The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel

by Dorothy Uhnak

  At home, in the Bronx, the war had been a private sorrow for those who lost a son, an inconvenience for those who had to adapt to rationing and blackouts. It had been a time when a great many unemployed people were put to work, at high salaries and long hours. Now, a whole generation of working-class young men were looking forward to a future unimaginable to their parents. There were low-cost mortgages available, amazing new suburban developments being planned. Sons were talking about moving away, having their own houses—being owners, not renters. People who had never even thought about college, some who hadn’t even finished high school, were going back to school on the GI Bill. The government was taking good care of its veterans, and there was a feeling of relief, joy, and growth all around. But Ben Herskel felt like a stranger in the midst of all this activity, all this exuberance. His days at the camps had become the most important part of his life, and he could not explain to well-meaning friends his decision to accept employment back in Germany. It was inexplicable to anyone who hadn’t been there.

  Only Charley O’Brien, of all his friends, understood. He had witnessed. He had tried, along with Ben, to do something, however small, their own private attempt at justice.

  Charley was coming to his own decisions; he would deal with what he had seen and learned in his own way. That was Charley’s business. Dante was all set up in law school. He had been a hero, decorated and promoted and discharged with great honor and a great future. Dante was the smartest of them all, the most ambitious. He would go far. Even Megan had benefitted from the war. It would have been nearly impossible for her to get into medical school if all the ambitious bright young men had been home. Not that she didn’t qualify; she certainly did. But it would have been different if there hadn’t been a war.

  And Eugene had been untouched by any of it. He had been at the Vatican the whole time, right in the midst of the Fascists, without having any real dealings or contacts with them. He wondered if Gene knew the role the Vatican had played in helping to transfer the war criminals to safety, to places where they would not only be unanswerable for their crimes, but would be guaranteed lives of safety and security and prosperity. He knew Gene could have had nothing to do with any of this, but he was a part of the church that had engineered and put into effect this ignominious “rescue.”

  It was a terrible, strange, almost irrational thing, but arriving back in Germany, Ben felt he had come home to do what he had been destined to do.

  Ben Herskel served as an interpreter-interrogator for scores of witnesses who prepared to testify against the defendants at Nuremberg. He spent hour after hour comforting and coaxing, trying not to show any feeling beyond benign compassion. It was his job to help the international staff prepare the various cases against the defendants. He himself had seen the end product of the horror—the corpses and near dead at the extermination camps, and daily he himself had to speak with the survivors. It was more difficult than anything he had ever done.

  He took their statements—accounts of the most extraordinary cruelties, perpetrated not on millions of anonymous people but on individuals—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. When the survivors spoke of the roundups, they meant of themselves, their families, their neighbors. When they told of the transports, it was they who had been inside the cattle cars, had seen the weak and the old and the young die and lie untouched until the final destination. When they spoke of “the selection,” they spoke graphically of families torn apart, of infants tossed, literally, to death in front of mothers, of husbands helplessly watching wives shoved to the death line while they, stronger, still of some value, were put into work lines. Ben Herskel knew that each was a human being with a past that reached back long before the Holocaust. Each had had a life before the Final Solution.

  Yet the empty people he spoke with hour after hour, day after day, were themselves frightening in their very lack of emotion. Their voices were flat, their faces dull, their stories always the same. The Army psychologists counseled the interrogators, the translators, the international social and medical workers, to help them cope with the effects of this massive inquest. Still, some of the staff members eventually could not take any more. Hating their own weakness, their unfulfilled fury at the perpetrators, they found themselves unable to carry out the job they were assigned.

  Ben Herskel hardened himself to the recitation of facts, which every day seemed more like a fiction concocted by sick minds. He stored emotion away for future use. He didn’t need counseling. He asked the necessary questions, noted the necessary facts. He worked with organizations that tried to locate family members, that found few parents, few aunts, uncles, neighbors—who more often brought together, the children who had been spared, the brothers and sisters. The meager joy was mingled with profound sadness.

  At night, Ben wrote down the stories for his own diary. These had to be recorded beyond the courtroom, beyond the newspaper reports that listed only numbers—in much the same way the Germans had accounted for the concentration camp population. These lives were more than numbers; they had to be shown to be more than numbers. Ben took down the individual stories as told to him, and though the circumstances were numbing in repetition, it was his responsibility to present the survivors and to remember the dead as whole human beings.

  When the complicated arrangements were finally completed and the trials began, Ben often visited the court. As he stared at the men in the dock, what he found difficult to accept was that these middle-aged men—with their prison-grayed faces, their stomach ailments, their coughs, their complaints about the light shining always in their cells, their requests for a different kind of soap or shaving cream—had been the same men who had planned and put into action the most savage crimes in history. They looked like schoolteachers, sales clerks, accountants, bakers, bus drivers. They looked just like everyone else, now, in their baggy clothing, as they sat, earphones on their heads, some nodding off, bored, impatient, some sitting erect, anger and indignation frozen on their faces. There were those who damned their judges and their victims. There were those who looked imploringly about the courtroom. I am but a man; I had to do what I was told. I had no idea. I never really knew. I only followed orders.

  Ben had wanted the monsters to look like monsters, but they looked like men. After the trials, he felt no inclination to stay around for the executions. What difference did a certain number of hangings make? What did they change? Whom did they bring back? What lessons did they teach?

  He couldn’t face going home. There was no way Ben felt he could pick up his former life. He was aching and empty, he had unfinished business. When he was approached by an official of the American Jewish Relief Organization, working with survivors, he accepted employment without even asking about salary or working conditions.

  His wasn’t a job; it was a life. The refugee camps were overwhelmed with arrivals from Poland, where new, un-publicized pogroms had taken place against Jews liberated from the death camps. Except to provide food, clothing, and some sort of medical care, there was little the well-meaning organizations could offer the survivors. There was so much need: people died from disease and from the long years of maltreatment. And from despair.

  Ben helped those with families in the United States. They could emigrate outside of any quota system. In some cases he even helped them to invent families, providing documents and forged papers. Not many asked to be returned to their original homelands. In their former ghettos or in their cosmopolitan cities, their friends and neighbors had either participated actively or watched complacently as they had been rounded up and deported. Their homes and businesses had been taken over; they were not wanted and their return would mean death.

  Ben could not help noticing a young woman who seemed connected with no particular agency but was everywhere at once. Her name was Eva Fine, and she was exceptional.

  For too many years, at the camps, during the trials and now, dealing with survivors, Ben had seen nothing but emaciated, death-faced women, lost and directionless,
their youth and health stolen from them. Most of the organization women were older, stone-faced and stoic, trying to deal with the horror they encountered.

  At twenty-three, Eva Fine was just a few years younger than he. She was tall and long-legged, with a look of glowing health. Her brown hair was thick and shot through with sun-bleached streaks. Her complexion was clear of makeup, shining with natural color. Her eyes were light brown and thick-lashed, and they looked directly at you when she spoke.

  “Do you have the list of names I asked you for yesterday?” she asked Ben. It was almost a demand: Don’t keep me waiting. She had requested the names of fifty of the strongest men between the ages of eighteen and thirty, who had no place in the world waiting for them. There were hundreds of thousands of such people, but she had been specific in her request. They must all be located within camps not more than five miles from headquarters. They must all be made available for her and her people to speak with as soon as possible.

  She was evasive about what organization she represented and who “her people” were.

  “Where do you intend to take these men?” he asked.

  She seemed evasive, distrustful. “We are working on placement for them.”

  There was something disturbingly familiar about her demand for the best, the healthiest, the strongest. The word selection came to his mind and, in his exhaustion, to his mouth.

  “Yes, I have a list. Of those selected who meet your qualifications.”

  Eva was quick; she caught the meaning and her face hardened. “How dare you? How dare you use that tone, that implication, with me!”

  “Well, you have been very specific in your requirements. Exactly who are you, what is your organization? Where are you taking these people, and for what purpose?”

  Without blinking, Eva Fine swung and smacked him across the face with the back of her hand. The attack was so unexpected, the blow so hard, that Ben was knocked to the ground. As he scrambled to his feet, she stood poised, ready.

  He shook his head, held his hand up. “Whoa, slow down, lady. I think we better talk.” And then, because she didn’t change her stance, quickly, skillfully, Ben spun her around and held her against his body. Instead of stiffening, resisting, she went limp and he realized she was a trained fighter. He released her, pushing her away. “Okay, I give up. This is stupid, isn’t it? I think we’re on the same side. Look, I apologize, what I said was stupid. My choice of words—”

  “Was offensive.”

  “Yes. Offensive. We are all very sensitive to certain words and implications. How about we talk, you and I? I can’t just give you this list of people without having some idea where they are going.”

  “Do you really care?”

  It was Ben’s turn to get angry. He was being asked to identify himself, to justify his presence in this place of horror. Softly he said, “No. I don’t care at all. I’m doing this for the hell of it. I’ll probably write a book and make a million dollars and that’s why I’m here. Okay? All right?”

  Eva shook her head then held out her hand. “Now I’m sorry. And I apologize. We are, I think, both under terrific strain. Do you have a cigarette?”

  They sat and smoked and studied each other. She liked the look of this large, healthy, handsome, redheaded American.

  “I will assume you are here for very good reasons, so I will trust you. Some instinct tells me this will be safe. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  She was a third generation sabra, born and raised in Palestine on a kibbutz. She had enlisted in the Hagganah when she was seventeen, and had risen to the rank of captain. “Yes, the organization is illegal. Everything about Jews is illegal, according to the British mandate.” She stubbed out her cigarette against a tree trunk. “But that will end. We will have our independence. We will have a Jewish state—Israel.”

  “Do you believe that will really happen?”

  Her voice hardened. “Do you think it won’t?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never thought too much about Zionism.”

  “Zionism? You can call it that if you want. We are talking about the ultimate survival of our people. Who the hell wants us? Not your country. Not any European countries. We must have our own country. The United Nations is debating, debating. Do you know why? They are giving the Arab nations the time to organize a war to exterminate us as soon as Israel is declared. That will take care of the ‘Jewish problem’ once and for all. But it is not going to happen that way.”

  “Is that why you want the strong, healthy young men?”

  She reached out, took his newly lighted cigarette, and sucked on it for a moment. “We have an underground system. We have way stations. We have friends, you’d be surprised. There are trucks and buses, but then they must travel on foot for many miles, to Yugoslavia, where boats will take them on the rest of the journey.”

  “To Palestine?”

  “To Palestine, which will be Israel.”

  “But the British …”

  “They intervene. They will use their mandate to the bitter end. They send those of us they capture to their concentration camps in Cyprus. A well-kept secret. But some get through—the toughest, the best. They are taken into the depths of our land. And they will be ready when the mandate ends. When Israel is declared an independent state. That will happen soon—within a year, it is predicted.”

  “And you are a kibbutznik? A farmer?”

  “And a soldier. I am a captain and I lead my troops.”

  “Do you actually fight?”

  “You mean, does a woman actually fight? My God, look around you. Who are half the victims, if not women and girls? In Palestine, we are all soldiers. We all do what we have to do. And you, Benjamin Herskel? What are you prepared to do? Are you going to return to the United States and become a doctor or a lawyer, or what? Will all of this just be a memory, war stories for you to tell the UJA—will you be a fundraiser for your people? You are, after all, an American, yes?”

  Ben drew in a deep breath. He felt his spine stiffen and his heart pound. “I am a Jew.”

  “Yes? And what does that mean? Tell me.”

  “You know what it means. Look around you. You know what it means.”

  “Do you want to join up? With us? With Israel? Do you want to turn away from your home and make your home with us? This is a terrible commitment that we need. Is this what you want?”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Ben answered, “Yes.”

  It was the direction he had sought since the first day he had seen the camps. He reached for Eva, and she responded immediately. Without another word between them, they lay down carefully, fumbled with clothing, and had a long, slow, surprisingly familiar and gratifying sexual encounter. Neither of them seemed surprised. It was something that was meant to be.

  Eva caressed his damp face, kissed him gently. “Will you be ready to leave with this new group? In two days?”

  “Yes.”

  A month later, on his second surreptitious landing on the beach at Caesarea, the British were waiting. Of the two hundred illegals aboard the small French ship, one hundred were captured and sent to Cyprus, seventy-five escaped into the night with their rescuers, and twenty-four were killed.

  Ben Herskel was wounded, and subsequently lost his right leg below the knee.

  But he survived to marry Eva Fine and to play an active role in the leadership of his adopted country, whose sovereignty was proclaimed by the UN one year after Ben’s arrival.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BEFORE HE WAS MUSTERED OUT AT THE end of 1945, Charley O’Brien had begun studying the precepts of Judaism. The Jewish chaplain, a twenty-five-year-old Reformed rabbi from San Francisco, told Charley to be very careful.

  “It’s your immediate reaction to what you’ve seen here, Charley. In one way, it’s healthy, but in another it’s a hysterical response. Go home, talk to your priest, talk to your mother. Talk to your brother. You have a lifelong religion already. Maybe what you really need is to fall back on your
Catholicism in a different setting. This place”—he shrugged, opened his hands helplessly—“this place is hell. None of us can think straight here. Just don’t rush into something that will be a lifelong decision.”

  Charley nodded and thanked the chaplain. He attended mass a few times, tried to talk to the Catholic chaplain, who advised him to go on an intensive religious retreat when he returned home. He also warned him about making a terrible mistake under the pressure of emotion.

  Ben Herskel had changed his own life without the slightest hesitation, by staying in the Army to be promoted to major, eventually becoming an interpreter during the Nuremburg trials. But even he cautioned Charley to go slowly, to wait until he got home, away from this place.

  “Jesus,” Charley said, “you Jews are a crazy bunch. If you said you wanted to become a Catholic, you’d be baptized on the spot, given a string of rosary beads, and pointed to the nearest church.”

  “One of the differences between us, kid. For someone to opt to be a Jew—well, the first thing you think, ‘This guy’s crazy.’”

  “But I am a Jew. From my mother’s womb. Ben, I’m dead serious about this. I feel a sense of obligation …”

  “To do what? Replenish the world? Make up for the horrors? Charley, do what you feel you must do, but do it for the right reasons, okay?”

  “You and I have always done what we felt we must, for the right reasons, haven’t we, kid?”

  Ben sighed and smiled sadly. “We’ve done what we had to do, Charley. Okay, that’s all I’ll say about it. I trust you to do what you feel you gotta do. You take care, kid. Every now and then, say a prayer for me. In whichever place you happen to be.”

  If Charley O’Brien thought his mother would be happy, or touched, or gratified by his decision, he was badly mistaken. When he left the Army and returned home, their confrontation was intense.