The Stiff-Necked City - A journalist's personal account of the Siege of Jerusalem, 1948
Not intended as a book it practically wrote itself. The author, a journalist who became a war correspondent and later joined the Israel Army serving in a POW camp, jotted down events and impressions as they came. Sorting out those hastily scribbled notes she found that they followed a certain pattern and began to connect them.
Part of the book describes life and work in an Israeli POW camp. Many books have been written by war prisoners yet very few by staff members of POW camps. There may exist a book or books by women soldiers who served in POW camps, but the author never came across one.
The reader is projected into an atmosphere of undeclared war while Palestine was still a British Mandate. Described is the fighting on many fronts of besieged Jerusalem defended by a strange assortment of poorly armed, ill equipped and partly untrained soldiers. However, they were commanded by experienced officers who had served in the British Forces during World War II. Described are shelling and terror, air raids, war shortages, tragic as well as humorous situations and sidelights of that short, violent and unforgettable period.