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The Rescue
Netty C. Gross
For 111 Albanian refugees, coming to Israel was a case of any port in a storm. For Israel, taking them in was a symbolic gesture of the salvation that the world failed to offer the Jews six decades ago.
Shehide Ramadani, trim, blonde and blue-eyed, sits under a palm tree just outside a guest house at Kibbutz Ma'agan Mikhael, on the Mediterranean 20 miles north of Tel Aviv. Until two weeks ago, the pony-tailed 18-year-old from Pristina, the Kosovo capital, was somebody, she says in perfect English, "with a life, car, telephone, bedroom, bite-plate, CD player." Her eyes well up with tears. Now she's a refugee, in borrowed green slacks and T-shirt, one of 111 Kosovars airlifted from the Brazde camp in Macedonia where I first saw her three days ago.
Shehide, surrounded by her parents and sister and brother, is recalling her ordeal since April 8, when her family was forced by Serbian policemen to leave their home at gunpoint. First came the horror of hearing that a friend was gang-raped by 18 Serbian men; then came the weeklong journey, with no food and little water, from Kosovo to Brazde during which a dozen refugees died. "I don't understand why the Serbs hate us," she says, as her mother admires my earrings - she had a similar pair. In the same breath, Shehide adds, "Nor do I understand why the Germans hated the Jews. They are great people, maybe the greatest."
Shehide is hardly the first to make the Holocaust-Kosovar link. Ever since Bill Clinton compared Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler, it's been on everyone's lips. And in Israel the parallels have hit what may be the ultimate hot-button in the national psyche.
While the government dithered about which side to take in the crisis, Israelis leaped into action to help the refugees. "We Cannot Remain Silent," was the slogan of an April 10 day-long Army Radio telethon and an evening rock concert/rally in Tel Aviv, which helped raise $1.5 million; the army set up, in two days, an impressive field hospital in Brazde, a 40-minute drive from Skopje, Macedonia's capital. And, using Holocaust Memorial Day as the backdrop for their arrival, Jewish Agency chairman Salai Meridor spearheaded an effort to bring Kosovar refugees to Israel.
The discovery that Lamija Jaha, the daughter of Dervis and Servet Korkut, Kosovars who hid Jews during the Holocaust, would be on the flight with her husband, topped off the Holocaust imagery.
Boarding a new 737 on a special pre-dawn Israir flight to Skopje to pick up the refugees, I'm confused by the Holocaust undertones. As the daughter of survivors, I'm acutely conscious of the unfolding drama, and touched by the Israeli public's determination to behave better than the West did two generations ago. But the upbeat, PR-heavy atmosphere on the plane makes me uncomfortable. And slightly cynical.
The group headed for Skopje includes two cabinet ministers, Jewish Agency officials, journalists and others. Also aboard is Yisrael Harel, the man who runs Israir and says he chartered this plane to the Jewish Agency and government at cost.
Agency director general Shimshon Shoshani explains that an official and a translator walked around Brazde with a megaphone to announce the Israel option. Two hundred refugees showed. Singles were rejected and the list was whittled down to 17 families, who will receive 35,000 shekels ($8,600) and other immigration benefits on arrival. He also tells us that 25 Macedonian Jews have opened immigration files; Jewish children from Belgrade and Kosovo have been evacuated to Budapest and on to Israel, and the Agency is looking for 18 missing Pristina Jews.
We land in Skopje as dawn breaks. NATO helicopters are on the tarmac. For the next 40 minutes, on a tour bus, Macedonian Jewish community president Victor Mizrahi, a middle-aged businessman in a black suit and tie, delivers a laconic, century-by-century history of the region's Jews, starting with Alexander the Great and ending with March 11, 1943, when 7,000 Jews were corralled into a factory and deported to Treblinka. Nobody returned. Today there are 186 Jews in Macedonia, most in Skopje. The community's Jewish newspaper is called, simply, "March 11th."
But few are listening. By now nearly all the Israelis are trying to get a dial tone on their cellphones. As we roll past a Balkan patchwork of green fields, crumbly farms, dowdy Communist-era housing, mosques and churches, half the bus is on the phone with Tel Aviv. Conversations carry a certain infantile urgency. "We're here." "I ate breakfast," shout grown men and women.
Still, it's a rich moment, all part of a piece. Fifty years after the Holocaust, Israelis - with the best cellphones, hospital and rescue mission package - want to be the Danes of the Kosovo war.
Survivors like my parents bristle at comparisons to the Nazi era. But the brutal destruction of the centuries-old Muslim settlement in Kosovo does contain unmistakable echoes. Brazde, where 23,000 refugees cram into 2,000 tents, is filled with mud, barbed-wire fences, with hostile Macedonian guards ensuring nobody leaves. Inside, an eerie silence prevails. Lines of unshaven, stunned men, some in soiled business suits, stand silently, eyes dark and pleading, as if they were in a macabre wedding reception.
Piles of garbage swirl around us. There is no running water and there are no toilets. Women, barely concealed by low, burlap screens, crouch over holes in the ground. Policemen watch from the other side of the fence.
Other refugees promenade around. It reminds me of films documenting the first days of the Warsaw Ghetto, before starvation and horror set in, when Jews appeared to walk around purposefully, as though late for business meetings.
A girl with a pixie haircut standing in the line of men looks at us expectantly. I feel fear. But of what? I realize that I'm afraid of the refugees. They look dirty, wild-eyed. Stripped of their homes, jobs, dignity, dehumanization has begun.
The Israeli army field hospital, with a staff of 70, is the largest humanitarian endeavor from any country in the camp. Large Israeli flags billow in the Macedonian wind. Gila Shoval, an army nurse from Rosh Ha'ayin, the only woman at the hospital who left children back home, says she's helped deliver six babies in the last seven days.
The 111 Kosovar refugees heading for Israel - including six babies and one 85-year-old grandmother - board three buses. We meet them briefly before they are escorted to the airport, ahead of us. Few know anything about Israel. They are frightened, tired and haven't bathed in 12 days. Some opted for Israel because their tents were pitched near the hospital and they were impressed. Others heard the megaphone and took a split-second leap of faith. "You had to think fast. React. Jump," says Raymon Mustafa.
On one bus, a pack of Israeli reporters converges on Malinda Hasani, 15, who speaks passable English. Malinda's father, Enver, is a businessman from Pristina who says he once owned three jewelry stores, three cars, a large two-story house and a dog. Sitting next to him is his wife, Sevda, 34, formerly a top basketball player, and three other children. Enver says that, 10 days earlier, Serb policemen in black masks appeared at his home and told him to get out. "They pointed to my wife and daughter and demanded cash," he says in halting English, explaining that it was payment or rape. "I gave them everything."
The family was loaded onto a packed train which took them to the Macedonian border camp of Blatze, which had no food, water or tents, just slabs of plastic as shelter from the rain. "I said what's this place, Auschwitz?" Enver recalls.
After four days, the family was bused to Brazde. Enver says he has no idea what became of his mother or sisters or the family dog, Arap - all left behind in Pristina.
I wander into the Israeli hospital tent marked "Pediatrics" in English. Doctors tend to about 10 young mothers and their sick children. The Israelis, says Halina Zegini, a single, pale 28-year-old English teacher from Pristina, "are very gentle and treat us like human beings." She is standing over the cot of her younger sister, Nurije, who a day before, after four harrowing days on the train and in Blatze, gave birth to a 2.7 kilo (6 lb.) baby girl.
Nurije is curled up on a cot, nose to nose with her tiny daughter, wrapped in pink. Both are covered with coarse gray wool blankets. Nurije cries. Halina nods comfortingly but notes that in the hierarchy of nothingness, a cot in a field hospital on a Macedonian airstrip is something.
Halina escorts me to her family's tent deep inside the camp. The gray blankets covering the mud double as beds. Eighteen people share the tent. Personal possessions and boxes of food are stacked in the corner.
Halina's 87-year-old father lies rolled up in a corner, refusing to budge; next to him sit Nurije's elderly in-laws. How's the baby, they ask wanly? Halina's older sister and her four children huddle in another corner. The sister runs a hand through her hair, an instinctive gesture to look respectable.
Halina didn't opt for Israel because she wants to go to Germany. But there's a long waiting list and now she's sorry.
I must go back to the bus, but Halina won't leave my side. I feel her distress. What is my obligation to these people? I can never say I didn't see, didn't know. I give her a hug, a business card, granola bars, lipstick. If the Israelis have another evacuation, I urge her, go with them.
On the trip back, the refugees have been allotted the back rows of the plane. Black and yellow sports bags filled with Israir T-shirts, sun hats and candy bags are handed out. An official explains what the evacuees will receive upon arrival, that they will have freedom of movement and be issued work permits. The refugees applaud gratefully but the ardor doesn't mute their frightened expressions. They have thrown in their lot with strangers.
Reporters prowl the plane, demanding to know how everyone feels, feels, feels. Refugees are asked to don the T-shirts and hats, and wave Israeli flags at the cameramen. They oblige quietly. The Kosovar diaspora is born on this plane.
I am one of the last non-refugees to disembark, to the sight of Prime Minister Netanyahu, bounding up the stairs toward me. He extends his hand in an athletic grasp. Maybe he thinks I'm a refugee. "Are there any translators here?" he asks me. "I'd like to talk to these people."
Lamija, daughter of the righteous gentiles, is located. On the tarmac, the prime minister tells her she may stay here forever. A fistfight breaks out between Lamija's husband, Vlaznim, and a CNN cameraman who thinks Vlaznim is blocking his shot. The cameraman shouts an obscenity at the refugee. Lamija turns to me, hysterical. Their nerves are frayed. Their two teenage children have been evacuated to Budapest. "We are just simple people," she weeps.
Three days later, I'm sitting on a bunk-bed in Enver Hasani's cabin at Ma'agan Mikhael. The refugees are more relaxed, but still perplexed by the Israelis' intense need to do good. Jews and Arabs drive up to present them with gifts. Six little Kosovar girls play busily in a room filled with donated toys.
A well-traveled, self-described "happy man," Enver still hopes to return to Pristina. But if not, he says, he will build his life anew, somewhere. He has friends in London and Paris. After all, he muses, "Look at what the Jews did with themselves after the Holocaust."
1999
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© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2000 |  |