“Shalom, friends, shalom,” the Bulgarian girl cried, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Shalom. Welcome.” Others joined her, calling out greetings in Hebrew and Yiddish, German, Romanian, French, Polish, Italian, and Greek.
As the newcomers began to make their way down the path, the inmates inside the fence kept up with them, trading rumors. Someone said that their boat had been fired upon in Haifa. Someone else said they heard this group was mostly Auschwitz survivors.
“Did you see the man who was carried off the train? Was he dead?”
“No, it was a woman who fainted in the heat.”
“These people are all legals with papers. They’ll be
out of here in a day or two.”
“How do you know that?”
By now, Tedi knew better than to pay too much attention to this kind of speculation; they’d get the real story soon enough.
As soon as the new inmates reached the front gate, a different kind of chorus rose from inside the camp.
“Vienna? Is someone from Vienna? Do you know the Gross-feld family? The furriers?”
“Lodz? Here is a neighbor if you are from Lodz.”
“Budapest? Avigdor Cohen family, near the High Street?”
“Slowinsky? Do you know anyone with the name of Slowinsky?”
Tedi hated this. She crossed her arms and stared at the mountains, trying to imagine what it was like up there, if it was cooler.
Her father claimed that the name Pastore was a souvenir from the Spanish Inquisition, when Jews fled to Holland. He said his ancestors had produced so many more daughters than sons that by 1940, there were only eight Pastores in all of the Netherlands. Tedi was the only one left.
If she were to see a classmate or an Amsterdam neighbor, she would be forced to remember everything: faces, flowers, shops, markets, bridges, canals, bicycles, windows with curtains blowing out, and windows shuttered for the night. And that would poke a dangerous hole into the dike of forgetting that she was building, day by day.
So she kept her head turned away from the group gathered at the gate and tried to ignore the plaintive clamor of names until the earsplitting scream of an ambulance siren made her look. Later, other people would compare the shrill, keening screech to the sound of a cat caught under a car wheel, to an air raid alarm, to a factory whistle. Tedi put her fingers in her ears but it didn’t block the volume or the pain that poured out of a frail woman who stood a few yards outside the now open gate.
She held herself oddly, with her feet turned out and her arms close to her sides. Her hands jerked like gloves blowing on a clothesline. Her head tipped back and her anguish ascended, filling the air with fear. It was hard to breathe. The sun grew hotter. A child wailed.
A nurse in a white uniform rushed forward, a syringe in her hand, but the woman wheeled around, fists raised, suddenly a crouching, punching, spitting dervish. She spun and circled so fast that Tedi thought she actually might rise into the sky, carried off by her own rage.
And then it was over. Two soldiers grabbed her so the nurse got the needle into her arm. The screaming gave way to heavy, heaving sobs, as the sum total of her misery surpassed its unnamed and unnameable parts. A shiver passed through the crowd, as though there had been a sudden drop in temperature.
A word emerged from the weeping, whimpered and repeated over and over.
“What is she saying?” people asked in a polyglot murmur.
“Is it Russian?”
“Is it a name?”
The translation was made and passed.
“Barbwire,” she wept. It was Czech. “Barbwire.”
In the Westerbork transit camp, Tedi had stood beside a barbwire fence and shivered for hours in the sleet, staring silently at an endless icy gray marsh. Beside her, a small, white-haired woman had wept softly. She’d worn an enormous man’s overcoat, with only bedroom slippers on her feet. “They didn’t let me find my shoes,” she’d apologized, again and again.
Finally, she’d asked Tedi to help her sit down on the ground, where she gathered the coat around her like a tweed tent. No one saw her scrape her wrists against the razor wire. By the time she’d fallen face forward onto the fence, her body was cold.
When Tedi arrived at Atlit, she had been shocked and frightened by the sight of barbwire, too. But they had given her clean clothes, warm bread, a pillow, and amid so many reassuring smiles, she had forgotten. Now all she could see was the fence: a million razor-sharp thorns telling her that she was still something less than free, something less than human.
The nurse cradled the weeping woman in her arms, rocking her like a tired child. She signaled to one of the guards, who picked her up and carried her to the infirmary.