Among the Reeds

by Tammy Bottner

  Gertrude too was moving on with her life. Soon after returning to Brussels she met another survivor, a German Jew named Shlomo Kliegsberg. She knew her husband Leopold had died at Auschwitz. And in any case, she had not lived with him in almost a decade. Still in the middle of her life, her children grown or almost grown, she, like the rest of Europe, turned her eyes to the future. A year after returning to Brussels Gertrude married Shlomo Kliegsberg, a kind and friendly man who brought joy back into her lonely life.

  Inge also found love. At the end of the war she met a soldier named Hans Kerpen. Hans, handsome, charming, and kind, was serving in the British army. He belonged to the Jewish Brigade from Palestine. His family had fled from Austria, establishing themselves in Palestine before the war. As part of the British Empire, Palestine supplied soldiers to serve in the war effort. Hans was stationed in Brussels as a British soldier.

  The two started dating. Gertrude, uncomfortable with her young daughter going off with a man unsupervised, enlisted little Bobby to act as chaperone when they went out. To keep Bobby busy, Inge and Hans often took the child to swimming pools. Bobby would happily go for a swim, while the young adults drank coffee in the pool’s cafe. In this way they courted. Sometimes they bought Bobby ice cream. They wanted him to enjoy these outings so that they could continue seeing each other.

  Inge, smitten with the handsome young man, listened wide-eyed as the young Jewish soldier regaled her with tales of his homeland, still under British occupation, but hopefully soon to become an independent Jewish state. Before he was shipped back out, he begged Inge to join him in Eretz Israel. The two young people seemed to recognize each other as kindred spirits. Each one saw the kindness and love they had in their own soul reflected in the other's eyes.

  Once her mother remarried, Inge found herself the lost middle child once again. With Gertrude now in a new marriage, Melly busy with her own husband and children, and Nathan involved in Hashomer Hatza’ir, Inge missed Hans terribly. She wanted to build a life with him, in a new place, away from the horrors of Europe. At the end of 1946 she left for Palestine on an illegal ship bound for the port of Haifa. She was twenty-one years old.

  Traveling on illegal ships from Europe to Palestine was incredibly dangerous. The ships were battle-weary and in poor repair. Conditions on board were horrible, with little shelter, overcrowding, and insufficient food and water. Several ships foundered and sank after colliding on rocks or running into mines. Often, they were pursued by British warships intent on intercepting them. These interceptions sometimes turned violent. Nevertheless, thousands of desperate people boarded these ships, eager to flee from the continent.

  Jewish entry into Palestine was severely restricted at this time. Even after the destruction of two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population in the Holocaust, Britain, bowing to Arab pressure, was turning away or imprisoning Jews attempting to enter Palestine. When Inge’s ship arrived in Haifa, Inge and the other Jewish Holocaust survivors from Europe were brought to a detention camp in Atlit, just south of the port of Haifa, by the British authorities. Luckily she was only detained there briefly.

  In early 1947 she was released from Atlit and reunited with her beau. She and Hans, who had by now left the British army, were married in Palestine. Inge was warmly welcomed into Hans’s family. Inge became the first of her family to escape Europe and establish a life in what would soon be the land of Israel.

  Back in Brussels, Nathan continued his involvement with Hashomer Hatza’ir. Nathan and his friends, the other young members of this group, all wanted to get into Palestine and establish a Jewish state. Nathan’s new stepfather Shlomo helped the youth group contact an organization that was clandestinely smuggling Jews into Palestine. This group was called Aliyah Bet.

  Bet is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Aliyah Bet referred to getting Jews who were not legally allowed entry by the British (due to restrictive quotas) into the country. Aliyah Aleph, aleph being the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, referred to legal immigration within the quotas.

  Many of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, most of whom had been in the killing camps, were now destitute, homeless, and living in wretched conditions. Having survived against unbelievable odds, they now found themselves living in displaced persons camps, many inside Germany, as they had nowhere else to go. The object of the Aliyah Bet was to transport as many of these Jewish survivors as possible into Palestine, ignoring the British quotas, and trying to evade the British navy that stood in the way.

  In March 1947 Nathan’s chapter of Hashomer Hatza’ir found itself on the move, beginning its journey to Palestine. On instruction from members of the Aliyah Bet, the group left Brussels and made their way to a chateau in the south of Belgium in a town called Boneff. Here other young Jews, survivors from all over Europe, came together to organize for emigration. They only stayed here for a few days, but it turned out to be an extremely important few days for Nathan.

  One evening at Chateau Boneff, Nathan and another boy, his cousin Jackie, found themselves at a ping-pong table where two pretty girls were playing a match. Soon they joined the girls and the four young people continued the game. One of the girls, a tiny young beauty with curling brown hair and blue eyes, was Regina Hershkowitz. Nathan learned that Regina and her sister Hermine had survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Later Regina would change her name to Shoshana; Hermine would become Shula. Little did Nathan know how important Regina/Shoshana would become in his life.

  After a couple of days the young people moved on to the French town of Sète, near Marseilles. After a few more days in Sète, they were brought into the harbor where they saw the ship that was to carry them to Palestine. The Theodor Hertzl was a forty-year-old rust bucket salvaged from the U.S. and roughly refurbished in France by the Aliyah Bet. She had a coal-fueled engine and could mount a maximum speed of eight knots.

  On April 2, 1947, the Theodor Hertzl was loaded with 2,641 young Jewish passengers and she set sail under a Spanish crew with a young Jewish commander named Mordechai (or Mecca) Limon, a member of the Haganah who would eventually become the Commander of the Navy in the State of Israel. The boat was terribly crowded. There were no cabins. The passengers slept on wooden shelves built into the hold, with only about twenty-five inches’ clearance between them.

  From the start the voyage was problematic. The ship was supposed to pick up additional Jewish refugees in Italy and Turkey, but both of these rendezvous were abandoned due to miscommunication. The vessel ran into a minefield as she approached Egypt. There was little food and water, and the boat was terribly crowded. But the passengers were tough young survivors, and they cared little about comfort. Their goal was to escape Europe and get to their ancestral homeland.

  Nathan refused to sleep on the cramped wooden shelves. He made his way onto the deck, taking his chances with the elements rather than the claustrophobic hold. Regina/Shoshana slept down below.

  After eleven days at sea, on April 13, as they neared Palestine, the passengers saw three British warships steaming toward them. These ships easily caught and surrounded the Theodor Hertzl. One British ship rammed into the stern and British sailors jumped aboard the smaller vessel.

  When the British boarded the Theodor Hertzl the Jewish young people resisted. A hand-to-hand battle commenced. Jewish teenagers, weaponless, attacked the British sailors with vegetable crates. They tossed one British sailor overboard. The British, shocked at the resistance, opened fire. Three young Jewish refugees were killed and twenty-seven were injured before the Theodor Hertzl was subdued. The boat was damaged during the fight, and had to be towed into the harbor at Haifa.

  Desperate Jewish refugees found themselves literally on the shores of the land they had dreamed about, but forbidden from entering. As the dead and wounded were carried off the ship, the rest of the passengers were informed by the British that they were to be transferred to Cyprus for internment in camps for illegal immigrants. The heartbroken passengers unfurled a sign that they hung o
ver the side of the boat. It read, in English, “The Germans destroyed our families and homes, don’t you destroy our hopes.”

  From the crowded deck Nathan watched the British ship Ocean Vigour and two other large British ships waiting to take them away. One by one the Jewish refugees were lead off the Theodor Hertzl by two British sailors, and ushered up the wooden gangplanks and onto the waiting British vessels. There was no escape.

  Soon they set sail again, watching the shores of Palestine again fade away as they steamed north toward the island of Cyprus. They had come so far and gotten so close, only to be rebuffed, refused refuge, once again. On board were over 2,400 young people who had come of age in a time of horror, most of whom had lost their families, all of whom had lost their homes, and who were destitute and desperate. Even after traveling across the European continent and across the Mediterranean, even as they arrived on the shores of their intended homeland, they were still unable to find a place to call home. Nobody wanted them. There would be no happy ending. Not yet.

  Nathan and the other refugees who had been aboard the Theodor Hertzl were shipped to Cyprus, where they were individually off-loaded and “processed.” Each refugee was registered and sprayed with DDT to delouse him, and then assigned a barrack in the British prison camp.

  Nathan was assigned to Camp 68, a tent camp in the desert, surrounded by barbed wire. This camp was in the location known as the “winter camps” in Dekhelia, near Larnaca. Another site about fifty miles away near the city of Famagusta housed what were called the “summer camps.” Only two crude buildings existed in Camp 68, one for cooking and dining, and the other for tending to the sick. The thousands of people living in the camp were housed in tents erected in close proximity in straight lines, forming a compound. Nearby were other camps: Camp 64 was beside them, and across the street were Camps 65, 66, and 67. By the time Nathan left the camp twenty-two months later, two more, Camp 70 and 80, had sprung up.

  Every month 750 certificates were issued by the British allowing for that many Jewish prisoners to leave Cyprus and legally emigrate to Palestine. The remaining tens of thousands of people languished in Cyprus, awaiting their turn.

  Nathan, ever resourceful and uncowed by the incarceration, made the most of the situation. He had learned to speak English during that year he had spent living in London with his father. Thus he was able to communicate with the British guards – which was very unusual among the refugees. The guards decided to give Nathan a job. Every day he was tasked with collecting food for the camp. He drove a truck out of the gate and to another site where the British stored food. Nathan was accompanied by a British soldier named Johnny, who came along to guard the process. Nathan loaded the truck with food supplies daily and then drove the truck back to Camp 68, bringing the food to the kitchen/dining building where it was unloaded and then prepared into meals by other prisoners. Thus Nathan spent the first few months of his Cyprus incarceration.

  After many months, as more Jews were slowly taken out of the Cyprus camps and brought to Israel, Nathan and his group were able to relocate from the tents to the newly vacated and more desirable tin barracks. Conditions there were only marginally better, however, with no electricity or running water, and ongoing problems with extremes of ambient temperature.

  The good part of the move to new quarters, however, was that Nathan was reunited with the pretty girl named Regina. The two formed a strong connection. Regina was a seventeen-year-old orphan. She was highly traumatized and nervous. Nathan found himself strongly drawn to the girl, wanting to protect her and to help her heal. In turn, Nathan’s steady presence gave her the strength to eventually tell him her story. The two spent long hours walking around the camp, holding hands and sharing the ways in which they had survived the war. Regina had decided to change her name. From now on she would be called Shoshana. Like many survivors, she happily shed her European name, choosing a new one to symbolize her symbolic rebirth as a free person.

  Regina was born in a town called Tornalla, Slovakia, close to the Hungarian border. Hers was a large family of eight children, who lived together with their mother and father. When she was a small child the area was taken over by the Hungarians. So Regina grew up speaking Hungarian. Because Hungary was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Jews of this country were relatively protected until later in the war. It wasn’t until 1944 that Hitler got around to annihilating the Hungarian Jewish population. But in 1944 life screeched to a halt. Regina’s two eldest brothers were sent to a work camp. The rest of the family was shipped in cattle cars to Auschwitz.

  How on earth did you survive? asked Nathan.

  I had three angels, she told him. Three angels who saved my life.

  Nathan wrapped his arm around the girl’s thin frame and, pulling her close, murmured, tell me.

  When Regina and her family got to Auschwitz, they stumbled off the train, completely disoriented from the journey in the dark, cramped, and airless compartment. They tried to stay together, but guards were screaming and there was a lot of confusion and fear. Regina’s sister Hermine, though, was with her. They held hands. They were herded along, through the gates of the camp, and told to line up. As they were waiting in line, a Polish man approached them. He was the skinniest man Regina had ever seen, dressed in striped rags, and he was her first angel.

  In Yiddish he asked them how old they were. Fifteen and sixteen, they replied. No, he said. You are now eighteen and nineteen. Remember. It’s important. Then he disappeared.

  They watched as the people in front of them got toward the front of the line where a couple of S.S. officers were stationed. Some of the people from their train were sent in one direction, most in another. They didn’t know what it meant. When they got to the front, trembling, still holding hands, the officers asked their our ages. They said eighteen and nineteen. The S.S. officer looked them up and down, then nodded and indicated that they should step to the right. They watched as their mother and little sister and baby brother were motioned to the left.

  Later they understood. Going to the right meant they would be admitted to Auschwitz. Going to the left meant straight to the gas chamber. They never saw their mother, sister, or brother again. Hermine and Regina were tattooed with numbers on their arms. And they came into the living hell that was Auschwitz.

  Shoshana took a few deep breaths. She started to cry. Nathan held her, whispered comforting words in her ear. Eventually she found the strength to resume her story.

  In exchange for the privilege of living, they had to work for the Nazis.

  Shoshana would not tell Nathan all of it. It was too awful. But she did tell him about when she met her second angel.

  Every day they had to march to the work site. It was far and it was very cold. They had no coats, their feet were frozen in the snow, they were shivering, starving. Every day prisoners gave up. All you had to do was stop, fall down in the snow, and the guards would shoot you. And just like that it could be over. Regina thought about it all the time.

  But there was one German guard who sang while they were marching. Over and over he sang this German song – it was something like “all things come to an end, after every December there comes May.” Regina listened to the words and they gave her strength. They brought her hope. His singing saved her life for the second time. Because of him she kept marching. She didn’t lie down in the snow. Yes, a German soldier was her second angel.

  The war was going badly for the Germans but, even as they realized they were going to lose, they intensified their efforts to make the world free of Jews, cleansed of Jews. Judenrein. This was the most important thing for them.

  Eventually they decided to move the prisoners from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. Naturally the camp inmates had to march. This was really a death march. By now they were so emaciated and weak that people were dropping left and right. But Hermine and Regina were still together, thank God. They had each other. Most people were completely alone. Anyway, they marched for a very long time. Days. Eventual
ly Hermine couldn’t do it anymore. I’m going to stop, she told Regina. Her sister begged her not to, but Hermine had no more strength. She lay down in the snow.

  And here, Regina said, her third angel appeared. Because the guards didn’t shoot Hermine. Perhaps they thought she was already dead, because they just picked her up and tossed her onto the truck that was carrying the corpses of all the other people who had died or been killed during the march. Regina also thought she was dead, of course. She was in a very bad state of mind. But a miracle happened. When they arrived at Bergen-Belsen, Hermine was again with Regina. She told her sister that when she lay on that truck full of corpses she found she didn’t want to die. So she jumped off and she started walking again. So they were together when they entered Bergen-Belsen. And they lived in that hell for some time.

  The British came one day and liberated the camp. And they survived. Three angels saved them.

  The British soldiers helped the prisoners when they liberated the camp. They gave them sips of water; they didn’t let them eat too much right away. You know, when you have been starving you have to start eating again very slowly. The British gave them a ride to Budapest. But Hermine got very sick. She and Regina were in the hospital for a while, but they recovered.

  And the rest of your family? What happened to them? asked Nathan after a while.

  Regina’s father had died of typhus. He actually survived until the camp was liberated, but he died anyway, before he could leave. After the war the sisters found that three of their brothers had survived. So compared to most people they were lucky. Out of ten of them, five survived.