Accounts by Red Cross and United Nations observers who visited the scene, said that the houses were first set on fire and the occupants were shot down as they came out to escape the flames. One pregnant woman had her baby cut out of her stomach with a knife. Reminiscent of the acts committed by their brother Jews in Russia during and after the Bolshevik {Jewish} take over. The head of the International Red Cross delegation in Palestine, Jacques de Reynier, drove into the village and was met by a detachment of Irgun terrorists. In his report of the massacre the previous night, he wrote: “All of them were young, some even adolescents, men and women armed to the teeth: revolvers, machine-guns, hand-grenades, and knives, most of them still blood-stained. A beautiful young girl with criminal eyes showed me hers {knife} still dripping with blood, she displayed it like a trophy." On April 10, 1948, the day after the battle, Jacques de Reynier, the chief Red Cross representative in Jerusalem, “received a call from the Arabs asking me to go immediately to the village of Deir Yassin, where the civilian population of the whole village had just been massacred." De Reynier's memoirs give no indication that he harboured any doubts as to the veracity of the allegation. When he set out for Deir Yassin on April 11, 1948, he already seemed to have been expecting to encounter the aftermath of a massacre. As de Reynier's told it, it was a dramatic tale of a brave humanitarian who again and again narrowly and miraculously- escaped from life-threatening situations to bring the world the truth about the Jewish mass-murderers. The first Irgun Zivi Leumi (IZL) commander he met on the scene supposedly “had a peculiar glitter in his eyes, cold and cruel." A female Jewish fighter he encountered was “a beautiful young girl with criminal eyes." The IZL-Lehi fighters were “these criminals." Reaching the outskirts of Deir Yassin, his car was stopped by “two soldier-like individuals, whose looks were far from reassuring, with machine-guns in their hands, and large cutlasses in their belts." It seemed that “everything was lost," de Reynier recalled “when, suddenly, a huge fellow, at least two meters tall and as large as a cupboard, appeared, pushed his comrades aside, and seized my hand and squeezed it in his enormous paws, shouting incomprehensibly." According to de Reynier, his anonymous rescuer was a Jew who had been aided by the Red Cross when he was a prisoner of the Nazis, so now he would help de Reynier. “With such a bodyguard I felt I could go to the end of the world," de Reynier wrote. Elsewhere in his account, de Reynier affectionately referred to the man as “my ‘wardrobe'" and “my good friend the glass cupboard." In fact, the man to whom de Reynier referred was not, as Reynier suggested, a secret savior whose gratitude to the Red Cross had moved him to switch sides and help de Reynier reveal the truth about Jewish savagery. He was Lehi intelligence officer Moshe Barzili, chosen by his superiors to escort de Reynier because he and the Red Cross official both spoke German. He was not sneaking de Reynier into Deir Yassin; he was sent by Lehi to give Reynier a detailed tour of the battle site. The Jewish fighters gave de Reynier permission to enter because they had committed no atrocities and had nothing to hide. The significance of this point was apparently lost on de Reynier, however. His account makes it seem as if he somehow managed to enter the village against the Jewish fighters' will – a feat that hardly seems possible. At another point in his memoir of the visit, de Reynier claims that when he wanted to enter one of the Arab houses, “a dozen soldiers surrounded me, their machine-guns aimed at my body," yet he “pushed them aside and went in to the house." When he tried to carry a wounded Arab from the house, “the officer tried to stop me" but “I pushed him aside." [email protected]
