336
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
appropriate for the occasion? This orthodox Jew at prayer, the
pitiful screams of the children, and the dark mass of humanity
ebbing in a black tide toward Zion Gate, now a gaping black
hole, are my last unforgettable impressions of the Last Exodus.
I see now a single file of prisoners emerging from Zion
Gate Way into the square. They look young. They are the
Haganah!
There were about 250 of them, the youths mixed in with
able-bodied men up to about fifty years of age. They were
lined up. Each was searched for arms, after which their bags
and bundles were examined. I walked among them, studying
their faces, looking into their eyes. They were uniformly short,
most of them puny, thin, and tired, as unheroic-looking a
group of first-rate fighters as I've ever seen. (Later I learned
that only forty among them were actual Haganah members,
the others being shopkeepers and students turned emergency
fighters.) The sorry lot were marched into the Vank compound and spent the night in the Seminary Building1 and
elsewhere on the grounds.
That night the Jewish quarter was put to the torch, and
burned from one end to the other, a huge conflagration consuming everything that had survived the other fires. I photographed the holocaust fr