I touched the second small bead. “Hail Mary full of grace,” I whispered. This time I let the words come out of my mouth. I could not hold them inside.
Mother Superior looked at me with compassion. “Your father must have been a very special man. He convinced us all that you were Catholic so we would not even have to hide you, like the other Jewish children. He knew that the best way to hide you would be to keep you out in the open. He was clever. And selfless, too. He put your welfare before his own desire to keep you by his side, and that is what saved you. Your father gave life to you. Twice. And life is too precious to waste on self-pity. You must move on. For him.” I touched the third bead and let out another Hail Mary.
“Now go, my child. Your life is starting over. You will go back to the name you came with.”
The nun’s face was a blur now through my tears. Dare I contradict Mother Superior? What did I have to lose now, anyway? “But I left that other name behind long ago. I don’t want to leave. This is my home.”
“You must go. They are waiting for you outside. Go in peace, my child. Your journey is blessed.”
I clutched the cross on my rosary with both hands. Jesus was being crucified beneath my fingertips. “But—”
“That is all now. You will do as you are told—”
“But what about Mass?”
“You do not need to pray Mass anymore. You will ask your people how they pray. It’s time to go.”
What did that mean? My father never prayed. Were there Jews who prayed? What did Mother Superior mean when she said to ask my people? The nuns and the girls in the convent were my people, the only people I had known for the past six-and-a-half years. If I did not go to Mass, if I did not pray the Rosary, if I did not kneel before the Blessed Virgin Mary, if I did not believe in the Holy Trinity, in what did I believe? When I sat in confession before my First Communion, I had denounced my father’s Godless way of life. Why was Mother Superior sending me back to a life without Jesus my savior?
I let the cross drop from my clasp. My whole body felt suddenly limp. My legs became jelly, and then they gave out beneath me. That is the last thing I remember before waking up in a car for the first time since I had been dropped off at the convent. Once again knowing not who I was or where I was going.
It feels so good to be writing this to you now, my dear Hope, to finally be sharing my story with you. I could not have done this before. It was too hard. I wanted only to bury it inside. Make it go away. Like those voices in my head. But now that I am at the end, the memories are filling my head instead of the voices, and they are spilling out faster than my pen can recreate them on the page.
So I continue . . .
I left the Sisters of the Cross that very day Mother Superior called me to her office. In my uniform, with my rosary around my neck. “You won’t need that where you’re going,” the man who was driving the car told me. And he was correct. I was a Jew now.
From the car, I went to a canvas-covered truck, where other teenagers were waiting. We were told to be quiet, which was not hard for me. We were often in silence in the convent. They fed us on the truck, and we had a few rest stops, but we drove for a long time. We even crossed borders. When we reached our destination, I was told we were in a displaced persons camp where we would prepare to move to a kibbutz in Palestine. I did not know what that meant. You see I had never heard of Zionism. If my father had mentioned it to me as a child, I did not remember. I had not even heard of Theodore Herzl, whose photo hung at the entrance to the camp like a crucifix over the altar.
But I had no home, so what did it matter if I didn’t know what a kibbutz was? If it would provide a roof over my head and food in my belly, it was as good a place as any. I soon learned that a kibbutz was an agricultural commune in the Holy Land that took in orphans like me. Jewish orphans. A “hidden child,” they called me. When I told them I was not one of those children hiding in the convent basement like rats, they said I should get off of my high horse and consider myself lucky I was still alive and that there was someone willing to have me. That was the last time I said anything to anyone about being different.
Like at the convent, I soon learned to fit in. Not fitting in was not an option. Thank God for David, my dear friend who would later become your father. But then he was just David, the other outsider who tried to be an insider. He too did not tell you his full story. David was half-French, half-Czech. He had lived in Prague, but his mother was French, so he spoke both languages. He even had a British grandmother on one side, so he spoke some English, too, I later discovered. They taught us Hebrew, but I was not such a fast learner, so I was relieved to have someone to talk to. There were children from all over Europe. It was hard to communicate. I had no real friends, except David. He understood me. My language and my soul. Although we were not allowed to speak anything but Hebrew in the public spaces, we would find places to talk in private in French.
David and his family were deported to the Family Camp in Theresienstadt and then later to Auschwitz. He and his sister, who were both teenagers by then, were sent to a special children’s section of the camp where they were treated comparatively well. Apparently, it was used as some kind of front for the Red Cross. There were studies and activities in this children’s section, as well as better food and bathing facilities. The man who ran it was a Jew, a Kapo, and he had pull with the Nazis. He was an athletic man and an educator, who had never married nor had children but treated the children in the camp like his own. It seems he had a special relationship with one particular SS commandant who sent presents for him and the children.
This Kapo, whom David called Jackie, took a liking to David and gave him first from the cakes and other treats the SS man sent. It was because of these two men that his life was saved. Jackie did not survive, though. When the children were all eventually sent to the gas chambers upon news of the impending Allied victory, Jackie went with the children to their deaths, even though the SS commandant had arranged for him to be saved. But he refused, saying his place was with the children. He was as dedicated to them as a father would have been. There were good Kapos too. And Jackie was extraordinary, even. He asked his SS special friend to save David instead of him. And that is how my dear David’s life was spared.
David did not go to the gas chambers the day the others, including his parents, did. Even his sister died with the others. The SS man had David taken from the children’s camp the night before, and David spent the rest of the war living in this SS commandant’s quarters. The day the camp was liberated, David found the man hanging with a rope around his neck in the bedroom. David suffered; he paid a price in order to survive, but he insisted he had been lucky. He’d been spared to be of service later.
David wanted to heal people, he told me. To heal the world. And I believed he would one day. His presence comforted me, kept me sane. He was my best friend. David saved me, but I am jumping ahead.
David and I both ended up in that DP camp in Italy which was run by the Betar Zionist movement, and where they both cared for us and indoctrinated us. The two went hand in hand. Most of the children became avid Zionists just from those months of immersion. Although also, of course, because of the horrors they had suffered on account of their Jewishness. They saw it would make no difference whether or not they considered themselves Jewish, as long as the rest of the world did. So they may as well embrace it, and fight for it, they said. Now they could be proud to be Jews, and live amongst other Jews and protect one another. But I never felt totally convinced, and I never felt totally Jewish. I went along, like I had at the beginning in the convent, because I knew I had no other choice. But I was older at this point, already almost eighteen, more experienced and scarred by life. I was not as easily influenced. And I was not in the camp for as long as I was in the convent.
Then one day, they told us it was time to start our journey home. I knew they did not mean back to from where we had come. They meant our homeland, what Herzl had called our Judenstaat, our Stat
e of the Jews. Eretz Israel. We sailed for what felt like about two weeks on a rickety freight carrier. I don’t know if I was more afraid of the boat sinking, the British finding us, or the heat and hunger killing us.
It was summer, and it was deathly hot. The deck was so crowded, there was barely any space to breathe. And we all had to take our turns below deck, which was as bad as the cattle cars that transported some of the others to the camps, they said. That is the first time David saved me. He told the crew I was sick and fragile—the latter was true, at least—and while I knew he was not so hardy himself, he insisted on taking my turn below deck. He spent double time below so I would not have to. Everyone assumed we were in love, a couple. They teased David about proposing to me and letting the captain marry us on the ship. David blushed, but there was nothing like that between us. He was like a protective brother to me.
There were deaths on the boat. They threw the bodies overboard. I could not look. But many of the others did not seem phased by it at all. They said they had seen much worse where they spent the war. As we approached Haifa, we saw the Carmel mountains in front of us, and everyone broke out into singing the HaTikvah ballad they had taught us in the DP camp. I watched and felt relieved at the thought of getting off of that ship and starting a life, but I did not join in the singing. People were crying from the joy of reaching Palestine. Some even had the strength to dance. But their hopes were diminished when we were stopped by British soldiers who announced over megaphones that we were under arrest and had to remain on the boat for another two weeks. We were in quarantine. Word had reached them about the passengers who had died and been thrown overboard. They suspected Bubonic Plague.
The Jewish yishuv in Haifa sent us food and water, but those two weeks were even more hellish than when we were at sea. There was no running water, and the stench was overwhelming. When we were told we were finally being brought to the Athlit detention camp in Haifa, we were elated. Anything was better than spending another minute on that boat. A few weeks later they let us leave, which we knew was very lucky since most other boats like ours that were caught were turned around and sent back to Europe or to Cyprus. A group of Betar halutzim loaded us onto pickup trucks and drove us to their kibbutz, which was to be my new home. I know I never told you I had lived in Palestine. Or that your father had. The memories from there were just too painful. We wanted a fresh start. But, again, I am getting ahead of myself.
While I had never seen a kibbutz before, I knew what to expect. They had been preparing us for kibbutz life. And the conditions felt ironically familiar. I had simply gone from one institution to another to another. That was to be my fate. You see, Hope, Kibbutz Zohar was in some ways the opposite of the convent, yet it was in other ways the same. You could tell me if it is still that way today, as I know you are their neighbor, although I hear kibbutz life has changed over the years.
Supplies were scarce but material things unimportant, anyway. I shared a room with eleven other comrades around my age, which meant from about sixteen to twenty years old. Age was not important among us “survivors,” as they called us, because many of us were not even sure how old we were. And starvation and hiding had stunted the growth of so many, too, so that it was hard to tell anyone’s age. If you were a man or a woman, that was not important, either, at least not in some ways. The rooms were co-ed. We all slept in our clothes. Feet to head, in rows. Sure, there was attraction between comrades, and everything that goes along with that; but marriage, starting a family—this was not what was on people’s minds. If children were born, they would live in the children’s house. The collective and the cause were what was important.
There were six bunk beds in our crowded sparse room—just like in the convent. And like in the convent, there was no such thing as privacy. And no such thing as private property, either. My rosary was the only thing I could call my own in the convent, and it was the only thing I could call my own on the kibbutz, too. And only because I kept it a secret from the other comrades. That and my old convent uniform. No one knew I had hidden the uniform beneath my mattress, and that I took my rosary with me in my pocket everywhere I went. If people knew, I could have been thrown off of the kibbutz—not only because my Jewish loyalty would have been suspect, but also because no one was allowed to own a thing. Everyone ate the same food, wore the same clothing, sang the same songs, danced the same dances, read the same books, and spoke the same language.
God was absent on the kibbutz, but for most, the cause of building a socialist Jewish homeland substituted just fine to give life structure and meaning. But not for me. No, a cause was not God. Those rules were man-made, and they had cracks in them. If all people were equal, why couldn’t I drive the tractor? I passed the course with my male comrades. Why did they only let me drive the kibbutz car and not a tractor, like the men? Tell me, did my womb, my ovaries, my breasts, make me less able to steer or move the gears? And if all nations would unite in a socialist ideal, why were we fighting for a Jewish homeland and not a universal socialist anti-country, anti-nation state? And if religion was the opium of the masses, why did it matter if I was Jewish or Christian? And why couldn’t the people living in the Arab village down the valley, Yakut al-Jalil, or the other one across the valley from it, Bir al-Demue, join the kibbutz if they wanted? But I would never have dared to say these thoughts aloud. I would have been laughed out of the kibbutz. Those Arabs were considered at best invisible, uncultured, illiterate peasants, and at worst violent, savage, beguiling enemies.
Thank God for David. He was with me in the camp, and he was with me on the boat, and he was with me on the kibbutz. We were inseparable back then. And his optimistic spirit kept me going when I could see only a dismal future ahead. He was an artistic soul. He saw the beauty even in that arid, crowded land to which they had finally brought us in the dark of night. To him, a pomegranate seed was a jewel and a sabra fruit a sunset. This did not go over well with the macho kibbutz men. So much for equality. He was good looking, with his dark complexion, light eyes, his fine red lips, and his thick wavy hair. But he didn’t swagger, and he didn’t boast. Like me, he was different, and he had secrets. We kept each other’s secrets. If not for him, I don’t know what I would have done. I would have felt completely alone.
But the height of my despair at the kibbutz came one Saturday afternoon some months after our arrival. On Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath, they showed films. This was the highlight of my week, a chance to escape to another place. The comrades on the kibbutz laughed at the impossibility of It’s a Wonderful Life, with its world of angels and happy endings. But I did believe in angels. Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael . . . The nuns at the convent had been angels, too. I did not believe in happy endings, though. That was for sure. The day I am talking about, they were showing the first episode of Rosselline’s Paisan series. The reel opened with news footage, as usual. This time, though, was different. This was old footage that was finally being released from Europe. From the war.
Live skeletons in stripes walked across the screen. Dead skeletons were piled in heaps for mass graves. The camera zoomed in on a face with no teeth and all eyes. Eyes holding such suffering that they looked hollow, practically not even human at all. Buchenwald, the caption on the screen read. That was the name of the concentration camp where Mother Superior said my father, your grandfather, had died. I searched the faces for my father. But even if he had been one of those skeletons on the screen, I would not have recognized him. They were ghosts. As I had gone about my life in the shelter of the convent, my father had become a skeleton and then a ghost. Like Jesus, he too had died a martyr’s death. He too had held the suffering of the world on his shoulders. He too had died for the sins of humanity. The sins of his own slaughterers.
My father did not believe in God or the Son of God. Like my kibbutz comrades, he would have scorned what the nuns taught me. But I could not bear a world that let my father become a ghost for no reason, a world that was all suffering with no redemption or relief
in sight. A world with no purpose other than to kill or be killed. I noticed some comrades left the dining hall. Some of them had even been in camps like those. I heard someone vomiting in the bathroom. But I could not stand up. I was frozen. I sat through the whole first episode of Paisan, watching the heroine on the big screen fall to her death, and I felt myself falling, falling, falling.
I left the dining hall but could not go back to my room. I needed to be alone. And walk. There was a golden cross on the horizon that had been beckoning me since my arrival at Kibbutz Zohar. It was calling me now so loudly that I had to go to it. I walked along the length of the valley, towards the cross, which was gold and shimmering in the sunlight against the sapphire sky. Like the name of the Arab village near the cross, where I was headed. Yakut al-Jalil. Sapphire of Galilee. I remember looking ahead as I walked, my eyes glued to that cross. My destination. I watched egret birds circle above a flock of sheep grazing in the distance on the verdant hills. The only sounds I heard were a dog barking and the clicks of a Bedouin shepherd giving orders to his sheep. As I tell this story now, for the first time in my life, it is as if I am still there, taking step after step towards that golden cross.
As the cross grew larger, it became clear to me that it was attached to a church. The chapel was inside a compound that reminded me of Sisters of the Cross, although it was smaller in scale. There were but a few buildings. Modest stone structures, with a stone wall all around. But there was a door. A large wooden door with a sign reading, “Sisters of Mary: Enter in Peace,” hanging on a chain, and a simple latch keeping the door shut. I lifted the hook from the metal loop and gave the door a nudge. It opened without much effort on my part, as if the nuns had been waiting for me.
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