Authors: Anita Diamant
In the changing room, they walked into a loud argument between one of the newcomers
and a woman from the Jewish Agency who didn’t speak enough Yiddish to make herself
understood.
“What’s the matter?” Hannah asked the distraught girl.
“I’m not putting my dress into that thing,” she said, pointing to the revolving dumbwaiter
that ferried clothes into the machine on the other side of the wall. “It’s the only
thing I have left of my sister.”
“You will get it back,” said Hannah. “Listen to me, all of you,” she said, trying
to make herself heard. “My friends, listen. They are only getting the bugs out of
your clothes, getting
them clean. There is no reason to worry. Lunch is waiting for you. Maybe you’ll sit
next to a handsome boy; there are many here. If you can understand me, translate for
someone who does not.”
The women seemed to respond to Hannah’s smiling certainty and did as she asked. She
is a natural leader, Tedi thought. She will run a school, a kibbutz—maybe even a government
agency. And for a moment, she was sorry that she would have to forget Hannah, too.
Hannah handed her a pile of worn towels and led her to a row of open shower stalls
where Tedi dropped her eyes to avoid the blur of gray flesh stretched tight over ribs
and hip bones, scars and scabs. The girls faced toward the walls, hiding themselves
as best they could. Some held their arms tightly against their bodies, like injured
birds.
“It’s the numbers,” Hannah explained in a whisper. “They are ashamed of the tattoo.”
In one stall, three Latvian girls, rounder and hairier than anyone else, soaped each
other’s backs, laughing and groaning with pleasure. “Good, good, good,” they said,
rolling the Hebrew word around in their mouths. They washed between their legs without
embarrassment, pointing and joking with each other in a way that made Tedi blush.
She handed out the towels, confused and dizzy. Surely she had been in this same loud
room with a group of girls like these, just weeks ago. Someone must have asked for
her papers and put a stethoscope to her heart. She must have sneezed at the DDT powder
and showered in one of these stalls. Someone had given her the dress she was wearing.
Yet she remembered none of it.
What little Tedi could recall of the past two years took the
form of snapshots, black-and-white and a bit out of focus, like the pictures in her
family’s leather-bound album. She remembered the magnificent head of hair on the Greek
boy who took care of her on the boat to Palestine. She remembered the way the barbwire
had sliced into the eyebrows of the woman who committed suicide at the Dutch transit
camp.
Tedi had just arrived at Westerbork, betrayed to the Nazis after two years in hiding.
They had told her she was going to Bergen-Belsen the next morning. Had that happened,
she might have been like the others who were terrified by the steam machines and showers
of Atlit. More likely, she would have been killed there.
But they never called her name for that train, and she languished in Westerbork for
a week, or maybe it had been only a few days; the cold and fear warped all of her
senses. She could not recall eating anything there or lying down to sleep.
Finally, she was shoved into a boxcar with seventy-five other starved and frozen souls
headed for Auschwitz. No one spoke as the train gained speed. Already as good as dead,
they did not even try to comfort one another. But in the middle of the night, in the
middle of nowhere, the engine stalled. A boy with a knife pried through the rotten
floorboards and Tedi had been the second to squeeze through.
“Come on,” Hannah said, taking Tedi’s hand again and pulling her back into the noisy
present. “Let’s help them get dressed.”
In the room beyond the shower stalls, damp piles from the steamers were heaped on
a low table. A dozen dripping women rushed over to claim their clothes.
“You lied to me,” wailed the girl who had not wanted to surrender
her sister’s dress. “Look at this,” she said, holding up a shrunken, faded remnant.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “Sometimes the machines are too hot. But we have many clothes
for you to choose from. The Jews of Palestine have given clothing from their own closets.
You will have everything you need, better than what you brought.”
Just then, the nurse ran in looking for Hannah, who, after a brief, urgent conversation,
held up her hand and announced, “My friend, I have to go with Nurse Gilad, but my
comrade, Tedi, will take care of you.”
Twenty-two faces turned toward her. They were more curious than frightened now, and
Tedi decided to pretend that she knew what she was doing. She led them through a door
at the back of the building into a makeshift tent made out of old parachutes. Long
wooden planks set on sawhorses were piled with stacks of underwear, dresses, blouses,
skirts, shorts, and trousers.
The women rushed forward and began trying on clothes and offering each other advice.
“Look at this,” someone shouted, waving a pair of bloomers from a hundred years ago.
They all laughed except for one girl who was pregnant and could find nothing to fit
over the firm drum of her stomach. Tedi suspected that Hannah would have walked into
the men’s tent next door and grabbed a shirt and a pair of pants. She lacked that
kind of nerve but felt responsible for the poor girl, who was on the verge of tears
and seemed to have no friends in the group.
Tedi rummaged through the pile of clothes again with no better luck. But when a flap
of yellow-gray parachute silk hanging from the side of the tent caught her eye, she
grinned. “I’ll be right back,” she told the distraught girl and ran into Delousing,
now deserted and so quiet that the sound of her sandals on the floor echoed behind
her as she ran.
As she reached the front door, she stopped the young soldier who had shown such kindness
earlier.
“Can you help me, sir?” she panted, first in Dutch and then in garbled Hebrew.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Tedi grabbed his sleeve, made scissors with her fingers and pretended to cut. Then
she pointed to the back of the building, and put her hands together as though in prayer.
“Ah.” He smiled, pulled a tiny pocketknife from his pocket, and put his finger to
his lips to make it a secret between them.
Tedi answered with a thumbs-up, took the knife, and dashed away.
She cut a swath of silk from the parachute and folded it so cleverly that the skirt
she created looked pleated. One of the other women surrendered a blue scarf to use
as a belt, to fasten it around the girl’s belly. Tedi’s efforts were met with praise
and pats on the back.
“She looks like a bride,” said one of the girls.
“A little late,” someone else said, slyly, but as the comment was translated, it turned
into a joke that made everyone laugh—including the “bride.”
Tedi did her best imitation of Hannah and announced, “Come along, friends. Follow
me.” As they filed past her, one girl stopped and kissed her cheek, leaving behind
a trace of fresh lavender. The smell of hope.
Zorah tried to focus on the footsteps of the sentry making his midnight rounds, but
the screams of the woman who had broken down at the gate still echoed in her head.
It was so quiet in the barrack, Zorah could hear the soldier clear his throat and
the wind in the cypress trees outside. It was a sound, she supposed, that others might
find beautiful and soothing but to her, it was just more proof that the workings of
the world were random, that beauty, like suffering, was meaningless, that human life
was as pointless as waves on sand.
Zorah hated the sea as much as she hated the wind in the trees. She hated Tedi, on
the far side of the room, for the ease with which she fell asleep. But most of all,
she hated the way people kept thanking God. Even now. Even here, where they were imprisoned
for breaking rules made in a distant, irrelevant
past, in the time before words like “boxcar” and “lamp shade” could chill you to the
bone.
So many words had come unmoored from their old meanings. The English called them “illegal
immigrants,” but Zorah recognized the term for what it was: a polite version of “filthy
Yid.” What other explanation could there be for a place like Atlit?
She squeezed her eyes shut and dared God to stop her from hating everything in His
creation, including this Palestine, this promised, this holy land.
In April, when Zorah had heard the news that Hitler was dead, the Hebrew blessing
had nearly slipped out of her mouth, but she had fought the reflex and bit her tongue
hard enough to draw blood. She would never again say, “God be praised.” Her mother
and father would have said it. Her grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts, uncles, and
cousins would have said it, along with the professional beggars who had worked her
street in the poorest of Warsaw’s Jewish neighborhoods. Zorah cursed everyone in Atlit
who said those words, especially the men who prayed, morning and evening, wrapped
in their dirty prayer shawls. How dare they?
In the cots lined up between Tedi at the far wall and Zorah near the door, eighteen
women sighed and tossed. And if none of them slept as soundly as Tedi, none burned
like Zorah, who used the hours of her sleepless nights to calculate the insults of
the day, all of which added up to the same thing—that no one cared to know what had
happened, and not just to her, but to each of them. To all of them. What they had
seen, what they had suffered, lost, and mourned. The British couldn’t care less, of
course. But it was no better among the Jews who took care of the day-to-day administration
of the camp: the Jewish Agency
bureaucrats, the kitchen workers, the doctors and nurses, the Hebrew teachers and
calisthenics instructors, the bleeding-heart volunteers who were free to come and
go.
Zorah knew why they avoided talk of roundups and forced marches, mass graves and death
camps: if you hold a piece of rancid meat under a person’s nose, he cannot help but
turn away. That is an animal reflex, pure and simple, an act of self-preservation.
But the local Jews were two-faced about it, greedy for scraps of news about their
own relatives, their own hometowns. They accosted dazed newcomers with questions about
their parents’ old neighborhoods in Riga or Frankfurt.
If you had no information, they rarely bothered to ask your name or where you came
from. After that, it was all about Palestine. Where are you going? Do you have any
family here? Are you a member of one of the Zionist youth movements with the fantasy
names, doctrinaire politics, and summer camps that taught the fine points of ditchdigging
and hora dancing? Are you ready to throw yourself, body and soul, into
Avodah Ivrit,
the work of building up the land? So
avodah,
a word for prayer, becomes the dirt under one’s fingernails. But holy dirt, after
all. Sacred dirt!
Zorah’s scorn included her fellow survivors, too, who changed the subject after they
determined that you had no knowledge of their Aunt Tzeitl or Cousin Misha. But them,
she forgave.
She knew they were reluctant to tell their own stories because all of them began and
ended with the same horrible question: Why was I spared? Everyone’s mother had been
gentle and devout, every sister a beauty, every brother a prodigy. There was no point
in comparing one family’s massacre to another’s.
Every atrocity was as appalling as the next: Miriam’s rape, Clara’s murdered husband,
Bette’s baby, who was suffocated so the rest of the family would not be discovered.
It was unspeakable, so they spoke of nothing. Every day, the girls sat and sighed
over the physique of the fellow who led them through morning exercises, or shared
tidbits about the newest pair of pants in the men’s barracks, or whispered about Hannah’s
breasts, which were growing larger every day. They clucked and preened like hens on
a roost.
To Zorah, their conversations about men and food and even Palestine sounded like dance
hall music at a funeral. She backed away from their offers of fruit and combs and
all the other little kindnesses that threatened her at every turn. While the rest
of the girls tipped their faces toward the sun and turned brown, she kept to herself
inside the barrack and remained as white as paper.
She decided that all of her fellow prisoners, though wounded and bereft, were no better
than wild animals. They were as heartless as the wind in the trees and as stupid as
the relentlessly forward-looking Jews of the Yishuv.
“Ach,” she muttered and rolled onto her back. Zorah was used to being the last one
awake. Insomnia had been her companion since infancy. Her mother used to tell the
other women on the street about how she would find her tiny daughter standing up in
the crib, her hands on the railing, listening to the nighttime sounds rising from
the street. For the entire first week in the concentration camp, Zorah had been too
frightened to close her eyes at all. And even now that she was no longer afraid and
the sticky Mediterranean heat made her feel dull and listless, falling asleep remained
a battle.
Ultimately, the weariness of her body overcame her restless
mind and Zorah did succumb, facedown on the mattress, the pillow on the floor, the
sheet bunched under her sweating breasts. The other girls walked past her on the way
to breakfast without bothering to lower their voices; once Zorah slept, nothing would
wake her, not even the door that slammed a few feet from her head.
The barrack was deserted when she opened her eyes. “Damn it,” she muttered, hurrying
into her clothes, determined to get a cup of tea and a piece of bread before the daily
comedy they called roll call.
The lineups in Atlit were a black joke for anyone who had survived one of the death
camps, where counting off had been a form of torture. Morning and evening, the Germans
had made them stand for hours, hot or cold, snow or rain, sounding the roll, barrack
by barrack. If someone was slow in speaking up, they might have to repeat the whole
thing twice or even three times. There were extra midnight lineups, too, called without
explanation. And when a prisoner dropped to the ground, unconscious or dead, it would
begin all over again.