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Last Visited: 11/7/2007
DAVID GUTMANN
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David Gutmann sits outside his Wallingford home on a gray, weathered deck overlooking the southern tier of the Green Mountain National Forest.The apple trees in his yard, laden with ripe fruit, sway in an unseasonably warm autumn breeze.
Gutmann, 82, has a round face, bulbous nose, bald head and large glasses that call to mind economist Milton Friedman or actor Ed Asner.
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Actually, until his retirement in the late 1990s, Gutmann spent more than three decades as a developmental psychologist, conducting research and teaching at Harvard, Northwestern and the University of Michigan.He pioneered studies of the psychological changes that come with aging and authored several books on the subject.
But Gutmann was a different kind of pioneer as a young man. Born in New York City, he worked during World War II as a merchant seaman, traveling throughout Europe and the Middle East.After the war, Gutmann says, he wasn't ready to attend college.He "was kicking around, looking for the next thing to do," when he got word in a union hall that the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization, was looking for sailors to smuggle Holocaust survivors out of war-torn Europe and into British-controlled Palestine.
"They didn't specify Jewish sailors," he recalls."As a matter of fact, many of our volunteers were gentiles."
Gutmann admits he didn't have much knowledge of Zionist politics, though he came from a strong Zionist background.In 1905, his grandfather had been part of the so-called "Second Aliyah," or wave of Jewish settlers who emigrated to Palestine between 1904 and 1914.
In 1946, the world was only beginning to grasp the full extent of the Holocaust."I knew that most of my European family must have been destroyed because no one came out, no one went to Jewish Palestine, and no one came to the states," Gutmann says."There was no word from them at all."Only years later did he learn that his family's hometown in Bessarabia - now Romania - had been annihilated by the Nazis.
In early 1947, Gutmann joined the crew of a ship called the S.S. Abril.The Abril was operated not by the Haganah but by the Irgun, a "terrorist organization competing with the Haganah for the Jewish resistance," Gutmann says.The Abril was an old, German-built yacht that sailed under a Nicaraguan flag.On its first mission, it picked up 650 refugees in a French port near Marseilles and headed for Palestine.
The trip was anything but a leisurely Mediterranean cruise."These ships were old rust buckets.If we'd had severe storms, I shudder to think of what would have happened to all those people aboard," Gutmann says.
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Upon their capture, Gutmann and his fellow crew members declared themselves American seamen and were tossed into Acre Prison in the Galilee.Soon, news spread around the world that American sailors were rescuing European Jews.Not wanting the negative publicity, the British quickly repatriated the Yanks.
"They made us sign statements that we'd never do this again," Gutmann says, with war-story matter-of-factness."On the basis of that, I immediately broke my parole."
Gutmann soon joined another ship, this one operated by the Haganah.The Paduca was a former American Coast Guard vessel built in 1907 and full of archaic machinery."She was a rather shrimpy boat. . . and carried about 1600 people," he remembers.
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Gutmann blended in with them and was imprisoned on Cyprus for three months.There he was housed among the Jewish orphans, who numbered in the tens of thousands."I don't know why they put us with them," Guttmann says."Maybe they wanted to keep us away from the mature women, given the reputation of sailors."
Inside, the prison camp was run by the Haganah, who secured Gutmann's release under an assumed name.He immediately contacted his father's brothers in Tel Aviv.There, Gutmann spent several more months recuperating from an infection he'd acquired in prison.
In the meantime, the U.N. had voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states."It was less than the Jews had hoped for, but at least it was a state, a place to bring the survivors," Gutmann says.
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For his part, Gutmann remembers few dealings with the Arabs."This is another one of the great lies, that it was the Jews who forced these poor, innocent peasants away from their olive fields and their orange groves," he contends.
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"Some of our guys who had previous combat training were sent out to join that op," Gutmann remembers.
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Gutmann doesn't remember feeling much personal animosity toward the Arabs, certainly nothing like America's anti-Japanese fervor during World War II."There was no demonization of them, really," he insists."Though we were told by our officers, not by way of propaganda, that when you're in battle, keep a bullet or a grenade for yourself because if you fall captive to the Arabs, they will do terrible things to you before they kill you."
After the State of Israel was declared in 1948, Gutmann spent another six months or so running immigrants legally between Europe and Israel before finally returning to the U.S. to attend college.In the decades since, he's been back to Israel numerous times.In fact, he was there doing research on the Islamic Druze of the Golan Heights in 1967 when the Six Day War erupted.
Does he think a different approach to the Arabs might have changed the course of history?"What should the Jews have done, refuse the state?Refuse the place of refuge for their own blood, for the 10,000 kids on the Isle of Cyprus that I lived among?"he asks."What could they have done differently?"
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David Gutmann will give a talk at UVM entitled "Correcting a Distorted History: The Early Days of Israel's War of Independence."Thursday, October 11, 5:30 p.m., Fleming 101.Info, 802-299-9548.
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