Part 23
Continuation of the original text, March 20th 1967
I ran into a hut. A girl was crying on a mattress, she had been living there for 4 months. I helped her up and together we took her stuff out.
‘You have only 10 minutes left,’ a soldier with a heavy Hebrew accent shouted. A police car tore into the wadi, knocked down Maximilion, a great Alsatian and narrowly missed me. Immediately more soldiers came. I ran to another hut where an Italian guy was busy saving his things. We threw everything together. A soldier walked up, took something and put it into his pocket. Steve saw him do that too, ran towards the soldier and demanded its return. Another soldier joined the first and they broke Steve’s glasses and hit him in the stomach. He got a kick between his legs, was grabbed by his hair and his face was bashed several times on the soldiers’ knees. The soldiers started ravaging and plundering the huts. The police dragged canvas, plastic and mattresses onto a heap and set fire to them.
I thought it time to clear out. With as many things under my arms as I could carry I ran up the slope, kicked off by a soldier. From the top I saw what happened when the 20 minutes had expired. Soldiers threw material from the huts into the fire and whatever else took their fancy was thrown in the back of a truck. They were dancing around the fire for fun&joy.
A bit further down I saw a couple of beatniks throwing another guy to the ground. Later they told me: ‘Ludwig had a gun and wanted to shoot at the soldiers’. With all we could muster, we brought the salvage to East Village, 3 kilometres further. With the ten of us, it took three marches to take everything there.
Jan Ploeg
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