down in the ditch by the road, curled up with his hands over his head, was already dead for sure. And Kfir added that he knew this, of course, but earlier he had been talking about a lighting grenade—so when we hear someone yell “projector!” we really should stay put like statues, because the British sentries light up the area from their towers and look for movement.
On the real night maneuvers, when we heard “grenade!” we jumped into the thorny bushes. And we stood as still as statues when we heard “projector!” While walking, we kept the proper spacing between us—not so far that we couldn’t maintain eye contact, but not so close as to get blasted by the same explosive charge. When the counselor whispered “count off!” to the kid at the front of the line, that kid quietly passed it on to the next kid, and so on until the count reached the counselor at the back of the line. Then that counselor would whisper “one” to the kid at the back of the line, and the count would eventually reach the front of the line again. Everything was done while walking, and it all had to take place as quietly as humanly possible.
With the years, these counts became simple. Unlike the treks in the army where the guy in front of me would be sweaty and tired. On that first night march I followed a pretty girl and was eager for the next count so I could move two steps ahead, place a secure hand on her shoulder and say “six,” while inhaling some of her body scent. After all, in full daylight I would never dare place a hand on that shoulder: she would see me blush and I wouldn’t know what to whisper to her. And here came night maneuvers to my rescue, making sure that I didn’t get lost in the fields or lynched by an Arab gang or kidnapped by the Brits, and allowing me—ordering me, in fact—to whisper into a pretty girl’s ear over and over again.
After the long trek, we stopped and gathered in silence. We were told that we were to be accepted into the secret fold of the movement, and that the acceptance ceremony would take place on top of a nearby hill. And since the hill was infested with enemies, we would have to sneak up in pairs. Two by two we ventured forth up the hill. On the way we encountered a British sentry with a torch. When the torchlight got close to us we froze as we had practiced, and in the last meters near the top we crawled among the basalt rocks and summer thorns.
At the top sat the secret commanders with masked faces. They read aloud an oath and made us sign it with our thumbs dipped in blood-like gouache paint. We swore to remain loyal and keep the secret and fulfill any mission we were assigned in love and good faith. One by one we swore and then marched together to the fire ceremony. A burning ball descended from the cliff and lit a huge torch, which was passed from group to group. There were greetings and songs, and then came the great surprise, which everyone except for us neophytes knew about already: our parents came there in cars, stayed with us for the ceremony and—special treat—drove us home afterwards.
At one of the youth summer camps I attended—I no longer recall whether it was “In the Footsteps of Warriors Camp,” or “Commando-Underground-Fighters-Against-the-Brits Camp” or perhaps even “Camp of the People of Israel”—I had a special role in night maneuvers. I walked at the end of the line with my friend Ran, who was much cooler and better-looking than I. When the call “grenade!” rang out, we lay down last, facing each other. After waiting on the ground for a long time, we had to make sure none of the kids had fallen asleep—from battle fatigue, or from staying up late to pull pranks, like painting the faces of the girls while they slept or stealing flags from nearby encampments. Ran and I knew we were putting ourselves at risk, but we also knew it was for the good of the whole force. Just like Nathan Elbaz did.
Nathan Elbaz was a soldier who sacrificed his own life to save his fellow soldiers. He was not an admired fighter—his job was to neutralize the detonators of grenades in the bunker tent. One day in the bunker tent, he suddenly heard the worst click of them all—the detonator on a grenade he was holding had somehow been activated. Nathan had four vital seconds to decide what to do. He ran out of the bunker to a nearby ditch, but saw many fellow soldiers there, so he turned back and again saw his beloved friends: Whose life would he sacrifice? He chose himself. He held the grenade close to his chest and jumped on it and died for the sake of everyone in the camp.
This story was often told in the youth movement around Memorial Day or right before a night maneuver. With his death Nathan Elbaz taught us the meaning of comradeship, sacrifice, life. With his death he taught us how to live. I wanted to cry for him but I couldn’t afford to be a crybaby in front of the whole group. On one Memorial Day, our counselor asked us if we would do what Nathan Elbaz the hero did: after all, he could have thrown the grenade far away and then his mates would only have been wounded, and he wouldn’t have been hurt at all. But no, not Nathan Elbaz. He didn’t risk his friends’ lives. He jumped on the grenade.
At that time there were still battle and sacrifice stories mixed up in my mind with tales of vampires threatening to suck my blood. But Nathan Elbaz really did jump over the grenade. His story was real. Unlike the vampire stories, there was no surprise ending that saved everyone from danger. Instead, at the end of Nathan’s story was the question: Would you do as he did? Would you die for our sake? And you?
And you, wouldn’t you want heroic tales to be told about you? Imagine that every year a group of children sat by the spring with their counselor, a counselor in sandals, a blue shirt and shorts, who would tell them fascinating, thrilling stories in which you were the heroine. I did. I wanted stories to be told about me, about my courage, my resourcefulness and cleverness. I dreamt of being a battle hero.
In the meantime, we continued jumping into thorn bushes on night maneuvers and crawling to the flag at summer camp. Years later, this know-how would help me get to you safely.
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* Pre-State commando troops.
* “Blade,” but also “flame.”
Like everyone else, I traveled to Poland with our school delegation. We Jewish Israeli high school students got to visit the death-camp of Auschwitz and other Holocaust commemoration sites as a part of our national grooming, a year before we graduated and enlisted in the military. On the same bus as our group was a delegation from the Israel Air Force technical school, so we had boys in uniform. Throughout the trip, the Air Force flag was flown along with the Israeli flag, all the more impressive and official looking for it.
In Poland, too, I was writing. I wrote because that is what you’re supposed to do—it was healthy and liberating, or so we were told—and also because I wanted to be one of those people who, at Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies, read out what he himself had written instead of some banal, well-known poem or psalm. And indeed, when we returned I did read one of my writings aloud at both the school and the moshav ceremonies:
I am walking inside the museum at Auschwitz and looking at the piles of shoes. I choose a shoe and try to imagine its owner. Here’s a pink little crybaby girl’s shoe, there’s a dark shoe of a respectable gentleman and pillar of the community. I try to dress those people in the rest of their clothing, and then proceed to give them their shape and gait and a face and eyes and a gaze. I try to hear them talking, but my attempt to imagine an unfamiliar language fails. Here is a pair of large boots, surely of a fifty-year-old man, perhaps even sixty, white-haired, his cheeks plump and his smile broad. A fairly large paunch peeps under an old faded blue cloth jacket, his rough dark trousers held up with a worn leather belt, the pant legs too short so that the heavy boots lying there in front of me show underneath. And that grandfather left his home in town yesterday and was taken here. His home was probably not much different from the houses we saw through the windows of our bus on the way here, a little wooden house surrounded by a garden, summer flowers blooming between the vegetable beds. In winter smoke billowed out of the chimney and a fire heated the small space where his family slept. His children had already left home. One of them
