The boy Michael will never forget the train station lit by dozens of searchlights. A mass of people uprooted from their homes, among them his father and mother, lost in the teeming yard. Soldiers gone wild, whipping people’s backs and shooting. Moans of pain and grief rose like waves from piles of humans and toppled those still standing.
Michael’s father pleaded with him to run away to their servant Diana. The mother joined the plea. Suddenly, the beloved parents seemed to distance themselves.
“I’m afraid.” The words flew from his lips.
“Please go to Diana.” His father ignored his fears.
Michael finally tore himself away and ran to the darkened tracks. He knew the way to Diana’s house, but the darkness and the terror blotted out his memory of the address. He thought he was lost and would be seized and crushed at any moment by the soldiers.
When he left the station, the fields were completely dark. He sat down and hoped for a stiff wind to lift him up and return him to his parents.
He recovered, stood up, and kept walking. It was fallow land, filled with prickly bushes. Lights flashing from afar blinded him. He was angry that his beloved father and mother had sent him away so abruptly, and therefore he thought that Diana would also not be pleased to see him.
As he stood wondering where to turn, a man came near. Certain that this was the end, he got down on his knees.
To his surprise, the tall man knelt down, too, and asked his name. Michael answered him.
“My name is Maxie,” the tall man said. “Don’t be afraid; come with me.”
They walked for an hour, maybe two.
The base was small then and looked like the summer camp of a youth movement. A few tents, a pot hanging over a pale fire. Michael doesn’t remember many details about those first days. He remembers the first slice of bread with oil that Tsila gave him. He didn’t think about his parents. Their pleading with him to go to Diana had cut him off from them.
From that night onward Michael has been with Maxie. When Maxie goes out on a mission, Michael can’t fall asleep. He eagerly waits for Maxie’s return before dawn.
Hermann Cohen turned a crate into a table and a smaller crate into a chair. Michael sits and copies verses from the Bible and from Martin Buber’s collection of Hasidic stories. At night he hands out the pages to the study group. Maxie teaches him arithmetic and geometry. Michael excels at arithmetic and will soon start to study geography and French. Maxie promises that when Michael returns to school, he will skip at least one grade.
“When will the war be over?” Michael asks every so often.
“Soon, I assume,” Maxie answers casually. “Do you miss your home?”
“Yes.”
“All of us do, and we want to go home, but until then we have to do our duty.”
“What is my duty?” Michael asks.
“To learn.”
Michael feels good here; he’s everybody’s child. Once in a while the fighters come upon a packet of chocolates or halvah. It is divided at once between Michael and Milio, and everyone is happy for the joy of the children.
Were it not for the nights, the vivid nightmares that come night after night, Michael’s days would be quiet. In the nightmares he sees his father and mother standing in the railroad station, kneeling under the whips of the soldiers. In the first months he saw their faces; now he sees their bent-over bodies falling heavily.
Once he asked Maxie if the dreams were true.
“Do you dream a lot?” Maxie tried to avoid an immediate answer.
“Yes.”
Maxie tries to speak to Michael in terms he can understand and does not talk of horrors. This time he ventured to ask, “What do you dream about?”
“About the train station.”
“Is it scary?”
“Very scary. Are my parents still standing in the train station?”
“No. They left a long time ago.”
“And where are they now?”
“It’s hard to know. I presume they’re with all the others.”
“Are they working?”
“I would assume so.”
These are tough questions for Maxie, but Michael doesn’t relent. He wants to know what kind of work they do and when they will be freed.
But he doesn’t ask so urgently every day. Most of the time he’s deeply involved in arithmetic and geometry and dictation. Maxie watches him concentrate and says to himself, Only with such diligence can a person achieve anything.
What to reveal to Michael and what to conceal, this, too, is a subject of controversy. One of the fighters voiced his opinion that Michael should be told that the people at the station were sent to death camps.
“To tell the whole truth?” Maxie said anxiously.
“Only the truth.”
“Michael is only eight and a half.”
“But wise enough to understand what is happening around him.”
Maxie feels differently: he believes that the naked truth will do the child no good. Things will become clear to him eventually; why deprive him of even one day of childhood? Every day that the child lives in his own world is a blessing.
“That’s the wrong approach.”
“I think it’s fine,” Maxie insisted.
Maxie is a quick and nimble soldier but a patient man, slow to anger. He answers Michael’s questions without adding “and that’s the truth,” or “that’s the real truth,” the way some fighters talk.
Michael has learned not to ask too many questions. Everyone is busy, working in the storehouse or training with his squad. Kamil is strict about the schedule, and training for the raids is a daily routine.
One of the fighters again remarks, “We’ve turned from people who were trained to fight an armed enemy into a bunch of bandits who live off stolen booty.”
Kamil’s plan that, when the time comes, we will attack the military camps around the wetlands is for now an imaginary plan. We are too few, and it’s impossible to leave the weak unguarded. Only if other fighters join us will we be able to engage in direct combat.
In the meantime, we continue to raid private homes and small farms. These are disgraceful raids: We wake a family up in the middle of the night and demand that they hand over their food and clothing or face the consequences. The farmers usually understand that there’s no point in arguing with an armed squad, and they give us what we ask for, but there are farmers who refuse or suddenly draw a pistol, and then we must act in self-defense.
These raids, it must be said, are not uplifting. For good reason the fighters return to the base drained and depressed. Kamil reassures them. “The action was successful, beyond expectations. The goods you brought will feed the base for a week. Our war is not for booty but to save people and smash the monster. For now we are preparing the fortress. The fighters will go out from here to destroy the enemy.”
“Where will the soldiers come from?” says a doubting voice.
“The same place we came from.”
It’s hard to argue with Kamil’s powerful beliefs. Kamil’s highs, it sometimes seems, flow from his lows. We know very little about his lows. Sometimes he hands the command over to Felix and withdraws to his tent. Now and then a voice is heard from inside. It’s hard to guess what he is talking about, or to whom. Even his deputy Felix, who sometimes enters the tent, doesn’t know.
THERE’S A SURPLUS of mushrooms, and Tsila energetically cooks tasty dishes. It’s marvelous what this tiny woman can do. The dishes remind us of home, but Tsila adds flavors of her own. Even her corn or semolina porridge has a new flavor. Kamil has said that even after the liberation we’ll come to Tsila so she can treat us to her food. Who could have imagined that here, of all places, far from any home or restaurant, we would eat such delicacies. Tsila, for her part, does not boast about her handiwork, sometimes simply saying, “Just bring me the basics, and I’ll make them into a meal.”
There are people here who know what she has gone through, but nobody talks about it. Tsila is consumed by doing. Her hands race from pot to pot, and at first glance she does not look like a bereaved mother.