tobruk and Malta.”

As for the war: in February, March, and April 1949, Israel signed armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan (which signed for Iraq as well); Syria did not come to an agreement until July 20, 1949. The war had finally come to an end. I had arrived in Basel in late May. The limitations of life in Switzerland closed in on them once again, and Max and Hilde decided soon after on making their way out of the old world altogether and into the new. They were delighted to learn that David Wodlinger, Hilde’s former boss at Bergen-Belsen, would sponsor their immigration to the United States. They embarked at Rotterdam on the SS Veendam, and arrived in New York, with me in tow, in March 1950.