Sara Giborat Nili
Summary of
Chapter 9
Years pass after the kids’ adventures as the “Gidonim” and they barely see
Avshalom. Aharon becomes famous for discovering “em hachita” – the origin of
the wheat plant. One day Avshalom comes back from learning in
Chapter 10
A guy named Chayim Avraham visits in the Aharonson’s house and he starts becoming
a regular there. One night, he asks Sara to marry him (how’s that for moving
fast?). She contemplates the idea since it would mean leaving
Chapter 11
Finally, she gets a letter in response. Chayim Avraham is home, so she can’t
check behind the stamp for the info she wanted, so she pretends to be sick and
locks herself in her room, reads it, then writes a response. When she gets the
response to this letter, Rivka informs her that David Katz, someone from Zichron
Yaakov, is in
Chapter 12
Stubbornly, Chayim Avraham agrees to let her go, and she goes by train. On the train, she is with lots of Arab soldiers. The train stops, and she looks out and sees the train ran over someone. She asks a soldier why no one does anything, and they explain because the victim is an Armenian, and the Turkish hate the Armenians. This worries Sara that the same situation will eventually happen with the Jews. Finally, she arrives home.
Chapter 13
She comes home and finds only her dad, Tzvi and Shmuel there. She asks where
everyone is, and they tell her that Rivka and Alex are in
Aharon takes Sara to his research station. He explains that her job is to organize the info collected and signal the British boat that passes every month if there is anything important. In the middle, a Turkish brigade comes to “investigate” and the commander makes empty threats to Aharon, but he bribes them and gets them away. That night, Aharon tells her all the secret codes and ways of passing info. He tells her that Avshalom and a guy Yosef Lishanski are in charge of gathering the info. One night, they come and give Sara info about positions of tanks and cannons, so she encodes it at puts up the sign on the clothes line for “urgent.”
That night, an Arab guy named Jamal (a friend of her family) comes to visit
and starts asking about
Avshalom brings in the key for the Turks’ code plus lots of other info, but they wish to send more important stuff. Luckily, Jamal invited Sara to his wedding where there will be lots of Turkish officers, so she sews herself a dress and goes to the wedding, and manages to pull info out of the officers. Everyone is so pleased with her that they invite her to visit them again sometime.
The end of the month came and went and no boat came. Menashe suggests it’s because of mines or submarines. Eventually, the boat comes and she puts up the signal, but the boat passes on by. They find a note tied to the dog saying that a guy did come from the boat, but couldn’t get in because of the dog, and he will be waiting again in 3 days by the shore. They end up getting the info on time to him on the 3rd day.
Sara gets a letter from Chayim Avraham who says he misses her and that it’s
already been a year when she said only 2 months. He warns that if she won’t
return, he’ll divorce and remarry. She hesitates and thinks about returning,
but ends up deciding not to. While she’s thinking about it, a Jewish guy from
the boat comes and asks her for any info and he tells her that Aharon sent him.
So she gives him the info and writes Aharon a short note. The guy ends up returning
because he couldn’t return to the boat due to a storm. For the meantime, they
need to hold him up, so they give him some job in the research station. He says
that he’s from
Sara tells the guy to go to Zichron and stay by her father’s so nobody suspects him. At the end of the month, the guy returns to the boat. Yosef Lishanski comes to Sara and she notices that Avshalom is not with him. He explains that while they were in the desert, they had a Bedouin guide, and suddenly a bunch of other Bedouins attacked them, and they barely escaped. Avshalom was injured critically and insisted Yosef move on without him, so he did. Sara refuses to believe Avshalom died, but it is an inevitable fact.
Again, the boat comes late because of German subs. A guy named Rafael comes
to take Sara with him back to the boat because Aharon wants her to come to
When she gets back, she is questioned by a Turkish officer as to her whereabouts during the past few months. She lies and says that she was in the hospital in Zichron and wasn’t allowed out, she only escaped from the hospital the night before. The officer insists on searching the station and they rip up the place looking. She goes to Zichron to visit her father, and everyone there is a refugee. Everyone tries to get Sara to quit these “spy games” because the Turks are torturing them there, looking for spies. She considers it, but decides she must go on.
Sara asks a Turkish general for help. At first, he’s reluctant but she convinces
him to help them acquire a map of the Turkish forces. She let’s the Brits know
via pigeon that they’ll soon have a map. Yosef comes and tells her that one
of their informants, Naaman Belkind, was caught and jailed. Yosef says he’ll
try to coordinate a rescue effort. A guy named Al-Din comes to Sara and hands
her the map, and she sends Al-Din to
Naaman is freed, Sara and everyone involved in Nili go to hide out in Zichron Yaakov. They wait for the boat, but it doesn’t come, even though they said that they’d be there. Sara knows that the Turks will search soon, so she hides her gun under a tile in the bathroom. Yosef comes and tells her that Naaman got jailed again, and this time they have evidence that he’s a spy. Yosef himself goes and hides somewhere.
On their way to shul, Sara and her dad hear the Turks coming to invade Zichron, so they run back home. The Turks come and start searching for Yosef, and they search the Aharonson’s house. They are convinced that Sara knows, so the Turks grab her father and her brother Tzvi and start whipping them and torturing them, but she still doesn’t reveal a word. The next day they start torturing her. They drag her to a house that they turned into a jail. On the way, she starts singing. The lyrics of her song are a hint for whoever hears that they should close the window in the Aharonsons’ vineyard, which is a sign to the boat that the situation is urgent. Every morning, when they took her to the torture room she sang this, and one day an old man sang back that the window was closed. Sara is now deeply injured and the Turks decide to send her north for interrogation, where they will surely break her. Sara asks that before they go, she go back home and get a new change of non-bloody clothes. While she’s home, she says she wants to go take a shower. In the bathroom, she writes Aharon a goodbye note and tells him to make sure they aren’t forgotten. She then takes out her gun that she hid under the tile and shoots herself. She doesn’t die immediately, but after 40 days she finally does while saying to the doctor that if he contacts Yosef, he should die rather than divulge info. The night that Sara’s grave was dug, the boat waited and signalled, but no one signalled back.