Day After Night (2 page)

Tedi yawned and stretched. She was the barrack’s champion sleeper, out like a light
as soon as her head touched the pillow, and so slow to wake that she sometimes missed
breakfast. When she finally put her feet on the cool cement floor, she realized that
she was alone and quickly pulled on the washed-out blue dress that showed a bit too
much thigh, though it was not as revealing as the short pants some of the girls wore.

On her way out, Tedi noticed Zorah curled in a tight ball on her cot near the door,
which Tedi closed as quietly as she could. Then she ran toward the latrine, telling
herself not to worry; there really was no danger of going hungry in Atlit. Even when
the kitchen ran out of tea or sugar, there was always plenty of bread and the cucumber
and tomato salad the locals seemed to think was a fit dish for breakfast. Sitting
on the toilet, she tried to remember the word for tomato.

“
Agvaniya!
” she said.

“What?” came a voice from behind the partition.

“I didn’t know anyone was here,” said Tedi.

“If you want
agvaniya,
you’d better get to the mess in a hurry. They’re going to close the door.”

Tedi decided she would ask Nurit, one of the Hebrew teachers,
to tell her the word for cucumber, but then she remembered that there was no class
that morning. One of the political parties had called a strike against the British,
and the teachers would be taking part in the demonstration. No Hebrew, no calisthenics,
nothing to break the monotony.

Suddenly, the day loomed before her, long and empty, with nothing to do among people
to whom she could barely speak. Unlike most everyone else in Atlit, Yiddish was not
Tedi’s mother tongue. “That uncouth jargon” had been forbidden in her mother’s house,
although she had heard her grandfather speak it and learned some in the Displaced
Persons camps and on the journey to Palestine. She understood more Hebrew every day,
but it was still hard getting her mouth around the words, which often seemed like
anagrams to her, random groups of letters that needed to be puzzled together before
making sense.

“
Ag-va-ni-ya,
” she whispered, as she splashed water on her face. A pretty word, it would make a
nice name for a cat. She had always longed for a calico cat. Were there any calicos
in
Palestina
? she wondered. I will have to ask someone about cats, Tedi thought. And cucumbers.

The sound of a train whistle in the distance shook Tedi out of her reverie and lifted
her spirits. The arrival of new immigrants meant the day would pass quickly now, and
she would be spared the problem of having too much time to think.

She joined the crowd that was moving toward the southwestern corner of the camp, close
to where the train would arrive. A few of the other girls said hello to her, and a
couple of the boys tried to catch her eye. Hannah, a cheerful, moon-faced girl who
seemed to know everyone’s name, rushed over and handed her an apple. “I saw that you
weren’t at breakfast,” she said.

“Thank you very much,” Tedi answered carefully.

“Your Hebrew gets better every day,” said Hannah. She already dressed like a kibbutznik,
in shorts and a camp shirt with her hair in pigtails. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said,
gazing at the train. “We need more settlers. More and more.”

Tedi nodded furiously, ashamed at having thought of their arrival as a diversion.
She followed Hannah, who pushed her way through until they were in front, looking
out through the strands of barbwire.

There was no station or even a wooden platform at the end of the track; the rails
just came to an end in an empty field surrounded by tall grass and wildflowers. Thousands
of feet had trampled the weeds and packed the earth into a clearing and then a path
that ran parallel to the Atlit fence and down to the road that fronted the camp. It
was a long five-minute walk to the gate for the tired, frightened people who arrived
carrying battered valises and the last of their hopes.

As the engine chuffed to a halt, British soldiers opened the doors to the three boxcars.
Someone behind Tedi gasped. “How can they do that? They brought me here on a bus with
the windows painted black and that was awful. But this?” Tedi turned and caught the
faint but unsettling odor of camphor on the woman who had spoken. She was very pale,
a sign that she was a recent arrival. “Surely these people know what it means for
Jews to be forced into cattle cars. I do not understand the English. They fought Hitler.
Why do they do this?”

“It’s a terror tactic,” said a stern Bulgarian girl who wore a black neck scarf, which
signaled membership in one of the many political movements Tedi couldn’t keep straight.
“They put us in trains to frighten us and keep us weak, but it won’t
work.” The new arrivals squinted as they staggered into the blazing sunlight, clutching
at their belongings.

“Shalom, friends, shalom,” the Bulgarian girl cried, cupping her hands around her
mouth. “Shalom. Welcome.” Others joined her, calling out greetings in Hebrew and Yiddish,
German, Romanian, French, Polish, Italian, and Greek.

As the newcomers began to make their way down the path, the inmates inside the fence
kept up with them, trading rumors. Someone said that their boat had been fired upon
in Haifa. Someone else said they heard this group was mostly Auschwitz survivors.

“Did you see the man who was carried off the train? Was he dead?”

“No, it was a woman who fainted in the heat.”

“These people are all legals with papers. They’ll be out of here in a day or two.”

“How do you know that?”

By now, Tedi knew better than to pay too much attention to this kind of speculation;
they’d get the real story soon enough.

As soon as the new inmates reached the front gate, a different kind of chorus rose
from inside the camp.

“Vienna? Is someone from Vienna? Do you know the Gross-feld family? The furriers?”

“Lodz? Here is a neighbor if you are from Lodz.”

“Budapest? Avigdor Cohen family, near the High Street?”

“Slowinsky? Do you know anyone with the name of Slowinsky?”

Tedi hated this. She crossed her arms and stared at the mountains, trying to imagine
what it was like up there, if it was cooler.

Her father claimed that the name Pastore was a souvenir
from the Spanish Inquisition, when Jews fled to Holland. He said his ancestors had
produced so many more daughters than sons that by 1940, there were only eight Pastores
in all of the Netherlands. Tedi was the only one left.

If she were to see a classmate or an Amsterdam neighbor, she would be forced to remember
everything: faces, flowers, shops, markets, bridges, canals, bicycles, windows with
curtains blowing out, and windows shuttered for the night. And that would poke a dangerous
hole into the dike of forgetting that she was building, day by day.

So she kept her head turned away from the group gathered at the gate and tried to
ignore the plaintive clamor of names until the earsplitting scream of an ambulance
siren made her look. Later, other people would compare the shrill, keening screech
to the sound of a cat caught under a car wheel, to an air raid alarm, to a factory
whistle. Tedi put her fingers in her ears but it didn’t block the volume or the pain
that poured out of a frail woman who stood a few yards outside the now open gate.

She held herself oddly, with her feet turned out and her arms close to her sides.
Her hands jerked like gloves blowing on a clothesline. Her head tipped back and her
anguish ascended, filling the air with fear. It was hard to breathe. The sun grew
hotter. A child wailed.

A nurse in a white uniform rushed forward, a syringe in her hand, but the woman wheeled
around, fists raised, suddenly a crouching, punching, spitting dervish. She spun and
circled so fast that Tedi thought she actually might rise into the sky, carried off
by her own rage.

And then it was over. Two soldiers grabbed her so the nurse got the needle into her
arm. The screaming gave way to heavy, heaving sobs, as the sum total of her misery
surpassed its
unnamed and unnameable parts. A shiver passed through the crowd, as though there had
been a sudden drop in temperature.

A word emerged from the weeping, whimpered and repeated over and over.

“What is she saying?” people asked in a polyglot murmur.

“Is it Russian?”

“Is it a name?”

The translation was made and passed.

“Barbwire,” she wept. It was Czech. “Barbwire.”

In the Westerbork transit camp, Tedi had stood beside a barbwire fence and shivered
for hours in the sleet, staring silently at an endless icy gray marsh. Beside her,
a small, white-haired woman had wept softly. She’d worn an enormous man’s overcoat,
with only bedroom slippers on her feet. “They didn’t let me find my shoes,” she’d
apologized, again and again.

Finally, she’d asked Tedi to help her sit down on the ground, where she gathered the
coat around her like a tweed tent. No one saw her scrape her wrists against the razor
wire. By the time she’d fallen face forward onto the fence, her body was cold.

When Tedi arrived at Atlit, she had been shocked and frightened by the sight of barbwire,
too. But they had given her clean clothes, warm bread, a pillow, and amid so many
reassuring smiles, she had forgotten. Now all she could see was the fence: a million
razor-sharp thorns telling her that she was still something less than free, something
less than human.

The nurse cradled the weeping woman in her arms, rocking her like a tired child. She
signaled to one of the guards, who picked her up and carried her to the infirmary.

“Poor thing,” said Hannah, tears on her cheeks. “They will take her to hospital straightaway.”

“Humph,” said Lillian, a plump Austrian girl with a weak
chin who was never seen without lipstick. “She is crazy like a fox. That performance
will get her out of here in a hurry.”

“Aren’t you the heartless one,” Hannah said.

“Not at all,” she said. No one liked Lillian, but she was tolerated because of the
hoard of cosmetics in her suitcase. “I’m only being honest. We all look out for ourselves
in this world.”

“That woman is never going to be right in the head,” Hannah said. “And it’s all the
fault of those damned English for putting her into a prison camp all over again.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Tedi said, placing her finger on a spiky barb. “Aren’t
we all hanging by the same little thread that snapped for her?”

Hannah grabbed Tedi’s hand. “Enough of that,” she said. “You can help me get the new
ones settled in.”

The main gates were closed now. All the newcomers stood, huddled together, staring
at the biggest structure in Atlit, an imposing wooden barn that the inmates had dubbed
“the Delousing Shed,” or just “Delousing.” Prison guards and translators from the
Jewish Agency were trying to move them into two lines: men in front of the doorway
at the right, women in a queue by a door on the left.

Tedi caught the strong, sweat-soaked smell of fear even before she saw the faces fixed
in horror at the spectacle of men and women being separated and sent through dim doorways
on their way to unseen showers. Beside both doors, twelve-foot-tall drums clanged
and hissed, exactly like the ones near the entrances in Auschwitz, where they had
also been told to surrender their clothes to be cleaned and fumigated.

Some of the women wept. Some of the men mumbled prayers. Couples called to each other
with words of encouragement or farewell.

One of the translators asked Hannah to see if she could do anything with a stoop-shouldered
man who refused to move or speak and was holding up the men’s queue. Hannah grabbed
Tedi’s arm and pulled her along, too.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said gently. “But this is not what you think.”

He glanced at the machines and shook his head.

“I know,” Hannah said. “They look like the ones in the concentration camp. But no
one here will be killed. Here you will get your clothes back, I promise.” He let her
lead him up to the door so he could peek inside. “Look,” she said, pointing to the
ceiling. “You see the open windows there? None of the rooms here is enclosed. The
shower is only a shower. The water may be cold and the disinfectants are unpleasant,
but there are no gas chambers. And once you are cleaned up, you will have food and
hot tea and delicious fruit grown by the Jews of Palestine.”

Tedi could see that the man wanted to believe what this glowing Jewish girl was telling
him, but he could not reconcile what she was saying with the testimony of his eyes
and ears.

“Like Terezin,” he muttered at last, naming the Potemkin village that the Nazis had
used to fool the Red Cross, showcasing Jews playing in symphony orchestras and mounting
operas for children—all of it a stage set on top of an abattoir.

“This is not Terezin, comrade,” said Hannah. “Remember, you are in Eretz Yisrael.
You will not be killed. You will be taken care of. If you are ill, the doctors will
look after you. I promise.”

He sighed. “You promise,” he said with a sad shake of his head, but he followed her
to a table where an English soldier, barely old enough to shave, had been watching
them. The
young man got to his feet, offered his hand and said, in Hebrew, “Shalom. I am Private
Gordon.”

“Is this man a Jew?” he asked Hannah, incredulous.

“I don’t think so.”

Tedi was struck by the young soldier’s kindness, and then watched as his eyes wandered
down toward Hannah’s chest.

“Thank you, Private Gordon,” Hannah said, showing off her English as she sternly ignored
his attentions. “This gentleman is ready for you now. My friend and I go to help with
the girls who get ready. Yes? Okay?”

“Okay.” He grinned.

As she followed Hannah into Delousing, Tedi had to stop so that her eyes could adjust
to the dimness. It was much cooler inside the building, but the noise was overwhelming.
Hissing machines, running water, and voices rose up to the distant metal ceiling,
magnified and distorted as they bounced between the bare walls. A burst of shrill
laughter issued from somewhere deep in the back of the hall, a demented grace note
that made her shudder.