In an article in the March 1965 issue of the National Geographic. John Scofield narrated the following observations he had made of a group of new arrivals to Israel. which illustrates the spirit of this people: An old man elbowed his way desperately through the crowd that jammed the ships rail so that he could glimpse the sunlit hills of Israel. still several miles away. Behind him he told me. lay 9 years as a political prisoner and 11 months of weary travel from Moscow to packed refugee camps in Poland. Germany. and France. Ahead lay a land and a language he had never known.