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Tel Aviv, Sunday, July 30, 1942
My Dearest Samuel,
Touch me with your words. Touch me with words brighter than light, deeper than shadow, and softer than your sleep-heavy breath—which should be filling the void in this empty bed, but is not. Touch me with your words because, without their anchoring power, I fear I will simply float away. Caress me with your words, and I will reciprocate with my own whisper-soft caresses. Touch me, my love, because I cannot conceive of an alternate light in this terrible darkness.
It’s now late at night, and I shall mail this first thing in the morning. I woke early today, sweltering after a miserable night. It is ungodly hot this summer, Aron tells me. Just last month, the highest temperature yet recorded in Asia was measured in Tirat Zvi, 53.9 degrees Celsius. The July Tel Aviv air is so heavy that it sticks in one’s lungs.
I had a dreadful chicory coffee, which is all that even your brother can get hold of, and went to buy a Palestine Post on King George Street. The news from Warsaw was beyond horrific. The Nazis have converted part of the Warszawa Gdanska train station and now call it Umschlagplatz—collection point. Every day, according to Aron’s friend Henryk Rosmarin, the Polish Consul General to Palestine, the Nazis “deport” 10,000 Jews. But they’re not really deporting them, Henryk insisted. He also insisted I call him by his first name—everyone is so refreshingly informal here.
We met him in Jerusalem. The Polish Military Theatre put on a benefit concert for Polish war orphans in the lovely courtyard garden of the Cafe Europe, right on Zion Square. Aron was of course invited. We arrived in Jerusalem after sunset, and the night air was beautifully clear and cool.
I think you would like Henryk, my darling. He used to edit Moment Magazine in Warsaw, and was especially outspoken about the numerus clausus—from which you suffered so personally. He’s also a lawyer and former member of the Sejm, the Parliament. He has deep-set eyes and delightfully fleshy jowls that shake when he laughs, very much like your father. But his eyes weren‘t laughing as he told Aron and I what was happening to the Jews of Warsaw, and indeed to the Jews everywhere in occupied Europe.
I’m an educated woman, but I have to confess I felt like a confused schoolgirl. Henryk simply used combinations of words that I’d never encountered—phrases with no meaning like “systematic extermination” and “industrial-scale murder.” Aron shook his head gravely, as if he understood perfectly, but I finally had to interject because it simply made no sense. Henryk was kind and explained. They have corroborating testimonies from too many sources to ignore, you see. There’s simply no further argument as to what is happening. And not just in Poland...
I’ve been in Palestine for several months now, my love, And my Hebrew has improved dramatically. I can now understand the rumors—whispered in intensely quiet conversations at the market or in small groups around public benches—but rumors are a far cry from personal confirmation by a government official. And now the Germans are coming here, the rumors (and Henryk) say. At the end of the El Alamein fiasco, just four days ago, the British captured documents from an Afrika Korps source, he told us. Hitler has authorized the SS to “deal with” the Jewish population in Palestine.
Are we to be “dealt with?” Is our fate to be the same as those poor souls in Warsaw—our former classmates, your parents’ friends? According to your brother, it will most definitively not be—not if he has anything to say about it. Yet his voice is only one of many. There’s a huge rift in the Yishuv leadership, Aron told me. Some are supporting the British decision to send much of the Palmach, our best fighters, south to Kibbutz Gat and Kibbutz Dorot. Despite being ridiculously ill-equipped—some don’t even have guns—the British expect them to hold off invading German tanks. This, instead of using them more effectively to stock caves and building defenses on the Carmel. The British, it seems, have their own priorities.
Here in Tel Aviv, Food Control is calling on citizens with open land next to their homes not to grow flowers, but rather food. The Haifa-Beirut railway line was dedicated, and the British are already moving unneeded staff and materiel directly from Cairo to Beirut. In Cairo, Henryk says, they’re burning sensitive documents, and the Egyptian newspapers carry pictures of a new German locomotive with armor plating as thick as a tank.
If only I had such armor, my love. If only these words, this terrible news, would bounce off me, leaving no marks. But I am scarred by the evil that so mercilessly chips at my soul, nibbling at my façade like the shrapnel from the Italian bombs that ate at the buildings on Bugrashov, just one street over from where I now sit. I am scratched. I am torn. I have no loving balm to soothe me. Hurry to me, Samuel. I long to be touched not only by your words, but by your soothing and beautiful hands.
I love you with all my heart,
Danuta
