Newspaper Page Text
Rome, Italy
November 6th, 1956
Dear Carolyn:
I never expected to end my travels as a “refugee.” Last Wednesday
160 of us were picked up at Haifa by two small U. S. Destroyers and
evacuated to Suda Bay Crete where we were transferred to the huge
troop carrier, the General Patch. For 24 hours we bobbed placidly in
the lovely harbor before being joined by 1500 others fleeing from the
violent hostile mobs and constant bombings and the terror of Egypt at
war. In my final six days in Israel I saw a nation jump from a disturbed
peace to war. The country suddenly became depopulated. The young
men and unmarried women turned from their farms and their city jobs
and with their rifles melted into the desert.
It was in fact a strange war, taken it seems, carefully from a Heming
way novel. That author has never been a favorite of mine but there
is little doubt that his stories of war and adventure can set a boy'.- mind
running over trenches and throwing home-made grenades, as they did
nine years ago. I thought then that I'd give everything to be caught tip
in a war—I was certain that a small war would do splendidly.
Those final six days were something like that, minus the necessity of
facing the enemy. Evil though the sound of war, that sound has excite
ment. The build-up for action, the swift victories, gave sudden reality
to Hemingway’s images of wars in Italy and revolutions in Spain.
The night Israel struck through the Sinai Penisula, I was in Jerusalem.
Signs of war and full scale mobilization had been everywhere for
several days. In the streets armed soldiers and police walked in pairs
and the number of available buses had been shrinking steadily.
The day before the attack the sounds crescendoed. Soldiers on wheels,
honking their truck horns and soldiers on foot, scraping their boots
along the pavements. Shouting newspaper boys and coffee politicians
and radios in open sandwich shops contributed to the clatter.
Yet to most Israelis the sounds which were weird to me were the
sounds of what passes for peace in the Middle East. This w.i the way
of normal life in Israel. World War II is still a clear and tragic memory
here. The 1948 War of Liberation served only as a prelude to constant
conflicts and raids and threats of liquidation. There was no particulai
reason to say “this is now the moment of War”.
Less than a week before, on Thursday, I arrived at Kibbutz Maayan
Baruch. Your Agnes Scott classmate Evelyn Elkin lives on that collect
ive farm in a community of 150 adults and about 150 childrren. She
determined to enter Palestine in the days when the British Mandate
government was restricting any form of Immigration. Nonetheless, the few
European Jews who had somehow escaped the Nazi gas chambers and
Allied DP confines, made for Palestine. I met in Israel many such
people who admitted quite honestly that there was simply no othei
place for them to go. Evelyn joined a group of such refugees in M ir-
seilles. Her ship almost succeeded in running the blockade. At ti e
last possible moment they were captured, and for a year, Evelyn nursed
orphans in a Cyprus stockade, where the British were interning such
refugees.
You must wonder, as I did, why she ever left a comfortable and secure
America, and after ten years, how she now lives, what she thinks of
her new life, the regrets, the memories of Atlanta, and what remains of
her youthful idealism. Certainly by our standards she lives primitively,
even dangerously. Her Kibbutz marks the Syrian frontier and looks
down a long valley to Lake Hulah, with the hills of Jordan on one side,
and those of Lebanon on the other. In a way Maayan Baruch rules
the valley floor, an overlord to former malerial swamp land now re
claimed and planted. The residual peat makes rich turf, especially
good for grazing and for rice. The autumn days were clear and warm
and from our hill I could see Lake Hulah, the planed green valley, and
the red, rocky mountains closing in protectively on either side.
I soon learned that the pastoral appearance was deceptive. Raiders
may come from three sides so fields must be plow r ed by twos, one per
son to run the tractor, the other to carry the rifle. The threat of maraud
ing Arabs is constant. For years the kibbutz border has been patroled
nightly. All males and those women without children take their turn
at guard duty. Trenches zigzag between homes and chicken houses,
along the ridges, behind the school, and are a delight to children play
ing hide-and-seek, and the security, if not pride, to the community.
Practice raids are also a part of the farm life. The day I arrived the
wives and the children were just emerging from the shelters and the
men with guns and stocking caps were returning from a mock raid in
the hills.
The children have an underground game room and have become ac
customed to living underground for several hours at a time. This raid
w r as a special one, Evelyn told me, because they were using for the
first time the new bomb shelter which the Army had helped them to
build.
More disruptive to the attempts at living a normal life was the in
security of not knowing when war w r ould finally come. That war wmuld
come w'as always assumed, for the Arab nations have promised a "second
round”. None of the Big Four powers, especially their former close
friend, the United States had moved to reduce this threat; even if
Tourist
into
Refugee
by LEON EPLAN
The author, pack on back, as
he traveled through Israel.
This moving letter was written by the au
thor to his sister, Mrs. Robert Goldsmith.
The son of Mr. and Mrs. Sam Eplan of
Atlanta, Leon graduated from Emory Uni
versity and took master’s degrees from the
University of Tennessee and the Universi
ty of North Carolina, directing his studies
to the field of sociology and city planning.
He took post graduate work also in the Uni
versity of London School of Economics and
intended to spend several months further
practical observation in Israel when the
circumstances he describes cut short his
visit there. He is now back in Atlanta as
sociated with Phil Hammer, a city planning
consultant.
8
The Southern Israelite