by Arnold Zable
But he does not write of abandoned hope. That would be a betrayal of those who returned to the world of the living. And he does not offer false hope. That would be a betrayal to those who perished. Sami simply holds the lamp, descends, shines the light in the darkest corners. And returns with the story.
There is one tale that recurs several times. It is the go-to story, emblematic, recited to journalists and visiting dignitaries: One day, in mid-1945, an inmate of the displaced persons camp makes his way to the rooms of the Kazet Theatre. There is a girl in a nearby camp reserved for former Polish prisoners, he says, who wishes to transfer to a Jewish camp. She had survived on Aryan papers, and has all but forgotten the Yiddish language. The ensemble takes on her case and she is brought to Bergen-Belsen.
This is the tale she tells them. When the war broke out the girl was eleven years old. She made her way with her mother and father, brother and sister, from their native village to Warsaw where they lived until January 1942. As the net tightened, they fled Warsaw and hid in a hamlet on the outskirts of Lublin in Eastern Poland. With her Aryan looks, the girl was assigned the task of scavenging for food and water.
Returning to the hiding place after an outing, she discovered that while she was away the SS had rounded up her family. Her mother, sister and young brother had been shot alongside other Jews who were hiding in the village, and her father deported to Treblinka death camp.
The girl fled the hideout and wandered day and night over field and forest, and from village to village, in dread of capture. After she had wandered for months, a farmer had pity on her and took her in as a shepherd. One afternoon, while at work in the pastures, she was overcome by a deep longing. She wept and, without thinking, she began singing the Yiddish songs her mother and father had taught her.
As she sang, she did not notice a Polish boy hidden behind a tree. He heard her singing and betrayed her to the Gestapo. She was arrested, interrogated and beaten, and given five minutes to admit she was Jewish. If she confessed, they said they would not harm her. If she did not confess, they would shoot her. She remained silent.
The two interrogators raised their guns and told her to walk. They directed her to a forest. On the way, they met an old German man. The officers told him what they were doing. He lifted his hand and said, let her go. She will not survive long. What harm can it do? Let her live a few more days. The officers told her to run.
When she was out of sight, she rubbed her hands together and pressed them to her cheeks. Had she been shot? Was she alive? Suddenly she saw the boy who betrayed her. She wanted to gouge out his eyes so that he would never betray anyone again. The boy sank to his knees. He crossed himself over and over and begged her to forgive him. In return he hid her and brought her food. They became close friends.
One day the boy told her that a battalion of German soldiers had arrived in the nearby village and was looking for Jews. You must leave, he said, or you will be caught and shot. She was paralysed with terror. She asked him, how can I escape when I have no identity papers? The boy left and returned an hour later with bread and salami and papers he had stolen from a village girl. She wept, then kissed him and left.
She roamed the countryside for three years disguised as a Polish girl. She was chased and held up, searched and interrogated. She was prized property; handing in a Jewish girl to the Gestapo earned you a kilo of sugar. She was finally arrested in a village. She showed the soldiers the papers the boy had stolen; the documents saved her life. But she was deported to a slave labour camp in Germany, where she was liberated by the Americans and placed in a displaced persons camp reserved for former Polish prisoners.
She did not know if any Jews were alive. She was told they had all been sent to Auschwitz and gassed. She contemplated suicide. Why live if my people have not survived? One fine day a man arrived in the camp in search of relatives. She recognised him and wept for joy. She could barely speak. He arranged everything, and brought her to Bergen-Belsen.
The girl’s name was Mala Friedman. She joined the theatre and relearnt the Yiddish she had all but forgotten. She embraced the ensemble as family, and they embraced her. She became one of their lead performers.
There is a story that appears in Sami’s memoir With Clenched Fists, and again in Through Twelve Fires of Hell, a second volume of memoirs written when Feder was almost eighty. Many years had gone by, and still, he was not done with it. I assume he wrote them in his apartment in Herzliya. Perhaps, when he lifted his head, he had a view of the sea through a window. If so, I doubt whether he dwelt on it.
His mind is in Bergen-Belsen on a cold evening, in the first winter after liberation. The windows twinkle with frost and the trees are coated in ice. The wind whistles in the chimneys. The stove glows red, and the freshly cut wood crackles. Sami sits by the stove reading a book.
A light knock on the door interrupts his reading. The door slowly opens and a woman enters. It is difficult to tell how old she is. At one moment, she appears to be young. A moment later her eyes are overcome by fatigue and a profound sadness.
She pauses by the open door, stares at Sami and says: ‘Forgive me. Perhaps I am disturbing you.’ She is unable to say more. Tears fill her eyes. Her lips are trembling.
‘Sit down,’ Sami says. ‘Warm yourself. Calm down. Perhaps I can help?’
Slowly she sits, then suddenly she springs back up. She covers her face with her hands and, as if speaking to herself, she says, ‘No! No one can help me!’
She sits back down and, in a near-whisper, begins to recount her tale.
‘I was born in Hungary. My parents were orthodox Jews and wealthy merchants. I was their only daughter. I studied medicine and worked as a doctor. Then the Germans invaded. Concentration camp…As a doctor specialising in women’s health, I was assigned to the women’s sick bay. My god! Why did I ever become a doctor?’
She falls silent and surveys her surroundings. She glances at the door and makes a move towards leaving.
‘Perhaps you will have something to drink,’ Sami suggests.
She glances at Sami, shakes her head, and continues. ‘I don’t know if you are aware that pregnant women were sent straight to the gas chambers. Many women tried to hide their pregnancies. They often fainted at their work place. Some of the pregnant women were brought by their friends to me in the sickbay. They kissed my hands and begged me to save them. But how? It was forbidden to give birth in the camps. Every one of them pleaded: “Save me. I am still so young. Please, help me.” Their pleas cut into my heart. My God!’
She pauses and remains silent for several minutes, then exclaims, ‘Is there a God? Where is he? Where are my grandfathers, and where are the rabbis? Where are our prophets? Where is the Messiah? If there is no Jewish Messiah, where is the Christian Messiah? He preached love of man for man. Where is that man? Does humanity exist?
‘‘‘How can I help you?” I asked the women. I told them, “If you wish to live, your child cannot be allowed to live.”
‘One woman looked at me in terror. She did not dare weep aloud. She whimpered and moaned like a wounded animal, and bit her lips till they bled. As her moaning grew louder, I bound her mouth with a kerchief so that the SS men standing by the window would not hear her.
‘These two hands! With these two hands I strangled her baby; but at the last moment, the mother ripped off the kerchief from her mouth and screamed: “Murderer! Give me back my child.”
‘I was covered in sweat. With my last ounce of strength, I held my hands to her mouth. She bit my hand until it bled and began weeping. I gave her an injection and she fell asleep. I packed the foetus in paper and hid it behind the barrack. The mother was saved, but for how long?
‘Thus I strangled babies. Me? With my own hands? God, why did you choose me to murder unborn children? Now they are all dead. Why did you let me live? No. They are not dead. I see them everywhere. Wherever I go, wherever I stand, I see them, by day and by night. I cannot sleep or rest. I did not even allow them their first
cry. Me. Me.
‘And now I hear them cry. All of them. They chase and pursue me. I can no longer be a doctor. My dream was to help people, to hear the first cry of a newborn baby and to witness the joyous smile of the mother, and now I am terrified. I do not trust my own hands. To save the mothers, I had to murder their babies.’
The woman cries out. ‘Forgive me for telling you this,’ she says. ‘Perhaps it will make me feel a little lighter.’
Quietly, she weeps. Sami remains silent. At that very moment, as if to mock them, a newborn child can be heard crying in the room next door. The woman leaps up. She holds her hands to her head, places them over her ears and runs from the room in terror. A cutting wind bursts into the room. Sami steps out, but the woman has vanished.
On Friday, 19 September 1986, fifty-one-year-old Chaim Orlin entered the offices of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation carrying a large photograph album. He had long intended, he explained, to entrust the photographic collection to an archive. He lived in Amsterdam, and the institute was internationally renowned for its collection of archives concerning World War II and its aftermath.
Chaim felt a sense of urgency. In his haste, he offered few details in handing over the album. He mentioned only that his sister, Cecillia ‘Zippy’ Orlin, had compiled it from photographs taken during the period when Bergen-Belsen was a displaced persons camp for survivors. With that, he left the premises.
The album weighed fifteen kilograms. There were 1117 photos, many with brief captions: Chaim’s gift was the most complete photographic record of life in the camp.
Historians Erik Somers and Rene Kok, who worked at the institute, wanted to know more about the album. Who was Zippy Orlin? Who had taken the photos? How did they end up in the Netherlands? Chaim would know.
Four days after receiving the album, they attempted to contact him. To their dismay, they learned that Chaim had died in his sleep the night before. It took them years to track down the answers, which they published in the 1998 yearbook of the institute. Soon after, Somers and Kok wrote a book about the album, and of the woman who compiled it.
Cecillia ‘Zippy’ Orlin was born in 1922 to an impoverished family in the town of Siesiekeij, Lithuania. She was the second of five children. Her father, Yisrael Orlin, struggled to support them. In 1928, Yisrael’s brother, who had emigrated to South Africa, convinced him and his family to join him. Yisrael earned a living peddling fresh produce from a horse and cart in Johannesburg. He worked his way to buying a truck and built a thriving business.
Zippy spent the war years as a secretary of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. Early in 1946, the board invited Zippy, then twenty-four, to work as a volunteer in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp. Her fluency in Yiddish, they assumed, would make up for her inexperience in relief work.
After a farewell banquet in the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg, Zippy left for Paris where she was inducted into the work. She arrived by army truck in Bergen-Belsen in July. As the truck jolted over a dusty corrugated road, the driver, a former prisoner, told her that many inmates were marched along this road to their deaths. The camp population had swelled to ten thousand with the influx of Jews fleeing a resurgence of anti-Semitic violence in their former home towns in Eastern Europe.
Throughout her stay, Zippy was acutely conscious of the historic moment. She documented her experiences in photos. She took some herself, but most were taken by friends and co-workers, ‘Willy with the Leica’, and Harry Koop, both members of the transport unit. Zippy also collected photos taken before her time, of scenes that confronted the British soldiers when the Bergen-Belsen transit camp was liberated.
Zippy worked in the displaced persons camp for twenty-seven months, and left when the population was rapidly dwindling. On her return to South Africa in 1949, she wrote a short account of her experiences and began work on the album. She took the photos with her to London, where she trained as a beautician specialising in facial massage, and to Tel Aviv, where she settled in 1960. She spent her final months in Johannesburg and died there in 1980, of cancer. After her death, her brother Chaim found the album among her personal possessions.
The photos provide a detailed record of daily life in the de facto republic of the stateless. Though there appear to be no photos of Sami and Sonia, the pictures were taken when they were there. They depict the camp as they would have seen it.
Some of the images document Zippy’s assignments. She conducted an exercise club for young women, and she worked alongside the camp hospital nurses. She taught at the elementary school, and looked after a group of orphans. She accompanied children who had tuberculosis to sanatoriums in Italy and Switzerland.
She attended births and circumcisions, weddings, concerts, dances and parties. In the photos, she appears light and unburdened, as if on an adventure, thriving because she is striking out on her own, independent of family. She is pictured standing with groups of children, her hands resting on their shoulders. She is smartly dressed, and her hair is swept up in a beehive.
Zippy is both participant and observer, empathetic but free of the trauma. Perhaps this is the reason why, of all those who worked and lived in the camp, it was she who assembled the most complete photographic record. Her captions are haiku-like poems of remembrance.
Of a photo of corpses lined up on the verge beside a road on the day of liberation, Zippy writes: ‘They are no more. The road to death for 30,000.’ Of a panoramic view of the displaced persons camp she observes: ‘1945. The SS torturers move out and the tortured remnants move in.’ Of the tombstones erected where the barracks once stood: ‘Amongst the rubble a tree now grows, that we shall remember Jews, Christians. The known and the unknown.’
Of the camp survivors: ‘They wanted to live, to provide, to be a child, to play, to keep law and order, to feast, to celebrate and to care for soul and body.’ Of the children’s choirs and theatre performances: ‘Acting and singing gave expression to their regained lust for life.’
A photo of infants at play is captioned: ‘Sturdy little toddlers romped in the flower-covered fields and expressed the childish emotions so long suppressed.’ And of two young children about to leave the camp, Zippy writes: ‘With heads held high they faced the future.’
There are photos of the camp hospital where Sonia went from bed to bed collecting testimonies. We see doctors and nurses tending patients, clinics for babies, and camp residents riding bicycles, and a battalion of Jewish-inmate appointed policemen, dressed in uniforms and black berets, standing at attention.
Camp leaders sit at meetings and conduct press conferences. They attend congresses of the liberated. The inmates take part in election campaigns. They ride trucks displaying banners and posters of candidates. They hand out leaflets, and line up to cast their votes for members of the Central Committee.
We see the inmates practising trades in vocational schools and workshops—bricklaying, welding, lathe work, dress designing and dressmaking. We see weddings: the men wear suits and ties, and the women, festive dresses. Young men and women attend parties. They wear party hats; the wine and beer is flowing. There is a photo of typesetters composing the Yiddish script of the camp newspaper, Unzer Shtimme, Our Voice, and of the co-editor, Arie and Jochi’s father, Rafael Olewski, reading an edition.
There are many photos of children. More than two thousand lived in the camp: a thousand were born there, and more than five hundred orphaned children were brought there from all over Europe. Dressed in light summer clothes, or swathed in hooded winter coats and jackets, they clutch dolls and toy animals. Some are pictured with doctors holding stethoscopes to their hollow chests. They wear sturdy boots and ride scooters. They cook and gather wood and walk hand in hand with their teachers and childcare workers.
Young children exercise in the fields in summer; they are lean, their rib cages protruding. Their backs are arched, heads tilted back, and their chests pushed forward. Their upper bodies are bathed in sunlight. The children are restored bef
ore our eyes from gaunt loners to potential wholeness. There are children watched over by teachers and nurses and doted on by their parents, in kindergartens, primary and junior high schools; the children perform gymnastics and eat at communal breakfasts.
Babies and toddlers are paraded in prams and strollers by young mothers. The women’s faces and the building behind them are lit by the sun. The predominant expression is of proud defiance. They seem to be saying: Despite it all, we have returned to life, and are savouring each moment—the open skies, the chestnut trees in the courtyards, the rustle of leaves as we stroll the camp grounds. Our bodies are restored. We have given birth. We breastfeed our babies. We are mothers. Lovers. Workers. We are women.
There is just one photo of the Kazet Theatre, taken on 15 April 1946, a year after the liberation, and three months before Zippy arrived in the camp. The performers parade through the streets. Sonia and Sami are most likely there, perhaps in the front row, obscured by the theatre banner.
The group is not captioned as the Kazet Theatre, but as displaced persons marching to the site of Camp 1, the Horror Camp. The cordoned-off grounds were open for the occasion. A stone had been erected in honour of those who lay there, buried in the weeks after liberation. The march commemorates the unveiling of the monument.
Those carrying the banner wear concentration camp uniforms. The men filing behind them are dressed in suits and open-necked white shirts, and the women in jackets, skirts and blouses. They look directly at the camera, conscious of the significance of the occasion; their expressions are grim and determined.
They are engaged in a political act—a deliberate return to the site of their enslavement. They reflect the sentiments expressed in the first verse, and the final stanza, of the Partisan Hymn, with which they concluded the memorial service: The hour we have longed for is surely near. Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: we are here!
