Our soft landing in the Middle East didn’t last long, however. In the middle of May 1967, we were visited by an Israeli army officer from a nearby base, who announced that war was imminent and that in all probability we would find ourselves on the front line. This shouldn’t have come as a major surprise, but somehow it caught both Maier and me off guard.
We were conscious of sporadic cross-border Palestinian guerrilla raids and the warmongering rhetoric of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. But despite a mutual defense accord signed by Egypt and Syria in late 1966, the perceived threat seemed rather distant. If anything, Israeli towns near the borders of Egypt and Syria appeared most at risk. However, the army officer’s visit forced us to focus on potential conflict in our neighborhood. We lived in one of the narrowest slivers of Israeli territory. Our compound was just eight miles from the Jordanian border. The Israeli army was afraid that when war came, Tulkarm, a predominantly Palestinian town just across the frontier on the West Bank of the Jordan River, would be used as a fire base.
The officer gave the ulpan’s director specific instructions on how to construct rudimentary defenses. There was no time to lose. We had to start digging foxholes and trenches immediately. It wasn’t a request; it was an order.
“I’m sorry. I can’t spare any soldiers to help you”, he said, before returning to his base.
Most of our motley group were originally city dwellers who had never handled a shovel. Not only that, but without a common language, we had trouble communicating. It was a daunting time, but Maier rose to the challenge. He had never experienced war but faced the looming conflict fearlessly.
Big or small, Maier dived into every project as though it was his puzzle to solve alone. With his engineering mind, he supervised the digging, organized a schedule, taught safety measures and made sure the bomb shelters were reinforced and fully stocked with supplies, in case we were forced to take cover for an extended period.
Maier’s upbeat determination was in stark contrast to my mood. For the first time in over twenty years, since the Nazis’ liquidation of Birkenau, I was truly petrified. My nightmares had receded again because life kept me engaged. But now they haunted me once more. I was tormented by visions of naked bodies, homeless children, starvation and torture, which robbed me of my sleep. I refused to get undressed at bedtime. I was afraid we’d be invaded during the night and I’d be caught naked by Arab soldiers.
Back in America, my father’s wartime nightmares were also resurfacing. He called daily, begging us to fly the children home to him while the borders were still open. When we refused, he bombarded the US Embassy in Tel Aviv with pleas to convince us to send the children to nearby Cyprus for safety, as so many were doing. Papa’s entreaties worked. A consular official came to see us.
“Your father has been calling us several times a day”, said the diplomat. “He made me promise to try to persuade you to evacuate the children”.
We politely declined his offer.
“What will happen to other Jewish children will happen to ours”, Maier said. Principled to the core, he was always an idealist and an unwavering Zionist.
Peace ebbed further away with every passing day. In the middle of May, President Nasser demanded the United Nations remove peacekeeping troops from the Sinai Peninsula, where, for more than a decade, they had been a buffer between Israel and Egypt. The 1,400-strong UN force was only there by invitation, so it was obliged to withdraw as 1,000 Egyptian tanks, and 100,000 soldiers — a third of the entire Egyptian army — advanced through the Sinai Desert toward the Israeli frontier, just thirty miles from Tel Aviv.
Tightening the noose still further, Nasser ordered a blockade of the Straits of Tiran, where the Gulf of Aqaba meets the Red Sea. The blockade severed Israel’s access to the sea from the Port of Eilat, imperiling the nation’s oil supply and other key imports from the south. Of all the provocations, the blockade was the most potent. The Israeli government interpreted Nasser’s decree as an act of war and announced a full mobilization, which was a highly efficient process. Most civilians of fighting age were reservists and well drilled. Once the call was made, people immediately stopped what they were doing and reported to their military units.
Meanwhile, to the northeast, Syria deployed troops to the Golan Heights, overlooking the upper Jordan River valley. A week later, Nasser signed a defense pact with Jordan’s King Hussein. The Israeli army officer had been spot-on. The war was going to take place in our backyard.
Risa and Gadi were oblivious to the coming storm. We made up a game that delighted them. We would scan the sky for aircraft, and when one of us spotted a plane, I’d bang a toy drum and they’d dive beneath the bed, which I had turned into a den, full of other toys and snacks. We practiced the drill for days, until it was no longer a game.
Air-raid sirens wailed early in the morning of June 5, 1967. This was no false alarm. It was the real thing. I grabbed the children’s hands and we sprinted to our foxhole. I held them as tightly as I could and, like my mother before me, tried to shield them with my body. I couldn’t see what was happening. But the sounds of rockets and shells were terrifying. The percussive effect of the explosions seemed incredibly powerful and destructive. The children were crying with fear, and although I was terrified, I tried to soothe them. Maier was nowhere to be seen as salvos whooshed through the sky. He was leading other families to their foxholes, and once they were safe, he jumped in with us.
“It’s the ones you don’t hear you should worry about”, he said. “The ones you hear have already passed you by”.
His remark meant I was now frightened for my children by the silence in between the shell bursts.
Ranged against Israel, the Arab coalition had a combined force of 900 aircraft, 5,000 tanks and 500,000 soldiers. We, in comparison, had only 175 aircraft, 1,000 tanks and a standing army of 75,000 soldiers, which could be boosted by reservists. The sheer weight of numbers generated a state of high anxiety among the civilian population. It felt like a war between David and Goliath. We had no inkling that our generals were so confident.
In the opening hours of the conflict, I assumed that Israel had been attacked first and that Jordan, just eight miles away, had started the aggression. In such circumstances, amid the confusion and fear of an artillery barrage, it’s hard not to think you are at the epicenter of the action. It was several hours before news reports on Israeli radio filtered back to us and put our plight in perspective.
What had happened was a classic move out of The Art of War, the military playbook written thousands of years ago by Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese general and philosopher. One of Sun Tzu’s principal exhortations is: “Attack the enemy where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected”.
That is precisely what the Israelis did. Early on the morning of June 5, 1967, the Defense Forces launched a series of preemptive strikes to blunt the Arab coalition’s military threat. Israeli aircraft destroyed 90 percent of the Egyptian Air Force’s planes while they sat helpless on the ground. Israeli pilots then crippled the air capacity of the other Arab nations in the alliance. Control of the skies enabled ground forces to confidently advance on their objectives.
Despite the rapid successes of the Israel Defense Forces, we stayed in our shelters. As I clutched my children, I wrestled with guilt. After all my experiences in Poland, how could I put their lives in danger? Was I being irresponsible? Should our desire to live in Israel take priority over their physical well-being? After all, this conflict was only the beginning. They would be living in a country surrounded by enemies, facing a perpetual existential threat and struggling for survival. These doubts were in the forefront of my mind while the artillery exchanges continued. We surfaced from the shelter when the guns ceased firing. In the darkness, we could see flames rising from Arab villages across the border.