Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  “I know, I know,” Reuben said. “Forgive me a passing fantasy. That’s all that was.”

  “So,” Levi interrupted. “Tell us all about what happened in Boston. And tell us what people, what Jews are doing about it.”

  “We’re organizing a massive demonstration, a march on Washington,” Sarah said, unable to hide the excitement in her voice. “We want to get media coverage across the country to shine a light on what our government has done. I’m organizing the Portland contingent.”

  Reuben recalled how in college Sarah could organize a march on almost anywhere over almost anything in almost no time at all. She had a way with slogans and chants and signs.

  Nothing ever came of them, though, Reuben thought.

  “And I’m organizing a different kind of demonstration,” Goldhersh added. “I have a warehouse full of little items that were waiting for shipment to Israel. I expect we’ll find a use right here for all my goodies. Sarah can march and carry the most clever of signs as long as she wants to, but this country’s government was the first to use force against Jews. The government can’t expect force to be met only with words and songs. After all, we didn’t conquer the West Bank with words, except maybe the words of the tank commanders to move forward and fire accurately.”

  He tapped Levi on the shoulder.

  “Lieutenant Levi, I have some things that will get President Quaid’s attention. I would not be surprised if other people have attention-getters of their own, would you, Levi?” Goldhersh asked.

  “Not in the least, Abram,” Levi replied. “Not in the least.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The federal justice system was well on the road to recovering from the overload following the arrest of nearly 5,000 people. The Israelis seized from hundreds of homes were taken to the Agganis Arena at Boston University, an indoor stadium where the BU Terrier hockey and basketball teams played. The stadium had seating for more than 7,000 spectators. With guards posted at all entrances, the detainees were given free run of the confined area.

  McQueeney returned to Massachusetts, making her fourth round-trip flight between Boston and Washington in a Justice Department executive jet in three days. She sat at the head of a table in the conference room at the US Attorneys office in the federal courthouse. Seated around the table were Arnold Anderson, the US Attorney for Massachusetts, and his top staffers. Although no one mentioned it, each was aware that their colleague Judy Katz was again not present.

  Her absence, and their individual assumptions for why she was not asked to attend, caused varying degrees of embarrassment and anger. Nobody raised the topic that she was Jewish.

  “As far as I’m concerned, this situation is out of control,” McQueeney said, looking around the table. “I hate to use the phrase, but I ordered this whole roundup because I was following orders. I have never, ever spoken badly of my boss, but I feel that I owe a duty to each of you to be as blunt as possible before any of you go any further down this path. My boss gave me no choice. This may shock you, but I am being candid. I offered to resign rather than do what we are doing. The boss wouldn’t let me resign—at least, not yet.”

  There was shocked silence around the table. The Queen continued.

  “I don’t want any of you to justify what you are about to do by saying you were following my orders. I am not ordering anybody to do anything. Any of you who wants out of this operation can get up and walk out of this room, now, without retribution from me. I was not offered that choice. I’m not the first attorney general ordered to do something she believed was wrong. In 1973, Eliot Richardson, the man who held my job, a man from Massachusetts in fact, was called into the Oval Office. His boss, Richard Nixon, ordered him to fire a fellow named Archibald Cox, a special prosecutor who was investigating Nixon.

  “Richardson refused. So he resigned. Nixon then turned to the deputy attorney general, Bill Ruckelshaus, and ordered him to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus resigned, too. Nixon finally found somebody in the chain of command who would do his bidding—Robert Bork. Bork fired Cox and, perhaps not too coincidentally, fourteen years later Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court, but I’m sure you know how badly that nomination failed.

  “So why this history lesson when we’re all so busy? Because I want each of you to know that sometimes the honorable thing, the downright right thing to do is to refuse to follow orders. I can tell you that I am ashamed of myself for not doing what Eliot Richardson did. I’ve got my reasons—maybe because with nuclear bombs destroying cities and armed attacks on Coast Guard ships in our own harbors we live in a less innocent time. But I can’t tell you that what we did was the right thing to do. And I can tell you that what we are about to do is the wrong thing to do.”

  Again she looked around the table.

  “Anybody leaving? Nobody! Well, damn you all then. And damn me. So let’s figure out what we’re going to do with this mess.”

  Anderson had accepted appointment by President Quaid as US Attorney for Massachusetts because he saw the position as a stepping stone to other, higher state office, such as senator or even governor. He appreciated that despite his basic agreement with the Queen on this issue, ducking out of it would be political suicide. An astute student of Massachusetts politics, Anderson knew that regardless of Eliot Richardson’s status as the hero of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, Richardson’s later effort to be elected US senator from Massachusetts came to a dead end when he was defeated in the Republican primary by a political nobody.

  “The big problem, boss, is that about four thousand of the detainees came off those ships. No question they are in this country illegally. The trouble is, we can’t deport them back to Israel because, well, there isn’t any Israel left to send them to.” Here even Anderson was hesitant. “We don’t want to turn them over to the Arabs, do we?”

  Like everybody else in the room, Anderson had seen clandestine surveillance footage from the refugee camps set up by the Palestinians for those surviving Israelis who failed to escape the invading armies. It was worse, far worse, than Guantanamo Bay. Palestinians were the world’s leading authorities on inhumane detention camps, having lived in them for generations.

  McQueeney interrupted.

  “We’re not going to have to worry about those people, the people from the boats. The way the president was talking yesterday, I think he’s come up with his own solution for dealing with them. A military solution that won’t involve the criminal justice system and therefore won’t involve us.”

  She looked around the table, from face to face.

  “What are we going to do with the other ones? The Boston people we’re holding? As I was reminded by my boss, more than once, ten Coasties are dead and somebody is going to pay for killing them. Suggestions, anybody?”

  “Conspiracy to commit murder,” one attorney said.

  “Harboring fugitives. Or maybe obstruction of justice?” said another.

  “Catch and release,” a third suggested. “Just like striped bass. We caught them, we taught them a lesson they won’t forget, now we slap their wrists and send them home, that’s what I say. We can’t charge a thousand people with murder.”

  McQueeney turned to Anderson.

  “Arnie, what do you say?”

  “Split the difference,” he said, looking for the political compromise. “We’ve got open-and-shut cases on harboring fugitives. After all, we took those boat people out of each of their houses. Charge them for harboring, let them plead out, and fine them a thousand bucks each. There’s nearly a thousand of them. That’ll be a million bucks, which will just about cover all the overtime for this whole deal. That’s what I say.”

  McQueeney sat back in her chair, tilted her head to look at the ceiling and stared silently for a minute. The president would not be happy with this solution. Well then, Quaid can go fuck himself, she thought. I’m the chief law enforcement officer of this country. He’s commander in chief of the military, not commander of the Justice Department. This is my call, no
t his.

  Maybe now he’ll accept my resignation.

  McQueeney leaned forward and looked Anderson in the eyes.

  “I like that. Make it happen. Make this all go away.”

  “Will do, boss,” Anderson said. “But this one isn’t going to go away.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Moishe Cohen felt obligated to take in a family from the ships. He lived in a large waterfront house in Marblehead, a yachting community north of Boston that had a substantial population of substantial Jews. Cohen thought many times about selling the house after his wife, Zelda, passed away from breast cancer three years earlier. He’d remained there more from inertia than for any other reason.

  There was plenty of room for Walid ben Mizrachi’s family in the nearly empty house. The three teenagers spoke English well, having attended Israeli schools their entire lives. Their parents, however, struggled to learn Hebrew after their arrival from Yemen. Their English was limited to a few phrases they’d heard in movies.

  Cohen had toyed with the idea of asking them to remain at the house, of taking on their adoption to America as a mitzvah—a good deed. They’d lost everything they owned in Israel and barely escaped with their lives. It was nice having children around the house, nice to take them in wide-eyed awe to the shopping mall. And he could find a place for Walid in the business.

  Watching the startled ben Mizrachi family carted off by federal agents in the dark of the night was more terrifying to Cohen than even his own arrest had been. He did not expect to see them again. Ever. Like so many other Jews who’d been taken to camps and were never seen again.

  Cohen had been placed on a yellow school bus filled with men pulled from their homes. Frighteningly, the bus was driven by a uniformed soldier. Cohen had watched dozens of yellow buses rendezvous at some sort of military camp in nearby Reading, Camp Curtis Guild. He’d never heard of the place and, in fact, did not know there were military camps in Massachusetts. But, then, what did he know of such things?

  The buses had parked in a large open area, engines were shut down, and then nothing happened. The men had to use a porta-potty next to the driver’s seat, in plain sight of all the others. Cohen was too embarrassed to use the device. The ache in his bowels only added to his discomfort.

  Some men dozed as the night wore on. Cohen had been unable to sleep. He recognized a few faces from synagogue and nodded to them. The man sitting next to Cohen made an attempt at conversation.

  “I told Nadine we shouldn’t have gotten involved,” he said. “Taking in fugitives. Hiding them in our house. And then when I saw on TV about those people being killed on that Coast Guard boat. I told Nadine we had to get rid of these people, we had to. But would she listen to me? God knows, does she ever listen to me? No way. So what does she do? She takes them shopping. To the North Shore Mall, of all places.”

  Cohen nodded, saying, “Good shops there, but expensive. I haven’t been there since Zelda, may she rest in peace, passed.”

  He paused. Smiled. Remembering.

  “No, that’s not right. I took the kids there last week.”

  “Nadine grew up around here and she grew up surrounded by Jews,” the man, Harry Mason as he’d introduced himself, continued. “I told her, I don’t know how many times, Nadine, I said, when you grow up the only Jews in a small town in Pennsylvania, like I did, you know better. I told her, Nadine, Jews better not rock the boat. I told her, Nadine, when Jews rock the boat, Jews are the first ones who fall in the water. That’s what I told her, but did she listen? Never. So what do you think they’re gonna do with us?”

  Cohen shook his head. He had no idea why he’d been arrested, or even if he was arrested. He pretended to sleep.

  An image surfaced in Cohen’s mind of a similar journey he took when he was nine years old, in Poland. Rather than a bus, he’d been on a train, a freight car. And rather than being surrounded by men, the freight car was filled with families, old, young, children, men, women, girls, boys, strong, weak, healthy, sick, frightened. All frightened. All Jews. He’d spent a week in that freight car, a week with only the food they’d brought with them, a week with only the little water they’d brought in jars, a week using a pile of straw in one corner as the communal toilet.

  He’d been with his mother, his father, his grandfather Shmuel, Shmuel his hero, and his two little sisters, Emily and Sarah.

  Finally, the train arrived at its destination, a railroad station in what looked like a small town. There were buildings in the distance and one tall smokestack, belching black smoke—the darkest, blackest smoke Cohen ever saw.

  As the people stumbled from the freight car, soldiers lined them up and they passed in front of a table at which two men sat, one in a German officer’s uniform, one wearing a white coat, like a doctor. When the Cohen family stood at the table, the officer gestured at Cohen’s mother and sisters. Soldiers dragged them off to the side. The doctor glanced quickly at Cohen, his father, and his grandfather.

  “Take the old one, too,” the doctor barked, and the soldiers took Shmuel, Cohen’s grandfather, and dragged him to where his mother and sisters stood trembling.

  Cohen and his father were taken through a door and eventually to a wooden barracks. His father lived five weeks and then did not awaken one morning. Cohen persisted. And persisted.

  Cohen never saw his mother, his sisters or his grandfather again.

  His eyes opened quickly and his head jerked forward as he suddenly came awake. The images were so real. He’d seen the faces of his family and heard the cries of the people around him. Most frightening, however, he’d smelled smoke, a smell he’d inhaled every day for two and a half years in that camp.

  Sitting in the yellow school bus as the eastern sky gradually lightened, surrounded by terrified Jews, Cohen smelled the smoke again and trembled. Shmuel, my hero.

  This time, he thought, this time I’m the old man. The very old man.

  Meals were distributed to the men, some sort of military food in packages marked Meals Ready to Eat. Cohen’s bus was sent to the Rockingham County Jail over the border in New Hampshire. The men were ushered off the bus and into several group cells, ten or twelve to a cell.

  Nobody told the men what was to happen to them. It was not discourtesy; it was just that nobody knew.

  As the day wore on Cohen became increasingly confused, unable to nap as most of the men were doing. His mind raced, jumping randomly, faster and faster from one thought to another as he lost all conscious control of his own thoughts.

  I was a mensch, he thought. I survived for a reason. My life’s goal was to do good, to treat people the way God wants people treated. When other fabric mills left Massachusetts and moved to Carolina, to Alabama, to China, I stayed. I paid my people well. I provided health insurance. I produced good products, not schlock. I supported the synagogue. I gave money to Israel. I’ve lived to be such an old man. Why am I here? Why, after all these years and all I have done, why am I locked up surrounded by Jews who are locked up?

  Cohen sat on the concrete floor and looked at his left forearm, at the row of numbers there. He smiled as he recalled the speech he’d given at the press conference a few days earlier. He recalled the words that brought a room full of news reporters, cameras, television lights and all, to absolute silence.

  “Never again,” he mumbled out loud. “Never again, never again.”

  Moishe Cohen closed his eyes, rolled his head back so his shut eyelids were facing heaven and silently asked Zelda what he should do.

  “Not again, Zeldala. I can’t go through it again.”

  Cohen stood, then slowly walked among the men to the far corner of the cell, where the toilet was located beneath a barred window. His trousers dropped to the floor. He knotted one pants leg into a loop and quietly placed it over his head. Climbing on the toilet seat, Cohen reached up on his toes and tied the other trouser leg to the window bars as high as he could reach.

  Taking one last look at the men in the cell, dozing or talk
ing softly among themselves in groups as far from the smelly toilet as they could get, Cohen whispered the prayer that had comforted him through his years in the German camp.

  “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad.” Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

  Moishe Cohen, millionaire industrialist, stepped off the toilet seat in the drunk tank of the Rockingham County Jail and dangled from his knotted pants. He’d stopped breathing by the time anybody noticed the old man in the corner.

  CHAPTER 24

  Abram and Sarah Goldhersh got a room at the Brooklin Inn and stayed overnight. The next morning at breakfast they still could talk about nothing but the events in Israel and Boston. Levi’s mind drifted. After three days in Brooklin, Levi was concerned they would soon attract unwanted attention. He wanted to find a place to stay on shore, and he wanted to remove the object from the boat and find a safe place to hide it.

  Abram Goldhersh would not stop talking. He grew increasingly more excited.

  “They’ve jailed thousands of Jews, thousands of Israeli citizens, and all you want to do is march around carrying signs saying ‘Let My People Go,’” he said, speaking to his wife, Sarah, in a tone so exasperated he sounded like a teenager whose voice was cracking. “Sarah, you know what sort of things I’ve been running around the country collecting the past few years. I’ve done that because Jews, at least Jews in Eretz Yisrael, learned that carrying a sign gets attention, but carrying a gun gets results.”

  “That is Israel and this is America,” Sarah said to her husband. “You walk around Boston with a gun now and you’ll wind up behind bars and that won’t do anybody—anybody—any good, will it, Mr. Shoot-em-Up? We have some very prominent people coming to this march— politicians, actors, business people. Besides, those poor people have been in that stadium for almost a week now. They have to let them out. What else is the government going to do with them?”