Birthright

by Alan Gold

  The British warship had sailed out of Haifa after a telegraph from Cyprus warning the authorities of the illegal refugee ship headed their way. The battle cruiser had met the small Greek passenger liner some fifty nautical miles off the coast of Palestine and transmitted a radio warning to the Greek captain that they would board and arrest him and his crew and confiscate his ship unless he put himself under British orders and sailed with them into the port.

  He had no alternative. There were numerous examples preceding him of ships trying to smuggle Jews from the desolation of Europe into Palestine being boarded and impounded. He had been well paid by rich Jews from England and France, known the risks, and taken them anyway. But he would not risk lives, so he shrugged his apologies to the passengers and followed the directive.

  The ship docked at the port, and without delay, the refugees were pushed and shoved down the gangplank onto the dock. They were a ragged group. Wearing old clothes that they hadn’t changed in weeks, exhausted, lice-infested, many of them emaciated from hunger, children limp in the arms of mothers, sons supporting their elderly parents, most barely able to stand. They stood in the boiling sun under the dispassionate gaze of the British soldiers, waiting for the arrival of the commanding officer.

  Many of the women were sobbing, their hopes and prayers of freedom from the Nazi terror of Europe, and now the hopeless aftermath of starvation and confusion, suddenly dashed by British soldiers. Several had fainted, and others had gone to their aid. When they moved, the British soldiers shouted harsh warnings for them to remain still. But these men and women were used to Nazi soldiers, and despite the raised rifles, the British were no Nazis. So the passengers ignored the orders, knelt down, and gave comfort and water to the weakest of their own.

  Eventually, the army commander, a self-important diminutive man called Lieutenant Colonel Pickford, roared up to the dock in a roofless military car. He stood up in the well of the passenger side and turned to address the group. There was a babel of languages among the refugees, but English was rare. To the predominantly German, Hungarian, or Russian speakers, his words were gibberish. Judita, however, understood every word. And in that moment she was torn. Her training told her to remain quiet, unnoticed, unremarkable. To blend in and be nondescript. But her time on the boat with these desperate people compelled her to speak and calm their rising fear and panic. She began to whisper a translation into German for those standing closest to her. Then into Hungarian, then Russian.

  “He’s saying that we’re illegal immigrants who have violated international laws by traveling to British mandate Palestinian waters without approval. Because we’re illegal, we’ll be taken to an internment camp and processed. From there we may be sent to another country in the Mediterranean, or else sent back where we came from.”

  The men and women standing around her looked at her in horror. But she continued with her translation as Colonel Pickford, bellowing through a megaphone, continued to shout at the refugees.

  “Men and women will be separated and sent to different camps for processing. Children will accompany their mothers. This will happen immediately. This is a naval dockside and needed by the British navy for the war effort . . .”

  As she finished the translation, a dozen armed British soldiers walked toward the huddle of refugees, their rifles pointing at them from waist height, and began barking further orders. Judita lowered her gaze and shrank into the crowd, hoping she didn’t stand out. She had been carefully prepared for the journey, her NKVD handlers believing the best way to make connection with the Jewish rebel groups would be to arrive as a refugee with a clear backstory validated by fellow passengers. For all her carefully rehearsed story, Judita could not physically hide the fact that she had not suffered through the horrors of Nazi Europe: She was healthy, her skin not drained of color, like all of the other people on board. Conscious of this, she pulled her scarf tighter around her head and shoulders.

  From either translation or inference, the refugees now largely understood what they had to do, and most of the men and women began to separate. They picked up their battered suitcases or bundles of possessions tied together in tablecloths or sheets, and followed a soldier away from the dock, forming long lines. Some women, however, screamed in their native language that they wouldn’t leave their husbands, and when this happened, the Tommies moved in and forcibly separated them with the barrel of a rifle. The refugees were then marched to waiting trucks, where they were loaded in to be driven inland to a camp that had been created months earlier to deal with the increasing numbers of illegal Jewish immigrants arriving in Palestine.

  As the people climbed on the trucks, Judita moved from where she’d been standing outside the group, translating the colonel’s instructions, and fell in at the end of the queue of women. In front of Judita, an elderly woman was panicked in confusion and slumped to her knees. Judita knelt beside her and asked where she was from, first in Russian, and when that received only blank looks, she tried German and then Czech. The final language flared recognition in the old woman’s eyes, and she clung to Judita’s arm as she was helped to her feet. Czech refugees were rare on this boat, and the woman was traveling alone.

  Focused as she was on the elderly woman, Judita did not see Colonel Pickford stop and watch her as he surveyed the lines of people. The old woman was quickly moved on by a soldier, and Judita hunched her shoulders and retreated further into her scarf to blend back in.

  Suddenly, the officer’s clipped British voice called her out. “You! Girl. Come here.”

  She turned and saw Colonel Pickford, standing next to his car, pointing at her. “Come here.” When she delayed, he shouted out, “Immediately, when I give an order!”

  Judita walked over to where the colonel was standing. She wanted to stare him in the face, not to flinch or show any sort of deference. But she knew better, knew her mission was too important, so she lowered her eyes as it flashed in her mind that the officer was the same height as Beria. That didn’t seem to be the only similarity.

  “What’s your name, girl?”

  Judita told him. He asked questions about her origin, and she told him her story, a story she’d learned by heart in her training in Moscow.

  “So, you come from Ruskie Land, do you? And how did you get here?”

  She explained that she had managed to escape from Leningrad during the Nazi siege, crossed the border into Finland, and hidden in the woods. She’d made her way into Norway, where she’d been looked after by a family of evangelical Lutherans; then she had been given money for passage to Trieste in Italy now that the Fascists had been defeated. Wanting to emigrate to Palestine, here she was. It seemed an extraordinary story and yet was entirely consistent with any that the people getting on the British army trucks could tell.

  “And you speak a number of languages?” said the colonel.

  Judita was angry with herself, knowing that helping the old woman had made her stand out; the officer must have heard her speaking in Russian, German, and Czech.

  “All these damn refugees from everywhere but Timbuktu! I need a girl like you in my office.” With that he turned to his sergeant and said officiously, “See that this girl is fed and washed, then bring her to my quarters.”

  The sergeant saluted and barked, “Yes, sir.”

  Colonel Pickford got back into his car, and his driver roared away, leaving the sergeant, Judita, and some soldiers on the dock. Everybody else had been taken away. The sergeant escorted Judita to a small truck. She remained silent, eyes downcast, yet her mind raced through scenarios of what might lie ahead.

  As they were walking, much to her surprise, the soldier said to her softly, “Listen, love. I got nothing against you Yids, okay? But—” The soldier stopped, cutting himself off midsentence, and looked around before continuing. “Look . . . just do what he fuckin’ says, all right? And then he’ll leave you alone and you can go back to your people. Like it never happened.”

  Judita imagined the confusion such an instr
uction might have had on any other young girl fresh off the ship. But she understood perfectly what he was saying. Though she did wonder if this soldier had tried to warn or even help others. She considered staying silent but instead, seizing the small chance to understand her enemy better, said, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “What?” The soldier was genuinely surprised by the question.

  Judita wanted to probe the nervous young man. “He’s your commander, so why do you tell me this? Aren’t you loyal to him?”

  “I don’t know. It just ain’t right. This army’s a fuckin’ joke. Just an old boys’ club. Them fuckin’ officers do what they like and we take the bullets and run their errands.” The soldier looked Judita in the eye for the first time. “I got a girl back home. We’re gettin’ engaged when this palaver’s over. It ain’t right what he does to the refugees. They’re just kids. He shouldn’t do it, that’s all. I just wanted to warn ya. Just do what he says and then forget about it.”

  “I understand. And thank you. Your girl in England. She’s lucky to have a man like you.”

  • • •

  An hour later, washed and fed, Judita was shown to the top floor of the officers’ quarters. The sergeant knocked on the door and nodded to the colonel. He smiled at Judita, pleased that she’d scrubbed up so nicely. She was indeed very pretty. One of the perks of the job, he had convinced himself, especially as he’d been stuck in this disgusting, stinking hellhole of a baking country when he should have been commanding a force of men, beating the living daylights out of the Krauts, or tending his roses back in Wimbledon.

  Judita entered his quarters. They were sparsely furnished, no pictures on the walls or photographs on the credenza. It was the archetype of a bachelor’s apartment, cold, austere, and friendless. The colonel invited her in, but said hardly a word to her. Instead, he acted like a medieval warlord, nodding at her to take a seat on the distressed lounge, the bottom sagging close to the floor, the cushions looking dusty and unkempt.

  He came over and sat next to her. This was no seduction, no smiling gentleman plying her with drinks or soothing her nerves with soft lilting words. To Judita, it felt very far removed from the drunken diplomat in the Moscow bar all those months ago.

  He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. “You know why you’re here, don’t you, girl?”

  Judita said nothing but held his gaze.

  “Play your cards right, and I can do a lot for you. If you’re a good girl and please me, I can arrange to have you set free, and you can join your other Jew friends in Tel Aviv or wherever you want to go. But act like a little fool, and things will go very poorly for you. Do you understand me? I have the power to send you back to wherever I choose; and if you don’t do as I say, you’ll be very, very sorry.”

  Judita’s mind was desperately working out what to do next. Her training in Moscow stood her in good stead; the one thing she didn’t do was panic.

  “Good. Now, get your clothes off, my little Jew, and go inside into the bedroom. I’ll be in there shortly. Lie on the bed; don’t get in it, because I’ve just had clean sheets put on.”

  She stood and walked toward the bedroom. As she crossed the floor, her eyes urgently searched for something she could use to protect herself. She deliberately walked slowly so that in those brief moments, she took in the landscape. As she passed by a simple kitchenette, with little more than a sink, a cupboard, and a gas ring with a kettle, she saw what she wanted.

  She turned and asked, “Sir, might I have a glass of water?”

  He was reading a report but looked up momentarily, nodded, and went back to his reading.

  She turned on the tap, and while the glass was filling, the sound of the running water masked what her hand was doing. She slipped a short and fairly blunt knife from the cutlery drawer and pushed it up into the sleeve of her dress. She was amazed that this nasty little British man could be so arrogant as to give her, a hostage to his power, free run of the place. It was madness, but to her advantage. How could he be so stupid? Had the other girls he’d brought here been so weak-willed, so broken, as to blithely capitulate? Was he so conceited as to think each would simply comply?

  After Judita had finished drinking, she put the glass back in the sink and went into the bedroom. She stood behind the door and waited for the colonel to think that she’d done as instructed.

  Standing behind the door, she heard him walking across the floor. She saw the handle of the door turning. She waited for him to come through. He entered with his back to her, walking into the bedroom, looked for her on the bed, assuming she’d be naked, her legs open, waiting for him.

  She was certainly waiting.

  Judita observed his posture and saw a man with no conception of being in any danger, a man accustomed to safety and power. The very opposite of the refugees who had trundled off the boats only hours earlier. If this was the British in Palestine, they would surely lose in the fight ahead.

  The colonel walked to the base of the bed, then looked around the room. Judita had been trained in many forms of armed and unarmed combat in Moscow. She had also been schooled in her limitations—she would never have size or strength to overcome a large man, but she would always have speed, and she could manufacture surprise. Although she was diminutive, here and now she had speed, surprise, and a knife.

  She sprang forward, whipping her arm around the colonel’s chin, her hand over his mouth. With her other hand, she twisted his neck as viciously as she could, not enough to snap the spine but enough to jolt his balance and shock his mind into panic, his body into an agony of pain. Using the weight of her body, she threw herself onto his back, his head at a murderously twisted angle. He was unstable and fell headlong to the floor. Acting quickly, she retrieved the knife from her sleeve.

  She grasped it and stabbed it sharply, through the gap between the jacket and trousers of his uniform, underneath his rib cage, tearing apart his diaphragm, and sticking the sharp point of the otherwise dull knife into his heart. She’d chosen a dull blade with a sharp point because she wasn’t using it to cut but to pierce. The accuracy with which she drove the blade up through his body overcame its lack of sharpness.

  Hand still gripping his mouth tightly, she held his body firmly as she felt it twitch for a couple of moments, as though he was struggling before his heart stopped beating. Then he became a deadweight, and to any observer he could have been asleep on the floor at her feet. She waited for three long minutes for his heart to completely stop before she stabbed him twice more. She sliced his carotid artery and then thrust the knife once again up through his chest into his now still heart. In her training, she’d been taught to ensure that a victim was definitely dead, never to assume that the first strike had killed him. The reason she’d waited for the heart to be completely still was so when she sliced the artery in his neck, it didn’t spurt blood over the walls and the floor. The little British bastard was well and truly dead. She dragged his heavy body across the floor, opened the wardrobe, and stuffed him inside, closing the door. Then she straightened the mat in front of the bed and covered the small stain of his blood and urine with some of his clothing from the drawers to make it look like he was just a messy individual. Anybody walking in and casually looking for the colonel would see nothing out of place.

  Hopefully, it would take some time for his quarters to be searched. But now Judita had blood on her hands. She returned to the kitchen, where she washed carefully with carbolic soap and water, dried, and then checked herself to ensure that there wasn’t any blood on her or that she wasn’t unkempt when she left the quarters and met the sergeant, who was under orders to return her to the camp.

  She had an hour to wait. She sat down on the dusty couch and read some of the colonel’s papers. They appeared to be very low-level stuff, just basic administration, an order from Whitehall about costs, efficiency, and dispersal of troops. He might be a colonel, but outside of the army, he’d probably be some minor office bureaucrat. He was
a nonentity, and the power he’d exercised over her and other girls must have been the most exciting part of his day.

  Judita rubbed her eyes hard so they turned pink, so the decent sergeant would assume that she’d been crying. She hoped he wouldn’t be blamed when the colonel’s body was discovered.

  Central Israel

  161 C.E.

  HIS MOUTH WAS full of mud and his lungs were bursting for air, his limbs little more than deadweights desperately trying to crawl up the riverbank. But Abram was alive.

  How long had he been beneath the surface of the water? It was so calm on top, yet the undertow had carried him far, far from the village. At first he’d struggled, but then he’d let the strong current carry him away from Abimelech and the others.

  How far had he drifted? These things he didn’t know. But he knew he was alive. Abimelech’s grip, the followers of Jesus on the riverbank, were an event of his immediate past, something that had happened far up the river. Surely they believed him to be dead, as he had believed until the Lord Almighty had caused him to cough and then struggle to the surface for air. The moment he choked, the gasping cough had awakened his senses. Floundering in the river, he’d managed to paddle to the side, and with a final almighty effort, he’d climbed the bank and now felt God’s sun on his body.

  Abram lay there for a long time, long enough for his shirt to dry on his back and become brittle with caked mud. He forced himself to roll over and, pushing himself up with one hand, felt a short stab of pain. He looked at his arms and saw the mud dark with dried blood. He didn’t remember the injury, but from the irregular tear, it looked to be the work of a branch or rock he must have bounced off as the current swept him away. He looked back to the river and continued to wonder why the surface was so smooth and bland, yet the current below was so strong. Was that why Abimelech had held him so tightly?