A Delayed Life

by Dita Kraus

  Practical advice came from our friends Eva and Pavel Lukeš. They had settled in a village near Netanya, where they had relatives. Otto learned that Pavel worked as a farmhand and that there was work for him, too. He bought a kind of large, short-handled hoe called a turyiah, and he and Pavel became agricultural laborers. Every morning they would stand with a few others near the village silo, where the local farmers came to hire a hand for the day. Work consisted mainly of hoeing around the trees in the pardessim, the citrus orchards. These farmers were originally not farmers at all. They had been merchants, lawyers, or industrialists in Germany and Czechoslovakia. They emigrated just in time, before the war, paying large sums for entry visas to Palestine, then still ruled by the British. They established several villages where they grew vegetables and oranges and raised chickens.

  Now the farmers would stand and watch their hired farmhand to make sure he was not straightening his back and being idle. At the end of the day, they paid him some measly wages, not before haggling with him about the lunch break.

  In the meantime I stayed with little Peter in the huge camp, sharing the tent with strangers. The conditions were unspeakably unhygienic. There was no floor; the iron beds stood on the dusty ground. The food I fetched from the distribution point became covered with flies before I reached the tent. Soon the child got sick, first with diarrhea, but then he got an ear infection. He was feverish, did not eat, could not sleep, and cried incessantly. I became desperate. There was no choice; I had to get help from my family in Jaffa.

  My aunt Hadassa was absolutely wonderful. She realized immediately what I had not been aware of: the baby’s life was in danger. She took us to the Kupat Cholim health clinic, where we waited, together with dozens of other sick children, for our turn to see the pediatrician. It was the year of the huge wave of newcomers, mainly from North Africa, and the health system, not prepared for such multitudes, was collapsing from the pressure. There were not enough doctors, nurses, and hospital beds. In order to get a number to the doctor, Aunt Hadassa got up before daybreak and stood in the queue at the clinic. She returned around seven with number nine or twelve and prepared her own children for school. My little cousin Doron was in second grade, and Edna, not yet three, in nursery school. Then Aunt Hadassa accompanied me with the sick child back to the doctor; he spoke only Hebrew, and I could not communicate with him.

  On the first visit, he pierced Peter’s eardrum, and that eased the worst pain. But it turned out that in addition to everything else, he had now also contracted measles. Doctors’ home visits did not exist, so the child had to be brought daily to the clinic, and the whole procedure, with the queue for the number, taking my young cousins to school and then returning to wait again at the clinic, was repeated day after day. Each time it took the whole morning. Of course little Edna also fell ill with the measles, but hers was only a mild case. At last Peter recovered, and we could think of settling somewhere to begin our new life.

  While I was staying in Jaffa, Otto remained in the village, where he worked. He rented a room in the house of an elderly widow in return for doing her chores in the yard and garden. Thus he not only labored all day in the sun with his turyiah, but had to do more hard work for the widow every evening till dark. At weekends he came to Jaffa with a bag of tomatoes or cucumbers, which his farmer employers let him have for a discount. We both felt pangs of conscience for inconveniencing my poor aunt and her family. The four adults and three children slept in the two tiny rooms, one of which did not even have a window.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  In the Village

  After several weeks, in the middle of July, Otto came with the good news that there would be accommodation for us. The village committee had erected six wooden prefab units for rent to the olim. And so we took our little Peter, who by then was healthy again, and traveled to Shaar Chefer near Netanya.

  The six new wooden huts stood on a hill. Each contained four one-room units, and two families shared a tiny shower room and toilet. There was no electricity and no road. The nearest grocery was two kilometers away, which made shopping a very strenuous enterprise. I had to drag the pram with little Peter through the deep sand, and the way back, weighted down with the groceries, was even harder.

  Our neighbors were Pavel; Eva, who was five months pregnant; and Eva’s mother. We shared the shower with them as well as the huge tin pot and oil-burner on which we heated water for washing and laundry. There was no boiler. In summer we drank tepid water; in winter we took cold showers. Together we bought a secondhand icebox. The iceman came three times a week with blocks of ice wrapped in sacks. With a big screwdriver and hammer, he would chop off half a block for those who could afford a larger icebox or one third of the block for the likes of us. We wrapped it in two layers of sacking to make it last. One had to open the box as little as possible, so that the ice would not melt before the next purchase.

  Our small unit contained one room and a cubicle with a little sink with a fake-marble work top on each side. The dishes and provisions were stored on two shelves underneath it, concealed by a curtain. I did my cooking on two oil cookers. The fuel was called naft, and it was sold from a barrel by a man who came once a week on a horse-drawn cart. The wick of the burners had to be changed frequently, because it smoked and blackened the pots.

  But even here in Israel, like in postwar Prague, food was scarce. Not only did we have very little money, but it was the time of tzena (austerity). It was barely a year after Israel’s perilous War of Independence, and the country was in the process of absorbing hundreds of thousands of newcomers. Thus its reserves were sorely depleted. There were even ration cards for certain items. Yet since the village’s livelihood was mainly chicken farming, the birds that could not be marketed due to a broken wing or other damage were plentiful and cheap. Also there was no scarcity of eggs, either cracked or misshapen.

  We lived hand to mouth. Every morning Otto went with his turyiah to the village depot to be hired as laborer for the day. In the late afternoon, Otto brought his wages, with which we paid the next day’s expenses, the naft, the ice, and the cinema ticket for the weekend film that was screened outdoors on the wall of the local culture hall.

  I also tried to earn some money. I offered my services as a seamstress to the farmers’ wives, to shorten or lengthen their dresses or to patch the elbows or knees of their husbands’ trousers and shirts. There wasn’t much demand, but from time to time, I did get some work.

  In the meantime we received notice that our crate had arrived in Haifa port and that we should fetch it soon; otherwise we would have to pay a storage fee. The cost of the freight itself was a few hundred pounds.

  Fortunately there was Aunt Ella, Otto’s mother’s sister in London. Hers had been a wealthy family who lived in a luxurious villa in Liberec in the north of Czechoslovakia. She and her husband managed to flee just a few hours before the arrival of the occupying Nazis. They left everything behind and escaped to London, where their son was studying. The British did not give them a work permit, and during the whole war Aunt and Uncle made a meager living, he by threading beads, and she by sewing and crocheting dresses for Jewish ladies.

  When Aunt learned that we had to pay the freight for our crate, she promptly sold her fur coat and sent the money. She was that kind of person: warmhearted, down-to-earth, practical. We heard the story of the fur coat many years later, not from her but from a mutual friend.

  After a few months in the village, those of the olim who were considered suitable by the village committee were offered memberships in the Cooperative. They invited Otto for a discussion and told him that for one thousand pounds we would be given a two-room house, a small henhouse, and an adjacent plot of three dunams (a dunam is a ten-by-one-hundred-meter area of land) for growing vegetables.

  Now was the time to turn to Otto’s American uncle, who had promised financial help. Otto was a careful planner; he would never have taken the risk of emigrating with a wife and child with just with the paltr
y seven and a half pounds we were allowed, and without any sort of financial backing. Before our emigration he had contacted Otto Strass, who owed the Kraus family quite a large amount of money, borrowed before his emigration, and asked him for a loan. This had to be done secretly by word of mouth, not, God forbid, by mail, which the Communist censors might read. Only when Otto was assured of the forthcoming help did he start planning our Aliyah.

  The American uncle promised the money, and Otto accepted on condition that it would not be a gift but a loan, which we would repay.

  The loan never materialized.

  The next letter from America brought the sad news that Uncle Strass had died. A tumor had been discovered on his brain, and he died on the operating table. He was only in his early forties. His wife, Dita, and two young daughters were now left without support, and we were without the hope of a loan.

  Otto decided to use his farming skills to start growing vegetables himself. We rented three dunams and a mule to plow the field, which had lain barren for several years. Moishe the mule was owned by the Cooperative, and as the saying goes, he was stubborn. He declined to enter his stable. Taking him out was no problem, but he just refused to go back in.

  In the end Otto found the solution; he made him walk in reverse, tail first. I had to lead Moishe, holding the reins near his head, and when we reached the end of the field, make him do a U-turn for the next furrow. One time, I must have somehow been on the wrong side of the animal, because suddenly his hoof landed on my foot. I cried out, which made him freeze. No matter how much I hit him, he remained standing on my foot. Only when Otto overcame his laughing fit did he come to my rescue. Fortunately, the soil was soft enough for my foot to sink in and there was only little damage.

  As Otto considered himself a professional agriculturist, he decided not to grow what everybody else did, such as cucumbers, onions, and peppers. Celery was a rare plant then and fetched a good price, and so did cauliflower and lettuce.

  Every day in the late afternoon, when Otto returned with his turyiah from hoeing the orchards, we would go to our field. It was hard work. While little Peter played with some toy at the edge of the field, we carried the heavy pipes with the sprinklers from place to place, each time uncoupling the sections and fixing them together again a few rows farther on. We also bought a few sacks of chicken manure and spread it out with shovels. The sprinklers had to be turned on after sundown to save water from evaporation in the heat of the day, and one of us had to return to the field later at night to turn them off. Automatic irrigation was as yet unknown.

  The climate in Israel is favorable, and the yield was quite good. The price of the produce varied. Sometimes it went up; other times it sank below cost. At the end of the year the calculation showed that although we hadn’t lost, the balance was merely the acquisition of the pipes. No debt but also no profit.

  What now? Saving the one thousand pounds needed to settle in the village became unrealistic. Staying as farm laborers was not an option. After a whole year in Israel, we had made no progress.

  Ever since our arrival at Haifa, various shlichim (emissaries) had come to the tent to attract new members for their kibbutzim. One of them, David, had urged us to come and see his kibbutz. It had been founded many years before by pioneers from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland. He continued to visit us in the village, and every time, he repeated his invitation. This time we went with him.

  The kibbutz was a pleasant place with lawns, much greenery, attractive kindergartens, and a communal dining hall. For supper there was bread, margarine, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, sardines, jam, and tea. But to top it all, each person got a bowl of fresh sour cream.

  That did it! I fell in love with the cream, and we moved to the kibbutz as prospective future members.

  But that is already the next story.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Givat Chaim

  I was looking forward to moving to the kibbutz. We had a number of friends there, some of whom had come on the same ship with us, some of whom had been members of the Zionist movement where Otto was active before the war. I was hoping that life in the kibbutz would be easier than in the village.

  Kibbutz Givat Chaim is one of the oldest established kibbutzim in Israel (kibbutz—singular; kibbutzim—plural), founded by Zionist pioneers in 1933. Givat Chaim was named after Chaim Arlosoroff, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. It is located in the Hefer Valley in central Israel, near the town of Hadera. The kibbutz movement was divided into several left-oriented streams, from the extreme to the more moderate, but the basic social structures were similar. The main tenet of the movement was equality of all its members. Property was owned by the collective, and the motto was everyone contributes according to his ability and receives according to his needs. This ideal was, of course, never quite achieved, even with the best of intentions; some members were always more equal than others.

  So, for example, when our small family joined the kibbutz, we were given the most unattractive work, which the old-timers hated to do. I was put to washing dishes in the kitchen—by hand, of course, as the kibbutz was not yet able to afford a dishwashing machine. My hands were immersed in the soapy water for hours until they were sickly white and furrowed like the underside of a mushroom. Moreover, the number of eaters exceeded the number of plates, spoons, forks, and knives, and I was constantly rushed to work faster, so the chaverim1 needn’t wait for a clean plate to start eating.

  Otto became a kitchen boy, who hauled the large heavy pots and milk cans, although he’d asked for work in the fields, telling them of his two years’ apprenticeship on the farms in Czechoslovakia. But the principle of the sadran avoda (the person whose task was to appoint the chaverim to the work areas) was to assign you to the places that were short of hands and not where you, the greenhorn, wished to work. The rationale behind this absurd and shortsighted policy was: We did our stint of the disgusting kitchen and the sanitation chores; now it’s your turn. It drove away dozens of prospective new members.

  David, our new friend, who was very pleased that at last he had managed to lure us to the kibbutz, took us around, showed us the cowshed with its dozens of cows—which, every year, received Israel’s first prize in milk production—the ducks, geese, and chickens in their modern coops, the orange grove, the banana orchard, the vineyard. We visited the clinic and sickrooms, the children’s houses with their well-equipped playgrounds, the laundry, the communal dining room, the culture hall with its library and music room, and the bakery, which baked fresh bread for the members every day. There was also a cobbler who repaired all the shoes, and a clothes store, where the laundered clothes were sorted, mended, and ironed, and where a seamstress even sewed new dresses for the chaverot.

  Otto and I were duly impressed, but what I wanted to see most was the room where we would live. The old-timers, who had initially lived in tents and later in makeshift cabins, were now already established in solid semidetached rows of houses. Each family had a single room with a porch, but since the children slept in dormitories, one room was sufficient for a couple. The kibbutz had recently erected several rows of wooden huts, with rooms of about fourteen square meters per unit and a lawn at the front. Our double bed, a small coffee table, and two chairs were all we could squeeze into the room. The rest of our furniture, sent in the container all the way from Prague, was gladly accepted by various neighbors. In this way, our friend Paťa got the green sofa, one of the three pieces saved from my childhood home. It was very useful to him and his lady friends—good-looking Paťa was now single again, having divorced Jana back in Prague. The green sofa would move to other locations but would eventually return to my possession.

  For the first few days, we did not have to work. It was necessary to acquaint our little boy, Peter, with the new environment. Children in the kibbutz lived in separate homes, not with their parents. For security reasons, the children’s houses stood in a cluster in the center of the settlement.

  Peter was two a
nd a half years old and spoke Czech. Now he had to live with children whose language he didn’t know, with a nurse who didn’t understand him. We took him to the toddlers’ home to get acquainted with the nurse and the other children. Nurse Zipora welcomed us warmly but insisted that we give the boy a new name, because Peter was not Hebrew and the children would not be able to pronounce it. She urged us to decide fast, so that she could tell the children what to call the new boy. Otto and I pondered over it in the evening and decided to call him Shimon. There was certain logic in the choice. Shimon of the Bible was named Peter after his baptism. We just reversed the procedure; from Peter, the Christian, he became Shimon, the Jew. Besides, I liked the name.

  I stayed with Shimon in the toddlers’ home every morning, until he gradually agreed to remain there alone. In the evening after a shower, he was put in his cot, like the other five toddlers. I held his hand until he fell asleep, and then I left, as did all the other parents. Kibbutz children were used to it, and they said good night and fell asleep. However, we were inexperienced parents; we didn’t realize what it means for a small child to lose his language and his name, or to sleep away from his parents, among strange children.

  Shimon bit the other kids, and the parents complained, showing us the imprint of Shimon’s teeth on the arms of their offspring. Of course he bit them, what could he do? They spoke to him in a language he did not understand, and when he spoke, they stared at him uncomprehendingly. And Mummy and Daddy were gone, too! I still fear that the damage we involuntarily caused our eldest child might have played a role in his later mental problems, despite the doctors’ reassurances that it wouldn’t have; the pangs of sorrow and pain for Shimon’s unhappy life are ever-present.