
The announcement, on the second day of the Six Day War of June 1967, sent me back to that dreadful 13th of April 1948. Like others on the Mount, there I was, witnessing the Hadassah convoy massacre, helpless to intervene. Doctors, nurses, patients, Hebrew University scientists, 79 – including my close friend from Jewish Brigade headquarters Avraham (Albert) Soffer. And the British police had assured: ‘the road is clear’!
It wasn’t the first massacre in which I was, so to day, ‘involved’. I was three-and-a-half years old in August 1929, when the Hebron massacre occurred – with a similar number of Jewish victims. I retain a picture in my mind, of standing at a corner of our street in Romema holding the hand of my grandfather, who was in animated discussion with two or three other grown-ups – and of two British Tommies billeted in the house next door, who used to come over to us for a ‘cuppa’.
Romema was then still an elite neighbourhood, with a healthy mix...
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