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.
The British counted the girls only once a day, inside their barracks in the evening. But the boys had to show up every morning as well. The sergeant in charge that day had sweated through his shirt even before the prisoners started filtering into the dusty yard in front of the mess hall. He tapped his foot and shouted for them to hurry, but they took even longer than usual as they arranged themselves in an intentionally crooked row. From the way they were glancing at each other and whispering, Zorah guessed that someone was missing: still in bed, or in the latrine, or perhaps even escaped during the night—something that had happened at least once in the three weeks since she’d been in Atlit.
The boys finally got themselves sorted, bellowing their names and saluting with exaggerated flourishes. As soon as the officer took a few steps down the line, the first prisoners took a step back and the others quickly closed ranks so the absence of one of the boys would not be noticed. By the time the sergeant had reached the end of the line, the first inmate, a cap pulled low on his forehead, gave another name and bowed from the waist. The whole crew kept a straight face and stood perfectly still until they were dismissed and strutted over to receive accolades from a group of female admirers.
Zorah watched the puffing of chests and the fluttering of eyelashes. Flirtations and romances bubbled up and burst from day to day—sometimes even from hour to hour. Zorah turned up her nose and headed for the shady side of Delousing, where the morning’s Hebrew lessons were taught.
When she saw who was teaching that day, she tried to duck out. Nurit caught sight of her first and pointed at a chair in the front row, but Zorah slipped in a seat in the back as the teacher chatted up a few of the newcomers, speaking Hebrew with a liberal smattering of Yiddish to make sure she would be understood.
“It’s only a matter of days, maybe a few weeks for some of you, but you’ll be out of here soon,” Nurit was saying. She was about forty, thick around the waist, and dyed her hair the peculiar shade of purple-red favored by the local women. Although she was liked by the others because of the chalky little squares of chocolate she handed out at the end of class, Zorah avoided Nurit’s sessions. Not only did the woman love the sound of her own voice, she talked too much about luck—how lucky they were to have survived Europe, lucky to have gotten past the British blockade, lucky to be on the soil of Eretz Yisrael, where so many devoted members of the local Jewish settlement were working on their behalf.
“Today, we are going to learn the names of the flowers and plants of the land,” Nurit began. “We will start with the biblical flora and continue with the trees that our people are planting, along with all the vegetables we have under cultivation. I myself spent the weekend planting bougainvillea in my garden. Do you know bougainvillea, my friends? I passed a whole day searching for just the right plant for my garden, but it was worth it. I tell you, it is the most beautiful of all flowers.”
Zorah stood up abruptly and knocked over her chair. “What the hell do we care about your garden?” she said as she stamped away.
“How do you say ‘pain in the ass’ in Hebrew?” someone muttered.
Laughter followed Zorah as she walked off. She thought she would pass the rest of the morning trying to read the Hebrew newspaper she had “borrowed” from Nurit’s bag last week. But it was too hot inside the barrack, so she wandered the grounds and kept her face turned toward the fence so no one would be tempted to talk to her.
Eventually, Zorah found herself near the front gate where a small crowd was watching the morning’s departures. Arrivals were unpredictable. If the British intercepted an illegal vessel, a train or a convoy of buses would arrive and two or three barracks would fill with refugees.
But people left the camp almost every day. It seemed to Zorah that most of them spent no more than a week in Atlit. If you had the right credentials, the Jewish Agency would present you to the authorities as “legal” under the infuriating quotas the British had set for Jewish immigration to Palestine. But those numbers were a moving target, and there appeared to be different rules for children, who were released as soon as a relative came to claim them.
Zorah also noticed that whenever a private car pulled up to the camp, the “sister” or “brother” it had been sent for would be carried away without acquiring the stamp or seal or signature that kept others waiting. This was called protectzia, a word she learned not in any of her Hebrew classes, but from Goldberg, a gruff, gray-haired Jewish guard who worked in Atlit in order to search for clues about his mother’s extended family in Germany. Goldberg was known to give away cigarettes, which made him one of the few people Zorah sought out.
She counted twenty-three people waiting to leave, bundles and suitcases piled around them. The children were the first to go, seven in all, walking stiffly beside people who were total strangers to them. Among them was Maxie, a ten-year-old who had been caught stealing shoelaces and matches. A grim-faced woman wearing an ugly black wig had her hand on the back of his neck and was pushing him along.
“Good riddance to that little shit,” said Lillian, touching her fingers to the corners of her crimson lips.
“Shame on you,” said a woman beside her. “Stealing probably kept him alive in Buchenwald.”
“Well, I don’t know what good it did him in here,” Lillian replied, with a bold stare that proclaimed that she, for one, would not be intimidated by the mere mention of a death camp.
“What on earth could he trade for in this place?” Lillian demanded, as she glared down at her black Oxfords, tied with twine. “He’ll be stealing wallets and purses and God knows what else as soon as he gets the chance. That poor woman has no idea what she’s taking in. Then again, did you see her? Like my great-great grandmother, from the shtetl. And that wig? Horsehair! I’m sure of it. What a horror.”
“Lillian,” Zora
h said. “You really should write a book of proverbs. I suggest you start with, ‘If you don’t have something spiteful to say about a person … why bother?’”
“And you are too clever for your own good,” Lillian said.
Zorah watched as six young men crowded around the cab of a dusty flatbed truck, arguing.
“He comes with us,” shouted a tall, skinny inmate, pointing at a boy with a heavy bandage on his ankle. “It’s nothing—a sprain. We do not leave without him. We will make a hunger strike and shame you in front of the Jews of the world. We will report you to the Jewish Agency! To the Palmach!”
The driver pointed at the British soldiers who were watching from the guardhouses that stood on ten-foot stilts around the perimeter of the camp. “You are giving these fucking British assholes reason to laugh at us,” he said. “If you don’t get in right now, and without that cripple, I will leave without any of you. And I am sure as hell not driving all the way back to get you, you big-mouth son of a …”
Zorah grinned at the barrage of curses and realized that she had understood every foul word in the tackata-tackata version of what her father used to call “the holy tongue.”
Papa had considered Zorah’s gift for languages a complete waste. The old man used to chase her away from the table while he tutored her brother, even though Herschel was never going to be able to understand the Talmud. At ten years old, the boy could barely tell one letter from the next while Zorah had been able to read Hebrew and Yiddish before she was seven, and spoke better Polish than either of her parents. In Auschwitz, she’d learned Romanian and German. She picked up some Italian on her way to Palestine and was learning French just by eavesdropping on two girls in her barrack.
A young Jewish guard named Meyer walked over to the truck and took the driver aside. After a few minutes of animated conversation, the guard helped the lame boy into the front seat and told his loud champion, “Watch your manners. In a country this small, you might end up sleeping in this fellow’s dormitory, or working in his brother’s unit. No need to get off on the wrong foot.”
The driver gunned the engine and then took off, forcing the others to chase after it. Their ringleader was the last to make it aboard, screaming and puffing until his companions pulled him on.
Zorah shook her head at the scene.
“You’re not Romanian, are you?” The question made Zorah jump. Meyer, the guard who had sent them off, was smiling at her through the fence. She would have turned on her heel except for the cigarette he held out through the wire—a Chesterfield, right out of the package.
She took it without meeting his eyes, stroked the fine white paper, and put it up to her nose. The guard held out a match.
Zorah thought about putting the cigarette away, to save it for later, but what was the point? Someone would start asking questions about where she’d managed to get such a treat; then again, she realized that half the camp would know all about this little exchange within minutes anyway.
“Fuck it,” she said, leaning forward to catch the flame. She inhaled deeply and glanced at him sideways.
He smiled. “Do you kiss your lover with that mouth?”
He might have been thirty years old, with wavy brown hair, a long face, strong jaw, and a pair of thick wire-rimmed glasses that had probably disqualified him from fighting in the war. Given what he’d just done for the stupid Romanians, she decided he wasn’t a British stool pigeon at all, a rumor based entirely on the amount of time he spent inside the fence with the prisoners. Zorah wondered if Meyer was his first name or his last.
“Aren’t you ashamed to wear such a stupid hat?” she said and walked away.
“You are most welcome,” said Meyer, and doffed the Turkish three-corner pillbox.
Zorah headed for the far side of the nearest building to escape his gaze. She took three quick, delicious drags on the cigarette, so different from the cut-rate, stale, military-issue stuff they sometimes got. She could have traded a pristine butt for a chocolate bar, or a half tube of Lillian’s lipstick, or the promise of getting a letter delivered to Tel Aviv or Haifa. But Zorah had no one to contact and no greater desire than tobacco.
She inhaled once more before tapping the cigarette out gently on the bottom of her shoe, then put the rest into her pocket to save until after dinner. The anticipation sweetened her whole day. Walking to and from the barrack, reading her newspaper, ignoring the fatuous conversation of the girls around her, she reached for it often, almost tasting it with her fingers. At dinner, even the bland eggplant and white cheese tasted sharper because of what was coming.
Zorah denied herself until the last minute and then slipped behind the latrine just before lights-out. She took her prize out of her pocket and massaged it gently back into shape. Before lighting it, she forced herself to pause for one final moment, watching as the last purple light of day faded to gray in the sky above the mountains.
She struck a match and inhaled deeply. The first puff, burned and sour, made her cough. But the next one was perfect and she held it in her lungs for as long as she could. She exhaled slowly, tasting the smoke as it left her. The third puff conjured a memory of her Uncle Moshe’s pipe mix, which in turn recalled the flavor of Aunt Faygie’s Rosh Hashanah baked apples. Zorah counted back; it had been four years since she’d eaten those apples; she had been fifteen years old.
Later, as she lay in the dark, Zorah noticed that her neck was not as tight as usual and wondered if nicotine was the cure for her insomnia. The woman on the cot beside her grunted in her sleep and rolled from her back to her side. Zorah savored the ten inches between them. On the boat from Europe to Haifa, and before that, in the DP center, in the forest, in the camp, in the boxcars, she had been piled, like a stick of wood, against other bodies that crawled with lice or burned with fever. Some had been clammy with sweat, and twice, rigid and cold. Zorah stretched out her arms, luxuriating in the space around her, the only thing in Atlit for which she was grateful.
Zorah tried to find the heavy satisfaction of the smoke in her lungs again, but the sensation was gone, like those argumentative Romanian boys who had, indirectly, been responsible for her American cigarette. Though she envied their escape, living on a kibbutz did not appeal to her. From what she had heard, it sounded a lot like Atlit: communal meals and bathrooms, order imposed by others.
Zorah wanted her own room and no one telling her when to go to bed at night or get up in the morning, or what kind of work to do. She knew these were extravagant wishes in a poor country, and she had no idea whether she would be able to make such a life for herself in a place where it seemed everyone was made to obey orders if only they were delivered by other Jews.
Not that she expected to leave anytime soon. She had no relatives in Palestine nor anyone willing to pose as family. She had never attended a Zionist youth meeting in Poland, nor had she ingratiated herself to the giddy new pioneers who were hatching all around her. But the biggest problem of all was that she had no papers. Officially, she did not exist.
She had walked out of the concentration camp so dazed and weak, she had been unable to think about what lay ahead. But when the Red Cross workers asked if she wanted a ticket back to Warsaw, she shook her head. She had been the only one in her family to make it through the first selection; there was no one and nothing to go back to.
In the DP camp, there were boys and girls who talked endlessly about Palestine as both home and hope, and since Zorah had neither she threw in her lot with them, joining with a small, well-organized group of Young Guards—the biggest of the Socialist Zionist youth movements. They boarded a train to Marseille, where they were met by a chain-smoking envoy from Palestine who led them to a flatbed truck, which jolted and bruised them for a day and a night until they reached a stretch of stony beach near a town called Savona.
A hundred other refugees were already there. The two nervous Italians in charge of the landing could offer nothing but whispered reassurances, which they repeated with less and less confiden
ce as the night wore on. Zorah crouched and wrapped her arms around her knees, sick with worry; her rucksack had disappeared somewhere between the train and the truck, and with it her identity card.
The faint sound of an engine offshore brought everyone to the water’s edge, where they lined up like a flock of ragged birds and stared into the darkness as a rowboat splashed into view. Four muscular men wearing blue sweaters and tight-fitting caps jumped onto the sand and exchanged a few words with the Italians, who kissed their cheeks and beamed with relief.
At dawn, an involuntary gasp went up as the refugees got their first look at the ship that was supposed to carry them across the Mediterranean—a worn-out ferry of the sort used to shuttle commuters across a river or vacationers across a lake. Zorah shook her head: God had a twisted sense of humor to let her survive the efficient Germans only to drown at the hands of a bunch of bumbling Jews.
A steep gangplank was quickly assembled and the men from the boat started taking names, checking them against those on a smudged piece of paper. Zorah was surprised that this slapdash escape had actually been planned down to the detail of a ship’s manifest. She hung back until she was the last one on the beach, knowing her name was not on their list.
The man holding the papers frowned at her and looked at the paper. “Levi, Jean-Claude.”
When Zorah didn’t move, he pointed at her and said, “You.”
Did he know that Jean-Claude was a man?
“That’s you,” he insisted. “Levi.”
The Italians ran up to them and pointed at a cloud of dust moving toward them. Zorah climbed the narrow, swaying ramp on her hands and knees.
She knew that she was not cheating Levi out of his rightful place. Nine times out of ten, a missing Jew in 1945 was a dead Jew. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about him. What would happen to her if Levi did turn out to be that one in ten? What if he had already reached Palestine? Would the British arrest her? Throw her in jail? Send her back?