On the Trail of the Station Master of Wadi es Sarar

 

Since I wrote on 11 August about my father’s friendship with a station master in Palestine during World War II, I have been fortunate to meet digitally Dr Walter Rothschild. Walter, in addition to being a rabbi in Berlin, is the author of a PhD dissertation about the Palestinian Railways 1945-1948, and editor of Harakevet, a magazine about the history of Israel railways. Walter, in turn, put me in touch with Chen Melling, director of the Israel Railway Museum at Haifa, and the museum’s archivist Moshe Haviv. Chen deciphered a mysterious Arabic word in the dedication on the back of a photo of Anis Eliyas Abou Zayd and his family as “al-Estaff”, a reference to Doug’s rank: Staff Sergeant.

 

The family of Anis Eliyas Abou Zayd, March 1942

With their help I have managed to piece together a little more about the place where my father worked and his friend Anis Eliyas, the Station Master of Wadi es Sarar, also known as Nahal Soreq in Hebrew, and as Junction Station to the British military during the World War I. I have also stumbled across two more photos of my father, Douglas (“Doug”) Jacobs. This is, therefore, an update about what I have pieced together about a young Suffolk lad born in the village of Grundisburgh in 1912, who, aged 29, was whisked away to a very complicated Palestine and a landscape so very different from the gentle green fields of Suffolk.

 

The church of St Mary, Grundisburgh, 14th-18th centuries. Doug's parents are buried in the graveyard

Doug Jacobs, left, Friede (?) and an unknown soldier in Tel Aviv September 1941

Firstly, a photo taken on 5 September 1941 proves that Doug was in Palestine before that date, after surviving the disastrous rout of the British expeditionary force in France in June 1940. The photo shows Doug and a colleague at a restaurant in Tel Aviv, with a waitress who has served them a drink. On the reverse is this text: “All the very best for the two nice Englishmen from Friede [?], Tel Aviv Sept. 5^th 1941.” If the waitress in the photo is indeed named Friede (this is Walter’s suggestion; the signature is not easy to decipher), short for Elfriede, she may have been from Austria or Germany and was fortunate to have reached Palestine before the war. The dedication infers that my father and his colleague were regular customers, about to leave Tel Aviv. Perhaps they had been on leave and were about to return to Wadi es Sarar.

 

Text on the reverse of the photo

Another photo on the front of a postcard, taken by Approved Military Photographer No.46, shows Doug in uniform with the three stripes of a Warrant Officer.

 

Official photo of Doug Jacobs 1941-1945

Doug’s station master friend is recorded in a list of junior staff of the Palestine Railway in 1930 as A. A. Zeid. He was born in 1898, so his childhood and early teenage years were spent under Ottoman rule. After World War I, British rule replaced the Ottomans. Anis joined the railway in 1924. In 1930 he was a Grade III employee with an annual salary of Palestine £132. He was ranked 51 in seniority of 71 Station Masters in his grade. The names of Anis’ colleagues in the 1930 list remind us that Palestine was a multi-ethnic, multi-faith territory, a reflection of a long history of trade, migration and wars waged by foreign powers. Among his colleagues were M. Cohen, a Ticket Examiner, N. Gurovitch (A Yiddish form of a Russian name), a Traffic Inspector, N. Dedeyan (Armenian), a clerk, E. Katz, M. M. Hussein, S. Filbert, N. Barkovitch (Slavonic), S. Kerry, F. Iskander (Iranian), all Station Masters.

 

Wadi es Sarar station, with possibly Anis Eliyas Abou Zayd centre

Chen and Moshe sent me a photo of five men and two women outside Wadi es Sarar. The portly man in the centre is the station master, quite possibly Anis Eliyas himself, although the photo is not clear enough to compare with our 1942 photo. Perhaps the woman to his left (our right) is ‘Wife’ of the family portrait.

 

With the help of Walter’s dissertation, I have been able to piece together a picture of the railway that brought my father and his friend Anis together. Palestine was a small country with a remarkably complex railway system, designed and constructed by, and in the interests of, a medley of foreign powers and organizations, with scant regard for the needs of the people of Palestine. The first line, Jaffa-Jerusalem, on which Wadi es Sarar was a stop, was financed by a French Catholic organization to take pilgrims to Jerusalem. It was cheaply built and narrow gauge, so it had to be rebuilt later to meet the military needs of the Ottomans. Other lines were constructed by French and Belgian interests or the Ottoman military. During WWI the Ottomans added a spur line from Wadi es Sarar to connect with a line that ran from Jerusalem to Beersheba and Sinai. The Ottomans also began a line west from Wadi es Sarar to take pilgrims to Mecca. The line also served Ottoman administrative and military needs. It reached Jordan, but there construction stopped. WWI bought more lines. The British built a line from Egypt into Sinai. The Ottomans built another from Tulkarm via Lydda (modern Lod) to Wadi es Surar. 

 

Wadi es Surar had thus become an important junction for strategic military purposes. In November 1917 the British attacked the Turks at Wadi es Sarar and seized control of the station and its junction. With the end of the war, the Palestine Railway came under British control. Most of the senior management, and some more junior posts, were British men employed by the Crown Agents in London. By the time Anis met Doug in 1941 the British had been managing the railway for 23 years. Our Station Master would have been long-accustomed to getting along with British superiors and colleagues. 

 

In WWII the main British base in the Middle East was in Egypt, but Palestine was a significant secondary base for operations in Syria, Iraq and Persia. Wadi es Sarar was one of five depots for ammunition and ordnance in Palestine. There was also an ammunition factory there. Between 1940/41 and 1941/42 military goods traffic in Palestine more than doubled. Between 1941/42 and 1943/44 it nearly doubled again. Doug and Anis must have been busy.

The rail system struggled to cope with the volume of traffic, so road transport was also essential. My sister recalls our father telling her that while he was in Palestine a new, inexperienced, officer was appointed. The officer was not happy with the way Doug organized the ammunition trucks, ensuring a substantial distance between each truck. He ordered his Warrant Officer to use a closer formation. Unfortunately, something set off an explosion in one truck, which in turn caused explosions in several others. 

 

Doug was suited by temperament to organizing people. His work was officially recognized twice by being “mentioned in despatches” and awarded the oak leaf decoration as a result, the first time in December 1941, the second in April 1942. On the second occasion a letter from the Director of Ordnance Services, GHQ, Middle East Forces, congratulated him “most heartily on being mentioned in General Wavell’s Despatches in recognition of the service you have rendered in the Middle East.”

I do not yet know exactly when Doug arrived in Palestine, nor when he left. We know that he was evacuated from St. Nazaire in June 1940 and remained in Britain for training, on the estate of the Marquess of Aylesbury in Wiltshire, for operations in the Middle East.  The Wadi es Sarar depot was completed by the Royal Engineers on 10 March 1941. An invasion of Syria was launched from Palestine in July 1941, and of Persia in August. Assuming that training lasted a few months, and allowing for transport to the Middle East, it seems likely that he arrived in early 1941 or Spring  that year. As for when he left, he was awarded the Africa Star, which recognized service in North Africa from 10 June 1940 to 12 May 1943. We know that he landed in France shortly after D Day in June 1944, so he probably left Palestine in the summer of 1943.

 

Doug returned home for good from Belgium in November 1945 to his young wife Alice and a baby son, Antony, born while he was in France and Belgium. He was a regular visitor to his mother in Grundisburgh where his name and those of his brother George and Leslie are recorded in the church.

The Roll of Honour in Grundisburgh church. George is G. E. Jacobs. Leslie is L. T. Jacobs (Royal Air Force). Doug's regiment is incorrectly listed as RA rather than RAOC

St Mary's Grundisburgh, interior

 

Angels on the roof timbers of St Mary, Grundisburgh, typical of Medieval Suffolk churches. These angels must have seemed a world away from Wadi es Sarar

During his time at Wadi es Sarar, Palestine was already a contested space. Doug was clearly aware of increasing tensions between different groups. He was once asked by representatives of one organization to sack his Arab workers. He refused. As an employer of local workers he was aware of the tensions that before the end of the decade would result in one of the most tragic and intransigent conflicts of the century.

 

What happened to his friend Anis and his family after Doug’s departure, or to his friend Friede, we do not know. However, the Palestine Railway ceased to exist at the end of the Palestine war of 1948. Trains were attacked near Wadi es Sarar by armed groups in January and February 1942. The 1948 left the station building in ruins. Its remains still stand, but Wadi es Sarar is now simply a passing point on the line.  Perhaps Anis survived these turbulent times. He may have remained in the new Jewish state or he and his family may have joined the great masses of Palestinians who fled into exile. In either case, as far as I know, my father never saw or heard from his friends again. 

 

A map of the Hulda area in 1942. The Jaffa-Jerusalem line runs down the centre of the map. Wadi es Sarar is to the south, not visible in this map (see map below)

I think we can suppose that 1945-1948 was a perilous time for Anis and his family. The photo of Wadi es Sarar station is in the archives of Kibbutz Hulda. Hulda takes its name from a Palestinian village named Khulda which existed nearby until the 1948 war. The land for the settlement was bought in 1905. The first settlers moved there in 1909. The farm was attacked and evacuated on orders from British forces in 1929, but resettled in 1931. It suffered further attacks 1936-1939. During the 1948 fighting Hulda was a base for  the Jewish military. Ani’s station was therefore in a hotly contested location. Google maps tells me that Wadi es Sara station is a 7.4km. walk from contemporary Hulda, so when intercommunal strife broke out the station will not have been far from any fighting.

 

Map of the Hulda area 1945. Wadi es Sarar is marked bottom right as Sara. Google maps suggests that the station was located slightly south of the point where the rail line crosses the main road to Masmiya and Deir Muheisin. According to this map there was no town or village associated with the station.