Day After Night

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A Novel

A
NITA
D
IAMANT

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This book is a work of fiction. Although based on historical events, names, characters,
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Copyright © 2009 by Anita Diamant

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Designed by Carla Jayne Jones

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009025883

ISBN: 978-0-7432-9984-8

eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-6624-6

Correction to jacket copy: Atlit is off the coast of the Mediterranean, south of Haifa.

In memory of my grandfather Abe Mordechai Ejbuszyc and my uncle Henri Roger Ejbuszyc,
victims of the Holocaust

Know that every human being must cross a very narrow bridge. What is most important
is not to be overcome by fear.

R
EBBE
N
ACHMAN OF
B
RATSLAV
, 1772–1810

The nightmares made their rounds hours ago. The tossing and whimpering are over. Even
the insomniacs have settled down. The twenty restless bodies rest, and faces aged
by hunger, grief, and doubt relax to reveal the beauty and the pity of their youth.
Not one of the women in Barrack C is twenty-one, but all of them are orphans.

Their cheeks press against small, military-issue pillows that smell of disinfectant.
Lumpy and flat from long service under heavier heads, they bear no resemblance to
the goose-down clouds that many of them enjoyed in childhood. And yet, the girls burrow
into them with perfect contentment, embracing them like teddy bears. There were no
pillows for them in the other barracks. No one gives a pillow to an animal.

The British built Atlit in 1938 to house their own troops. It was one in a group of
bases, garages, and storage units set up on
the coastal plains a few miles south of Haifa. But at the end of the world war, as
European Jews began making their way to the ancestral homeland in violation of international
political agreements, the mandate in Palestine became ever messier. Which is how it
came to pass that Atlit was turned into a prison or, in the language of command, a
“detention center” for refugees without permissory papers. The English arrested thousands
as illegal immigrants, sent most of them to Atlit, but quickly set them free, like
fish too small to fry.

It was a perfectly forgettable compound of wooden barracks and buildings set out in
rows on a scant square acre surrounded by weeds and potato fields. But the place offered
a grim welcome to the exhausted remnant of the Final Solution, who could barely see
past its barbwire fences, three of them, in fact, concentric lines that scrawled a
crabbed and painful hieroglyphic across the sky.

Not half a mile to the west of Atlit, the Mediterranean breaks against a rocky shore.
When the surf is high, you can hear the stones hiss and sigh in the tidal wash. On
the eastern horizon, the foothills of the Carmel reach heavenward, in keeping with
their name, kerem-el, “the vineyard of God.” Sometimes, the candles of a village are
visible in the high distance, but not at this hour. The night is too old for that
now.

It is cool in the mountains but hot and damp in Atlit. The overhead lights throb and
buzz in the moist air, heavy as a blanket. Nothing moves. Even the sentries in the
guard towers are snoring, lulled by the stillness and sapped, like their prisoners,
by the cumulative weight of the heat.

There are no politics in this waning hour of the night, no regret, no delay, no waiting.
All of that will return with the sun. The waiting is worse than the heat. Everyone
who is locked up
in Atlit waits for an answer to the same questions: When will I get out of here? When
will the past be over?

There are only 170 prisoners in Atlit tonight, and fewer than seventy women in all.
It is the same lopsided ratio on the chaotic roads of Poland and Germany, France and
Italy; the same in the train stations and the Displaced Persons camps, in queues for
water, identification cards, shoes, information. The same quotient, too, in the creaking,
leaky boats that secretly ferry survivors into Palestine.

There is no mystery to this arithmetic. According to Nazi calculation, males produced
more value alive than dead—if only marginally, if only temporarily. So they killed
the women faster.

In Barrack C, the corrugated roof releases the last degrees of yesterday’s sun, warming
the blouses and skirts that hang like ghosts from the rafters. There are burlap sacks
suspended there as well, lumpy with random, rescued treasures: photograph albums,
books, candlesticks, wooden bowls, broken toys, tablecloths, precious debris.

The narrow cots are lined up unevenly against the naked wood walls. The floor is littered
with thin wool blankets kicked aside in the heat. A baby crib stands empty in the
corner.

In Haifa, the lights are burning in the bakeries where the bread rises, and the workers
pour coffee and light cigarettes. On the kibbutz among the pine trees high in the
Carmel, dairymen are rubbing their eyes and pulling on their boots.

In Atlit, the women sleep. Nothing disturbs them. No one notices the soft stirring
of a breeze, the blessing of the last, gentlest chapter of the day.

It would be a kindness to prolong this peace and let them rest a bit longer. But the
darkness is already heavy with the gathering light. The birds have no choice but to
announce the dawn. Eyes begin to open.

Tedi woke to the smell of brine. It reached her from beyond the dunes and past the
latrines, confounding the stale breath and sour bodies of the other nineteen girls
in her barrack. She sat up on her cot, inhaled the sharp salt fragrance, and smiled.

Tedi Pastore had lost her sense of smell during the war. With too little to eat, she
had lost her period, too. Her heavy blonde hair had grown dull, her fingernails brittle
and broken. But everything was coming back to her in Palestine.

In the two weeks since she’d been in Atlit, Tedi’s nose had become as keen as a dog’s.
She could identify people with her eyes closed, not only who they were but also what
they had been up to and sometimes even what they were feeling. She caught the overwhelming
scent of sex on a girl she passed in the compound, and gagged on the strange choking
tang of burning hair
that rose from Zorah Weitz, who slept on the far side of her barrack—an angry little
Pole with flashing brown eyes and a crooked front tooth.

At first, Tedi thought she was going crazy, but once she realized that no one suspected
her secret, she stopped worrying about it and fixed her attention on the future.

Her plan was to live on a kibbutz where everyone smelled of oranges and milk and to
forget everything that had come before. For Tedi, memory was the enemy of happiness.
She had already forgotten the name of the ship that had brought her to Palestine and
of the stocky Greek boy who had held her shoulders while she retched, seasick, into
a bucket. She wondered if she could fill her head with enough Hebrew to crowd out
her native Dutch.

Tedi promised herself that the moment she walked away from Atlit, she would forget
everything about it as well: the ugly, parched-dirt compound, the long days, the heat,
and the girls from all over Europe—the nice ones as well as the obnoxious ones. She
would forget the cool blue mirage of mountains in the distance, too, and the eccentric
volunteers from the Yishuv, which is what they called the Jewish settlement here.

She would start all over, like a baby, and she toyed with the idea of putting a new
name—a Hebrew name—on her next identity card. She would become like the pioneer boys
and girls—the ones who had grown up in Poland and Romania singing about the land of
Israel and dreaming of a life filled with farmwork and folk dancing. Sons and daughters
of shopkeepers and teachers, their Zionist summer camps had given them a taste for
physical labor. All they talked about was how they wanted to plow and dig and fight
and build a state. They seemed to face the future without a single backward glance.
She thought they were wonderful.

The Zionist kids liked her, too, though she knew it was mostly because of her blonde
hair and her height. They could be arrogant and rude; one boy called Tedi “a fine
specimen” to her face. And while she knew they said such things without malice, she
was self-conscious among them. In Amsterdam, she had been one of many Jewish girls
with blue eyes, narrow hips, and broad shoulders. Like her, most of Tedi’s friends
had had at least one Lutheran parent or grandparent, and it was considered bad taste
to take note of anyone’s mixed parentage until 1940, when non-Jewish relatives became
assets.