13

 

The Years of Disgrace

 

 

“Ezekiel’s eyes were closed, he seemed to be asleep. Marian blamed herself for not having realized it sooner. She had been speaking for more than an hour, and, as on other occasions, she felt as if she had not been talking to Ezekiel or to anyone in particular, but had rather been telling the story for herself, just as she remembered the Ziads telling it to her. She got up, trying not to make any noise, but Ezekiel opened his eyes and smiled at her.

“I’m not asleep.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter, you must be tired and I’ve just kept on talking. I’m not really being very considerate, given your condition.”

“Don’t worry, these conversations are good for both of us.”

The door to the room opened and a young man wearing a uniform came in. It was Jonah, Ezekiel’s grandson. He had a submachine gun casually slung over one shoulder, just as he’d had the first time they met. Marian thought he looked like his grandfather; yes, the blue-grey eyes were the same.

“Jonah, come in! I’m with Marian.”

The young man came forward and shook her hand strongly.

“I was just leaving . . .”

“Don’t worry, stay as long as you want,” the new arrival said.

“I’ll leave you, I don’t want to be a nuisance. I hope that you get better and get out of the hospital soon.”

“I think I’ll be home in a couple of days. And you, what plans do you have?” Ezekiel asked.

“I have to go to Amman, but I won’t be more than a day.”

“Are you still at the American Colony?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll call you. It’s my turn to speak. I think you’ll be interested in what I have to tell you.”

Marian left the hospital feeling sadder than she had on previous occasions. She could see death in Ezekiel’s eyes.

She made a few phone calls when she got back to the hotel. She had to arrange an appointment in Amman and another in Ramallah.

She was starting to feel crushed in this area, in the face of the constant presence of the soldiers who treated everyone trying to get in or out of Jordan or the territories controlled by the Palestinian National Authority with the same rudeness. She asked herself how they could live with so much hatred and so many irreconcilable differences.

The next morning she took a taxi that left her at the Allenby Bridge border crossing into Jordan. Israel and Jordan maintained formal diplomatic links, but the Israelis treated people entering and leaving the country with suspicion. Especially those who were entering. She waited patiently while the taxi that had been sent for her from the other side of the border was checked and sent through. There were a few meters of no-man’s-land. She remembered two images from the Cold War: the Bridge of Spies in Potsdam and Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. When the taxi dropped her off at the office where she had to fill out the paperwork to enter the country, she was pleased to see Ali Ziad waiting for her with a smile.

“How’s work going in Jerusalem?”

“Good, I don’t think there’s that much more to do.”

“You’re so lucky! Maybe I’ll go to Jerusalem one day.”

“I’ve said I can arrange it for you . . .”

“No, I don’t want to go like a stranger, I don’t want people to look at me with hatred or treat me with condescension. Why should I put up with something like that?”

“So . . .” Marian fell silent and didn’t dare continue.

“What?” Ali asked curiously, in the face of the sudden silence.

“They won’t go, Ali, they won’t go, they’ll never give you back Jerusalem . . . They won’t go . . . They’re not going to step back, they will stay . . .” Marian’s voice was bitter and despairing.

“They have to give us back what they stole from us,” Ali replied. “Sooner or later they will have to.”

She did not reply and instead let her gaze and her thoughts wander to the cultivated land on either side of the asphalt highway that led to Amman.

Ali turned on the radio and a smooth voice filled the morning air, singing a popular song. Soon they could make out the Fortress and, packed in front of it, the hundreds of houses that made up Camp Hussein, where a number of exiled Palestinians lived in hopes of one day returning to their country.

An old man was waiting impatiently for them in the doorway of a house on a narrow street. He smiled when he saw Marian coming with Ali, and as soon as he said hello he offered them a cup of tea and some pistachios.

Marian thought about how comfortable she was in this modest, jerry-built house, put up without any plan just like the rest of them, built over what had once been a refugee camp for those leaving Jerusalem after the defeat of the Six-Day War. It was only ever intended to be a provisional encampment, because the people all thought that they would return one day, but there were elderly people living here now, with their children and grandchildren, waiting for the day when they would be able to gather their belongings and travel back across the Jordan River.

She could stay only a few hours, as the next day she had to go back to Jerusalem first thing in the morning. She had a meeting arranged in Ramallah with members of al-Fatah. Listen, listen, listen, all she could do was listen and put together the pieces of a puzzle that seemed infinitely large and difficult. She wanted to see Ezekiel again. These endless talks with the old man tired her out and above all left her feeling bitter, a bitterness it was difficult to get rid of. But she would listen to him as much as she had to—this was her job.

 

Ezekiel was in the hospital with his grandchildren. It was only two days since she had last seen him, but she found him even worse.

“I want my father to come back, to see if he can make him eat something. A granddaughter has no control over her grandfather, but a son should be able to influence his father, at least a little, don’t you think?” said Hanna, although it was more an affirmation than a question.

Marian didn’t know what to say and looked at Ezekiel.

“I brought you some sweets from Amman. I think you’ll like them, they’re made with pistachios.”

“From Amman?” Jonah’s voice was distrustful. He stood up and looked at the box.

Marian was offended by the young man’s attitude.

“I swear that they’re sweets and not poison,” she said angrily.

“I’m sure, but I don’t know if my grandfather should eat them . . . ,” he said a little shamefacedly.

“Why shouldn’t he eat them? If he likes them then at least he’s eating something,” Hanna said, taking the box and showing it to her grandfather.

“Let me try one,” said Jonah.

“Yes, try them, make sure they’re not poisoned.” Marian was offended.

“Don’t be silly! Of course there’s nothing wrong with them. I had these sweets when I was in Petra and I loved them,” Hanna said.

“You’ve been to Jordan?” Marian asked with interest.

“Of course, we have diplomatic relations with Jordan and many Israelis have taken the chance to go see Petra. If you haven’t gone I suggest you go, it’s one of the most beautiful and impressive places in the world. Do you have to go back to Amman?”

“I hope so . . .”

“Well, next time take a couple of days off and go to Petra and Wadi Rum . . . It’s a real experience to sleep in a Bedouin camp in the desert,” Hanna said.

 

When Hanna and Jonah had gone, Marian sat next to Ezekiel’s bedside.

“Jonah is a good boy,” the old man said.

“I don’t think he likes me.”

“He’s prejudiced against you, or rather, against your NGO. He thinks that your report will be biased against Israel.”

“And Hanna? Does she think the same thing?”

“My granddaughter is different. She’s a committed pacifist and is harsher in her criticism of the government than you could ever be. She works a lot for Peace Now and has friends in Ramallah, human rights activists. Yaniv, her boyfriend, declared himself a conscientious objector so as not to serve in the Territories. Don’t think that it’s an easy decision, the youngsters who choose not to serve in the Territories are not only looked down upon by their friends, but also by a large part of society. But people like Yaniv and Hanna will make the world a better place in the future than it is right now.”

“So Jonah is the hawk and Hanna is the dove.”

“Yes, I suppose. I wouldn’t think that all of us in Israel think the same and that we all follow our government’s advice like sheep . . . Although it is difficult for you to believe it, I think that there are people here who think that it is possible for Palestinians and Jews to live in peace. Hanna is one of them.”

“Like Samuel was, right?”

“Yes, my father thought the same. But it was easier for him. I think that my granddaughter has more of my mother than my father in her. She’s inherited her sweetness.”

“Shall I pour you some tea? I think it will go well with these sweets.”

 

Like Mohammed, I never saw Samuel again. We heard from him until the beginning of the war and then his letters, and those of my sister Dalida, stopped coming.

It was not easy for me to say goodbye to my father. He invited me to lunch at the King David Hotel. I accepted on one condition, that Katia would not be there. He accepted. I was twelve and felt sorry for my mother. I realized the effort she had to make not to lose her composure when Samuel came to see us at Hope Orchard.

I remember one afternoon Dalida and I hid and eavesdropped on a conversation they had about Miriam’s refusal to let us go live in England.

“You are denying them a better future than they could ever have here. Let them study in London and when they are older they will decide where they want to live. You can go see them whenever you want, and they can come home during the holidays, of course,” Samuel insisted.

“You want to take my children from me as well? What will I have left? Tell me, Samuel, what will I have left?”

“Miriam, don’t be melodramatic! Dalida and Ezekiel will be with us, I am their father and there will not be a single minute when I’m not looking after them.”

“I don’t want my children going to boarding school; they are happier here.”

“Living here is becoming impossible! There are deaths every day, Miriam; the Arabs attack the British, the British kill the Arabs, and we’re here in the middle, a part of the conflict. And some of our own people are involved in reprisals against the Arabs. This group, the Irgun . . . I am ashamed that there are Jews capable of committing such atrocities.”

“I was born here, Samuel, and I will stay here. I understand that you don’t think of this land as being yours, but it is mine, and it will be our children’s as well.”

They could not understand each other, much less come to an agreement, but something unexpected happened that afternoon. Dalida walked into the room and revealed that she and I had been listening to the conversation. My sister was sixteen and starting to express her opinions forcefully. After my father had come back she argued with her mother, she blamed her for the separation, and on more than one occasion had blamed her for taking us away from Paris.

“You are fighting about us, but Mother, you haven’t asked me what I want, or Ezekiel what he wants.”

Miriam felt uncomfortable, angry at Dalida’s entrance, and ordered her to leave the room.

“You are so ill-mannered! Your father and I are talking. How dare you eavesdrop and then interrupt us! Leave here at once!”

“No, Dalida is right. She has a right to have an opinion about her future; she’s not a child anymore, she’s sixteen; Ezekiel is twelve, he’s old enough to decide.”

My mother looked angrily at Samuel. She knew she had been beaten. Dalida made me come into the room and confront my parents.

“Mama, I know what I want to do, I have decided to go with Papa and with Katia. Papa is right, we’ll be better there and we’ll be able to come see you.”

My mother’s face showed the pain she felt. I saw that she was trying hard not to cry. Dalida’s betrayal had left her speechless. She looked at me and I wanted to hug her, to protect her, to shout at my father and my sister to get out, to leave us in peace. But I stayed silent, unable to move or utter a single word.

Samuel seemed pleased, and took Dalida’s hand and squeezed it with affection.

“And you, Ezekiel, what do you want to do? Will you come with us?”

I don’t know how long I took to reply, but I remember my mother’s anguish as she waited.

“No, I’ll stay with Mama.”

This obviously surprised my father, he was expecting me to copy my sister’s decision. My mother was relieved and burst into tears.

“Come on, Miriam! Don’t do this to the children! They have the right to choose.”

She walked out of the room without saying another word and I ran after her. She hugged me so tight that I could scarcely breathe and said, in a faint little voice, “Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you.” I wanted to go back to the room and tell my sister that she was shameful and disloyal, and that if she left I would never speak to her again. But I stayed still and hugged my mother.

When they were going to leave, my father said he wanted to speak to me; we agreed that I would go to the King David Hotel and that he would not force me to see Katia.

You can’t imagine what the King David was like back then. In the corridors you were as likely to pass a sheikh as you were to see a European aristocrat or a famous painter. Everybody who was anybody who came to Jerusalem stayed at the King David.

My father had reserved a table on the terrace that was far enough from the rest of the hotel for us to be able to talk with a certain amount of privacy. I didn’t see Katia, but I did see Konstantin, who was very friendly toward me. But this was nothing new. Konstantin was like that, friendly and well disposed toward everybody.

My father took a while to work his way round to the real reason for that meal. It seemed that he did not dare ask me straight out why I had decided to stay in Palestine, so I felt ever more nervous, as I knew that this was the only reason we were alone there together. When I could not bear it a minute longer I gave him my reasons, before he had a chance to ask for them.

“I’m not going to London, I’m going to stay with Mama. I don’t think it would be good for us both to go with you and to leave her alone. You have Katia, but Mama only has us. Also, if I go to London I wouldn’t live with you, I’d be at a boarding school, which I would like even less. I wouldn’t like to live with Katia, I would think of Mama too often.”

My father looked at me in surprise and I think he was even a little nervous.

“So you’ve made your decision . . .”

“Yes, I’m staying with Mama, and I think it’s a bad thing that Dalida is going with you. I’ve already told her that I will never forgive her.”

“That’s not fair. You are free to choose, don’t blame your sister for having the same freedom.”

“I don’t think it’s right to leave Mama. She loves us more than you do, she’s never left us alone. Mama never left us to be with anyone, but you did to be with Katia.”

These reproaches hurt Samuel. You could see it in his expression, in the way his gaze became unfocused.

“You shouldn’t judge me. When you are older I hope you will understand me.”

“What do I have to understand, that you love Katia and you don’t love Mama?”

I was being insolent. I was too hurt by my father to spare him this suffering. In fact, I needed him to suffer like I was suffering at this new separation.

“I love your mother, and I assure you that I always think about her, just as I always think about you. But there are things that I do not know how to explain . . . that I do not want to explain. Yes, Katia is important for me and I want to live with her. You, too, will decide one day whom you want to live with and you won’t care what the rest of the world thinks.”

“I don’t ever want to leave Mama.”

“I’m very sorry you are not coming with us. I think that the best thing for you would be to receive a good education in a British school, but I cannot force you, so I won’t insist.”

He said that now that I had made my decision there was nothing more for him to do in Palestine, and that he would leave Jerusalem in at most three days to head to Marseilles from Jaffa, and then he would go to Paris before leaving for London.

We said goodbye at the hotel, because when he went back three days later to pick up Dalida I was nowhere to be found. I asked Wädi to help me hide. He insisted that I should say goodbye to my father and my sister, but I didn’t want to because I was afraid I would cry.

When at last they left I went back to the house. My mother had locked herself in her room, and Kassia said that it was better for me to leave her a while.

“She needs to be free to cry, it was not easy for her to say goodbye to Dalida.”

Kassia seemed angry, as did Ruth, who had used her illness as an excuse not to leave her room to say goodbye to Samuel. The only ones who had kept up appearances were Marinna and her son Ben, as Igor was at the quarry and he, too, had saved himself this scene.

Marinna held me tight and tried to console me, but I escaped once again and ran to Wädi’s house and asked Salma if I could stay for dinner with them. Salma agreed and sent me to be with Wädi.

We were all upset at Dalida’s absence, especially my mother. I think that Miriam saw it as a betrayal on her daughter’s part. I don’t know why, but we stopped mentioning Dalida, as if she had never existed. I suppose we did so to lessen Miriam’s suffering. I only spoke about my sister with Wädi, who said that he would never pardon his sister Naima if she did what Dalida had done.

 

Nineteen thirty-eight was a year in which death decided to visit Hope Orchard without showing us any mercy.

The first to go was the old pharmacist, Netanel. He died of pneumonia. Sometimes I wonder if he actually wanted to die, because for all that my mother and Louis insisted that he go to the hospital he claimed the opposite.

“It’s nothing, just a cold and general old age,” he said to calm us down.

One morning, when he seemed to be choking to death, Louis sent my brother Daniel to look for Yossi. When my uncle arrived, even though they took Netanel to the hospital, it was too late for them to do anything for him. He died a few hours later.

Daniel was the one most strongly affected by the old pharmacist’s death.

Netanel had been like a second father to him. After our mother, the pharmacist was the most important person in his world. They had spent many hours in the laboratory together, and Netanel had, with great patience, taught the young man all he could.

Daniel had never been all that fond of Samuel. He thought he was an intruder, someone who came between him and his mother, and when Miriam brought Dalida and me into the world, I suppose that only made him feel more alone.

In spite of always being attentive to Daniel’s wishes and desires, Samuel didn’t show him very much affection either. As for Dalida, she did not seem to take much interest in her big brother, who preferred to spend all his time in the laboratory and whom my mother had to send for to make him come and eat with us. The difference between our ages was too great for us to feel close to one another, so Daniel grew up feeling lonely, and he found the affection that he didn’t find at home in Netanel.

I still remember how I felt to see him weep for the old pharmacist. Nothing my mother said could console him.

Back then, although he was already a man, Daniel was still studying at the university. Netanel had decided to make a good pharmacist out of him, and so, although the laboratory had been destroyed in the fire, he undertook the task of building it back up. It was more modest even than the first one, because Netanel was really too old now to do such work, but it was enough for him to be able to teach Daniel, and most importantly, for Daniel to have a place where he could hide.

“That boy’s going to get ill,” Kassia said to Miriam, worried because Daniel hardly ate anything.

“I don’t know what else I can say,” Miriam said sadly.

“He needs you more than he’s needed you his entire life. He needs to know he is not alone,” Kassia insisted.

“But he’s never been alone! I’m his mother and I love him.”

“Maybe he doesn’t see it like that. You were too much in love with Samuel, too busy with Dalida and Ezekiel. I think that Daniel feels he’s not important to you, at least not as important as the family you created with Samuel.”

Kassia’s words hurt her because she knew in her heart that she was right.

“What can I do?”

“Be with him, speak to him, convince him to finish his studies.”

“Of course he will finish his studies! With what the university is costing us, how could he want to drop them now!”

But Daniel did leave the university. He refused to finish out the year, and the most surprising thing was that he told his mother he wanted to be a rabbi.

“But you’ve never wanted to hear a single word about religion before now!” Miriam said, trying to understand her son.

Yossi found a solution for Daniel. He would go to a kibbutz in Tiberias. If he still wanted to be a rabbi after a few months, then no one would stand in his way.

“He needs to find a meaning to his life, and he needs to do it by himself. Let him go, he’s a man now,” Yossi said to Miriam.

She accepted, even though it hurt her to see Daniel leave. She felt guilty that she had not been able to show just how much she loved him.

I also suffered to see Daniel go. He was my older brother, and although we treated each other with indifference, he was a part of my daily life.

“I don’t think I’ve been a good brother to Daniel,” I admitted to Wädi.

“Don’t be silly! Of course you’ve been a good brother, why would you think that you haven’t?”

“I didn’t speak to him much, I wasn’t interested in what he did and . . . Well, I heard him say once to Kassia that he felt as if he’d been pushed to one side because my mother loved Dalida and me more than him.”

“Brothers don’t always get on well, I fight with Naima all the time, she’s a busybody, but I love her even if I never say so.”

“Do you think that my mother loves Dalida and me more?”

Wädi was silent for a while. I knew he would tell me the truth.

“No, I don’t think so. When you were born, Daniel was already quite grown up and your mother had to pay more attention to you than him. Daniel might have been angry that his mother married another man.”

“But Daniel’s father had died . . .”

“Yes, but . . . Well, I wouldn’t like it if my mother married another man. Would you?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know whether I would care or not, I was so angry with my father. I couldn’t forgive him for having left, and even less for having left with Dalida.

I went to Wädi about everything. He was eighteen and a man, and I was an adolescent, twelve years old, but he was always patient and affectionate with me. There was no one I trusted as much as him, when it came down to it I owed him my life.

I would fight with Ben, Marinna and Igor’s son, over almost every little thing. We were very different even though we loved each other, having grown up together. Ben preferred action, he was always planning some mischief or other, and I was more peaceful. I liked to read and had no trouble with my studies, but Ben passed each subject with great difficulty. The teachers said that he couldn’t sit still for a minute, that he was incapable of concentrating on what he was doing. But although he was not good at math he had other qualities. With just a quick glance over any machine he could take it apart and put it back together. He could fix anything, even the motor on our old truck. He had a prodigious memory. He could remember anything, even if he had only heard it once. I think that Ben liked to flirt with Naima back then, but Marinna and Salma did all they could to keep them apart. Marinna, normally so easygoing toward her son, would get seriously angry if she saw him going over to the fence that separated our land from that of Mohammed and Salma.

“Do you want to ruin Naima?”

“I’m only going to talk to her!” Ben protested.

“There are enough problems between the Arabs and the Jews for you to go throwing more wood on the fire. Naima is fifteen and she’s not a child anymore, she can’t go running around with you anymore.”

“Why not?” Ben asked.

“Because it’s not the right thing to do. Do you want to make problems for her? I won’t allow it.”

One morning when I was getting up to go to school I saw Igor with his mother in his arms, and Louis helping him. They took her to the hospital and she died that morning.

Ruth had been ill for a long time and had not left her room. She had suffered a stroke and the left side of her body was paralyzed. We all looked after her, but it was Kassia who treated her like a sister.

I was affected to see Igor crying like a child over the death of his mother. Not even Marinna seemed able to console him. Ben seemed to have become invisible for a few days. He was deeply affected by his grandmother’s death. The only moments in the day when Ben was quiet was when he came back from school in the evening and sat next to Ruth’s bed to tell her what he had done that day. Ruth could barely speak a word, but her eyes lit up when she had Ben near her.

“We’re getting old, first Dina, now Ruth, I’ll be next,” Kassia said, and her words made a chill run down my spine.

Kassia was the pillar holding up Hope Orchard. I could not imagine the house without her, I thought we could all disappear without anything happening, but not Kassia.

I was still an adolescent when I realized that in the ever more bloody conflicts between the Arabs and the British, it was the Arabs who were getting the worst of it. Louis always said that they were disorganized and this made them more vulnerable.

Louis still disappeared from time to time, although less often than before. He had, in a natural way, assumed the leadership that Samuel had abandoned years before. Igor, the other man in the house, recognized his authority, as did Moshe.

The relationship between Louis and Moshe was tense, as Moshe had decided to support the National Military Organization in the Land of Israel (Irgun Zevai Leumi), better known as the Irgun. They argued a lot nowadays, as Louis, an important member of the Haganah, disagreed strongly with the Irgun’s military and political plans.

“We are not at war with anyone; our aim is to defend ourselves, defend our farms and our homes,” Louis never tired of repeating.

But Moshe thought that the Arabs and the British were just two sides of the same coin, both of them creating obstacles to the Jews having their own homeland.

“You know what, Moshe? They persecuted us for centuries in Europe, the tsars organized pogroms against the Jews, and the only places in the whole world where we could live peacefully were in the East, within the borders of the Ottoman Empire or even farther afield. The Arabs are not our enemies, we’ve lived with them for centuries with no greater problems than you would normally have with any neighbor.”

Moshe did not listen to reason.

“The British will leave, and then it will be them or us. The sooner that the Haganah realizes this, the better it will be for all of us.”

Kassia didn’t invite Moshe and Eva to spend Sabbath with us very often. She said that she was tired of these interminable discussions that never led anywhere.

“You know that Moshe is a part of the Irgun. He shouldn’t even be with us. I don’t agree with any of the atrocities they have carried out, and when I see him I wonder if it was he who carried them out,” Kassia complained.

Marinna agreed with her mother.

“We gave them shelter when they arrived, but many years have gone by now, they’re not poor immigrants with no resources anymore. They could go anywhere. Their children live on a kibbutz in Galilee, why don’t they go to be with them? Every time I think that it was their group that threw grenades into that café in Jerusalem . . .”

“But we don’t know if he was involved,” Miriam said, uncertainly.

“You should talk to Moshe,” Kassia insisted to Louis.

Miriam, my mother, tried to mediate. She didn’t sympathize with Moshe and Eva, but she didn’t like the idea of throwing anyone out of Hope Orchard. I suppose that in her heart of hearts she thought Samuel would not have approved, as he saw Hope Orchard as a place of welcome.

“We must learn to respect one another. Moshe and Eva don’t live in this house,” Miriam said.

“Yes, but they live two hundred yards away,” Marinna replied.

“But we never even see them,” my mother insisted.

“I want to have Moshe nearby. I think it’s not a bad idea for the Haganah to have some notion of what the Irgun is up to, although our leaders don’t think it’s a good idea to deal with them,” Louis explained.

I liked to hear the adults talk, especially Louis, to whom I had assigned, without realizing it, the role of father. I told him all my little secrets, and it was also he who scolded me when I did something wrong, or when he saw me trying to get out of helping my mother.

This was when I started to regret that Louis was not my real father. I preferred him to Samuel, especially because he was there for me and had not abandoned me.

 

The worst part of those years was the distance that began to grow between us and the Ziad family. Louis had warned us to be careful.

“If you see them too much they could be accused of being traitors, and I don’t know what would happen to them then. If they come over here they will be welcome, but we shouldn’t compromise them with our presence. And you, Marinna, I know that you miss her, but you can’t carry on going to Deir Yassin to visit Aya. I know that she was insulted by a group of women a few days ago and that Yusuf has been warned for allowing his wife to receive Jews in her house.”

“I’m not going to stop seeing Aya! She’s like my sister. I refuse to let a couple of old gossips get in the way of our friendship,” Marinna protested.

“The important thing is for Aya not to suffer from your friendship. You’ll find a way to see each other, but you shouldn’t go over there.”

Igor didn’t usually contradict Marinna, but in this he was in agreement with Louis. He had the idea that they meet at Yossi and Judith’s house.

“No one will think it strange for Aya to go to the doctor. The Arabs respect Yossi. There are many important figures in their community who are his patients. He’s the best doctor in Jerusalem.”

Marinna accepted this solution, reluctantly. I almost entirely ignored Louis’s warnings, and went to Mohammed’s house to be with Wädi as often as I could. Of course, I tried to do so when night was falling, hoping that no one would see me. Even so, I would sometimes completely ignore Louis’s warnings and would go with Ben to the Ziads’ fence and wait for Wädi or Naima to invite us in. Sometimes it was Salma who saw us and waved for us to come in.

Salma reminded me of my mother. She was younger, but when her veil fell back you could see her dark reddish chestnut hair that was the same as my mother’s. She seemed very pretty, as much or more so than Miriam.

Some nights Louis, too, came over to the fence, hoping to find Mohammed smoking among the olive trees, sitting on the old wooden bench that Ahmed Ziad had made when Mohammed was still a child.

They would speak in low voices until late at night. Louis barely mentioned what he spoke about with Mohammed, although he would always say that whatever happened we should try to make sure that the ties connecting us to the Ziad family were never broken. Kassia often reminded him that Dina had been a good friend to her and that she felt as if Mohammed and Aya were her own children. My mother best understood Louis’s fears. The Peel Report had been a hard blow for the Arabs and a relief for the Jews, and that had made the breach between the two communities all the worse. Louis’s concern was how to mend this breach, at least as far as our two families were concerned.

Following Igor’s recommendation, Marinna met with Aya at Yossi and Judith’s house. My mother and I would often go with her, so we could see my Aunt Judith.

The passage of time had turned her into an inert being, who not only had lost her sight but also seemed barely to recognize us. Yasmin looked after her tenderly, and helped her father in the office. Mikhail, for his part, was now fully involved in politics. He helped the clandestine Jewish immigrants settle in the country. They would look for a patch of land to settle, and would mark it out with four stakes and a few tents.

It was not the case that the British had become more lenient about Jewish immigration to Palestine, but Nazism in Germany was forcing more and more Jews to flee their country. This was not an easy task, because as well as needing money to charter boats they had to deal with the rigid control of the British fleet along the Palestinian coast, trying to prevent more immigrants from arriving and thereby worsening their conflict with the Arabs.

One day I heard Mikhail explaining to my mother that my father was involved in chartering boats to try to overcome the perils of the sea and the English blockades.

“Samuel and Konstantin are spending their fortune buying old boats and bribing their captains to run the English blockade. I went to meet a group a few years ago up in the north, coming off a Maltese cargo ship. If you had seen the state of the boat . . . I don’t know how it kept afloat. We managed to disembark a hundred people. Lots of them were ill. They had traveled in heaps and the hygienic conditions were terrible. We took them to the Negev. It will be difficult for them to adapt, most of them are teachers and merchants who have never seen a hoe before.”

“You didn’t know how to plant a tree either,” Miriam said with a smile.

“I was young, but these people . . . Also, they only speak German, some of them know a little Hebrew, but they’re the minority.”

“At least no one will persecute them here,” my mother said.

“No one apart from the English, but they prefer that risk to the Nazis. If you could hear the stories they tell . . . Some of the women cry because of what they have left behind: their families, their houses, the tombs of their ancestors . . . In spite of all they are suffering, they feel themselves to be German, not anything else. Here they feel lost, they have turned into peasants overnight.”

“Is Samuel still working with the Jewish Agency?” my mother asked, keen to find out what had happened to her husband.

“Along with Konstantin he is one of the most active members. They do all that they can to help Jews escape from Germany and to defend our cause to the British. Apparently Winston Churchill is a great ally of theirs, one of the few British politicians who is not ashamed to proclaim his sympathies for the Jews.”

My mother was comforted to hear Mikhail speak well of Samuel. Their relationship had been filled with misunderstandings, especially their inability to recognize the immense affection that each held for the other. Miriam knew this well because for years she had heard Samuel talking of Mikhail’s lack of understanding.

It was no surprise for anyone when Mikhail decided to join the Jewish Settlement Police, whose mission was to protect the settlements. Mikhail could thereby combine his two activities, his official work with the English and his unofficial work with the Haganah, both of them sharing the same objective: protecting the Jews from the frequent attacks from Arab bands.

If the Peel Report had been a step forward for the Jews, with its recommendations that Palestine be split into two entities, a Jewish and an Arab state, it had been a step backwards for the British. On November 9, 1938, the British decided to shelve the report’s recommendations.

The British government gave way in the face of the evidence that although their superior military capacity had enabled them to control the Arab revolt, the Palestinian situation would eventually slip out of their hands.

This news came accompanied by another piece of news, tragic this time, that an even crueler persecution of Jews had taken place in Germany, known as Kristallnacht. It was one more step in the Nazi policy of threatening and liquidating the German Jews.

Louis came home worn out. For the first time we saw him look pessimistic. A few days after news of the massacres of Kristallnacht had been made public, the British refused visas to tens of thousands of children coming from Germany.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. The British are playing their own game again. They don’t want to carry on their confrontation with the Arabs, so they have decided to ignore their promises to us. And those poor children . . . I don’t even want to think about what will happen to them.”

 

I don’t know why, but somehow I trusted that my father would do something. Didn’t they say that he was friends with some English ministers? Didn’t he have enough money to charter ships? Yes, Samuel must be able to do something, I was sure that he wouldn’t sit by with his arms crossed when he heard the news. I remembered a few conversations he had had with my mother when I was just a little boy and they thought I wasn’t listening. Conversations about what he considered to be a terrible threat—Nazism, and its leader, Adolf Hitler, who so hated the Jews. I did not know why.

At about this time, my mother started to ask me what I wanted to study in the future at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I didn’t know whether to become a doctor like my Uncle Yossi or a chemist like my father, even though neither of those two careers really attracted me. I was fascinated by the comings and goings of Louis and Mikhail, and I thought that they must be having extraordinary adventures, laughing at the British forces and helping the immigrants who arrived secretly. But there was a part of that adventure that I rejected outright, and that was the idea that defending the colonies implied confrontations with the Arabs. I could not see the Arabs as enemies even though I had nearly died in the flames a few years before when that group of young men burned Hope Orchard. My world was to me no more than my mother, my Uncle Yossi and Aunt Judith, Yasmin and Mikhail, and everyone who lived at Hope Orchard. Especially Wädi. Dina had also been an important person for me, as were Aya and her children Rami and Noor. Even Mohammed’s Uncle Hassan and Aunt Layla, and their son Jaled, were an important part of my existence. I couldn’t see any differences between the Jews and the Arabs, and when I looked at the scars on Wädi’s face, I thought that I would always owe an eternal debt to him and his family.

 

I have said that death seemed to be hovering around us. In January 1939, shortly after the beginning of the Christian year, Judith was found dead in her bed. Yossi did not realize this until morning. She must have died during the night, as her body was stiff and cold.

I remember the knocking on my door. A friend of Yossi’s had come to tell us. My mother seemed to become incapable of moving, or speaking, or crying. I burst into tears immediately.

Kassia took control of us all. She told us to hurry up and get dressed and washed, and sent Ben to Mohammed and Salma’s house to tell them what had happened. Louis was not at home, and it was Igor who drove us to the Old City.

My Uncle Yossi was crying silently at Judith’s bedside. Yasmin had helped him wash and prepare the body for its final journey into the land that had given it birth.

There was no space for argument. Miriam and Judith had always said that they would like to be buried in Hebron. That was where their mother and father slept their eternal sleep, and it was where they wanted to take their final rest as well. Igor was worried about the journey to Hebron, and above all about the hostility that we might expect to encounter from Arab groups who were active in the vicinity. But my mother was inflexible. Her sister would be buried in Hebron and she would take the body there herself, even if it put her life in danger.

Yossi didn’t argue. He wanted to fulfill what would have been Judith’s wishes, so once all the documentation was filled out in Jerusalem, we left for Hebron, although he insisted that we tell Mikhail and Louis beforehand. We might need protection.

It was not easy to find them and they couldn’t get back until two days later. When they returned, all of Judith’s friends and acquaintances had already passed through the house to say their farewells to her. I was surprised that my mother still had not shed a single tear. After the death of her sister she had reacted with immense self-control. So great it was that Kassia was worried.

“It’s bad not to cry, it’s better if you do, you’ll suffer more if you hold it all in,” she said to my mother.

But Miriam was simply incapable of crying, and she spent three days attending those who came to pay their condolences.

In spite of all our fears, we experienced no problems on the road to Hebron. Perhaps this was because the people who could have attacked us decided to respect the cortège. We reached the small Jewish cemetery without incident.

It was a comfort for my mother to find her childhood friends here. They were Arab women the same age as my mother who sincerely mourned the loss of Judith. I asked myself how it was possible that here, years ago, there could have taken place the attack on the Jews in which my grandfather lost his life.

The night we returned home was when my mother started to cry. She shut herself in her room and we heard her uncontrollable sobbing. Kassia wouldn’t let me go in.

“Leave her. If she doesn’t cry, then she’ll explode.”

A few days later we went to see Yossi and Yasmin; I was shocked to see how much my uncle had aged.

“I can’t bear Judith not to be here. For all that I tell myself she’s been more dead than alive for years, it’s been a comfort to have her beside me.”

Yasmin was worried about her father, who barely ate and who apparently didn’t sleep either.

“He sits in his old chair and waits until morning. If he carries on like this he’ll fall ill.”

 

But however we felt, life continued. There was a conference in London about the future of Palestine in 1939, attended by Arab and Jewish delegations. His Majesty’s government could not keep sending troops to reinforce Palestine, as they saw a closer and more fearful danger on the horizon—the aggressive, expansionist policy of Hitler and the Nazis.

The Jews of Palestine were worried about what might result from this conference, but if one thing was clear, Louis explained, it was that we were not going to take a single step backwards.

The Arabs came to the London Conference divided. On the one hand, Jamal al-Husseini, the mufti’s cousin, was there; on the other hand, one of the most important members of the Nashashibi family, Raghib al-Nashashibi, the head of the more moderate Arab Palestinian faction, was also in attendance.

Al-Husseini stayed in the luxurious Dorchester Hotel, al-Nashashibi in the no less luxurious Carlton. Dr. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion were our representatives.

Mikhail had a few doubts about Dr. Weizmann. “He’s too British,” he said, but Louis reminded him that it was thanks to Weizmann that the Jews had received a precious gift, Lord Balfour’s declaration that Jews should have a homeland in the land of their ancestors, Palestine.

The news that came from London was not exactly optimistic. Samuel sent a long letter in which he said that the conference had needed to be inaugurated twice, once for the Palestinian Arabs and once for the Zionists because the two refused to be together, “something which irritated the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.”

Samuel said in his letter that the British seemed “more predisposed toward the Palestinian Arabs than us. A few days ago, at dinner in a banker’s house, Konstantin had heard from Chamberlain’s own lips that in the case of conflict with Germany the Jews would side with the British against the Germans, for what option did they have? So I’m afraid that they will make concessions to the Palestinians more readily than they will to us. We don’t have very many friends in the British government either; the new colonial secretary, Malcolm McDonald, seems to be not very engaged with our problems. The lack of agreement between Dr. Weizmann and your Ben-Gurion doesn’t help either. Ben-Gurion came to London committed to not moving an inch. I fear he is not a very flexible man. As far as I have been able to find out, Dr. Weizmann was willing to accept a reduction in the number of Jewish immigrants. Ben-Gurion has not allowed this at all. One of the diplomats who has been privy to their conversations, and who is a good friend of Konstantin, says that what Ben-Gurion proposes is a Jewish state within an Arab confederation. As you might imagine, the Palestinian Arab delegation has not accepted this proposal. I fear we have reached a dead end.”

Years later, history books would state that Ben-Gurion would not accept a limit placed on the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, an argument based on the persecution that they could expect in Germany. For his part, Jamal al-Husseini put his cards on the table from the outset: the British had to put a quota on Jewish immigration to Palestine, prohibit the Jews from buying more land, and, above all, accept the creation of a Palestinian state. The Nashashibi were in favor of allowing the Jews who were already in Palestine to be part of an Arab state, but al-Husseini added that they should not be given their own territory.

It was impossible to reach an agreement. In fact, it was worse than impossible, because before the conference had finished the British came up with a new plan to attempt to solve the Palestine problem. In this proposal, which became the basis of a new White Paper, the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, sought to solve the problem via the creation, within the next ten years, of a predominantly Arab state. He also considered an immediate halt to Jewish immigration. The document made the Jewish delegation walk out of the talks and abandon the conference. On May 17 the White Paper was made official and the Balfour Declaration was officially annulled.

We received news of all these developments with worry and a great deal of discussion. Kassia and Marinna, socialists above all else, argued with Louis about the Jewish leaders who wanted a homeland, a state. Mikhail, a fervent supporter of Ben-Gurion, vehemently supported the idea that the Jews should have their own state within an Arab confederation.

“I don’t want a state,” Marinna said. “Our aim is to live in peace with the Palestinian Arabs, we didn’t come here to find anything else.”

Marinna suffered from the confrontations between the two communities. Not because her love for Mohammed clouded her judgment, but because she had grown up and become a woman under the influence of her parents’ socialist ideals. They were internationalists above all and thought that Arabs and Jews had problems that went beyond the idea of nationalism.

My Uncle Yossi and my mother were upset by these discussions. They were as Palestinian as anyone, and defended what had been the status quo up until that point. Their hearts were divided. They knew that the Jews needed a homeland, a place where no one could persecute them, and at the same time they understood the worries of their Palestinian Arab friends in the face of the massive influx of immigrants. Neither could they imagine an exclusively Jewish state.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Ben-Gurion’s message was blunt: we shall fight the war against Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.

Ben and I asked Louis to let us join the Haganah. Officially the Haganah did not exist, but everyone knew that it did, so we didn’t beat around the bush. We had heard enough conversations over the years to know that Mikhail and Louis were part of that clandestine organization. Dedicated to protecting the settlements, it also stood up to the Irgun and the Stern Gang, two organizations characterized by violent and even terrorist methods. Just after the publication of the White Paper, the Irgun had placed bombs near the Jaffa Gate that had killed nine Palestinian Arabs.

Louis took our petition seriously, but he rejected it.

“I think it’s good that you want to help, and I’ll tell you how. To start with, you can deliver messages.”

“I’m seventeen, I can do more important things,” Ben said angrily.

“I’m almost fourteen, and I’ve heard that men my age are trained in the kibbutzim to help with defense of the settlements,” I said, trying to convince Louis.

“If we have to we’ll go to a kibbutz and then no one will stop us from fighting,” Ben warned.

We hadn’t realized that Kassia had been listening to us.

“Are you crazy? Don’t we have enough problems with Moshe without you coming along and breaking our hearts?”

“Come on, Kassia, they’re not children anymore and sooner or later they’ll have to take on their responsibilities.”

“Responsibilities? What do you mean? The Arabs are not our enemies.”

“But the British are,” Louis replied with disdain.

“And we’re going to fight them with children?” Kassia was getting ever more angry.

My mother and Marinna came in at this point. They had just been out beating down the olives.

“What’s going on? Why are you shouting?” Marinna asked.

Kassia explained, and Marinna grew angry at all three of us, Louis, her son Ben, and me. My mother tried to calm her down.

“They want to have adventures, they’re at that age, and they want to join the Haganah because they don’t know what it means.”

“Of course we know!” Ben interrupted, upset at my mother’s condescending tone.

Louis ended the discussion by saying that he had to leave, but as he was on the threshold he cast a glance at Ben and me that made us think all was not yet lost.

 

It may seem odd, but for the six years of the war there was a kind of truce between the Arabs and the Jews. Maybe this was because, in spite of our having spoken out against the White Paper, it remained a clear possibility that the Jews would not have their own homeland in the future, or else because the British were still trying to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine, even as they knew that those who attempted to get out of Germany were doing nothing more than trying to escape from the claws of their worst enemies, Hitler and his henchmen.

In spite of our mothers’ opinions, Ben and I started to work as messengers for the Haganah. In 1940 we were asked to smuggle weapons and messages from one side to the other. I think that my mother and Marinna both decided that Louis would use his good judgment to ensure that we were not placed in too much danger.

Louis had put us under the command of Mikhail, and my mother tried to convince Kassia that my regular visits to Yossi’s house were to see him and Yasmin.

“Ezekiel is a sensitive boy. Ever since the death of Judith he has not missed a chance to help his uncle and his cousin,” she said, proudly.

My cousin Yasmin knew what we were up to, but she, like her father Yossi, showed a certain reticence with regard to our actions.

The most difficult thing of all was for me not to be able to tell Wädi what we were up to. Louis had been strict on this point.

“The Haganah does not exist,” he insisted.

“But I have heard him tell Mohammed that you must be a part of it,” I protested.

“He can think what he likes, but he has no proof. I know that Wädi is very important to you, you owe him your life, but now the lives of a number of people depend on your silence. What you know does not belong to you, and so you cannot make any use of it.”

I felt bad. There was a knot in my stomach whenever I was with Wädi, because I was unable to tell him what I was doing.

The scars on Wädi’s face reminded me that I owed him my life, although he never mentioned it, and if I did then he made light of the fact.

Wädi had decided to be a teacher and was in training. He had received a good education at St. George’s School, and his teachers emphasized the help he gave to the weaker students. He was especially protective of his sister Naima, who trembled whenever she heard her mother tell her father that they had to think about finding her a good husband. When Wädi told Ben this, his face grew bitter. He was in love with Naima, for all that he had told his parents that he would not take a single step that might compromise her. Marinna would have liked to allow her son to follow his heart, but she knew that this would have created problems not just with Salma, but with Mohammed as well. If she and Mohammed had had to give each other up in an age when there were far fewer problems between the Jews and the Arabs than there were now, then the situation now was impossible. And Marinna was firm, and Igor was inflexible. He had even threatened to send Ben to England to be with Samuel if he did not give up thinking about Naima. Ben knew it was impossible for them to send him to England. The war was approaching its peak, the British were trying to keep the Jews under control, and they wouldn’t have given the necessary permissions to send a young man to London. Why would they need to do such a thing? We weren’t important people, all in all.

Today, with hindsight, I think that Ben was more interested in Naima than she was in him. She was flattered that Ben felt so nervous in her presence and spent hours standing at the fence that separated their two farms, trying to see her. She watched him from the window and if she could get away from her mother she ran to be with him. But such occasions were infrequent, as Salma was always watching over her daughter.

I was upset by the ever more frequent arguments between the Ziad family and Louis and Igor. I remember a night when Marinna invited Aya and her husband Yusuf to come eat with us, along with Mohammed and Salma, Hassan and Layla, and their children. We youngsters were happy to spend these hours together, and the last thing we wanted was for the grownups to get caught up in an argument. But it was Igor, normally so prudent, who reproached our friends for the mufti’s Nazi sympathies.

“Apparently, the Germans have promised the mufti that once the war in Europe is finished they will help solve the ‘Jewish problem’ in the Middle East,” Igor said, looking Mohammed straight in the eye.

Mohammed looked back at him, uncomfortable. Marinna grew tense. She was not pleased when her husband and Mohammed confronted each other. It was not Mohammed who replied, however, but Mohammed’s uncle, Hassan.

“There are a number of Arabs who agree with Hitler in his distaste for the Jews, but this is nothing more than a coincidence. You have to understand that the Palestinians are worried about any plans to divide our land. We can share it, of course, but should we let it be taken from us?”

“Palestine is the home of our ancestors. We are not foreigners,” Igor replied.

“You have to go back to the beginning of time to claim that ownership. You know that none of us sympathizes with the Husseini, and that we are openly opposed to them. We don’t want to swap a British master for a master from Germany, although the mufti thinks that if he supports Hitler then the German leader will help him to seize Palestine without asking for anything in return. We hate the racial theories of the Nazis. But this hatred has nothing to do with the worry we feel when we see how many Jews are now coming to Palestine, and the fact that the British have decided to divide our land,” Hassan insisted.

“You should be ashamed that your mufti is a friend of the Nazis while the Jews are suffering Hitler’s terror.” Igor seemed to want to argue.

“And you should stop taking what doesn’t belong to you.” Hassan’s tone of voice was less conciliatory this time.

“Supporting Hitler means supporting the persecution of the Jews.” Igor would not let the subject drop.

Marinna looked at him, upset. The evening that she had promised would be a friendly meeting of old friends looked like it was turning into an open confrontation. It was Kassia who called it to an end.

“Enough! Igor, this is not the time to argue. I want to enjoy my friends while I have them here. Let’s talk about old times . . .”

 

When I think back, I remember my mother’s silent suffering. She and I never referred to my father or my sister Dalida. My mother didn’t speak about her oldest son, Daniel. Everyone else respected our silence. Now I realize that his absence hurt each of us so much that we had opted not to speak about it as a form of self-defense.

My mother never complained about anything. She seemed to find some kind of relief in working the land, stretching her day out from sunrise to sunset.

Kassia insisted on working the land, but my mother tried to help her out; not just because of Kassia’s age, but because she had grown worryingly thin.

“You should take your mother to see my brother-in-law Yossi,” my mother said to Marinna.

“Miriam, you know what my mother is like, she refuses to go to any doctor. She insists that she’s alright.”

“I don’t like the color of her skin, or the bags under her eyes. Maybe your husband can talk to her . . .”

“Igor? No, Igor can’t tell my mother what to do. Maybe she’ll listen to you more than to us.”

Ben also realized that his grandmother was ill. Obviously worried, he said as much to me.

“The other night I heard her moaning, I got up to see if she needed anything, and she was vomiting.”

But Kassia refused to allow any doctor to see her. I think that she wasn’t too keen on living, that she had no more hope left, for all that she loved her daughter Marinna and her grandson Ben. For years, Kassia had been scared that Marinna would end her marriage to Igor, but she had realized that even though Marinna was not in love with her husband, she would stay with him. Time had lulled her love for Mohammed, as she knew that he would never break his commitment to Salma. Marinna and Mohammed had renounced each other, and this renunciation calmed Kassia’s worries. As for Ben, she had no illusions, she knew that her grandson did not need her, or at least didn’t need her enough as to give her a reason to live.

When Kassia finally went to the hospital she was more dead than alive. The doctor who attended her left no room for doubt: she had stomach cancer, now in its terminal phase. He was surprised that she had not come earlier.

“I don’t understand,” he said to Marinna, “how she could be coping with so much pain.”

Marinna started to cry. She blamed herself for not having accepted what Miriam had told her, that her mother was very ill, that she refused to eat, that her vomiting and her extreme thinness were evidently symptoms of some illness. When the doctor told her that she had to stay in the hospital, Kassia rebelled.

“You know I’m not going to live much longer, why not give me something for the pain and let me die in my bed?” Kassia asked.

“For God’s sake, Mother, the things you say! Of course you’ll get better,” Marinna said with tears in her eyes.

But Kassia told her to be quiet, and repeated her request to the doctor to let her die in her bed.

The doctor refused. He could do nothing more to save her life, but thought at least that she would be better cared for in the hospital. My Uncle Yossi made a sign to the doctor and took him into the corner to talk with him. When they came back, Kassia knew that she had won this final battle.

“If it’s what you want, you can go home, but you will have to be in your bed, with a drip, and I’ll give you some injections for the pain . . . If you go, there’s not much I can do for you . . .”

“If I stay here’s not much you can do for me either, except salve your conscience,” Kassia replied.

December 1941 was a cold month. And I can still feel that cold on my skin when I think about Kassia’s last days.

My mother kept a fire permanently burning in the fireplace, and Kassia’s bed was filled with hot-water bottles.

Marinna cried when Kassia couldn’t see her.

“If only she had paid attention to you,” my mother said.

It wouldn’t have changed anything, even if Kassia had gone to the doctor months earlier, but Marinna would blame herself for the rest of her life for not having wanted to see how ill her mother was.

I don’t know what was in the injections that my mother gave Kassia, only that they kept her drowsy.

It’s not easy to die. I realized this for the first time when I saw Kassia’s agonies.

A noise woke me one morning, and I found all the lights on and the door to Kassia’s room open.

She was vomiting, and choking on her vomit as she fought for breath, and every time a breath entered her lungs we heard a dull scraping noise. Her sticklike body was convulsing and it was almost as if it were about to break. She was very upset and she grasped Marinna’s hand and tried to force herself to speak, but nothing came from her mouth except a dull murmur. Ben was standing by my side and trembled. Louis had gone to find Yossi.

My mother tried to clean the bed and wipe away the vomit, but she took a moment to beckon Ben to his grandmother’s bedside.

Ben kissed her forehead and took her other hand.

“Grandmother, I love you, I love you a lot, you’ll get well,” he said in a whisper.

Kassia made a last effort to hold Marinna’s and Ben’s hands, then a terrifying scream came from her mouth. This was the death rattle. Then she died. Her body fell still and her gaze lost itself in eternity.

We stayed silent for a few seconds, without daring to move, as if we might wake her. Igor went over to Marinna and tried to get her to stand up, and my mother did the same with Ben. Marinna resisted and asked us to leave her alone with her mother. Igor didn’t want to go, but she shrieked at him and he left the room, dragging Ben with him.

My mother shut the door, and this was the first time I had seen her look weak. It was not until Louis arrived with Yossi that my mother allowed herself to cry.

We waited a while until Marinna came out, her eyes were shrunken from so much crying.

“I have to get her ready,” she managed to say as she held my mother tight.

 

As soon as dawn broke, my mother sent me to Mohammed’s house to tell them that Kassia had died. When I got there, he was having a cup of tea before heading off to the quarry.

“Kassia is dead,” I managed to say.

Salma was stock-still, waiting for Mohammed’s reaction. He seemed not to have heard me and didn’t even look at me. He stood up and, his eyes closed, leaned his head against the wall. Wädi, who had gotten up when he heard me come in, went over to his father and put his hand on Mohammed’s shoulder.

“Go with Ezekiel, we’ll come later,” he said to his father.

We walked quickly and didn’t speak. When we entered the house, Kassia’s body was lying on clean sheets and the room smelled of lavender. My mother had cleaned it from top to bottom. Marinna was on her knees by her mother’s bedside and Igor was making coffee.

Mohammed went over to Marinna and held his hand out to her. She stood up and hugged him.

“I’m sorry . . . so sorry . . . I know how much you loved your mother,” Mohammed said, his voice faltering.

Marinna let her tears carry her away. My mother stretched her hand out to Mohammed and then hugged him, too, to break the tension that had grown up between us. Igor had left the house and Ben did not look away from Mohammed and his mother. I followed Igor with a cup of coffee.

“Come in, it’s very cold,” I said, just to say something.

When we went in, my mother was still hugging Mohammed and this made Igor a little more relaxed. Then Mohammed walked over to Igor and hugged him as well. It was a rapid gesture, one that the situation demanded.

“Kassia was my second mother,” he said as he dried his tears on the back of his hand.

Marinna found a letter containing her mother’s last wishes. It was very short, in fact she only wanted one thing, to be buried under the olive trees at Hope Orchard.

We buried her one morning with the Ziad family present. Mohammed and Salma were there, with their children Wädi and Naima; Aya and Yusuf, Rami and Noor; Hassan and Layla, and their son Jaled.

None of us did anything to try to hold back our tears. Aya held on to Marinna while Ben stood behind his father. It seemed that Igor was hurt that Marinna needed Aya’s support rather than his own; after all, he was her husband. But not a single sound of reproach came from his lips.

Now that I am old and have so much free time, sometimes I remember those days and ask myself about Igor’s composure and loyalty. I am surprised at his resigned love for Marinna.

It was Louis who wrote to Samuel to tell him of Kassia’s death, but we never received a reply.

It was not easy to get back to normal. With Samuel’s absence and Kassia’s death, Hope Orchard seemed to have lost its raison d’être. I knew that this was what my mother thought, even though she said nothing, and I know that she was also tempted to head off with me to the city and to leave Marinna and Igor in charge of everything. But we didn’t, I suppose that she thought that I would have taken it as a loss of my roots.

Ben continued insisting on his desire to go to a kibbutz. He was extremely admiring of the people our age who were already planning to fight, whether against the Germans, who seemed to be coming ever closer to Palestine, or against the British, who were trying to prevent Jewish immigration, or against the Arab gangs that were opposing the ever-growing Jewish community.

One day my mother asked Louis what would happen if Rommel’s troops tried to reach Palestine. Louis’s answer was blunt.

“We would have to sort it out ourselves. This is what we are preparing for. The leaders of the Yishuv have been taking measures for quite some time for us to be on the alert. The British know that they will need our help.”

 

The news that came from Europe made us extremely depressed. We knew that the Germans were taking the Jews to concentration camps, but we could not have imagined even in our worst nightmares that these were really extermination camps. We knew that Jews disappeared, just as we knew about the tragedy of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, or the persecution that they were suffering throughout Europe.

What the men of the Yishuv did from the start was to ask the British for permission to fight alongside them.

The British didn’t trust us then, so only very few of us were allowed to fight on the front lines, but some were accepted into auxiliary roles. Then the British changed their minds and even helped create the Palmach, a commando unit made up from members of the Haganah.

My confidence in human nature was lessened by two events that marked me. The first was an argument between Louis and Mikhail and Moshe. It affected me not because of the argument itself, but because of its cause.

We were having Sabbath dinner, and although we didn’t normally invite Moshe and Eva, on that occasion we did so. My mother and Marinna had made the food, and along with our two guests at the table were Igor, Ben, and me. We didn’t know if Louis was going to turn up, but we had become accustomed to not waiting for him.

The dinner was uneventful until Louis and Mikhail arrived. They didn’t even say good evening. Louis stood still, looking with hatred at Moshe, and Mikhail went over to him and grabbed him by the neck, forcing him to his feet.

We were dumbstruck. No one understood what was happening. Mikhail pushed Moshe up against the wall, then gave him a punch and kicked him in the stomach, forcing him to double up and fall to the ground. Eva leapt to her feet and ran shouting toward her husband. My mother and Marinna also got to their feet and asked what was going on, and Igor tried to get between Moshe and Mikhail.

Mikhail was like a raging bear, he got away from Igor and carried on punching Moshe, who had no time to respond to any of the blows he was receiving.

“For God’s sake, stop! Stop! You’re mad!” Eva shouted, trying to hold her husband and protect him with her own body. But Mikhail pulled her to one side and threw her to the floor as well. Mikhail gave Moshe a few seconds to stand up and defend himself. They fought so violently that the room became a battlefield.

Ben and I were dumbfounded and didn’t know what to do. Louis had lit a cigarette and was looking at this violence that could put an end to Moshe with no emotion at all on his face.

My mother got between the two of them in the end, she knew that Mikhail would not dare lift a hand against her.

“Enough! That’s enough! Do you want to kill him?” she shouted.

“Yes! I’m going to kill him!”

My mother pushed Mikhail and he stood in front of her with his face twisted.

“No one will kill anyone in this house. And if you try, then you will have to kill me first.”

Louis went up to Mikhail and put a hand on his shoulder, to calm him down.

“You will leave tonight, Moshe. You will leave forever,” he said, and his voice was cold as ice.

“But why? Why?” Eva said as she cried and held her husband’s head, which was little more than a bloody pulp.

“Because we don’t deal with murderers,” Louis replied calmly.

“What happened?” Igor asked, his face twisted at the sight of such violence.

“His friends from the Stern Gang have decided to fight on their own terms. And that means putting us all in danger. If you carry on attacking the British and hiding from them, then you will have to hide from us, too. We will not allow you to kill innocent people,” Louis said, and breathed in a mouthful of smoke.

“Moshe is not a member of the Stern Gang! You know he’s with the Irgun!” Eva shouted.

“Two sides of the same coin. You people from the Irgun and Lehi make me sick,” Mikhail shouted.

“Two days ago, Moshe met with the Stern Gang. It was not the first time he did so. Maybe your husband has swapped the Irgun for Lehi, the Stern Gang, and you don’t know about it,” Louis said.

“Speaking to someone from the Stern Gang doesn’t make you a part of it,” Igor said, upset by the scene.

“Alright, then we’ll ask Moshe: Have you left the Irgun to join Lehi? It’s a simple question, yes or no.”

Marinna passed a glass of water to Eva so that Moshe could drink something, even a few sips.

“I’m not with Lehi. I’m still with the Irgun,” Moshe said in a voice that showed how much pain he was in.

“Right . . . So what were you doing talking to that man from Lehi?”

“He’s a friend of my oldest son,” Moshe managed to say as he coughed and spat a stream of blood from his mouth.

Eva looked at him in shock and I realized that whatever her husband had done, Eva knew nothing about it.

“Your oldest son lives in Haifa,” Louis replied.

“Yes, he does,” Moshe replied without adding any further details.

“So your son is in Lehi.”

“I didn’t say that. Is anyone responsible for what his friends do? They met each other through the Irgun. This man decided to follow Stern, and that’s it.”

“And what were you talking about?”

“I’m not in Lehi, I promise,” Moshe insisted.

“Tell us what you were talking about with this man.” Louis was giving an order.

Moshe did not reply. Eva, with my mother’s help, pulled him to his feet.

“Now go, Moshe, and try not to cross our path again. We will work with the British to get you all sent to prison. We don’t want to deal with terrorists, much less with traitors. If you are still here at dawn, I will hand you over to the British myself,” Louis declared.

When Eva and Moshe had left our house we sat for a few minutes in silence. Marinna gave Mikhail a wet towel so he could clean his face.

“And now, can you tell us what’s going on?” Igor demanded.

“As you know, when the war broke out, the Irgun decided to follow the Haganah’s lead and stop fighting the British. Germany is the enemy now. But one of the leaders of the Irgun, Avraham Stern, has formed his own group and is attacking the English. The Haganah found out that the Stern Gang are preparing an attack against British soldiers in a place where there are also likely to be civilian casualties,” Louis explained. “Do you know what that means?”

“Are you sure about this?” Igor’s face showed he was upset.

“We have our ears everywhere,” Mikhail said, preempting Louis’s answer.

“It’s a very grave accusation, even against people like the Stern Gang.”

“The Irgun doesn’t want to know anything. More than that, it doesn’t seem to mind everyone being arrested. And the Irgun is not known for their restraint. They have never been characterized by having too many scruples, but they’ve realized that while the war is on we have enemies more important than the British,” Mikhail said.

“I hate them,” Ben said.

“And are you sure that Moshe is one of them?” my mother asked.

“He has dealings with the Stern Gang,” Mikhail affirmed.

“But they could be his friends, or his son’s friends, like he said; they were all members of the Irgun until quite recently,” my mother said.

“It’s better that they go, even if it’s just for our own safety. The Jewish Agency and the Haganah are not going to have any mercy on Stern, or on his followers. Moshe knew what the risks were in having a relationship with them,” Louis said, and ended the discussion.

I don’t think any of us slept that night. I was spying through my window on Moshe and Eva’s house, where the lights burned brightly until morning. Then I saw them go out and fill their car with suitcases and tools. Eva was crying but Moshe paid no attention to her tears and forced her to hurry up. I couldn’t stop myself from asking what my father would have done, what he would have thought. I didn’t know the answer.

“It’s not that I miss them, we didn’t see them very often, but I think that now nothing is left of Hope Orchard.”

My mother was talking with Marinna. They both seemed depressed.

Marinna agreed. She, too, felt the emptiness now present in the community where she had grown up, and which my father Samuel had transformed into a home for a group of strangers who had ended up linked together through bonds that were closer than those of blood.

I didn’t want to leave Hope Orchard, it was my home; but I asked myself, just as my mother did, if it still made sense for us to stay there.

Ben and I spoke about the Stern Gang.

“I hate them. I hope they all get captured and hanged. I know that the Jewish Agency and the Haganah are going to work with the British to have them all arrested,” Ben said.

It wasn’t easy. Avraham Stern always slipped out of the hands of the British, but in 1942 they found him in one of his hidey-holes in Tel Aviv. Someone had told them where he was hiding.

But before this happened, I suffered my second disappointment.

On October 27, 1941, the mufti had been received with full honors by Benito Mussolini at Palazzo Venezia in Rome. The newspapers informed us that the two men had agreed there was no place for the Jews in Palestine or in Europe.

But it was not only by Mussolini that the mufti was received as a friend; a month later, Adolf Hitler did the same and received him with full honors in Berlin.

Hitler agreed with Mufti al-Husseini that after finishing off all the Jews of Europe, he would do the same with those of the Middle East.

This would not be the last time that the mufti would be received by members of the upper hierarchies of the Nazi Party in Berlin. Heinrich Himmler, the sinister chief of the SS, developed a good relationship with the mufti. Not only this, but the mufti asked his own followers to enlist with the Nazi forces. His speeches on Radio Berlin were heard all over the Middle East. Hitler and the mufti had a common goal, to finish with the Jews and, in passing, to deal with the British as well.

When we found out about the visit of the mufti to Berlin, I went to ask Wädi to explain himself. It hurt me to do this, because aside from my mother he was the person I loved most in the world, and I sometimes thought I loved him even more.

We argued for the first time. He tried to explain me why some Arabs supported the Germans.

“You know that neither my family nor I are supporters of the mufti. I was ashamed to see in the newspaper that the mufti had decided to side with Germany. But don’t believe that all the Arabs who follow the mufti are Nazis or opposed to the Jews. They are only nationalists who are defending their country and who want the British, the French . . . all the European powers to leave forever. Why do the Egyptians need to be under a British mandate? Why do we have to put up with it ourselves? As for the French, they are in Syria and Lebanon.”

“Alright, I can understand why the Arabs fight against the English; so do we, although Ben-Gurion ordered us to collaborate with them in the war against Germany. But it’s one thing to fight the British, and quite another to join forces with Germany, knowing that they want to exterminate the Jews. Don’t you know that the Jews are being taken to concentration camps? That they are made to work there until they are exhausted, or even dead? There is nowhere in Europe where the Jews are not persecuted, arrested, and sent to these camps.”

“I don’t understand why the mufti hates the Jews, neither does my father. You know that. I don’t need to remind you that even Omar Salem is suspicious of us ever since my father criticized the mufti. My Uncle Yusuf now says that Omar Salem doesn’t trust us as much as before.”

“Yes, I know, and I know you’ve had problems for not allying yourself with him, but even so . . . Does no one dare stop this man?”

“He’s the mufti of Jerusalem and his family is as old as it is important. You know that some of our friends have died for daring to oppose him.”

“You want to say that they were murdered. Does it cost you so much to acknowledge that this is what the mufti does with those who disagree with him? Don’t you know that your father’s own life has been at risk?”

“If it weren’t for Yusuf, who is married to my Aunt Aya, then my father might well not be alive,” Wädi acknowledged.

“So . . .”

“So you need to think that lots of people follow the mufti because he is the only person who represents the interests of the Arabs. Lots of us have nothing against the Jews, they are neighbors, even friends, but we are not going to allow immigration to continue. Palestine cannot be Jewish, which is not to say that there cannot be a large number of Jews living here, but immigration has to stop. We also cannot tolerate the British dividing our territory and handing a large proportion of it over to the Jewish Agency. What right do they have to do so?”

 

Wädi was always patient with me and offered me explanations of what had happened, although he never convinced me. I was very young and all I understood was that some of my schoolmates were now allied with the Nazis and were aiming to destroy us. This was not the case with the Ziad family, I was sure of that; Mohammed and Wädi both hated the Nazis and laughed at their propaganda and their theories about the superiority of the Aryan race. But I did not understand how, for all the annoyance felt by the Palestinian Arabs at Jewish immigration, they were capable of allying themselves to a group of people whose aim was to remove us from the face of the earth.

I was fairly innocent in those days. My mother had taught me that there were two options in anyone’s life, good and bad, and that whatever the circumstances one should not be prevented from following the path of the good. It was a philosophy that boiled down to the idea that the end did not justify the means. My mother was very inflexible in this respect. So I thought that nothing could justify the Stern Gang, or the members of the Irgun, taking other people’s lives. It was also hard for me to understand how many Arabs openly sympathized with the Nazis because of their nationalist beliefs, whether they were from Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon,.

Whether through Ben’s insistence, or my mother and Marinna’s thinking that a few months’ change would do us good, in the end they allowed us to spend a few months on a kibbutz. The excuse was that we should go visit my brother Daniel on the kibbutz where he lived, in the Negev. Mikhail would come with us, along with Yasmin. My cousin Yasmin was very fond of Daniel, more so than of my sister Dalida and me.

I can’t forget the words my mother said to me on the morning that we were to leave on our trip.

“This is not the world that I wanted for you, I would have liked for us to live in peace, but things are as they are, and you are a part of the future, so you have to do what you need to do to ensure this future. All I ask is that you don’t hate anyone, and that you don’t think that there is anything that makes you any different from anyone else. Praying in a different way does not make us different. And this is how things have been up until now in Palestine. They have persecuted Jews for centuries in Europe, but here we have shared the fate of the Muslims, for good or for ill. If we could only all just be sensible for a moment . . . I don’t want a Jewish state, but I cannot tell you what you should want.”

 

It took me several years to understand my mother. She was a Palestinian, she had been born and brought up in this land, just as her ancestors had been, sharing the land with other Palestinians whose only difference was one of religion, but for whom this had never been any kind of problem. They had lived under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and her first husband had died defending that empire. She had nothing against the Turks, in spite of the suffering they had caused us, and felt the same about the British. In fact, for my mother, control of Palestine had passed from Ottoman to British hands without it causing her any major kind of turmoil. She did not understand the pioneers who wanted to have a nation. She had allowed herself to be carried along with the flow, all she wanted to do was live, love, dream, see her children grow, and die. Everything else was out of her hands.

 

It was the end of the spring of 1942 when we arrived at the kibbutz. I was surprised to see Daniel. My brother appeared not to be the same man. His skin was dark, a result of the long hours of work in the sun, his hair was untamed and a contagious serenity radiated from him. I wasn’t sure he liked having Ben and me there, and perhaps because of this he told us that exceptions would not be made for us and he would not specially look out for us. And this was how he behaved, in spades. No one would have said that we were half-brothers, such was the indifference he showed me. In fact, we avoided any occasion where we could be alone together, and we spent whole days without talking to one another. Daniel had never felt comfortable with the family his mother, my mother, had made with Samuel. It was clear that he had not forgiven her for marrying again, and certainly not for having had other children, and he must have felt very lonely during the years we lived together.

But I was proud to have him as my half-brother, as I realized that Daniel’s opinions were well respected by the other members of the kibbutz.

Now I can admit that it took me a lot of effort to adapt to the lifestyle in this peculiar community. It wasn’t that we lived a life of luxury at Hope Orchard, but at least we had our own rooms, and although we weren’t related it wasn’t hard for us to form bonds similar to those of a family.

In the kibbutz there were no leaders, decisions were made by majority vote, after having been discussed by each member of the community. After a decision had been made, it was carried out without protest.

As for tasks, they were done in rotation. You would be in charge of the kitchen one week, in charge of cleaning the next, in charge of the farm work the third; and every member of the kibbutz, absolutely everyone, received self-defense lessons.

Who would have thought that Daniel would have become a good teacher for the younger members of the community? My brother had learned the techniques of hand-to-hand combat well; he had been taught by some of the leaders of the Haganah, whose job it was to prepare people to enter the kibbutz. Daniel knew how to load a gun with his eyes closed, and he was a good shot, too. He had authority over the younger members of the community, and was demanding in what he asked of them, but also affectionate and fair.

As I said, neither Ben nor I was given preferential treatment. We slept in a wooden barracks where there were several beds in a row, and we kept them in perfect condition. I spent the first week peeling potatoes in the kitchen, as well as cleaning the common dining room. I spent the few free hours I had in learning how to fight. I knew that Daniel was a member of the Haganah, and that he was in the Palmach, but I had never imagined that he would be such a formidable warrior. The British, whose relationship with the Jews could be classed as schizophrenic, had trained the Palmach.

As the kibbutz was situated in an area where Arab attacks were frequent, we were on the alert twenty-four hours a day. Everyone, including women and children, no matter their age, all took part in the defense of the kibbutz.

Now I understood what my mother had said when she told me that life in a kibbutz was no bed of roses. The men and the women who had established the first communal farms were from Russia, and they brought communist and socialist ideas with them and put them into practice unhesitatingly. The only advantage was one of freedom. No one was forced to stay or forced to share everything with everyone. You were allowed to stay in the kibbutz forever, or else, if you decided that this voluntary collectivism was too much, then you could leave without receiving the slightest reproach from your fellows.

The closest the world ever got to socialism was the kibbutz system during those years.

The most difficult part of life in this kibbutz at the edge of the Negev Desert was getting the ground to bear fruit. The community had planted vegetables and trees that would take a long time to produce their first crop. Ben was happier than I was. He enjoyed learning how to fight, and was always the first to volunteer for any job. Had I not been scared of disappointing Louis, Mikhail, my mother, Marinna, even Ben himself, I would have gone back to Jerusalem once the summer was over. But I didn’t dare make that decision. There were other reasons of course: I fell in love for the first time.

Ben and I had been in the kibbutz for a month when Paula arrived. I felt attracted to her immediately. Her father was a German and her mother was a Pole. An explosive mixture, they told me, because the Poles and the Germans have so much history of conflict.

Paula’s father was the conductor of an orchestra and her mother played the cello; they had met in an orchestra before the Great War, they had fallen in love, they had married, and the result was Paula. They lived in Berlin, but they were able to escape before the massive arrests of Jewish citizens began. For a brief time they lived in Istanbul, where they barely managed to survive.

“My father gave music lessons and that made enough for us to eat, but little more,” Paula told me.

A few months earlier, her father had decided that their place was in Palestine, and they decided to head there.

“It was difficult to live in Istanbul, but at least no one treated us like we were monsters there. You can’t understand the shame I felt the first day I had to go to school with a Star of David sewn onto my overcoat. In Germany, it had become something bad to be a Jew. Only two of my classmates were brave enough to still be friends with me and invite me to their houses in spite of their parents’ protests. They were afraid of being accused of being too kind to the Jews.”

 

Paula dreamed of becoming a musician, and if the Nazis had not interposed themselves into her life, she would have continued with the piano lessons that she had taken ever since she could barely walk. But they had no money in Istanbul to buy a piano, and she had to resign herself to learning from her mother how to play the cello.

“But I don’t like it, I wish I could go back to studying the piano one day.”

I didn’t want to disappoint her, but I thought that it would be impossible for a piano ever to get to this corner of the desert. Also, I did not think it would be voted for as being one of the key necessities of the kibbutz. They didn’t spend a single penny there unless the community authorized it, and the necessary goods were so many that it was impossible that anyone would ever propose buying a piano.

I saw that it was hard for Paula to adapt herself to life on the kibbutz, as it had been for me. She didn’t complain, but I saw that an expression of confusion, sometimes hurt, often appeared in her large blue eyes. To the difficulties inherent in sharing a barracks with other girls or cleaning the latrines, which was the job she was given the first week, one had to add the problem that she didn’t speak any Hebrew. She had learned Turkish in Istanbul, and she could speak English, which was the language we used to communicate with each other.

I offered to teach her Hebrew if she would teach me German. It was a way of helping her, but also of being close to her.

At night, if neither of us was required to patrol the perimeter fences, we found time to give each other lessons.

In the summer of 1942 I received a letter from Wädi announcing that he had decided to enlist in the British army. They were forming mixed Palestinian battalions, made up of both Arabs and Jews, and he had decided to fight. His letter to me made me cry:

 

I have made this decision because I think that we cannot remain indifferent in this war. Some of my friends justify the support Mufti Amin al-Husseini gives to Hitler by saying that when Germany beats England then they will help us be free of the English. I am sure that they are mistaken, and that if Germany were to win the war, then we would become merely another part of Hitler’s empire.

My father has helped me resolve my doubts and above all he has encouraged me to make this decision. You know that sometimes he says that there are times in life when the only way to save yourself is by dying, or killing. In this case, if I die it will be in the cause of stopping Hitler becoming the ruler of the world. And if I kill it will be for the same reason.

I am being trained in Tel Aviv at the moment, but not for much longer. I think they will send us to Egypt.

Look after yourself, Ezekiel.

 

So Wädi was off to fight Hitler. This made my respect for him increase all the more, and I wanted to be a couple of years older and to be able to go to the front myself.

Finally, on November 4, 1942, the British Army defeated the Germans in Egypt, at the Second Battle of El Alamein. When we heard the news we celebrated. It was decided that we would have a special dinner and sing songs around some bonfires that we would build on the road to the kibbutz.

My brother praised my ability to learn languages. While it was difficult for Paula to make any headway with Hebrew, I was rapidly becoming able to speak German well.

Every now and then I would go with Daniel to deal with some of the leaders of the local Arab villages, to buy food or materials that we needed in the kibbutz. Daniel and I both spoke Arabic well. I had learned to speak Hebrew and Arabic at the same point in my childhood, and even today I can’t say which is my mother tongue, although for family matters it is Hebrew.

My mother visited me every now and then. She would come with Louis or Mikhail and I was worried for her, as it seemed that on every visit she had aged a little more. Her hair was streaked with white and her eyes were dull. She asked me if I was happy, I suppose hoping that I would say I was coming home. But I was too much in love with Paula, and was not planning anything that didn’t mean spending time by her side.

It was Ben, after a visit from Mikhail, who managed to convince me that the time had come for another change of scenery. It was at the end of 1943 and I had just turned eighteen.

“I’m going to join the British Army. Mikhail has promised me that he’ll sort it out. When he tells me to, I’ll go back to Jerusalem and from there to Tel Aviv. I want to fight in Europe, I don’t want to stay here knowing that millions of Jews are kept prisoner in those Nazi camps. Mikhail says that they tell terrible stories of what goes on in them . . . ,” Ben said.

“But we are fighting here. Imagine what would have happened if Rommel had reached Palestine . . . ,” I replied.

“But the English managed to defeat him. The Germans have already lost here,” he replied.

I had no desire to separate from Paula. We had even thought about getting married. My mother knew of my relationship with Paula and approved. She said that now that she could no longer look after me at least someone would, although she tried to convince us to go back to Hope Orchard to live. But Paula said that our place was in the kibbutz and I didn’t feel any urge to contradict her.

Ben was impatient to hear from Mikhail and to go back to Jerusalem to join the British Army.

I started to wonder if maybe I should do the same. I thought that if I stayed where I was then I was betraying the thousands of Jews who were doubtless praying for the Allies to defeat Germany.

Without knowing it, Paula helped me make the decision. One night we were on patrol together and she told me of the anguish that she and her parents had felt to know that hundreds of their friends had been taken to labor camps and that nothing was ever heard of them again. This knowledge was one of the things that encouraged them to escape, so that they could avoid a similar fate.

Suddenly she asked me:

“Has it really been so many years that you have heard nothing from your father and your sister?”

These words exploded in my brain. I had begun to remove Samuel and Dalida from my life and thought about them less and less.

The next day I found Ben, who was digging a ditch.

“You’re coming with me, aren’t you?” he said as soon as he saw me.

We had grown up together, we were like brothers and we knew each other too well, so that sometimes a single glance was enough to know what was going through the other’s head.

“You’re right, we need to defeat the Germans over there. We will have time later to help here.”

When we got to Jerusalem, Mikhail and Louis arranged with the English that we be allowed to enlist and sent to the front. We came from a kibbutz, we had been taught how to fight and use a gun, and for all their negative behavior toward us in the past, the British now needed all the men they could find who were willing to fight. There were Jews fighting in British battalions in Greece, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. They worked the supply lines for the British Army in Tunisia, Libya, and all over the Middle East. There were also some Jews in the RAF, and deployed in other capacities on other fronts.

 

The worst of it was saying goodbye to my mother. Ben said that it had been the same for him, although we both acknowledged that neither Miriam nor Marinna had shed a single tear, and that the only thing that they had asked was that we come back alive. Igor could not hide the apprehension he felt, and when he said goodbye to Ben, he held him in an embrace that seemed to last forever.

I also went to say goodbye to the Ziad family. Mohammed gave me all kinds of advice; he had fought in a desert war and he knew that there was not an ounce of romanticism in dying or in killing, whatever the cause.

Naima asked me if they would send me to be with her brother Wädi, of whom they had heard nothing for a few weeks. Rami, my former playmate, the son of Aya and Yusuf, made me promise that I would take care.

“Don’t make me have to come and find you,” he said with a smile.

I asked him why he did not enlist like his cousin Wädi had. The question made him uncomfortable. There were not many Arabs fighting in the Allied ranks. The mufti had personally tried to convince the Muslims that they should join the Nazi forces, and in his broadcast harangues he told the Arabs to pay no attention to the Allies, whom he considered his worst enemies.

“You know that we are not followers of the mufti in my house. If I do not come with you it is because I don’t know if this is my war,” Rami said thoughtfully, “although I do not like this Hitler. Only a madman could believe that one race is better than another. Also, once he has conquered Europe he might very well decide to take the rest. Who can say if the Germans would not decide to become our new masters? No, Ezekiel, I am not going to go, although I wish with all my heart that you come back as soon as possible, and that all your battles are victorious.”

I knew that in spite of these words, the truth was very different: Rami had not joined up in order to protect his father. Omar Salem would have dispensed with Yusuf’s services if Yusuf’s son had decided to fight on the side of the British.

Aya wept without hiding it, although Rami and Noor both told her not to: “Don’t make Ezekiel leave in sadness,” they said.

The next morning, all the Ziads presented themselves to wish me luck.

I can still remember the last words my mother whispered into my ear: “If you are going to Europe, try to find out what happened to your father and your sister Dalida. We have heard nothing from them in years.”

I was surprised that at such a moment she would give me such a task. We had not spoken of them for years, as if they had never been a part of our lives, but I promised her that I would try.

 

At the Tehran Conference, Stalin had asked the Allies to reopen a Western front. The Soviet Union was struggling hard on the Eastern front, but it now was time for Hitler to feel the pincers closing in on Germany. Ben and I joined the war just in time to be among the Allied troops who landed in Normandy. We had been trained in Tel Aviv, and now they told us we were ready for war.

 

It’s not easy to kill a man, at least not the first time, especially when you see his face. After disembarking, my regiment, part of the Third Infantry Division, joined with Montgomery’s troops and went to take Caen, a city in Normandy and a strategic point at which the Twenty-First Panzer Division and the Twelfth SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend,” as well as the 101st SS Panzer Battalion and the Lehr-Panzer Division, had stopped us dead. I thought this was the worst place in the world and I will always remember it because it was there, not during the disembarkation, that I learned that it’s not easy to kill a man who looks you right in the eye.

I think I remember that one of the sergeants was named O’Connors. His men seemed to like him.

“I asked for men, not innocents. You’ve come at a bad time,” he said when our group presented itself. “They’ll attack us tomorrow.”

Some of his men laughed nervously. I thought he was trying to impress us, so I stupidly said that we were here to fight.

“I’ll make you lose your appetite for that,” he said, looking at me condescendingly.

When we left the improvised officers’ station I muttered to Ben, who was by my side:

“This guy, how does he know the Germans will attack tonight? He’s too clever by half.”

I hadn’t realized that there was a British officer behind me, a major, although it was hard to tell because he was not wearing a recognizable uniform. I knew later that he must have belonged to the Intelligence Service.

“He knows, he always knows. They will attack, so you should be prepared.”

I reddened, but I stood to attention and saluted the office whose name I later found out was Matthew Williams.

“I’m sorry . . . sir,” I said, trying to apologize.

“Go to your posts. The sergeant has said that they will attack at dusk, and there is not long to wait.”

We spoke very little for almost two hours. Some of the soldiers from our platoon came up to us.

“Odd night, this. You got any cigarettes left?”

Ben gave him one without paying him much attention.

“Are you Jews?” the man, whose name was David Rosen, asked.

Ben and I went on the defensive, troubled by the question.

“Yes, what of it?” I replied.

David slapped my back. As he was taller and stronger than I was, I lost my balance a little, although I thought it was meant to be a sign of comradely affection.

“I’m a Jew as well and that’s why we fight better than the rest. Why’s that? Because we’ve got more reason to do so. There are thousands of Jews rotting in labor camps waiting for us to liberate them and take them home. And that is what we’ll do.”

 

I felt drawn to David from the first day, I even said to Ben that it looked as if he were Jewish like us. When I first knew him he was twenty-five years old, and so strong that we were all a little in awe of him. One day when our jeep broke down and there was no way to get it off the road, he went over to it as if it weighed nothing and moved it a few meters. He was not only strong; he was also intelligent. He had studied engineering at Cambridge, and said that the solutions to all problems could be found in mathematics.

He had been born in Munich, although his mother was English and he had lived in England from a very early age. Every now and then he said that he felt ashamed “to have been German.”

That evening we shared the cigarettes we had in our satchels and the cold entered into our bones.

The rain had soaked the ground so much that it was difficult not to feel cold, although we were standing in the shelter of a trench.

O’Connors was not mistaken. The first shadows of dusk had barely started to fall when we began to receive mortar fire. We replied in kind. For a few hours my whole world was reduced to the noise of the guns and the shouts of our officers.

I don’t know how it happened, but I heard Major Williams telling us that the Germans were assaulting the trench. I was paralyzed for a second without knowing what to do. Ben shook me by the arm and told me to fix my bayonet.

“The Nazis are going to know what a Palestinian is worth!” he said to encourage me.

And then I saw him. He seemed to be older than I was. His gaze was cold, his face was angry, he seemed keen to kill me. It took me a moment to react, maybe no more than a fraction of a second, but enough time for him to have killed me. I was lucky. Survival in war is sometimes a question of luck. The soldier stumbled and I took the opportunity to plunge my bayonet into his stomach. He fell down in front of me, twisting in pain, and tried with one final effort to stick me with his bayonet. I kicked his gun out of the way; it fell to the ground and was quickly lost in the mud. The second man I killed did not catch me unprepared, I shot him at point-blank range, as I did with the two or three subsequent ones, until I lost all notion of time.

Then I felt someone grabbing me and telling me to stop. David was shaking me and trying to bring me back to reality.

“Stop it, the man’s already dead!” he shouted at me, as I stuck my bayonet again and again into the body of a soldier who seemed to be looking at me in surprise.

“Did we win?” I asked, as if this were some children’s fight.

“I think so, we’re still in the trench. The colonel has ordered us to get rid of all this, or soon we won’t be able to stand the smell of the corpses.”

The next days were like the first. They attacked us. We resisted. We killed. We died. You get accustomed to the routine and you stop thinking. The only thing you have to do is kill so as not to die, and you direct all your senses toward that end.

 

A month after entering this hell, Major Williams asked for volunteers for a mission “behind enemy lines.” “I need someone who can speak French and German.” David and I volunteered. David was German but he had studied French at school and could get by fairly easily; as for me, I spoke French like a Parisian and Paula had taught me enough German for me to make myself pretty well understood.

“We have to go to Belgium to find a member of the Resistance who is hiding on a farm. He has important information. High Command wants him alive.”

He explained the details of the mission. Three men would go, under Major Williams’s command: David Rosen, a corporal named Tony Smith, and me. We got rid of our uniforms and dressed in civilian clothes. The major explained that if German soldiers stopped us they would shoot us for being spies.

“If we were in uniform, we might be lucky and get taken to a prisoner-of-war camp, but we have to go dressed like natives so as not to attract any attention. We will only have pistols and a couple of grenades each.”

We waited until the Meteorological Service told us that we might expect a dark and moonless night. Although we held our line against the Germans, Major Williams thought that they were retreating a little, but the skirmishes still took place fairly often.

We dragged ourselves through the mud for I don’t know how long, trying to make no noise so as not to be heard by the Germans. We didn’t lift our heads until Major Williams gave the signal. Then we stood up and grouped ourselves around him.

“We have to walk seven miles to get to the farm. The Intelligence Service assures us that it’s uninhabited. We’ll wait there until someone comes to pick us up. Once we are in contact with the Resistance we’ll go to the collection point, which they say is about fifteen miles from the farm. We’ll wait there until they bring us the Resistance member. Once we’ve got the ‘package,’ we’ll come out. Any questions?”

There was nothing to ask, so we got to our feet and started to march, careful not to make the slightest noise. It was a dark night, with no moon at all. The thick woods were our ally. Even so, I started whenever I heard the slightest noise, thinking that the Germans would find us at any moment. We had agreed that in case we were stopped it would be Rosen who would talk. After all, he was German. Corporal Smith’s father was as well, but his mother was from Bath and he had been born in England and had never left there, so although he spoke good German, his accent might give him away.

The first few miles went by without any problems. We got to the farm just as the shadows of night were lifting. It seemed to me very pretentious to call this place a farm—it didn’t even have a roof. Williams told us to rest while he waited for the arrival of our guide. He would take the first watch.

I couldn’t sleep. I was too tense even to try. I would have killed for a cigarette, but smoking was the last thing I could do. We waited patiently all day. Tony saw a German platoon with his binoculars. We thought the worst, that they were coming to the farm, but they walked right past.

The hours dragged unbearably. We were impatient, although we said nothing. Only David Rosen dared to ask openly what would happen if no one came to find us.

We waited another day, and when night fell we heard some light footsteps approaching. It was my turn to be on watch, although I suspect that my companions were as awake as I was.

My pistol was prepared with the silencer ready, and I remained on the alert until the person who was approaching made himself visible. He was an elderly man, who I think must have been nearly seventy, but he moved extremely lightly. He raised his arms as he came closer and I left my hiding place. I asked him in German who he was and he replied with the agreed-upon countersign: “I don’t know if it will snow.”

Major Williams came out of the shadows and asked the man to come closer.

“I met a couple of patrols not far from here. They didn’t see me, but we’ll need to be careful. Are you ready?”

We said yes, eager to get going.

“I’ve been walking for a long way, I need to rest for a couple of hours; it’ll be pitch black by then and we’ll run less risk of being seen.”

He dropped into a corner and fell asleep. We let him sleep. Two hours later the man opened his eyes and we set off.

We had to avoid four German patrols. One of them was about to discover us because a soldier was lagging behind. Tony trod on a branch and it sounded like a clap of thunder. The German went on the alert and started to hunt around in the dark, but he didn’t find us. The major made us stay still and silent for a long time after the patrol had gone by.

Five miles later, dawn was starting to break and we were exhausted. The man who served as our guide said to Major Williams that we needed to pause to recover our strength and eat something. We went into a grove in the woods that seemed far enough away from prying eyes.

We still had a few miles to go, but the guide decided that we would rest until nightfall. He fell asleep straight away, and we watched over him, Tony and I taking the first watch, the major and David the second.

When we were about to set off again it started to rain and the last few miles turned into a nightmare.

It was still night when we reached a farm. The guide gave us a sign to hide among the trees while he went over to see that everything was in order. We saw him walking directly and decidedly toward the farmhouse and pushing open the door. I don’t know how long it took for him to come out again, but those minutes seemed like an eternity to us. He waved to us to come closer and we did so, cautiously.

“They’re from the Resistance,” he said, pointing at a middle-aged couple.

The woman offered us some food, soup and stewed rabbit, and let us dry our clothes in front of the fire. Her husband explained that the person we were meant to take with us had not yet arrived.

“And where is he?” Major Williams asked. There was a note of uncertainty in his voice.

“I don’t know. All we know is that a person will come to our farm and that the British will pick him up. That’s all I was told and I don’t need to know any more. The less we know, the better for everyone; if we fall into the hands of the Gestapo, they’ll make us confess.”

Although the woman did all she could to make us feel comfortable, we were very tense, worried that the person we were waiting for was late. Our guide seemed fairly calm, on the other hand.

“Do you think it’s easy to get here from Germany? A thousand obstacles could have sprung up. My orders are to wait here for two days and if the ‘package’ doesn’t turn up then I’m to take you back to where you came from.”

“But if the Germans have got the ‘package,’ they could come here at any moment,” Corporal Smith replied.

“We’ll kill a few of them before they kill us,” David Rosen said with a smile, sure that he would turn his words into actions.

We didn’t have to wait for two days, only until the next morning. I was relaxing in an upstairs room when I heard footsteps approaching and some people whispering. When I came downstairs I found a couple of young men and an elderly woman. How old might she be? Sixty, perhaps, but I remember her as an old woman, fat and not very attractive.

She presented herself as Fräulein Adeline. The two young men who were with her seemed to be exhausted, more so than she was, and each accepted gladly a cup of tea and a piece of cake.

Major Williams didn’t think it odd that the “package” had turned out to be a woman. I did, but I said nothing, and David Rosen, Tony Smith, and I all looked at her with interest.

“They won’t realize I have disappeared until tomorrow, Monday. I left the office on Thursday saying that I was feeling ill.”

“When will they start looking for you?” Major Williams asked.

“I suppose more or less in the middle of the morning. My colleague will be worried about my absence and will call my home. I live alone, so if there’s no answer they’ll think that I’ve gotten worse. My house is not so far from the office, so she’ll come round as soon as she can, and when she finds she can’t open the door, I suppose she’ll talk to the porter, and then . . .”

“So we have a few hours’ head start,” the Major muttered.

“And a cattle truck waiting to take you as close as possible to the border along an old landing strip, which is where I suppose they’ll pick you up in twelve hours’ time,” our guide said.

“How did you get here?” Tony Smith asked, in spite of the disapproving gaze of the major.

“In a car, we changed vehicles four times,” one of the young men said.

“The sooner we get started, the better,” the other one added.

“We’re not far from the landing strip, if we go now we’ll be out in the open for too long,” Major Williams replied.

“That’s a risk you’ll have to take. These people have done their bit,” the guide said, pointing to the farmers.

Major Williams didn’t contradict him, and when Fräulein Adeline and her companions were ready, we got as comfortable as we could in an old sheep wagon. The animals greeted us with bleating, and seemed upset at our intrusion, but eventually they made a space for us.

I couldn’t stop looking at Fräulein Adeline. I could not imagine how this woman might be important for the Secret Service and I wanted to ask Major Williams, but I repressed my curiosity.

We met a column of tanks. The young man who was driving pulled over to let them pass and he and our guide, who was in the front seat with him, waved enthusiastically at them. We stayed silent among the sheep, with our pistols cocked and ready, although we knew that we did not have any chance against them. But on that day God was on our side; the German soldiers didn’t even ask where our truck was going.

When we got to the old landing strip, there were two other men waiting for us, ready to summon the airplane that was to pick us up as soon as the radio told them to. I don’t think any of us breathed easily until we were inside the plane and well up in the air. If Fräulein Adeline were trying to surprise us even more, then she succeeded: She fell asleep in the plane, as if she were coming back from a day trip.

I never knew who the woman was, nor where she worked, nor what she knew or what she had that was so important for the Secret Service. When I asked Major Williams he told me that I didn’t need to know. I didn’t insist.

 

When I got back to France, Major Williams made me an offer before I rejoined my battalion.

“Would you like to work with me? You know what I do now.”

I said I would have to think about it.

It was seductive, the idea of working behind enemy lines, but I didn’t know if I wanted to spend the whole war carrying out missions I didn’t understand.

I was also surprised that Major Williams would trust me. I was only nineteen years old, and although the months of fighting had turned me into a man, I did not have the experience or the training to be able to go on intelligence missions.

“Tell me, Major, why do you want me to work for you?” I plucked up the courage to ask at this interview.

“I think you have the necessary qualities. You don’t get nervous, you think things through, you don’t want to be a hero, you only want to do what you have to do, and also because of your appearance—you don’t attract anyone’s attention. You’re not too tall or too short, you’re not thin, you’re not fat, your hair is brown and you have a body shape that could be a Frenchman’s, or a German’s, or an Englishman’s. You have a great advantage for this kind of mission, which is that you can pass unnoticed.”

“Like you.”

“Yes, like me.”

“I’m not sure that I want to spend the war going on special missions.”

“I thought that you had already made up your mind.”

“You haven’t given me time to think.”

“Time? You want time? Where do you think you are? This is war, it’s us or them, and we don’t even have time to catch our breath.”

I looked straight at him. Neither of us blinked, I suppose he was more certain of my reply than I was myself.

“We’ve lost contact with one of our agents in France. A plane will take you there. You’ll find out what’s happened and come back.”

“Easy as that?” I knew that the question annoyed Major Williams.

“I’m sure it will be easy for you,” he replied sarcastically.

It would not be my last mission. I went on two more after that.

When I came back from my last trip behind enemy lines I asked to be reincorporated into my battalion.

I stood up while I gave my report and as always they asked me to give them every last detail. I was asked the same question again and again, and always gave the same answer. It was a part of the routine.

“Go back to the front,” they said when they were satisfied with what I had told them.

“Sir, I want to join the Jewish Brigade, I know that it’s open to volunteers from different units.”

The major stood in silence weighing up my request.

“Yes, you’ll be better off with your own people.”

A few days later I was in the north of Italy, in Tarvisio, on the border with Yugoslavia and Austria. It was here that some of the last battles took place before the end of the war. The front was at Cervia, where other regiments as well as our brigade had been sent.

Ben had joined the Jewish Brigade earlier than I had, and was waiting impatiently for me, as was David Rosen.

“There are Jews from everywhere in the brigade, not just from Palestine,” Ben explained.

“General Ernest Benjamin is a good soldier and he’s a Jew. He was in the Royal Engineers,” David added.

A lot of the men who were in the brigade had already fought in other British units, so our new companions-in-arms were not novices.

When we had a moment alone, I told Ben of all that had happened since Major Williams had asked me to work under him.

Ben agreed with me that the best way to fight the Nazis was at the front.

“I don’t know how this will be, but we had our baptism of fire in Caen, so I don’t imagine it will be any worse,” I said with conviction.

David Rosen, always smiling and optimistic, added:

“Well, and it’s nearly spring.”

He was right, although in those first days of March 1945 I had not even thought about which season it was.

The Jewish Brigade was deployed in the area between Mazzano and Alfonsine, an odd place with little canals and dozens of farms, some in the middle of no-man’s-land.

The enemy lines were well defended. Our major told us that the German soldiers were under the orders of General Reinhard, a very experienced soldier.

If we had thought that Caen was hellish, this place was no better.

We thought this especially after the catastrophe of Fosso Vecchio, which we barely managed to escape from with our lives. We had to protect ourselves from the mines that were scattered all over the ground, the traps that the Germans had planted on some of the many little farms, and the continuous mortar fire.

David Rosen had trained as a sapper and Ben and I held our breaths whenever he went off to find those lethal hidden bombs.

We killed, knowing that at any moment it could be us who died. In La Giorgetta we fought with our bayonets, face to face, and in moments like that the only important thing is to live, so you stop seeing the other soldier as a human being and this brutalizes you and removes all that remains of your humanity. After every skirmish, after every battle, I felt a void in my gut, I felt disgusted with myself for having lost, for the duration of the conflict, the knowledge that the combatant in front of me was another man like I was.

“It’s not that you forget, it’s just that you have no choice, it’s his life or yours,” Ben tried to console me, although I knew he also felt anguished every time he killed a man.

We also fought near Brisighella. The orders were to take control of both banks of the Senio River. The Germans were on one side, we were on the other. We faced to the Fourth Parachute Division under General Heinrich Trettner. Trettner’s soldiers were well trained.

General McCreery, commander of the British Eighth Army, had planned an operation with the Americans. Our brigade was supposed to remove the Germans from nearby Fantaguzzi Mill. If all went well, we would meet other Allied forces and continue to Bologna.

The American planes bombed the area to make our path easier.

The generals use maps to plan their objectives, but it is the soldiers who put their lives at risk to attain them, and those little lines of rivers on the maps became black water that swallowed everything.

In those months, David Rosen became the best comrade that one could want in a war. He was always brave, always prepared, always generous. The more tired we were, the greater effort he made to cheer us up.

“I’m ashamed of being German,” he said one day.

“Well, you’re not German, you’re Jewish,” Ben replied.

“I’m German, Ben, I’m German. I think, I dream, I cry, I love, I laugh in German. And I’m fighting in this war not because I’m a Jew but because I’m a German. I want to get my homeland back, my future, my life.”

This declaration moved us all. Ben slapped him on the back and I sat in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Time moves strangely slowly in a war. You cannot stop thinking about death, because death is all that surrounds you. But the time comes when even that thought stops being bitter.

You are there to kill, and to die, if it comes down to it, and so you end up behaving like an automaton. It was in Italy that I understood why discipline is so necessary in the army. They prepare you to obey, and so you end up repeating all the gestures mechanically, all the actions and routines, including the routine of killing.

A captain comes along, or a sergeant, and he tells you to get ready, you’re heading off on patrol. It doesn’t matter how tired you are, or if you’re in pain. You get up, check your equipment, and obey. No one will ask you your opinion, and it’s better if you don’t fall into the trap of offering it.

Some nights I spoke with Ben about Wädi. Where had they sent him? They had said that the Palestinian Arabs were in North Africa, fighting bravely. I was sure of that. But there was also a sense of resentment at the fact that the mufti had not only allied himself to Hitler, but had also managed to attract men to take up his cause. The Thirteenth Waffen-SS Mountain Division “Handschar” was made up of Muslim volunteers from various countries, above all Croatia and Bosnia.

There was a point when the fighting stopped. The war was in its last throes. We received the news of Benito Mussolini’s and Clara Petacci’s deaths, followed by the suicide of Hitler in his bunker. The Führer had shot himself through the mouth. The only thing I regretted was that the Soviets had not been able to take him alive when they took Berlin.

All the remaining Germans in Italy surrendered on May 2. The war was over for us, and we could see the moment in the near future when we would go home, although I still had to carry out the task given me by my mother, to find out what had happened to my father and to my sister Dalida.

David Rosen, for his part, wanted to go back to Munich.

“I don’t know what I’m going to find there. My parents and I were lucky because we got out in time, but lots of my friends and family got stuck there.”

By now we knew about the existence of the extermination camps. The Soviets had been the first to enter these death camps, and, as the English and the Americans did later, what they found were people whom the Nazis had deprived of their humanity. The survivors were more dead than alive, and all of them had the horror of their descent into hell written in their eyes. The question was whether they would ever be ready to return to life, to think themselves human again, to be capable of loving, feeling, dreaming, being moved, being touched.

Months later I met a Russian soldier in Berlin and became friends with him. His name was Boris and he told me in detail how they had liberated Majdanek, a camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland.

 

Before I met Boris, or even went to Berlin, Ben had told me that we should put off our plan of returning to Palestine.

“We have to do something to help the survivors. We can’t leave them in the Red Cross camps.”

He had already decided to help the Brihah, the organization that was helping thousands of Jewish survivors to find new homes.

I agreed with him. For us to have left at this point would have been a betrayal of the thousands of poor wretches who had been freed from hell, and who had become a problem for the victorious powers. This was the day after the war in Europe had ended, and on such a day, all the powers that had been allied up until that point now had their own problems and their own needs.

The Americans didn’t want there to be a massive exodus of Jews to the United States. The British wanted to stop large numbers of Jews from going to Palestine at any cost, as that would mean renewed problems with the Arabs. As for the Soviet Union, Jews were not well received there either.

After the first shock of discovery at what they found in the concentration camps, the political leaders returned to their normal pragmatism, the same old Realpolitik as usual.

“They are Jews, and so we need to face up to the problem. We will take all the Jews to Palestine who want to go,” Ben said.

Before setting out on this adventure I asked for permission to go to Paris. I had to find my father and Dalida. I never thought that anything had happened to them. They must have stuck out the war in the Goldanskis’ house. My father had even thought about marrying Katia.

I saw the euphoria of triumph when I arrived in Paris. The city belonged to the Parisians once again. The American and British soldiers gave a touch of joy to the capital.

I went straight to my father’s house, and to my surprise a woman whom I didn’t know opened the door.

“What do you want?” this elderly woman asked in a friendly voice.

“I’m looking for Samuel Zucker, I’m Ezekiel Zucker.”

The woman looked me up and down and there was a glint of fear in her eyes.

“No Samuel Zucker lives here,” she said quickly and tried to close the door.

“I’m sorry, Madame, but this is my father’s house, my house, so tell me who you are and what you are doing here.”

I heard a man’s voice call from inside the house.

“Brigitte, who’s there?”

“Someone who says that this is his house,” the woman shouted.

A man appeared, older and fatter than I was, dressed in a sweat-stained shirt and trousers without a belt. I looked at his hands and thought that they were the hands of a killer.

“Who are you?” His voice was a challenge.

“You need to tell me who you are and explain yourselves. Tell me what you are doing in my father’s house.”

“This is our house and I do not need to give you any explanation.” The man slammed the door as he said this.

I stood in front of the door without knowing what to do. I thought I should ring the bell again, but I realized that with such a rascal the most that could happen would be that he would break my nose.

I remembered that Irina’s husband had also lived in this building, the husband of that woman about whom my father and Mikhail spoke so much. But I couldn’t remember where the Beauvoirs lived.

I went down to the entrance to see if I could find the concierge, hoping that the woman, old as she might be, would remember me. But there was no one there.

A middle-aged woman entered at that moment and I recognized her immediately.

“Agnès!” I said, pleased to see the concierge’s niece, who had looked after me and Dalida when we lived in Paris.

She looked at me in fright without recognizing me.

“I’m Ezekiel! Samuel Zucker’s son!”

“My God! But yes . . . It’s true! You’re not a child anymore, you’re a man . . . My God! My God!” and she took a step backwards as if she wanted me to get out of her way.

“Come on, Agnès, it’s like you’ve seen a ghost. Tell me, what do you know about my father? Why is there another family in our apartment?”

Agnès looked at me in even greater fright. Had she been able to, I think she would have run away.

“Monsieur, I know nothing, I swear.”

This was enough for me to realize that she was lying, so I grabbed her by the arm.

“Where is your aunt? Is she still the concierge?”

“No, Monsieur, I am the concierge now, my aunt is very old and has gone back to our village, to Normandy.”

“You worked in my father’s house, so you must tell me what happened.”

I followed her to the concierge’s office, which she unlocked. She unwillingly invited me to sit down in a rickety chair.

“I . . . I was always good to Monsieur Zucker, I swear! Then, when . . . Well, when it became a problem to be a Jew I stopped working for your father . . . You have to understand that these were difficult times, and if you had dealings with Jews then you drew suspicion onto yourself . . .”

Agnès’s words hit me in the stomach. I looked at her with disgust and she gave a start.

“Monsieur, don’t get angry, I . . .”

“Tell me what happened to my father! And my sister, what do you know about Dalida?”

“I don’t know anything. Your father and your sister abandoned the apartment at the beginning of the war. I don’t know where they went, they didn’t tell me, I was only the maid. I don’t know anything else . . . I swear!”

“Who are the people who are living in our house?”

“They’re a good family, he’s a policeman, I think he’s an important man. They have two children.”

“Why are they living in my house?”

“Well, I don’t really know, Monsieur . . . I think that some Jewish houses were confiscated and . . . Of course, now they say that if the owners come back and prove that the houses were theirs . . . It’s all so confused, Monsieur; the war has only just finished and we don’t really know what’s going to happen.”

It was difficult for me to recognize in this woman the young girl who had looked after Dalida and me when we were children. The Agnès of those days was a carefree young woman who took us to play in the Luxembourg Gardens, who got lost with us in the streets of Paris, who turned a blind eye to our naughty behavior. The Agnès I had before me now was a survivor, one of those people who think only of themselves while the world is falling to pieces around them. The war had brought out the worst in her.

“And the Beauvoirs?”

“He died a year ago, I think that some nephews inherited the apartment, you know that Monsieur Beauvoir had no children.”

“And our furniture, our paintings, all our things? Who has them now?”

“I don’t know anything, Monsieur, only what I have just told you. Please, I don’t want any problems!”

I left without knowing where to go or whom I could ask about my father and my sister. What if they had been arrested? No, that couldn’t be, why arrest them? I answered the question myself—they were Jews, there was no other reason. What I didn’t understand was why my father and my sister had stayed in Paris. They could have taken refuge in London with the Goldanskis, I always thought that was what they would have done, and my mother thought the same, I think.

I did everything I could to get an answer from the French authorities. I gave them the names of my sister and my father and they promised to send me an answer in a few days. They were not on file as having disappeared.

I sent a telegram to Ben telling him I couldn’t join him or David Rosen at the moment to help them with the Brihah organization, whose aim was to help the Jews who had survived.

I went to London, convinced that the Goldanskis could give me the answers I needed. Konstantin was my father’s best friend and business partner, and Katia . . . Well, I imagined that Katia must have married my father.

I didn’t even try to find a hotel when I got to London: I went straight to the Goldanskis’ house.

London felt like a city more bitter than Paris. The English capital had suffered badly from the continued bombing of the German airplanes, whereas Paris had largely been protected. It had been the rearguard for Hitler’s troops.

The Goldanskis’ house was still standing, although its wings seemed to have been destroyed. I approached in fear, praying for them to be alive. A maid opened the door and invited me to come in and wait in the hall while she told “the mistress” I was there. I was preparing myself to meet Katia, whom I hated for having taken my father away from me. But it was not Katia who received me, but Vera, Konstantin’s wife.

“Ezekiel! What a surprise! You’re alive!”

Vera hugged me with affection and signs of joy. I responded similarly, as I had always been captivated by her sweet nature. Vera had changed. Her hair was completely white and she was thinner than before; so thin that I felt her bones as I hugged her.

We sat in what had previously been a drawing room, a small room with a stove where the family used to meet when they didn’t have guests. I was upset to see that the porcelain figures were gone, the ones we had not been allowed to touch when we were children.

“My son Gustav is about to come, please have lunch with us. My God, what a pleasant surprise to have you here!”

Vera asked me about my mother and wanted to know how I had spent the war. She crossed herself when she found out that I had fought in France and then in Italy.

I don’t know why I had the impression that she was trying to forestall all my questions with questions of her own.

“And Konstantin?” I finally managed to ask.

She let drop a few tears that she immediately caught up in a handkerchief.

“He died here. You see how the house is now. That day . . . It was not yet dawn when the German planes started to bombard London. Gustav and I were not at home. As soon as he was old enough and we gave him our permission, Gustav joined the army. They sent him to serve in the General Staff office. He wanted to fight, but his superiors thought that they would take advantage of the fact that he spoke Russian, French, and German perfectly. And I . . . well, I collaborated as much as I could; I was a volunteer in the Nursing Service. I was at the hospital almost before dawn broke. I had just left the house when I heard the sirens and ran to the closest shelter and hoped that Konstantin would do the same. When I left he was taking a cup of tea in his office, which was . . . Well, you know, it was in the wing that is now as you see it. A bomb fell on the neighboring house, but it was such a powerful explosion that our house got it as well. Konstantin died in the explosion, under a shower of rubble that destroyed his body.”

This time Vera could not hold back her tears and started to cry. I sat next to her and tried to embrace her and comfort her.

“I am sorry, Ezekiel . . . I couldn’t get over the loss. You see, we ran away from Russia to survive, but evil has even followed us here.”

“I am sorry, Vera, I truly am. I . . . Well, my sister and I thought of you and Konstantin as another uncle and aunt to us.”

“And we loved you as if that’s what we truly were,” Vera replied.

The moment had come to ask about my father and Dalida, and, although it hurt me to do so, about Katia as well.

“And Katia? How is she?”

Vera looked at me with an infinite sorrow in her huge grey eyes.

“I don’t know, Ezekiel, I don’t know. The war only finished three weeks ago. Gustav is doing all he can to find out about what happened to Katia and your father, but . . .”

I felt tense, alert, but at the same time I also felt a slight sense of relief at the idea that they might be somewhere together, somewhere unknown, but both of them alive.

“Do you know where they were during the war? Here with you, no?”

Vera twisted her hands, trying to find an answer to my question that would not hurt me too much.

“Konstantin asked your father to stay in London, but he . . . Samuel is very stubborn and he said he was not going to stand idly by while the Germans persecuted the Jews. For Samuel it was like the pogroms were starting all over again. He never got over the loss of his mother and his brother and sister. Your father thought that two wars were taking place at the same time: the war of democracy against Nazism, and the war of the Jews for their own survival. He was prepared to fight on both fronts.”

“Where is my father, Vera?”

“I don’t know, Ezekiel. He decided to stay in France, and started to work with a Resistance group made up of Spanish Republicans and Frenchmen. Gustav will explain it better than I can, he knows more of the details. You know that Konstantin tried to keep me from getting upset about things, he thought I had suffered enough during the October Revolution. I got annoyed and said that I didn’t want to be treated like a child, but he tried to hide things from me that he knew would affect me. Even so, I found out that your father was a member of the Resistance and that Katia, in spite of Konstantin’s pleading with her, had decided to stay with him in France. She also worked with the Resistance. We did what we could from here. I assure you that not one single day went by when Konstantin and I did not try to help Jewish citizens.”

“And Dalida? Where is my sister?”

“Gustav is trying to find out what became of her, but there is a lot of confusion around the subject. Apparently the Gestapo took her. Dalida was also in the Resistance,” Vera added.

Just hearing that word, “Gestapo,” was still enough to provoke fear. You know about their crimes, their extreme cruelty, how they enjoyed torturing people.

Vera answered my questions and at the same time tried to calm the anxiety that was taking hold of me. When Gustav came home, I already had a more or less clear idea of how my father and sister had spent the war.

Gustav and I shook hands, wondering if we should hug each other. We had both become men, and neither of us showed any trace of those years of childhood we had shared.

Gustav had always seemed a child who was too coddled and spoiled, although his parents were stricter with him than mine were with me. We felt closer at this moment than we had during our childhood.

The three of us had lunch and remembered the past. Vera reminded us about some of our mischievous actions, and we spoke of nothing that could disturb our reminiscences. We went back to the drawing room after lunch.

Gustav lit his pipe and offered me a cigarette, which I accepted.

“I’ve been investigating for a couple of months and I don’t know much, but I hope what I do know will help. You want to find your father and your sister, and I want to find my Aunt Katia. The destinies of all three of them were connected during the war.”

Gustav’s tale shocked me and showed me a Samuel I didn’t know. Suddenly my father had acquired aspects of character that seemed to me almost unbelievable.

 

Samuel and Katia were in Paris on the day that Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned. Two days earlier, on June 14, 1940, Marshal Pétain’s treachery had come to a head and France knew the shame of seeing German troops marching down the Champs-Élysées. Until that moment the Jews had had a bad time of it; now their only job became survival.

On September 27 of that accursed year 1940, the Germans ordered the Vichy government to take a census of all the Jews in the Occupied Zone of France. Your father decided that neither he nor Dalida would register in the census. “They want to know how many Jews there are so they can treat us like cattle. I won’t let them degrade me like this,” he wrote to my father in a letter. Don’t ask me how it got through to him, because I don’t know. What I do know is that Samuel and Dalida left the house they had lived in, and rented another one in a quiet street in the Saint-Michel area. The hardest thing was to get rid of the laboratory. Samuel met with the manager and told him that he was leaving France and that he would sign papers to give the man the right to manage the business while he was gone. His precaution was not of much use, because the Vichy authorities decided to confiscate all Jewish property. Your father had been careful and had a large sum of money set aside, as well as some paintings and other valuable objects that he gave to Katia to look after. He refused to allow Katia to live with them.

“You are not completely Jewish,” he said, to which my aunt replied: “I have at least half a pint of Jewish blood.” But not a lot of people knew that. The friends of my parents and my aunt in Paris were people like us, Russians who had fled Russia after the revolution.

Katia rented a house near Montparnasse and decided to stay in Paris, come what may.

In October, on the third, I think, France passed a “Jewish statute.” All the Jews became second-class citizens from that moment on. What am I saying! They stopped being citizens entirely.

Samuel wanted to fight in the rearguard, so together with David Peretz, the son of Benedict Peretz, the man who had helped him so much in the past, he started a Jewish Resistance group. They were not the only Jews in the Resistance, there were others: Solidarité, Comite rue Amelot, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants. Some of these groups had good relations with the Maquis and worked with them. In the end, they were all engaged in the same fight.

I don’t know how, or via whom, but somehow David Peretz found out about a Russian exile who made his living as a forger. The question was whether the man would help the group, and especially, if he was trustworthy, as he had arrived in Paris before 1917, which made him suspicious. But they decided to take the chance, as neither Samuel nor Dalida could risk being caught without documentation. Samuel decided to meet with this man.

He lived near Montmartre, in a narrow little alley. A woman opened the door to him, her hair black and her eyes so wild as to be frightening. He said the phrase that he had been told would be the password, and she asked him in, but as soon as he went into the house she took out a pistol and covered him.

She took him to a back room with no windows and made him sit down. Then she stood in front of him and began her interrogation. Samuel realized from her accent that she was not French. He found out later that she was named Juana and was a Spaniard.

She had been in a militia during the Civil War, and she was a committed anti-Francoist who had seen her husband die on the Aragon front; later she lost the child she was expecting. The rest of her family, her father and her uncles, were shot shortly after the end of the war. But she found this out only later, as she fled the country to escape a prison from which she knew the only exit would be to end up dead in a ditch. Juana did not wait to be found and went to France, where she crossed over from Catalonia at a place called Cerdaña, regularly used in later years by anti-Francoist forces.

They arrested her in Perpignan and took her to a concentration camp from which she escaped; she reached Paris several days later, where a relative looked after her. Her relative, a distant uncle, I believe, was a printer, a Republican who had helped those who asked him, and who had fled in 1938 before the war was definitively lost. When he reached France, he started to work with the Resistance.

Juana met Vasily via her uncle. He had escaped from Tsarist Russia, but when the October Revolution took place he did not go back to Moscow, because he had made himself a good living working as a printer in Juana’s uncle’s print shop. Pedro, Juana’s uncle, had come across Vasily one evening working in the print shop late at night, almost in the dark. He was forging papers for people who could pay him to, most of them criminals. Pedro didn’t hand him over to the police and the Russian became his faithful servant. The war meant that the two men joined forces to work together to help political groups that had problems with the law.

Juana must have been satisfied by the answers Samuel gave to her questions, because she allowed Samuel to see Vasily.

Samuel found himself in front of a man of medium height, with mocking blue eyes, who addressed him in Russian. They spoke in this language for a good while until Juana interrupted them angrily.

“Either you talk in French or you don’t talk at all,” she said, and Vasily accepted this insistence with a smile.

“So you want several passports, including one for you and one for your daughter, and you want to have them by yesterday. My colleague and I are not miracle workers.”

“I’m not asking you to work miracles, all I want is for you to help save lives, not just Jewish lives, but French lives as well. Aren’t you opposed to the Nazis?”

“Yes, Juana’s uncle has managed to convince me that money isn’t everything, and here you have me, Monsieur, leaving my business to go to ruin while I work for free. Of course, you can pay, or am I wrong?”

He was not wrong, Samuel would have given all he had for those passports. But Juana stood up and gave Vasily a slap across the face.

“Pay? Don’t even say that as a joke. You will do what I ask and you will work night and day if you have to,” she said in a menacing voice.

“You see, Monsieur, it is impossible to resist the wiles of women. She is the boss here.”

Later Samuel got to know Vasily well and found out that behind his cynical mask there was a man who was willing to do everything for liberty, even risk his life for it.

Samuel and Dalida’s new passports turned them into Monsieur Ivanov and Mademoiselle Ivanova, father and daughter, from Saint Petersburg, victims of the revolution.

Vasily warned them:

“If they arrest you with French passports they can check if the identity on the document is real, but if you only have a Russian passport there is no way to check this with the Soviets. You have to claim to be committed enemies of Stalin and admirers of Hitler. Hitler is your only hope of ever going back to your homeland.”

Samuel’s first order from Vasily was for fifty French passports for fifty Jews whom he wanted to get out of France to Lisbon, and from there to Palestine.

My father, Konstantin, took charge of chartering the ships. It was not an easy task. Europe was at war and all he could get his hands on were some leaky old tubs that would scarcely stay afloat. My father used all his influence to get permission from the British authorities for these men and women to be allowed to disembark in Palestine. My father ended up working with the British Secret Service. He sent the reports he had from Samuel and Katia to his friends in the Admiralty.

To these first fifty passports there were quickly added more. With Juana’s help, Vasily and Pedro worked without stopping. The woman seemed not to be afraid of anything, as she had lost everything that gave meaning to her life.

You must know, Ezekiel, that your sister refused to stay in London with us, just as my aunt and your father had done.

Dalida became a link for another Resistance group whose leader was French. Armando, they called him, but no one knew what his real name was. He had a great deal of fame among the Resistance members, and he was very lucky at escaping from dangerous situations. He came and went from Paris to the French border along the Bidasoa River and near Perpignan. Collaborating with other Resistance groups, he helped people pass clandestinely over the border from France and then travel onwards to Portugal. And not only Jews. Armando also worked with the Comète group, which was dedicated to repatriating Allied airmen who had been shot down over France, Belgium, and Holland.

Sometimes Dalida went with various groups of Jews to the border. They did not normally travel in groups of more than four or five people. It would be suspicious if there were more of them. They traveled with false documents as a family claiming to be going south to visit relatives and to look for a place of greater safety during the war. Your sister took them to a farm where they stayed until Armando’s men could take them over the border into Spain.

I don’t know how many trips Dalida made, but she helped save many lives.

Katia also was useful. It was not hard for an exiled Russian countess to have the doors of the most disgusting collaborators in Paris opened to her.

At the end of 1940, Katia received a call from the police. They wanted to know what she was doing in Paris, what her work was, and above all whether she sympathized with the Nazi Party, and if not, whether she was a spy.

I don’t know how my aunt managed to pluck up the courage, but she came out of the interrogation with flying colors.

“Countess, how long are you intending to stay in Paris?”

“As long as you gentlemen will let me. Where could I go? I lived in London, it is true, but I did not feel comfortable there as my friends knew of my Nazi sympathies.”

“So you . . .”

Katia did not let the policeman continue and carried on speaking herself.

“All I want, Monsieur, is for the Führer to win the war and give my country back to the authentic Russians. I know it will mean dealing with the Soviets, politics is like that, but I pray that Hitler will one day become emperor of Europe.”

“And are you comfortable in Paris?”

“If what you want to know, Monsieur, is whether or not I can pay for my own upkeep, then the answer is a definite yes. I fled Russia with sufficient money so as not to have to beg in the streets.”

“And are you a Jew, Madame?”

“Monsieur! I’ll have you know that there was a Jewish problem in Russia before the Führer came along. No, Monsieur, I am not a Jew, the Lord save me from such an evil fate.”

Men were never able to resist my aunt’s beauty, and although she was by then more than seventy years old, she had an elegance and a presence before which it was difficult not to surrender. So it was not difficult for her to introduce herself into the upper circles of the Pétain government; she also started to deal with its officers, who thought her inoffensive and slipped occasional pieces of information into her ears. Information about roundups they were planning, or which Resistance members they were following . . . Armando analyzed this information carefully, worried that at any moment they might find out the truth about Katia and use her to set a trap.

She went from one side of Paris to the other in her black Mercedes with a chauffeur who was one of Armando’s men. They carried weapons and explosives, they delivered letters, they hid money.

One afternoon Katia left the house with one of Armando’s men and a package containing explosives. She bumped into the police officer who had interrogated her and with whom she still had some dealings. He was with several members of the gendarmerie and an SS officer. They were asking everyone to show their documentation and to open their bags. Katia saved herself by a miracle. She went straight up to the police officer she knew and greeted him effusively.

“Monsieur, what a pleasure to see you here! Are you working? I don’t want to distract you . . .”

No policeman would dare ask for documentation from this woman who was speaking so animatedly with one of their bosses. Even so, the SS man asked her what she was carrying, and Katia replied with a smile:

“A bomb, Monsieur, what else would it be?”

The Frenchman laughed at what he thought was a joke, but the German was serious.

“Allow me to present Countess Katia Goldanski . . . Madame, this is Theodor Dannecker, the real master of Paris.”

“What a great responsibility to own a city like Paris! Look after her, she’s a unique city, a real jewel in the crown of the Third Reich.”

They exchanged a few pleasantries, and then the two men walked with her to her car and Katia left, giving thanks to God for having saved her.

The network she was a part of had a few safe houses; even so, they were always on their guard. In David Peretz’s group, in which Samuel and Dalida and Katia were all fighting, and in Armando’s group as well, vigilance was the price to be paid for survival.

It was via Dalida that the two groups ended up working together. She had been the first to contact Armando, and it had not been difficult to win his confidence. In other circumstances, Dalida might have been intimidated by this forty-year-old Spaniard, with his wrinkled face and strong hands. But your sister was not fooled by Armando’s appearance; his voice made it clear that he was not a brute, it was the voice of a cultivated man that did not fit with his appearance.

They met at Vasily’s house. Dalida had gone to hand over photographs for passports that Samuel intended to use to save a Jewish family. When she arrived, Juana sent her through to the back room, where a man was arguing with Vasily.

He had his back to her and didn’t see her come in. Juana didn’t introduce them, and Dalida pretended to not be the least bit interested in this man and in what he was doing there. She stayed quiet and listened to the discussion.

“I told you I needed the documents for today!”

“You’ll have them in a couple of hours,” Vasily said, without raising his voice.

“And what do I do now? I have to leave for Marseilles in less than an hour. I can’t wait, and it’s too late for me to find someone to pass along the documents,” Armando complained.

Dalida looked at him and said:

“I could take them.”

Armando turned around, surprised and angry at this young woman’s interruption.

“And who are you? Are you mad? I said I didn’t want anyone else here when I came around.”

Juana stood up to Armando.

“I make the rules here. It’s my house. No one comes in whom I don’t know, and let me tell you that this girl is a Jew, and part of a Jewish network, and with as much reason as any one of us not to trust anybody.”

“And she’s so innocent or so stupid as to offer to do a job for someone she doesn’t know. How old are you?” Armando asked, looking Dalida up and down.

“I’m about to turn twenty,” she said calmly.

“And why should you do this job for me?”

“Because you can’t do it and you said there are men in danger who need these documents.”

“And why should you care?”

“I care about anything that has to do with defeating the Nazis.”

Juana smiled. It wasn’t that she was surprised at Dalida’s attitude, she knew that she carried messages for David Peretz’s group, but to put everything at risk for a man she didn’t know showed that she was braver than she had thought.

“There aren’t that many options. Either she goes, or you can wait,” Juana said bluntly.

“How do I know that . . .”

Dalida interrupted him.

“You don’t know anything, you don’t know if I can do it, if I will get lost, if I will be late, you don’t know what I will do if they arrest me, you don’t know if I will talk . . . I cannot promise anything, just that I will try, I will try to be in the place you tell me at the time you tell me, I will hand over the packet and try to make sure no one follows me. And that is all.”

Armando found Dalida intriguing. She looked like a young girl in the flower of her youth, but she seemed far more self-possessed than most people her age.

“Alright.”

Armando left, not knowing if he had made a mistake. She had to be trustworthy if she worked with the Jewish group, but he didn’t know anything about her, except that Juana, Vasily, and Pedro all vouched for her. It was a guarantee, but no guarantee is sufficient for those who live outside the law.

Dalida left the print shop carrying a bag that contained four French passports for four Spaniards who had escaped from a concentration camp and who had come to join the ranks of the Resistance.

She walked fast, but not so fast that she might attract anyone’s attention. It was a long way from Montmartre to the Champs-Élysées, where the bar was where she had to hand over the documents, so it would take longer for her to get back home than she had planned and her father would be worried about her.

An hour later, she arrived at the bar. She walked in without caring about the men who looked at her curiously. She went to the bar and spoke the countersign: “François sent me for bread.” The barman looked at her oddly. He had expected Armando, who was this slip of a girl? He gestured to her to come behind the bar. When she went into the kitchen, a man grabbed her and held a knife to her neck. She felt that the point could dig into her neck at any moment, but she didn’t move.

She told these men what Armando had told her to say, words that meant nothing to her but had all the meaning in the world for them.

From that day on, Dalida worked with David Peretz’s group and also with Armando’s. She won the respect of the other men and women who, like her, were risking their lives in this occupied Paris that seemed on the surface to be such a happy place.

Armando’s lieutenant, a tall bearish Alsatian whom everyone called Raymond, taught her two things: how to use the radio that connected them with London, and how to prepare explosives. She was a good student.

It was not easy to transmit the Resistance’s messages. She kept the radio in her room, afraid that at any moment they could find it. Raymond had told her not to speak for too long, to make it difficult for the Gestapo to track the signal. She never forgot this advice, and sometimes even broke off a message so as not to put the group or herself in any danger.

From time to time, Katia went to Madrid and from Madrid to Lisbon, where she would meet her brother and tell him detailed information about Nazi troop positions in Paris, and would also receive a sealed envelope containing instructions from the British Intelligence Service for its contacts with the Resistance in Paris. Also, Konstantin would ask her to come back to London. But she would refuse.

“I am in love, Konstantin. Can’t you understand that? Do you think that I would abandon Samuel? I would go with him to hell itself.”

“Katia, the war will finish one day and crazy old Samuel will come back to London to be with you. You must agree that neither he nor I are of an age where it makes sense to run around playing at being spies. I’m not running any risk at all in coming to see you in Lisbon every now and then and in bringing you certain information from London, but I can’t sleep when I think about the risks you’re taking.”

“Konstantin, I’m in love with Samuel, and have been ever since I was a little girl. I rejected every suitor I ever had, you remember how cross grandfather got because I refused to marry anyone. When I thought that I was done for, I met him again, and you know the sacrifices he made to be with me. He gave up everything he’s ever had, his wife, his son, and you expect me to leave him in Paris risking his life while I wait for the war to be over from the safety of London . . . No, Konstantin, not even all the divisions of the Wehrmacht will be enough to keep us apart.”

“At least send Dalida back, she’ll be safer in London.”

“You wouldn’t recognize her. Dalida has become a woman now and is only responsible for herself. Samuel is worried because she is ever more involved with Armando’s group. She helped blow up some trains near Paris last week. She seems to have learned how to deal with explosives. The other day I asked her if she was scared, and you know what she said? ‘I am only afraid that we might lose the war and then the Nazis would take over Europe. That is what scares me.’”

 

Gustav paused and Vera offered him a cup of tea. Then he carried on with the story.

 

Ezekiel, have you ever heard of the “Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv”? It was a roundup where they arrested hundreds of Jews, on July 16 and 17, 1942. They locked them in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which is where the name comes from. The worst part is not what they suffered there, but what they were to suffer later. Lots of them were taken to Germany, to different extermination camps. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The French had received an order from their German masters—they had to carry out a massive roundup of Jews, and it was an order they executed without complaint. It was not difficult for them, all the Jews were registered, so the police knew where to find them. On the morning of July 16 thousands of policemen presented themselves at Jewish homes. They took twelve thousand people to the Vélodrome, including women and children.

Some of them managed to escape; others, who were already with the Resistance, managed to avoid being arrested because they, like Samuel and Dalida, had left their families behind and gone undercover.

Some of those arrested were taken to the Vélodrome, others to Drancy, a camp to the north of Paris, others to Pithiviers, to Beaune-la-Rolande . . .

Some families were separated. The children were taken one way, the parents another. Lots of the children were sent directly to Auschwitz, where they were killed in the gas chambers on the day they arrived.

Remember these names, Ezekiel, never forget them, they are the names of three officers of the SS, three murderers: Alois Brunner, Theodor Dannecker, and Heinz Röthke. Alois Brunner would later on become the camp commandant at Drancy.

Your father and your sister survived the roundup and they, along with the rest of their group, suffered from not being able to do anything. It became an obsession for Samuel to try to get the Jewish children whom he found hidden in friends’ houses out of France. David Peretz and he found a group of ten of them. I have told you that my father never said how Samuel managed to get in touch with him, but I know that he received word that Samuel was going to try to take these children out of Paris. Samuel asked my father to do all that was necessary to pick them up in Gibraltar or Lisbon and take them to Palestine, or anywhere else they would be safe. Difficult as Samuel’s instructions were, my father always followed them. It was not easy to organize the necessary material and permissions to get these ten Jewish children to Palestine. You have fought alongside the British, and so have I, you know that on the battlefield their bravery is beyond question, but they defend their interests above everything else, and it had been their policy for years to stop more Jews from immigrating to Palestine. They didn’t want to open more fronts in the war, and not for anything would they annoy the Palestinian Arabs.

Pedro and Vasily made false documents for these children. Katia had the idea of using nuns, the Sisters of Charity, to help. Katia had heard that these nuns took in orphans, and asked for their assistance. She went to the convent and asked to speak to the mother superior, but she wasn’t there, so she met with Sister Marie-Madeleine, who was no older than forty and whom acquaintances said made much of her bad temper.

Katia didn’t beat around the bush. She explained the situation to Sister Marie-Madeleine directly.

“Some friends have managed to save ten Jewish children. Their parents were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver . . . We want to save them and to do that we have to take them to Spain, and from Spain to Lisbon or Gibraltar. But we need them to be safe until we can set them on their journey. Can you give them shelter here?”

Sister Marie-Madeleine huffed and puffed and said something that Katia didn’t catch, then she looked her straight in the face and said, without smiling:

“I don’t know what to say to the mother superior. She has gone with another sister to look after some poor old people near Paris. She won’t be coming back until tomorrow. If you bring the children today, then she won’t be able to refuse them. When she gets back it will be a fait accompli.”

“If she didn’t agree, would she throw the children out?”

“I’ve said already that she wouldn’t. But you have to understand that we put the others we have here in danger if we take in these children. What would happen to these orphans without us? Tell me, how long will they stay here?”

“I don’t know, Sister, a few days, but I can’t tell you how many, we’ll try to make their stay as short as possible.”

“How old are they?”

“The youngest is four and the oldest is twelve.”

“May God aid us and protect us!”

“Amen, Sister.”

That afternoon the members of the network took the children to the convent. They had told the younger ones not to cry, and in spite of their sad faces and trembling lips they all behaved like what they were, survivors.

Some of the sisters were scared and unwilling, they had enough to do with looking after their own orphans, but Sister Marie-Madeleine was inflexible:

“Are we going to deny Christ by denying help to these poor mites? Of course it’s dangerous, but are we going to be afraid for our own well-being, we, the brides of Christ who died on the cross?”

The mother superior scolded Sister Marie-Madeleine for having exceeded her authority, but she was a good woman and, in spite of her fears, she welcomed the children.

Sister Marie-Madeleine convinced the mother superior to allow her to go with the children to the border. They would go by train. Their excuse would be that they were children who were suffering from tuberculosis and that thanks to the generosity of Countess Katia Goldanski they were going on holiday in the south, by the sea. The presence of a nun would give credence to this improvised plan.

Dalida convinced Armando that his network should pick up the children when they reached the border. Armando was unwilling at first, he didn’t want to put his men in any danger, but in the end he gave in and promised that some of his men would take the children across the border. Once there they would have to be passed into the hands of Samuel and David Peretz’s organization. It was decided that they would go to Perpignan and then to the border, and that once they had crossed the border they would go to Barcelona, where there was an organization that helped with refugee children. It wasn’t easy to cross the border, they would have to use smugglers’ paths.

The day they started the journey the children were scared, but they hadn’t stopped being scared since the day they were taken away from their fathers and mothers and brought to different houses and then to that convent where strange women insisted that they learn the Our Father and the Ave Maria. The nuns did not want to convert them to Catholicism; Sister Marie-Madeleine wanted them to be able to pass as Christians in case they were stopped.

They had decided that the presence of a man would arouse suspicion, and so, in spite of his doubts, Samuel accepted this and said goodbye to Dalida and Katia without knowing if this would be the last time he would ever see them.

Sister Marie-Madeleine had a very commanding voice. She could make the children fall quiet simply by looking at them. She was a nun with a natural air of authority, which was more necessary than ever for them in those days.

On the platform the police asked for their documentation. The nun explained to one of the policemen that the journey was possible thanks to the generosity of this charitable lady. Katia smiled indifferently, as if this were simply an innocent journey. Dalida pretended to be the countess’s servant.

Just as the police seemed to be satisfied with the explanations that Sister Marie-Madeleine had given them, two Gestapo agents came up and asked for the documentation of the women and the children.

“I suppose that the Third Reich has nothing to fear from a group of poor orphans,” the nun said to the two severe-looking men.

“It is traitors who should fear the Third Reich. Are you a traitor, Sister?” The Gestapo agent looked haughtily at the nun.

“I am a nun who is looking after these poor sick children. They have tuberculosis, here is the documentation that shows it. We are taking them to the south so they don’t infect any of the other children in the convent. The countess is very generous and has paid for everybody’s tickets. The Lord will reward her.”

 

That day the Lord came down on the side of the poor orphans. Of course, thousands of others died in the gas chambers without him making his presence felt. The Gestapo agent allowed them to get on the train.

Katia and Dalida gave the children sandwiches.

“You have to eat and then you should try to get some sleep. It’s a long journey down to the border and I want you to be quiet,” Sister Marie-Madeleine warned the children. They listened to her in fright. In spite of their youth, they were aware that their lives were at stake.

The train stopped at several stations and they had their documents checked at every one by the French police and the Gestapo. But it was in Perpignan, when they were just about to leave the station, that four Gestapo agents came and stood next to them and asked for their papers. One of the men went up to Dalida and said: “I can smell Jews.” Dalida shuddered and gave him her false documents.

“So you are an expatriate Russian. Ivanova, that’s your name?”

“Yes,” Dalida managed to reply.

“She’s my companion . . . I am Countess Katia Goldanski,” Katia interrupted.

“Ah, so the young lady is your companion! Can you assure me that she’s not Jewish?”

“For God’s sake, it’s clear that she’s not! Also, do you think that I would be so stupid as to employ a Jew?” Katia behaved with all the old aristocratic haughtiness that she could muster.

Sister Marie-Madeleine stood next to Katia.

“Sir, the countess has taken pity on these poor orphans who are suffering from tuberculosis, and thanks to her kindness we are taking them to recover a long way from the city. I can swear to you that Madame Ivanova is not Jewish, do you think that we Christians want to have anything to do with the descendants of the killers of Christ? The Lord would not allow it! I ask you, sirs, please let us continue, the children are tired after so much traveling, they are little and need to eat and sleep.”

The Gestapo agents looked at the faces of the children, who stared back without saying anything.

They let them go. They walked slowly, as if they had nothing to hide and nothing to fear.

“Sister, what you have just said to this Gestapo agent has been the perennial excuse for why the Jews have been persecuted—for having killed Christ. All those who ordered the massacres, the pogroms throughout Europe, their consciences were clear because they claimed that the Jews crucified Christ.” Dalida spoke in a low voice, but it was clear that the nun’s words had shaken her.

“You think I don’t know that? That’s why I said it. What other explanation could convince those men that this was not a group of Jews? I’m sorry to have offended you,” Sister Marie-Madeleine apologized.

“I’m not offended, it’s just that it’s a terrible thing to accuse the Jews of being the cause of Christ’s crucifixion,” Dalida replied.

“I do not excuse in any way the persecutions or the murders that have taken place over the years with Jesus’s death as an excuse. Our Lord was a Jew and never pretended to be anything else, so how could I blame the Jews?”

“The church will have to ask our pardon one day,” Dalida said bitterly. She, being Palestinian, had never experienced discrimination in all her life, but she was starting to realize that being a Jew in Europe meant sinking into some subhuman category of being.

“If it’s of any use I will gladly ask for forgiveness, for all the sins we have committed against the Jews.”

The three women said nothing more. The older children had not missed a word of the conversation, and their faces showed how it worried them.

Armando had given them clear instructions; when they left the station they were to turn to the right and walk for half a mile, then someone would come up to them and use the phrase: “Some journeys are endless.”

They had walked for longer than expected when a truck pulled up next to them and the driver stuck his head out and used the agreed-upon phrase. In less than a minute all the children were on board, and though they could barely move they felt that they were safe.

They left the city without the driver saying anything about where they were going. In the end they arrived at a house hidden in the undergrowth around the border. A small, fat woman was waiting for them. She seemed worried.

“The children should come straight into the house without anyone seeing. No one comes by here, but it’s better if they are not seen.”

The house was modest, it had two floors and the lower one was occupied by an enormous kitchen, which also served as a salon and a dining room. The roaring fire warmed them, as did the mugs of milk and slices of bread the woman had prepared.

“It’s not much, but at least they’ll have something in their stomachs.”

She was named Ivette and had been married to a Jew.

“My husband died before the war broke out. I don’t want to think about what might have happened if he had lived . . . These people took all the Jews to Germany; they said to labor camps . . . But they also said that . . . Well, I won’t say anything, I don’t want the children to get scared.”

Ivette had two daughters who were now both in Spain.

“I had to convince them to cross the border. It’s not the case that Franco likes the Jews, but at least he doesn’t kill them or force them to have the Star of David sewn onto their lapels. Every now and then I go to Spain to see them, but I don’t let them come home.”

Night had fallen by the time another truck came to pick them up. The man who drove it called himself Jean, and was with another, younger man, who said his name was François. They explained that they would drive to Les Angles, and that from there, via secret paths, they would get across to Puigcerdà. Ivette would go with them.

The children were exhausted, but Sister Marie-Madeleine had such control over them that they didn’t dare cry. They got into the truck as best they could, with a blanket over them to keep them warm and also to protect them from prying eyes.

Jean drove with his headlights off along little-used paths, far from the main road. They took longer than they had thought and it was nearly dawn by the time they reached Les Angles. The village was small and the inhabitants had not yet woken up.

“From here we’ll walk across the border. It won’t be easy. The nearest village is Puigcerdà, but we cannot go directly, we have to try climbing the mountain. Do you think the children will manage?”

Katia looked up at the mountains with their sprinkling of snow on top. She thought about how beautiful they were and how much she would have liked to rush down those white paths on a sledge.

Sister Marie-Madeleine told the children once more that they should say nothing.

“We’ll go on a trip, you’ll like it,” she said, without letting the sorrow and love that she felt for these defenseless creatures show at all on her face.

Dalida took the youngest one in her arms, and Sister Marie-Madeleine took hold of a girl who could not have been more than five or six. Katia looked tired, when it all came down to it she was seventy-three years old, but she did not shirk her duty and took another of the youngest children, as did Ivette.

Jean led the way and insisted that they all be silent. From time to time he shut his eyes and concentrated, as if by doing this he could register all the sounds on the mountainside. François walked at the back, and every now and then disappeared and then came back to whisper something to Jean.

“They know these mountains like the back of their hand,” Ivette said to Katia.

A girl stumbled and fell and started to cry. Dalida told her to keep quiet and bandaged her knee as best she could.

“Look, spit in this handkerchief, the saliva will help cure the cut, you’ll see, it’ll stop hurting soon.”

“We should go more slowly,” Katia suggested.

“We should get over the border. Your friends on the other side know the timetable of the Spanish patrols. A minute’s delay could mean that they find us. I’m sorry, we need to continue.”

But it was hard for the children to walk along these frozen paths where their feet sank into the snow and made them feel even colder and start to shiver. None of them had adequate clothes or shoes. Neither did Katia or Dalida, and Sister Marie-Madeleine was especially badly prepared. It was only Ivette and the men who had mountaineering gear and boots to help them walk through the snow.

“They’re going to get sick,” Katia whispered.

“But they’ll save their lives,” Dalida replied.

They had to stop. The children had started to groan, fatigue was beating them down. The youngest ones fell asleep as they walked.

“Give us half an hour to rest or the children won’t make it,” the nun begged.

“Ten minutes, no longer,” Jean agreed. Then he told them to carry on in silence as he sent François ahead to explore the area.

When he came back he was nervous.

“There’s a detachment of soldiers very close by. They’re looking for someone. We have to carry on. We have to take a little detour around the summit, there’s no other way to get them off our tail,” François said.

“The children won’t make it!” Dalida protested.

“There are only two options: either they manage, or we all get arrested, and I’m not prepared to get onto one of those cattle trains for Jews and Maquis fighters that take them to prison camps in Germany,” Jean replied as he started to walk.

They followed him. They had no choice. Katia promised a bag of sweets to every child who managed to keep quiet.

How long did it take them? Katia didn’t remember. All she remembered was that their feet were soaked and the children were shivering with cold. Someone started to cough. The four women forced the children onwards, making them walk, picking them up when they fell, covering their mouths when they began to cry.

Suddenly Jean smiled and turned back to Katia to tell her:

“We’re in Spain.”

“Praise the Lord!” Sister Marie-Madeleine said as she looked up at the sky and muttered a prayer.

“Are you sure?” Katia said nervously.

“Yes, we are in Spain,” Jean confirmed.

He let them sit down for a while underneath a huge fir tree with its snow-covered branches. They were soaked, sweating, starving, but they were safe.

“Where are the people who are to collect us?” Sister Marie-Madeleine asked.

“We have gone off the track and we need to walk another couple of miles before we get back to the meeting point. François will go ahead and make contact. Maybe there will be no one waiting for us, as we’re very late.”

“The children can’t walk another yard,” the nun said.

“We have managed to avoid the soldiers, Sister, but we aren’t safe. We could still run into Spanish soldiers or the Guardia Civil,” Jean said.

“And what would they do, send these children back to France? Hand them over because they are Jews?” Sister Marie-Madeleine had raised her voice and was angry.

“We are at war, Sister, do you think that anyone would care about another couple of orphans? You have saved ten children, and your God may reward you for that, but if the soldiers find us then you are really going to need his help.”

“Do you perhaps not believe in God?” the nun asked.

“Please, Sister, what does it matter!” Katia seemed annoyed.

“No, Sister, I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t stop me from being a decent person, with a conscience. You saved these children on behalf of your God, and I fight against the Nazis and believe that all humans are equal, no matter their race or their religion. Everyone should act according to his beliefs. Sister, I won’t get involved in your beliefs, and you should leave mine well alone, too.”

The children couldn’t take another step, so in spite of Jean’s protests, Katia insisted that they be allowed to rest. It was only the fact that they were in Spain that allowed her to feel a little more relaxed. She knew that Franco was Hitler’s ally, but as far as she knew he did not persecute the Jews, he did not send them back to France, knowing the fate that awaited them there. She said as much to Jean.

“If you want to trust the Francoists, then go ahead, but I won’t. I am an anarchist, Madame, and in Spain they shoot anarchists, and they won’t care if the bullet goes into a Spanish anarchist or a French one. I help save people’s lives by crossing the border, and that’s all. If they don’t want to walk, then I can’t do anything.”

“Come on, Jean, don’t get angry,” Ivette said. “You have young children yourself, imagine them having to go through what these children have gone through.”

But Jean was inflexible and made them start walking again. Afternoon was wearing on when they heard some footsteps behind them. They stayed still and silent and Jean went out to see who was moving about so close to them. He came back with four men. One of them was François.

“There is a house not that far from Puigcerdà. A mother and a daughter live there, the husband is a smuggler but they arrested him and shot him. You can rest there until the truck comes to pick you up and drive you to Barcelona,” François explained.

They said goodbye to Jean and François and handed themselves over to the mercies of these three Spaniards who carried the most exhausted of the children in their arms. All three also carried rifles.

No one saw them enter the farmhouse at the foot of the mountain.

“Good Lord, the poor children!” the owner of the house exclaimed as she saw them. She must have known Ivette, as they kissed each other twice on the cheeks.

“Nuria, can you give them anything hot to eat?” Ivette asked.

“The first thing they have to do is take off their wet clothes, I’ll hang them out by the fire,” Nuria replied. She was a redhead, with chestnut eyes, neither very tall nor very short, but as filled-out as Ivette was.

“They’ll catch their deaths if you make them take their clothes off,” Sister Marie-Madeleine replied.

“They’ll die if they don’t. I’ll put some cushions on the floor, and we’ll cover them with blankets; Ivette, give me a hand. You can start heating some milk, it’s in the pitcher over there.”

A good while later, Sister Marie-Madeleine had to admit that Nuria had been right. The children were dry, wrapped in sheets and blankets, and all of them fast asleep, after having drunk a few generous mugs of warm milk.

Katia and Dalida had accepted dry clothes from Nuria, but Sister Marie-Madeleine just coughed and tried to dry herself by the fire.

“Do you really think God will care all that much if you take your habit off for a while to let it dry?” Nuria asked.

The nun didn’t answer. Her head hurt and she felt a burning sensation in her chest that kept her from breathing.

“The woman’s ill,” Ivette said, addressing Nuria.

Katia convinced her to go change in Nuria’s room, and to cover herself with a shift while her habit dried.

“No one will see you, sister, I promise.”

“Being a nun is a decision that involves the acceptance of a series of norms which no one other than yourself forces you to keep. I understand that it might seem absurd for me to refuse to accept other clothes, as you and Dalida have done.”

“I’m not judging you, Sister, but I insist that you behave logically. Let your habit dry, and stay in my room until it has done so. No one will see you. I’m sure you can accept that.”

Nuria told them that the three men who had taken charge of the group were guarding the house.

“We won’t see them unless we look out the window, but they are keeping an eye on us and will come immediately if there’s any danger.”

“Why do you work with the Resistance?” Katia asked.

“Do you know how many Spaniards there are in the Resistance? It’s not for that, I just want the Allies to win the war and then help free us from Franco.”

Night had fallen when there were some dull knocks at the door. Nuria opened it with one hand, the other holding the pistol she concealed in the pocket of her apron.

One of the men who had accompanied them told them that the truck had arrived and was ready to take the children. The little ones had all rested and eaten enough to have regained some of their energy, but Sister Marie-Madeleine was not well. She had a fever and couldn’t stop shaking.

“Stay here, Sister; we’ll take the children to Barcelona. We’ll pick you up when we return,” Katia insisted.

The nun was not prepared to allow her fever to beat her, so she put on her habit and prepared to go with them.

“They say that Franco is a very Catholic man, so it’s better if I go with you, no one will refuse to trust a nun.”

They could not convince her not to, and managed to get her into the truck as best they could.

It was a tiring journey. They were stopped once en route by a couple of men from the Guardia Civil. The driver explained that he was taking a nun and some children who were suffering from tuberculosis to the convent of the Sisters of Charity in Barcelona. The men gave a quick look into the truck and let them continue.

“We’ve been lucky,” Katia said.

“It wasn’t luck, God was protecting us,” Sister Marie-Madeleine insisted.

“Why doesn’t God protect everyone who needs protection? Sister, do you know how many children have lost their parents and how many parents have lost their children? Tell me, why does God allow there to be war? If we are all his children, just as you never tire of telling us, then why has he allowed us, his children, to spend centuries being persecuted simply for the fact of being Jewish?” Dalida had raised her voice. She hadn’t seen God’s handiwork for a long time. Sister Marie-Madeleine had no answer for her.

In spite of the damage caused by the Civil War, Barcelona seemed a majestic city. The driver seemed to know where they had to go. The children were exhausted.

The house was in the Paseo de San Juan. The driver told them to wait while he announced that they had arrived. A tall woman opened the door, her salt-and-pepper hair tied back in a chignon. She spoke to the driver for a few seconds then came over to the van to tell them to get out.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” was all she said as a greeting.

Once they were in the house, the woman introduced herself to them as Dorothy. She was American and was a part of a group that helped to rescue children from the clutches of the Germans.

“We work with the Jewish Agency, we do what we can, but it’s not enough; though at least some children will survive the war.”

“Where will they be taken?” Katia asked.

“They’re safe here for the time being; later on we’ll take them to Palestine if we can, but it’s getting more and more difficult, the British are doing all they can to stop even one more boatload of Jews from getting through. I cannot tell you where exactly, only that they will be safe.”

“They’ve told us that they are welcome in Switzerland,” Katia said.

“You mustn’t worry, I promise you they will be safe.”

“Don’t you think that there’s a danger that Franco will adopt the Führer’s racial policies and deport all the Jews that are here in Spain?”

“I can’t guarantee anything, all I can say is that such a thing has not yet happened. We are trying to be discreet and I think that this is our best weapon.”

“And why do you help the Jews?” Dalida asked.

“My dear, I am a Jew. My family was from Thessaloniki, but my parents immigrated to the United States. I was born in New York and I feel the need to help the Jews as much as I can, especially children.”

“My mother’s family is also Sephardi, from Thessaloniki as well.” Dalida felt calmer now that she knew the American was a Jew.

Dorothy insisted that a doctor take a look at Sister Marie-Madeleine, who was sweating rivers because of her fever.

They had to stay in Barcelona for a few more days until the nun felt a little better. Dorothy showed them the city.

“It’s very beautiful, but a shame that the people are all so sad,” Dalida said.

“And how would you have them be after a civil war? All of them have lost someone, a father, a brother, a wife, a son, a nephew . . . The worst of it is that apart from those who died at the front, the rest know who killed their nearest and dearest. Especially in the villages, where everyone knows everyone else. A couple of generations will have to go past before the Spaniards forgive themselves,” Dorothy said.

Katia and Dalida felt attracted to this American, not because she was a Jew, but because she was so clearly a good person. She was married to another American, who worked for the United States government. Dorothy did not tell them what he did and they didn’t ask.

Dorothy helped all the Jews she could who came secretly over the border from France.

“Aren’t you worried that the police will arrest you?” Katia asked.

“I don’t think they will, but also, though Franco and his men are allies of Hitler and Mussolini, it is also the case that they don’t want to upset the British or the Americans. He’s put some of his eggs in our basket, if you can put it like that. And we’re not naïve and try not to be too open about what we do. Like I said, it’s about acting with discretion.”

The result of this operation was not only that Katia and Dalida saved the lives of those children, but they also made Sister Marie-Madeleine another member of their group.

It was difficult to convince David and Samuel that they should trust the nun.

“Katia, don’t be so incautious. Things went well this time, but why should she want to be involved in saving more Jews? Also, our friends in the Resistance won’t allow us to involve a nun in our business. They’re not going to risk their lives trusting her.”

Dalida spoke to Armando about the nun. The Spaniard listened to her without accepting what she had to say.

“I’m not going to put my men’s lives in the hands of a nun.”

“We would not have saved those children if it hadn’t been for her,” Dalida argued.

“You know how we work here, so stick to doing what you have been doing. Don’t think about telling this nun about us. You may trust her, but I have no reason to.”

“I know that the church in Spain supports Franco, but this is France,” Dalida replied.

“Don’t insist, girl, or else . . .”

“Or else what?”

“You can go your own way. I’m not going to put the organization at risk simply because a nun has decided to do some charity and save some Jewish children. I’m not just fighting to save the Jews, I’m fighting to smash fascism. I’m fighting for freedom. I’m fighting for France, and Spain. If we win this war, I hope they will help me recover my country.”

Dalida understood that Armando would never accept the help of Sister Marie-Madeleine. For him, priests and nuns were Franco’s allies, and he couldn’t see beyond his own hurt, the hurt that he felt at having lost not only a war, but who knows what else.

She knew next to nothing about Armando, personal matters didn’t exist in the Resistance. But she had heard that Falangists had entered his village and ordered all the “Reds” to shave their heads, and then had shot all the men whom they knew to be loyal to the Republic. They said that his wife was one of the victims. But she didn’t know if this was true. She had never dared ask him.

She told Samuel about her argument with Armando. Her father said that the Spaniard was right.

“I understand that you and Katia feel close to Sister Marie-Madeleine, but that’s not enough for the Resistance to trust her. We don’t ask other people to adopt our cause or to do more than they need to. This nun has helped us, but it would not be fair to insist that she do more.”

Dalida paid him no attention. She liked to argue about God with Sister Marie-Madeleine, who more often than not had no answer to her questions. The nun was not a theologian, she was a brave woman who followed the Gospel by helping others. She did not do this for political reasons, but simply because she saw the persecuted Christ in the faces of the persecuted, and the murdered Christ in the victims of murderers.

“You know what? Sister Marie-Madeleine has joined this war because of her faith. We all fight for a cause, why should hers be less than our own?” Dalida argued.

Samuel grew impatient with your sister Dalida, Ezekiel. As you know well, your father never had any religious feeling. He always thought of Judaism as a burden, as something that stopped him from being like the rest. He couldn’t understand the interest Dalida felt toward Catholicism, much less that she would sometimes go to church on Sundays to hear the nuns sing Mass.

Armando’s group received an order from the British. They had to blow up some train lines, the ones that connected Paris to the German border.

Armando asked Dalida to help them. They needed someone to take the explosives out of Paris. Your sister had learned how to drive, and Armando knew that David Peretz had a car in his garage.

Samuel and Armando met to talk about the operation. Your father was scared that Dalida would be running a more serious risk than the danger normally associated with the operations she was involved in. He offered to drive the explosives himself.

“No one will mistrust an old man like me,” Samuel argued.

“It’s not just taking the explosives one hundred kilometers out of Paris, it’s also setting them. Dalida is young and will be very useful to us; also, we’ve taught her how to deal with explosives, and I doubt that you know how to set a timer.”

Both of them had to give in. Dalida would go, but Samuel would go with her.

On the day in question, they went out as the afternoon was drawing to a close. The plan was to arrive at night, and Armando would show them where to go. They had chosen to set the bomb some distance from any village or city. It was better to go into the open countryside so as not to arouse anyone’s curiosity. They had the help of an old retired railway man. The man had shown them the best place to plant explosives. They needed to blow up a section of the track to sabotage the supplies that the Wehrmacht received from Germany.

Samuel drove slowly so as not to attract attention. Dalida had asked him to let her drive, but your father was right, a young woman driving would have attracted too much attention. And very little escaped the eyes of Section IVB4 of the Gestapo. Alois Brunner, Theodor Dannecker, and Heinz Röthke had already gained a reputation as murderers.

Luck was not with them that day, and they got a flat tire on the outskirts of Paris, just by Drancy, where the Germans had gathered together thousands of Jews.

The internment camp was near three train stations, where convoys of Jews were sent directly to Poland, to the camps at Auschwitz and Sobibór.

From where they were on the road they could see the five towers of the blocks that made up Drancy.

“I don’t know if I’ll know how to change the wheel, we’ll need to ask for help,” Dalida said, worried to be so close to the camp.

“Don’t worry, I may be old, but I still know how to change a tire. If you help me I can do it quickly.”

Samuel was taking off the punctured tire when a group of soldiers wearing SS insignia came up to them.

“Where are you going?”

“North, to the house of some relatives of mine.”

“Where, exactly.”

“Normandy. I am old and it is hard for me to stay in Paris,” Samuel explained.

“And what do you do?” the soldier asked Dalida.

“I look after my father and I work as a paid companion to an elderly woman.”

They didn’t seem to be all that happy with their answers and the soldier ill-manneredly walked away and began to look over their car.

Samuel took out a cigarette and started to smoke with an indifferent air. Dalida prayed that they would not find the hidden compartment where Armando’s men had hidden the dynamite.

She didn’t know where it was. Armando had said that if they arrested her and interrogated her then she would have no reason to lie, it was better if she didn’t know where it was, so she would not give herself away by looking toward the hiding place.

Two soldiers looked over the car carefully and found nothing. When they had finished their inspection, they walked on, telling them to keep moving as soon as they had changed the tire.

Samuel and Dalida were silent as they finished fixing the car. It was not until much later that they dared to speak again.

They got to the agreed-upon place two hours late. No one seemed to be waiting for them. Samuel parked the car.

“Let’s wait a while, if they don’t turn up, we can go back to Paris.”

“They’ll think that we were arrested. Armando never waits a single minute. When someone doesn’t get to the rendezvous point on time, then he cancels the operation, whatever the cause,” Dalida said regretfully.

“We’ve done what we can, here we are. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

They waited expectantly for half an hour. But nothing moved. Then it started to drizzle.

Samuel was turning the motor over when they saw a shadow coming toward them. It was an old man who hobbled toward them, leaning on a stick. They waited for him to come over to the car.

The man leaned down to the car window on Dalida’s side and said the agreed-upon words: “You mustn’t trust the weather, it could still rain tonight.”

Dalida leaped up and opened the car door so quickly that she nearly knocked the old man down.

“You’re very late, why?” he asked.

“We got a flat tire and were stopped by an SS patrol,” Dalida explained.

“Where are our friends?” Samuel asked.

“Not very far away. I’ll go and find them.”

“We’ll come with you,” Dalida suggested, but the man refused their offer.

“No, it’s not a good idea for you to be seen. Wait here with your lights off. They’ll come, and if they don’t then I’ll come tell you.”

They saw him disappear into the darkness of the night. Almost an hour later, without them seeing where he was coming from, Armando appeared, accompanied by another man. He opened the back door and got into the car.

He made them repeat what they had told the railway man. He seemed to be unsure about what to do.

“It’s too late, and the fuses will get wet, even though it isn’t raining that heavily . . . ,” Armando said, unsure about the decision he should make.

Raymond, his lieutenant, didn’t agree.

“We can’t go, a train full of supplies from Berlin for the troops in Paris is due tomorrow. We have to stop it from getting through.”

“It’s raining,” Armando insisted.

“Even though it’s raining, we can still blow up the tracks, it will be difficult but we can still do it.”

They argued, and eventually Armando gave in to the Frenchman’s arguments.

Raymond got out of the car and walked over to where the railway man was standing. It was impossible to hear what they said, but the old man walked away. He didn’t take long to come back, and brought with him five other men and a woman who he said was his daughter-in-law.

Two of the men dismantled the back seats of the car and revealed a space where the explosives were concealed. They started to set them up along the track, while Armando ordered Samuel to drive a few kilometers further on without turning on his lights.

Dalida helped Armando to set the charges. She did it fearlessly, certain of what she was doing.

It took them almost half an hour to plant the explosives. They didn’t speak or rest, tense with worry in case dawn should surprise them. When all the charges were in place, Armando gave the sign for the fuses to be lit.

They went away and waited impatiently for the detonation.

Not all the charges went off. The rain had extinguished some of them, but a goodly section of the track had been rendered unusable. It would take the Germans a while to repair it.

“Now we separate. I’ll see you in two days in Paris,” Armando said to his men.

Samuel was too tired to drive and refused to allow Dalida to do so. Armando didn’t know how to drive, but they couldn’t stay there either because of the risk that someone would see them and arrest them.

“Let’s hide at a farm I know of a few kilometers away from here. The farmer can be trusted. They’re waiting for us,” Armando said.

“What about the others?” Dalida asked worriedly.

“They all have an escape plan. They’ll be safe.”

The farm belonged to the son of the old railway man, who had been sent to Morocco with the French Army. His wife, the woman who had helped them plant the explosives, told them to hide the car in the hay-barn. Then she offered them some hot soup and a room where they could rest.

They stayed at the farm for a couple of days while they waited for the controls on the roads to slacken off.

Katia was waiting impatiently for them in Paris. When they arrived she already knew about the devastating effect of the explosions.

She had gone for tea with a friend who had good relationships with the German officers. One of the women present had commented about how angry the military governor of Paris was. She had said to her friends that “he was going to look for the culprits everywhere, even in the sewers. He had arrested a few suspects. They will be shot, of course. I don’t understand people whose actions make things more difficult for the rest of us.” Katia had not replied, she had only smiled. Dalida had told London of the success of the mission, and had been given another job for Armando to do.

Dalida woke up feeling cold and sighed, thinking that she would be even colder when she put her feet on the ground. Samuel’s cough had woken her. She would ask Katia to convince him to spend some francs on wood for the little stove that didn’t even heat their house.

She knew that if her father refused to buy firewood it was because he had less and less money available.

They had sold a few paintings and precious objects at a loss, but they had very little left to sell. Also, Samuel spent most of the money he had on financing the operations he organized to save the Jews who managed to escape from the Nazis’ bloody claws.

She was tired. She had slept little more than four hours, as she had taken part in another of Armando’s operations the night before.

There was a café where various members of the SS used to go, including the hated Captain Alois Brunner. The Resistance had decided to plant a bomb there.

Armando’s plan was simple. Someone would go into the café, order something at the bar, then go into the restroom. He would plant the explosives there, knowing that he had less than a minute to escape.

“What will happen to the civilians?” Dalida asked.

Raymond laughed at her scruples.

“Come on, there is no such thing as a civilian in this war, only soldiers and collaborators. Don’t you believe that the owner of the café is better than these Nazis. He is worse than they are, because he is a traitor to France.”

The answer convinced her, but it was not enough to make her agree to participate actively in the plan. All she offered was to take the bomb from the house of one of the members of the Resistance to that of the man who would plant the bomb in the café. That is what she did, and then she went home, plagued by a bad feeling about what was going to happen.

She looked out of the window as she made herself a cup of tea. Dawn was about to break and she saw no one in the street. She wanted to go back to bed, but she knew that if she did so, being awake, she would find it impossible to get back to sleep. Also, she had chores to do, darning her father’s socks and trying to make a warming soup out of their scarce provisions. But she didn’t settle down to either of these tasks, she felt uncomfortable.

Samuel was still sleeping when she heard some dull knocks on the door. She was already dressed, but she wondered who could have come round so early. She opened the door to find Katia.

“But what are you doing here? Come in, come in . . . Has anything happened?”

“They’ve arrested David Peretz. I found out last night but it was impossible for me to come round. I was at a dinner and heard someone say that they had arrested a leader of the ‘Jewish Resistance.’ I didn’t dare ask who it was, so I was alert until I heard them mention the name Peretz. The man who spoke of this was an SS officer who was speaking to one of the heads of the French police here, scolding him for not having rounded up all the Jews in Paris. The policeman apologized; he said they had done what they could, but that ‘lots of Jews had escaped, but there was no doubt that they would be arrested.’ Then he spoke about David Peretz. They had arrested him for trying to hide some Jewish children, daughters of a family that had been sent to the camp at Royallieu. The parents had asked a friend to look after them, the friend had done so but his wife was nervous and didn’t know what to say when telling her neighbors who those little girls were. She said they were the children of one of her cousins who was sick, then she confessed the truth to one of her neighbors, who denounced her to the police. The husband barely had time to get the children out of the house, and he took them straight to David’s place. But the police were already following him and they arrested them all.”

“No one knew about David’s house, only a few of us knew where he lived,” Dalida replied.

“Yes, David, like your father, left his house and found another one, a safe house, but he has been found out. They’ve taken him and his wife. We took his children across to Spain quite a while ago.”

“I’m going to wake my father. He’s had a bad night, he hasn’t stopped coughing.”

“It’s very cold here.”

“He doesn’t want us to spend a franc on firewood and he laughs at me if I say I’m cold. Then he talks to me about the winters in Saint Petersburg, and says that they were really cold.”

“He’s right, but there . . . We were never cold.”

Samuel did not take long to come down to the little sitting room where Katia and Dalida were waiting for him with a cup of tea.

“What are we going to do?” Dalida asked when Katia had explained the situation again.

“We should go now. It won’t take us long to get all our stuff together: there’s not much of it. David will talk about us and they will come to find us.”

“How can you say that, Papa! David would never betray us!” Dalida protested.

“I know that our friend will resist as much as is humanly possible, but the Gestapo knows how to make their prisoners talk. They torture them until they can bear it no longer, and then they always talk.”

“Your father is right. I will help you to get out to somewhere else. Maybe you could come to my house, even if only for a few days. No one will look for you there.”

“No, Katia, no. You are more useful to the Resistance and the British staying here, doing what you’re doing, listening and passing information. Dalida could stay with you, we’ve kept up the pretense that she is your companion, so your servants would not be surprised if she were to stay in your house; the only thing my presence would do is put you both in danger.”

“You have to hide,” Katia insisted.

They agreed that your sister would stay in Katia’s house and that your father would go there for a couple of hours until he could think of a place where he could go to hide.

Dalida went to see Juana and Vasily. She was sure that they would be able to help.

Juana listened to what had happened and bit her lower lip.

“When your friend David speaks they’ll look for you all over Paris,” Vasily said.

“There has to be somewhere my father can hide.”

“He could stay here for a day or so,” Juana said.

Vasily was going to say something, but the look Juana gave him stopped him dead. It was Pedro, Juana’s uncle, who dared question his niece’s decision.

“We are now all in danger. It’s like a domino, when one falls, then the rest fall with it. David knows about us, we’ve made lots of documents for your group, and if they make him talk . . .”

“What are you saying?” Juana shouted. “Are we going to crumple? We know that the Gestapo want to hunt us down, and what the risks associated with that are, if they ever find us. They will torture us and if we are lucky they will kill us, or maybe send us to one of their camps in Germany. But we have a saying in Spain—you can’t make a tortilla without breaking eggs.”

“What do you suggest, Juana?” Vasily asked.

“For the time being, to bring Samuel here until we can find him somewhere safer. Dalida needs to put the Resistance on alert as well. Armando is not in Paris, but she can speak to Raymond. He’ll know what to do.”

“The most sensible thing would be to get you out of France,” Pedro suggested.

“Yes, that would be best. We can get you to Spain and it will not be difficult to send you to Portugal after that,” Juana said.

Dalida was amazed at Juana’s strength. She was a woman who didn’t give in in the face of any danger. No wonder Vasily was captivated by her. Dalida was surprised that this great big man, almost a giant, behaved like an obedient child in front of Juana.

“I have another idea,” Juana said. “Maybe you should hide your friend in the nun’s convent. No one will look for you there and Katia won’t be in any danger.”

“I don’t know if that would be possible . . . ,” Dalida said.

“Try it. I think it would be the best option. As for your father, he can stay here, but whether you like it or not the time has come for you to go.”

“You are in danger as well,” Dalida reminded her.

“We cannot leave. We could move at the very most, but it’s not easy to do that. Our only guarantee of security is that no more than a dozen people know how to find us,” Pedro answered.

“But David is one of them,” Dalida replied.

Juana cut the conversation short.

“We’ll do what we have to do and we’ll try to be more careful,” she said.

Katia didn’t think it was a good idea for Samuel to hide in Juana’s house.

“If David talks, it will be the first place they’ll look,” she said, worriedly.

“The one place they can’t find me is here.” Samuel was tired and couldn’t stop coughing.

“You’ve insisted that I keep myself out of danger, but do you really think I’m safe?”

“The only thing I don’t agree about is our leaving Paris. There are people here who need us,” Samuel said worriedly.

“Maybe the time has come for us all to leave. Konstantin was right when he insisted that we go to London. We’ve done what we can here, but now . . . If they arrest us it will be worse,” Katia mused.

“I think it’s a good idea for you to go to London and to take Dalida with you, but I’m staying here.” Samuel was inflexible about his idea of what needed to be done.

Katia introduced a little bit of common sense into the discussion.

“Let’s go through this step by step. The first thing is to stop them from arresting us. Dalida will take you to Juana’s house. I’ll go see Sister Marie-Madeleine. We’ll meet at the convent. If the sister agrees to let Dalida stay with them, there won’t be any problems; if not, then we can go home.”

Juana was worried by Samuel’s appearance. She saw that he had a temperature and wouldn’t stop coughing. Pedro gave him his own room so that he could rest, and Juana promised Dalida that she would look after him.

“He’s as stubborn as my own father was,” Juana said.

When Dalida got to the convent, one of the sisters sent her to the refectory, where Sister Marie-Madeleine was talking with Katia. She saw the tension on the nun’s face immediately.

“I was telling Katia that if it were up to me then you would of course be able to stay here, but I will need to speak to the mother superior, and she is a timid woman.”

“I’m sorry to put you in this position after all that we’ve done,” Dalida excused herself.

A few weeks ago Dalida had brought a Jewish family to hide in the convent, and the nun had taken them in without asking any questions. Her superior had scolded her for her conduct, reminding her that she was putting the whole community in danger. The truth is that the mother superior was scared, and was debating between her fear and what her conscience told her was the right course of action, aware of the recriminations that Sister Marie-Madeleine would make.

“Imagine if it were Christ seeking shelter and we who were refusing it to him. Christ was a Jew, like these good people, so will we refuse them our aid? God would not forgive us.”

The mother superior had crossed herself, shocked into silence by the nun’s reasoning. She wanted to help the Jews but she trembled to think what would happen if the Gestapo knocked at the convent door.

Days later, Armando asked Dalida to help him find a place for a woman in the Resistance to hide from the Gestapo, who were following her closely.

She asked Sister Marie-Madeleine to hide the woman until Armando could get her out of Paris and take her to a safe place. The nun agreed once again, but this time the mother superior got angry.

“You cannot put the convent at the service of the Resistance. It is one thing to help the orphans, and quite another to help everybody.”

Sister Marie-Madeleine could not make her change her opinion. The mother superior accepted the presence of the woman, but warned that “never again” could she agree to accept anyone without permission.

“I’ll try to get her to allow you to stay, but if she says no . . . I cannot disobey her,” the nun said apologetically.

Katia and Dalida waited impatiently for the sister to come back after speaking to the mother superior. The fact that they had to wait so long made them think that the answer would be “no.”

When she came back to the refectory, Sister Marie-Madeleine’s face was that of someone who had escaped from a battle without winning it.

“You can stay for two days. No more. I am sorry, it’s all I’ve been able to get her to agree to.”

“It’s much more than we expected,” Katia assured her with a smile.

At least they had two days to try to organize their flight to Spain. Armando and Raymond would have to help them.

Katia didn’t know either of them, but the Resistance did know about Katia and benefitted from her reports. As Dalida was the only point of contact, it would have to be her who got in touch with Armando and Raymond.

Whenever the situation was an urgent one, Dalida would go to a little haberdashery near the Louvre, where there presided a middle-aged woman, always serious and circumspect, but well turned-out: Madame Josephine. Dalida would look at the spools of thread and hanks of wool and then would leave, always saying the same thing: “It is a shame that in my haste I didn’t bring enough money with me; I’ll be back in a bit.” This meant she needed to meet someone urgently. If she finished the sentence by saying “I’ll be back tomorrow,” then it meant that the topic could wait a little.

She barely exchanged a word with Madame Josephine.

Once she had said that she would be back in a bit, she left the haberdashery and began to walk around. She couldn’t go back to the shop for two hours, the fixed time.

Without any clear idea about where she was going, she headed toward the bank of the Seine. She was worried because she had left the radio in Katia’s house. But she knew that she couldn’t ask Sister Marie-Madeleine to let her install it in the convent. The nuns were running far too great a risk to open themselves up to even more.

As she walked, she had the impression that someone was following her. But when she looked back she didn’t see anyone who looked suspicious. Couples tended to stroll along the banks of the Seine, a favorite haunt of lovers.

She couldn’t stop looking at the clock as she was impatient to go back to the haberdashery, where she was sure that either Raymond or Armando himself would be waiting in the room behind the shop.

She climbed the steps that took her from the banks of the Seine to the Place de la Concorde, and on the way back to the haberdashery she again had the sensation that she was being followed. She saw a car that drove so slowly it almost seemed to be keeping pace with her. She didn’t want to look at it directly; it was a black car with three men in it. She started to walk faster and moved to the other side of the road to try to avoid them. She felt calmer when she saw that she had managed to get rid of them.

When she got back to the haberdashery, Madame Josephine made a sign to her to go into the back room, where Raymond was waiting for her.

Dalida explained what had happened without omitting a single detail.

“You must leave Paris at once,” Raymond said worriedly.

“Can you help us? We haven’t dared be in touch with anyone from our network. We think that most of them must have been arrested by now.”

“And they will be looking for you.”

“What can we do?”

“We don’t have much time to organize your escape. Tell me, where is the radio?”

“In Katia Goldanski’s house.”

“I don’t think that woman is safe.”

“Well, we know that the French collaborators and the Germans trust her, you and I have both benefitted from this.”

“The Germans are not stupid, Dalida, and I promise you that they will not take long to pull the string and see that it leads to her.”

“How long can someone withstand torture?”

“You’re thinking about Monsieur David . . . I cannot give you an answer. There are men who are tortured until they die and who never speak a word, there are others who spill the beans straight away . . . No one knows where his limit is. And I am not one to judge anyone who speaks while in the hands of the Gestapo. Monsieur David is an elderly man, it’s difficult to imagine how long he might last.”

They agreed to see each other in the same place at the same time. Raymond said that it would be difficult to take her and Samuel and Katia over the border together, that the easiest thing would be to take them out individually. But Dalida refused to think of doing this.

“I can’t leave my father here, and he won’t go without me and Katia.”

“If you are being looked for, then it’s a risk if you all go together.”

“I have to say something . . . Maybe it’s not important, maybe I’m just being paranoid . . . Earlier I had the impression that I was being followed, but I couldn’t see anyone who looked suspicious; then a black car started to drive alongside me and . . . Well, I don’t know if I’m just nervous, but . . .”

Raymond tensed up. He didn’t believe in coincidences, especially since it was true that if he had in the past been able to avoid the Gestapo it was entirely because he had followed his instincts.

“They’ve found you! They’ll catch us all, we need to get out of here.”

He coughed loudly and Madame Josephine came into the back room.

“We have to go out through the basement,” he said nervously.

Madame Josephine nodded and moved an old sewing machine to one side and, lifting a carpet, revealed a trapdoor that opened onto some extremely narrow steps.

“You know how to go, hurry up,” she said, and closed the trapdoor over their heads.

Dalida could see nothing, and it took her a few seconds to get used to the darkness. Raymond had taken her hand, and was pulling her down the stairs. She felt her clothes getting hooked on something and heard her skirt rip, but she continued heading downwards as the damp and the smell of mold made her stomach turn.

“This basement is connected to the one next door,” Raymond said in a low voice.

They walked for a few minutes and then he lit a match to illuminate the hole they found themselves in. Dalida shrieked as a rat ran between her legs.

“Shut up!” Raymond ordered and pulled her along by the hand and helped her up some more steps, which were in an even worse state than those at the haberdasher’s.

Dalida didn’t dare ask how they would get out of here and what they would do once they were in the street. She took it for granted that Raymond would know what they had to do.

She felt him let go of her hand, and then he lit another match. She saw him smile as he lifted a trapdoor over their heads. They climbed out into a cellar that smelled extremely powerfully of wine.

“This is the cellar of an inn, where you can still sometimes get good wine if you are able to pay for it. The owner is one of ours,” Raymond explained.

He pointed to a corner where she could sit, and she sat. He sat down next to her.

“We’ll wait here a while. Then I’ll go up into the inn, and if there’s nothing suspicious I’ll come back down for you.”

“I have to be in the convent before dusk, the mother superior is inflexible about timing.”

“And who said that you’re going to the convent? The first thing we need to do is find out if you are being followed, and send word of it to Juana; imagine the disaster if they were to find your father in the print shop.”

They sat there in silence next to one another, each of them sunk in their own thoughts. Suddenly they heard a noise and footsteps coming toward them. Raymond took out the pistol that he wore in his belt and made a sign to Dalida not to move.

The footsteps came ever closer until a huge man, taller even than Raymond, appeared before them.

“I thought I might have a visitor. Two Gestapo men came in here a while back, pretending that they were only looking for a good glass of wine. Three or four of their cars have come past as well.”

“Did they go into the haberdasher’s?” Raymond wanted to know.

“No, they didn’t. I suppose they think there is a Resistance hiding-place near here, but they still don’t know where it is. What about this girl?” the innkeeper asked.

“My good friend, she is Jewish. She’s part of a Jewish underground network and works with us. She knows how to deal with explosives, but above all she’s our messenger, she has a radio which she uses to be in touch with London,” Raymond explained.

The tall man nodded, as if he suddenly remembered who Dalida was.

“We have to warn Juana,” Raymond said. “This girl’s father is in her house.”

“It would be a disaster if they found the print shop! Whoever thought of hiding a Jew in Juana’s house?” the tall man asked in alarm.

“Juana herself, you know that no one tells her what to do.”

“I don’t know how Vasily puts up with it, but she’s the one who wears the trousers.”

Raymond shrugged. Vasily was a good forger, but Juana was the heart of the network. Armando trusted her more than anyone else, sometimes Raymond wondered if it was because the two of them were Spanish. But he normally put this thought to one side. Juana’s pulse would not have flickered if she had had to kill a man. She was much braver than many men.

“Go and have a look around and if you don’t see anything suspicious we’ll come up. I’ll take care of the girl, you go and warn Juana and Armando.”

“Where are you going to hide her?”

“If they haven’t seen us, then the hiding-place she has chosen will be safe, at least for tonight,” Raymond told the tall man.

“Fine, but we need to send some messages to London. I have them ready to pass over to you. They are urgent. Our friends have rescued a couple of British airmen.”

“She sends the messages and I don’t know if it’s a good idea for her to do so at the moment.”

“We have to take the risk.”

They waited impatiently until the innkeeper came back. He seemed happy with what he had seen, or had not seen.

“The street is calm: I sent my son Claude and his girlfriend Adèle out for a walk, and they’re just back now, they say there’s nothing suspicious going on. You can go, but change your clothes.”

Raymond put on a different jacket and hat, and Dalida borrowed Adèle’s scarf and coat.

They went out into the street, stepping boldly as if they had nothing to fear. They walked very close to one another. After a while they calmed down. Raymond was sure that no one was following them.

“I don’t like it, but we have to do it; go to Katia’s house and send the messages that they gave us. Then go back to the convent and wait there until I get in touch with you. We have to get the radio out of your friend the countess’s house. We can’t afford to lose her.”

He went with her to Katia’s house and she stood in the entry hall, waiting patiently for the elevator to come.

Katia was not at home, but the maid did not mind letting Dalida in to wait for her. She knew her and knew that her mistress would never forgive her if she didn’t let in this young woman who sometimes served as her paid companion.

Dalida lost no time and locked herself in Katia’s bedroom, which was where she had hidden the radio. In other circumstances she wouldn’t have sent more than a couple of messages and would have left the rest for the next day, but she didn’t know when she would be able to get back to the radio again, so she sent them all, even though she knew the risk she was running. Then she stood by the curtain at the salon window, peeking out into the street, impatient to see Katia. Night had already fallen when my aunt came home.

“How long you’ve taken!” Dalida said while she hugged Katia.

“I’m worried. I’ve just come from Madame Deneuve’s house, you know that she runs a literary salon where important Frenchmen and the occasional German come regularly. I don’t know, but Madame Deneuve seemed to be upset by my presence and some of the women seemed to be avoiding me. Maybe it was just my imagination . . . Then a higher-up in the police arrived along with that horrible German officer, Alois Brunner. They apologized to Madame Deneuve for coming so late and when they saw me they seemed surprised. My friend the policeman came up to me and said some words that I didn’t quite understand: ‘Countess, I thought you would be somewhere else this evening,’ then he turned away without giving me a chance to reply.”

“They’re going to arrest us,” Dalida said. “It’s just a question of time, you said so yourself.”

“But I didn’t think they suspected me . . .”

“We have to get the radio out of here and take it to Juana’s house. She’ll get it to Armando,” Dalida explained.

“It’s too late . . . If they’re watching us and see us coming out of the house . . . I don’t know, I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

“We have to do it. Do you have the car?”

“Yes, but I told Grigory that I didn’t need it today.”

“It’s a good thing that Grigory is married to your housekeeper and that both of them are Russian and feel no sympathy for the Germans. I don’t think that Grigory would be upset if you called him out now.”

“My dear, it would be madness to try to take the radio out now.”

“It would be even madder if we were to leave it here. We can’t lose it, the Resistance needs it.”

They couldn’t agree and Dalida eventually had to give in. She would go to the convent and hide with Sister Marie-Madeleine until Raymond or Armando came to find her. Dalida did not accept having Katia or even Grigory accompany her to the convent.

“I will be less noticed if I go alone. You hide the radio as best you can, so that they won’t find it if they search the house.”

They knew that everything was lost, so that when they said goodbye it was as if they did so for the last time.

Dalida walked slowly, hiding in the shadows until she reached the convent, where Sister Marie-Madeleine was waiting impatiently for her. The nun was in the little garden from which a gate led onto the street.

“Don’t make any noise. It’s very late and the mother superior thinks we are all asleep. You had me worried.”

“They were following me, I think they were Gestapo agents, but I think I managed to get rid of them.”

“You’ll be safe here.”

“I hope so. I don’t have much time, at most another day; and then Armando or Raymond will come for me. They’ll take us to Spain.”

“And then?”

“To London; Konstantin, Katia’s brother, will take us into his house.”

They walked on tiptoe so as not to make any noise until they reached the cell that would be Dalida’s bedroom.

“I am going to pray for God to help us,” Sister Marie-Madeleine said as she left, making the sign of the cross.

Dawn had not yet broken when Dalida was woken up with a start at the sound of blows and screams. The door of the cell opened suddenly and Sister Marie-Madeleine ordered her to get dressed at once.

“Put this on!” she said, handing her a habit. “The Gestapo are searching the convent. The mother superior told them that we were not hiding anyone. I’ll help you escape. We’ll go out the back door.”

Dalida put on the habit and the nun helped her to adjust the wimple. Then, holding hands, they ran along the little passages of the convent, hearing the footsteps of the Gestapo get ever closer. They went into the kitchen and found the sister cellarer with an odd expression on her face. They didn’t have time to ask her anything because a hand closed around Dalida’s arm.

“Did you really think you could escape?” The man had on a black leather overcoat and it was difficult to see his face because it was hidden under the brim of his hat.

“Who are you?” Sister Marie-Madeleine asked, confronting the unknown man. “Can’t you even respect a group of poor nuns?”

“Ah, the Good Samaritan! Would you like to come with us as well? I don’t mind at all. Traitors are traitors even if they wear a habit.”

The man twisted Dalida’s arm and made her stumble.

“I thought that you Christians hated the Jews, wasn’t it they who killed Christ? Well, I suppose there’s an exception to every rule.”

The mother superior arrived at that moment, accompanied by two other Gestapo agents. She tried to keep her dignity, even though her eyes showed a fear that was as large as it was intense.

“Ladies, the game is up. You have to answer for having hidden a Jewess in your convent,” the man who seemed to be in charge said.

“You are mistaken, sir, there are no Jews here, we are all nuns,” Sister Marie-Madeleine said.

The Gestapo agent walked up to the nun until he was less than half an inch away from her, but the woman didn’t flinch.

“If you insist, you can come with us as well.”

The mother superior tried to protest, but they pushed her away and she nearly fell onto the stoves. The men left, taking with them Dalida and Sister Marie-Madeleine.

They drove off in a car, crammed in next to one another. The nun started to pray in a low voice.

When they got to the Gestapo headquarters they were pushed out rudely. They walked upright, trying not to show the fear they felt.

They were locked in separate cells. Dalida shuddered at the cold that came from these dirty walls. There was nowhere to sit, and she stood up as she tried to grow accustomed to the darkness and its disgusting smell, a mixture of sweat, fear, and blood.

They didn’t take long to come and get the two women. Two of the agents who had arrested them pushed them out of their cells, insulting them while making them climb some narrow steps.

They took Sister Marie-Madeleine to a room where a man was waiting for her.

“Sit down and watch,” he ordered, “and you’ll see what happens to Jews and traitors.”

There was a glass panel set into one of the walls, which showed a room that at the moment simply contained an empty chair. She could see the men pushing Dalida into the room and how she fell to the floor. The men shouted at her to get up and your sister got to her feet as best she could. They told her to sit down and tied her hands behind her back. Then another policeman came in, and looked around with distaste. He walked around her a couple of times, then suddenly punched her and broke her nose. Dalida lost consciousness for a few seconds, then felt the blood running down until it reached her lips. Her hands were tied and she couldn’t stop herself from swallowing her own blood.

“You are the daughter of Samuel Zucker, where is your father hiding?”

Dalida didn’t reply. The man came closer and looked at her intently and then hit her again, this time in her right eye. This time she really did faint. She remained unconscious for a while. When she came to, she was still bleeding and the pain in her eye was unbearable.

“Your Jewish friends told us where to find you. Ah, David, such a good friend to your father! All you Jews are a bunch of cowards, ready to hand over your own children to protect yourselves. You hide like rats in the most obscure little holes, but it is useless, because you always fall into our traps. Yes, soon we will be able to tell the Führer that Paris has been completely disinfected.”

As he spoke he stood in front of Dalida, who could scarcely see him out of her one good eye, the other one being so bloodied.

They picked her up out of the chair and, without untying her hands, hung her head downwards from a hook in the ceiling. The man who spoke kicked her in the head, then another policeman punched her, and so it continued for a while. She didn’t know if she was screaming or if her screams were being muffled in her throat. The pain was so intense that all she wanted to do was die. When they had stopped hitting her they took her down from the hook and she fell to the floor like a sack. One of the policemen came up to her and ripped off the habit, leaving her naked. She heard them talking about her body, disgusting words meant to humiliate her.

“Your friend the countess is with us now, so why not tell us where your father is? You should be a good daughter and do all you can to be with him.” The policeman burst out laughing at this, as if he had told a good joke. Dalida did not hear any more as she had lost consciousness again.

When she came to she heard one of the policemen speaking: “She’s more dead than alive. The best thing to do would be to kill her and save ourselves the cost of sending her to Germany. There are too many Jews in the camps, we can get rid of them here as well.”

The beasts had gone so wild that Dalida would not have been able to talk even if she’d wanted to, such was the state they had left her in. The question was which camp would they send her to, if they sent her anywhere. Or would they kill her here, in Paris?

Katia had been arrested that same night. She didn’t speak either. Like Dalida, the torture made her lose consciousness. The men were so cruel that her body became a mass of bloody flesh that not even they had any use for.

As soon as they had gotten her to the General Headquarters they made her strip. And they kept her in a cell, naked, for four days. They didn’t give her any food or drink, and they kept the lights off.

Katia heard the scuttling noise of the rats running around her cell, and didn’t dare sit down for fear that they would bite her. She remained standing, leaning against the wall, terrified, confused in the darkness. When they brought her to be interrogated she had almost lost her mind. But she had not, not completely, and so she didn’t tell them where to find Samuel. She was hovering on the border of insanity but she understood that if she kept quiet then she had a slim chance of coming out alive. The sane mistrust the words of the mad, but maybe these men were sane and Katia was mad?

They made her kneel and clean the boots of the man who was interrogating her with her tongue. Katia didn’t refuse, she just acted mad, as if she didn’t know what they wanted of her. They hit her, and she fell to the floor and received more blows until she lost consciousness.

Sister Marie-Madeleine stayed still, tied to a chair and watching the suffering being inflicted on Katia in the other room. She didn’t pray. She knew that no one would come to rescue them.

For several days they made her watch the same macabre spectacle that she had seen inflicted on Dalida as well.

The nun also suffered at the hands of those criminals, but in a different way. After she had seen Dalida tortured, one of the policemen raped her. Another day they took her down to her cell, raped her again, and didn’t take her back up to the glass-walled room. They finally let her go, scorning her as they did so.

The mother superior met her with sobs and wanted to make her swear that she would never be so imprudent again, but Sister Marie-Madeleine swore nothing. She couldn’t. If she closed her eyes she could feel that man’s hands on her body. She could smell his sweat and his disgusting saliva on her lips.

She had not been hung from a hook as if she were a piece of meat, she had not been beaten unconscious. But the torture they had chosen had been equally cruel, as she would never be the same after being raped.

She went to confession, did her penance, and asked for God to explain what had happened. But all she heard was silence, the same silence that millions of Jews had heard, millions of Gypsies, millions of men and women in the extermination camps. She herself decided to fall silent forever.

 

But where was she? Where was Katia? She had been in Paris recently. Sister Marie-Madeleine could not tell me anything. It was hard for me to get the mother superior to allow me to see her. She said she wouldn’t speak to me because she didn’t speak to anyone, but as soon as the nun left us alone together, Sister Marie-Madeleine told me all that I have told you. Her voice seemed to come from another world. I had the impression that in spite of being here with us, this woman was no longer among the living. Before I left she surprised me by asking: “Why did they let me live?”

After speaking with Sister Marie-Madeleine, I tried to find Pedro and Vasily. It was not easy, but I found the print shop. Pedro was still alive. He greeted me mistrustfully. He also felt guilty for having survived.

Pedro gave me the last clue about your father. He told me that Raymond had been to Juana’s house and had told her to get Samuel out of there.

“They’re rounding up Jews again and they are looking for him.”

“And Dalida?” Juana asked.

“She must be with the nuns. They have arrested the countess. Two of our men went to her house to get the radio and saw the Gestapo taking her away. I hope that Dalida is safe, Armando has gone to the convent . . . He won’t be too long.”

Juana started to walk up and down the room as she always did to help her to think. Her Uncle Pedro and Vasily looked at her expectantly.

“We have to get Samuel out of here,” Vasily dared say.

“Oh, do we? And where would we take him? He’s got a fever, he doesn’t stop coughing. And you, Raymond, is your escape route to Spain ready yet?”

“No one can leave Paris at the moment. The Gestapo are everywhere, and so are the men of the Feldgendarmerie. I’ve told you, they’re looking for Jews, as if there were not enough in Royallieu or Drancy.”

“We have to show them that for all the Jews they arrest, and for all the members of the Resistance they kill, they will never stop us,” Juana replied.

“Now is not the time to do anything,” Pedro warned.

“Yes, yes, it is the moment, it’s exactly the right moment. They have to know that they cannot crush us like this. If we could get rid of that SS assassin . . . ,” Juana said angrily.

“Forget about Alois Brunner.” Vasily’s words sounded like an order to Juana.

She stood in front of him, hands on hips, and glared at him.

“Forget about him! No, I’m not going to forget about him, if we get rid of him, then we will put fear into the rest of his crew.”

“Stop dreaming, Juana, we have other problems now, and the biggest two are getting Samuel Zucker out of here and getting the radio back. The countess may have hidden it or given it to someone she trusts. Samuel knows her well, so he might have an idea.”

Juana accepted reluctantly the idea that Raymond should talk to Samuel.

Your father was lying down, half asleep because of the fever.

“Samuel, this is Raymond, you’ll have heard Dalida talk about him. I have bad news. They’ve arrested Countess Katia Goldanski, and possibly your daughter Dalida as well,” Juana said, as she wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.

Samuel sat up in fear. It was as if he had been given a punch in the gut when he heard about Katia and Dalida.

“Where are they? Who took them?” he shouted faintly.

Raymond explained everything that had happened in the last few hours and Samuel sank back onto the bed again. Knowing that Katia was in the hands of the Gestapo, and that his daughter might also be, brought him close to some kind of attack. Juana could hear Samuel’s heart racing like a clock. She made a sign to her Uncle Pedro to bring a glass of water and insisted that Samuel drink it.

“We have to think, we cannot give up now. You have to help us. We need to get the radio back that Dalida gave to the countess to look after. Where do you think she might have hidden it?”

He did not answer straight away. His eyes were closed and he tried to control his trembling hands. When he felt capable of looking Juana in the eyes, he said:

“Katia trusted Grigory, he’s her chauffeur and he’s married to her housekeeper. They are Russian like us. But are you sure that the Gestapo hasn’t found the radio already?”

“No, we’re not sure, but if there’s a chance that they haven’t, then we need to make sure,” Raymond replied.

“I have to go,” Samuel said.

“No, you’re not going anywhere,” Juana commanded.

“If they are looking for me they will find me, and they will find all of us. You have to dismantle the press; take it and save yourselves,” Samuel said.

“We will do nothing of the kind. We have a press, and so what? We earn our living printing what we can: visiting cards, posters for shops . . . We have nothing to hide.” Juana spoke so firmly that it was difficult to contradict her, but even so her Uncle Pedro dared to speak.

“What will they do if they find all the documents we’re forging? We have more than a dozen passports here, halfway prepared.”

“And that is what you will take out of here. Take anything that might compromise you and we’ll let them see what our real job is. We don’t have to dismantle the press, it would be reckless.” Juana had answers for everything.

They agreed to take the compromising documents, but nothing else.

“They will arrest us,” Vasily said, almost in a whisper, when Raymond had left.

“Not all of us, you can go with my uncle, but I’ll stay here with Samuel.”

“You’re mad!” Vasily feared Juana’s decisions because he knew that it was impossible to make her change her mind.

“It would be stupid for you to get yourselves arrested. You and my uncle are too valuable to the Resistance, and it’s better if you stay hidden. I will stay with the old Jew until Raymond comes back this evening and tells us how to leave Paris. But you should go now, there’s not much time.”

For once in his life Vasily didn’t agree and stood up to Juana.

“Do you think that I can save myself and leave you here? Your uncle can go with the incriminating documents, but I’ll stay here, and if they come, then we’ll see what to do. Haven’t you said that we can pretend to be printers, normal printers? Well, let’s do it, let’s work together.”

Juana was about to reply when she changed her mind. She realized that an argument with Vasily at this moment would be a waste of time, so she decided to use another tactic.

“Alright, stay with me, but I want you to help my uncle get all the sensitive material out of here and take it to Raymond’s house. My uncle will stay there and then you can come back here.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone for so long,” Vasily protested.

“Don’t be silly, don’t you see that my uncle can’t go alone with all that material?”

They didn’t take too long to gather all the files with the false documents. Then they put them in a couple of old bags and covered them with other stuff.

When Juana said goodbye to her uncle she whispered in his ear, “Don’t let him come back.” She was talking about Vasily. Pedro looked at her in surprise, worried about what his niece might be planning, but he said nothing.

Once Juana and Samuel were alone, she checked that the pistol she always carried with her was loaded and cocked. Then she went over to Samuel’s bed and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Can you get up?”

“Yes, I think I can . . .”

“I’m going to try to get you to the border, although I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

“But . . . What about your friend? Raymond . . . Doesn’t he have to come to find us?”

“We can’t afford to lose any time in waiting. I am afraid that the Gestapo could be here any minute. Look, I have a friend who lives not too far from here, a Spaniard like me, an exile, she lost her husband in the Civil War but managed to escape with her youngest child. He’s a good lad, he works as a taxi driver, maybe he could help us.”

“Are they with the Resistance?”

“No, they’re not, they’ve never wanted to commit themselves, they have suffered enough, but they are anti-Fascists and will help us if they can.”

She helped him to sit up and then took him to the bathroom so he could wash his face. Then they went out to meet their fate. They went down the stairs to the main door and looked out at the street for a few seconds without seeing anything out of the ordinary. A mother with a shopping bag in one hand and a four- or five-year-old child holding onto the other, a young student with his textbooks, an elderly couple slowly strolling . . . No, there was nothing out there that made them suspicious, so they went out into the street. Juana took Samuel’s arm to support him. They went to the Métro and a few minutes later got out at Montparnasse. She tried to look at people’s faces by seeing them reflected in the shop windows, but she still saw nothing suspicious.

Juana’s friend’s house was a single-room attic, as dark as it was narrow. The woman opened the door, surprised at this unexpected visit.

“I’m sorry to put you in a tricky situation, but I need you to help me save this man,” Juana explained to the disconcerted woman.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Thank you, Pepa, I knew I could count on you! Look, if your son could take us to the border . . . We have friends in Biarritz who could get him across to Spain . . .”

“Jaime is about to come home. He has a few hours off before he is supposed to carry on with his work driving the taxi . . .”

“I know that this is getting you involved in a situation you might not want to be a part of, but I can’t think of any other way to get this man out of Paris.”

They heard the sound of a key in the lock, and the young man Jaime appeared. He looked like his mother, the same dark brown hair, the same steady eyes, the same air of calm.

“Here he is! You explain the situation, Juana.”

Jaime listened without saying a word, thinking about how to reply.

“I have to hand the taxi back at ten o’clock, but I could tell my boss to let me have it overnight so that I could start work earlier. If he says yes, then we can go now, but in any case I need to be back tomorrow.”

The young man went off to call his boss from the nearest bar and came back with a smile on his face.

“It’s all sorted out, we can leave right now.”

Juana did not lie to them and told them that the Gestapo was looking for them.

“If they find us, then you will pay the price as well.”

Mother and son looked each other in the eye and told themselves wordlessly what they needed to do. Ten minutes later Jaime was waiting for them, parked by the door. He hugged Pepa goodbye.

“Thank you, thank you . . .”

“Try to make sure nothing happens to you, you’re the only child I have left,” the woman replied.

“I . . . I hope I’ll be back safe and sound . . .”

“If you don’t . . . Well, I don’t even want to think about it, but if you die, it’s better to die for a cause. Go on, go now, if Jaime has to get to the border and back before tomorrow he doesn’t have much time.”

They had left Paris when two men pulled in front of Jaime’s taxi. Juana took hold of the weapon that she had in her overcoat pocket.

“Reverse,” she said to Jaime. But it was too late, two other black cars had stopped just behind them, blocking their exit.

Four men, pistols in hand, approached the car.

“We have to get out of here,” Juana insisted.

“We’re surrounded, there’s no escape,” Jaime said.

“Yes, yes, we can escape. Turn right, off the road and we might still be able to get away.”

“Juana, we can’t, they’ve got us trapped; if we try to escape they’ll shoot,” Jaime insisted.

“Do as I say!” she said and gave the steering wheel a twist.

“You’re crazy!” Jaime shouted as he tried to take control of the car.

The Gestapo agents opened fire, and one of their bullets caught a wheel of the taxi. Juana took the pistol out of her coat, opened the side window, and opened fire. Her eyes lit up when she saw that she had hit one of the men, but the car carried on running out of control down the embankment. The Gestapo agents carried on firing. Juana fired again, but it was the last thing she did: A bullet struck her in the head and killed her instantly.

The car hit a tree and Jaime was knocked unconscious.

The Gestapo approached and told them to get out of the car. Only Samuel would have been able to reply if he could have found the words to do so.

Juana was dead, and Jaime appeared to be dead. The Gestapo took the bodies out of the car. One of them kicked Juana’s lifeless body, his revenge for the comrade whose life Juana’s bullet had taken.

Samuel sat still and calm, as if he were in the middle of a nightmare. One of the men hit him with the butt of his pistol and knocked him to the ground. Then they made him get into one of the cars. And after that he disappeared.

Thanks to Pedro I was able to speak with Pepa, Jaime’s mother. I was impressed when I met her because she is a woman who has lost everything and yet she is still not crushed. She told me that she was from Granada and that she lost her husband, her two oldest children, and other members of her family in the Spanish Civil War. And in Paris she lost her last remaining son, Jaime. Jaime had risked his life to save Samuel, a man he didn’t know. I said to Pepa that I admired her bravery and that of her son. You know what she said to me? “If you have to die for freedom, then you will die. And you die with dignity.”

Pepa never recovered Jaime’s body, so she doesn’t know where to go to mourn him.

As for your father, Pepa told me that the only news she ever managed to find out about him was that he was taken for a few days to Gestapo headquarters. It’s possible that after that he was taken to Drancy, and from there on a cattle train to Auschwitz or Treblinka or Mauthausen. We don’t know, we haven’t been able to find out anything at all up through today. If you ask me did I go to Drancy, the answer is yes. I have been in Paris trying to find out what happened. I wasn’t able to find any papers that showed your father had been there, because the Nazi hierarchy burned all their papers before trying to escape. When the Allies entered Paris, the Red Cross took charge of Drancy. They were unable to tell me for certain whether your father, your sister, and my aunt had passed through the camp.”

 

I was shocked at Gustav’s story, I had not dared interrupt him as he told it. It was as if what he was telling me had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my father or my sister. That it was just another one of those terrible stories that we were all hearing every day at that time. But such things, I thought, could never happen to us.

Vera had been crying silently for a while. Tears ran down her face and she knotted her hands together.

“I haven’t stopped searching for them since the end of the war,” Gustav assured me.

“Someone must know something,” I said, but without much conviction.

“A friend in the Foreign Office has advised me to go to the continent, to Poland, to Germany, maybe we can find them in one of the camps . . . The Germans kept records of everything. I was planning to go to Berlin tomorrow.”

“I would be more at ease if you went together,” Vera said, looking at me through the veil of tears that covered her eyes.

“Yes, but first . . . Well, I know someone . . . an intelligence officer, maybe he can help us.” I don’t know why, but at that moment I thought of Major Williams.

I explained to them who he was and that I had been under his command, although I didn’t say exactly what I had done.

Gustav went with me next day to the Admiralty. He knew enough people and had enough influence to get someone to tell us how we might find Major Williams. We were lucky. He was in Berlin. They had promoted him to colonel. They called him and he said that he would see us straight away, so we rushed off to Berlin.

Colonel Williams had grown older, or so it seemed to me. His chestnut hair was speckled with white and his eyes were duller.

“Thank you for seeing us, Colonel,” I said as I shook his hand.

“Curiosity, yes, I know that my job makes a lot of people curious. When they said you wanted to see me I asked myself what you could want from me now.”

Gustav explained briefly what he had been able to find out, and I asked him to help us.

Williams listened to us in silence. I won’t say that he was struck by what Gustav had to say, because he must have heard stories like this regularly throughout the war, but he did seem ready to give us a hand.

“These damn Germans had one thing going for them; they wrote down everything they did. There are registers of all those who were prisoners in the camps, all those who were sent to the gas chambers . . . We’ve found documentation about their horrible experiments on human beings. If your father or your sister or your aunt did not die in Paris and were sent to Poland or Austria or Germany, then we should be able to find them. It might take some time, so you’ll need to be patient. I have an acquaintance in the Russian zone, Boris Stepanov. He can have a look at the camp registers that the Soviets captured. I’ll call him and get him to agree to meet with you. As for me, I’ll look for their names as well.”

“Tell me, sir, are there still people in the camps?” I asked apprehensively.

“The Red Cross is in charge and is taking care of these poor unfortunates.”

“I want to go to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Treblinka; I want to go to any of the places where they could have been sent.” My request was a supplication.

“I wouldn’t recommend it. You’re a soldier and you’ve fought at the front, you have risked your life and killed like a soldier, but these camps . . . If a hell exists, it’s there.”

“Can you get us permission to go?” I insisted.

“Yes, I can, but I don’t know if I should. You don’t need to, we can look for your family from Berlin.”

“Please . . .”

“Go and see Boris first, and I will try to find out what I can. We’ll see about everything else later.”

 

Walking through Berlin made me feel strange. I looked at the faces of the Germans, trying to see the marks of guilt. Starving men to one side, old men to another, lost-looking youngsters, housewives desperate to find food for their families . . . In other circumstances these faces would have moved me. But now . . . No, I couldn’t forgive them, I didn’t know if the faces I saw were guilty or innocent, but I thought they were all guilty for unleashing the madness of the Holocaust. How many of them had stood up to Hitler? How many of them had risked their own lives to stop thousands of people being sent to the gas chambers? They exculpated themselves, they said that people didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t believe that. They couldn’t be deaf and blind to what was taking place a few meters from their own homes, to the enormities that were being committed by their children, their husbands. These women, walking along with their faces turned to the ground, they had applauded the bastards who had murdered millions of Jews.

“I can’t bear being here,” I admitted to Gustav.

But he was a better man than I, and tried to convince me that all people have a survival instinct that makes us cowards, and that you can’t ask people simply to become heroes, that sometimes the masses have to close their eyes and cover their ears simply to go on living . . .

“No, I’m not asking for them to be heroes, I’m just asking how they can carry on living in the knowledge that their personal well-being is based on a crime. Whatever you say, you know as well as I do that they are not innocent.”

 

Gustav was a person entirely free from malice, and it was difficult for him to discern wickedness in others. These days would have been impossible for me without him, because to me everyone looked like a murderer.

With the safe-conduct pass that Colonel Williams had given us, we did not have too many problems in crossing into the Soviet sector of Berlin.

Boris Stepanov met us in an office in which he seemed to be swimming in papers.

“So you are looking for your family . . . Everybody’s looking for something. Fathers, brothers, uncles, sons . . .”

We told him what we knew, and gave him some old photos, and he promised to call us if he found anything out. He even offered us a drink.

He seemed a nice enough man, and I felt close to him, as he and I had fought in the same war.

“We were among the first to find the extermination camps. I went into one of them myself.”

Gustav asked him to tell us what he had seen, and he spoke to us about his time in Majdanek in Poland.

“When the Nazis knew they had lost, when we were about to arrive, they tried to destroy the camp, they blew up one of the crematoria, but we advanced too quickly and they left, leaving the gas chambers standing.”

Boris told us not only about what he had seen in Majdanek, but also about how they had suffered during the liberation of Auschwitz.

“If hell exists, it was there,” he said, as he poured out two glasses of vodka to try to help him banish the shadows of the horror. He continued: “The men we met seemed to have risen from their graves. The women . . . I will always have nightmares when I see those desperate faces. And the children . . . I have two children, and when I saw those children with their condemned faces my heart broke. What kind of men could have committed such atrocities? You face enemies in a war, enemies who are the same as you, you kill them, they kill you, and that’s it . . . But this, this . . . I am a peasant and I swear that no animal is capable of doing what the Nazis did.”

Boris, as large as a bear, broke down when he told us about the hell he had seen. And he, a professed atheist, crossed himself as his mother had taught him to do as a child, to protect himself from the evil he had seen.

 

Back then, large parts of Berlin were nothing more than heaps of rubble. The war had left its mark on the whole city. The worst was not the damaged urban landscape, but the misery in which the Berliners lived.

One evening Gustav and I were walking through the Nikolaiviertel on the banks of the Spree when a girl came up to us who could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. She offered herself to us with the resignation of someone who had no other option available to her to continue living.

“What’s your name?” Gustav asked.

“What do you care? Call me what you want,” she said, her voice dry and tired.

“Why do you do this? Don’t you have a family?” I asked.

She turned away when she saw that we had no intention of taking advantage of her, and also that she was not going to get the money she needed from us. Her silence was the last piece of dignity remaining to her. She sold her body but nothing else, which was why she had no need to give us any explanations.

Gustav caught up with her and put some coins into her hand.

“Go home, I think this should be enough for a few days.”

The girl seemed to hesitate, then closed her hand tight, nodded briefly, and disappeared into the fog on the banks of the river.

The whole scene had depressed us, and once again I cursed Hitler for having taken life away from millions of human beings, including many who were still breathing.

 

Colonel Williams called us after a few days to ask us to go with him to see Boris Stepanov.

“You’re giving me the perfect excuse to see the Soviet sector,” he said.

He took us to Boris’s office, where the Russian was waiting for us with a bottle of vodka.

“I’ve brought you some authentic Scotch whisky,” the colonel said to Boris as he handed him a bottle.

“Well, we’ll drink your whisky, and when we’ve finished that, then we’ll drink my vodka.”

Neither Gustav nor I wanted to refuse Boris’s offer, but we both still remembered the headaches we had had the day after we had first met him and had been unable to refuse his offer of vodka. Boris was a generous and expansive person, who didn’t understand the idea of someone rejecting the chance to share a glass with him.

“I have some information for you,” he said, and was quiet for a few minutes as he looked over some papers he held in his hand. “Samuel Zucker was sent to Auschwitz in December 1943, and was sent to the gas chamber the day he arrived. He was old and sick, so there was no way of getting any work out of him. He was in two camps in France—he went to Drancy first and then after a few days was sent to Royallieu, and from there straight to Auschwitz. He traveled with two hundred other Jews in a cattle car. I’m sorry, Ezekiel.”

 

I didn’t know what to say or what to do. I didn’t even move. I had to understand what Boris had just told me, to take in the fact that my father had been killed in a gas chamber after having seen the preliminaries to hell in a cattle car, where he had spent several days without food or water, defecating in full view of all the other prisoners, breathing in that unbearable stench, treated like a member of a subhuman species.

I couldn’t bear the images that filled my head while I tried to accept that this had been my father’s fate.

Gustav and Colonel Williams said nothing, what could they have said? I felt dizzy, I couldn’t accept that my father had been killed in a gas chamber. I thought about my mother, about what she would suffer when she found out.

“It can’t be true,” I managed to say.

Boris did not reply. He looked at me very seriously and put a glass of whisky in my hand.

“Drink it,” he ordered, as if it were a medicine that could ease the pain I was feeling at that moment.

I didn’t drink, I couldn’t, all I wanted to do was scream, to get up and hit everyone who I found in my way, to go out into the street and shout “murderer” to every German I met, tell them that they all had blood on their hands, and that never, whatever they did, would they be able to cleanse themselves of that blood.

Yes, I wanted to curse them and tell them that their sins would fall on the heads of their children and their children’s children, would resound into eternity. But I didn’t move, I was paralyzed with the horror of it.

I felt Gustav’s hand on my arm, his way of telling me that my pain was also his pain.

“Damn it! Why did it have to be me who gave the bad news?” Boris snapped and poured himself another glass of whisky.

“Come on Boris, don’t blame yourself,” Colonel Williams said.

“The worst of it is that lots of the animals who did this will get away scot-free,” Boris said.

“There is a trial underway, the guilty will be punished,” Colonel Williams said.

“My dear friend, do you really think that the guilty men will all be made to pay? No, it won’t happen, they will condemn a few of the Nazi top brass at Nuremburg and that will be it. If there were any justice then all of Germany would be put on trial. They were all complicit,” Boris said, angrily bringing his fist down on the table.

“There were Germans who fought against Hitler,” Williams reminded him.

“How many? You could count them all on the fingers of one hand,” Boris said angrily.

I listened to them all in silence, unable to say anything, although I wanted Boris to tell me more about my father’s murder. I made an effort and asked him:

“What else can you tell me?”

“Nothing more than what I’ve already said. I asked if they kept anything of what your father was wearing, but I already knew that they took all their clothes and stole anything that might be of any value. All that’s recorded is that the day he arrived they removed his two gold teeth and then the same day . . . I’m sorry, I swear that I am.”

 

I tried to imagine what my father’s last hours might have been like. The moment the doors of the train car were opened where they had all been kept for days in the dark, piled up in a heap, all kinds of people whom the Nazis treated like they were worth less than cattle.

I saw him blinking in the face of the sudden light, disoriented by the unknown. I imagine that as a gesture of respect to the others and to himself he would shake the dust from his wrinkled and foul-smelling clothes. Then some of the Nazi soldiers would tell them to get out of the car and line up to be counted. Then they would have put them, a little later, on a truck to take them into the heart of the camp.

Maybe some innocent would have tried to get people’s hopes up: “They’ll make us work, but we’ll survive.” My father would not have been so optimistic. Except for the case of Katia, my father had never allowed himself to be carried away by imagination or desire. So my father would have asked himself at what point the Nazis would decide to get rid of him. Why should they want a man of his age, a man past seventy, a man whose arms were weak and whose eyes were clouded? I imagined him dealing with the pain when his two gold teeth were pulled out with no anesthetic. Trying to maintain his dignity in the face of death.

They would have taken him from that room, the room where they pulled out his teeth, to a larger room where they would have made him take his clothes off, along with other men who were of no use to these devils’ interests. It wasn’t difficult for me to put myself in his skin and imagine the shame he felt in front of the other men, and how he would then be pushed into an even bigger room where they were told that they were going to have a shower to get the dirt of their journey off them.

The door would close and the men would look up to the roof where they would see some false showers from which suddenly there would come pouring not clear water but a poison gas that would kill them, making their bodies convulse as it did so.

My father’s body would fall alongside other bodies, and would lie there until the devils came to clean them up as if they were no more than rubbish and carry them out and throw them into the crematorium, where they would disappear forever in a thick smoke whose penetrating smell filled the whole camp.

This had been how my father, Samuel Zucker, had died, the same end as that of six million other Jews. I wanted to ask Boris and Colonel Williams how there could be people who thought that the Jews who had survived could just get over the Holocaust—what could they say to make us come to grips with the magnitude of what had happened?—and above all, who thought that we could somehow be able to pardon our executioners.

But I said nothing and they said nothing, leaving me a few minutes of silence with my eyes shut as I saw what had happened to my father pass before my eyes, as well as the fates of all the men who had gone down the same route.

“Can you tell us anything about Dalida Zucker and Katia Goldanski?” Colonel Williams’s voice drew me back to reality.

Boris cleared his throat and took a good swig of whisky. He looked down at the paper in his hand and seemed to be thinking about whether to tell us. He must have thought that I needed a rest before hearing about my sister Dalida. So he turned his blue eyes to Gustav.

“They took Katia Goldanski to Germany, to Ravensbrück. She arrived in January 1944. This was a women’s camp to begin with, but they built other camps nearby. She died there.”

“In the gas chamber?” Gustav dared ask.

Boris’s fist against the desk startled us all. It was such a heavy blow that he knocked over his glass of whisky. Boris got up and went to find something to clean up the spill. We looked at him without daring to say anything, while we tried to take in what he had just said, that Katia was dead, that she had lost her life in a camp in Germany itself.

“These murderers weren’t content with the gas chambers. There were some psychopaths who called themselves doctors who gave themselves carte blanche to experiment with the prisoners.” Boris took a large gulp from his glass of whisky, draining it. He seemed to be wondering whether to continue, so Williams poured him a good slug of scotch.

“Please, carry on,” Gustav said.

“These psychopaths were working on bone transplants. They took a section of bone from someone and implanted it into someone else whose bone they had previously cut open. They did it without using anesthetic.” Boris hit the table again.

“Why should they bother? We Jews are subhuman, anyway,” I said.

“Zucker, please!” This was more than a request on Williams’s part; it was an order for me to control my bitterness.

“In Ravensbrück they also used prisoners in experiments with pathogenic germs. They injected people with,” and here Boris took a piece of paper and read it with a certain amount of difficulty, “tetanus, and then put earth, wood, ground glass into the wounds . . . They wanted to see the effects of the infection, and if the medicines that they were using were effective. Many people died of gangrene.”

“And my Aunt Katia, how did she die?” Gustav spoke in such a low voice that it was hard for us to hear his question.

“Your aunt . . . Katia Goldanski had several bones sectioned and transplanted into another prisoner. But when they were sectioned . . . Well, I don’t need to go into too much detail, but the nerves and the muscles were cut as well . . . Some of the victims died in terrible pain. She couldn’t deal with the experiment . . . She died of blood loss, and none of these animals even gave her anything to calm the pain.”

Gustav covered his face with both hands. He was making an immense effort to control his tears, trying to hold himself together before he could look us in the face again.

Katia had been like a marble goddess to me. I had heard Dina say that she was so beautiful she didn’t appear real. Dina had been right. It was impossible not to surrender to Katia’s beauty, although she didn’t feel any sympathy toward her. I hadn’t been able to forgive her for taking my father away from me, but even so I had not been able to hate her.

The beasts of the Paris Gestapo had been merciless to her body. They had shattered her beauty into fragments, and when she was only a mass of blood and meat, they had sent her on to Ravensbrück, where a sadist dressed as a doctor had completed the sacrifice.

Countess Katia Goldanski, sleeping in a barracks along with other prisoners who had had almost all their humanity stripped away from them. Lice and fleas clambered over their flesh and hid in its crannies. And her hair? What had they done with her hair, so blonde it was almost white, the hair she wore drawn up in a chignon on her neck? They had cut it all off to emphasize her nakedness.

It was hard for me to imagine her in those striped sacks that the Nazis used to dress their prisoners. She would have had to share that stinking food, and work without pause while the guards beat them with sticks. I imagine that Katia would have clenched her teeth, and even though she was dressed in striped sackcloth, would have tried to walk upright and smile at her companions, to console the ones who were fading, and not to forget for a moment who she was, to do whatever it took to avoid committing any shameful act.

The day that they took her to the room where those sadists who called themselves doctors experimented on the prisoners, she would have followed the instructions that the witch disguised as a nurse would have given her. “Take your clothes off.” “Lie down on the bed.” “Stay still.” She would have set her lips when they tied her to the bed so as not to move, and would have tried to hide the first grimace of pain and not to cry when the butcher’s knife started to cut through her flesh until it reached her femur, cutting through veins, arteries, muscles, tendons. She would have shouted, and fainted, and died, in the face of the indifference of those devils to whom Katia meant nothing, because she was Jewish, or half Jewish, or a third Jewish. She had enough Jewish blood in her veins not to be considered a human being. She had also been in the Resistance, so for these monsters Katia, beautiful Katia, had to die.

“Her body . . .” Gustav could hardly speak.

“They burned it in one of the Ravensbrück ovens. It’s in the register,” Boris replied.

It was my turn again. Boris was looking at me to see if I was capable of hearing how my sister had been murdered. No, I wasn’t, but I had no option other than to hear it. I saw Gustav clenching his fists and trying not to cry. He felt as defeated as I did. We had fought in the same war but had not been able to save our loved ones. We had not been able to stop our people from being massacred. Never had I, before that day, understood what it meant to be a Jew.

“Dalida Zucker was taken from Paris to Auschwitz. She didn’t go through Drancy, but was taken directly to Poland, so she couldn’t have seen her father.”

I don’t know why Boris made this observation. Would anything have changed if they had seen one another in one of those abominable camps? I had been trembling for a while now, and I tried to control my body as I listened to Boris’s thick voice.

“Your sister lived for longer than your father and the countess. She was killed a few days before we liberated the camp. I’m sorry.”

I felt anger taking hold of me so strongly that I nearly leapt up to attack Boris, the colonel, or anyone else nearby. Gustav put his hand on my arm again, as if he could calm me down with that gesture. But I could not have moved even had I wanted to. My head and my body were now almost completely dissociated. I looked at Boris and invited him to continue.

“According to the records, your sister reached Auschwitz at the end of January 1944 in a train filled with French Jews that over the course of its transit was joined by other prisoners from all over the battle zone. When the prisoners reached Auschwitz they were divided into groups by the camp commandant. Many of them were made to work from sunrise to sunset on a number of tasks, including the maintenance of the camp itself, which was a branch of hell on earth. Your sister was young and strong, and so, instead of being sent to the gas chambers she was selected to work. Auschwitz was the largest camp, although it was in fact three camps, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II, more commonly known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III, also known as Monowitz. Your sister was in Auschwitz-Birkenau and they sent her to work in the munitions factory near the camp. From the very first day of her time there she suffered unbearable torment, because although the prisoners were an invaluable source of free labor for the Third Reich, the SS guards enjoyed mistreating and torturing, these poor wretches. Also . . . Well, your sister was a beautiful young woman and was made to be a . . . distraction for some of the SS officers.”

Boris lowered his head as though the words he had just uttered embarrassed him. He poured himself the last inch or so of whisky from the bottle and drank it in a single gulp, without breathing. I asked myself why I was letting my mind wander by watching Boris instead of thinking hard about what he had said. I now know that it was because I could not bear the pain that hearing about what had happened to Dalida caused in me.

I felt Gustav and Williams looking at me, but I avoided their gazes. I couldn’t bear for anyone to feel sorry for us.

“Apparently your sister was not easy to control, so she was sent to Auschwitz I, under the control of Dr. Josef Mengele, although the commandant of Auschwitz at that time was SS Colonel Arthur Liebehenschel.”

“Dr. Mengele?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes, Mengele, the sadist who ruled over Block 10; it was there that he carried out his experiments along with other doctors and nurses as bloody and psychotic as he was. His preferred victims were twins, dwarves, children . . . He sterilized his own sister. Mengele and two other doctors of death, Dr. Carl Clauberg and Dr. Horst Schumann, were struggling to develop a method whereby they could sterilize all the ‘subhumans’—Jews, the mentally ill, the sick . . . They injected them with homemade medicines that included silver nitrate, iodine, and other substances that caused unbearable pain in their victims, as well as provoking hemorrhages that often led to a swift death. Many of them died, but this was not a problem for Mengele, he had thousands of human guinea pigs at his disposal, and didn’t care what happened to them. Apparently he came to the conclusion that radiation was the easiest and cheapest way of sterilization, and used it on thousands of prisoners. Lots of them died because of the radiation treatment. Dalida Zucker endured these experiments, but when she was little more than a ghost she was of no use for their macabre games, and they sent her to the gas chamber. Her murder coincided with the arrival of our troops. A few days earlier the commandant had sent a few prisoners out of Auschwitz to other camps, but those who were too weak to travel, or were simply of no use to them, were all gassed.”

There was not a single drop left in either of the two bottles, and Boris had nothing to help him recover from having informed us of these deaths. Williams sat still in his chair without even daring to offer me his condolences.

Everything had now been said. My father and my sister had each died in a gas chamber. Katia Goldanski had had her bones sawed open, and had bled out on an operating table. I didn’t want to hear anything else, much less did I want anyone to pat me on the back and show their sympathy.

I got up and Gustav did the same. Like me, he wanted to get out of there and breathe fresh air. We were both feeling stifled.

“I brought my car, I’ll take you back to your sector,” Williams offered, but we both refused.

“Could I visit Auschwitz? Speak to a survivor?” I asked Boris and Williams.

They looked at each other uncertainly. In those days the Red Cross was in charge of most of the camps, and in some of them there were survivors whom no one knew what to do with.

“It’s not a good idea,” Colonel Williams said.

I shrugged. I didn’t care about his opinion. With or without the help of these people I would go to Auschwitz, even if they arrested me.

“We can arrange it,” Boris said.

“Do it, as soon as possible,” I asked him.

Gustav and I walked in silence for a couple of hours. We didn’t need to say anything, all we wanted to do was think about our dead relatives. I thought about my father and my sister; he thought about his aunt. It would have been meaningless to try to console one another.

“I will go with you to Auschwitz,” was all that Gustav said to me when we got back to the hotel.

“And I will go with you to Ravensbrück.”

 

It was easier to get to Ravensbrück. It was fifty-five miles from Berlin, and Colonel Williams decided to travel with us, “to help us with the paperwork.”

A Red Cross doctor came with us on the visit, giving us terrifying details about the survivors. Gustav wanted to see the barracks where Katia had spent the last months of her life.

We could smell misery and sickness and despair when we entered.

A few wooden bedsteads were piled against the wall, and Katia had slept on one of them. We imagined her there, defenseless even though she tried to make it appear as if the Nazis could not break her spirit.

The doctor told us of a woman who had been in the same barracks and who was still alive, although very sick.

“She’s lost her mind, and only speaks nonsense.”

We insisted on seeing her, wanting to rediscover Katia via the shadows of madness that shrouded this poor woman.

The camp’s hospital was now a refuge for a few poor wretches who were being looked after by the doctors and nurses of the Red Cross. They were too sick or too mad to be taken anywhere else. Also, the Allied powers had not yet come to any agreement about what should be done with the Jews. They had not fought to save us, but to save themselves; we Jews were simply there, and once again we seemed to be in everyone’s way.

A nurse put a couple of chairs next to the bed and warned us that “she didn’t know what she was saying. When she arrived in Ravensbrück she was four months pregnant, and they cut the child out of her. They did it without anesthetic, they wanted to see how much pain she could bear. Then they cut open her breasts. She went mad.”

“Did you know Katia Goldanski?” Gustav asked her.

The woman looked at us and I thought I saw a spark of recognition in her eyes.

“She was tall, with white-blonde hair, very blue eyes, very distinguished,” Gustav continued.

“Katia . . . Katia . . . Katia . . .” The woman did nothing more than repeat the name, but suddenly she rummaged in her sheets and pulled out a lace handkerchief.

Gustav held out his hand to take it, but she hid it among the sheets once again.

“That was Katia’s handkerchief,” Gustav murmured.

Yes, it could have been no one else’s, a cambric and lace handkerchief. The woman held onto the piece of cloth as if it were somehow important.

“She cleaned me . . . She cleaned me . . . like this, like this.” The woman passed the handkerchief over her face and neck.

We watched her without daring to interrupt her, hoping for a spark of sanity to grow in the mind of that woman who had taken refuge in madness.

“Did she say anything, talk about anyone?” Gustav insisted.

She looked at him as if she recognized him, then she passed her hand through his hair. Gustav didn’t move, he seemed to have turned to marble. Then she put her hand down and began to sing, an old Yiddish song. She curled up and closed her eyes and we saw thin tears trickle down her cheeks.

The nurse made a sign for us to leave. The poor woman could tell us nothing, and if we had insisted then we would only have made her suffering worse.

“This is a terrible place,” Gustav murmured.

It was. How could it not be? The souls of thousands of women remained in that camp, in those barracks, in the hospital where those monsters had pitilessly experimented on women’s bodies before reducing them to nothing. These souls were confined within the walls of the gas chambers.

The soldiers had liberated the camp, but they couldn’t liberate the souls from the extreme suffering the Nazis had inflicted on their bodies.

“It’s horrible . . . I can’t bear thinking about what happened here,” Gustav said as we got into Colonel Williams’s car and drove back to Berlin.

We were quiet throughout the whole journey. Silence was becoming the norm between us. I think that all we really wanted was to escape.

 

Two days later we visited Auschwitz. Boris had arranged it now that Poland was under the control of the Soviets.

Williams could not come with us this time, but Boris provided us with safe-conducts so that no one would stop us. He also recommended a friend of his, a captain called Anatoly Ignatiev.

“We’re from the same village, we’ve known each other since we were children, although he’s a little older than I am. If you take a good bottle of whisky he’ll appreciate it.”

Gustav got hold of a couple of bottles on the black market. We shared them with Captain Ignatiev, because in those days Gustav and I used alcohol to lose consciousness and overcome the pain we felt.

Captain Ignatiev was waiting for us in Krakow. He looked like Boris. He was tall and strongly built and just as expansive, and he made us take a drink even before we set off for Auschwitz.

“We will go tomorrow, it’s better if you rest tonight. I’m only doing this for Boris; my stomach turns every time I visit that camp.”

I asked him to help me look among the survivors for someone who might have known my sister.

“I don’t recommend it,” he said.

But I insisted. I needed to meet my sister here, to feel her suffering, to feel her despair, her dreams, because I was sure that Dalida would not have given up even at the end. I had always admired her strength of character, her way of facing up to life without caring about the consequences.

As we approached the camp it started to rain mercilessly. I felt my pulse quickening as we went through the entrance. I stopped dead when I saw just how large this place was, where millions of people, most of them Jews, had been killed on an industrial scale.

Anatoly Ignatiev guided us through the three camps, he let us go everywhere, to the barracks where the prisoners had sheltered, the kitchens, the places where Dr. Mengele had carried out his cruel experiments, the gas chambers, and the rooms where the dead people were sorted as if their corpses were those of animals. First their skin and then their hair was removed to make wax and other goods, then their gold teeth were taken out, and finally they were taken to the crematoria ovens . . .

I don’t know how many hours we spent in the death camp, all I know is that we had to stop a couple of times for me to vomit. Ravensbrück had moved us; Auschwitz froze our blood. It was a city, a small city raised up with a single objective: to kill.

The train lines stopped here, because here the only destination was death.

“You’ve seen enough, let’s go,” Anatoly Ignatiev insisted.

But I did not want to escape. If my father and Dalida had suffered here, if their lives had been stolen from them in this place, then I needed at least to withstand visiting it, to face up to this place where the spirits of the dead seemed fated to dwell forever.

I saw Dalida, yes, I saw her as she tried to walk in the mud. I felt her despair when they pushed her into the barracks where she had to live for a long year. She must have tried to cheer herself up, telling herself that after being tortured by the Gestapo nothing worse could happen to her. Maybe a woman as desperate as she was had come over to greet her and tell her that this was the place where people came to die, whether it be days or months the end was the same for everyone. She listened attentively to all the advice she was given. Which of the guards was the most sadistic, the work they had to do, the desperation to discover that there was no way to escape from here.

Dalida had a personality like a magnet, so soon she had friends to share her misery with, her own misfortune and those like her. And she had told them about Palestine. Of course she had. Palestine, the rediscovered home, the land that was waiting for them.

I was sick when I left Auschwitz. I had a fever, my stomach hurt, I needed air. I asked Gustav to go get drunk with Anatoly Ignatiev on his own, I needed to put myself back together.

When I got back to the hotel I fell onto my bed and went to sleep straight away. I don’t know how I managed to sleep, but I did, and in my sleep I saw the depths of hell. The hell I saw in my dream, my hell, was nothing other than Auschwitz.

The next morning Gustav woke me, worried about my health.

“We’ll go back to Berlin so you can see a doctor.”

“I won’t see a German doctor. Never,” I replied.

Gustav was scared by my insistence.

“But . . .”

“We are Jews, do you think we can put our lives in the hands of a German? All of them, they all knew about it and it seemed fine to them, they are all guilty of genocide, and you want me to go to a German doctor, to have someone see me who either said nothing, or else openly welcomed the Final Solution.”

“You can’t blame all the Germans,” Gustav said.

“Yes, yes, I can, and I will, they are all guilty. And I will never, never forgive them. We cannot forgive them, don’t you see what they have done? The Holocaust was not the action of a single madman, or of a group of men, but it was the action of an entire country, and they are all guilty. I am disgusted to think that some of them now want to make the world think that they knew nothing.”

“Please, Ezekiel, stop going over it again and again, or else you’ll go mad!”

“I may go mad, but however mad I become, my madness will not make me kill all the Germans. You know why? Because this was not the act of madmen; it was a perfectly thought-through, organized, and executed plan. There is not a single grain of madness in what they did. For God’s sake, Gustav, let’s not pardon them by calling them mad!”

 

Captain Anatoly Ignatiev called us to tell us he had found someone who had known Dalida. She was a woman who, like my sister, had been forced to prostitute herself to the soldiers who guarded the camp, those cursed devils of the SS.

She was named Sara Cohen and she was Greek, from Thessaloniki. She was in a Red Cross camp.

I thought about my mother. Miriam. Her family had come to Palestine after being expelled from Spain and taking refuge in Thessaloniki. So I felt that I had a link to this woman not just because she had known my sister, but because my mother could not explain who she was without taking into account her Greek origins.

 

It was not easy to get permission to talk to the survivors of the camps that were under Red Cross control, but with the help of Boris and Captain Ignatiev, we managed to get to see Sara Cohen.

When we finally found her we thought we were visiting a ghost camp. Hundreds of skeletal men and women, exhausted, their gazes lost in the distance, all trying to return to the land of the living, were walking from one side to the other, followed by a nurse, or a doctor, or a good samaritan who was helping in the work of the camp.

The doctor who met us said his name was Ralf Levinsohn and he told us to be careful and not to do anything that might make this woman who was prepared to speak with us sink any deeper into the pain that had swallowed her.

“Sara Cohen went through Dr. Mengele’s hands and if she’s not dead it is because the SS officers took a fancy to her. But she has suffered more than any human being can bear. Her physical health is fragile but her mental state is even more so. She is very young, she has just turned twenty-five, and she is finally escaping from a battle between madness and reason, but she is on the border and we are worried that we might lose her.”

We followed Dr. Levinsohn to a ward where several patients were sitting around without looking at one another, each one trying to escape from the visions of hell that would accompany them until their dying day.

Sara was sitting in a corner. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be sleeping.

“Sara . . . Sara, I’ve brought these men I told you about . . . They’re related to your friend Dalida . . .” The doctor spoke so softly that it was difficult to hear him.

For a few seconds she didn’t move and made no sign that she had heard him, then with an agonizing slowness she opened her eyes and looked at me. At that moment I fell in love with her.

I don’t know how long we spent looking at each other. I didn’t know if she was trying to judge me, or was looking for traces of Dalida in me. I couldn’t look away from her eyes because, even in her extreme fragility, she seemed to me to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Yes, the green of her eyes had faded a little through what she had been forced to see, and her body seemed to be broken into pieces, a heap of inert bones, and her blonde hair was dull and her hands were rough, but even so, her beauty did not appear to be of this world. I don’t know why I thought of Katia. Until this moment Katia had seemed to me the most beautiful woman in the world. But Katia’s beauty had been earthly, elegant, full, whereas Sara Cohen seemed to be a transparent butterfly with broken wings.

Gustav held my arm and squeezed it to show how worried he was about Sara, and the doctor looked at us expectantly, and just as he was about to tell us that we should go, she spoke.

“Ezekiel . . .” She said my name in a whisper.

“Yes, I am Ezekiel Zucker, Dalida’s brother.”

“I want to get out of here, I want to go home . . . ,” she murmured.

“I will take you, I promise. I give you my word that I will take you.”

Gustav and the doctor looked at me in surprise. I had made such a ringing affirmation that I thought they were scared that nothing would stop me from fulfilling the promise I had just made to Sara Cohen.

“She told me about you . . . She missed you . . . She missed her mother. At night, when we came back from . . .” Sara closed her eyes and I knew that she was seeing what had happened. “Well, you know . . . She would throw herself on the bed and cry and call for her mother in a low voice. She asked her forgiveness for having left her, and I would get up and try to comfort her. I said that her mother would forgive her everything. Dalida wouldn’t forgive herself. She blamed herself for being so selfish as to leave Palestine to live in Paris and London, to have dresses, go to parties . . . She loved her father, and admired his new wife. Katia? Yes, I think she said her name was Katia.”

She closed her eyes again. You could see that she was exhausted by the effort of speaking, of remembering.

“You should rest,” the doctor said. “Maybe these gentlemen can come back tomorrow . . .”

But she opened her eyes and looked at me in fright.

“No, no . . . I’m not tired, I want to speak, I want to leave this place, he promised that he would take me away from here . . . I don’t want to be here . . .”

I went up to her and took her hand. She pulled herself away with such violence that I was scared. I felt confused. She seemed to repel all physical contact, but a second later she held her hand out to me and started to cry.

“You shouldn’t have taken her hand,” the doctor scolded me. “I think that’s quite enough for today . . .”

Sara insisted once again.

“I want to speak. I want to tell them what I know. And then I want to leave here,” she repeated.

“We don’t want to upset her, we can come back tomorrow,” Gustav said.

“I will speak, I will speak . . . I was in Auschwitz when Dalida arrived. I had been here for a few months, yes, I remember that they put us on the train in March 1943 . . . The Jews in Thessaloniki had thought they would survive until as late as ’43 . . . We had been confined to the ghetto, we had been thrown out of our homes, we had lost everything of value that we owned, but we thought that we might keep our lives. But in February the men came . . .”

“Sara, you have to tell these men what you remember of Dalida.” Dr. Levinsohn tried to stop her from getting lost in her own memories.

“Let her carry on, I want to know everything,” I said to the doctor.

“I don’t know if it will do her any good . . . ,” he protested.

“Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner were their names. Everything got worse when they arrived. We had to have the yellow star sewn to our overcoats and we couldn’t go outside at night, we couldn’t use the tram, we couldn’t go into a café; the Jews were thrown out of all the unions, of any organization they were members of . . . They ordered that all the Jewish houses should have a mark so that they could be identified. We weren’t allowed to work, so we had to sell all that we had, until they forbade us from doing that as well. The time came then when the SS men decided to confine us all in a single space near the station . . . They put barbed wire around it and posted guards to see that we didn’t escape. It was an area of town that had been built a century before by Jews who were fleeing the tsar’s pogroms . . . Who would have said that this place of freedom would become a prison . . . We organized ourselves as best we could, but we barely had enough to eat. They had taken everything away from us. Then Brunner announced one day that we were to be sent to Krakow and that we would start a new life there in a Jewish colony. None of us wanted to go. Thessaloniki was our own little country, the country our ancestors had founded when they left Spain. My father was an old man, my mother was younger than he was, but she fell sick during these months of captivity and I was in part the cause of her sickness. I had a boyfriend, Nikos, a Greek and a Christian. We had planned to escape, to go to Istanbul, where we could live without the pressure of his parents or mine. A Jew and a Christian! But we loved each other and didn’t care about religion. When we were locked in the camp I was already pregnant. In the middle of the disaster another disaster: a Jewish girl pregnant and without a husband. Nikos did what he could to get me out of the camp, risking his life because as well as wanting to rescue a Jew, he was a member of the KKE, the Greek Communist Party. But all his efforts were in vain. They arrested him and shot him. When they made us board the train I was so desperate I didn’t even care where we were being taken.”

Sara closed her eyes again. The doctor came up to me and whispered in my ear, trying to stop her from hearing:

“She’s wandering, maybe she won’t tell you anything about your sister.”

I said that I was prepared to listen to her, that her story was the story of millions of souls and that these stories were a part of my own story.

She opened her eyes again and I saw that she seemed to have difficulty focusing her eyes. When she did so, then she continued.

“You can’t imagine what it is to feel that you are less than anyone else. For the SS men we were not human, and so we didn’t deserve to be treated as though we were. We weren’t allowed off the train until we reached Krakow, Auschwitz . . . Imagine, hundreds of people in these cattle cars, without even a corner to do their most intimate activities. The stench was disgusting and as each day went by we ourselves lost whatever remained of our humanity. When we got to the camp, the SS guards separated us. My father and my mother were sent to join a large group of older people; the younger and stronger ones were sent to the other side. I shouted out because I did not want to be separated from my parents, but one of the guards hit me with the butt of his gun and I fell to the floor with a wound on my head. Another guard came over and kicked me in the stomach so hard that I felt it right in my guts. ‘Get up, bitch!’ he shouted, and I don’t know where I found the strength, but I stood up, as I knew that had I not done so he would have killed me where I lay. I heard my mother’s laments and my father’s angry voice as he tried to get across to help me. But they were beaten as well. Then they were marched off to a set of barracks. That night they were sent with all the other old and sick people to the gas chambers. I went into labor that night. The women in the barracks helped me bring my children into the world under cover of darkness, in the light of a single candle stub that they kept alight I don’t know how. I don’t know how they managed it. One of them opened up my flesh with her own hands to take my children out of my insides. Another one put her hand over my mouth to stop my screams from alerting the guards. ‘It might be bad to give birth here, but it would be far worse if you were in Dr. Mengele’s ward,’ a young woman of my age murmured. I don’t know how long I took to give birth, but I remember that it was dawn when finally they put my children into my arms. They were two beautiful boys, identical. I could barely move. I was exhausted and had lost a lot of blood, but I felt more alive than I ever had before, ready to defend my sons from the evil that I was sure was falling over us like snow. For all that I tried to hide myself in the barracks, the guards found me. My children cried and were hungry and there was not a single drop of milk in my breasts. They beat me to make me get up and one of them went to find his superior. When that man came in . . . he looked me up and down and ordered the kapos to take my sons to Dr. Mengele’s ward. ‘He’ll be happy with this present,’ he said with a laugh. I started to scream and tried to stop them taking them from me . . . They beat me and I fell unconscious to the floor. When I came to I felt the man’s breath so close to my face that I was about to vomit. ‘Excellent . . . Excellent . . . She’s coming round,’ the words made their way into my head. When I recovered the power of speech I asked for my sons, but the man made a gesture with his hand that I should not bother him. I asked again. A nurse injected something into my arm and I lost consciousness. If it had not been for my children I shouldn’t have wanted to come back to the land of the living. I came back because I thought I could save them. I don’t know what they did with my body, but Dr. Mengele had fun experimenting on me. They injected me with substances, I don’t know what they were, and they examined my uterus to see what extraordinary capacities my womb had to produce twins. The more I asked for my children the more they refused to answer my questions, until one day a nurse said: ‘They are not your sons, they belong to the doctor now.’ They sent me back to my barracks one day. I could barely walk, I don’t know what they had done to me, but I felt my guts burning and I didn’t stop bleeding. ‘If she lives she will work, if she doesn’t work she’s no use, so you’ll know what to do with her,’ I heard a guard say to one of the kapos. But I lived. I had made up my mind to live, to rescue my children from wherever they might be. I knew nothing about Dr. Mengele, my companions in the barracks told me about his passion for twins, his murderous experiments. I don’t know why, but one of the guards took a shine to me, and I was forced to become a prostitute. Some women were forced to prostitute themselves to our guards in the camp. The soldiers abused us, and even the officers used us to let off steam every now and then. In Auschwitz, if they gave you a piece of soap and ordered you to wash, then you knew what was in store for you. There was another woman whom they used as a prostitute as well in the camp at the same time as me. She was older than I was and seemed resigned to it. ‘If you struggle it will be worse, they’ll beat you and they’ll rape you all the same,’ she said, but I found it impossible to give in without a struggle. I hated those men. The guard who had chosen me was angry because they sent me to his superior’s dormitory. The man didn’t even look at me. He pushed me against the wall, ripped off my clothes, and raped me. I stayed still, trying to control this disgust that rose and rose in my throat until I vomited. When the sergeant was tired of raping me I still had to suffer twice more, once from the guard who had picked me out and again by a friend of his. The rapes became a routine. I don’t know how many soldiers, how many officers, how many kapos all abused me. I can still feel those strange hands running over my body, mistreating my flesh, humiliating me and turning me into a soulless whore. The sergeant from the first day made it his habit to be first with me every night, and then he didn’t care what they did with me. As the weeks went by he started to speak to me, I barely listened to him and replied with indifference, what should I care what he had to say to me? But one day I thought that the man might be able to tell me something about my children. When I asked him, he was thoughtful. Me, a subhuman, asking him about what had happened to my children. I don’t know why, but he promised to find out what had happened to them. The next day he swore to me that my children were well, that Dr. Mengele was treating them as if they were a real treasure, that nothing bad would happen to them, and that if I were a little more responsive when I was under his body then he might even take me to see them. I obeyed. Yes, I obeyed. The promise that I might see my children overcame my desire to keep my dignity and to stop my body from becoming more than a simple object. I asked him every night when I was going to see my children, and he slapped me and told me not to pressure him and to behave. He never took me to see them. I wouldn’t have been able to even if he had wanted to help me . . . When your sister Dalida came she took a bed next to mine. The woman who had been in it had died of a heart attack. The first day she arrived the first thing she asked was how she could escape. The other women told her that it was impossible and that if she tried then all she would do was hasten her date with death. But she was so determined that a few days later I went up to her and said that if she found a way to escape then I would go with her, although first she would have to help me find my children. I told her my story and she told me hers and we started to dream of escape. Less than a month had gone by when they gave your sister a piece of soap and asked her to wash. She cried so much that I didn’t know how to comfort her. The first night she was raped by half a dozen guards. When she came back to the barracks at dawn she could barely walk and the dried blood on her legs was like some macabre drawing. I hugged her so that she wouldn’t feel alone, but from that night onwards, just as had happened to me, Dalida’s heart was frozen.”

 

Sara closed her eyes and I was afraid that she was lost among her memories. Dr. Levinsohn made a sign for us to leave, but I was not ready to go without hearing everything that had happened to my sister, so although Gustav got up from his chair, ready to follow the doctor, I stayed still and waited for Sara to open her eyes again. She did so, but looked at me for a while as if lost, as if she didn’t know who we were or where she was.

“If you’re tired . . . ,” I said.

“I am tired, yes, very tired. But you need to know what happened to be able to rest, so I will forget my tiredness to help cure you of yours.”

“Thank you.” I don’t know what else I could have said.

“After that first night Dalida did not cry again. She made herself keep quiet. She didn’t want those swine to see her scared or beaten. ‘They will kill me all the same, but I won’t give them the satisfaction of laughing over my distress,’ she said in an effort to keep her spirits up. We worked in the arms factory during the day. We were woken as soon as dawn had broken and they took us to the factory where we worked until afternoon, when they took us back to the barracks. It didn’t take long for a guard to come with his piece of soap. Then we washed ourselves as best we could before they took us to where the men were waiting for us in the canteen. Allowing ourselves to be raped became a routine with us. They treated us like pieces of meat and we made no effort to be anything else. Some of the guards tried to make us drink and we drank. Sometimes they offered us food and although at first I refused because I didn’t want any special treatment from them, your sister convinced me to take this food; it was nothing special, gherkins, black bread, pickled onions, but we kept what we could and took it back to the barracks to share with our comrades. Some of them . . . Well, some of them looked at us with disgust. The Jews in the camp hated the kapos and they hated us who were their prostitutes. They did not dare say anything to us directly, but their looks . . . There was not a day that went past without some group being taken to the gas chambers. We were saved by having been chosen to work as whores. We bought time for ourselves involuntarily with our bodies, but if we had been given the choice we would surely have opted for death instead of the use that those pigs put us to. Another sergeant became enchanted by Dalida. He called for her every night and even paid his comrades for them to allow her to stay with him all night. Dalida hated him as much as she hated the rest of them, she said that he used her for his most degrading fantasies. Sometimes she came home with bruises all over her body because he enjoyed hitting her. He tied her to the bed and . . . Well, I’ll spare you the details, they are not necessary. You can’t imagine what we had to deal with . . . I don’t know why, but one day they took your sister to Dr. Mengele. He had asked for young women for his experiments. They sterilized her and irradiated her, but they miscalculated the time and she suffered burns that left her maimed. She could no longer work in the factory, much less be of any use to the guards, so . . .”

 

Sara burst into tears. She looked at a distant point, where surely she was seeing Dalida. My legs started to tremble.

“I never saw her again, they took her to the gas chamber with other women who were no longer of any use to them. I didn’t find out until two days later, when I insisted to the guard who had taken a liking to me that he tell me what had become of Dalida. He was drunk and started to laugh. ‘She’s where you’ll end up soon. You get uglier every day and you’re no comfort to a man.’ And then he pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the back. I got up, expecting him to do it again, because that is what he liked to do. And he did it. When I got back to the barracks I knew that I would never see Dalida again. When they set us free I insisted that they tell me what had happened to my sons. The doctor . . .” She looked straight at me. “The doctor looked in the archives and found out what they had done to my sons. They had injected something into their eyes to try to change their color . . . They were blinded . . . They were not happy with that . . . They sewed them together, yes they sewed them together; Mengele wanted to know how Siamese twins were put together . . . They tortured my children to death. They only lived a few months. My little ones couldn’t bear it.”

 

I had been crying myself for some time now. I didn’t mind, I didn’t care if anyone saw me crying. Also, Sara was not impressed to see a man crying. Her tears had dried up a long time before, and she could no longer feel compassion for others.

“You should go.” The doctor’s words were more an order than an invitation.

“He promised to get me out of here,” Sara said.

“I will, I won’t leave without you.”

We followed the doctor to his office. I was ready to fight to take Sara with me.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea.” The doctor seemed worried on my behalf. “She is ill, ill in her body and ill in her mind. She was rescued from hell, and I don’t know how she can return to any kind of normality. Also, I would have to fill out lots of forms to let you take her.”

“Yes, I know, the Jews are still a problem, and no one knows what to do with the survivors of the camps. Everyone regrets what has happened but they won’t even let them emigrate. America won’t take them in, France won’t, Britain won’t . . .”

“Mr. Zucker, I am an American and a Jew. My parents were Polish, they left for the States at the end of the nineteenth century, and now I, their son, the son of a pair of peasants, am a doctor. When I was a child my mother told me about the pogroms, about how it was to live and feel yourself different. I don’t ever forget that I am a Jew and I promise you that I do all that I can for the people who are here,” Dr. Levinsohn said.

“Help me take Sara with me,” I begged.

“You have to think about what the doctor says,” Gustav dared say.

I turned around angrily, and raised my voice as I replied.

“Just imagine for a moment that it was Katia, or my own sister, and that someone could save them, get them out of here . . . How do you think they would be if they were still alive? They would be ghosts like Sara. I need to help her. I need to.”

 

It was hard to find Colonel Williams. At the British Military Government headquarters in Berlin they told us that he had gone back to London and would be gone for at least a week. His adjutant told me that he would try to track him down and tell him that I urgently wanted to speak with him. Then I insisted that the operator put me through to the Soviet headquarters in Berlin.

Boris listened to what I had to say without interrupting and didn’t seem to be surprised when I asked him to help me get Sara Cohen out of the Red Cross camp. He promised that he would talk with his colleague, Captain Anatoly Ignatiev.

“My friend Anatoly has already told me that you want to get this woman who was a friend of your sister’s out of Auschwitz. I won’t get in your way, I’ll do what I can, but give me a couple of days at least. It takes longer to get a piece of paper from one office to another than it does to win a war.”

 

I never imagined that the friendship between me and Gustav would be so intense. We had known each other as children and had found each other as men after the war, but we had little in common. He was an aristocrat, you knew it just to look at him, while I had grown up free as a bird at Hope Orchard, free of all conventional upbringing. However, in the course of those days that we had gone looking for Katia and my sister and my father, we had gotten to know each other and had come to feel a sincere affection for each other. So while I was trying to get Colonel Williams and Captain Stepanov to try to use their influence and get Sara out to be with us, Gustav, without saying anything, was putting the whole Foreign Office in motion to try to get the relevant recommendations to hurry up the necessary permissions. We managed to get them, all of us working together, but Gustav’s contribution was decisive.

We took Sara to Berlin and from there we traveled to London. None of us felt any desire to remain in Germany. I had to make an effort to control the anger that I felt toward the Germans. Sara could never forgive them, and Gustav was desolated by the loss of his Aunt Katia, although he seemed more in control of himself and did not lose his equanimity.

Vera was relieved to see us. She had been scared for her son. She knew Gustav better than anyone, and was aware that behind his apparent imperturbability was a sensitive man to whom no suffering was alien. If she was surprised to see Sara she did not show it, and she immediately welcomed her as if she were an old friend. She set her up in the guest bedroom, and offered to take her shopping. Sara lacked everything, even the most basic necessities.

Her screams woke us up some nights. She called for her sons, for the twins she had barely had time to hold in her arms. Vera would immediately go into her room and hug Sara like a child until she managed to calm her down. Gustav and I would normally stay in the doorway without daring to say anything. We did not know how to console her. Sara seemed to find a certain degree of comfort in Vera’s company.

“What are you thinking of doing?” Vera asked me when we found ourselves alone together one day.

“I will go back to Palestine. I have to tell my mother that Dalida and my father are dead. I didn’t think I could write it down. I want my life back. I couldn’t live anywhere that wasn’t Palestine; my mother is there, my family, my friends, my house. I miss opening a window and seeing the olive trees. I was raised as a peasant, subject to the cycle of nature. Suffering when the trees got blight or when it didn’t rain or when it rained too much.”

“You should study when you go back, it’s what your father would have wanted.”

“Maybe I could go to the university and become an agricultural engineer, but I don’t want to make any plans.”

“And Sara?”

“She will come with me to Palestine. Gustav has promised to help me get the permissions I need. The British have placed restrictions on immigration, they want to stop the survivors from going to Palestine, but where else can they go? Do you realize, Vera, that they don’t want us anywhere, that they think we’re a problem for them, that they don’t know what to do with the survivors?”

“Have you asked her? Maybe she wants to go back to Thessaloniki, maybe she still has family there . . .”

I hadn’t thought of asking her. I took it for granted that she would come back to Jerusalem with me, that she would live at Hope Orchard and that when the wounds to her soul were healed we would get married. But Vera was right, Sara had to decide. She didn’t belong to me.

You should try to recover your father’s property in France. Your house in the Marais, the money in the bank. Some of that is here in London, though. Your father made a will.”

“Yes, Gustav told me, tomorrow we will go to the notary.”

I knew that my father had never been very interested in money, but even so he had had a talent for making it. He didn’t have an excessive amount, but the business he had been in with Konstantin had borne fruit. If Konstantin had left Vera and Gustav well off, then my father had done the same for Dalida and me. All that he had was for Dalida and me, except Dalida did not exist anymore, and so I was the sole owner of shares in one of the main City banks, as well as cash and, what was most surprising, a good handful of diamonds. Yes, my father had bought diamonds and had kept them in a safety deposit box in London. He had a fortune in precious stones that I could have sold, but Gustav told me that “it was not a good moment to sell precious stones. The best thing would be to keep them. You would lose money on them now.”

In the notary’s office I signed a document giving Gustav power of attorney so he could deal with my inheritance in London and act in my name in front of the French tribunals. The collaborationist government had confiscated the laboratory. The notary told me that it would be difficult to recover what had been expropriated, but at least I should try. Gustav thanked me for trusting him. This surprised me. If I trusted anyone in the world, it was Gustav. I was sure not only of his honesty, but also that he was a pure and good person.

When we left the notary’s office, Gustav seemed more melancholy than on other occasions. I asked him why.

“I would like to be like you, able to do whatever I want.”

“What’s stopping you?” I asked.

“The education I was given, the sense of duty I feel. If it were up to me I would go and retreat to a monastery. To pray, to think, to read, to be silent . . . But I have to marry and have children, and teach them the values of our traditions, the pride they should have to bear our name. Also, I couldn’t leave my mother alone. She has some family left in Russia, but it is unimaginable that she should live under Stalin’s boot. She and my father were lucky to be able to flee in time. They have friends in London, good friends of my father and of his family, but really the only person she has is me. I couldn’t be so selfish as to choose my own path and simply walk away. What sort of man would I be if I were not able to make sacrifices for the person I love the most? I think God puts us to the test.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear of Gustav’s religious concerns, but it was difficult for me to imagine him in this light. I wondered if I would be able to sacrifice myself for my mother and my duty as Gustav was doing. I didn’t really know what my duty was, and anyway, my mother had Daniel. He was her oldest son, from her first marriage, so I had an advantage over Gustav; as I was not an only child, I could do what I wanted in my life without my conscience pricking me.

When I suggested to Sara that she come with me to Palestine she fell into one of those silences that caused me so much pain. I knew that I should give her time to think, so I decided not to pressure her. Meanwhile, I received an unexpected visit. Ben, my dear Ben, sent me a telegram to say that he would shortly be arriving in London.

Vera insisted that he stay at the house, although she regretted having only a single guest room, the one where Sara was staying. I laughed at her worry. Ben was like me, we were both children of Hope Orchard, who had grown up sharing everything, none of us who lived there had anything of our own, everything belonged to everyone, no one sold or bought anything unless the whole commune agreed. Then we had finished our youth in a kibbutz, so sharing a room with me in Vera’s house would really not be a problem.

I went to meet him at the airport. We hugged for a long time. We felt that we were brothers, not just for the childhood we had shared, but also because we had learned to survive together, and the first time we had been called upon to kill a man, he was at my side and I was at his.

Vera and Gustav greeted him with such warmth that it was impossible for him not to feel at home. Sara didn’t pay him any attention. She had been sunk into her own thoughts for days and barely spoke.

Vera surprised us with a Russian dinner. I don’t know how she managed it, but we ate pickled cucumbers, borscht, and blinis with salmon, and we toasted each other with an old bottle of vodka that she had been saving. We enjoyed ourselves, forgetting that we were only survivors and the next day would remind us of this reality.

Sara seemed absent, although I think that from time to time she showed a glimmer of interest.

Later, before going to bed, Ben and I had a chat.

“They’re good people,” he said, referring to Gustav and Vera.

“Yes, they are. I’m only finding out now, when I was younger I couldn’t appreciate what they were worth. I suppose that because they were related to Katia it was hard for me to love them.”

“And Sara, is she important to you?”

I explained her story, and how I had fallen in love with her the first moment I saw her, and that I was willing to do anything to help cure the wounds that had clawed their way into her soul.

“She made an effort to live thinking that she would get her children back, but when she found out that they had been murdered, she gave in, she had nothing left to live for.”

“Do you think she loves you?” he asked skeptically.

“I don’t know, I don’t think so, not yet. She needs to get well, to find her desire to live once again. I trust that my mother and yours will help her find it.”

Yes, I trusted my mother and Marinna. If anyone could help Sara it was them. Marinna was as strong as her mother Kassia had been before her. Ben had inherited her strength and his father’s prudence. Igor was a man who never acted on impulse, who liked to weigh the pros and cons of what he did, and who had taught Ben and me as children to think before we acted.

“Sara will get better only if she wants to get better. I think that you will suffer, and that you are perhaps obsessed with her, but not really in love with her . . . You don’t know her at all. And if, as you told me, they sterilized her in Auschwitz . . . Well, if you marry her you won’t be able to have children.”

If anyone else had said this to me I would have gotten angry, and I would have told him not to stick his nose into my life, but this was Ben, who was, like Wädi, more than a brother to me.

Later on he told me that he was not going to go straight back to Palestine.

“The Haganah wants to help all the camp survivors who want to come to Palestine. You know that the British don’t want to grant anyone permission, so we have no option other than to take them over the border illegally. I am part of a group that is going to work in Europe buying boats and then taking survivors across to our coasts. Why don’t you stay and help us?”

If I hadn’t met Sara then I would have signed up for this adventure, but my only obsession was her. I wanted to offer her a home, a place where she could get well again, and I knew of none better than Hope Orchard.

Ben gave me news of the Ziad family. Wädi had survived the war fighting in the sands of the Tunisian and Egyptian deserts, and his father, Mohammed, had stayed loyal to the Nashashibi family and had stood against the mufti.

I was proud of them, and comforted to know that we had fought on the same side, against the same enemy.

I asked him about Aya and Yusuf, and their children Rami and Noor, and about Naima, Salma and Mohammed’s daughter, with whom Ben was in love.

“They married her off,” he said, without bothering to hide how much this upset him.

“But she’s just a girl!” I said indignantly.

“No, she’s not. She’s twenty-two years old.”

“And . . . Who did they marry her to?” I was curious whether I knew Naima’s husband.

“We don’t know him, he’s the oldest son of Yusuf’s sister. You know, Yusuf, Aya’s husband. He’s named Târeq and he is a successful merchant. He has a house in Amman and one in Jericho. They have already had their first child.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, I know it had to be like that. They would never have let us get married.”

“I don’t know why . . . After fighting in this war I think we have another one about to start, the war of prejudices. What’s the harm in a Jew marrying a Christian or a Muslim? People can pray to whichever deity they want, or not pray at all, but as the famous rabbi Jesus of Nazareth once said, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,’ and I don’t think that God would mind whom we fell in love with.” I was angry. I was upset at Ben’s sadness, for all that I had always thought that his flirtations with Naima were nothing more than the expression of adolescent stirrings.

“Well, we have other battles to win now, and the most important one is for the Jews who have survived to now have a home,” Ben replied in resignation.

“If Sara were a Muslim I would not let anyone try to take her away from me,” I insisted stupidly.

“But she’s a Jew.”

Ben changed the subject and told me the news he had from our home. Louis was still coming back and forth from Ben-Gurion’s headquarters, and my Uncle Yossi was still a doctor, although he had had some health problems himself. His daughter, my cousin Yasmin, was dedicated body and soul to the Haganah, as was her husband Mikhail.

“Yasmin was depressed for a long time after she found out that she couldn’t have children. But my mother said in her letter that Mikhail had told her this didn’t matter and that now the two of them are closer than ever.”

 

I was upset that Ben had to go to Rome, and was impatient for the British authorities to give permission for Sara to come with me to Palestine. We celebrated joyfully the day that Gustav came round with the anxiously awaited document.

Vera said goodbye, saying that we would always have a place in her house, and Gustav promised that he and his mother would come visit us.

I had a British passport. I had served in their army and felt ambivalent toward them. I admired their discipline and bravery, but I did not trust their intentions. I had learned that the British always placed their interests first in any situation, whatever kind of situation it was, and that Palestine was nothing more to them than a file in their geopolitical archive.

 

My mother was waiting for me at the port in Haifa, which was where our ship docked. Igor and Louis were with her. I could see her among the crowd on the wharf as our ship approached. She was walking impatiently from one side to another, incapable of controlling her nervousness. I was nervous as well. I had told her nothing about my father or Dalida in the letter I had sent her to tell her that I was coming across with Sara, so my mother didn’t know that she had lost her husband and her daughter in Auschwitz.

I had scarcely put my feet on dry land when she came up to hug me, and held me so tight that I thought she would break my ribs. I hugged Igor and Louis once I had gotten myself out of her embrace. Louis was older. His hair was grey, almost white, but he was as strong and warm as always. Igor was sadder than I remembered, but he seemed happy to see me.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder and shouted “Wädi!” Yes, it was my friend’s hand, and if I had been moved to embrace my mother, the presence of my friend meant that I could no longer contain my tears. Some people looked on in surprise to see an Arab and a Jew embracing as if they were brothers. In their eyes I saw that Palestine had changed and that the breach that had started to open between the Arabs and the Jews was getting ever wider. But I did not want to distract myself with bitter thoughts and instead I enjoyed this reunion with my dear friends.

Sara said nothing, and she looked more fragile and insecure than was normal for her.

“Mother, this is Sara . . . I wrote to you about her in my letter . . .”

My mother embraced her affectionately and presented her to the men. They were surprised to see how comfortable Sara was when they shook her hand.

“Well, I see that you’ve prospered,” I said when I saw Louis’s truck, a slightly more modern model than he had been in possession of the last time I had seen him.

Marinna was waiting for us with Aya and Salma at the entrance to Hope Orchard. Noor, Aya’s daughter, was there, but I did not see her older brother Rami, nor any sign of Naima.

Marinna and Aya hugged me tight, but Noor was shy and did not allow me to kiss her. She had become a very beautiful young woman, and they said that she would be married soon.

Although neither Sara nor I were hungry, we couldn’t refuse to eat the food that Marinna and my mother had prepared. Sara especially liked the pistachio cake that Salma had made, following Dina’s recipe. My father had loved Dina’s cakes, I thought with nostalgia, evoking in my mind the profound friendship that had united them.

“They are all so old,” I thought, when Mohammed and Yusuf arrived later on. Mohammed’s hair was grey, and Yusuf, who had always seemed to be such a gallant man, now walked with a stoop and his eyes, which had been so lively, were now faded.

It was not until late in the afternoon, when everyone had gone home, that my mother asked me to come talk to her alone.

Marinna was helping Sara get settled in, and Louis and Igor were having a cigarette by the door to the house.

My mother looked at me and I read in her eyes the question: Where are my husband and daughter?

I tried to control my feelings as I told her that they had been murdered by the Nazis. That Samuel had died the day he arrived at Auschwitz, but that Dalida . . . I cried as I told her that these devils had made her into a prostitute and, not content with crushing her soul, they had experimented on her body, trying to apply the form of sterilization that had been thought up by the mad killer, Dr. Josef Mengele. I told her how both of them had fought in the Resistance, and how they had saved the lives of others, the lives of Jews who, thanks to their bravery, had cheated their appointment with the gas chamber.

My mother trembled. Her whole body trembled. I don’t know how she managed to deal with my tale. I didn’t spare her a single detail. She had a right to know the entire truth.

I embraced her, trying to control her convulsions, and we both sobbed and groaned, unaware that Louis and Igor had come in quite a while back.

The next day at breakfast I told the rest of the group what had happened to Samuel and Dalida, and explained in detail what Auschwitz was like. I was telling them about the extermination camp when Sara came into the room. I stopped talking at once. To the surprise of us all, Sara, after sitting down, took up the conversation and told them how she, Dalida, and others had all lived through hell, sharing all the details of what happened in that land of the Devil.

Marinna couldn’t bear what she was hearing and burst into tears. Louis and Igor seemed to have been struck dumb. Palestine had received clear news of the Holocaust, but when the events were told by a survivor the horror acquired an extra dimension. Sara revealed her forearm and showed where she had been tattooed with her number.

 

We all cried, and hugged each other, and were made disconsolate by the tragedy, astonished by the scale of the evil. Louis slammed his fist down on the table and stood up. He looked at us all and said:

“Never again. No, never again will we Jews allow ourselves to be persecuted, killed, tortured, treated as if we were not human. Never again will we be subject to anyone, will we tremble thinking that we can be expelled from our homes, from our villages. No, it will never happen again, for we have our own land, however small it may be, and all the Jews in the world know that they have a place where they can be born, and live and die. We will never allow more Holocausts to take place, never again allow another pogrom. It is over, over for good.”

 

After having heard Sara speak, no one dared question my desire to join my life to hers. And if my mother regretted that we could not have children, she never said anything. We had survived, and that was enough. She couldn’t bear any more losses. Not only had she lost her husband and her daughter, but also Daniel, her firstborn son.

From what my mother told me, my half-brother had fallen ill suddenly. He was tired and weak, and the leaders of the kibbutz called my mother. In spite of Daniel’s protests my mother and my Uncle Yossi went to find him and took him to Jerusalem. The diagnosis could not be any more devastating: leukemia. The word alone was a death sentence. Daniel lived barely six more months.

My mother cried as she told me of Daniel’s suffering, and I blamed myself for not having been able to know him better, for we sincerely loved each other. Some nights, when I was on watch, I had thought of my brother whom I had never learned to appreciate like he deserved. He was like a foreign body in our lives, he felt like that and we made him feel like that. He never understood how his mother could have married again, how she could have shared her life with another man, could have had other children, could have torn him out of his home and brought him to that community of unknown people. I think that Daniel started to feel happy in the kibbutz, there he was himself and himself alone and counted on the respect and attention of all the others. I might have asked myself why he had to die just when he was finally happy. But I didn’t ask that question, because I had come from living among the dead, and so Daniel’s death was just one more loss.

I said to my mother that I would wait until Sara was ready to marry me and that meanwhile I would go to the university and work at Hope Orchard just as my father had before me. She didn’t argue. It was decided, I would become an agricultural engineer. I could think of nothing better.