Aharai

`To Gal, and to all of the men and women of the Israel Defense Forces — fighting Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Iran, and the ignorance of the world; to those who sacrifice their careers, their marriages, and their lives to protect the Jewish nation — remember that the ground beneath your feet was won by pioneering freedom fighters: an “army” of Palestinian Jews and refugees from Europe and Arab countries who had to beg, borrow, and make their own weapons for their own defense.`

`All they had going for them was a lust for life and no alternative. In no way should they have been able to defeat a colonial superpower and beat back five Arab armies attacking at once. What should have been bloodbaths, and the end of the Jewish state, turned into impossible victories.`

`You are the legacy of their bravery in the face of existential threats, their creativity, their resourcefulness to overcome the impossible, and their will to do what needs to be done. One of those pioneering freedom fighters was Shlomo Levitsky. His story is your story.`

`This book is dedicated, also, to the memory of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.`

`He was twenty-three years old — an American-Israeli, born in California, raised in Virginia, and brought home to Israel as a child. He was a young man who spent his days working on a project that used soccer to bring Israeli and Palestinian children onto the same field, and who had painted across his bedroom wall, in English and in Hebrew and in Arabic, a single sentence: Jerusalem is everyone’s. On the morning of the seventh of October, twenty twenty-three, he was at the music festival in the fields near Re’im. When the gunmen came, he took shelter in a small roadside bomb shelter with his closest friend, Aner Shapira, and a crowd of other young people, and the killers threw grenade after grenade in among them. Aner threw seven of those grenades back out before he was killed. One of them tore away Hersh’s left arm below the elbow; bleeding, he tied his own tourniquet, and he was filmed being loaded, alive, onto a truck and driven into Gaza. He was held underground for nearly eleven months, while his mother stood before the United Nations and the world and would not stop saying his name. And then, at the end of August, twenty twenty-four — days before he was to have been brought home — Hersh and five other young hostages were murdered by their captors, at close range, in a tunnel beneath Rafah.`

`There is a private thread that binds this book to him. The author of these pages had come to know Hersh’s grandmother, Marcy, through family friends, and had given her a necklace — set with Hersh’s birthstone, and a Star of David — to wear while he was still alive, while he was still a hostage, while his name was still a prayer with a future tense. The author landed in Israel, in that late summer of twenty twenty-four, on the very day that Hersh and the others were killed. The last time the author saw Marcy was at the memorial for Hersh — held not in Jerusalem but in Skokie, Illinois, a few miles from the town where George Levy Mueller has lived out his long life, and from the museum where George still goes to tell his story. The chain this book describes is not a figure of speech. It runs through that room.`

`May his memory be a blessing. May his memory be a revolution.`

`At every wedding, the groom shattered a glass under his foot — a custom said to remember the Temple even at the moment of greatest joy. At Tisha B’Av the entire community sat on the floor and read the Book of Lamentations by candlelight, the way mourners sit shiva, except the mourned one was a city. The exile was not a metaphor. It was the air the Jewish people breathed. It defined them as completely as language and Sabbath and kosher law.`

`And yet for two thousand years the longing remained. They waited in the Pale of Settlement, where the Tsar’s edict of seventeen ninety-one had crammed the Jews into a strip of empire stretching from Kovno to Odessa. They waited in the mellahs of Morocco and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem itself, which had never been quite empty of Jews. They waited through expulsions and crusades and pogroms and quotas. They waited.`

`Then, in the late nineteenth century, a journalist sitting in a Vienna cafe wrote a book that turned a prayer into a plan.`

`His name was Theodor Herzl. He was Hungarian-born, Vienna-raised, assimilated to the point of indifference. He had grown up speaking German, dueled in his university fraternity, and wrote lighthearted comedies for the theater. In eighteen ninety-four he was sent to Paris as the correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse to cover the trial of an artillery captain named Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer on the French general staff, accused of selling secrets to the Germans. Herzl watched the captain be marched into a courtyard, his sword broken over a knee, his epaulets ripped away. He watched the crowd outside scream, “Mort aux juifs!” — Death to the Jews — in the streets of the capital of the Enlightenment, eighty years after the Emancipation. He went back to his hotel and began to think.`

`Two years later, in eighteen ninety-six, he published a hundred-page pamphlet titled Der Judenstaat — The Jewish State. The Jews, he argued, did not need to convert and did not need to assimilate, because conversion and assimilation would not save them. The hatred was not religious. It was not even rational. It was a hatred of strangers, stateless Jews by people who had decided the Jews would always be strangers. The only solution was for the Jews to stop being strangers. They needed a state of their own.`

`The Jews of Vienna laughed. We waited two thousand years, the joke went, and it had to happen to me? The rabbis of Eastern Europe called him a madman; the radicals called him a bourgeois; the assimilationists called him a traitor to their hard-won citizenship. He convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in eighteen ninety-seven anyway, gaveled it open in a hall hung with the new blue-and-white flag of the movement, and wrote in his diary that night: If I were to sum up the Basel Congress in a word — which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly — it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State.`

`He was right. He died seven years later, before any of it came to pass. But the idea was alive. It moved through the shtetls and the seminaries and the cafes. Young Jews began to do the impossible thing he had described. They began to leave.`

`Zionism is not, despite what its enemies say, a colonial enterprise. It is not the expression of religious extremism. It is not racism or apartheid or settler ideology. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people — an indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland after being stateless and persecuted for thousands of years. Israel does not exist because the Jews were dumped into the Middle East after the Holocaust as some kind of European guilt offering. Israel exists because the Jews, in waves, over the half-century before the Holocaust and through it and after it, willed it into existence. They got on boats. They walked from Poland and from Yemen. They cleared malarial swamps with their bare hands at Hadera. They resurrected a language out of an ancient text and made it a tongue spoken in nurseries and machine shops. They invented an army out of fifteen-year-olds with hunting rifles and a slogan: Aharai — After me. They paid for every square meter in blood and sweat and disbelief that what they were doing could possibly work.`

`This is the story of three of those Jews — and, through them, of the people they belonged to. None of the three is a Founding Father in the sense the Americans use the term. There is no Mount Rushmore in Tel Aviv, no marble forehead overlooking the Negev. They are something rarer and harder to memorialize, and in some ways more important. They are the ones who actually lived it: the one who helped make the state, the one who survived what the absence of the state had cost, and the one who is, at this hour, defending it.`

`The first is the youngest son of a chain of rabbis stretching back five centuries to the Spanish Inquisition — a skinny, blond boy who climbed water towers in nineteen thirties Jerusalem, and who, when his country was nothing but a dream guarded by a few thousand half-armed teenagers and raggedy Holocaust survivors in the dark, picked up an Italian carbine bigger than himself and walked, hand over hand, down a rope into the future. His name is Shlomo Levitsky.`

`The second is the son of a decorated German soldier, born into a family that had been German for two hundred years and believed it — a boy who boarded a train with his little sister in Westphalia and watched his mother on the railway platform grow smaller and smaller until she was gone, and who learned, in three concentration camps before the age of fifteen, what it means for a people to have nowhere on the earth that is theirs. His name is George Levy Mueller.`

`The third is the descendant, on one side, of the Jews of Babylon — carried out of Iraq as children, by way of a long sojourn in Iran, and sent ahead on the trains to the new state — and on the other, of the stubborn families who had farmed the Land of Israel since before Zionism had a name — a captain in the reserves who, on a Sabbath morning in October, drove south toward the smoke without waiting to be called. His name is Gal Sharon.`

`One was the missing link between the idea of Jewish self-determination and the reality of it. One was the living proof of why the idea could not be allowed to fail. And one is the inheritor, holding the line his grandparents’ generation drew. Their three lives do not run one after another. They run alongside one another, and underneath one another, and into one another, and that is how this book will tell them — braided, the way they truly happened, into the single chain of a single people.`

`On the last day of March, fourteen ninety-two, the Catholic Monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree. Every Jew in their kingdoms had four months to convert to Christianity or to leave. Their houses, their olive groves, their bakeries, their books — all of it had to be sold or abandoned. They were forbidden to take gold or silver out of Spain. By the end of July, somewhere between forty thousand and two hundred thousand Jews — historians still argue about the figure — were on the roads, on the ships, on the docks of Cadiz and Tarragona and Valencia, looking for somewhere in the world that would take them. Many crossed into Portugal, where they were expelled five years later. Many sailed for Morocco and the Ottoman Empire — the Sultan Bayezid the Second, in a famous remark, supposedly thanked Ferdinand for sending him such excellent subjects. Many died on the road.`

`Shlomo Levitsky’s family tradition holds that one of his ancestors did not wait for the decree. He was a financial advisor to the Queen — a man who saw the books, who knew the temper of the court, who had perhaps overheard the inquisitors lobbying. The Queen herself, the story goes, warned him. Take your tribe. Go east. She gave him an escort of Spanish soldiers, and he gathered his clan and left.`

`For the next century the family moved across Europe, paying off princes and kings, leaving small chains of cousins in each country as security and welcome — settling some families in Poland, some in Lithuania. Eventually one branch pushed all the way into the great forests and pasturelands of Ukraine. There, on the eastern frontier of what would become the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a great Christian landowner welcomed the rabbi he found at the head of the caravan. The landowner needed people. He needed people who could read and write. He needed people to keep his ledgers, to run his mills, to translate his correspondence with the markets of Krakow and Lviv. The rabbi’s son was Yaakov, like the patriarch in Genesis; the landowner’s son was Ivan. Together their fathers founded the town of Ivankov, named after Ivan, and the rabbi opened a yeshiva.`

`It was the seventeenth century. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the most cosmopolitan state in Christendom — a vast realm stretching from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea, ruled by an elected king, populated by Catholics and Orthodox Christians and Calvinists and Muslims and Jews. Jewish life flourished in a way unimaginable elsewhere in Europe. By the sixteen sixties more than half of the world’s Jews lived in this single state. The Council of the Four Lands governed the internal affairs of the Jewish communities like a kind of parliament. There were yeshivas in every town with more than a few dozen Jewish families. There was a Yiddish printing industry, a Hebrew literary culture, a network of merchants who could send a letter from Vilna to Constantinople and trust it would arrive.`

`For two centuries Yaakov’s chain of rabbis was unbroken in Ivankov. The yeshiva produced sons who became rabbis, who married the daughters of other rabbis from Berdichev and Zhitomir, who raised more sons who became rabbis. The Ukrainian peasants worked the land. The Polish nobles collected the rents. The Jews ran the inns and the mills and the small businesses that wove the fabric of small-town economic life.`

`Then, in seventeen seventy-two and seventeen ninety-three and seventeen ninety-five, the three great Partitions of Poland tore that world apart. Russia, Prussia, and Austria carved the Commonwealth into pieces. The vast majority of its Jews — including the Levitsky line — found themselves overnight under Russian rule. The Tsarina Catherine the Great, who did not want her Christian Russian subjects exposed to Jewish economic competition, restricted the Jews to a band of territory along Russia’s western frontier called the Pale of Settlement. There they would remain for the next century and a quarter, prohibited from moving to the heartland, prohibited from owning farmland in many districts, prohibited from a long list of professions, prohibited from a long list of universities.`

`And then there were the conscriptions.`

`In eighteen twenty-seven, Tsar Nicholas the First introduced what the Jews would remember as one of the cruelest decrees of all. Jewish boys, as young as twelve and sometimes younger, were to be drafted into the army for twenty-five years of service. Twenty-five years. They would be taken from their homes, marched east, often beaten until they accepted baptism, and almost never come back. The Jewish community devised systems to satisfy the quota: poor families’ sons were sent in place of rich families’ sons; orphans were sent in place of children with parents. Khappers — child-snatchers — roamed the shtetls. Mothers hid their boys in cellars. Some maimed their own sons to make them unfit for service — an amputated finger, a bullet to the foot, a deliberately blinded eye — because the alternative was worse.`

`When the khappers came for the Levitsky boys, the Christian landowner who had once welcomed their ancestor stepped in. He had grown up with Yaakov’s descendants. He had played with them as a child. He understood — as the Tsar’s officials in Petersburg did not — that his town would die if its Jews were carted away. He told the soldiers that the rabbi’s children were his own. Take my name, he said to the rabbi. Take Levitsky. So that when the soldiers come back, they will see my name on the children, and they will believe me.`

`That is how the family of rabbis came to be known as Levitsky. The name was worn first as a disguise. It was the gift of a Christian patron to a Jewish friend, and for nearly two centuries it allowed the rabbinic line to continue.`

`Shlomo Levitsky would be born Shloime Levitsky in nineteen twenty-seven. He would carry the name like a passport. Eventually, much later, when he raised an Italian carbine over his shoulder and joined a clandestine Jewish army in British Mandatory Palestine, the name worn first as a disguise would become the name of a soldier of Israel.`

`There is another line in the family, on his mother’s side, and it is worth pausing for. Her father — Shlomo’s maternal grandfather — was a wealthy landowner, an unusual position for a Jew in the Pale. He had a country house, he had servants, he had every advantage. He buried child after child. They came out small, or they came out blue, or they did not come out at all. There is no record of what killed them. Most of them probably died in the first weeks of life — Russian infant mortality among Jews in the late nineteenth century was catastrophic by modern standards, with as many as a third of all Jewish children dying before their fifth year.`

`After a string of small graves the grandfather went, in despair, to the Grand Rabbi of his region, a Hasidic master whose name has not been preserved. The Rabbi heard him out. When the next child is born, he said, give her a name that sounds like bubbe. The angel of death will hear it and look for an old woman. He will pass over your daughter.`

`The next child was a girl. They named her Babel. It is a Yiddish nickname; it means, more or less, “Grandma.” She lived.`

`She lived to be a grandmother in fact. She would, in time, become the mother of Shlomo Levitsky. In the years of the Russian Revolution she would befriend, as a girl, a Bolshevik named Sasha — Sasha the legendary young Communist commander, the kind of figure who rode at the head of cavalry columns and chased the White Russian army across the Ukrainian steppe. Later, in the nineteen thirties, when Sasha was no longer chasing anyone but managing a vital Soviet automobile factory in Russia, that same Sasha would receive a visit from Shlomo’s eldest brother Mayer — a young Jew showing up at the factory gates, in the middle of Stalin’s purges, looking for an apprenticeship under the dangerous name Levitsky. Sasha remembered his childhood friend Babel. He hired the boy. He protected him. He saved his life.`

`These were the women and men whose blood Shlomo inherited. The financial advisor who left Spain before the door closed. The rabbi who walked his caravan across Europe and founded a town with a Christian landowner. The unnamed grandmother who outwitted the angel of death. The Bolshevik who remembered an old friend forty years later.`

`They were the clever ones. They were the ones who survived.`

`Then in October, nineteen seventeen, the Bolsheviks seized Petrograd, and Russia collapsed into civil war. For the next four years Ukraine became one of the bloodiest pieces of geography in human history. White armies, Red armies, Green peasant militias, German troops, Polish legions, French expeditionary forces, the Don Cossacks, the Black Hundreds, the Makhnovshchina anarchists, and Ukrainian nationalist forces under the commander Symon Petliura all fought across the same towns, in some places six or seven times in a single calendar year. The Jews, as always, were caught in the middle and accused by all sides.`

`The Petliura forces were the worst. The Ukrainian People’s Republic, of which Petliura was first the military commander and later the head of state, claimed to be a modern nationalist movement. In practice, its troops carried out the largest wave of anti-Jewish massacres seen in Europe between the Khmelnytsky uprising of sixteen forty-eight and the Holocaust. Modern historians estimate that between thirty thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand Jews were killed in the pogroms of nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty-one — across more than a thousand separate incidents, in nearly every town and village of central and western Ukraine. The killings followed a pattern: a band of armed men would ride into a Jewish neighborhood, demand a “contribution” from the community, take whatever they wanted, kill those who resisted or those they decided looked Bolshevik or those whose women they wanted, and ride on.`

`This is the world into which Yaakov Levitsky stepped, freshly ordained, to take up his post as rabbi of a small town in Ukraine.`

`The pogrom in his town followed the script. A column of horsemen — they may have been Petliurists, they may have been independent bandits operating under the Petliurist banner, the survivors never agreed — rode in one afternoon and headed straight for the rabbi’s house. They knew the protocol. The rabbi was the moral center of the Jewish community. He was the man who could open the safes and the dowry boxes and the burial-society funds. They tied a rope around him.`

`What followed was an extortion ritual that played out a thousand times across Ukraine in those years. They walked him from house to house at the end of the rope, like a goat being led through a market. At each door they demanded that the rabbi tell his congregants to give up their valuables. Silver Sabbath candlesticks. Hidden gold coins. The brass kiddush cups passed down from a great-grandmother. The Polish prayer book bound in leather. Anything.`

`The Jews of the town gave what they had. The rabbi was their rabbi. They hoped that if they were generous enough, the bandits would take their loot and leave.`

`The bandits did not leave. They took the loot, walked the rabbi out of town to the bridge over the river, and tied a heavy stone to the rope around his neck. He had never learned to swim. He would, all the rest of his life — through Soviet rule, through immigration, through old age in Jerusalem — be terrified of water. He could not stand to bathe in a tub. He could not bear to wade in the sea. His youngest son, growing up in the holy city, would never see his father step into a body of water that was deeper than his knees.`

`The bandits prepared to throw him in.`

`Then — and this is the part of the story that Shlomo would, eighty years later, tell with a particular small smile — a horseman came riding hard from the east, shouting that the Reds were just over the hill. The Bolshevik cavalry was coming. The bandits dropped the rabbi at the foot of the bridge, scooped up their stolen silver, and fled.`

`The rabbi was untied by a passerby. He walked home. He sat down in his synagogue. He kept being a rabbi.`

`He would tell that story for the rest of his life. He would tell it to his children at the Sabbath table, his voice quiet, his hands folded in his lap. There was no grand moral, no triumphalist conclusion. There was only the bridge, the rope, the stone, the rider, and the fact that he was, against everything, alive.`

`“We live in the miracle,” he would say. “One miracle.”`

`It is the same sentence, almost word for word, that Shlomo would later say about his own life. A boy in a drawer. A blond Palmach trainee on a kibbutz water tower. A bleeding fighter walking five kilometers through an orange grove. A captain walking into the worst prison in Cairo with his shoulders back. One miracle. Always exactly one.`

`It is the lesson the rabbi left him. It is also, in a deep sense, the lesson the Jewish people themselves had been carrying for two thousand years.`

`And the German Jews did something with that freedom that has few parallels in history. They poured themselves into German life with an ardor that the word “assimilation” does not capture. They did not merely blend in. They fell in love. They fell in love with the German language, with German poetry, with German music and German philosophy and the German idea of Bildung — the cultivation of the self through learning. They produced, in the space of three generations, an astonishing share of the country’s scientists and physicians and jurists and composers and industrialists. They called themselves, in a formula that was meant with complete sincerity, “German citizens of the Mosaic faith.” The faith was a detail. The German was the substance. By the nineteen twenties a great many German-Jewish families attended synagogue, if at all, the way a great many German Protestant families attended church — three times a year, out of respect, on the days the calendar required.`

`The Levys of Lippstadt were exactly this kind of family.`

`Lippstadt was a modest town in Westphalia, in the region the modern map calls North Rhine-Westphalia, set in the flat agricultural country between the Ruhr industrial belt and the open farmland to the east. It had been founded in the Middle Ages; it had a market square and church spires and a small river running through it. It had a small, settled, unremarkable Jewish community of the ordinary German kind — a synagogue, a Hebrew teacher for the children, a cemetery, a handful of families who had been in the town and the towns around it for as far back as the records ran.`

`Max Levy was a Lippstadt merchant. He owned a store — a clothing and dry-goods store — on the ground floor of a large building in the town, and the family lived in comfort above it. It was, by the standards of the place and the time, an upper-middle-class life, the life of a respected local businessman. Max’s parents, George’s grandparents, lived upstairs in the same house. Max’s brother Ludwig lived with the family as well. The household was full and prosperous and entirely ordinary.`

`Max Levy had also, as a young man, gone to war for Germany. When the First World War came in nineteen fourteen, the Jews of Germany had volunteered and been conscripted in the same proportions as their Christian neighbors — roughly a hundred thousand German Jews served, and some twelve thousand of them were killed. Max served, and survived, and was awarded the Iron Cross. It is worth pausing on what that decoration meant to a man like him. It was not a trinket. It was the proof — pinned to the chest, witnessed, official — that he had bled for Germany and that Germany had recognized it. It was the visible token of the whole German-Jewish bargain: we belong here; we have earned it; we are home.`

`Max married a woman named Lucie. Her name was spelled in the French manner, L-u-c-i-e, the way a certain kind of cultured German family liked to spell things in those years. Lucie had a sister, Irmgard, and Irmgard had married a man named Joseph Mueller. That marriage — and that surname, Mueller — will matter a great deal later in this story, in a way no one in the family could possibly have foreseen in nineteen thirty. For now it is enough to know that the Mueller name existed, on the edge of the family, attached to a brother-in-law who had gone to America.`

`George Levy was born in Lippstadt on the third of September, nineteen thirty. His sister Ursula was born about five years after him, in nineteen thirty-five. They were the children of that large, warm, prosperous house — the store below, the grandparents above, the uncle down the hall. George grew up speaking German, the only language he knew. He played soccer. He ran on the school track team. He was, by his own later description, a regular little kid, and the regularity was the point: he was a German boy, in a German town, in the only country his family had ever thought of as theirs.`

`There is a temptation, looking back from the far side of what is coming, to read the Levys’ Germanness as a kind of blindness — to think that they should have known, should have packed, should have run. It is the wrong way to read them. The Levys were not naïve. They were the opposite. They were the success story. They were the living proof of the most hopeful idea the modern world had offered the Jewish people: that the long exile could simply end — not by going home to Zion, but by being accepted, fully and finally, as citizens of the country where you already lived. Max Levy had the Iron Cross to prove it.`

`That was the idea. Within a decade of George’s birth it would be tested to destruction, and the testing would teach the Jewish people a lesson written in the blood of a third of their number — the same lesson, exactly, that Theodor Herzl had tried to teach them from a Vienna café forty years before, and that a chain of rabbis in Ukraine, and a clan of Jews who would soon be put on trains out of Baghdad, were learning at the same hour by other roads. The lesson was that a Jew without a state of his own is a guest, and that a guest remains in the house only as long as the host permits.`

`The Levys did not yet know they were guests. They thought they were home.`

`By the early twentieth century the Jews of Iraq were one of the most established and deeply rooted Jewish communities in the world — more than a hundred and thirty thousand people, some ninety thousand of them in Baghdad, where they made up something close to a quarter of the city, and another ten thousand in the southern port of Basra, where they made up a comparable share. They were its merchants and its money-changers, its musicians and its physicians and its clerks; the first finance minister of modern Iraq was a Jew. They spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. They thought of themselves, most of them, as Iraqis — as Arab Jews, at home in a country their ancestors had lived in for two and a half thousand years. It was, in its confidence, the very same at-homeness that the Levys felt in Germany. And it would be taught the very same lesson.`

`The lesson came, for the Jews of Iraq, on the first and second of June, nineteen forty-one, in two days that the community would afterward call the Farhud. A pro-Nazi government had briefly seized power in Baghdad, and as it collapsed, a pogrom swept the Jewish quarters of the city. Mobs murdered something like a hundred and eighty Jews, wounded many hundreds more, left hundreds of children orphaned, and looted and burned thousands of Jewish homes and shops. The Farhud lasted two days. It ended twenty-six centuries of a certain kind of confidence. It told the Jews of Iraq, in the plainest possible language, what Kristallnacht had told the Jews of Germany three years before, and what the pogroms had told the Jews of Ukraine across the generations before that: that a Jewish community living as a guest in a country not its own remains in the house only so long as the host permits, and that the permission can be withdrawn in a weekend.`

`After the Farhud, the young Jews of Baghdad did two things at once. They resolved never to be left defenseless again, and they began to look for the way out. Emissaries from the Yishuv — agents of the same clandestine arm of the Jewish leadership that would later crew the Aliyah Bet boats Shlomo Levitsky sailed — were smuggled into Iraq, and out of their work an underground was built. Its members did not give it a grand name; they called it, simply, the Movement. It had three faces. One was a defense wing that gathered and hid weapons, in cellars and behind the false walls of synagogues, against the day of another Farhud. One was a migration wing that forged passports and exit papers and mapped escape routes. And one taught modern Hebrew, and the geography of a country most of its students had never seen, in secret rooms. The whole of it was built in cells of three to five people, each cell blind to the others, so that no single arrest could unravel the network.`

`Then came nineteen forty-eight. The State of Israel was declared in May; the surrounding Arab states went to war against it; and Iraq, which had sent an army to that war, turned on the Jews who had lived among its people since antiquity. Zionism was made a capital crime. There were arrests, the seizure of Jewish property and businesses, the public hanging of prominent Jews. To leave Iraq legally became, for a Jew, impossible. So the Movement built an escape route instead — an underground railroad that carried Jews north and east, out of Iraq and across the frontier into Iran, and from Tehran onward by air to the new Jewish state. By nineteen forty-nine it was moving something on the order of a thousand people a month. Within two years that clandestine trickle would swell into a flood the new state called Operation Ezra and Nehemiah — the great airlift that, across nineteen fifty and nineteen fifty-one, carried almost the entire Jewish community of Iraq, some hundred and twenty thousand people, out of the country and into Israel, all but ending twenty-six centuries of Jewish life in Babylon in the space of two years. And parents, watching the country they had thought was theirs become a country that wanted them gone, began to send their children ahead of them down that route — the older children first, alone or in small groups, into the hands of the network — meaning, themselves, to follow.`

`This is the point at which the wide story narrows to a single family — Gal Sharon’s father’s family — and names can be put to it. Gal’s paternal grandfather was a man named Salman; his grandmother, a woman named Victoria. They were Shaharbanis, and they were, in the way of old and careful families, distant cousins of one another. They came not from Baghdad but from Basra, the great southern port on the Shatt al-Arab where the Tigris and the Euphrates run together toward the Gulf, and where the Jewish community was among the most ancient in all of Iraq. Victoria was born into the Alfi family, a clan wealthy and prominent enough that a square in Iraq carries its name; out of that same family would later come Yossi Alfi, who grew up to be one of the best-known storytellers and men of the theater in Israel. Salman kept a fabric shop. By the early nineteen forties they had two small sons — Yehezkel, born in nineteen thirty-nine, and Avraham, born in nineteen forty-one. They were, before the century turned on them, exactly the kind of settled, comfortable Iraqi Jewish family that assumed it would always be Iraqi. And then the Farhud reached even Basra. Its organized massacre fell on Baghdad to the north, but its violence rippled south to the port, where mobs turned on Jewish shops; and Salman — stubborn against Victoria’s pleading that he stay behind his own door — went out anyway to open his store. He was stabbed in the street. He made it home bleeding, and he lived; but the lesson had been written into his own body, and the family understood that the Iraq they had thought was theirs was finished.`

`Not long after, Salman and Victoria left. They crossed the Shatt al-Arab into Iran, to the refinery city of Abadan a few miles downriver, meaning to wait out the danger — a year, perhaps two — and then to see. They stayed ten. In Abadan they slowly built a life again, in a large compound set around a central courtyard, where the children of many such refugee families played through the long days while the adults waited for the world to settle. Iran became, against every intention, the place where much of the family’s life was lived for a decade, and it left its mark in the most intimate way a place can mark a family: in the languages its children spoke. The parents and the two oldest children went on speaking the Arabic of Basra to one another; the younger children, raised across those years in Iran, grew up speaking Farsi. It was a single household divided, by the border it had crossed, into two mother tongues.`

`It was during those years in Iran that Victoria became something more than a mother waiting out a danger. She joined the work of the Movement. The Iraqi Zionist underground had followed its people across the frontier, and from inside the refugee world of Iran it carried on the same labor it had done in Baghdad — and one of the things it did was send Jewish children onward to Israel. Victoria helped with that work. And when the moment came, she did it for her own: in nineteen forty-eight, the year the State was founded, she put her two oldest sons — Yehezkel, then nine, and Avraham, then seven — onto the route to the new state, a train to a bus station inside Iran, the rest of the long journey coordinated from there by the Jewish Agency. They were children, and they went without their parents, ahead of their parents, because the whole purpose was to get them to Israel and to trust that the rest of the family would follow.`

`This is the second time in this book that a mother has put her children on a train in order to save them, and the two trains deserve to be set side by side. A decade before Victoria’s children rode out toward Israel, and two thousand miles to the northwest, George Levy’s mother, Lucie, had taken her son and her small daughter to a railway platform in Lippstadt and put them on a train out of Germany — and had stood on the platform and waved, and not been able to follow, and been murdered. The act was the same: a mother sending her children ahead, alone, down a railway line, because the country around them had become a thing to escape. But the two trains ran toward two different worlds. Lucie’s train, in nineteen thirty-nine, ran toward a Holland with no Jewish state standing behind it, a Holland that would itself be overrun within the year; she had nowhere on earth to send herself, and no one was coming for her. Victoria’s children rode toward a Jewish state that now existed — declared, defended, its doors thrown open to exactly these children by its very first laws, its agents working the route at the risk of their lives. That is the whole of the difference between the two trains, and it is the difference this entire book exists to describe. Because there was an Israel, Victoria could follow her children. And she did.`

`She came out of Iran afterward, by a different road, in nineteen fifty-two — four years behind her children. Making that last aliyah, Salman and Victoria were allowed to carry almost nothing out with them: a single suitcase, and the wedding ring on Victoria’s hand. Salman managed one act of quiet defiance — he smuggled out a silver kiddush cup, and over that cup the family still recites the blessing of the wine to this day, a single whole object of home carried out across the wreck of a world. She reached Israel some time after her children had, and she did not know where they had been placed. The Jewish Agency had received them and set them on a kibbutz, but no one had told her which one. So she walked. She went from kibbutz to kibbutz, gate to gate, asking at each the same question: are there children here who came from Iran, out of Iraq, without their parents? It took her the better part of a month. And at one of them, at last, the answer was yes. The family began to reassemble itself on the soil of the new state, out of the pieces the century had scattered. In time the household settled into ordinary Israeli lives: Victoria kept the home, as she always had, and Salman, who had kept his fabric shop in Basra, took work in a flour mill and stayed there until he retired. One of their sons would, years later, set the whole journey down in a book of his own; the family no longer has a copy, but they know that it was written, which is its own kind of record.`

`The kibbutz was where a great many of these children landed, and where Victoria’s eldest were raised the rest of the way into Israelis. The Ashkenazi families already settled there taught them what the young country expected: agriculture and the work of the fields, modern Hebrew, and — in the smaller, sharper lessons — how to carry themselves, how to behave, how to be “civilized” in the European sense, which they believed was superior to the ways of the primitive brown Jews from the Arab countries. It was, beyond any question, a rescue, but a complicated one. The state was European in its leadership, secular, and in a desperate hurry, and it set about turning the children of Baghdad and Basra into Hebrew-speaking Israelis as fast as it could — Arabic discouraged, old names exchanged for new ones, the deep Mesopotamian inheritance quietly folded away. It cost something real. The Sharabani family became Sharon. `

`And then, in nineteen sixty, on the soil of Israel, Victoria had the child she had wanted all along. From the first her goal had been a Sabra — a child born in the land itself, native to it, belonging to no country but this one — and the boy born to her in nineteen sixty was exactly that. He was Gal’s father. He grew up inside a household still divided among its languages: his parents and his oldest siblings in the Arabic of Basra, the middle children in the Farsi of Iran, and he himself, the Sabra, in Hebrew and Hebrew alone. He was, in a way the older children could never quite be, simply Israeli. And like a great many children of his moment, in the Israel of the nineteen sixties, he was faintly ashamed of the rest of it — of how old his parents were, of the Arabic they spoke in the street, of the unmistakable foreignness of a family carried out of another world. So he turned from the Arabic, and let it go. It is one of the quiet costs of the ingathering, repeated in a hundred thousand households: that the price of becoming wholly Israeli was so often the loss of where one had come from. There is a coda to Victoria’s story, and the full shape of it surfaced only at the very end of her life. The family had always understood that she had helped get children out — that much was known. But when the soft-spoken old woman they had simply called Safta died, and they gathered at her grave, her cousin rose to speak — Yossi Alfi, of the same Basra Alfi family, by then one of the best-known storytellers in Israel, a man who had himself been carried out of Iraq as a small child. He had come to honor a hero. And what he told the mourners, what Gal heard for the first time standing at his grandmother’s graveside, was how far it had gone: that she had not merely helped a few children onto the route, as the family had always pictured it, but had been one of the Movement in full — trusted with its work, exposed to its dangers — and had carried the whole of it in silence across an entire lifetime in Israel, never breathing a word, not to her children, not to her grandchildren.`

`What, exactly, she did, the family has never learned, and most likely never will. That is not so much a gap in the record as it is the record itself: the Movement was built, deliberately and from the first, to leave no trace — its cells of three kept blind to one another, its members’ names never written down, its work designed to be invisible even to the next room. What can be known is the general shape of what a young mother could do for the underground, because young mothers were among its most useful people — for the simple reason that the police, Iraqi or Iranian, did not think to search them. A woman pushing a pram could carry, beneath the blankets and the infant, a codebook, a forged exit visa, the dismantled parts of a shortwave radio. A household with a young family in it could host a cell meeting behind the ordinary cover of relatives coming to visit. The thin, telltale whine of a clandestine transmitter signaling Tel Aviv could be lost beneath the everyday noise of a child. A mother with a toddler on her hip, stopped and questioned, was only a mother with a toddler on her hip. Whatever Victoria’s particular part was, it belonged to that hidden architecture — and it is enough, for the purposes of this book, to know that the old woman her grandchildren grew up beside had once been one of the people who held the escape route open.`

`Gal’s mother’s side came from the other river entirely. Her family had not arrived in any of the great twentieth-century waves of refugees, from Europe or from the Arab world. They had arrived in the eighteen hundreds — long before the State of Israel, long before the Balfour Declaration, long before even the First Aliyah of the eighteen eighties had a name. They were among the small, stubborn, pious Jewish families who made their way back to the Land of Israel in the slow trickle of the nineteenth century, when the country was a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire and Jerusalem was a dust-blown town of mixed religious quarters. They farmed. They endured Ottoman taxation and malaria and drought and the upheavals of two world wars. They were there, on the land, when the State was declared in nineteen forty-eight. By the time Gal was born, his mother’s family had been on the same earth for the better part of two centuries.`

`This is the meeting of histories that would, in the early nineteen eighties, produce a child in Tel Aviv. The Babylonian line and the old Yishuv line. The academies that redacted the Talmud and the stone houses of nineteenth-century Jerusalem. One side carried out of Iraq as children, by way of a decade in Iran; the other already home, and waiting, when the trains and the ships began to arrive. Three families, then, stand at the head of this book. A chain of rabbis who carried the name of a Christian patron as a disguise. A Westphalian merchant with the Iron Cross on his chest. A grandmother out of Basra, by way of ten years in Iran, who walked from kibbutz to kibbutz until she found her children, and who carried a secret out of the underground and all the way to her grave. Each of them was, in the middle of the twentieth century, living a different answer to the oldest Jewish question — the question of where, on the surface of the earth, a Jew is permitted simply to exist. Within a single generation all three answers would be tested in fire. And out of the three families, across the generations, would come the three lives this book has set out to braid: Shlomo, and George, and — the grandchild of that whole embattled generation — Gal. `

`They were a single plotline in what was becoming the most extraordinary immigration story in modern history. The First Aliyah, in the eighteen eighties, had brought tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews to Ottoman Palestine, mostly farmers and idealists fleeing the Russian pogroms of eighteen eighty-one. The Second Aliyah, between nineteen oh-four and nineteen fourteen, had brought another wave — younger, more secular, more radical, many of them socialists who would build the first kibbutzim. The Third Aliyah, after the First World War, came in fleeing the Russian Civil War. The Fourth Aliyah, in the mid-nineteen twenties, came from middle-class Polish Jews squeezed out by anti-Semitic economic legislation. The Fifth Aliyah, which the Levitsky family was joining in nineteen thirty-three, was driven by the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the deteriorating conditions across Eastern Europe. By the end of the decade it would bring more than a quarter of a million Jews into the country, doubling the Jewish population of Palestine.`

`In Hebrew, the word for immigration to the Land of Israel is Aliyah — ascendance, going up. It is the same word used for being called to read from the Torah in synagogue. It is not a neutral movement, like the English “emigration.” It is an ascent. To leave for Israel is, in the language of the people, to rise up.`

`Yaakov disembarked at Jaffa with his wife and his surviving children, carrying everything they had in trunks, kissing the ground in the half-comic, half-serious way of Jews from the diaspora who have read about doing so in old books. Israel is the only nation in the world founded around the idea that immigration is not a problem to be managed but an ascent to be celebrated.`

`They settled in the new Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Ram, on the western edge of the city. Yaakov opened a small print shop — the trade he had taught himself in Kiev, where Hebrew printing had been one of the few legitimate Jewish trades under the early Soviets. He kept doing rabbinic work on the side; people came to him with questions of kashrut and marriage and bereavement. The family settled into the rhythm of life in British Mandatory Palestine: ration cards and Hebrew lessons, the long Sabbath afternoons, the eucalyptus trees the early Zionist pioneers had planted to drain the malarial swamps.`

`The chain of rabbis was, for the first time in five hundred years, home.`

`After about six weeks, the men were released and sent home. George was at the Lippstadt railway station to see them come back. He watched the train come in and the men climb down from it. His uncle Ludwig climbed down and could walk. Many of the men could walk.`

`His father could not.`

`Max Levy came back from Oranienburg on a stretcher. Whatever had been done to him there, or simply allowed to happen to him there in the cold, had ruined his legs — they were, George understood, frozen, and Max could no longer stand on them. They carried him into the Judenhaus and set him down, and he sat. He sat all the time now, because sitting was all that was left to him, and he wept, and he looked, to his eight-year-old son, terrible — broken in his body and broken in some deeper place that a child could see but not name. He was a man who had won the Iron Cross for Germany, and Germany had sent him home on a stretcher, and the stretcher was the whole answer to the whole German-Jewish bargain.`

`They moved Max to a Catholic hospital in Lippstadt. Lucie took the children to visit him two or three times. George remembered the talk among the adults of amputating his father’s legs — whether it had been done, or only discussed, he was never sure. It did not, in the end, matter. Max Levy died in the hospital in the first days of January, nineteen thirty-nine, only a few weeks after the train had brought him home.`

`And on New Year’s morning — the same dark turn of the same dark winter — the family found Uncle Ludwig dead in his room.`

`Two men of the household, gone within weeks of the Night of Broken Glass. The Levy family had been, in the autumn, a large and prosperous and ordinary German-Jewish family. By the second week of January, nineteen thirty-nine, it was a widow and two small children, in a borrowed room in a Jew house, in a country that had just demonstrated exactly what it intended.`

`Lucie Levy understood the demonstration. She decided, in that January, that her children had to get out of Germany.`

`It was not a simple thing to decide, and it was very far from a simple thing to do. The doors of the world were, by the start of nineteen thirty-nine, very nearly shut. Only six months earlier, in July of nineteen thirty-eight, delegates from thirty-two countries had met at the French resort of Évian, on the shore of Lake Geneva, to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis — and country after country had risen to explain, with regret, why it could not take in any meaningful number of Jews. The conference had told the Nazi regime, in effect, that the world did not particularly want its Jews either. And there was, in nineteen thirty-nine, no Jewish state with open doors. There was a British Mandate in Palestine, and the British were in the very act of slamming that door too; within months they would issue the White Paper that choked Jewish immigration to a trickle. A Jewish mother in Lippstadt who wanted to save her children had almost nowhere on the surface of the earth to send them.`

`Lucie found one road. She knew a man — some kind of lawyer, a decent person, a non-Jew who had been kind to her — and she went to him and asked him to help her get herself and her two children out of Germany. He could not do it for all three. The truth of nineteen thirty-nine was that the chances of saving a Jewish adult were far worse than the chances of saving a Jewish child; the world had agreed, in a few narrow programs, to take children. What the lawyer could arrange was passage out for George and Ursula. Not for Lucie.`

`She took it. She gave the lawyer the family’s photographs and papers for safekeeping — the visual memory of the Levy family, handed to a Christian acquaintance because there was no longer anywhere safer to put it. Many years later, in the nineteen fifties, George would be a young man in the uniform of the United States Army, and he would travel back and find that man, and the man would still have the photographs, and would give them to him. That is how the few surviving images of the Levys of Lippstadt came down through time: because a mother, in the worst month of her life, understood that she might not survive to carry them herself.`

`So the decision was made. Lucie would send her son and her daughter, alone, out of Germany — and would stay behind, and try to follow, and hope.`

`This is the thing to hold onto, going forward, about George Levy’s story, and about why this book argues what it argues. Lucie Levy was not a careless mother or a foolish one. She was a brilliant and a brave one. She did everything a human being could do. And the most that everything could buy, in nineteen thirty-nine, for a Jewish mother who loved her children with her whole life — was a train that would carry them away from her, to a country that was itself about to be overrun, while she stayed behind in the closing dark.`

`That is what the absence of a Jewish state cost, measured in one family. The next chapters are the rest of the bill.`

`He did not know it was the last time. That is the particular cruelty built into the scene — that a mother and a son could stand on a platform and wave at each other and neither of them be permitted to know that this was the end, that this ordinary gesture, the waving, was the last thing. Lucie waved her children toward the only safety she could find for them and kept, for herself, the harder country. She had promised to follow. She meant it. She would spend the rest of her letters trying.`

`The transport carried the children across the Dutch border and into the Netherlands. George and Ursula were taken first to a quarantine center in Rotterdam, and then to a large home crowded with refugee children — children who had fled, as they had, out of Germany, out of the closing dark, and washed up in this flat wet country to the west. From there, after a time, the two of them were sent south, to a small town near the Belgian border called Eersel.`

`Eersel was a beautiful place — a small village of farmers in the green south of Holland, with a church and a square and quiet lanes. George and Ursula were taken in at a convent there, and lived among the Sisters, alongside other refugee children from Germany and alongside Dutch children who came out from the cities in rotations of a few weeks for the fresh country air. The two Levy children had a legal guardian arranged for them — a man in the regional capital who looked after their affairs — and they were under the care of a Catholic relief committee. George went to the local boys’ school in the village. He learned Dutch. He made friends, the ordinary friends of a schoolboy, and the best of them, a Dutch boy named Sjef de Blok, would stay George’s closest friend for the rest of his life. George would say, ever afterward, that although Lippstadt was the town he was born in, Eersel was his real hometown — the place his heart returned to, the place his own children and grandchildren would one day go to find their friends. He was an orphan in an institution, far from his mother, and he missed her every day, and he did not like living in a home that was not a home. And still: Eersel was where a boyhood, of a kind, survived.`

`It survived for a little over a year.`

`In May of nineteen forty, the German army invaded the Netherlands. The country, small and flat and unprepared, fell in five days. And then everything that had been done to the Jews of Germany began, on a compressed timetable, to be done to the Jews of Holland. The occupation installed pro-German men in positions of power — pro-German mayors in the towns, pro-German officials in the police — and the familiar machinery of anti-Jewish law was imported wholesale. Jewish teachers could no longer teach. Step by step the Jews were ruled out of ordinary life. Jews could not go to the cinema; the village of Eersel had a small cinema, and George and Sjef de Blok and the other boys snuck in anyway, the way boys will, not yet old enough to understand that the rule against them was a rung on a ladder that led somewhere.`

`The Sisters of the convent understood. As the occupation hardened, the nuns of Eersel became part of the Dutch resistance. When an Allied airman — an American or a British pilot — was shot down over the surrounding countryside, the Dutch underground tried to save him, and a shot-down flier hidden in the neighborhood might be brought to the convent and concealed there for a while before being passed down the line, through Belgium and France and over the Pyrenees into Spain, and home. The Germans answered this the way they answered everything. When they could not find a flier they knew was being hidden, they would seize two young men off the street — men in their twenties, kept for exactly this purpose — and shoot them, so that the population would learn what hiding a pilot cost. The Sisters kept doing it anyway. George was living, without fully knowing it, inside a small node of the war.`

`And through all of it, the letters came.`

`Lucie Levy wrote to her children. From Germany, from wherever the shrinking Jewish world allowed her to be, she wrote to George and Ursula in Holland, regularly, faithfully, for as long as it was possible to write. The letters were the thread. They were the proof that the promise on the platform was still alive, that somewhere a mother was still trying to come.`

`Then the letters stopped.`

`What had happened on the German side of the silence, George would only assemble fully in later years. Lucie had been caught in the deportations. She was sent east — first to the ghetto the Germans had established at Riga, in Latvia, the holding-pen into which tens of thousands of Jews from the Reich were poured, and from which very few came back. From Riga she was eventually deported to the Stutthof concentration camp, near Danzig on the Baltic coast. And there, in nineteen forty-three, Lucie Levy was murdered.`

`She never reached Holland. She never saw her children again after the platform at Lippstadt. The promise — I will come as soon as I can — was a true promise, made by a woman who would have walked the whole distance on her hands if the world had let her, and the world did not let her, and that is the entire point. Lucie did the one thing in her power. She got the children out. She could not get herself out, because she was an adult, and a Jew, and there was no country obliged to take her, and no army of her own people coming for her. Years later George would publish the story of his survival, and he would give the book his mother’s name and his mother’s purpose. He called it Lucie’s Hope. Her hope, he explained, had been to save her children. And she did. The book exists, and George’s descendants exist, because the hope held even though the woman did not.`

`Hold this chapter beside the one that runs alongside it. In nineteen forty-three — the very year Lucie Levy was killed at Stutthof — a sixteen-year-old named Shlomo Levitsky was walking into a British recruiting office in Tel Aviv and being steered, instead, into the Palmach. Within two years he would be standing in the surf at night, off the beaches of the Land of Israel, lifting the survivors of exactly this catastrophe out of small boats and carrying them ashore. The people Shlomo carried up those beaches were Lucie’s people. Some of them were mothers who had managed what Lucie could not manage. Some of them were children who had been, like George, sent ahead alone.`

`For almost the whole length of their lives, the two strands of this book did not touch. George and Shlomo each lived out the better part of a century without knowing the other was alive — and the account of how, at the very end, they were drawn into a single story waits in the last pages of this book. But they were working, in those years, on the two ends of the same problem. Shlomo was building, with his hands and his back and an Italian carbine, the thing whose absence had killed Lucie Levy. And George — eight years old, then ten, then twelve, in a convent in Eersel, taking good care of his sister as he had been told — was about to find out, in person, what that absence still cost a Jewish child in the heart of occupied Europe.`

`The danger was closing in on Eersel. By nineteen forty-three almost all of the Jews of the Netherlands had already been deported. There were not many left for the machine to find. George and Ursula were two of them.`

`The induction center was a low colonial building on Allenby Street, with rotating fans and a Union Jack and a row of seated young men in clean shirts waiting their turn. Shlomo went through the door and presented himself at the desk.`

`A man in a small side office saw him from the corner of his eye.`

`The man’s name was Elkanah. He was a Jewish recruiter — formally a clerk for the British, but in practice an officer of the Hagana, planted at the induction center to spot exactly this kind of boy. Elkanah waved Shlomo over. He shut the door.`

`“How old are you?” Elkanah asked, in Hebrew.`

`Shlomo lied: “Eighteen.”`

`“You look about fifteen,” Elkanah said.`

`“Sixteen.”`

`Elkanah leaned back. He looked the small blond boy up and down. He took in the wiry build, the blue eyes, the bored steadiness with which the boy met his gaze.`

`“Why don’t you join the Palmach?” Elkanah said quietly.`

`It was, in nineteen forty-three, a question with weight.`

`A note on the Palmach is necessary here, because most readers in the year twenty twenty-six will not know what it was, and the entire arc of this book turns on it.`

`The Palmach — Plugot Mahatz, the Strike Companies — was, in concept, the answer to a strategic problem that had been worrying the Hagana high command for more than a year. The Hagana itself was a part-time militia. Its members had day jobs as farmers or shopkeepers or schoolteachers and reported for duty in the evenings. That worked for static defense — manning the watchtowers of a kibbutz against Arab raiders — but it was useless for the kind of mobile, immediate response that an actual war would require. What if the Germans came over the Sinai? What if the British, beaten in North Africa, withdrew from Palestine altogether and left the Jews to face the Arabs alone? What if some hour came in which the Yishuv had three days to mobilize a fighting force, and three days was all there was?`

`The answer, conceived in May of nineteen forty-one by the Hagana leader Yitzhak Sadeh, was the Palmach. It would be a full-time, permanently mobilized strike force of young men and women living and training on kibbutzim, where they would split their time between agricultural work, ideological education, and military preparation. The kibbutzim would feed them, house them, and disguise them. In exchange the Palmach would defend the kibbutzim and pitch in with the harvest.`

`The British had initially funded it, in mid-nineteen forty-one, because they needed Jewish commandos to operate behind Vichy French lines in Lebanon and Syria. The very first Palmach operation, in June nineteen forty-one — Operation Boatswain, a maritime sabotage mission against Vichy oil installations at Tripoli — ended in disaster: twenty-three Palmach members and their British liaison officer sailed from Haifa and were never heard from again. The Hagana built a memorial in their name. The Palmach kept going.`

`After El Alamein, when the German threat receded, the British abruptly ordered the Palmach disbanded. The Palmach went underground. Yitzhak Tabenkin, the head of the great kibbutz union HaKibbutz HaMeuhad, proposed that the Palmach be self-funding through agricultural labor. Each kibbutz would host a platoon. Each Palmach fighter would work fourteen days a month in the fields, train for eight days, and have seven days off. In exchange the kibbutz would feed them and the platoon would protect them. The plan was approved in August, nineteen forty-two. It was called hakh’shara meguyeset — Drafted Training. It would prove, in the end, to be the most important institutional innovation in the history of the Israeli military.`

`By nineteen forty-three, when Shlomo walked into the British induction center, the Palmach numbered perhaps a thousand fighters. By nineteen forty-eight, when the State of Israel was declared, it would number more than two thousand permanently mobilized fighters in three brigades, with reserves bringing the total to over five thousand. Its members would form the entire backbone of the Israeli Defense Forces in the war that followed. Future prime ministers — Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Allon — would emerge from its ranks. Future generals, future ambassadors, future kibbutz leaders, future Israeli Air Force pilots, future Mossad chiefs — all of them would come out of the Palmach.`

`In every meaningful sense, the Palmach was the practical realization of Herzl’s most radical idea — that the Jews would not wait any longer; that they would be their own Messiah; that when their hour came they would take fate into their own hands. The Palmach’s battle cry, used by every officer leading a charge, was a single word: Aharai! — After me! It referred not just to combat technique but to a whole ethic of leadership. Palmach officers did not stand behind and shout orders. They went first.`

`“Why don’t you join the Palmach?” Elkanah said in his office on Allenby Street.`

`Shlomo did not need to think long. He had grown up hearing about the Palmach. His older brothers’ friends had been disappearing into kibbutzim. He had heard the songs at bonfires. He took the leftover bus fare he had for the British Navy enlistment and used it instead to make his way north, the next day, to the kibbutz where Elkanah had told him to report.`

`He did not tell his parents. His father, would not have approved. Yaakov was an old-world religious Zionist — he had wept when the family disembarked at Jaffa, he kept the laws strictly, he prayed daily — but he would not have wanted his sixteen-year-old youngest son carrying a rifle in the dark. Babel would not have wanted it either. Shlomo solved the problem by simply not telling them. He left a note saying he had gone to a friend’s kibbutz for the harvest. He kept extending the lie by letter for the next year and a half.`

`He was assigned to Pluga Daled — Company Four. The companies were numbered by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Daled — A, B, C, D. Pluga Daled had been formed in the summer of nineteen forty-one from the Hagana youth members of Tel Aviv and surroundings who had been recruited through the Nahal Pioneer Combatant Youth at the agricultural school Mikveh Yisrael. Its first formation had been brief — ten days of intensive training, then home to wait. In the spring of nineteen forty-two the company had been recruited again, this time more permanently. They had trained first at Ben Shemen, then at the kibbutz of Mishmar HaEmek in the Jezreel Valley, and then they had been posted to the kibbutzim of the eastern Jezreel Valley — Givat Hayim, Ein HaHoresh, Ramat HaKovesh, Givat HaShlosha — where they had begun the routine of half-soldier, half-farmer that defined Palmach life.`

`By the time Shlomo arrived in nineteen forty-three, Pluga Daled was a brotherhood. Its men and women were mostly eighteen to twenty-two years old. There were several future Israeli generals among them. There were several future kibbutz movement leaders. There were a couple of future poets. The company had no formal ranks — rank in the Palmach was, on paper, deliberately suppressed; you obeyed who you obeyed because of who he or she was, not because of stars on a shoulder. Initiative and chutzpah counted for everything.`

`He was almost certainly the youngest fighter in Pluga Daled, perhaps the youngest in the entire Palmach in that year. He was small for his age. He was blond. He had not yet shaved. He looked like someone’s little brother.`

`He had, the company commander informed him after the first week of training, a great deal to prove.`

`The unit’s best athletes were chosen for the swearing-in ceremony.`

`The swearing-in was a ritual of central importance in Palmach culture. It marked the moment when a class of trainees became full fighters. The heads of the Hagana — including its commander-in-chief, the formidable Yaakov Dori — would come up to the kibbutz to watch. The four platoons of the company would compete in front of them in an obstacle course: a three-kilometer run with rifle, a fence scale, a rope traverse strung between two trees, a tower climb, and finally a rope descent down the side of the kibbutz water tank. The winning platoon’s captain would receive the honor of leading the swearing-in.`

`Shlomo was not chosen for the demonstration team. He was, the company commander explained, too small. The dignitaries would be watching for spectacle. The small blond boy could not provide spectacle. They needed the bigger, more physically commanding fighters at the front of the column.`

`On the morning of the competition, one of the chosen runners woke with a bad stomach. Something he had eaten the night before — perhaps the cucumber salad, perhaps the local water — had given him a violent case of dysentery. He could not stand up without doubling over. He was out.`

`The company commander walked through the barracks looking for a substitute. He thought about the wild kid he had heard about — the one who ran along cemetery walls in Jerusalem, who climbed the kibbutz water tower at night for fun. He found Shlomo lacing his boots in the doorway of the bunk room.`

`“You go in,” he said.`

`They put Shlomo into the runner’s slot. They handed him an Italian carbine — a Carcano Modello Trentotto, a serviceable little rifle that the Palmach had acquired in some untraceable way, smaller and lighter than the standard British Lee-Enfield, but still nearly as long as the boy himself. The barrel reached past his ear when he slung it. He looked, his platoon mates would say afterward, less like a soldier than like a kid who had broken into his uncle’s hunting gear.`

`The dignitaries arrived. Yaakov Dori was there, and the kibbutz movement leadership, and the heads of the Hagana intelligence services. They sat on wooden benches that had been set up in the kibbutz’s central yard. They had coffee. They settled in.`

`The gun went off.`

`Shlomo ran the three kilometers with the rifle on his back. He was, against the expectations of every dignitary on the benches, holding his own with the bigger boys. He came into the kibbutz field at the head of his platoon. He climbed the perimeter fence. He went hand-over-hand along the rope strung between the two cypresses — his palms tearing on the rough fibers in a way that left small ladders of blisters that would scab over the next morning. He climbed the kibbutz water tower. He was breathing hard but not panting.`

`The descent was last.`

`The descent was a single fixed rope tied to the top of the water tank, falling fifteen meters straight down the side of the tank to the dirt of the kibbutz yard. The fighter had to swing his legs over the edge of the rim and walk himself down, hand over hand, with his feet braced against the steel side of the tank, while the dignitaries below watched.`

`The biggest fighter in the company went first. He was a giant of a fella, six foot two, big-shouldered, who had been chosen specifically for the visual impact of his descent. He swung over the rim of the tank confidently, took the rope in both hands, planted his right foot — and the foot slipped. He fell. He did not fall all the way, because he caught the rope with his hands and then with the crook of his elbow, but he fell halfway down the tank with his shoulder slamming into the steel and his legs swinging out into space.`

`The crowd of dignitaries gasped. Yaakov Dori stood up. The platoon at the base of the tank rushed forward to catch him. He landed on his feet, but badly, and he could not get back to where he had been. He had to climb down the rest of the way, slowly, embarrassed.`

`Then the dignitaries on the benches looked up.`

`A small blond boy with a rifle bigger than himself, all of one hundred and ten pounds, swung his legs over the rim of the tank. He fitted his hands to the rope. He braced his feet against the steel. He started to walk down. He did it slowly and without hurry, the way someone strolls down a flight of stairs at home. Hand over hand. Foot after foot. The rifle bobbed against his shoulder blades. He came down all the way to the dirt of the kibbutz yard and let go of the rope and turned and looked at the dignitaries.`

`The dignitaries did not say anything for a moment.`

`That night the new fighters of the Palmach were sworn in. There were bonfires set up around the central yard of the kibbutz. The company stood in lines. They raised their rifles in the air with their right hands. They swore loyalty to the Jewish people and to the Jewish arm — the arm that would be raised only for just causes. Yaakov Dori read out the oath. The four platoons answered together. The fires crackled.`

`Afterward there was singing. The Palmach had its own canon of songs — Shir HaPalmach, Hen Efshar — songs that would be sung in Israel for the next eighty years, on memorial days, by the grandchildren of the people who had sung them first.`

`Shlomo, the smallest fighter at the bonfire, sat in the middle of his platoon and ate his share of the bread and drank his share of the wine and learned the words to the songs. He had been in the Palmach for less than a year. He was sixteen years old. He had a great deal still to learn.`

`He was, however, by midnight, no longer the boy from Givat Ram.`

`He was a Palmachnik.`

`Then the taxi drove through the gate of Vught.`

`Vught was a real concentration camp — the only full SS concentration camp the Germans built inside the occupied Netherlands, set near the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch. It had a men’s camp and a women’s camp; it had a section for Jews; it had barbed wire and watchtowers and roll-call squares. And it had, in nineteen forty-three, a commandant named Karl Chmielewski, a man who had come to Vught from the Mauthausen camp system in Austria, from the subcamp at Gusen, with a reputation for sadism so pronounced that it had marked him out even among the SS. The children had been delivered into the keeping of one of the cruelest men in a system built out of cruel men.`

`George’s first minutes inside the wire taught him where he was. He and Ursula were set down and left standing, two children, no one speaking to them. Nearby were the guards — young SS men, laughing, carrying on, firing their weapons into the air for amusement. And then an older guard came along on a bicycle, a man who looked perhaps seventy, in uniform — a guard the prisoners had a grim nickname for, and, George would learn, the meanest of them all. A few feet from where the children stood, a prisoner was standing. The old guard got off his bicycle, took up a heavy piece of wood, and began to beat the prisoner — beat him down to the ground, and went on beating him after he was down, and no one ordered him to stop, and no one made him stop. That was the first thing George Levy saw inside Vught. He was twelve. His sister, beside him, was eight.`

`A Jewish woman came and found them where they stood — a prisoner herself, from the Jewish women’s camp; George remembered her as Flo. She asked whether they were George and Ursula Levy, and took them in, and brought them to the women’s camp. For a boy of twelve it was a strange place to be assigned, but it kept him near his sister, and keeping near his sister was the instruction his mother had given him on the platform at Lippstadt, and George kept it. When the camp later moved him for a time into the men’s section, the separation was hard on them both, and hardest on Ursula, and he got himself back to her as soon as he could.`

`Life inside Vught was the ordinary life of the camps, which is to say it was crowded, and it stank, and the food was bad, and every day there was the Appell — the roll call, the prisoners stood in ranks and counted, for hours, in the cold, in the women’s camp by Dutch women of the SS. There were beatings constantly; brutality was the medium the place ran on. George, because he was a child, was not assigned to labor, and so he had, in a sense, the worst job of all: he had time, and nothing to fill it with but watching. He learned to make himself scarce. He found an empty barrack with a piano in it, and he taught himself to pick out tunes on it, and he played for Ursula — the songs their mother used to sing — and tried to teach his little sister to play. It is one of the images to keep from this part of the story: a boy and his small sister at a piano, inside a concentration camp, playing their dead mother’s songs to each other because there was nothing else with which to be kind.`

`And then something happened that pulled George and Ursula Levy partway back out of the machine — not all the way, but partway, and partway turned out to be the difference between living and dying.`

`A claim was lodged on the children’s behalf. It was not true, and everyone who constructed it knew it was not true, and constructing it took real nerve, because a lie told to the SS about a prisoner’s identity was a lie that could get the liar killed. The claim was that George and Ursula were not full Jews at all — that they were half-Jewish children, the children of a Catholic German father. And the claim had one genuine thread running through it that made it just plausible enough to survive a check: there really was a man named Mueller. Dr. Joseph Mueller was George’s uncle — the husband of Lucie’s sister, Irmgard — and he was a real person, and he really had emigrated to the United States. The fiction simply moved him from the edge of the family to the center of it, and turned an uncle by marriage into a father.`

`Chmielewski himself summoned the children to his office to judge the claim. He looked them over — looked the two of them up and down, two small children with blue eyes — and he delivered his verdict. It must be true, he said; they hardly looked Jewish. He went so far, this commandant, this man from Gusen, as to sit little Ursula on his knee. It is one of the most chilling scenes in George’s whole account, precisely because nothing violent happens in it. A mass murderer dandles an eight-year-old girl on his lap and decides, on the evidence of the color of her eyes, that she may be allowed to go on living a while longer. That was the whole logic of the racial state, performed in a single small domestic gesture.`

`The verdict reclassified the children. They were given better accommodations than the rest of the Jewish prisoners. They had become, in the bookkeeping of the camp, something other than what they had been the day before. They were no longer simply two Jewish children with no value, slated for the same end as every other Jewish child. They were now potential assets — children who might, with their supposed Catholic father and his American address, be worth keeping intact, worth holding, worth perhaps one day exchanging for German prisoners in Allied hands.`

`It was a monstrous kind of luck. It depended on a lie, and on a brother-in-law’s surname, and on the tint of two children’s eyes, and on the willingness of the people around them to gamble their own lives on a forged story. None of it should have been necessary. In a world with a Jewish state, none of it would have been: George and Ursula Levy would simply have been two children safe behind their own borders. In the world as it actually was, in the spring of nineteen forty-three, the only thing standing between the Levy children and the gas was a fiction about a Dr. Mueller.`

`That fiction was about to be tested. The summer of nineteen forty-three was coming to Vught, and with it the transports.`

`They searched. They searched the dining hall. They searched the laundry. They searched the children’s house, where the small ones of the kibbutz were terrified by the men with rifles and the loud English voices. They searched the dairy. They searched the orange grove for hours. They found exactly one thing.`

`In the bushes near the perimeter fence, half-buried in the leaf litter, a soldier found a dummy Mills bomb — a training grenade, hollowed out, painted a dull green. It had been used in a training exercise some weeks earlier and someone had failed to retrieve it. It was harmless. It contained no explosive. It was, however, on its face, an item that no civilian kibbutz had any business possessing.`

`It was enough.`

`The colonel signaled. His sergeants started moving through the assembled kibbutzniks with rifle butts and short truncheons. They were looking for the boys. They knew, the way colonial occupiers always know, that the cadre of an underground army would be young and male. They began clubbing.`

`Shlomo was hit in the side of the right knee with a rifle butt. He went down. The fighter next to him went down on top of him. The fighter next to that one went down on top of them both. Within a minute thirty-five young Jews of the kibbutz were lying in a pile in the central yard, bruised and bleeding, being kicked and shouted at by the colonial troops in their khaki shorts.`

`The British loaded them — handcuffed in pairs — into the open backs of three lorries. They drove them, with no explanation, north and east, into the hill country. Several hours later they stopped at the British prison in Nablus.`

`The prison in Nablus was a big white stone building with high walls, in the middle of a town that, in nineteen forty-three, was an Arab nationalist stronghold. The British held it as a regional security base. The Jewish prisoners were processed and put into cells, six and seven to a cell, on cement floors, with metal slop buckets in the corner. The cells smelled of old urine and rotten potatoes. The other prisoners — many of them Arab nationalists picked up in the aftermath of the Revolt, some of them ordinary criminals — watched the new Jewish arrivals with a kind of impersonal curiosity.`

`His father, the rabbi, did not know where he was.`

`When the news of the British raid on the kibbutz reached Jerusalem, Yaakov knew that the youngest son who had supposedly been “helping with the harvest” for the last year had not actually been doing anything of the kind. He did not get frantic. He did not weep. He sent Shlomo’s older sister Rachel, who was practical and brave and the kind of older sister who had been keeping track of her younger brother her whole life, to find out where he had gone. He’s a Palmachnik, Father. The rabbi closed his eyes. He may have prayed. He certainly did not stop being his son’s father.`

`The Jewish prisoners were transferred from Nablus, after a couple of weeks of processing, to Latrun.`

`Latrun was — and is — a strategic crossroads on the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, about forty kilometers from each. Whoever holds Latrun controls the road. The British had built a fortress there in the nineteen thirties as part of a system of police forts designed by a Royal Engineers officer named Sir Charles Tegart, who had cut his teeth fighting the Bengali insurgency in India in the nineteen twenties. The Tegart forts were squat reinforced-concrete blockhouses with corner turrets, designed to dominate the surrounding terrain and to be defensible against any attack short of artillery. There were sixty-two of them scattered across Mandate Palestine. They are mostly still standing. Several of them are Israeli police stations today.`

`Latrun was, by nineteen forty-three, also the British detention camp for Jewish political prisoners. Members of the Hagana, the Palmach, the Irgun, and Lehi — anyone caught with illegal weapons or anyone suspected of underground membership — would be held there without trial under the Mandate’s emergency regulations. Among the famous prisoners who would do time in Latrun was Moshe Sharett, who would become the second prime minister of the State of Israel — he was held there for months in nineteen forty-six during the British “Black Sabbath” mass arrests. Many of the senior Hagana leadership cycled through the camp.`

`Latrun was, by nineteen forty-three, also the British detention camp for Jewish political prisoners. Members of the Hagana, the Palmach, the Irgun, and Lehi — anyone caught with illegal weapons or anyone suspected of underground membership — would be held there without trial under the Mandate’s emergency regulations. Among the famous prisoners who would do time in Latrun was Moshe Sharett, who would become the second prime minister of the State of Israel — he was held there for months in nineteen forty-six during the British “Black Sabbath” mass arrests. Many of the senior Hagana leadership cycled through the camp.`

`Shlomo and his comrades did three months at Latrun. The food was bad — British rations, lentils and salt pork that he could not eat, hard biscuits and tea. The barracks were dormitories with twenty bunks each. The exercise yard was a stretch of dirt the size of a tennis court. The prisoners were allowed to write one letter a month, censored by a British clerk.`

`They were also, secretly, organized. Latrun functioned as a kind of university for the Jewish underground. The older Palmach fighters taught the younger ones what they had learned in the field. The Irgun prisoners — although officially the Palmach and the Irgun were rivals, and although in nineteen forty-four the Palmach would actively cooperate with the British in the Saison operation to suppress the Irgun — got along with the Palmach prisoners in jail; there were classes in topography, in signals, in basic Hebrew literature for the boys from Yemen and Iraq who had not had the schooling. There were exercise drills in the yard. There were lectures, after lights out, in the bunks. The British knew this was going on. They could not entirely stop it. They contented themselves with the fact that, while these men were inside Latrun, they were not blowing up British radar stations.`

`After three months Shlomo and ten of his comrades were released. The British procedure was deliberately cruel and deliberately unhelpful. They loaded the boys into a lorry, drove them out onto the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem highway in the middle of nowhere, opened the back, and waved them out.`

`“Go.”`

`They had no shoes. The British had not bothered to return their boots, which had been confiscated on entry. They had no money. Shlomo had a single American dollar bill folded in the lining of his belt — he had kept it through the whole prison stay, against this exact moment — but no Palestine pounds. They had no food. They had only their thin prison shirts.`

`They flagged down the first bus that came along. The driver, a Jewish man, recognized them on sight — bareheaded, bare-footed boys with the look of people who had not slept indoors in weeks — and waved them aboard without asking for fares.`

`In Tel Aviv, on the local bus that took them from the central station to the neighborhoods, Shlomo saw his sister Rachel sitting two seats up. She had not been told he was being released that day. She was on her ordinary errand, on her ordinary bus, on her ordinary afternoon, when her younger brother sat down next to her smelling of three months of British prison food and looking like the last picture in a wartime newsreel.`

`She did not scream. She squeezed his hand. She wept quietly into her scarf for the rest of the ride. When they got off the bus she walked him through Tel Aviv to the apartment of an aunt who could feed him before he was sent back to Jerusalem to face their father.`

`He had been in the Palmach a little over a year. He had a single American dollar to his name. He had been arrested by the British, beaten in a kibbutz yard, transferred to Nablus, held three months at Latrun. He had not, in any of this, fired a shot in anger.`

`He was about to.`

`The special children’s camp was Sobibor.`

`Sobibor was not a camp in any sense that the word, used about a place for children, can survive. It was one of the three killing centers the Germans had built in occupied Poland for the single purpose of murder — not labor, not detention, murder, at once, on arrival. A transport reached Sobibor and within a few hours almost everyone on it was dead. The children of Vught, and the mothers who had been allowed to keep them company on the journey, were taken off the freight cars at Sobibor and killed. Roughly thirteen hundred children, together with the adults sent with them — some three thousand people in all — and not one of them lived out the day. They had been told they were going to a place that would be better for the young.`

`Five children did not go.`

`When the transport moved on from Westerbork toward Sobibor, five children were held back — kept off the cars, left behind inside the wire at Westerbork — and two of the five were George and Ursula Levy. They were not held back by any virtue of their own. They were held back because of the fiction — because the claim that they were the half-Jewish children of a Catholic father in America had reclassified them, on paper, as something the system had a reason to keep. The lie about Dr. Mueller, constructed months earlier by the people trying to protect them, did the exact thing it had been built to do, at the only moment that would ever matter. It held five children back from the cars while thirteen hundred others rolled east.`

`George understood, even at twelve, the shape of what had happened. He would carry it for the rest of his life — not as guilt, exactly, though survival of that kind always leaves a residue, but as knowledge. He knew the names of none of the thirteen hundred. He knew only that he and his sister had been in the same transport, marked for the same place, and that a piece of paper had reached down and lifted the two of them off the train. There is no moral in it. There is only the fact of it, and the fact is the argument of this whole book: in nineteen forty-three a Jewish child’s life turned on a forged identity and a stranger’s nerve, because the Jewish people had nothing larger than that — no state, no army, no border — to put between a child and a death camp.`

`So George and Ursula remained at Westerbork. And Westerbork, for all that it was the antechamber of the killing centers, was in its daily texture less violent than Vught had been. It was enormously overcrowded, and the food was bad, but there were not the constant beatings. It was a place where people simply waited.`

`What they waited for was the list.`

`Every week a list was posted — the names of the people who would be put on the next transport out of Westerbork to the east. The transports left on a fixed schedule, and the whole psychology of the camp organized itself around the posting of that list. A prisoner would go to the wall and read down the names. If your name was not on the list, you had been granted one more week — one more week of Westerbork, which was wretched, but which was not the train. And if your name was on it, you knew. Week after week the relief of the spared and the dread of the named were measured out against the same sheet of paper on the same wall.`

`George and Ursula read that wall from the summer of nineteen forty-three into the new year. For months their names stayed off it. And then, in January of nineteen forty-four, their names were on it.`

`George was thirteen now, going on fourteen. Ursula was nine. They had been in Holland for almost five years; they had survived the convent and the sweep and the commandant at Vught and the transport that had carried the other children to Sobibor. Now their names were on the list, and a train was coming for them too.`

`But the fiction was still working. The train that George and Ursula were put on in January of nineteen forty-four was not going to Auschwitz, and it was not going to Sobibor. Because of their classification — because of the half-Jewish claim and the American uncle and the possibility, however remote, that the two of them might one day be worth exchanging — they were routed instead to a camp inside Germany itself. They were going to a place whose name had not yet gathered, in the winter of nineteen forty-four, the full horror it would carry by the spring of nineteen forty-five.`

`They were going to Bergen-Belsen.`

`A few weeks later Shlomo was leading a group of about twenty Lebanese-Jewish refugees — mostly women and children — down out of the hills toward Nahariya. He had loaded them into the back of a small flatbed truck whose Lebanese-Christian driver, an Arab man from a Maronite village along the road, had figured out instantly what was happening when Shlomo’s unit had flagged him down. The driver had not asked for money. He had said only, in good Hebrew, I will take them. The Maronites of Lebanon, descendants of the early Christian heretics of the eastern Mediterranean, often had a quiet sympathy for the Jews; their priests had been giving Jewish refugees shelter for years.`

`The road came down out of the hills toward the coast. As they approached the bridge that crossed the main highway, Shlomo saw what was ahead. The Arab Legion had set up a checkpoint at the bridge. There were two Bren-gun carriers — half tanks, half armored cars, with mounted .303 machine guns on top — drawn up on either side of the bridge so that cars had to slow to a crawl and weave between them. There were perhaps eight legionnaires visible.`

`The Maronite driver did not slow.`

`He floored the accelerator. The truck bounced over the small rise that came before the bridge and roared toward the checkpoint at perhaps sixty kilometers an hour. The legionnaires were not, in that moment, manning the Brens. They had been smoking and drinking tea on the side of the road, in the lazy heat of the early afternoon, and the machine guns sat on their tripods unattended.`

`One legionnaire ran toward the truck. He leapt onto the running board as it passed and grabbed for the wheel. The Maronite driver let go of the wheel with his left hand, jerked his elbow into the man’s face, and shoved him off. The legionnaire went flying. He landed in the dirt and rolled. The truck roared past, with twenty Jewish refugees in the back gripping the sideboards.`

`The Brens, still unmanned, swung on their tripods.`

`The truck made the run to Nahariya. The refugees were delivered to the safe house — a Hagana flat above a fish shop on the seafront — and from there dispersed inland. The driver was paid in gold coins from a Hagana pouch and disappeared back over the border with a wave. Shlomo blessed God in the old Yiddish formula, Boruch Hashem, and went and found a glass of water and sat on the floor of the safe house with his back against a wall.`

`The refugees from that truck and from the dozens of other operations like it became, in the years that followed, Israeli citizens. Some of them are still alive, in their nineties now, living in Nahariya and Haifa and Karmiel and Beersheba. Their grandchildren are doctors and software engineers and IDF officers.`

`There were the roll calls — the Appell — standing in ranks for hours in the cold while the count was taken. And there were the Kapos. A Kapo was a prisoner who had been given authority over other prisoners and a measure of privilege for using it, and the system did much of its daily violence through them. George remembered two Kapos in particular at Bergen-Belsen, men he understood to be Russian or Ukrainian criminals, actual murderers, who had been set over the prisoners and who beat them. He watched, standing in the roll-call line, a Kapo beat the man in the row beside him — beat him, and beat him, and go on beating him — until even the German guard standing there told the Kapo that it was enough, that he could stop now. When a German guard is the one who calls a halt, you have a precise measure of the world you are standing in.`

`Into that same camp, in the late autumn of nineteen forty-four, came a transport of women from Auschwitz. George remembered the women arriving. He did not know, then, that among them were a mother and her two daughters from an Amsterdam family named Frank — that one of the daughters was a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who had been keeping a diary, and who would die of typhus in Bergen-Belsen a few weeks before the British came, along with her sister Margot. George learned that only long afterward, the way the world learned it. At the time they were simply more women, from the east, walking into the same dying place.`

`And yet George Levy, fourteen years old, starving, grey, surrounded by the dead, was certain — flatly, unshakably certain — that he was going to live.`

`He had reasons, and the reasons were not faith and were not denial; they were intelligence reports, gathered by a teenager with his eyes open. He could see the sky. Day after day the sky over Germany went black with American bombers flying east, and a boy who watched that sky could count, and could draw a conclusion. He knew the Allies had landed in Normandy. He knew the Russians were coming on. He knew, with what he later described as one hundred percent certainty, that Germany was losing the war and that the camp would, in the end, be reached. The only problem — the whole of the problem, but also, clarifyingly, the entire problem — was to stay alive until it was. That was the project. Hang on. Stay alive. The war would do the rest.`

`And there was one more thing George insisted on, every time he told this story, because he refused to let the account be only darkness. Not everything, he said, was bad. There had been, even here, one small good thing, and he wanted it on the record.`

`He was so hungry, one night, that he went to a guard. The guard, in the dark, brought his weapon up and asked the boy what he wanted. George told him the truth: that he was starving, that he had to have something to eat, and that he had a little sister in the barracks. The guard told him to come back the next night. And the next night the guard gave George a slice of bread — one slice, all he could spare — and George took it back and shared it with Ursula. When George looked at the guard, he saw that the man was perhaps only four or five years older than himself. A boy, a little older, on the other side of the gun, who had found one slice of bread and decided to give it to a Jewish child. George kept that, deliberately, alongside everything else. It was the reason a man who had every right to a closed heart could say, at the end of a long life, that hope had been real even in Bergen-Belsen — that you could be inside that place and still find, once, a human being.`

`The bread did not change the arithmetic of the camp. By the early spring of nineteen forty-five Bergen-Belsen was collapsing into itself, the typhus everywhere, the dead beyond counting. The British army was coming; it would reach the camp in the middle of April and find horrors that its soldiers would never afterward be free of. But George and Ursula would not be there to be found by the British. In the first days of April, with the Allied armies closing from both directions and the SS frantic to empty the camp before they arrived, the Germans began loading prisoners back onto trains.`

`George and Ursula Levy were put on one of them. It would become one of the strangest and most terrible journeys of the entire war, and it has a name. It is called the Lost Transport.`

`The boat crossed the Mediterranean in eleven days. It made the rendezvous with the Palmach signaler on the beach at Caesarea by lining up a particular shore feature — a particular Roman column — with a fire on the dunes. The Palyam ferried it the last two hundred meters into the surf with three small sailing dinghies. Shlomo was in one of the dinghies.`

`The Europeans, when the dinghies pulled up alongside the fishing boat in the dark, stared down at the Palyam crew as if they were a vision. They had been told, in Italy, that there were Jews in Palestine. They had not entirely believed it. The Jews they had known in Europe had been pale and bookish and well-mannered. The Jews who were now reaching up to them out of the dinghies were brown, sun-tanned, bare-armed, wearing nothing but shorts and undershirts. They had rifles slung across their backs. They were laughing in Hebrew. They reached up with hands that were calloused.`

`The refugees climbed down into the dinghies — perhaps twenty per dinghy — and the Palyam rowed them through the surf and onto the sand of the Land of Israel. They were given hot tea on the beach. They were embraced. Many of them cried. A few of them kissed the sand. Then they were put into trucks that had been waiting in the dunes and driven inland to the network of kibbutzim that would absorb them.`

`Shlomo and the other smugglers got drunk on Italian wine that night, in a stone barn behind the dunes. It was the wine the fishing boat had carried as part of its cover story. They drank it out of tin cups. They had brought home their first survivors.`

`They kept doing it, ship after ship.`

`There were sixty-six in all. The Palyam’s records list them. Dalin. Hatikva. Geula. Theodor Herzl. Yagur. Lo Tafhidunu — You Will Not Frighten Us. Hannah Senesh. Exodus 1947. Each was an old freighter or trawler or schooner, often dangerously overcrowded, named for some figure or phrase in modern Hebrew. Each was crewed by some combination of Palyam fighters and foreign volunteers. Each was tracked, in its final days at sea, by the Royal Navy.`

`The British had figured out the operation by nineteen forty-five. They installed great coastal radar fortresses on Mount Carmel above Haifa and at Givat Olga, on the dune escarpment north of Tel Aviv. The radar stations could detect ships approaching from a hundred miles out. The Royal Navy maintained a permanent picket of cruisers and destroyers off the Palestine coast, with orders to intercept any unidentified vessel approaching and to escort it to Haifa for processing.`

`By nineteen forty-six the British were catching more ships than they were missing. Most of the refugees who had been caught — perhaps fifty thousand of them by nineteen forty-seven — were interned in camps on the British colony of Cyprus. Some were turned back to Europe outright. The most famous of these turnbacks was the Exodus 1947, which sailed from southern France in July of nineteen forty-seven with forty-five hundred Holocaust survivors aboard. Off the coast of Palestine it was rammed by a British destroyer, and after a deck battle in which Palyam fighters and refugees fought British marines with crowbars and tinned-food cans, the ship was boarded and the refugees deported. The British did not, in this case, send them to Cyprus. They sent them all the way back to displaced-persons camps in Germany — back to the country whose camps they had just survived. The international outrage helped, in some real sense, to win Jewish independence at the UN that autumn.`

`The radio operator chosen to ride with the Exodus on its fatal voyage was a young Palyam fighter who had filled the slot Shlomo had been offered and turned down. Shlomo had been on land at the time, working a particular Palmach operation that he had not been willing to leave. The young man who took his slot survived the Exodus battle but spent the rest of nineteen forty-seven in a British internment camp at Bremen. He would, after his eventual release, become a senior officer of the Israeli Navy.`

`Shlomo’s most vivid memory of the Palyam years, however, was the night of the Hannah Senesh.`

`The Hannah Senesh was named for one of the great Jewish martyrs of the Second World War. Hannah Senesh had been born in Budapest in nineteen twenty-one to an assimilated Hungarian-Jewish family. She had immigrated to Palestine in nineteen thirty-nine, at the age of seventeen, and joined a Zionist youth movement. In nineteen forty-three, at the age of twenty-two, she volunteered for one of the most dangerous operations of the war: she was parachuted into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia by the British, with a small team of other Palestinian-Jewish volunteers, with orders to make her way overland into Hungary and to organize Jewish resistance and rescue. She was captured at the Hungarian border in June of nineteen forty-four. She was tortured. She was tried for treason. She refused to give up the names of her contacts. She was executed by firing squad in Budapest in November of nineteen forty-four, six months before the end of the war. She was twenty-three years old. The Palmach buried her body in the Kinneret cemetery after the war. She wrote, in a Hungarian prison cell awaiting execution, a poem that ends with the words: Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame. Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart. Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake. Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.`

`The ship named for her sailed from Italy in December of nineteen forty-five with two hundred and fifty Hungarian and Romanian Jewish survivors aboard. It was a small wooden trawler, intended for a Mediterranean fishing run, not for an open-sea passage in winter weather. It crossed in heavy seas.`

`It arrived off the coast of Nahariya on the night of December the twenty-fifth — Christmas Day in nineteen forty-five. The Palyam had chosen the night carefully. Christmas was a holiday for the British soldiery of the Mandate. The garrison along the northern coast would be drunk in their barracks. The intelligence officers would be playing cards. The radar operators, where they were on duty, would be paying attention only to formal alerts.`

`The Palyam had arranged something more. A small group of fighters had spent the previous afternoon in the cafes of Nahariya, getting friendly with the local British officers stationed at the Tegart fort. By that evening the officers had been invited to a Christmas party at a discreet apartment in town — a party laid on, the officers were told, by the Mayor’s wife. The Mayor’s wife, in fact, had nothing to do with it. The Palyam had hired a group of local prostitutes — a particularly Hebrew solution to the problem of the British garrison on a Christmas night — to entertain the officers from sundown until daylight. The British command structure in Nahariya, that evening, was distracted.`

`The sea was heavy. There was a strong wind blowing out of the southwest. The Hannah Senesh came in too close to shore in the dark. Her hull struck the rocks below the beach. She keeled over dangerously.`

`The Palyam shore team — Shlomo among them — was waiting on the beach with townspeople from Nahariya. They saw the ship list. They saw the lights of the deck lanterns swinging at an angle they should not have been swinging at. They went into the water.`

`They pulled the refugees off, one by one, through the surf in the dark. The sea was cold — December cold, the temperature at which adult men begin to shake within twenty minutes and small children within five. The Palyam fighters formed human chains through the breakers. They handed the refugees, like packages, from one chain link to the next. The townspeople of Nahariya had brought blankets to the beach and hot tea in tin urns. They wrapped the survivors as they came out of the water.`

`One hundred and fifty souls landed at Nahariya that night.`

`They were scattered, before dawn, into the neighboring kibbutzim — Hanita, Eilon, Matzuva. By the time the British officers at the Tegart fort had sobered up and made it back to their posts, the Hannah Senesh was a stripped wreck on the rocks and the hundred and fifty Hungarian and Romanian survivors had vanished into the rural population of the western Galilee. None of them were ever caught. Their descendants are Israelis today.`

`The Palyam’s record of the night reads, in dry official language: On the night of December twenty-fifth, the vessel arrived at the shore of Nahariya. The sea was stormy and there was a strong wind blowing; these circumstances caused the vessel to run up onto the rocks close to the shore, and keel over dangerously. A shore team of the Palyam, together with town citizens, helped the passengers leave the vessel and scattered them about in the neighboring kibbutzim.`

`What it does not say — what cannot be said in an official record, but what was said over and over again in private by the Palyam crews and the townspeople of Nahariya — was that nobody died that night. Two hundred and fifty Holocaust survivors went into the cold December surf of the eastern Mediterranean and every single one of them came out of it alive.`

`It was, Shlomo would say, the proudest night of his life. He was eighteen years old.`

`It is worth holding still, for a moment, on what Shlomo was actually doing on those beaches, because the other strand of this book was unspooling at the very same hour. Through nineteen forty-four, while Shlomo waded ashore in the dark at Caesarea carrying the survivors of Europe out of the small boats, a Jewish boy named George Levy was a few hundred miles to the north, inside Germany — a child of thirteen, starving in the Star Camp at Bergen-Belsen. He was precisely the kind of child the boats existed for. He was not on one of them; almost no child was; the Bricha network and the Palyam between them could reach only a fraction of those who needed reaching, and the British navy caught a great many of the ships besides. But every survivor Shlomo carried up a beach in those years was a person who had come out of George’s world — and every one of them was proof that the work was the right work, and a reproach that there was not more of it, and not sooner. Shlomo did not know George’s name. He did not need to. He had spent his whole youth memorizing, with his back and his hands, the general shape of him.`

`After thirteen days the train came to a stop for the last time, near a small German town called Tröbitz.`

`George remembered the moment of it as sound before sight. A woman on the train began to call out that they were free — free, free — and George looked out, and there were soldiers, and the soldiers were Russian. The Red Army had come across the wandering train and taken it. It was the twenty-third of April, nineteen forty-five. Two weeks before the end of the war in Europe, the Lost Transport stopped being lost.`

`Liberation, for the survivors of that train, was not the scene from the newsreels. The Soviet soldiers who had found them were front-line troops with a war still to finish and very little food of their own; they could not feed twenty-five hundred starving people, and the survivors were, in the main, left to fend for themselves. Most of them could not walk. George and Ursula could. The two of them, who had walked out of so much already, walked the rest of the way into Tröbitz.`

`The town was empty. It was a ghost town. The German civilians who had lived in Tröbitz had fled west ahead of the Red Army, abandoning their houses, and so the survivors of the Lost Transport found an entire small town standing open and vacant. George and Ursula simply took over one of the empty houses and moved into it, and lived there, in the strange suspended weeks that followed.`

`The dying was not finished. The typhus the prisoners had carried out of Bergen-Belsen had come with them on the train, and at Tröbitz it broke out as a full epidemic. The liberated kept dying after liberation — that is one of the cruelest facts of the end of the camps, and it was true at Tröbitz as it was true everywhere. The survivors were deloused; they were tended as well as the conditions allowed; and still, many of them died in the town that was supposed to be the end of it. George and Ursula stayed at Tröbitz for two or three months, inside that aftermath, until they could be moved.`

`George Levy was fourteen years old.`

`It is worth stopping on that number, because the body that carried it did not match it. George had the white hair of an old man. His teeth had loosened in his gums and fallen out. He weighed perhaps sixty pounds, perhaps a little more — the weight of a small, healthy child of eight, hung now on the frame of a boy of fourteen. He had been three years in the camps. He had lost his father, his uncle, his grandparents, his mother, his home, his country, his name as a thing that meant safety, and very nearly his body. By every external measure he was a ruined child.`

`And here is the thing that has to be said plainly, because it is the center of who George Levy was. Through all of it — through Vught and the commandant, through the transport that took the other children to Sobibor, through Westerbork and the list on the wall, through Bergen-Belsen and the bodies along the barracks, through thirteen days on the Lost Transport eating grass — George had never once believed he was going to die. He had been certain, the whole way, that he would live. He never had a doubt. It was not bravado and it was not innocence. It was something closer to a decision, made early and held without wavering: that his job was to stay alive and to keep his sister alive until the war reached them, and that the war would reach them. The war had now reached them. He had been right.`

`Eventually the survivors at Tröbitz could be brought west, out of the Soviet zone and into the American one. George and Ursula were taken to Leipzig, to an American base, and for the first time in years there was simply enough food — plenty of it, handed to them freely — and George, a boy again for an afternoon, enjoyed himself. From there a long, crowded train carried them back across a smashed Germany to the Netherlands, to the south of Holland, near the Belgian border where the convent had been. George was sick, and was put into an American Army hospital, and stayed there until a doctor finally told him that he was well, and that he could go.`

`The war was over. George Levy had survived it. He was fourteen, going on fifteen; he was an orphan; his mother lay in a grave she did not have at the Stutthof camp; the large warm prosperous family in the big house in Lippstadt had been reduced to a brother and a sister standing on a street in the south of Holland with nowhere in particular to go.`

`And here, again, the two halves of this book lie down side by side, and ask to be read together.`

`In April of nineteen forty-five, while George Levy’s train wandered the broken rail lines of eastern Germany with twenty-five hundred stateless Jews aboard and no destination that would take them, a young man named Shlomo Levitsky was on the far shore of the Mediterranean, in the Land of Israel, doing the opposite work with the opposite kind of train. Shlomo’s people ran ships — old freighters, fishing boats, trawlers — packed with the survivors of the camps, and drove them through the British blockade to land their human cargo on the beaches in the dark. Two conveyances, in the same season of the same year. One was a train full of Jews that no country on earth would receive, rolling in circles until six hundred of its passengers were dead. The other was a fleet of small illegal boats full of Jews, aimed with absolute precision at a single shore — the one piece of ground that wanted them.`

`George Levy had spent his whole childhood being moved against his will across a continent that had no place for him. Shlomo Levitsky had spent his whole youth building, with his hands, the place. For nearly the whole of their lives they did not know of each other. But if you want to understand, in one image, why the State of Israel had to exist, you can hold those two trains in your mind at once: the Lost Transport, and the boats at Caesarea. The difference between them is the difference a homeland makes. It is measured in children.`

`George had survived without one. He would spend the rest of his long life as living testimony to what that had cost — and to what it must never be allowed to cost again.`

`The Palmach nurse on duty took one look at him and said, in the way that experienced Israeli nurses say everything: “What are you doing here?”`

`He told her.`

`She talked him into staying home for the Passover Seder. The breakthrough operation, she said, would be over in a day. He was four weeks out of surgery. He should go home, eat his mother’s charoset, and come back for the next round. She was kind. She was firm. He went home.`

`The breakthrough operation at Latrun was a disaster.`

`The Palmach had attacked at dawn. The Arab Legion had been waiting in ambush in the wadis and on the heights around the fort. The Israeli forces — many of them Holocaust survivors who had just arrived in the country, some who had been off the boat at Haifa for less than a week, with minimal military training and rifles they had been handed at the Hulda kibbutz the night before — were cut to pieces. The official casualty figure for that one operation, the First Battle of Latrun, was seventy-five dead and dozens more wounded. A subsequent attempt, the Second Battle of Latrun a week later, killed sixty-four more. The Jews could not break through. Latrun would remain in Arab Legion hands until the Six Day War of nineteen sixty-seven, when the IDF finally took it.`

`Many of Shlomo’s friends were killed in those first battles. Including another blond fighter named Shlomo Levin — different last name, but the same first name, the same blond hair, and a face that, to anyone who saw it from a distance, looked very much like Shlomo Levitsky’s. The two of them had been mistaken for each other in the Palmach for years. When Shlomo Levin was killed at Latrun, comrades who had seen him in the morning and heard about Shlomo Levitsky’s wounding in the previous month assumed that their Shlomo, the blond one with the rifle bigger than himself, was dead.`

`For months afterward, when Shlomo Levitsky walked through the streets of Tel Aviv, friends would stop in front of him, frozen, and stare. “You’re alive? They told us you were killed at Latrun.”`

`He would shake his head. He was alive. The other Shlomo was dead. He would walk on, with his small cushion tucked under his arm. He could not, in those months, say much about it.`

`Then a few jeeps from a Jerusalem unit slipped through the mountains by dry riverbeds and reached Tel Aviv — and from there reached David Ben-Gurion himself. They reported that there was, perhaps, a way around Latrun. The wadis south of the main highway were, in places, navigable by a jeep or a small truck. If one could connect the existing tracks, blast through the rough bits, and grade a passable surface, one could move convoys around the Latrun bottleneck and into Jerusalem without ever firing a shot at the fortress.`

`Ben-Gurion authorized the project. Command was given to an American Jewish colonel named Mickey Marcus.`

`Marcus is one of the great minor heroes of the war. Born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents from Romania, he had been a star athlete at West Point in the nineteen twenties, served as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan in the nineteen thirties, and parachuted into Normandy with the eighty-second Airborne Division on D-Day in nineteen forty-four. He had been part of the planning team for the post-war occupation of Germany. In nineteen forty-seven, hearing of the Yishuv’s desperate need for military experience, he had quietly resigned his US Army commission and volunteered. Ben-Gurion appointed him the Israeli army’s first general — the title was aluf, an ancient Hebrew word reactivated for the moment — and put him in charge of the Jerusalem front.`

`He organized the construction of an alternate side road through the wadis. Hundreds of laborers — many of them new immigrants who could barely speak Hebrew, swinging picks alongside Palmach engineers — worked the route day and night, blasting boulders, grading the surface, throwing in fill where the road dipped. The Israelis called it, after the Allies’ improvised supply route through the Burmese jungle to wartime China, the Burma Road. The name stuck.`

`Marcus was killed by a sentry’s mistaken bullet at four in the morning of the eleventh of June, the day before the road opened. He had walked outside the wadi camp to relieve himself; the Israeli sentry, who spoke no English, did not understand his answer to the challenge and shot him. He was the only American general to die in combat under a foreign flag in the twentieth century. Kirk Douglas would one day play him in the movie Cast a Giant Shadow.`

`Convoys began rolling into a starving Jerusalem on the first of June, nineteen forty-eight. They came around the Burma Road, slowly, jeep by jeep at first, then small trucks, then in column. They brought flour and lentils and water in jerry cans. They brought ammunition for the Hagana defenders of the Old City. They saved the holy city from starvation, if not from the partial fall of the Jewish Quarter — the Old City Jewish Quarter, with its ancient synagogues, would surrender to the Arab Legion on the twenty-eighth of May and would remain in Jordanian hands until nineteen sixty-seven. The synagogues would be dynamited. The Jewish residents who survived would be paraded through the streets and expelled.`

`But West Jerusalem, where most of the Jewish population had been concentrated since the eighteen sixties, was held. Mostly because of the Burma Road.`

`Shlomo, recovered enough to limp without the cushion by midsummer, joined the Burma Road traffic. He and his fellow recovering wounded — Moshe, the leader of the small group, who had a girlfriend in the right social circle; Moisi, a Greek-Jewish kid; and one or two others — decided they wanted to form a jeep commando unit. The Negev Brigade had nicknamed its jeep-mounted company the Negev Beasts — jeeps with bolted-on machine guns that ran rings around the Egyptian columns in the desert. Moshe’s group wanted to do the same on the Jerusalem road.`

`They had no jeeps. They had no quartermaster authorization. They had no military rank, exactly, because the Palmach in those months was still figuring out how to fit into the new Israeli army structure.`

`Moshe, the leader, had a girlfriend whose father was an important man in the Tel Aviv business community. The father had an important jeep. Moshe took advantage of this. He walked up to the father’s driver one afternoon, in front of the family’s apartment building, and announced — in his best command tone — that he was confiscating the jeep for an important military mission, and he drove away with it. The four jeep-less fighters now had one jeep.`

`On the way up to Jerusalem on the Burma Road — a track of jagged rocks, rutted, badly graded, designed for emergency throughput and not for comfort — the jeep blew a tire. They had no spare. They flagged down passing convoys; no one would give them one. Night fell. They drove the rest of the way to Abu Ghosh on three wheels and a rim, banging through the mountains. They got their spare in Abu Ghosh — a Christian Arab village along the road that had stayed friendly with the Jews since the Yishuv days and would remain so for the next eighty years.`

`Before they could get a second jeep for the commando unit, an army lawyer arrived from the girlfriend’s father, threatening a court-martial. Moshe was forced to return the jeep. The jeep commando unit was over before it began.`

`Then the armistice was signed.`

`The Israelis had, against every expectation, won.`

`The armistice agreements were signed at Rhodes between January and July of nineteen forty-nine — separate agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Iraq, which had also fought, refused to sign and is still technically at war with Israel. The State of Israel emerged from the conflict with about a third more territory than the UN partition plan had originally allotted. It controlled the western Galilee, the coastal plain, most of the Negev, and West Jerusalem. It did not control the Old City, the West Bank (which Jordan annexed), the Gaza Strip (which Egypt occupied), or the Golan Heights (which Syria held).`

`The shooting, in the meantime, stopped.`

`By its end, the Palmach had lost one thousand one hundred and eighty-seven fighters in the war of independence and the years before it. The figure includes the Givat Olga raid and the Hannah Senesh night and the orange grove at Yazur and every other operation since nineteen forty-one. The dead were eighteen to twenty-five years old, in the main. About thirty-four of them were women. About a tenth had been born in the United States or Britain or other Western countries; about a half had been born in Palestine; the rest had been born in the Pale of Settlement, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Morocco, in Bukhara, in Salonica. They had come from everywhere. They had fought in one place. They were buried in the same long graveyards on the hillsides above the kibbutzim that had hosted them.`

`Shlomo went to Haifa and joined the Navy.`

`For about fifty years, George Mueller lived this life on top of the sealed door. He had decided, stepping off the boat in nineteen forty-seven, that the way forward was silence, and he kept the silence with remarkable discipline. His neighbors did not know. His friends did not know. His own children grew up not knowing their father’s birth name, not knowing that he had been in the camps, not knowing that the Lost Transport had a fourteen-year-old boy on it who was now the man making their breakfast. George did not lie to them, exactly. He simply did not open the door, and they did not know there was a door to open.`

`What finally opened it was a teacher.`

`Sometime in the nineteen nineties, a schoolteacher learned that George Mueller had a history, and asked him to come and speak to her class. George said no. He did not, he told her, do that kind of thing. She asked again. He said no again. She kept asking — and at last, worn down or won over, George agreed to do it once.`

`He never stopped. After fifty years of silence, George Mueller began to speak, and once he had begun he found he could not, and would not, leave it alone. He went to schools — class after class, year after year, a steady unglamorous circuit of ordinary American classrooms. His wife suggested that the Holocaust museum might want to hear him, and so he became a speaker there as well, telling the story to strangers, on a schedule, deliberately. He wrote it all down in a book, and he gave the book the truest title it could have. He called it Lucie’s Hope — for his mother, and for what she had hoped, which was simply to save her children, and which, against the whole weight of the twentieth century, she had done.`

`George was clear, in his old age, about why he had reversed himself so completely — why a man who had buried the story for half a century now spent his last decades telling it on purpose. He did not enjoy talking about the Holocaust, he said; he would not do it at a party, would not do it socially, did not want it brought up. But standing in front of a classroom, telling it whole and telling it to people who needed to hear it, was different. That, he said, helped him. It made him feel he was doing something. It lifted, a little, the weight he had been carrying since nineteen forty-seven. The silence had been a way to survive the peace. The speaking, at the end, was a way to be useful with what he had survived.`

`He had to forgive a good deal in order to live as lightly as he did, and he thought hard about forgiveness, the way a serious person thinks about a hard thing. He had forgiven people — the policemen who came for him, the police chief whose order had sent him to Vught — and he had forgiven them, he said, partly for his own sake, because a person cannot walk around the world carrying hatred without the hatred doing its damage to the carrier. But his forgiveness had a hinge in it, and the hinge was honesty. He would forgive someone who was truly sorry for what he had done. Someone who was not sorry — someone who would say it had not happened, or that it had been right — George did not believe he could forgive, and he did not pretend otherwise. He had been spared, by good fortune, ever meeting face to face anyone who had actually run the machine. That, he said, had made forgiveness easier to offer; it is easy to forgive in the abstract. He was too truthful a man to claim more virtue than the facts of his own life had tested.`

`The nightmares came less often as the decades passed — once a year, then less. The past loosened its grip, slowly, the way it does for the strong and the lucky, and George was both. But it never fully let go, and the world kept reminding him. In the late nineteen seventies, when a group of neo-Nazis announced their intention to march in Skokie, Illinois — a Chicago suburb that was home to thousands of Holocaust survivors, and where George’s own sister Ursula lived — George felt the old fear move in him again. Anything like that, he said simply, is scary. Ursula lived out her life in Skokie, and died there, of natural causes, an old woman, around the end of the twenty-tens. George had kept her alive through Vught and Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen and the Lost Transport, sleeping feet to feet so each would know the other was there; he outlived her by a few years, the last of the two Levy children of Lippstadt.`

`George Levy Mueller would reach the age of ninety-five — the boy who, at fourteen, had the white hair of an old man now genuinely old, a great-grandfather in a quiet Illinois town, still playing his mother’s songs by ear on the piano, still going, when he was asked, to tell the story. His advice to the young people who came to hear him was not dramatic. He told them not to worry too much; that everyone suffers and everyone is also given good things; that this is simply the shape of a life; that things, in the end, tend to work out. From most men it would be a platitude. From a man who had eaten grass on the Lost Transport at fourteen and gone on to fly his own airplane through clear American skies, it was a finding — reported back from the far side of the worst that the century could do.`

`There is one more reason George’s decision to break his silence belongs at the hinge of this book. When George finally began to speak, in the nineteen nineties, he assumed — most survivors assumed — that he was doing the work of memory, carrying a warning back from a closed and finished past so that the future would be inoculated against it. He did not expect to live to see the warning become current again. He did not expect that, in his nineties, he would be watching antisemitism rise in the streets of the cities of the West, watching Jewish students harassed and synagogues guarded and the oldest accusations put on new mouths. He did not expect October.`

`But that is where this book is now going — to October, and to the third of our three lives, the one being lived right now. George Mueller had spent fifty years in silence and thirty years as a witness. The witness, it turned out, was needed more than anyone had thought. The thing he had survived, and the thing Shlomo Levitsky had fought to make sure could never happen again, had not, after all, agreed to stay in the past.`

`The cargo was loaded over several days. Ninety-three tons of meat, packed in salt in wooden barrels. Forty-two tons of plywood, in stacks lashed under tarpaulins on the deck. Thirty tons of cured hides, in canvas-wrapped bales. The cargo manifest was bona fide. The receiving shipping agent in Haifa had been arranged. The freight insurance had been purchased through Lloyd’s of London. Everything about the run was, on paper, an ordinary commercial voyage.`

`Shlomo, with the leisurely pace of a sailor waiting for departure orders, did some reading. A Norwegian sailor in a freighter berthed alongside the Bat Galim in the Massawa harbor had given him a stack of paperback novels in English — cheap pulp, Westerns and adventure stories, the kind of books merchant seamen passed around for entertainment. Shlomo took them aboard.`

`He would need them.`

`The Bat Galim sailed north from Massawa on the twenty-fourth of September, nineteen fifty-four. The Red Sea passage was easy. The weather was calm. The crew rotated through their watches. By the morning of the twenty-eighth of September she was approaching the southern entrance of the Suez Canal.`

`The date was, for the crew of the Bat Galim, a particular date. The twenty-eighth of September, nineteen fifty-four, was the first day of the Hebrew year five thousand seven hundred and fifteen — Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.`

`She arrived at the southern entrance of the canal, by ship’s log, at five-thirty in the morning. The sun was just rising. She identified herself by radio to the Egyptian Suez Canal Authority. She gave her name, her cargo, her flag, her tonnage, her destination, and her crew complement. The Authority logged her in.`

`In accordance with the usual procedure, she anchored at Green Island, off Port Tewfik, the southern terminus of the canal. She moored alongside three other ships waiting for the convoy north. There was the Empire Clyde, a British vessel under charter to the British Ministry of Transport. There was a Norwegian merchantman, name lost to the official records. There was a tanker, flag also forgotten.`

`At eight a.m. the Egyptian Port, Health, and Immigration officials boarded the Bat Galim. The inspections were carried out in a friendly atmosphere. The officials checked the cargo manifest. They stamped the crew passports. Some of the officials, recognizing it was the Jewish New Year — the Bat Galim had flown her Honduras flag at her stern but the Israeli sailors had been speaking Hebrew on deck — wished the crew, in passable English, a happy New Year.`

`The captain and Shlomo and the others made polite noises in return.`

`At nine a.m. an Egyptian patrol vessel approached.`

`She came up alongside the Bat Galim with her guns at the ready. An Egyptian naval officer climbed aboard. He carried orders, in Arabic, that he showed to the captain. The orders read: The ss Bat Galim is hereby seized as a vessel of enemy origin found in Egyptian territorial waters in violation of the General Armistice Agreement. The vessel, her cargo, and her crew are placed under the custody of the Egyptian Navy.`

`The captain protested. He pointed out the Constantinople Convention. He pointed out the Security Council resolution. He pointed out that the Bat Galim was an unarmed commercial vessel on a legitimate commercial run.`

`The Egyptian officer was polite. He was unmoved. “Effendi,” he said in his careful English, “you will please bring the crew on deck.”`

`Wireless communication with the company offices in Haifa, which had been maintained on a regular schedule through the night, came to an end at that moment. The Egyptian patrol vessel jammed the Bat Galim’s radio. No contact with the ship or its crew was made for the next eight days. In Haifa, the company office knew what had happened only because Lloyd’s of London cabled the loss of contact to the Jewish Agency that evening.`

`The Egyptians had a story. Or rather, they were beginning to invent one.`

`The story, as it emerged over the following weeks in the chambers of the Mixed Armistice Commission and the United Nations Security Council, went as follows. The Bat Galim had not approached the canal peacefully. Rather, she had crossed into Egyptian territorial waters in the Gulf of Suez during the night, had encountered three small Egyptian fishing boats numbered ninety, three hundred and fourteen, and the “mother boat” of a small fishing flotilla, and had opened fire on them with automatic weapons. Two Egyptian fishermen — named, in the Egyptian complaint that would be filed at the UN, as Abd el Aziz Sabri and Mohamed Hameed el Talatini — had been killed. Their bodies were missing. Their boat had been sunk. Two other fishermen had jumped overboard to save themselves. The Egyptian fishermen had reported the attack to the Abu Darag frontier post in the early hours of the morning. The Egyptian patrol vessel had been dispatched to find the offending Israeli ship. The seizure of the Bat Galim was the apprehension of the armed Israeli warship that had been masquerading as a commercial vessel.`

`This story was — to use the technical legal term — a fabrication. The Bat Galim carried no automatic weapons. She had not deviated from her ship’s track. Her log showed clearly that she had arrived at the entrance of the canal at five-thirty a.m. by the southerly course she had been on continuously since leaving Massawa. There had been no two fishermen missing — the brother of one of the supposedly missing fishermen, when located by a UN observer team later in October, could not say where his brother lived. There had been no automatic-weapons fire — the Egyptian medical-legal expert who examined the alleged victim boat, a Dr. Zaki Mohamed el Banhawi, was caught by the UN observers in the act of probing the holes in the boat’s hull with a knife, apparently inserting bullet slugs into them to manufacture evidence.`

`None of this mattered, in the short term, to the men aboard the Bat Galim.`

`They were taken off the ship at gunpoint. They were lined up on the dock at Port Tewfik. They were searched. They were loaded into the back of an open Egyptian Army lorry.`

`The lorry started north for Cairo.`

`Where this needle had come from, none of the Israelis knew. It was a steel sewing needle, of the kind used for canvas work or sail repair. It was contraband — sharp objects were officially banned in the prison — but the same kind of internal economy that produced contraband cigarettes and contraband food also produced contraband sewing needles. Shlomo paid for the needle in halvah.`

`Halvah is a Middle Eastern sesame-paste confection. It is sold in big slabs in the markets of Cairo and Beirut and Tel Aviv. The Red Cross packages sent to the Israeli prisoners had contained, among other items, a small quantity of halvah from a Turkish supplier. Shlomo had been keeping his portion, untouched, for exactly this kind of currency. He traded a fist-sized piece of halvah for the needle.`

`With the needle, working in the long evenings in his cell when the guards had gone off shift, he made himself a pair of shorts.`

`The cloth was an Egyptian prison-issue shirt. It was a heavy white cotton, with thick seams and a pocket. He had been issued two. One he kept to wear as a shirt. The other he unstitched, panel by panel, with the needle and his own teeth. He cut the cloth — using the edge of an aluminum spoon ground sharp against the cement of the cell floor — into the pattern of a pair of summer shorts. He sewed them by hand, with thread he extracted from the unstitched seams. He used a flat-felled seam, the kind sailors use on heavy duck trousers. The fly was a single button salvaged from one of the discarded cloth panels.`

`The shorts took him about three weeks.`

`They are still in his New Jersey apartment today. They are folded in a drawer with his other small relics. The stitches are fine. The seams are precise. The shorts have outlasted the prison commandant, the Egyptian junta, the Nasser era, the Camp David Accords, and Anwar Sadat, and they are still, after seventy-some years, in serviceable condition.`

`The Egyptian guards never confiscated the needle.`

`There was a fourth incident worth recording. When the time came for the ten Israeli prisoners to be taken to court — formally, for a trial on the charge of having murdered two Egyptian fishermen — they were taken from the military prison to a civilian courthouse in central Cairo. The transit ritual was deliberately frightening. The prisoners were blindfolded. They were lined up against a wall in the courtyard outside the prison. They heard, behind them, the cocking of rifle bolts.`

`It was a mock execution. The guards stood ten paces behind the line of prisoners with their rifles raised and aimed. They held the firing position for perhaps fifteen seconds. The whole point was to make the prisoners believe they were about to be shot.`

`The two guards who had stolen the ring tied Shlomo’s blindfold so loosely that he could, by tilting his head slightly forward, see down the line of his fellow prisoners. He could see the rifles raised. He could see, after a moment, the rifles being lowered. The guards laughed. The prisoners were marched onto a bus to the courthouse.`

`The trial was theater. The Egyptian prosecutor presented the fabricated evidence of the fabricated attack on the fabricated fishermen. The Egyptian judges nodded gravely. The Israeli prisoners were not permitted to speak in their own defense; they had Egyptian lawyers assigned to them, who said little. After several days the matter was set over for further deliberation. The prisoners were taken to a civilian political prison — a different building from the military prison — where conditions were marginally better.`

`It was there, at the civilian prison, that a particular Egyptian guard later said something to Shlomo that he remembered for the rest of his life.`

`“You are the captain,” the guard said. “We knew you were the captain because you walked in standing up straight. Everyone else was bowed and afraid.”`

`Shlomo had not, in fact, been the captain. The captain of the Bat Galim had been a man named — the records preserve different versions, but his Hebrew name was Avraham Cohen. He had been older, more senior, more experienced. He had not, in those first days at the military prison, walked in standing up straight. He had been running through the yard with a bedpan, white with terror, because the prison had immediately given him diarrhea and the indignity of the gauntlet had broken something in him.`

`Shlomo had not been the captain. He had been, however, the boy from Givat Ram who had, as a child, practiced walking through Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem with his shoulders back and his head up — to project Jewish confidence, as he would say later. He had been doing it since he was nine years old. It was as automatic as breathing.`

`He had walked into the worst prison in Cairo as if he were going to dinner.`

`Meanwhile, eight thousand miles away, his future wife was riding the subway every morning from Brooklyn to Manhattan to sit in the United Nations gallery on the East Side and listen to the world debate the meaning of an Israeli flag in the Suez Canal.`

`Alma Feldner was, in the autumn of nineteen fifty-four, a graduate student at Brooklyn College. She had been raised by her parents to follow politics. She had been raised, in the Brooklyn Habonim chapter where she had met Shlomo three years earlier, to follow Israeli politics in particular. When the news broke in late September that the Israeli ship Bat Galim had been seized by Egypt and her crew imprisoned, Alma had run her finger down the crew manifest in the New York Times and seen, in the third position from the top, the name Shlomo Levitsky.`

`She took the IRT train to Forty-Second Street every weekday morning that autumn. She walked east to the UN. She showed her student ID at the public gallery desk. She sat in the back row and listened.`

`She heard, on the twenty-eighth of September, Israel’s permanent representative to the UN, Abba Eban, deliver a formal note to the Security Council. Eban was thirty-nine years old, a Cambridge-trained orator with a voice like burnt honey. He read his note in the British English that would, for the next three decades, become the public voice of Israel at the UN.`

`“On instructions from my Government,” Eban read, “I have the honour to convey to you the following information concerning an act of aggression perpetrated by the Government of Egypt against an Israeli merchant vessel in the Suez Canal. On the twenty-eighth of September, nineteen fifty-four, the ss Bat Galim, a vessel of five hundred tons flying the Israel flag, arrived at the southern entrance of the Suez Canal bound from Massawa in Eritrea to Haifa in Israel. The vessel was manned by a crew of ten, all Israelis, and carried a mixed cargo consisting of ninety-three tons of meat, forty-two tons of plywood, and thirty tons of hides. No firearms of any description, except the Captain’s pistol, were on the ship…”`

`Alma listened. She made notes in a small spiral pad. She walked home in the November cold to her parents’ apartment in Crown Heights and read the New York Times coverage in the evening. She wrote to Shlomo’s family in Jerusalem to ask if there was any way to get a letter through. There was not.`

`She kept going to the UN.`

`On the nineteenth of November, the Mixed Armistice Commission for the Egyptian-Israeli border met at kilometer ninety-five of the demarcation line to vote on the Egyptian complaint against the Bat Galim. The Egyptian delegation submitted a draft resolution finding that the Bat Galim had entered Egyptian territorial waters in violation of the General Armistice Agreement. The Israeli delegation voted against. The Chairman of the Commission — a Norwegian colonel named Major-General E. L. M. Burns — abstained. The Egyptian draft was not adopted. The Israeli delegation then submitted a counter-resolution finding the Egyptian complaint to be unfounded. The Israeli delegation and the Chairman voted in favor. The Egyptian delegation walked out.`

`On the sixth of December, nineteen fifty-four, the Egyptian government announced — through its permanent representative Omar Loutfi, in a brief communication to the United Nations — that Egyptian judicial authorities had found “insufficient evidence” to support the charges that the Bat Galim’s crew had fired on and killed Egyptian fishermen. Egypt would therefore release the ten-man crew and the cargo. It would not, however, release the ship. The Bat Galim would be confiscated.`

`Alma Feldner, who had read in the Times that morning of the Egyptian announcement, took the IRT to the UN that afternoon and watched as Abba Eban took the floor of the Security Council to respond. The Israeli government, Eban said, would accept the release of the seamen and the cargo. It would not regard the case as closed. “The only solution which Israel can accept,” Eban read, “is the unconditional release of the ship together with its crew and cargo so that it can complete the journey, which Egypt had not the slightest right to interrupt in the first place. No other outcome would be compatible with international law and practice.”`

`The Egyptian Government, in private, ignored him. The ship was confiscated. The Bat Galim itself would never sail under the Israeli flag again. She was rebranded by Egypt as a coastal patrol vessel and was, the last sources indicate, scrapped in the late nineteen sixties.`

`The crew was kept in Cairo for another three weeks, during which the practical question of how to release them across an active armistice line was hashed out between the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.`

`On New Year’s Day, nineteen fifty-five, an Egyptian Army truck drove the ten Israeli sailors out of Cairo to a deserted road in the Gaza Strip — at that time under Egyptian administration. The truck stopped. The driver got out. He opened the back. He pointed at the desert beyond.`

`“Go,” he said.`

`The Israeli captain — the same captain who had been running through the prison yard with a bedpan in the first weeks — looked at the Egyptian officer accompanying the truck. “Will you shoot us in the back?” he asked.`

`The Egyptian officer was, as it happened, the same officer who had been their custodian since the trial. He had grown, over three months, to a kind of grudging respect for the men in his custody. He smiled. “If we wanted to shoot you,” he said, in good English, “we would have shot you in Egypt.”`

`The ten sailors walked across the demarcation line into Israel. Bavbel, the old human-torpedo man, suspected mines. He had Shlomo and Pepo at the back of the column, the captain in the middle, the rest spread out at intervals. The walk was perhaps two kilometers. The desert was cold. The sun was rising behind them, over Sinai. Israeli soldiers — green-uniformed boys, much younger than the Palmach veterans they were greeting — met them at the crest of a low rise just east of Kibbutz Erez and embraced them.`

`Shlomo was clean-shaven. He had decided in the prison to keep shaving, against the prison brushes that the entire population had used. Pepo had refused to shave with the prison razors and had kept his beard. Shlomo, in the December sunlight, looked like a boy again.`

`He had been in Egyptian custody for ninety-five days.`

`He had a single American dollar bill hidden in the seam of the shorts he had sewn himself. He had been keeping it the whole time, against the same possible necessity for which he had once carried a single dollar out of the British prison at Latrun.`

`He was twenty-seven years old. He had been shot, jailed, beaten, mock-executed, and starved. He had been threatened with death by the British, the Arabs, and the Egyptians. He had been jailed by the British, shot by the Arabs, tortured by the Egyptians. And — each time — he had walked back out alive.`

`He decided, in the truck that drove the ten of them from the border up to Tel Aviv that afternoon, that he had used up enough miracles.`

`He was finished with the old adventures.`

`At six twenty-nine a.m. the rockets began.`

`A barrage of perhaps three thousand rockets — the largest single barrage in the history of Hamas’s eighteen-year war against Israel — was launched from Gaza into southern Israel. It was the largest opening salvo of any war in the country’s seventy-five-year history. The Iron Dome interceptor system fired up. The morning sky over the Negev filled with the pale parabolas of intercepting missiles.`

`Behind the rocket barrage, under it, through the smoke, three thousand Hamas operatives crossed the southern Israeli frontier. They came through more than thirty separate breaches in the border fence that had been blasted open with planted explosives in coordinated detonations. They came in trucks. They came on motorcycles. They came on foot. They came on paragliders that floated, ridiculously and lethally, over the southern fence and dropped armed men onto the Nova music festival from the air. They had Kalashnikov rifles. They had GoPro cameras strapped to their tactical vests so that the operation could be filmed and uploaded in real time. They had detailed maps of the kibbutzim, with the locations of the safe rooms and the bomb shelters marked, prepared in advance from years of intelligence gathering.`

`Three thousand was the first count, and it was an undercount. The breaches in the fence were not closed for many hours — in some places not until the following day — and for as long as they stood open, people kept crossing. A later assessment by the Israel Defense Forces would put the number who came through the fence on the seventh of October at roughly six thousand.`

`They did not all belong to Hamas. The spearhead was the Nukhba — Hamas’s elite commando force, some three thousand eight hundred men, trained for precisely this assault and briefed in detail on the kibbutzim, the locations of the safe rooms, the festival ground. Behind the Nukhba came fighters of the smaller armed factions, Palestinian Islamic Jihad among them. And behind the fighters came something the earliest accounts of the day mostly left out: roughly two thousand people who belonged to no military organization at all. They were ordinary residents of Gaza — men and boys who walked west through the broken fence in the open hours of the morning because the fence was broken and the way into Israel, for the first time in their lives, lay open. They came on foot, on motorcycles, in the beds of pickup trucks. Some of them killed. Many of them looted, carrying back through the breaches the contents of the kibbutz houses — televisions, bicycles, kitchen appliances, the cars of murdered families. Some of them seized hostages of their own, and a number of the Israelis taken into Gaza that day were held not in Hamas’s tunnels but in the back rooms of ordinary Gazan homes.`

`This is among the hardest facts of the seventh of October, and it should be stated plainly, because the word terrorists, repeated through the early reports, can quietly conceal it. The assault began as a planned military operation and became, within hours, something closer to a mass event — and it reached far beyond the kibbutzim and the festival. Gunmen fought their way into the town of Sderot and seized its police station, and the army in the end had to destroy the building to take it back. They overran army bases along the frontier. They attacked the Erez crossing — the very gate through which Gazans had passed into Israel for medical care and for work. By the middle of the day the whole of the Gaza envelope, its farming villages and its roads and its towns, was a battlefield on sovereign Israeli soil, a thing that had not happened since the war of nineteen forty-eight.`

`What followed was, in the cold technical assessment of the official Israel Defense Forces investigation released in March of twenty twenty-five, the most consequential failure of state security in the history of the State of Israel. The IDF Gaza Division — the unit responsible for defending the southern frontier — was overwhelmed. The kibbutzim were unprotected for hours. The Border Police squad at Nahal Oz, eleven undercover officers, held off perhaps thirty Hamas operatives in the first wave alongside the eight members of the kibbutz security squad. Then the second wave came. By ten thirty-four a.m. terrorists had infiltrated through the front gate of Nahal Oz, which was unstaffed. By ten forty additional terrorists had entered through the back gate. One hundred and fifty attackers entered Nahal Oz in the second wave.`

`The first significant infantry reinforcement — a Maglan unit of seventy soldiers — did not arrive outside the kibbutz until one fifteen p.m. They did not enter until one forty-four p.m. The final combat at Nahal Oz, near the dairy farm, was around three-thirty p.m. Nearly nine hours after the attack had started.`

`By the end of the day, thirteen kibbutz members of Nahal Oz had been murdered, including the kibbutz security coordinator Ilan Fiorentino, who had been killed two minutes after he discovered that the armory could not be opened because of a power failure. Two foreign agricultural workers from Tanzania and Thailand had also been killed. Eight residents of Nahal Oz had been kidnapped and taken to Gaza, including children.`

`Behind the numbers at Nahal Oz were families, and the seventh of October did something to those families that no earlier war had done. The attackers had been issued, along with their rifles and their grenades, body cameras and the instruction to film. At Nahal Oz they went further still. They seized the victims’ own telephones, opened the victims’ own social-media accounts, and broadcast the assault live — to the friends, the relatives, the neighbors who followed those accounts. It was a new kind of weapon, aimed not at the body but at the mind of an entire people: terror delivered in real time to exactly the people who loved the victims most.`

`Two Nahal Oz families were broadcast to the world that morning. In the home of the Idan family, gunmen forced their way toward the safe room. The Idans’ eighteen-year-old daughter, Maayan, was shot through the door of the shelter as she helped her father hold it shut. The gunmen then took the telephone of the mother, Gali Idan, and began a livestream on Facebook. What it showed — what Gali’s own friends and family watched on their screens — was Gali and her surviving young children on the kitchen floor, in the blood of their daughter and sister, one of the children asking aloud whether they, too, were now going to be killed. The father, Tzachi Idan, was filmed wounded on the floor, and then he was taken, alive, into Gaza. Gali and the younger children survived. Tzachi did not come home for more than a year; in the end it was his body that was returned to Israel, and he was buried beside Maayan.`

`In another Nahal Oz house, the gunmen broke in upon the family of Dikla Arava and her partner Noam Elyakim, and used Dikla’s Facebook account to run a livestream that lasted some twenty minutes. It showed Dikla. It showed Noam, bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound to the leg. It showed Dikla’s seventeen-year-old son, Tomer, and Noam’s two daughters — Dafna, fifteen, and Ella, eight. And then the gunmen forced Tomer, at gunpoint, out of the house and into the lanes of the kibbutz, and ordered him to call out to the neighbors, to coax them out of their safe rooms and into the open where they could be killed.`

`Tomer Arava was seventeen years old, with a rifle at his back, and he did one of the bravest things in this book. He went to the neighbors’ doors as he had been ordered to — and he told them the houses were empty. He warned them. He used the only moments he had, and the only freedom a boy can keep with a gun behind him, to save the people of his kibbutz. Then he tried to escape, and he was killed in the crossfire of the battle for Nahal Oz — by Israeli fire, in the chaos, a death the army’s own inquiry would later examine in detail and set down by name. His mother, Dikla Arava, fifty-one years old, was murdered that day. Noam Elyakim was shot, carried into Gaza as a hostage, and died of his wounds. Dafna and Ella Elyakim, fifteen and eight, were abducted into Gaza and held there for fifty-one days — and then, alone among the people in that twenty-minute broadcast, released alive, in a ceasefire deal, and brought home.`

`The reader has already met Ella and Dafna once in these pages — two names among the hostages whose photographs Gal Sharon carried in his mind. Now the house they were taken from has its place in the story too. And the houses of the Idans and the Aravas stood among the houses of Nahal Oz — the same houses that Gal’s unit, in the days that followed, would walk through room by room. What the camera had broadcast live to the world, the soldiers would meet again, afterward, in silence.`

`That was only Nahal Oz.`

`At kibbutz Be’eri, ten kilometers north along the fence, one hundred and one civilians were murdered in a single day. At kibbutz Kfar Aza, sixty-four civilians were murdered. At kibbutz Nir Oz, where about a quarter of the entire population was kidnapped or killed — seventy-six dead, seventy-six taken — a place that had been a working agricultural community of four hundred people the night before was, by sundown of the seventh of October, a ghost.`

`The worst was the music festival at Re’im. The Nova festival — three hundred sixty acres of open Negev desert, a sound stage, a few thousand young people, mostly Israeli but with a sprinkling of foreign nationals from twenty-two countries — was overrun starting at six thirty a.m., one minute after the rockets began. The attackers killed three hundred and sixty-four young people. They filmed the killings. They loaded the survivors into pickup trucks and motorcycles and took them to Gaza. Forty of the festival-goers were taken alive as hostages.`

`The numbers can be set down. What the numbers cannot carry is what was done in the hours the numbers count. In the months that followed, the official Israeli inquiries, the foreign press, and the United Nations itself would assemble a record of the seventh of October, and the record is worse than the totals suggest.`

`In March of twenty twenty-four, Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, led a mission to Israel at the Israeli government’s invitation. Her team’s report found reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence had occurred during the attacks of the seventh of October in more than one place — including rape and gang rape at the Nova festival ground and its surroundings, along the road known as Route Two thirty-two, and at Kibbutz Re’im. It found, further, clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape and sexualized torture, had been committed against hostages held in Gaza, and reasonable grounds to believe that it might still be ongoing against those who remained captive. The mission was a fact-finding visit and not a criminal investigation, and Patten was careful to say so; her conclusions were stated in the conditional. But they placed on the record of the United Nations itself a thing that some in the world had already begun to wave away.`

`Thirty-six of the murdered were children. Whole families were killed together in the fortified safe rooms that every Israeli house near Gaza is built around — rooms designed to withstand rocket fire, never designed to be held shut, from the inside, against men with rifles and grenades and time. Houses were set alight with the families sealed inside them. In some of the burned houses the forensic teams that came afterward could not, at first, tell how many people had died, or who they were, or whether a person now missing had been murdered inside the home or carried alive across the fence into Gaza.`

`Among those carried into Gaza were Shiri Bibas and her two small sons. Ariel was four years old. Kfir was nine months old — a baby, the youngest hostage of the entire war. They were taken from their home at Kibbutz Nir Oz; their father, Yarden, was seized separately and held apart from them. For sixteen months Hamas maintained that the mother and the two children had been killed by an Israeli airstrike. When the bodies of the boys were returned, in February of twenty twenty-five, Israeli forensic examination concluded that Ariel and Kfir had not died in any airstrike: they had been murdered by their captors. Yarden Bibas had been released alive three weeks earlier. Shiri and her two red-haired sons were buried together, in a single casket.`

`The hostages taken on the seventh of October spanned the whole length of a human life. The youngest was the Bibas baby. The oldest were past eighty — and among them were Jews who had survived the Nazi camps as children and were now, in their last years, dragged from their homes and made captive a second time. They were citizens of more than twenty countries. They included the foreign agricultural workers, Thai and Nepali, who had come to the kibbutzim for the season’s harvest and were taken alongside the families they worked beside. Some of the hostages were freed in negotiated exchanges; some were recovered alive by soldiers; too many came home only as bodies. The last of them would not be brought out of Gaza until the twenty-sixth of January, twenty twenty-six, more than two years after the morning they were seized.`

`By the time the smoke cleared over southern Israel three days later, the official total was approximately one thousand two hundred Israelis murdered, two hundred and fifty hostages taken into Gaza, and a country in a kind of psychological condition that no Israeli alive had previously encountered.`

`There had been bigger wars. The Yom Kippur War of nineteen seventy-three had killed more Israeli soldiers — about two thousand seven hundred dead in three weeks. But the people killed on the seventh of October were not soldiers. They were children. They were grandparents. They were Thai farmworkers who had come for the season and did not know what was happening. They were teenagers at a music festival who had been dancing two minutes earlier. They were Holocaust survivors who had survived Auschwitz and were now, eighty years on, murdered in their kibbutz homes by gunmen who filmed the murders for the internet.`

`The proportion is sometimes lost. A country of seven million Jews lost twelve hundred people in one day. In American demographic terms, that would be roughly fifty thousand Americans murdered in a single morning — fifteen times the death toll of September eleventh, two thousand one. There is no twentieth- or twenty-first-century American event of equivalent scale.`

`He was among the IDF soldiers who entered the kibbutz on the second day after the attack.`

`When Gal’s unit arrived, the fighting at Nahal Oz was not over. Hamas operatives were still inside the perimeter — in houses, in sheds, in the agricultural buildings on the eastern edge — and the IDF presence was still thin. The kibbutz was not yet secured. Gal’s unit had to hunt down the last of the terrorists who remained on the grounds, room by room and structure by structure, before the work of clearing the kibbutz could even begin. The active fighting continued, in pockets, into the evening. The infiltrators who had been operating outside the perimeter were either being hunted through the agricultural fields between the kibbutz and the border fence, or were still firing from concealed positions inside. Only once the last of them had been killed or captured was the kibbutz handed over to the slower, methodical task that came next: the room-by-room clearing of the houses.`

`This is a technical military term. It means to walk through every building, room by room, in the wake of an attack, securing each space and identifying what is in it. There were several reasons to do it. The first was tactical: there might be operatives still hiding inside. The second was forensic: the bodies of the dead had to be identified and recorded for the police investigation that would follow. The third was humanitarian: there were, in some of the houses, survivors — people who had been hiding in their safe rooms for nine hours, hearing the gunfire outside, terrified that the next door to open would be the wrong one.`

`It was Gal’s unit, on the afternoon and evening of the eighth and the morning of the ninth, that walked through the houses of Nahal Oz.`

`He would not, in the years afterward, talk about all of it. There are some things he has not, fully said out loud. There are some images and memories that he has chosen not to set down in language because language would make them permanent in a way that he could not yet bear.`

`But he has talked about the houses themselves.`

`The houses had been left in the condition that the seventh of October had found them at six thirty in the morning. Breakfast tables abandoned. A coffee cup half-finished on the kitchen counter, the coffee still warm twelve hours later in the case of one house because the electric kettle had been left on. Reading glasses on a coffee table, folded, beside an open book. Children’s toys scattered across the living-room floor — wooden blocks, a small plastic dinosaur, a cloth doll missing one button-eye. The light coming through the kitchen window in the long October afternoon falling across all of it as if these were ordinary rooms in an ordinary kibbutz on an ordinary Saturday.`

`Layered over the ordinary rooms, in unmoving contradiction, was the evidence of what had happened to them.`

`There was blood on some of the floors. The blood was so thick, on the kitchen tiles of one particular house, that Gal could smell it from outside the door — the iron, the warmth, the gathering of flies. There was the ash of buildings that had been set on fire and were still, in places, smoldering at the joists. There were the GoPro footage uploads that Hamas had made of certain rooms, which the IDF had access to through monitored telecommunications channels, which the soldiers could cross-reference with the rooms they were now walking through. In one house, a Hamas operative had killed a family of four — father, mother, two children — and had filmed the killings in detail. Gal walked through that house with the footage having been described to him by his commanding officer five minutes earlier. He recognized the dish on the kitchen counter. `

`These were the houses of the dead and the missing.`

`Time, in those houses, had stopped at six thirty a.m. on the seventh of October. The kibbutz of Nahal Oz had been a working farm community. It had been a place where people grew tomatoes and milked dairy cows and raised their children. The bodies on the kitchen floors had names. The children’s toys had owners.`

`Gal’s unit was assigned, in the days that followed, to a particular task. Some of the Israelis who had been kidnapped from Nahal Oz had been killed by their kidnappers before they crossed back into Gaza — shot in the agricultural fields between the kibbutz and the fence, executed when they slowed down the pickup trucks, or killed at the moment of the breach when the IDF helicopters had begun firing at the retreating Hamas operatives. Their bodies were strewn across about three square kilometers of open land between the eastern edge of Nahal Oz and the Gaza fence. Gal’s unit had to find them. They walked the fields in line abreast, twenty soldiers across, in the slow methodical infantry pattern called a grid search. They worked at night because the early-October days were still hot. They found, over the course of three nights, eleven bodies. Each one was identified, photographed, and carried back in the unit’s vehicles to the field morgue.`

`There was a particular kind of anguish at Nahal Oz in those first days, and it had to do with the fires. Many of the houses had been burned — some of them deliberately set alight with the families still sealed inside their safe rooms. Where there had been fire, there was often no way to tell, from what remained, whether a person had been murdered in their own home or dragged alive across the fence into Gaza. The families of the missing were left in a state that is hard to describe to anyone who has not lived it. It was not grief, exactly, because grief requires knowing. It was the suspended, sleepless torment of not knowing whether to mourn a death or to hold out hope for a return. Gal watched that torment settle over the survivors and the relatives who came looking, and he decided he could not leave it alone.`

`His idea was an unusual one, and it came from the practical, problem-solving cast of his mind. The kibbutz had a dental clinic. A dental clinic keeps records — X-rays, charts, the precise map of every patient’s mouth — and dental records are one of the few things that can identify a body after fire has taken everything else. If those records could be put into the hands of the forensic teams, the families would finally have answers. So Gal took a couple of men from his unit and went to the dental office. It was not a secured area. There were still active terrorists inside the kibbutz, and the work was done under the threat of fire. The men crawled in through a window. They found the clinic’s laptop. And one of Gal’s soldiers — a reservist who in civilian life was a computer programmer — sat down with the machine and used his skills to break into it and recover the patient files. The dental records went to the people who needed them, and post-mortem identification became possible. Because of what Gal and his men did in that dental office, under fire, a number of the families of Nahal Oz no longer had to guess what had become of the people they loved. They could grieve, or they could hope, but at least they could do it knowing. Gal hoped, more than anything, that it brought them some small measure of relief.`

`It was during one of those nights — Gal would remember the exact moment for the rest of his life, sitting in the back of a pickup truck on the edge of the dirt road that ran along the eastern perimeter of the kibbutz, at perhaps three in the morning, looking out at the orange grow-lights of Gaza City beyond the fence — that he made the private promise that would shape the next year of his existence.`

`I am not going to stop fighting, he told himself, until the hostages come home.`

`He meant the two hundred and fifty Israelis who had been taken into Gaza on the morning of the seventh of October. He meant the children he had seen photographs of taped to the walls of the unit’s command tent. He meant the elderly grandmothers and the agricultural workers and the festival-goers and the soldiers and the kibbutz children. He meant Hila Rotem-Shoshani and the Bibas family and the Elyakim sisters from Nahal Oz, Dafna and Ella, who had been driven out of their home alive that morning. He meant all of them.`

`This is the promise he kept.`

`That sentence should be read slowly, because the number is doing a great deal of quiet work. When Gal drove south on the eighth of October, twenty twenty-three, ahead of his orders, he was a reserve officer, and reserve service in Israel has always been understood as an interruption — a few weeks pulled out of a civilian year, an inconvenience shouldered and then set down. Israeli reservists are not professional soldiers. They are agronomists and software engineers and schoolteachers and dentists and farmers, and Gal was an agronomist, with a job at an agricultural cooperative and two-year-old twin boys at home. He expected, the way every reservist who reported in those first days expected, that this would be the hardest interruption of his life and then it would be over.`

`It was not over for a very long time. The interruption became the life. The war that began on the seventh of October would keep Gal Sharon in uniform, in rotations, for well over a year — through the whole of twenty twenty-four and beyond. He led his unit into Gaza. He led it through the broken streets of Khan Younis, in the kind of urban combat that the world's armies regard as the most dangerous work there is — clearing buildings room by room, against an enemy who had spent two decades building a second city underneath the first one, a hundred and more miles of tunnels bored beneath hospitals and schools and apartment blocks, fighting from beneath the very civilians whose suffering it then offered to the cameras. Gal had trained for years for exactly this and no amount of training makes it anything other than what it is.`

`And then, in twenty twenty-six, he led the same unit into Syria and then to the north, into the hills of southern Lebanon, into the second front — the long-promised confrontation with Hezbollah that had been simmering on the northern border since the day after the seventh of October, and that had driven sixty thousand Israelis out of the towns of the Galilee and into hotel rooms for a year. Gaza in the heat, Syria in the cold. The slogan Gal used, leading his men through both, was the slogan the Palmach had carried eighty years before, the slogan Shlomo Levitsky had heard shouted around a bonfire at his swearing-in in nineteen forty-three. Aharai. After me. Israeli officers do not send their men forward. They go first, and the men follow. It is the oldest rule of this army, and it is the reason the casualty lists of Israel's wars are so heavy with lieutenants and captains.`

`Between the rotations, Gal went home.`

`This is the part of a long war that the histories tend to omit, because it does not photograph well and it has no maps. A reservist's war is not continuous. It is a brutal oscillation. For weeks Gal would be in Gaza or in Lebanon or in Syria, in the particular sealed reality of combat, and then he would be released for a stretch from his many tours in Gaza, and he would drive north, and within an hour he would be standing in a playground beside the Yarkon River watching his small sons go down a slide. No human nervous system is designed to make that crossing, again and again, on that schedule. The men who did it described the strangeness of it in nearly identical words — the sense of being two people, neither of whom fully believed in the other. Gal had kissed his wife and his boys goodbye on the eighth of October not knowing when he would be back. The answer turned out to be: again and again, briefly, for more than two years, each time a stranger in his own living room, each time having to learn his children's new words.`

`The cost of it ran along several seams at once. There was the plain cost in lives — the friends and soldiers who did not come back, the funerals slotted between rotations, the growing weight of names. There was the cost the book's own dedication names without flinching: the careers put on indefinite hold, the businesses that quietly failed while their owners were in Khan Younis, the marriages that bent and some that broke under four hundred days of separation and silence and the things that could not be said. Israel asked an enormous amount of a relatively small number of people in those years, and it kept asking, and the people Gal's age — the ones with the young children and the half-built careers — paid most of it.`

`And underneath all of it ran the promise.`

`Gal had made it to himself on the second night, sitting in the back of a pickup truck on the dark perimeter of Nahal Oz, looking at the grow-lights of Gaza beyond the fence: that he would not stop fighting until the hostages came home. Two hundred and fifty human beings had been dragged into Gaza on the seventh of October. Over the months that followed, some of them came back — in the deal of late twenty twenty-three that returned more than a hundred of them, in the later, harder, partial agreements that traded pauses in the fighting for the living and, heartbreakingly, for the bodies of the dead. Each release was a public catharsis and a private agony, because each one also published, by omission, the names of those who were not on the list. Gal kept photographs of the hostages in his mind the way the command tents kept them taped to their walls. Some of the people whose return he had sworn himself to came home to their families. Some were murdered on October seventh, some came home barely alive, and others returned in coffins. The not-knowing that Gal had first watched settle over the families of Nahal Oz in October of twenty twenty-three settled, over the long war, into the collective psyche of the nation.`

`The war changed Gal Sharon, and he has been honest about the direction of the change. He had been, before the seventh of October, a man of the Israeli center-left — an agronomist with Arab colleagues, a man who had believed, the way a great many decent Israelis believed, that some negotiated two-state arrangement was the eventual and obvious destination, that the conflict was a problem with a solution and that reasonable people would one day reach it. He did not come out of over two years of war with that belief intact in its old form. Very few Israelis of his generation did. What October had shown them — the planning, the maps of the safe rooms, the GoPro footage, the open celebration in foreign capitals while the bodies were still warm — had relocated the conflict, in their understanding, from the category of solvable political dispute to the category of the very old thing this book has been describing all along: the recurring, shape-shifting refusal to permit the Jewish people a safe existence. Gal did not become a man without hope. He became a man whose hope had been forced to grow up. He still wanted his sons to live in peace beside their neighbors. He no longer believed peace would arrive because it was reasonable. He believed it would arrive, if it arrived, the way everything in this book has arrived — because Jews were strong enough, and stubborn enough, and unwilling enough to disappear, to make the alternative impossible.`

`Two years. And then more. Gal Sharon spent them the way Shlomo Levitsky had spent the years from nineteen forty-three to nineteen forty-eight, and the way the boy in Bergen-Belsen had spent the years from nineteen forty-three to nineteen forty-five — doing the unbearable, daily, on the grounds that there was no alternative, and that the people behind him had no one else.`

`He kept the promise. That is the thing to record. Whatever else the war did to him, Gal Sharon kept the promise he had made in the dark at Nahal Oz. He went where the country sent him, for as long as the country needed him there, and he did not stop.`

`None of this, for the people in this book, was a set of distant headlines. The author lives in Highland Park, Illinois, home of one of the United States' highest per capita Jewish populations, on the North Shore of Chicago, and the North Shore in these years had its own quiet accumulation — the threat warnings, the new guards at the doors of synagogues and schools, the harassment, the vandalism. One night in the summer of twenty twenty-four a crowd came in the dark to the Highland Park home of the author’s own congressman, Brad Schneider, who is Jewish. There were perhaps forty of them, and they came after two in the morning, with drums and a bullhorn, and they chanted at the windows while his family was inside, and they poured a red liquid across the sidewalk like blood. It had the unmistakable character of a mob, and the congressman named it for what it was: it was meant to frighten. And the young man who fired the shots outside the museum in Washington had grown up in Chicago, and had studied at the same university as the author’s own oldest child. This is the thing that is hardest to carry across to those outside it. The Jewish people is so small — and this chapter will come, a few pages on, to just how small — that for a Jew, anywhere, there is in the end no such thing as a distant antisemitic attack. The arithmetic is merciless: in a people of barely sixteen million, every name is two or three handshakes from one’s own.`

`The former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky — who had spent nine years in the Soviet gulag before being released to Israel in nineteen eighty-six and who later served as Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs — had articulated, in two thousand four, the working tool that has become the standard analytic device for distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism dressed up as such. He calls it the Three D Test. The three D’s are Demonization, Double Standards, and Delegitimization.`

`None of this means that criticism of an Israeli government is antisemitism. It is not. Israelis criticize their own governments more fiercely, and far more publicly, than any outsider ever will; argument is the native language of the country. But criticism becomes something else when it denies to the Jewish people alone the right of self-determination it grants to every other people; when it holds the one Jewish state to a standard it demands of no one else on earth; when “Zionist” quietly becomes the word a person is permitted to say in public when the word he means is “Jew.”`

`Palestinianism, as Wilf describes it, is something narrower and more corrosive than any of those. It is, in her account, an ideology organized not around the building of a Palestinian future but around the negation of the Jewish one — a movement whose deepest unifying commitment is not that there shall be a Palestine, but that there shall not, anywhere in the land, ever, be a sovereign Jewish state. Its central engine, in Wilf’s telling, is the idea of perpetual return — the demand, sustained now across four generations and institutionalized as no other refugee population’s claim in the world has been, that the descendants of the Arabs who left in nineteen forty-eight will one day return in their millions and, by sheer weight of number, unmake the Jewish majority and with it the Jewish state. So long as that idea is taught and funded and believed, Wilf argues, no two-state compromise can ever actually close — because the compromise was never the goal; the end of Israel was the goal, and a Palestinian state beside Israel would be accepted, if at all, only as a stage on the way to a Palestinian state instead of Israel. From this she draws a hard conclusion: that an ideology of erasure is not negotiated with but defeated and discredited — the way certain other ideologies of the twentieth century had to be defeated before the nations that had carried them could be helped toward something better — and that the better thing, on the far side, is an Arab world that has made its peace with a Jewish state in its midst. Wilf’s thesis is a contested one, and a controversial one amongst those who do not know the history and culture of the land. But one thing about the autumn of twenty twenty-three is not contested, because it was visible on the streets of every Western capital. `

`And the project, having done its work once, immediately did something the author had not planned. One of the people who had helped organize that Chicago event, through the Chicago Jewish Alliance, was a man named Zach Glick. In the course of the work, Zach told the author about his grandfather — a man named Shlomo Levitsky, ninety-nine years old, a veteran of the Palmach, a sailor of the clandestine immigration ships, a survivor of an Egyptian prison. And there was the next project. They began to plan a second event and film screening, this one in New Jersey, where Shlomo lives. Gal and Shlomo spoke by telephone — the captain of the October generation and the Palmachnik of the founding generation, voice to voice, across the same line — and a meeting was arranged. Gal would fly to New Jersey and stand in a room with Shlomo Levitsky, the way he had stood in a room with George Mueller.`

`He did not get there on the day he was meant to. In March of twenty twenty-six, Gal was on his way to the airport — on his way to meet Shlomo at last — when the war with Iran broke out and Ben Gurion Airport closed behind him. The chain, reaching for its final link, was made to wait.`

`But the reaching is the point, and the reaching is what this chapter is here to record. The three lives at the center of this book — the founding generation, the Holocaust generation, the October generation — did not, for the better part of a hundred years, touch one another at all. They were brought into contact deliberately, recently, by hand, by one friend who refused to let a soldier come home from a just war into an empty life. The chain that this book keeps calling unbroken is not only a figure of speech and not only a fact of history. In the years twenty twenty-four and twenty twenty-five and twenty twenty-six, it was being forged again, link by link, in video messages and packed auditoriums and telephone calls, by people whose names are in these pages.`

`Gal Sharon went looking for a mission bigger than himself. What the project showed him was that he had been standing inside one all along. He was a living link between George Levy Mueller, who had survived the world that had no Israel in it, and Shlomo Levitsky, who had helped build the Israel that George's grandchildren and Gal's children now get to be born into. He was the proof that the line still ran. And the book in your hands is what the project made — the three lives, set down side by side at last, in one place, so that the chain could be seen whole.`

`The child who ran along the cemetery walls of Givat Ram and climbed the five-story water tower on a summer afternoon because the fear had been chased out of him and never came back.`

`The child who sat on a train with his little sister in Westphalia and watched his mother wave, and grow smaller, and grow smaller, and be gone — and who took his little sister by the hand, because he had been told to take care of her, and did, for six years, through three camps, sleeping feet to feet so each would know the other was there. `

`The teenager who walked down a rope with a rifle bigger than himself while the dignitaries on the benches went silent.`

`The teenager who, starving in Bergen-Belsen, was given one slice of bread by a guard not much older than himself, and carried it back through the dark and shared it with his sister — and who chose, for the rest of his long life, to remember that slice of bread alongside everything else, so that the account would be true.`

`The smuggler who carried other people’s children on his shoulders through the dark of the Galilee so that they would not cry.`

`The boy on the Lost Transport who ate grass for thirteen days and never once believed he would die.`

`The porter who tied a charge of explosive to a British radar tower with his own belt.`

`The wounded soldier who walked five kilometers alone, bleeding through his trousers, through an orange grove, counting in Hebrew to keep his feet moving.`

`The captain who walked into a Cairo prison with his shoulders back, and walked out ninety-five days later with a pair of handsewn shorts and a single American dollar folded in the seam.`

`The survivor who kept his silence for fifty years, and then broke it, and spent his last thirty years standing in front of schoolchildren so that the warning would be carried.`

`The reserve officer who drove toward the gunfire on a Sabbath morning, and led his men through the burning gate of a kibbutz, and did not stop — for four hundred days and more — until the promise was kept.`

`Three men. Three families. One chain.`

`The grandfather in New Jersey, who in his ninety-ninth year finds life a little slow. The great-grandfather in Illinois, who at ninety-five still plays, by ear, the songs his murdered mother sang. The captain in Tel Aviv, who will one day be old too, and will still be telling it.`

`Never back down. Never give up. Because you have no alternative but to win impossible victories.`

`The chain is unbroken. It runs through this book. It runs through history — past, present, and future. It runs into tomorrow, into hearts not yet born and events not yet imagined.`

`It does not stop.`

`It will not stop.`

`Am Yisrael Chai — the People of Israel live.`

`The biographical material on Shlomo Levitsky in this book comes principally from interviews with Shlomo himself, conducted in New Jersey, and from the recollections preserved by his three daughters Ava, Beverly, and Lily, his sisters and brothers, his nephews Noni and Kobi, and the wider circle of family that has carried the stories down.`

`The biographical material on George Levy Mueller comes principally from George’s own testimony — from the spoken account he gave of his life, and from his memoir, Lucie’s Hope, named for his mother and for the hope that saved him and his sister Ursula. Where George’s memory of a date or a place name was uncertain, as he himself was always the first to say, the text has quietly reconciled it with the documentary record. For the camps through which George passed, that record includes the standard scholarship and archival material on Camp Vught — the Herzogenbusch concentration camp — on the Westerbork transit camp, and on Bergen-Belsen and its Sternlager, the Star Camp for so-called exchange Jews. For the transport that carried George and Ursula out of Bergen-Belsen in April of nineteen forty-five, the text draws on the research compiled on the “Lost Train” to Tröbitz, including the work of Erika Arlt cataloguing the roughly six hundred people who died on the journey and were buried along its route.`

`The material on Gal Sharon comes from his own account of the seventh of October and the war that followed it. For the events of that day, the text draws on the official Israel Defense Forces investigations, in particular the inquiry into the assault on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, and on contemporaneous reporting.`

`The historical material draws on a number of standard sources. For the Palmach itself: Yoav Gelber’s A Palmach Battalion and the official memorial site of the Palmach Veterans Association, which preserves detailed unit records and casualty lists. For Aliyah Bet: Ze’ev Venia Hadari’s Second Exodus and the Palyam Veterans Association’s online archives. For the war of independence: Benny Morris’s 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War and David Tal’s War in Palestine, 1948. For the Bat Galim affair: the relevant United Nations Security Council documents, principally S/3287, the report of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization S/3323 of the twenty-ninth of November, nineteen fifty-four, and contemporaneous reporting in The New York Times by Kathleen Teltsch.`

`For the broader history of Zionism and the Jewish people in the modern era, the standard accounts remain Walter Laqueur’s A History of Zionism, Anita Shapira’s Israel: A History, and Simon Schama’s three-volume The Story of the Jews. For the destruction of European Jewry, the reader may turn to Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews and Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the Jews.`

`Where the family record and the documentary record diverged on small details — a date, a place name, the spelling of a foreign word — the text has generally followed the family record, on the principle that the people who lived a story are the most reliable witnesses to it, and that history, in the end, is what is remembered around the Friday-night table.`