One warm summer night we were wakened by the alarm usually tolled only at meal times. Looking out the window, we saw our dining hall ablaze. We had used it temporarily while a more spacious and modern building for this purpose was under construction. The burning building was a concrete structure roofed with galvanized corrugated sheet. An adjacent wood-frame shed with walls and roof of corrugated sheet stored sacks of chicken food. At its farther side was a much larger shed of similar construction, about 15 ft high, used to store the lorry, the tractors, and some metalworking equipment. This garage was the center of the conflagration. While the tractor batteries were being charged, a near-by basin filled with kerosene for degreasing oily machine parts must have caught fire from the generator’s spark. In the wooden structure the fire spread quickly to the roof.  Two pressurized containers of an acetylene welding set along the wall opposite to the entrance posed added danger. Bold fellows on high ladders worked frantically to isolate and lower the glowing roof sheets before they could fall down and cause an explosion. Unfortunately, the water level in the main reservoir was below minimum and generated no pressure. All of us tried to help the fire fighters with every available pot and bucket to supply water, but it was too little and seemingly too late. Two daring young men ventured inside the burning shed, freed the gas containers, brought them out, and set them down at what they thought was safe distance. However, another heroic pair carrying a 15-ft glowing sheet just lowered from the collapsing roof, moving cautiously away from the danger zone set their scalding burden on the ground. They could not see the gas containers, as only two kerosene storm lamps lighted the whole area. A frightful explosion threw the two men violently apart and flung the still glowing sheet against the barn, about 100-150 yards away. It was a ghastly sight to see that glaring-hot object flying trough the air in the pitch-dark night and igniting the haystacks around the barn. The two sheet carriers were severely wounded. One of them was the bus driver who had brought us home the night before, the other a recently befriended member of Ruhama.  Their faces and hands were scorched and bruised, and they had to stay in the hospital for a while, where I visited them two days later, relieved to learn that they were going to heal.

The two exploded containers were found in the morning many yards from the site. An additional source of danger was ammunition hidden between the sacks of chicken food; it went off as the sacks caught fire. Bullets flew around us and endangered the fire fighters. Fortunately they hit nobody.

The central administration of Hakibbutz Haartzi notified us that we were to finish our preparation period toward the end of summer, when a local gar’in would join our two Hungarian gar’in groups, and we would together establish our new, independent kibbutz. They advised us to arrange a meeting of the three groups to get acquainted with our new Eretz Yisraeli companions who were finishing their preparation period in a northern kibbutz, Eilon, near the Lebanese border.

The meeting of the three groups was a remarkable experience. Each group related its history, we made friends with the members of the third group and, as the last item of the meeting, we decided to call our new kibbutz Hassela (The Rock).

At the end of summer 1946 we finished our training period in Ruhama, as did the two other groups in their respective kibbutzim. It was agreed that all three groups would assemble in a few weeks at the tent camp of Kibbutz Artzi in Kiryat Haim (a quiet town in Haifa Bay) that served new kibbutzim in their first stage of “independence”.

We used our waiting period for a vacation with Haya to visit Jerusalem, which we had not yet seen. We found a more or less lodging in a youth hostel. We viewed as many historic sites as I remembered from my studies. The climax of our tour was, of course, the Western Wall (known also as the Wailing Wall), the western section of the wall King Herod had built around the site of the Holy Temple about 2200 years earlier, and which since the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE has remained the most sacred shrine of Judaism all over the world. Standing there—in front of that immense structure built of enormous stones (with weeds growing between them), and considering how many fervent prayers had been whispered and how many hot tears had been shed at this site by Jewish people bewailing their bitter fate of hatred and persecution, throughout Diaspora—one feels part of all his, a link in the long chain of those desperate generations. We both were greatly moved and remembered our dear parents and their pious longing to live for a moment such as this, for an improbable chance of praying at this historic Wall!

Members of kibbutzim in their initial stage of “independence” were earning their living as hirelings wherever they could find work. Most of the males (haverim) were working as porters in the port of Haifa, the rest as hired hands in different factories. The female members (haverot) found employment as household servants or waitresses in restaurants and coffee shops. I worked at a quarry and this required much physical effort. Haya had a most responsible and demanding function of kitchen chef. The kitchen, the pantry, the dining room and even the weekly acquisition of food for the whole kibbutz were under her control. Thanks to her supervision of cooking, our Eretz Yisraeli group became familiar with, and got to like, the delicacies of Hungarian cuisine.

As mentioned above, we had come to the tent camp to start there our independent kibbutz-life. We lodged in rectangular military tents that were occupied by four singles or two couples, in which case it was divided by a jute partition, which was not too convenient. Mats spread on he sand served as flooring. The tents were not connected to the urban power and we had to use kerosene lamps. Fortunately no lamp was overturned and no fire was caused while using these lamps.

We corresponded with Haya’s Mother in Budapest as regularly as was possible via post-war international mail services. This exchange of letters not only bridged our geographic distance, but also disproved the popular view about strain of in-law relationships. An especially wise and sensitive woman, she had found in me a substitute for her missing son, and I on my part, responded likewise to her warm attitude. She informed us that she had started to liquidate her household, preparing to leave for Eretz Yisrael.

In those days, severe stress prevailed between the yishuv (the Jewish population of Eretz Yisrael) and the British Mandate’s authorities. The British tried to dismantle the Haganah and any other Jewish militant organizations fighting Downing Street’s “White Book”, which severely restricted Jewish immigration and pioneer settlements in Palestine. The leadership of the yishuv responded by landing refugees from their boats at night and establishing settlements under cover of darkness. Prefabricated elements of a watchtower, a security wall or a safety fence and a couple of wooden cabins were carried by lorries to the designated site, where a group of volunteers, well-trained kibbutz members, erected a new settlement before dawn. According to an old Turkish law, a reminder of Palestine’s earlier Ottoman rulers, the authorities had no right to destroy any roofed structure. These settlements were called “Wall and Tower Settlements” (Negba was one of them).

The Allied Forces had liberated the death camps in Europe and saved their survivors. European governments had established camps for those displaced persons (D.P.’s) who could not or would not return to their homelands, because they had been dispossessed of everything and, in most places, were still unwanted. As Europe’s anti-Semitic feelings had not subsided, tens of thousands of homeless Jews had been waiting to be admitted to Eretz Yisrael while the British government had issued its “White Book” instead of Certificates (immigration permits) for these desperate people. Agents of the Yishuv acquired second-hand vessels wherever they could get them serviceable for transporting hundreds and thousands of displaced persons from the crowded camps in Europe to Eretz Yisrael. This operation was called Aliyah Beith (immigration B). All those people had to be transported from their D.P. camps to transition camps near Mediterranean ports, where they had to be lodged, clad and fed until they could be sailed off. Great Britain fought against this modern “Migration of (one) Nation(s)” on land and on the high seas. It sent menacing warships against under-equipped and overcrowded vessels carrying loads of a miserable humanity seeking a new homeland after having barely escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Some vessels succeeded in evading their pursuers and reached or neared an Eretz Yisraeli beach, where brave Palmach fighters carried the passengers ashore in their arms.

We got message from Mother that she had joined a group of Aliyah Beith on her way to Eretz Yisrael. She started her adventurous journey at the age of 50, transgressing the borders of several countries (Romania, Yugoslavia and Italy), and together with about 400 survivors, at long last boarded a ship called Knesset Yisrael (Assembly of the Jewish People) hidden in a fishermen’s port of southern Italy. The British Navy discovered and captured the vessel on the high seas and towed it to port of Haifa, where we saw it, hemmed in by British war ships, from the roof of the only two-story building of our tent camp. The Navy allowed neither the passengers nor the personnel ashore, but transferred all to one of their warships and took them to the detention camp in Cyprus, which already had hundreds of earlier captives.

Although these camps enjoyed the “hospitality” of the British Government, they were prisoners all the same. However, while they were lodged in military barracks, they were fed decently, and Eretz Yisraeli volunteers facilitated their everyday life. We received optimistic letters from Mother. Despite living in a camp again; she was joking about the British and called the camp “Bevin’s Sanatorium”. (Ernest Bevin was the British Foreign Minister who, more than any other politician, was personally responsible for the implementation of the “White Book” restrictions, including the maritime pursuit and subsequent internment of illegitimate immigrants.)

In the meantime, we were waiting impatiently at our temporary camp in Kiryat Haim for the official go-ahead to establish our own, independent kibbutz on a specified spot on the map. After a few months the Settlement Authorities notified us that we had been chosen to settle at the top of a desolate hill in the Western Galilee, East of Nahariya, near the ruins of the medieval Crusaders’ fortress Jiddin. We considered this a pioneers’ job par excellence. On visiting the place we found a picturesque landscape, hills strewn with mighty boulders, but very little soil for agriculture. There was no access road whatever, only a dirt path of several miles up the hills, winding between the boulders. In spite of all the hurdles ahead, we young idealists liked the place and gladly accepted the offer of the Settling Authorities. Our kibbutz was given the Name Yehi-Am, after a Haganah hero who had been killed in the vicinity some months earlier while blowing up bridges near Eretz Yirael’s borders in order to avoid or hinder invasion of Arab forces.

After a year of captivity in the British camp on Cyprus, Mother arrived at last in Haifa, together with the other passengers of Knesset Yisael. This was not yet the end of her troubles. All the newcomers were kept for about a month in a “quarantine” camp in Atlit, south of Haifa. Haya and I met Shosha, Haya’s sister, at the camp’s gate, where nobody was permitted to enter. Then we met Mother after 2½-3 years of separation. Mourning over the dear members of the family who had become victims of the Holcaust, saddened our spontaneous joy of reunion. Mother told us that she had been officially notified about the death of her husband Avraham, who had perished on the “death march” toward the Austrian border. Imre (Yitzhak), her firstborn, had died of typhus as war prisoner of he Red Army. Bözsi, her married daughter with a baby, had not returned from Auschwitz, nor had her husband.

Mother looked great and seemed to have gained weight in that Bevin’s Sanatorium. We parted with the hope to meet again at the Kiryat Shmuel transition camp, which was close to our tent camp, in Kiryat Haim, where she was going to stay until the end of November.

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