Tag #157043 - Interview #79438 (Hillel Kempler)

After the wedding I continued to work and was also very active in the Haganah. All the young people were organized there. Then the War of Liberation began in 1947, overnight, when the UN decided that the state of Palestine was to be divided into two states. People say the war began in May of 1948, following the call for the state of Israel, but there was already war. It’s true that the war began the night from the 29th to the 30th of November, 1947. I was immediately mobilized. It had been bubbling up constantly, but there was war on the night of the decision. The Arabs shot at all the highways in the country, at Jewish cars. We already had munitions and were prepared. The military didn’t just need soldiers who could shoot, but specialists. I was a specialist for motors and generators. There were very few materials and we had to keep trying to piece things together. I had various kinds of motors and generators that were broken, and had to put parts from various machines together in order to make a generator. The generators were important for lots of things, like camps and hospitals. It was our luck that the English military, and other smaller military troops that were here during the Second World War and withdrew between 1945 and 1947, had been well-equipped and left their camps here. They had taken the good equipment with them, but they left all the broken equipment here. It was my task to put the machines together. My friends in the military would always laugh, they would say, you’ve crossed a cow with a sheep. I had a knack for being able to see fairly quickly how you could build a machine out of other machines.