runs out. Then you get work on another ship. You can do that for six months or even a full year."

We dream. We are sitting on the deck of a ship, watching the sun go down, puffing on a pipe, and listening to the waves. No artillery, no tanks, no aircraft. Our lives are not threatened. Everything is OK.

"We could set off with a whole group of friends," adds Shalom. "We don’t need anything. If there is no food, we just don’t eat. That would be nothing new ..." "But then we would be adventurers," warns Yaakov, "and the way back would be even harder." "To hell with the way back," counters Shalom. "If we don’t get what we are entitled to, we’ll take it. Take my word for it." "But only if we are agreed on it," says Yaakov. He is watching a fly. Suddenly his hand slams down. The fly is squashed. We are experts at that.

"What are you talking about?" says Shalom. "The war is not over yet." Suddenly we all come to ourselves again. No one believes that the war is over. We are too near the front. In the distance we hear occasional shots.

With the words "if we are still alive after the war ..." Yaakov closes the discussion. We can all feel this "if’ hanging over our heads.

It was exactly these "happy" days at Jassir that really brought home to us the awful side of war. Our main task was to prevent Arab civilians from entering the areas we had conquered. Hungry Arabs were crossing daily over the no-man s-land from Beit Jibrin, Agur, and Zakariyya into our areas around Kedima, Tel al-Safi, and Kfar Menachem. We were sup-posed to stop these movements.

On one of our patrols we stopped off at the Tel al-Safi position. Suddenly we noticed two Arab children running around among the sol-diets and serving them. This unusual sight is imprinted in my memory. I wrote a little story about it.

13 August 1948

Jassir

Little prisoners

The resistance was broken. The enemy had evacuated the village. Now only occasional shots were coming from the mountain oppo-site. Now and then a bullet hummed past at a great height, with the

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