The Night of the Burning (11 page)

“Devorah,” I ventured.

“How do you like the
Edinburgh Castle
?” Pete asked. His Polish sounded stiff, as if he hadn’t spoken it for a long time, and sometimes he inserted a few English words. It was the Polish of Panya Truda—and of the villagers who burned our shul.

I managed to give a nod, which apparently satisfied him.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Pete agreed before turning to say a few words in English to his companion. “My friend Joe here wants you to try his peppermint toffees, so let’s sit down for a bit and we’ll tell you the story of the
Edinburgh Castle
.”

Before I had a chance to wonder about danger, I was sucking on a candy that filled my mouth with a delicious icy fire, and Pete was telling me sea tales. It turned out that Joe spoke some German, which is similar to Yiddish, and also that he had a comic talent for acting out the meaning. When he imitated a greedy gull, I startled myself by
sending a real laugh out into the wind, my head giddy with sea air and freedom.

Nechama and some playmates found me on the deck and gaped at my new friends.

“Where you sleep, there’s not much fresh air, is there?” Pete said to Nechama and me and the rest of the growing audience. “Yessir, we can see it in your faces!”

Joe performed a little pantomime of the children rolling from side to side and then being sick into the ocean. Bubbly laughter opened my chest.

“Now come along with us, don’t be shy,” Pete continued. “We’re going to show you the posh quarters for the toffs up above.”

We followed Pete and Joe on the tour. It soon became clear that “posh” meant fancy and “toffs” meant wealthy people. After a quiet conversation with a sympathetic steward, Pete and Joe allowed us to peek into a spacious suite with real beds and a separate sitting area, oil paintings and gold light sconces on the walls, and immense bowls of flowers everywhere. We gasped in admiration.

“That’s a stateroom,” Pete explained proudly. “The King’s first cousin once slept in that very bed.”

“We sang for the King,” piped up Nechama. “The Queen smiled at me.”

It was the sailors’ turn to be impressed. “Blimey,” Joe said. “I’m honored to meet such famous singers.” He swept a grand curtsy to the ground.

I laughed along with the rest. There was no need to
mention how disappointed I’d been in the King and Queen. “Blimey.” That sounded like a useful word to remember.

Many of the other third-class passengers were also friendly and spent hours teaching us songs and drawing funny pictures for us on scraps of paper. I tried drawing, too, and one of them admired my sketch of our village. “You have artistic talent,” he said, in front of everyone.

The unexpected compliment made me bold enough to ask him and his Yiddish-speaking friends, “Did you know anyone from a village called Domachevo?” But most of the refugees wanted to talk about the future rather than the past.

One day, I noticed a group of smartly dressed men and women peering down at us from the deck for first-class passengers.

“I wish they’d stop staring,” I whispered to Nechama, squirming uncomfortably.

“I don’t mind. Some ladies in beautiful dresses came down and gave us sweets and little cakes this morning.”

“Weren’t you shy?” I asked.

“No, because the cakes had thick pink icing on them,” replied Nechama.

I opened my mouth to remonstrate. How was I supposed to keep Nechama safe if she went around talking to strangers? Then I remembered my own quick friendship with the kind sailors, and I shut my mouth again.

Seventeen days after we left London, I was awakened by loud noises and shouted commands. I trembled. I was suddenly back with Nechama and Aunt Friedka as a neighbor shouted warnings of a pogrom.

But Nechama squealed happily in the bunk above me. “Pete was right. He said we’d reach Africa today.” She pulled on a skirt and shirt and was gone.

“Wait, Nechama. Put on something warm,” I ordered. Then I gave up, scrambling into my clothes and carrying Nechama’s coat under my arm as I chased my sister up the flights of stairs to the main deck.

It was still early in the morning; the sun had not yet risen. But below the skies, in the distance, was land. A surprisingly large, mistily purple, mountainous land. South Africa. We could see South Africa.

“Look at the mountain that’s completely flat at the top,” Pete called out to us as he hurried past. “That one’s called Table Mountain.”

A pure white tablecloth of clouds hung down over the edges of the mountain. It reminded me of something. “The table’s ready for Shabbes dinner,” I whispered to myself. But Nechama overheard and turned to smile at me. We were remembering the same Shabbes table. My eyes blurred with tears.

By the time I could see clearly again, the ship had drawn closer to the great land mass, which glimmered with thousands of lights. The white sparkles were woven into diamond necklaces swinging from the breasts of the
mountains down to the dark sea.

I gasped. “It looks like fairyland in my English books.”

The sun came up slowly. All of us were on deck now, chattering and pointing. We could just make out small moving shapes on the dock.

“Those are people!” Nechama exclaimed. “Look at all the people waiting to meet us.”

“There must be hundreds,” I said.

“Thousands,” Laya said with awe.

“Yes, the whole town’s turned out to see what monkeys Daddy Ochberg has brought them!” Little Faygele giggled.

We laughed excitedly.

“They must really want us,” Nechama said to me, and we squeezed hands.

The crowd on the wharf became clearer. There were adults and children, swaying together from side to side. And gradually the sound of singing crept over the water and reached our ship.

A thrill rippled through me. “Nechama,” I said, “Papa taught us that song, remember?”

Nechama leaned over to listen and a faint recognition lit her eyes. “I think I remember. Sing it for us. What does it mean?” she asked.

I started to sing softly. In an instant, the children around me had picked up the words, or at least had remembered the beautiful melody, and we swayed arm in arm as we sang again and again:

“Hinei ma tov u’ma nayim

Shevet achim gam yachad.

How good and how pleasant it is

When families dwell together in unity.”

The group on the dock could hear us singing, too, and their own singing became louder. Back and forth the words traveled. Voices rose and linked across the water in the dawn’s light, a ribbon of sound threading us closer and closer, singing of safety and reunion.

1921

From our bus, festooned with streamers by the welcoming crowd at the Cape Town dock, I saw a strange world. How very different it was from Europe. My part of Poland was flat and brown and marshy; even London had been gray most days. But Cape Town in spring was like a painting from one of my books. It was as if someone had decided to draw the bluest of blue skies and an emerald ocean and golden mountains between. Then the sun had been painted in, with a wash of color kissing everything.

The people, too, were of many different colors. The Jews who had greeted us so kindly had been almost as white as we were, and I saw other whites walking and driving on the streets. Many people were a glowing and very definite brown. Those in between in color seemed to talk in a lilting singsong. Then there were lightly colored women with long, straight, and brilliant black hair, wearing slim pants underneath bright tunics.

“What are those people eating?” Nechama asked me, pointing out the window at a white woman and her little girl sitting on a park bench and sharing what looked like a large, curved, pale yellow finger. As we stared, the woman casually pulled off a thick skin. I shivered, remembering the whispers about cannibals I had heard in the orphanage in Pinsk.

The bus made a sharp turn into the shadow of the mountains and puffed along a gravel driveway through a forest of pines. It stopped in front of a large, gracious building. At the door waited a smiling woman in a starched white uniform and a white nurse’s cap. Hanging out of the windows of the orphanage were fifty, sixty, maybe seventy sturdy and tanned South African children, staring with unabashed curiosity. We stared back.

Daddy Ochberg stood up to greet the woman. “Lunch first, Matron, then playtime,” he called as he stepped out. “These children have been cooped up in close quarters for too long.”

We climbed down, nudging against Daddy Ochberg and one another like scared lambs. Nechama had lost all her breezy optimism about Africa. “Itzik said there will be spiders and snakes under our beds. Will there? I didn’t like the thing that woman was eating in the park. Will there be real food here?” she whispered. I didn’t have any answers.

After a few hours, we agreed that the food was as good as in London and that, although there were a few spiders, there didn’t seem to be any snakes. Then Faygele burst out
laughing. “This place is so crowded that there isn’t any room for snakes!”

“The children are right,” Mr. Bobrow told Daddy Ochberg and Matron. “Even after half of the children leave for Johannesburg tomorrow, where will we put the rest? Your new wing won’t be ready for weeks.”

Half of the children leaving for Johannesburg? I turned to Daddy Ochberg in shock. After all this time together?

Daddy Ochberg saw my face and reached down to smooth my hair back. “Everything will be all right, Devorah of the big dark eyes,” he said. To Mr. Bobrow, he answered, smiling, “We will stretch the walls.” And we did. All of us slept in two long rooms, some in small beds and others on close-packed mattresses on the floor. Little suitcases spilled their contents everywhere.

The next day, one hundred of Daddy’s orphans were sent by train from Cape Town to the Jewish orphanage in Johannesburg. Nechama and Faygele sobbed as they waved goodbye to those who were leaving us. But my eyes were dry and the muscles in my face felt like stone. I wouldn’t say another goodbye; I couldn’t. I turned my face away as the bus rumbled down the driveway between the pines.

“Goodbye.” “Bye.” “Write to us soon.” “Goodbye.” When the shouts of farewell had curled up toward the mountains and disappeared in the Cape Town breeze, there was a long silence on the steps of the orphanage. Then we moved back inside, slowly.

I saw Daddy Ochberg glance at Mr. Bobrow, raising his eyebrows in an exaggerated movement and cocking his head toward all of us with a concerned look. Mr. Bobrow nodded back seriously.

“We can almost fit in now,” Itzik commented.

Daddy Ochberg brightened. “Time for a story!” he announced. We looked at him with interest as he settled himself on a narrow little mattress and leaned back against the wall. “Do you know the story of the man who complained that his house was too small?” he asked, patting the bed next to him to invite us to gather close.

“Tell us,” Yankel shouted.

“Once there was a man,” Daddy Ochberg began, “who lived in a tiny house with his wife and ten children.

“One day he complained to the rabbi of the town. ‘There is no room in my house for me to move around.’ The rabbi thought for a while and then he said, ‘Bring your donkey into the house with you.’

“The man was amazed but he could not disobey the rabbi, so he led the donkey into the house and gave it some of the family’s precious space. A few days later he complained to the rabbi. ‘Rabbi, now there is no room in my house for me to eat.’

“The rabbi considered the problem and then told the man to bring his goats into the house, too. The man was in despair, but he did as the rabbi advised.

“After a day or two he complained again. ‘Rabbi, now there is no room in my house for me to think.’ ‘Take your
goats out of the house,’ the rabbi replied.

“The man did so and marveled at the quiet and space he had gained. A few days later, the rabbi told him to take his donkey out of the house, also. ‘Oy,’ the man said proudly, ‘what a big house I have, with so much space for my wife, my children, and myself.’ “

Daddy Ochberg laughed deep from his belly and the children laughed, too, looking around at the room that now seemed just the right size.

Within a few weeks, the new rooms built by Daddy Ochberg at the back of the orphanage were complete, and the orphans were divided twelve to a room, by age group. For the first time in our lives, Nechama and I did not sleep next to each other. Excitedly, Nechama moved her things to the new room she would share with her little friends. But I tossed and turned in my bed at night. My arms felt empty. I know they can’t keep all the sisters and brothers together in the same room, I thought, but Nechama needs me. That’s why I came with her to South Africa.

A small number of Ochberg children left the Cape Jewish Orphanage during those early weeks. Two girls and a boy had cousins far north in Rhodesia; letters had arrived inviting them to come and live in the copper-mining towns. Three toddlers were adopted by Jewish families in Cape Town who couldn’t have their own children. Itzik and another big boy were sent to the country to live with a Jewish shopkeeper and a Jewish farmer.

Itzik had been in the orphanage in Pinsk when Nechama and I arrived there. He was the first boy to admire me, in my flour-bag apron in Warsaw. Of all the people in the world except Nechama, I’d known him and Mr. Bobrow the longest.

I listened anxiously as Daddy Ochberg read Itzik’s letters aloud. He wrote to say that he was earning a small amount of money working in his new family’s general store after school every day. “My plan is to save up and open my own shop when I turn eighteen,” he wrote. “I work long hours, but Mr. Katz is a fair boss. Mrs. Katz is very kind to me and a wonderful cook.”

I was relieved to hear Itzik sounding so well and happy. And I was glad that no more children were sent away. After three weeks in the orphanage, I felt as if we had lived there for three months. The big building was already home.

I loved London and the ship, I remembered one night, reaching down to touch the boxes of books still housed, at Mr. Ochberg’s instruction, under my bed. But I think I like Cape Town even more. It’s colorful and warm and safe. No more pogroms, no more hunger, no more sickness. And I see Nechama at breakfast every morning. It is good here. I hope Mama and Papa know that.