One morning at Haifa the Squadron-Leader called me aside and told me that a small satellite landing field had been prepared about thirty miles inland behind Mount Carmel from which the Squadron could operate should our aerodrome at Haifa be bombed out. ‘I want you to fly over there and have a look at it,’ the Squadron-Leader said. ‘Don’t land unless it seems safe and if you do land I want to know what it’s like. It’s meant to serve as a small secret hideaway where those Ju 88s could never find us.’
I flew off alone and in ten minutes I spotted a ribbon of dry earth that had been rolled out in the middle of a large field of sweet-corn. To one side was a plantation of fig trees and I could see several wooden huts among the trees. I made a landing, pulled up and switched off the engine.
Suddenly from out of the fig trees and out of the huts burst a stream of children. They surrounded my Hurricane, jumping about with excitement and shouting and laughing and pointing. There must have been forty or fifty of them altogether. Then out came a tall bearded man who strode among the children and ordered them to stand away from the plane. I climbed out of the cockpit and the man came forward and shook my hand. ‘Welcome to our little settlement,’ he said, speaking with a strong German accent.
I had seen enough English-speaking Germans in Dar es Salaam to know the accent well, and now, quite naturally, anyone who had anything even remotely Germanic about him set alarm-bells ringing in my head. What is more, this place, according to the Squadron-Leader, was meant to be secret and here I was being met by a welcoming committee of fifty screaming children and a huge man with a black beard who looked like the Prophet
Isaiah and spoke like a parody of Hitler. I began to wonder whether I had come to the right spot.
‘I didn’t think anyone knew about this,’ I said to the bearded man.
The man smiled. ‘We cut down the corn ourselves and helped to roll out the strip,’ he said. ‘This is our cornfield.’
‘But who are you and who are all these children?’ I asked him.
‘We are Jewish refugees,’ he said. ‘The children are all orphans. This is our home.’ The man’s eyes were startlingly bright. The black pupil in the centre of each of them seemed larger and blacker and brighter than any I had ever seen and the iris surrounding each pupil was brilliant blue.
In their excitement at seeing a real live fighter plane, the children were beginning to press right up against the aircraft, reaching out and making the elevators in the tailplane move up and down. ‘No, no!’ I cried out. ‘Please don’t do that! Please keep away! You could damage it!’
The man spoke sharply to the children in German and they all fell back.
‘Refugees from where?’ I asked him. ‘And how did you get here?’
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he said. ‘Let’s go into my hut.’ He picked out three of the older boys and set them to guard the Hurricane. ‘Your plane will be quite safe now,’ he said.
I followed him into a small wooden hut standing among fig trees. There was a dark-haired young woman inside and the man spoke to her in German but he did not introduce me. The woman poured some water from a bucket into a saucepan and lit a paraffin burner and proceeded to heat water for coffee. The man and I sat down on stools at a plain table. There was a loaf of what looked like home-baked bread on the table, and a knife.
‘You seem surprised to find us here,’ the man said.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.’
‘We are everywhere,’ the man said. ‘We are all over the country.’
‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. Who do you mean by we?’
‘Jewish refugees.’
I really didn’t know what he was talking about. I had been living in East Africa for the past two years and in those times the British colonies were parochial and isolated. The local newspaper, which was all we got to read, had not mentioned anything about Hitler’s persecution of the Jews in 1938 and 1939. Nor did I have the faintest idea that the greatest mass murder in the history of the world was actually taking place in Germany at that moment.
‘Is this your land?’ I asked him.
‘Not yet,’ he said.
‘You mean you are hoping to buy it?’
He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food.’
‘So where do you go from here?’ I asked him. ‘You and all your orphans?’
‘We don’t go anywhere,’ he said, smiling through his black beard. ‘We stay here.’
‘Then you will all become Palestinians,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps you are that already.’
He smiled again, presumably at the naïvety of my questions.
‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do not think we will become Palestinians.’
‘Then what will you do?’