I spent Christmas reading delicious books that have nothing to do with work and one of them was the biography of Roald Dahl, in which he applies the same narrative simplicity with which he embroiders his stories. It has been memorable. flying alone (Alfaguara) collects the adventures of this British author who worked for Shell in British Tanganyika in the 1930s; that he was forced to catch Germans when the war broke out and that he did it with less enthusiasm than his servant, a descendant of a warrior tribe that had defeated the Maasai and who had no problem beheading the Teutons who still remained in Africa ; who enlisted as a pilot in the RAF and who fought in the Mediterranean by throwing bombs at Hitler's planes and, above all, fleeing and avoiding those thrown at him. His plane often came back to the ground with too many holes.
Among those vibrant pages there is an episode that he tells strangely, without understanding, and that takes us directly to the present. After the disasters suffered by the English in Greece and Crete, the RAF retreated to the Middle East and the 80th Squadron, to which he belonged, attacked the Germans and Vichy French as best they could, whom the author does not forgive. Its base was in Haifa, then British and today Israeli. Faced with the serious possibility of being discovered, Dahl was sent to take a look at a makeshift runway in some nearby cornfields. His orders were clear: not to land if there was any doubt. And there went young Dahl, frightened, in search of that clue in which to hide his hurricanes if the Germans discovered their positions.
He flew alone until he saw the strip of dry land between corn plantations, cabins and fig trees. She landed and stopped engines. He was scared, and suddenly, not the enemy surrounded him, but a bunch of children along with a man with a German accent. Worst.
Dahl put himself on guard and he identified himself: “We are Jewish refugees. The children are orphans. And this is our home.” And this is how Dahl encountered a reality that he did not know, that shocked him and that he did not understand. It was 1941, he knew nothing about the massacre of Jews in Germany and even less that many were emigrating to those lands. As the man said, the locals let them live in them.
“Is this land yours?” he asked.
“Not yet,” replied the German.
Dahl was surprised by that determination. She had just come across the germ of the Israeli State and ended up arguing with him. Today, 82 years later, one wonders what she would think upon landing in the cornfield and finding that those Jews are no longer refugees welcomed in Palestinian lands but rather emboldened rulers who have turned the Palestinians into what they were: refugees. In the best case. It's the good thing about reading. @bernagharbour
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