“Piety?” said Noah. “Excuse me, Papa, but you are a hypocrite. Like everyone else, you go to shul because it is expected and then sleep through most of the service. Not that I blame you for dozing off. It’s all nonsense. And you know it.”
“Apologize to your father,” said Mama.
“Ach,” said Papa, and slammed the door.
The arguments continued, but after the Germans invaded Poland, Papa began to listen more than he talked. When Noah announced he’d decided to go to Riga, where he could book passage on a boat bound for the Mediterranean, their parents made no objection, though no amount of begging, threats, or tears would move them to let Shayndel go with him.
As the Nazis marched closer to their town and stories about what they were doing to the Jews became impossible to ignore, Shayndel brought home a few of her Young Guard friends to convince her parents to let her go to Vilna, a gathering place for Zionists from all over Eastern Europe. Her father walked out of the room before anyone said a word. Her mother served tea and listened to their arguments about the need for resistance and the relative safety of the city. But after they had left, she took Shayndel’s face in her hands and said, “I understand why you’re doing this. But, darling, that tall fellow is in love with the other girl, the brunette with the hazel eyes. You are making a fool of yourself.”
Shayndel left home a week later, in the middle of the night, without saying good-bye. In Warsaw, she discovered that Noah had been murdered on the road by Polish thugs and wrote home to tell her parents the terrible news and ask for their forgiveness. Later, she learned that they had been murdered with all the other Jews in town—shot and buried in a field that had been her family’s favorite picnic spot. She prayed that they had never received her letter.
As Shayndel walked along the back of the Delousing Shed, she noticed that one of the doors was unlocked. Seeing no one, she slipped inside, set the latch, and stood perfectly still, waiting to be sure she hadn’t been followed and that she was alone. A sparrow flew through the clerestory windows and landed on a beam high above her, which she took as a good omen.
There were no towels or soap and the water was freezing, but Shayndel stood under the shower and let the grit and sweat of Atlit wash away, remembering when she would have given anything for the luxury of clean water, no matter how cold, and a little privacy. When she started to shiver, she turned off the tap and shook herself dry, like a terrier, and dressed. As she slipped back into the daylight, she ran her fingers through her hair, pleased with herself; she still knew how to disappear and get what she needed.
Shayndel followed the sound of voices to the shady side of the dining hall, where Arik was holding forth. His Hebrew classes began with the same vocabulary lists and drills as Nurit’s, and like her, he ended with patriotic poems and songs. But where Nurit talked about her home and family, her garden and her neighbors, Arik always turned the conversation to politics.
“The British are not our allies,” he said, speaking a little too fast for most of his students. “There was some hope that when Labor came to power we’d be able to count on them, but now they are denying the right of our people to come home. There are a hundred thousand Jews waiting in Germany with nowhere to go, and those bastards offer us a quota of two thousand? This is not the act of an ally but of an enemy.”
“I heard they were going to permit another fourteen hundred a month,” said a stocky young Pole named David, who had been in Atlit for less than a week but seemed to know everyone in the camp.
“Bah,” said Arik, “that only happens if the Arabs agree to it, and they want the Jews out—or dead. And what the British want most of all is access to Suez and oil.”
“If you’re right, then the Yishuv will be at war with the British in earnest, and soon,” said David, who was sitting on the edge of the bench, his elbows on his knees. “And that’s too bad. My cousin fought with the Palestinian regiments, and he had nothing but praise for them.”
“The limeys don’t want your respect,” shouted a baby-faced boy with a very deep voice. “They’re in bed with the emirs and the effendis, and that makes them our enemies.”
“But we are not at war with the British,” someone objected.
“Not yet. But if we are to have a state and a homeland for our brothers and sisters in Europe, we must kick the empire out of here,” said Arik.
At that, Miloz, the camp heartthrob, got up from his bench muttering, “I have no idea what they’re talking about.” Four girls followed as he walked away, and all the men in the class turned to watch them except for David, the well-spoken Pole, who caught Shayndel’s eye and motioned for her to take a seat beside him. “I am David Gruen,” he said. “And I believe you are Shayndel Eskenazi, yes?”
“Shhh,” she said. “I want to listen to this.”
Someone in the crowd said, “The minute the British are out of here, the Arabs will attack us. Isn’t that right, Arik?”
He shrugged. “We will beat them. The Jews of Palestine know how to fight.”
“But there are millions of them,” said David, “and just a few hundred thousand of us.”
At that, a man in the front row said, “Maybe you can explain this to me, Arik. In all of my years as a Zionist, in the youth groups and in all of my reading, no one ever mentioned the Arabs. Now I come here to discover that there are three times as many of them as there are Jews here in the land. Did any of you know that?”
“They are peasants,” said Arik. “Worse than peasants. They are illiterate, dirty, backward. The educated ones with money use their tenants like serfs, like slaves. Besides, the Arabs did nothing with this land for hundreds of years, and I would remind you that we bought the land from them, legally. But now that we have built factories and made modern farms, now that we have jobs and schools and hospitals, the Arabs are crying that we are taking over their precious birthright.”
“It sounds like the story of Esau and Ishmael,” said a woman sitting in the back row. Shayndel saw that it was Zorah, her arms crossed tightly against her chest.
“Esau and Ishmael? What are you talking about?” Arik demanded. “Do you think we should let our brothers rot in Displaced Persons camps so that these people can take the land back to the dark ages? If you want to quote the Bible, what about, ‘this land that God gives to you.’ To you, not to Esau and Ishmael. To the Hebrews. To the Jews!”
“The rabbis taught that our misery was caused by the mistreatment of Ishmael, the brother of Isaac, and Esau, the brother of Jacob,” said Zorah.
“Which rabbis?” Arik scoffed. “Diaspora rabbis? No, my dear, it is not so complicated. This was our land from the beginning, and it is our land to win back.”
“You were a stranger in a strange land,” said Zorah.
“So what? This is the real world,” Arik said. “If we do not act, there will be none of us left to debate the fine points of the Torah.”
“And that means we must become like all other nations and oppress our neighbors?”
“You know, Zorah has a point,” Shayndel whispered to David, impressed at how her usually silent barrack-mate had stood up to Arik.
“Maybe,” said David. “But there really is no turning back, and nowhere else to go.”
“Enough philosophy for today,” Arik announced. “I’ll be back on Friday. Until then, speak Hebrew to each other. Now everyone stand up for ‘Ha Tikvah.’”
Shayndel thought that “The Hope” might be the saddest piece of music ever written. The song was so slow and stately it sounded more like a dirge than an anthem. Still, the melody was more powerful than any hymn’s, and the words still moved her as deeply as the first time she’d heard them, a young girl with braids and a brother.
Shayndel sang quietly, under her breath.
As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,
With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,
Then our hope—the two-thousand-year-old hope—will not be lost:
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem
“You have a nice voice,” David said. “You should sing louder.”
“You must be tone deaf,” she said, looking at his kind blue eyes, his high, thoughtful forehead.
“There’s a rumor going around that you fought with the Jewish partisans near Vilnius. Maybe you knew my cousin,” he said.
“You seem to have many cousins.”
“Wolfe Landau?”
Shayndel stared at him. “Wolfe was your cousin?”
David nodded. “I know about Malka, too.”
“Malka,” she echoed. It had been a long time since she had heard or spoken either of those names, though neither of them had left her thoughts for more than an hour since she’d lost them.
“You were the third member of that troika, weren’t you,” he said. “I’m honored to meet you. Why don’t people know who you are? What you did?”
“Why should they?” Shayndel snapped.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t say anything if you don’t want me to, though I don’t understand why not. You should be proud.”
“I only did what I could,” she said. “They were the brave ones, the real leaders. I was just the tail at the end of the kite.”
“Someday, we should fly a kite together.”
Shayndel frowned.
“Or we could just go for a walk,” he said, reaching for her hand. “I’m not a bad fellow. Not as dashing as Wolfe, but you could do worse.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to sweep you off your feet,” he said. “I think you are—I don’t know the Hebrew for it—adorable.”
“Ha!” Shayndel stepped back. “And I think you are exactly like all the rest of the men in Atlit, which is hungry for a woman. Any woman.”
“I won’t deny that.” He grinned and waggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, then pretended to balance a cigar between his thumb and forefinger. Shayndel couldn’t keep from smiling, but as she walked away from him, she was overcome with the same inexplicable sadness she had felt on the day she arrived in Palestine.
Setting foot on the soil of Israel had been a terrible disappointment—nothing at all like her dream of what the moment would be like. She might as well have arrived in Australia, for all the emotion she felt. There had been a small crowd on the beach that morning, waving and shouting, “Shalom.” Others had wept for joy and kissed the ground. They had sung Zionist songs until they were hoarse, but Shayndel had been silent. She wanted to be as happy and as grateful as they appeared to be, but the only gratitude she felt at that moment was for having Leonie to care for.
And yet, this David had managed to touch her. He was funny and smart and his touch had been electric. He had called Wolfe and Malka out of the grave, suddenly alive and laughing. Not the bloody corpses she had fled from, running through the snow to save her own life. By naming them, he made her remember them, sparring and joking, always six paces ahead of her on their long legs, glancing back over their shoulders and telling her hurry, Shayndel, hurry. She would have to ask David if he had known Wolfe as a boy. She wondered what else he knew about her and what she needed to know about him.
In the dining hall that evening, Shayndel waved at Leonie but walked past their usual table to sit among the new arrivals and listen to the story of their journey and capture. They had suffered a rough crossing, caught in one storm after another. Everyone was bruised from the heaving and tossing, and one fellow had broken a wrist. There had been three sleepless days and nights before they sighted the shores of Eretz Yisrael, and then, after a British ship stopped them, they were forced to spend another day on board, stewing in the sun. When the English sailors tried to climb aboard, those who were able resisted with sticks and shovels until a canister of tear gas landed on deck, and a dozen people had to be carried off on stretchers.
“They said they were taking them to the hospital,” said a young Lithuanian man with thick, sand-colored curls. “Not that I believe that for a minute.”
Shayndel said, “It’s likely that they did go to the hospital, unless they were suspected as spies.”
“Spies?” he said bitterly. “Two pregnant women and some cripples?”
“The Jewish Agency will look after them, then,” Shayndel said. “You seem to know a lot about the people on your ship.”
“What if I do?”
“I’m just wondering about the girl they put in my barrack. She looked so thin and wasted. She fell asleep and we couldn’t wake her to come to dinner. I hear she’s German.”
At that moment, David walked over and put out his hand to the boy Shayndel was quizzing. David had big, warm eyes, Shayndel thought, and she saw that he was losing his hair even though they were probably the same age.
“I am David Gruen. And you are?”
“Hirsch Guttman, from Kovno.”
“Well, Hirsch Guttman from Kovno, don’t get any ideas about this girl: she’s mine.”
“She’s the one who approached me, brother,” said Hirsch.
David smiled at Shayndel. “No matter,” he said. “I trust her. I’ll see you later, beloved.”
“What do you want to know about Hetty?” asked Hirsch.
“Hetty?”
“The German girl you were asking about. She’s a good egg. Luckier than most. She spent the whole war in Berlin working as a maid for some rich family that had no idea she was Jewish. She speaks perfect German, and she had some of the best false papers you’ve ever seen. Even her Yiddish sounds like high German. On the boat, they gave her a real grilling to prove she was a Jew. Can you imagine? But she recited all the Sabbath blessings and she knew all the words from every Passover song anyone could come up with.”
“So you think she’s all right?” Shayndel asked.
His eyes grew cold. “I know what this is all about,” he said. “On the boat she got sick with a fever and was ranting in her sleep, in German, of course. One of those thickheaded Poles started saying that she was a Nazi. What a schmuck. Is that why you’re asking about her?”
“Goodness, no,” Shayndel said. “I was just wondering because, well, she looked so tired. You’ll find out that Atlit is full of gossip. Don’t worry about Hetty.”
“All right,” he said, looking at Shayndel with new interest. “So what’s the story with you and that Gruen fellow? Do I have a chance?”
“A chance at what?” Shayndel said, adding, “You moron,” in Hebrew, as she got up.
Back in her usual seat beside Leonie, she asked, “Are you feeling better?”
“I’m fine.”
“Did you talk to the nurse?”
“Yes,” Leonie said, relieved she did not have to lie to Shayndel about that, at least.
After breakfast, Leonie had waited to go to the latrine until she thought she might have a few minutes alone there. The pain in her abdomen was getting worse, and she was afraid that soon she wouldn’t be able to keep it to herself; she had nearly doubled over at breakfast. Leonie sat with her head in her hands until she heard someone else come in and left, determined to get some medicine.
The building that housed the infirmary had once been used for storage, but the Jewish Agency had plastered the walls and put in a new wood floor, making the place seem airy and modern by comparison with everything else in Atlit. Six hospital cots made up with starched white linen stood at crisp attention along the right-hand wall; on the left were a desk, a few cabinets, and an examining room partitioned off with an old parachute hung from the rafters.
Leonie was greeted with a warm, “Good morning, sweetie,” from the regular weekday nurse, Aliza Gilad. “I’m glad you’re here early; the children are coming in for inoculations.”
Within days of arriving in Atlit, Leonie had presented herself as a volunteer at the clinic, claiming that she had always wanted to become a nurse. Aliza made it clear that she had little confidence in someone as young—and pretty—as Leonie and assigned her only me
nial tasks: mopping the floor, carrying out garbage, and washing metal instruments in alcohol. But Leonie proved herself well-suited to the work of the sick bay. She didn’t flinch at the sight of blood or vomit, and she was good with crying children, calm and reassuring with their distraught mothers, too. Aliza began trusting her with more responsibilities and came to treat Leonie as a protégée.
Leonie was glad to have a way to fill the long days and for Aliza’s growing warmth toward her. But she had been bitterly disappointed to find that all of the drugs—even the aspirin—were kept under lock and key. There was no way she would ever “find” a dose of penicillin.
“Is Dr. Gerson coming today?” Leonie asked as she put on her apron. After meeting all of the physicians who made regular visits, she had decided to approach one of the two female doctors—a reserved and closed-mouthed Swiss.
“I don’t think we’ll be seeing her anymore,” Aliza said. “She’s got a big job in Tel Aviv.”
“That’s nice for her, yes?” Leonie said, trying to hide her disappointment.
“Why did you want Dr. Gerson?” Aliza asked, as she readied a vaccine. “Do you need something? Is there something I can do?”
“No,” Leonie said. “I was just thinking about, well, studying pediatrics. I wanted to see what she thought of that.”
Aliza lowered her voice and asked, “Are you pregnant?”
“No.”
“A venereal disease, then.”
Leonie flinched.
“Don’t worry,” said Aliza. “And don’t think you’re the only one. You’d never guess who I’ve dosed in this place, including some of the girls you know. Even staff.” She put a hand on Leonie’s arm and added, “Not that I would ever tell.”
The door flew open and a flock of children marched in, shepherded by three teenage volunteers from a nearby kibbutz. The girls were trying to get the little ones to sing the alphabet in Hebrew, though some were barely old enough to walk.
Aliza melted at the sight of them. “Delicious,” she crooned. “Sweet as honey. I could eat you all up. Look at those cheeks. Like apples. Like plums.”
Day After Night Page 5