Mija Wald's physical disability

Mija Wald's physical disability is a specific medical history, not simply a sign of incapacity: after losing his left kidney to an illness at age nine, he falsifies the records that might have kept him from combat and goes to war. His decision binds bodily vulnerability to family conflict and public rhetoric, and makes his death in the 1948 war the point at which those pressures can no longer be discussed as abstractions.

Injury and enlistment

At nine, Mija undergoes an operation at Hadassah Hospital on Haneviim Street, where surgeons remove his left kidney. Gershom Wald later describes his son as an invalid, like himself. The condition is not incidental to Mija’s enlistment: in late 1947, he falsifies his medical certificate and his father’s signature to deceive the recruitment committee. The committee is said to have been readily deceived amid the disorder preceding the war, and Mija’s father recalls that its members seemed glad to be fooled.

The concealment exposes a contradiction between the medical fact and the public expectations surrounding military service. Mija’s bodily history could have barred him from combat, but falsification allows him to present himself as fit to fight. The account does not describe a later treatment or a change in his condition; it records instead how the condition enters the story through the effort to hide it.

Family arguments over war

Atalia tells Mija not to go. She mocks the prospect of men going off to play at cowboys and Indians and regards men as incapable of growing beyond adolescence. Shaltiel Abravanel likewise makes Mija promise not to fight. He calls the war madness—not only Ben-Gurion’s, but the madness of both peoples—and argues that the young on both sides should lay down their weapons. Even after bloodshed, roadblocks, and sniper fire begin in the autumn of 1947, he continues visiting Arab friends to try to persuade them against the conflict.

Gershom’s position is different. He remembers arguing that the war was sacred and that even a bridegroom should go to battle. He says he raised Mija on the memory of Tel Hai’s defenders, Wingate’s night squads, the Jewish police special forces, and the Maccabees, training his son in the ideals of military sacrifice. In retrospect, he sees himself as part of the collective voice that called Mija to war. The disagreement makes Mija’s enlistment more than a private act of evasion: his father’s patriotic instruction and Shaltiel’s opposition to the war pull in opposite directions, while Mija’s falsified records conceal the physical vulnerability that might have interrupted that course.

The body concealed and the death disclosed

After Mija is killed, Gershom explains that his son had only one kidney and had falsified both his medical certificate and his father’s signature. He broadens the confession into an image of shared deception: the recruiters were fooled, but so were those who did the deceiving, and Gershom includes himself in that chain. Mija’s disability thus returns in the family’s account not as a recovered medical narrative, but as evidence of how wartime institutions and convictions can cooperate in sending a vulnerable young man into battle.

Atalia recounts that Mija, aged thirty-seven, was sent to escort a convoy heading toward Jerusalem on April 2, 1948. When the convoy came under fire from the surrounding hills, some fighters were sent to clear a stone roadblock, while Mija and others climbed to attack sniper positions with homemade grenades. The assault was repelled. The fighters withdrew after dark carrying some of the dead and wounded, but Mija was missing; a search party found him on the slopes at dawn the next day. Atalia describes his body as brutally mutilated. She cannot know whether he was killed before or after the mutilation, and says that the unanswered question remains with her night after night. The account gives no indication that his missing kidney or disability caused his death; it places his medical history beside the circumstances of a fatal combat mission without claiming a medical explanation for the outcome.

Memory and consequence

Gershom’s later disclosure makes Mija’s disability part of a wider reckoning with responsibility. He had once taught his son to answer the call to fight; Shaltiel had urged him not to go; and Mija had hidden the medical fact that might have kept him out. Gershom concludes that he himself had helped make that call audible. His description of a whole people deceived refuses to place the burden solely on the recruitment committee or on Mija’s falsification.

Mija’s death also changes the relationship between Gershom and Shaltiel. Although the two men had argued over Shaltiel’s political position, Atalia recalls that after Mija died they ceased arguing altogether. She, Gershom, and Shaltiel then lived together in the house for about two years, in a silence that had replaced their disputes. In that aftermath, Mija’s physical vulnerability is inseparable from the family’s grief and from the question of how a society’s ideals can turn a concealed disability into a passage to combat.