Zipporah Porath, a native New Yorker, arrived in Jerusalem in 1947 for a one-year program at the Hebrew University. Almost immediately, she found herself caught up in Israel's War of Independence and the struggle for the survival of the nascent state. Abandoning studies, she secretly joined the underground Haganah defense forces, served as a medic in the siege of Jerusalem and in the fledgling Israel Air Force. The letters she wrote to her family during that incredible year vividly describe her impressions and feelings and capture the historic events as they occurred.