“Good night,” Tedi said. “Many thanks.”
The clearing in front of the dining hall, noisy with laughter and music, was full of dancers, but Tedi was too tired to join in. Her face ached from smiling back at the stares and comments from the kibbutzniks. She wondered if she would always be treated as a curiosity: the tall blonde Jewess.
She walked toward the eastern fence, which faced onto a half-plowed field, pungent with the smell of broken sod and crushed weeds. The mountains were a dark shadow in the moonless night.
After the closeness inside the dining hall, the air was sweet and cool. She took a deep breath and turned her face to the sky. It seemed impossible that these could be the same stars she had looked up at six months ago, impossible that she was seeing them through the same eyes.
On the night of her escape, the icy air had hit her like a slap in the face, harsh but welcome after the fetid heat and terror inside the boxcar. There had been a full moon that night, which seemed as outsized and unreal as a paper cutout in a theater set.
After ten of them had squeezed through the floor of the cattle car, they found themselves facing an enormous field, flooded with moonlight. Tedi saw the others start to run but then drop to the ground, disappearing in the weeds. She followed suit, lying on her back and staring up at the moon as the sound of boots grew closer. One of the soldiers had a bad cough. One of the others swore as he stumbled over a rail tie. They seemed in no hurry and Tedi realized that they were unaware there had been an escape.
Her fingers burned in the cold; she wished she had thought to bury her hands in her armpits, but she didn’t dare move. She became terrified that she might sneeze. Go away, she prayed. Go away.
Finally, the engine coughed back to life and the train pulled out, but Tedi waited until she heard someone else move before she dared lift her head. They scrambled for a line of trees, where they huddled close and rubbed each other’s hands back to life.
Tedi sank down and sat in the dust of Atlit. After the Germans marched into Amsterdam, Tedi’s best friend had told her, “You’re so lucky. You look like a poster girl for the Hitler Youth.” Gertrude had said it without malice, but Tedi was ashamed. A few weeks later, her parents announced that they were sending her into hiding at a farm outside Utrecht.
“I don’t want to go,” she wept. “I want to stay with you. Why don’t you send Rachel instead?” But the decision had been made; her sister was too young to go to strangers. They would find somewhere else for her as soon as they could.
On the night before she was to leave, Tedi’s mother sat on the bed beside her and brushed her hair. “You will be all right, sweetheart,” she said, “but our Rachel has no chance of passing.”
The memory of her mother’s words sent a chill up Tedi’s back. She tried to think about something else, but tonight she was too tired to fight the past. Rachel had been as dark as Tedi was fair, intellectual where Tedi was artistic, moody where she was sunny. Tedi was the favorite daughter, and both of them had always known it.
“I’m sorry,” Tedi whispered.
Two days after her little group escaped from the death train, a group of British soldiers found them, gave them tea, and wrapped them in blankets before putting them on a truck headed for the Displaced Persons center in Landsberg. There she found more barbwire, more barracks, and endless lines in which she waited to talk to officers and Red Cross workers and black-market “fixers,” who flourished in the chaos. She was sure that someone could help her get home, which was all she could think about. So many of the others talked about getting to America or Palestine, Argentina or Canada; she wondered if she was the only Jew in Europe who wanted to stay.
Her mother had said they were all to return to the apartment on Bloemgracht as soon as they could; that was the plan for “after.”
Tedi got as far as the train depot in Stuttgart, which is where she ran into Arne Loederman, her father’s business partner for seventeen years, since she was a baby. It took her a moment to recognize the frail old man calling her name. He wept at the sight of her, skin and bones.
He told her that he had been in Bergen-Belsen. He had seen her father, mother, and Rachel there; her Uncle Hermann, Auntie Lu, and their sons, her cousins, Jakob and Hans, too. He raked his fingers down his cheeks and looked at the ground. He didn’t have to say it.
Tedi shivered, as cold as she’d been in the moonlit field. Even her fingers were numb. It was not a surprise. She had known they were dead, felt it even as she insisted on getting back to Amsterdam.
Mr. Loederman held his arms out to her and held her close, weeping bitterly on her shoulder. She did not return his embrace or cry and finally, he pulled away. He took both her hands in his. “You must travel back to Amsterdam with me, Tedi,” he said, without meeting her eyes. “Half the business belongs to you. You remember Pim Verbeck, the old foreman? He promised to take care of things for us. Whatever is left will be your inheritance. I will take care of you.”
But Tedi said, “I am going to Palestine.”
Mr. Loederman’s eyes filled with fresh tears. “I suppose I would do the same if I were younger. You must write to me when you get there. I will send you what I can. Here.” He tried to press a few coins into her hands.
Tedi would not take them. “I have to go,” she said. “Wait. Let me buy you something. Food, a pair of shoes, something.”
Tedi was already running away from him, hoping to catch up to the people she had been traveling with, the ones who were headed for Palestine. They had tried to talk her into coming with them and leaving behind the whole poisoned graveyard that was Europe. But she had kept her mind fixed on Amsterdam, the markets and the cinemas, the light on the water, the bakery down the block from her house, her favorite bridges. Once she got home, she promised herself, she would never complain about the dampness, or the long winter nights, or even the smell of the canals at low tide.
But Mr. Loederman had erased her longing and turned her homesickness and nostalgia into anger and loathing. Why had he survived? Why not her father, who had been a better man—kinder, smarter, and younger, too? Why was Tedi alive and not Rachel? Where was her mother? Her cousins? Her friends? Suddenly she imagined Amsterdam full of ghosts, reproaching her from every window, every storefront, every doorway.
In Palestine, at least, no one would burst into tears at the sight of her.
Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Tedi traced her name into the dirt and remembered Mr. Loederman’s wife, Lena, an old-fashioned woman who wore crocheted collars. They had had a grown son, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. All dead, she realized. She should have hugged him back.
The accordion raced up a scale. Young voices rose into the night. Tedi put her fingers into her ears and listened to the sound of her own breathing, one breath at a time, as her father had taught her when she was seven years old and miserable with the mumps. Papa had sat beside her on the quilted white counterpane. “Shah, darling, shah,” he said, putting a cool hand on her burning forehead. “Take a deep breath. Good. Now, take the next breath. Then another breath, and another, and another, and voilà! You will be somewhere else, all better, no more headaches. The sun will shine and we will eat too much chocolate and we won’t tell Mamma.”
Tedi was rocking and weeping, her fingers in her ears, wanting her father, wishing that she could be that seven-year-old girl again, wondering how a lifetime could be burned and buried when it was so close that she could still feel the comfort of her father’s hand on her face.
But the hand landed on her shoulder instead, grasping her firmly from behind. Tedi screamed and threw her elbow back as hard as she could and jumped to her feet, fists clenched.
Zorah was on the ground, clutching her thigh. “Bloody hell,” she sputtered. “You idiot. Why did you do that?”
“I’m sorry,” said Tedi, dropping to her knees. “I’m so sorry. Are you hurt?”
“I’ll be all right,” Zorah said, sitting up and rubbing her leg. “I didn’t mean to star
tle you.”
Tedi was rocking back and forth, her eyes squeezed shut, her arms wrapped around her sides.
“Really,” Zorah insisted. “It’s not that bad.”
“They would grab from behind like that,” Tedi whispered. “One of them would hold me down. They both laughed. They covered my face. It was as if I wasn’t even there, just my …”
Zorah put her arm around Tedi’s shoulders. It took a long time until she stopped rocking and trembling. The accordion played a tango from start to finish. Then there was a big-band ballad and a local folk tune. Finally, Zorah ventured a few words. “It was hell for women in the camps. I know.”
“I wasn’t in a concentration camp,” Tedi said. “I was in hiding. I was at a farm in the countryside. All day long, locked inside the barn, and at night the farmer’s son would come. Sometimes he brought someone else, an older man, and the two of them, sometimes every night.
“When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I said something to the mother. She slapped me. The Germans came the next day.”
Tedi started rocking again. “Don’t,” said Zorah, pushing the heavy hair away from Tedi’s damp forehead. “Those bastards will rot in hell forever. But you got away, didn’t you? You are far, far away from all of that. You’re safe now, right?”
Zorah put her arm around Tedi’s shoulders and held her still. “You’re in the land of milk and honey, right?”
The sound of the party rose and fell, as though it were coming from a boat circling the shore.
“It’s late,” Zorah said finally. “Time for bed.” She stood up, brushed the dust from her skirt, and offered Tedi her hand.
When Tedi got to her feet, she wrapped her arms around Zorah. “Thank you,” she whispered, surprised at the delicacy of the fierce little woman who banged through Atlit like a clenched fist.
“No need for thanks,” said Zorah, trying to break free.
But Tedi held on until Zorah stopped struggling. And for a moment, or perhaps no more than a fraction of a moment, Tedi was almost certain that Zorah hugged her back.
It was very late when Shayndel crept into Leonie’s cot and woke her up.
“What’s the matter?”
“David and me … I ended it.”
“What happened?” Leonie asked. “I thought you liked him.”
“I do, I mean I did, at first anyway. But I can’t take it anymore. He is only in love with the idea of me. I make him feel important.”
“I think he has great respect for you.”
“It has nothing to do with me,” Shayndel said, “and certainly nothing to do with what I want. He goes on and on about war like it is something beautiful and noble, which only means he’s never seen it himself. War is hideous and it leaves you covered in shit. I cannot kill anyone else. I will not. Not even for the Jewish state. Someone else has to do it this time. I will work on a chicken farm and shovel manure. I will add up long columns of numbers in an office without windows. Anything but that.”
“What does David say when you tell him this?” asked Leonie.
“He doesn’t listen. He lectures me about the duty we all owe the Jewish people and the dream of a state. He puts his hand under my dress like it’s his right and he says I must make sacrifices.”
“What do you mean? Did he try to take advantage of you?”
Shayndel smiled. “Hardly. We’ve been going at it behind the last barrack almost since we met.”
“I had no idea,” said Leonie. “Good for you.”
“Not particularly,” Shayndel said. “Let’s just say he doesn’t know what to do to make a girl happy.”
“There are ways to teach them about that. Or at least, that’s what I’ve heard. And when there is real feeling …”
“You don’t have to tell me about sex,” Shayndel said. “In the forest, there wasn’t much to do at night, and we all learned how to make each other happy. But this is not about fooling around. It’s about him, David.
“Tonight he was completely impossible. I told him it was finished between us, and then he laughed at me and said I had cold feet. Like I was a little girl. Like I didn’t know my own mind! Now all I want is for him to disappear so I don’t have to argue anymore. Tomorrow wouldn’t be soon enough. Do you think I’m right?”
“Chérie, if you do not love him, you are right. And it seems clear that you do not love him.”
“I guess I wanted to be in love with someone. But not him. I’m just sorry that I didn’t tell you about him from the beginning. I felt badly that you didn’t have a boyfriend, too. That I betrayed our little plan with the two brothers.”
“Our plan? That was more like a game, a nice little story we told each other,” Leonie said. “Making plans is a game. Life chooses for you.”
“Do you really believe that? That we are like leaves floating on the river, wherever it takes us?”
“This is not a bad thing,” said Leonie. “It is not a good thing, either. That’s just how it goes.”
“So nothing makes sense?”
“How could you make sense of our lives?”
Shayndel lay still for so long, Leonie said, “I’m sorry if I offended you.”
“I took no offense. I was just thinking what it would be like to keep that philosophy in mind on Yom Kippur.”
“It is the day of judgments, no?”
“Yes. God is the judge who writes in the heavenly book who will live and who will die in the coming year,” Shayndel said. “I wonder why I never objected to that idea. How can I permit anyone to speak of God sitting on His golden throne and deciding that Malka and Wolfe should be murdered, and millions of others, too? It is horrible.”
“Were they believers?” Leonie said. “Your friends?”
“They believed in Palestine and the dream for a homeland.”
“May it be so,” said Leonie, using the ancient Hebrew formula.
“I thought you didn’t know anything about the prayer book.”
“I don’t, but my grandfather used to say that. They took me to see him only a few times when I was a girl, but when I left and I said, ‘See you again, au revoir,’ he would answer, ‘May it be so.’ I used to think he was joking, but maybe he was a little serious, too. He died in his sleep, my grandfather, in his own bed, long before the Germans marched into Paris. He was not even sixty, but now I think he was a lucky man.”
“On Yom Kippur, everyone weeps for the dead,” said Shayndel, who had not cried when her friends had died, nor since.
“Weeping is terrible for the complexion,” said Leonie, holding Shayndel close, “but it is very good for the heart.”
Yom Kippur, September 17
Yom Kippur dawned overcast and muggy; it was going to be a hot day. Some of the men got up for early prayers, but without a regular breakfast hour or roll call, nearly everyone slept late. Tedi crept out of the barrack and walked through the quiet camp without seeing a soul.
There were a dozen people in the mess hall, and all of them looked up as she entered. Some raised their water glasses defiantly, showing off their disdain for the day-long fast, but others quickly dropped their gaze. There was no tea that morning or fresh salad, nor would there be any regular meals, but because children and the sick are exempt from the rules of self-denial, platters of fruit and cheese and baskets of bread had been set out, covered with dish towels to keep off the flies.
Tedi was surprised to find Zorah there. She was sitting alone, staring at an apple on the table in front of her.
“Can I join you?” she asked, waiting for permission to sit down. They had barely spoken since Rosh Hashanah, when Zorah had shown her such kindness.
“Suit yourself,” Zorah said. “Where is your breakfast?”
“I’m not hungry, not yet anyway. I never really fasted on Yom Kippur. In my family, we—”
A boy stuck his head through the door and announced, “The Poles are starting Musaf.”
“What is that?” Tedi asked.
“It’s an extra servic
e after morning prayers,” Zorah said.
“Aren’t you going?”
Zorah felt the call to prayer in her body. Her feet twitched and her heart raced, but she had no intention of giving in to the urge. “Why should I go?” she said, as if she’d been insulted.
“You seem to know so much about such things, the prayers, the Bible, the commentaries, even. Some of the girls call you ‘the little rabbi.’” Tedi thought the name suited her, given that Zorah had begun to smell like a book—an oddly comforting combination of paste and ink and dust.
“That’s no compliment if you consider the maniacs and lost souls who care about such things around here. Later, I’m going to have a big lunch with the Communists. Just watch me.”
“I meant no harm,” Tedi said softly.
“Ach,” Zorah relented. “Don’t listen to me. I need a smoke, that’s all.”
Tedi and Zorah sat at the table for an hour, watching as people wandered in and out. Only mothers with children walked through the doors without embarrassment or apology, urging their little ones to eat and taking sips of water when they thought no one was looking.
Zorah said, “I’m going to get some air.” She left the apple untouched and wandered the perimeter of the camp, trying to avoid the chanting and muttering and bursts of song. But as the day wore on, boredom and curiosity got the better of her, so as the afternoon services began, Zorah went for a tour of the four separate observances.
The largest was held by the Poles in the promenade between the men’s and women’s barracks. Anschel, the religious zealot, was gone, and a rabbi had been imported for the service—a robust old man with a short gray beard; he wore a long white robe, the ceremonial garb of grooms, corpses, and Yom Kippur supplicants.
The Hungarians met behind one of the men’s barracks, and the handful of Romanians who chose to pray fit beneath the overhang in front of Delousing.
The Communists and Socialist Zionists got together in the shade behind the mess hall, where they argued about whether to say any prayers at all. They agreed that formal worship was a waste of time and a distraction; still, a few of their number wanted to do “something.” Finally, a short Russian with the loudest voice declared, “Enough. We can recite some words strictly out of solidarity, to honor the dead and the traditions of the dead. We say the words, we remember, and then we get drunk and have a good cry.”
Day After Night Page 8
