Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  “There’s no water in the camps,” Josh explained. “The British have to bring it in. It comes to about a cupful for each person per day. That’s for everything—drinking, cooking, washing.”

  People pushed and shoved to get to the spigots. A youth shinnied up onto the tank and pounded it madly, as if he expected a spring to spurt forth under his hand. The tank emptied quickly and the supplicants moved carefully away with their treasure.

  Josh’s face was tormented. “No water is only part of the degradation. No privacy is worse. A girl came to me yesterday and asked if she could use our kitchen shack in the camp. ‘I’m getting married this afternoon,’ she said, ‘and I’d like to use it for our honeymoon. It’s the only place in the camp where we can be alone.’”

  They walked back toward the JDC hut. “That debate in the UN,” Raquela said tentatively. “They should be voting soon on partitioning Palestine. Maybe there won’t be any more IJIs.”

  “I wish I could share your optimism,” Josh said.

  He picked up her suitcase at the hut. A taxi with a Cypriot driver waited nearby. “He’s a friend,” Josh told her as they climbed into the cab and drove off. “A lot of the Cypriots are our friends. They want the British off their necks as much as we do.”

  “We?” she asked. “I thought you were American.” She looked at Josh more closely. He seemed young—in his late twenties, perhaps; he had a poetic face with a cleft chin, full, sensuous lips, and wavy brown hair. But it was his eyes that held her—deep, mournful eyes that for the moment lost their sadness and seemed to twinkle.

  “I’m a City College boy from Brooklyn,” he said. “My wife’s a New Yorker, too. But now we’re kibbutzniks, with a couple of Sabra kids. We live in Ein Hashofet.”

  Raquela knew the kibbutz, in the hills overlooking the Jezreel Valley. Young American pioneers had founded it and named it Ein Hashofet—“Spring of the Judge”—for their hero and benefactor, Justice Louis Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  “We were neighbors for a while,” she said. “I did my national service at Tel Adashim.”

  He seemed to regard her with new respect. “Here’s our telephone number.” He gave her a slip of paper. “Phone me any time of the day or night. At the office or at home.”

  The British Military Hospital lay on a hill on the outskirts of Nicosia. A typical army hospital, it was a vast complex of warlike Nissen huts made of corrugated, galvanized iron. The huts huddled together ominously.

  Each one looked as if a huge circle of iron had been chopped horizontally in half and deposited on the sand. The entrances were bizarre, as if someone had taken a knife and slashed a sheet of iron to create a door, and above the door, a small triangle of windows. A distance from the huts but running parallel to them were two rows of impenetrable poles and barbed wire. Raquela recognized the architecture. It was straight out of Auschwitz.

  Two soldiers looked at their passes and waved them in.

  Josh led Raquela to a Nissen hut, introduced her to Matron White, and took leave.

  Big bosomed and large bottomed, Matron White studied Raquela’s name on the JDC-personnel-appointment form Josh had left with her.

  “Nurse Leeveye.” She spoke in a braying voice. “These are our tours of duty. We work on twelve-hour shifts. One month on day shift. Following month on night shift.”

  Raquela was silent. The matron seemed to be looking through her.

  “Since this is the twenty-second of November, Miss Leeveye, and almost the end of the month, I will permit you to start on the day shift. Beginning December one, you will work the night shift. You work the entire month, no days off until the end of the month. Then you get four and one-half days.”

  I’ll need them, Raquela thought. I’ll probably do nothing but catch up on sleep.

  The matron was still braying. “You work for the JDC, Miss Leeveye; you’re on their payroll. But at the hospital, you’re under British military command. You take orders from me.”

  She sounds like a one-woman outpost of the British Empire, Raquela thought.

  “Finally, Nurse Leeveye, when I enter the dining room, you will stand up. No one touches a knife or fork before I do.”

  Then the matron called out, “Nurse Welles, show Nurse Leeveye to the nurses’ quarters.”

  A kindly gray-haired English nurse led her to a long arched metal hut. Inside, it was partitioned into small rooms, each with two army cots, a cupboard, a small table, and two chairs.

  Nurse Welles spoke softly. “Don’t let Old Battleship scare you. She’s hard on all of us, but you learn to live with it.”

  Old Battleship, Raquela thought, looks as if she’d like to ram me through like some of those broken “illegal” ships lying in the Haifa harbor. She’ll discover I don’t break easily.

  Nurse Welles was talking. “How long will you need to get into your uniform? Matron White wants you to begin working the minute you’re ready.”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  Raquela changed swiftly, pinned her silver Hadassah pin on her uniform, and fixed her cap in her hair.

  She waited for Nurse Welles outside the iron barracks. The sun and heat had evaporated. Dark clouds hid the sky; the winter rain fell again, turning the dirt paths into mud.

  Nurse Welles ran through the rain. “I’ll take you directly to the Jewish wing,” she said.

  Again the dismal pattern Raquela knew all too well: the barbed-wire fence surrounding the prison wing, soldiers outside the barbed-wire gate, and, inside the enclosure, rows of iron huts, black and desolate.

  Plodding through muddy, nameless streets, Nurse Welles began pointing out the huts in the compound. Are you ready for another descent into hell? Raquela heard Arik’s voice.

  “This hut’s for surgery,” Nurse Welles was saying. “This one’s for medicine, this for pediatrics, this for isolation, and now”—she stopped in front of a strange array of barracks different from all the others—“here’s Maternity.”

  “It looks like a prehistoric bird or monster.” Raquela stared. Composed of three barracks, its sides were two elongated black wings and its front was a short round protrusion painted white. A door in the protrusion was the opening, with three windows and a chimney stack.

  They entered the door. A round, friendly-looking coal stove dominated the arched hall; this was the kitchen. They walked down the right wing; this barracks held the nurses’ station, the admitting room, the labor room, and two small delivery rooms. Raquela recoiled at the delivery rooms; they were filthy.

  They walked back to the protrusion, then down the left wing, a long barracks with twenty-four cell-like arches and a recessed window between each arch. Below each window a woman lay on an army cot, covered with a khaki blanket. The women looked like the patients in the black and white woodcuts of cluttered, unclean medieval hospitals she’d seen in her textbooks.

  A few of the women sat up in bed as the two nurses entered. A woman near Raquela burst into tears. “We have a Jewish nurse,” she shouted. “Look, everybody. Look at her cap. The star of David.”

  Now all the women pushed themselves up to look; some climbed out of their cots to come closer.

  “Where are you from?” one of them asked Raquela.

  “Jerusalem.” She said it simply, slowly.

  “Jerusalem! Yerushalayim!” The women’s voices picked up the word and repeated it up and down the barracks until the prehistoric-looking monster seemed to change, to turn modern, light, hopeful, as if the hut itself were singing the word Ye-roo-sha-lie-im.

  Nurse Welles was startled. “What are they so excited about? They seem to be saying one word. What is it?”

  “Jerusalem.”

  The kindly English nurse shook her head. “I never imagined people could get so passionate about a city.”

  “It’s more than a city,” Raquela started to say, and then stopped. How could she explain that these women had risked everything to reach Jerusalem?

 
In the hospital administration building, Raquela telephoned Josh Leibner.

  “We’ve got to clean up the filth. It’s inhuman to treat women in labor like so much—” her voice faltered. “It’s like an insane asylum.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Some good, strong girls.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “More sheets.”

  “I’ll try my best to get you some, but there are only a few here. The people in the camps sleep on the tent floors. I can get you more army blankets.”

  “They stink. We’ll wash the blankets we have. I can still smell the soldiers who slept under them.”

  Within the hour Leibner headed a contingent of six young refugee women. One of the soldiers summoned Raquela to the entrance gate. She explained that the young women were her aides.

  “How do I know they’re not smuggling guns?”

  Raquela looked at their ragged clothing. “I’ll be responsible.”

  He waved them in. Each of them had a blue number tattooed on her left forearm—all death-camp graduates.

  Raquela organized her small battalion with quiet precision. They scrounged for basins, soap, a mop, rags, and first-aid supplies. The hospital had ample water. Then they set to work. One mopped the floor; another dusted the iron walls; a third scrubbed the windows; a fourth cleaned the beds.

  Raquela studied her aides; then she selected two to help her sponge-bathe the patients. Gerda was a young Polish woman with dark piercing eyes and black ringlets framing her heart-shaped face. She was short, compact; she looked like a fighter. Lili, a Hungarian, was tall and fragile and so gaunt her skin seemed wrapped around her face. But her blond hair and green-blue eyes bore witness to the beauty she must once have been, and, Raquela thought, when all this is over, might become again.

  Gerda and Lili learned fast. Gently they bathed the patients whose bodies were blotched with rashes. “They’re the signs of deprivation,” Raquela explained to her two aides. “It’s the lack of hygiene, proper food, decent medical care.”

  She went to the hospital pharmacy and found salves to alleviate their discomfort.

  The maternity ward was cleaned just in time. A woman entered. Raquela greeted her, smiling. “You’re going to have your baby under the best conditions we can create for you.”

  The woman spoke wearily. “I’ve been through so much already. I just want to give birth.”

  Raquela helped her secure her feet in the metal foot grips.

  “Just try to relax.” She spoke gently.

  “Relax! I’ll relax when I get home.”

  “It’ll be soon. And you’ll bring a new citizen with you.”

  The delivery was easy and fast. Gerda wept as she saw the baby’s head emerging.

  “It’s a boy,” Raquela announced. She handed the baby to Lili to wash while she massaged the mother’s uterus, through the abdomen, coaxed the placenta down, and examined it to make sure no pieces had broken off.

  “Mazal tov!” she called out jubilantly.

  “Is he normal?” The mother asked the first question all her mothers asked.

  “Normal? The most beautiful boy in the world.”

  She placed the baby in the mother’s arms.

  Later, scrubbed and clean, with the mother and baby sleeping, Raquela turned to Lili and Gerda. “I couldn’t have chosen better assistants.”

  “Are you as excited as we are?” Lili asked.

  “If you stop being excited, you’d better stop being a midwife. Let’s have tea and celebrate.”

  They sat in the kitchen, around the coal stove, the experience of the birth drawing them together.

  “I’ve never seen how a baby is born,” Gerda said. “I gave birth to my son in a cave.”

  Raquela put down her teacup and glanced at Lili. They nodded and waited for Gerda to talk, or to remember in silence.

  She talked. Her eyes stared unseeingly out of the hut’s window, as if she were looking back to another landscape, another time.

  “It was winter. The Carpathian Mountains were covered with snow. My husband stood guard outside the cave. He had to watch not only for the Germans but also for the Ukrainians. They either raped the women and then killed to steal whatever we had or they turned us over to the Germans for ransom.”

  Raquela lowered her eyes from Gerda’s face. To deliver your baby in a cave. The terror outside. All alone. No one to help. They never taught you that in the school for midwives.

  “I was in labor—I don’t know for how many hours. I didn’t dare scream. Any sound would have given away our hiding place. I was weak from lack of food. All we ate were grass and berries. But we had water; we made it from snow. My son was born. I bit the cord and tied it with a piece of cloth I tore from my skirt.”

  Raquela and Lili stared through the windows; the Nissen hut closed around them; they were with Gerda in the cave in the Carpathian Mountains.

  “He lived a few days. I had no milk in my breast. We tried to give him water from our hands.”

  She paused. “It was better he died so soon. He could never have survived. We lived in the woods for three years before we were liberated.”

  “Three years!” Raquela blurted out. “Surely you couldn’t have survived in a cave that long!”

  She was back in reality. Back in Cyprus. She regretted her remark, but surely Gerda didn’t expect her to believe she could stay alive in a cave for three years.

  Maybe something happened to the people of the Holocaust. Maybe the hunger, the terror, the dying all around them, did things to their sense of time.

  “It was three years,” Gerda repeated dully. “We went into the cave in June 1941, and we came out in July 1944, when the Russians drove the Nazis back. But my husband was very weak; he weighed only sixty pounds. He died after we were liberated.”

  That night Raquela wrote her first letter to Arik.

  Athlit was just a beginning. I think that’s where I began growing up.

  But Cyprus! Tens of thousands crowded into tents and iron huts. There is so much to do, so much to learn, Cyprus is going to age me so fast in these next six weeks, I think I’ll bridge the fourteen-year-gap between us.

  FIFTEEN

  NOVEMBER 1947

  Midmorning the next day, Josh Leibner appeared in the maternity ward.

  “Can you take time off?” he asked. “I want to take you to hear Golda Meir.”

  “Golda Meir in Cyprus!” What could have brought the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency to the prison camps?

  “There’s an outbreak of typhus,” he explained. “The doctors are afraid it may hit the children. We want to get all the babies out before we lose them. Golda’s been able to convince the Palestine government in Jerusalem to let the parents with babies under one year old leave immediately.”

  “You mean the British are bending the rules? No more seven-hundred-fifty-a-month quota?”

  “Not exactly. They’ll just deduct the number from a later quota. Golda’s here to try to convince the refugees to bend the rules. They’re the ones who decide who should go first. You know the rule: first in, first out. Golda met yesterday with Sir Godfrey Collins—he’s the commanding officer here in charge of the camps. Golda learned he got a cable from the chief secretariat in Jerusalem. It said, ‘Beware of Mrs. Meir. She is a formidable person.’ She’s so formidable, she may have scared him into letting all our orphans go, too.”

  Raquela laughed. “I can’t leave here without permission from Old Battleship.”

  They entered Matron White’s office. “Are you sure you have enough aides to cover you?” the British nurse demanded.

  “Two excellent young women,” Raquela said.

  The matron waved her hand impatiently. “You can go, but don’t make a practice of this.”

  Raquela hurried to her room to pick up her cape. The day was somber; rain threatened.

  The Cypriot taxi driver opened the door of the cab. Soon they were driving to the second complex of
camps, at Dhekelia, near the Mediterranean shore. It was called the “winter camp” and was eighteen miles from the camp at Caraolas.

  They pulled up in front of a dilapidated wooden gate crisscrossed with the ever-present barbed wire. Soldiers inspected their ID cards and opened the gates.

  Raquela saw a straggly line of people, in ragged European winter coats and shawls, waiting in front of a dark iron hut. Obviously newcomers, straight off a British prison ship, they milled around, bewildered, resentful. Behind them were the round black iron huts that looked like sewer pipes: their future homes.

  “We’ve got more than thirty thousand in the camps,” Josh said bitterly as they walked across an open area and came upon a crowd of people circling an improvised grandstand made of vegetable crates. Men, women, even small children, were talking, arguing, gesticulating.

  Josh introduced Raquela to a small, attractive young woman with curly black hair and a smiling, freckled face. “This is my wife, Pnina, and this is Ehud, and Ruti.”

  Raquela shook hands with the two children—a boy of eight whose serious face was a carbon copy of Josh’s, and a two-year-old freckled miniature of her mother.

  “Josh has told us about you.” Pnina’s voice had a breathless quality. “We’d like you to visit us whenever you’re free. We live in the first house near the port in Famagusta. You can’t miss it; it’s a two-story white stone house with a porch. We just have to be careful when we talk.” She lowered her voice. “An important judge lives right over us.”

  “I’ll be delighted to come on my days off.” It was good to know there was an American family from Palestine with children; maybe she could relax with them away from the barbed wire.

  The air grew still. A heavyset woman in a dark tailored suit and white shirtwaist, clutching a bulging black pocketbook, strode toward the makeshift platform. Golda climbed to the top of the crates and began speaking. The words, strong and simple, sounded to Raquela like the footsteps of a soldier marching.

  “There is typhus in the camps. We cannot allow Jewish babies to die. We owe them life. I am asking you to make a sacrifice.”

  An angry voice interrupted. “Sacrifice! What kind of sacrifice do you want from us now? Haven’t we sacrificed enough?”