Zorah hated the sea as much as she hated the wind in the trees. She hated Tedi, on the far side of the room, for the ease with which she fell asleep. But most of all, she hated the way people kept thanking God. Even now. Even here, where they were imprisoned for breaking rules made in a distant, irrelevant past, in the time before words like “boxcar” and “lamp shade” could chill you to the bone.
So many words had come unmoored from their old meanings. The English called them “illegal immigrants,” but Zorah recognized the term for what it was: a polite version of “filthy Yid.” What other explanation could there be for a place like Atlit?
She squeezed her eyes shut and dared God to stop her from hating everything in His creation, including this Palestine, this promised, this holy land.
In April, when Zorah had heard the news that Hitler was dead, the Hebrew blessing had nearly slipped out of her mouth, but she had fought the reflex and bit her tongue hard enough to draw blood. She would never again say, “God be praised.” Her mother and father would have said it. Her grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts, uncles, and cousins would have said it, along with the professional beggars who had worked her street in the poorest of Warsaw’s Jewish neighborhoods. Zorah cursed everyone in Atlit who said those words, especially the men who prayed, morning and evening, wrapped in their dirty prayer shawls. How dare they?
In the cots lined up between Tedi at the far wall and Zorah near the door, eighteen women sighed and tossed. And if none of them slept as soundly as Tedi, none burned like Zorah, who used the hours of her sleepless nights to calculate the insults of the day, all of which added up to the same thing—that no one cared to know what had happened, and not just to her, but to each of them. To all of them. What they had seen, what they had suffered, lost, and mourned. The British couldn’t care less, of course. But it was no better among the Jews who took care of the day-to-day administration of the camp: the Jewish Agency bureaucrats, the kitchen workers, the doctors and nurses, the Hebrew teachers and calisthenics instructors, the bleeding-heart volunteers who were free to come a
nd go.
Zorah knew why they avoided talk of roundups and forced marches, mass graves and death camps: if you hold a piece of rancid meat under a person’s nose, he cannot help but turn away. That is an animal reflex, pure and simple, an act of self-preservation.
But the local Jews were two-faced about it, greedy for scraps of news about their own relatives, their own hometowns. They accosted dazed newcomers with questions about their parents’ old neighborhoods in Riga or Frankfurt.
If you had no information, they rarely bothered to ask your name or where you came from. After that, it was all about Palestine. Where are you going? Do you have any family here? Are you a member of one of the Zionist youth movements with the fantasy names, doctrinaire politics, and summer camps that taught the fine points of ditchdigging and hora dancing? Are you ready to throw yourself, body and soul, into Avodah Ivrit, the work of building up the land? So avodah, a word for prayer, becomes the dirt under one’s fingernails. But holy dirt, after all. Sacred dirt!
Zorah’s scorn included her fellow survivors, too, who changed the subject after they determined that you had no knowledge of their Aunt Tzeitl or Cousin Misha. But them, she forgave.
She knew they were reluctant to tell their own stories because all of them began and ended with the same horrible question: Why was I spared? Everyone’s mother had been gentle and devout, every sister a beauty, every brother a prodigy. There was no point in comparing one family’s massacre to another’s. Every atrocity was as appalling as the next: Miriam’s rape, Clara’s murdered husband, Bette’s baby, who was suffocated so the rest of the family would not be discovered.
It was unspeakable, so they spoke of nothing. Every day, the girls sat and sighed over the physique of the fellow who led them through morning exercises, or shared tidbits about the newest pair of pants in the men’s barracks, or whispered about Hannah’s breasts, which were growing larger every day. They clucked and preened like hens on a roost.
To Zorah, their conversations about men and food and even Palestine sounded like dance hall music at a funeral. She backed away from their offers of fruit and combs and all the other little kindnesses that threatened her at every turn. While the rest of the girls tipped their faces toward the sun and turned brown, she kept to herself inside the barrack and remained as white as paper.
She decided that all of her fellow prisoners, though wounded and bereft, were no better than wild animals. They were as heartless as the wind in the trees and as stupid as the relentlessly forward-looking Jews of the Yishuv.
“Ach,” she muttered and rolled onto her back. Zorah was used to being the last one awake. Insomnia had been her companion since infancy. Her mother used to tell the other women on the street about how she would find her tiny daughter standing up in the crib, her hands on the railing, listening to the nighttime sounds rising from the street. For the entire first week in the concentration camp, Zorah had been too frightened to close her eyes at all. And even now that she was no longer afraid and the sticky Mediterranean heat made her feel dull and listless, falling asleep remained a battle.
Ultimately, the weariness of her body overcame her restless mind and Zorah did succumb, facedown on the mattress, the pillow on the floor, the sheet bunched under her sweating breasts. The other girls walked past her on the way to breakfast without bothering to lower their voices; once Zorah slept, nothing would wake her, not even the door that slammed a few feet from her head.
The barrack was deserted when she opened her eyes. “Damn it,” she muttered, hurrying into her clothes, determined to get a cup of tea and a piece of bread before the daily comedy they called roll call.
The lineups in Atlit were a black joke for anyone who had survived one of the death camps, where counting off had been a form of torture. Morning and evening, the Germans had made them stand for hours, hot or cold, snow or rain, sounding the roll, barrack by barrack. If someone was slow in speaking up, they might have to repeat the whole thing twice or even three times. There were extra midnight lineups, too, called without explanation. And when a prisoner dropped to the ground, unconscious or dead, it would begin all over again.
The British counted the girls only once a day, inside their barracks in the evening. But the boys had to show up every morning as well. The sergeant in charge that day had sweated through his shirt even before the prisoners started filtering into the dusty yard in front of the mess hall. He tapped his foot and shouted for them to hurry, but they took even longer than usual as they arranged themselves in an intentionally crooked row. From the way they were glancing at each other and whispering, Zorah guessed that someone was missing: still in bed, or in the latrine, or perhaps even escaped during the night—something that had happened at least once in the three weeks since she’d been in Atlit.
The boys finally got themselves sorted, bellowing their names and saluting with exaggerated flourishes. As soon as the officer took a few steps down the line, the first prisoners took a step back and the others quickly closed ranks so the absence of one of the boys would not be noticed. By the time the sergeant had reached the end of the line, the first inmate, a cap pulled low on his forehead, gave another name and bowed from the waist. The whole crew kept a straight face and stood perfectly still until they were dismissed and strutted over to receive accolades from a group of female admirers.
Zorah watched the puffing of chests and the fluttering of eyelashes. Flirtations and romances bubbled up and burst from day to day—sometimes even from hour to hour. Zorah turned up her nose and headed for the shady side of Delousing, where the morning’s Hebrew lessons were taught.
When she saw who was teaching that day, she tried to duck out. Nurit caught sight of her first and pointed at a chair in the front row, but Zorah slipped in a seat in the back as the teacher chatted up a few of the newcomers, speaking Hebrew with a liberal smattering of Yiddish to make sure she would be understood.
“It’s only a matter of days, maybe a few weeks for some of you, but you’ll be out of here soon,” Nurit was saying. She was about forty, thick around the waist, and dyed her hair the peculiar shade of purple-red favored by the local women. Although she was liked by the others because of the chalky little squares of chocolate she handed out at the end of class, Zorah avoided Nurit’s sessions. Not only did the woman love the sound of her own voice, she talked too much about luck—how lucky they were to have survived Europe, lucky to have gotten past the British blockade, lucky to be on the soil of Eretz Yisrael, where so many devoted members of the local Jewish settlement were working on their behalf.
“Today, we are going to learn the names of the flowers and plants of the land,” Nurit began. “We will start with the biblical flora and continue with the trees that our people are planting, along with all the vegetables we have under cultivation. I myself spent the weekend planting bougainvillea in my garden. Do you know bougainvillea, my friends? I passed a whole day searching for just the right plant for my garden, but it was worth it. I tell you, it is the most beautiful of all flowers.”
Zorah stood up abruptly and knocked over her chair. “What the hell do we care about your garden?” she said as she stamped away.
“How do you say ‘pain in the ass’ in Hebrew?” someone muttered.
Laughter followed Zorah as she walked off. She thought she would pass the rest of the morning trying to read the Hebrew newspaper she had “borrowed” from Nurit’s bag last week. But it was too hot inside the barrack, so she wandered the grounds and kept her face turned toward the fence so no one would be tempted to talk to her.
Eventually, Zorah found herself near the front gate where a small crowd was watching the morning’s departures. Arrivals were unpredictable. If the British intercepted an illegal vessel, a train or a convoy of buses would arrive and two or three barracks would fill with refugees.
But people left the camp almost every day. It seemed to Zorah that most of them spent no more than a week in Atlit. If you had the right credentials, the Jewish Agency would present you to the authorities as “legal” under the infuriating quotas the British had set for Jewish immigration to Palestine. But those numbers were a moving target, and there appeared to be different rules for children, who were released as soon as a relative came to claim them.
Zorah also noticed that whenever a private car pulled up to the camp, the “sister” or “brother” it had been sent for would be carried away without acquiring the stamp or seal or signature that kept others waiting. This was called protectzia, a word she learned not in any of her Hebrew classes, but from Goldberg, a gruff, gray-haired Jewish guard who worked in Atlit in order to search for clues about his mother’s extended family in Germany. Goldberg was known to give away cigarettes, which made him one of the few people Zorah sought out.