We Are Coming, Unafraid by Keren Michael;Keren Shlomit; & Shlomit Keren

Author:Keren, Michael;Keren, Shlomit; & Shlomit Keren [Keren, Michael & Keren, Shlomit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Long Road to Palestine

While he may have felt like Moses on the road to the Promised Land, the diarist still had to go through several weeks of routine life in the British army before reaching it. In the weeks that followed, the diary was filled with descriptions of drills and inspections, thefts, fistfights, a lost battle against flies and insects (compared again to Pharaoh’s plagues), and thoughts on war and peace.

Sept. 13, 1918. It is difficult for Jewish boys to devote themselves entirely to the sword and the rifle, and that is actually why we have started classes in Hebrew for those who are beginners and those who already know how to speak Hebrew. In the evening, while I was at bayonet practice, I thought of something strange. What? I will really have to kill a person? I had absolutely no worries about my own life—[I just thought] about how I would do this. No! It cannot ever get that far. I just became a student in Hebrew school, how could it possibly even be imagined that I would kill someone? That made me sad a whole day. A vaudeville show that was put on for the benefit of the rifle brigade, which was staying in our camp until they could get to England, lightened my mood a bit. . . .

Sept. 17, 1918. Peace! Millions of people are waiting for this. Thousands of fathers and mothers are praying to God for the time that peace will come, but I doubt that anyone wants it as badly as I do.

Some of the reflections in Liss’s notebooks concern the Turkish and German prisoners of war. The difficulty in coping with the large number of POWs taken by the advancing British army in the Middle East has been described in various sources as a “nightmarish situation.”5 Elias Gilner described trainloads of prisoners in Palestine whose condition was appalling.

There was nothing soldierly about them; in fact they hardly looked human. They were shadows of men, with emaciated, grimy faces, from which sunken eyes glared with the sick, ravenous hunger of jackals, or stared with dull resignation. They had all been victims of starvation, fever and vermin. Some of them would take a few steps, then totter and fall flat on their faces. The odor they gave off was so nauseating that no soldier could stand close to them for any length of time.6

In another study, Eran Dolev described the terrible condition of Turkish prisoners in Damascus, with thousands of the sick and wounded among them having been abandoned by their retreating units. As one eyewitness reported, “Deserted by all save a handful of Turkish Medical personnel, starved for three days, and suffocated by the stench of their own offal and unburied dead, the plight of these wretches was more than miserable.”7 With the number of German and Turkish prisoners estimated in September 1918 to have reached forty thousand,8 POW camps were erected, and the Jewish Legions were charged with the unpleasant task of guarding them.

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