Mihai Wald fought and died in Bab Wald

Mija Wald’s participation in the 1948 fighting and his death at Bab al-Wad are the central loss around which the surviving characters’ memories converge. The account joins a specific battle on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road to an intimate reckoning: his father, Gershom Wald, admits that he helped teach his only son to go to war, while Atalia’s later testimony gives the death a brutal, unresolved aftermath. The event is therefore both a battlefield loss and a continuing wound, sustained by what the family knows, what it cannot know, and the voice that helped send Mija away.

Background and Decision to Fight

Mija was Gershom’s only son. His mother died when he was about six, and Gershom raised him alone. Their closeness was not only parental: from around the age of ten, Mija was also his father’s best friend. They could spend hours talking or remain silent together; Mija sometimes tried to explain higher mathematics and formal logic to Gershom, the old teacher of Bible and history, and teased him as a man of the past. Gershom’s recollection of that companionship makes the later loss inseparable from the loss of a confidant.

Mija had lost a kidney to illness at nine. In late 1947, despite that history, he deceived the recruitment committee and entered the fighting. Gershom says that in the disorder before the war the committee was not difficult to fool, and even seemed glad to be fooled. Atalia had told Mija not to go, mocking him as a boy rushing out to play cowboys and Indians; she regarded men as ridiculous, never having grown beyond adolescence. Shaltiel Abravanel, too, made Mija promise not to fight. He called the war a madness shared by two peoples and urged young people on both sides to lay down their weapons and refuse to fight.

Shaltiel’s opposition was grounded in sustained contact with Arab neighbors and friends, not a withdrawal from the country’s political conflict. At least twice a week, even after violence began in the autumn of 1947 and roads were blocked and snipers fired, he traveled to speak with Arab friends. Neighbors called him a friend of the Arabs, the muezzin, and the devout Muslim; some called him a traitor because he partly justified Arab opposition to Zionism and maintained close relations with Arabs. He nonetheless insisted that he was a Zionist, one of the few not intoxicated by nationalism, and called himself the last disciple of Ahad Ha’am. Fluent in Arabic since childhood, he had Muslim and Christian Arab friends and advocated another path. His warning that the war was madness stood against the martial story Gershom had taught his son.

The Voice That Sent Him

Gershom does not absolve himself by remembering that others also encouraged Mija to fight. He says that he argued for the war as a holy war and raised his son on the memory of the defenders of Tel Hai, Wingate’s night squads, the Jewish police special forces, and the Maccabees, whom he believed must rise again. Mija was trained not by his father alone but by the wider community: nursery teachers, schoolteachers, boys and girls of his generation all repeated the call that a voice had summoned and they had gone. Gershom finally includes himself among those voices. The national appeal that made Mija’s departure sound like obedience was not abstract; it had been spoken into him from childhood by family and country alike.

The father’s later words reverse the certainty of that earlier call. Remembering that he stayed while his son went, Gershom insists that the contrast no longer holds: Mija is gone, and he too is not alive in any meaningful sense. He describes himself as a dead, endlessly talking man. His account makes grief an admission of participation: he mourns his son while recognizing that his own lessons helped prepare him for the battle. The political argument is thus carried inside the family relation, not set apart from it.

The Battle at Bab al-Wad

Mija was thirty-seven when he was sent to escort a convoy heading toward Jerusalem. The date was April 2, 1948. The route ran through a deep ravine along a winding road, where Arab fighters fired on the convoys from the mountains on both sides. As dusk approached, the convoy commanders feared being trapped in the narrow passage after dark. Some fighters climbed down from the armored trucks to remove a stone barrier across the road; others, including Mija, ran uphill to attack sniper positions with homemade grenades.

The assault was repulsed. At nightfall, the fighters withdrew carrying the dead and wounded, but did not bring everyone back. The convoy was nearing Jerusalem when someone realized Mija was missing. At dawn the next day, a platoon went back to search the slopes. Most of those searching were Mija’s closest friends, ten or fifteen years younger than he was. They spent the morning combing the area before finding him. The sequence leaves the reader with a stark gap between the withdrawal and the discovery: the battle’s immediate outcome is known, but the precise circumstances of Mija’s final hours are not.

Aftermath and Unresolved Knowledge

Atalia recounts the death years later in the library, speaking with an intensity she describes as almost furious exhilaration rather than grief or hatred. She says that Mija was sent up the hill with homemade grenades, that the attack failed, and that the survivors carried back the dead and wounded without him. She cannot establish whether he lay wounded through the night, cried for help, or tried to crawl toward the road while bleeding. Nor can she know whether the Arab fighters found him after his companions withdrew. Her account distinguishes what the family can reconstruct from what remains permanently beyond its reach.

The account of how Mija’s body was found is graphic and explicitly uncertain in one crucial respect: he had been killed by having his throat cut, stripped from the waist down, and mutilated. Atalia says the family will never know whether the throat-cutting came before or after the mutilation. The unanswered question remains with her as a recurring object of thought at night. Rather than resolve the violence into a single recoverable story, her narrative records the limits of what can be known and the lasting force of those limits.

Atalia had not first learned the details directly from the people who searched for Mija. About a year after his death, one of his companions died in a workplace accident in Galilee, and his diary came into her possession. In fewer than ten words, the diary recorded how Mija had been found among the rocks. Atalia says she had otherwise been told nothing; the discovery in the diary became the source of an image she sees continually, with her eyes open or shut, day and night. She continued living with and caring for the two bereaved fathers who would never become grandfathers. Her account connects the missing information, the sudden written disclosure, and the repeated image into a single aftermath that does not end with the battle.

Significance

Mija’s death exposes the human cost of a war that Gershom once taught his son to regard as sacred and Shaltiel urged him to refuse. The two men’s opposed appeals meet in Mija’s choice to fight: one trained him for a national struggle, while the other argued that young people on both sides should lay down arms. Neither memory makes the outcome simple. Gershom’s grief cannot undo his part in the call to battle, and Shaltiel’s alternative did not prevent the war or save Mija.

The event also persists through different forms of telling. Gershom speaks as a father confronting his own responsibility; Atalia reconstructs the military sequence and names what remains unknown; the dead companion’s diary preserves, in a few words, the fact of the discovery. Those accounts do not combine into complete knowledge. Their gaps and returns are part of the event’s continuing meaning: Mija’s death is not only the moment he was lost at Bab al-Wad, but also the unresolved knowledge and inherited grief that the survivors carry afterward.