The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(15)
And that’s pretty much what Danny Kahneman remembered, or chose to remember, when asked about his childhood. From the age of seven he had been told to trust no one, and he’d obliged. His survival had depended on keeping himself apart, and preventing others from seeing him for what he was. He was destined to become one of the world’s most influential psychologists, and a spectacularly original connoisseur of human error. His work would explore, among other things, the role of memory in human judgment. How, for instance, the French army’s memory of Germany’s military strategy in the last war might lead them to misjudge that strategy in a new war. How a man’s memory of German behavior in one war might lead him to misjudge Germans’ intentions during the next. Or how the memory of a little boy back in Germany might prevent a member of Hitler’s SS, trained to spot Jews, from seeing that the little boy he has picked up in his arms from the streets of Paris is a Jew.
His own memories he didn’t find all that relevant, however. For the rest of his life he insisted that his past had little effect on his view of the world or, ultimately, the world’s view of him. “People say your childhood has a big influence on who you become,” he’d say, when pressed. “I’m not at all sure that’s true.” Even to those he came to regard as his friends he never mentioned his Holocaust experience. Really, it wasn’t until after he won the Nobel Prize and journalists started to badger him for the details of his life that he began to offer them up. His oldest friends would learn what had happened to him from the newspaper.
* * *
The Kahnemans had arrived in Jerusalem just in time for another war. In the fall of 1947 the problem of Palestine passed from Britain to the United Nations, which, on November 29, passed a resolution that formally divided the land into two states. The new Jewish state would be roughly the size of Connecticut and the Arab state just a bit smaller than that. Jerusalem, and its holy sites, belonged to neither. Anyone living in Jerusalem would become a “citizen” of Jerusalem; in practice, there was an Arab Jerusalem and a Jewish Jerusalem, and the residents of each continued to do their best to kill each other. The apartment into which Danny moved with his mother was near the unofficial border: A bullet passed through Danny’s bedroom. The leader of his scout troop was killed.
And yet, Danny said, life didn’t feel particularly dangerous. “It was so completely different. Because you are fighting. That is why it is better. I hated the status of being a Jew in Europe. I didn’t want to be hunted. I didn’t want to be a rabbit.” Late one night in January 1948 he saw, with a palpable thrill, his first Jewish soldiers: thirty-eight young fighters gathered in the basement of his building. Arab fighters had blockaded a cluster of Jewish settlements in the south of the tiny country. The thirty-eight Jewish soldiers marched off from Danny’s basement to rescue the settlers. Along the way, three turned back—one who had sprained an ankle, and two others to help him walk home—and so the group would become known for all time as “The 35.” They’d intended to march under cover of darkness, but the sun rose to find them still marching. They met an Arab shepherd and decided to let him go—at least that is the story that Danny heard. The shepherd informed the Arab fighters, who ambushed and killed all thirty-five young men and then mutilated their bodies. Danny wondered at their disastrous decision. “Do you know why they were killed?” he said. “They were killed because they could not bring themselves to shoot a shepherd.”
A few months later, a convoy of doctors and nurses under the Red Cross banner drove the narrow road from the Jewish city to Mt. Scopus, the site of Hebrew University and the hospital attached to it. Mt. Scopus lay behind Arab lines, a Jewish island in a sea of Arabs. The only way in was through a mile-and-a-half-long narrow road over which the British guaranteed safe passage. Most of the time the trip was uneventful, but on this day a bomb exploded and stopped the lead vehicle, a Ford truck. Arab machine-gun fire raked the buses and ambulances that followed. A few of the cars in the convoy were able to turn and speed off, but the buses, which carried passengers, were trapped. When the shooting stopped, seventy-eight people were dead, their bodies so badly burned that they were buried in a mass grave. Among them was Enzo Bonaventura, a psychologist imported from Italy nine years earlier by Hebrew University to build a department of psychology. His plans for a psychology department died with him.
Whatever threat Danny felt to his existence he declined to acknowledge. “It looked very implausible—that we would defeat five Arab nations—but somehow we were not worried. There really was no sense of impending doom that I could pick up. People were killed and so on. But, for me, after World War II, it was a picnic.” His mother evidently did not agree, as she took her fourteen-year-old son and fled Jerusalem for Tel Aviv.
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself a sovereign state, and the British soldiers left the next day. The armies of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt attacked, along with some troops from Iraq and Lebanon. For many months Jerusalem was under siege, and life in Tel Aviv was far from normal. The minaret on the beach beside what is now the Intercontinental Hotel became an Arab sniper nest: The sniper could, and did, shoot at Jewish children on their way to and from school. “There were bullets flying everywhere,” recalled Shimon Shamir, who was fourteen years old and living in Tel Aviv when the war broke out, and would grow up to become the only person ever to serve as Israel’s ambassador to both Egypt and Jordan.