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Tel Aviv, July 30, 1942
What are words in the face of the pain and rage, the cries of agony of the martyrs of Polish Jewry? Words will not express these agonies. Our deeds will!
Berl Katznelson wrote this in the morning’s Davar. The words stuck with me throughout the day, ineffectually circumnavigating my sweltering office like the hot air pushed by my feeble desk fan.
They continued to resonate when the sun finally took its daily cooling dip in the Mediterranean, lifting the cloak of summer heat. As Tel Aviv drew a collectively deep breath and exhaled with cool relief, I walked down Bugrashov, then along the sea breeze-swept promenade until I reached London Square.
The humble Armon Hotel on HaYarkon Street stood starkly dark in the blacked-out twilight, but crowds had filled the bar within. The smell of sweat, dust, and alcohol easily overcame the fickle breeze that trickled in around the blackout curtains. I scanned the mass of suits and uniforms—all male, of course—for Sean’s blond curls, in vain. He was late, at best, or more likely a no-show.
My face must have reflected the lump in my stomach, for Theo, the Armon’s iconic bartender, winked at me and deftly slid a chubby bottle of Eagle Beer across the bar. He’d seen me coming in here alone, and occasionally leaving in company, for many years. If the Armon Hotel bar existed as the solar system for homosexuals in Tel Aviv, Theo was its sun. Lives lived in darkness were quietly and cautiously illuminated in the Armon. No matter what face you presented to the rest of the world, no matter who you had to pretend to be, Theo knew you not only as you really were, but as you truly wanted to be known.
I nodded in thanks to him, but returned the bottle and asked for a seltzer. On the third and hopefully last day of a severe stomach flu, I feared alcohol would loosen floodgates that had only recently closed. I mopped my damp brow with my handkerchief, running a tender finger over the monogram. Sean had ordered them from London for me as a six-month anniversary present. I felt weak and must have looked peaked, yet I persisted and scanned the crowd again.
Words will not express these agonies. Our deeds will! Katznelson’s words resonated in my head, turning into an unconscious mantra in which I found some validation, but mostly anguish.
I strolled gently through the crowd, bumping an elbow here, a dangling slouch hat or rifle barrel there. I nodded, smiled thinly, exchanged a passing word in English or Hebrew with men I knew, and some whom I had known. Sean wasn’t here; there was no question. Would he come? He was either busy with the British retreat from Palestine, I told myself, or conducting his own personal retreat from a relationship that had become complex at best, potentially deadly at worst.
I stepped through the blackout curtains onto the balcony, which faced the street. Here the air was fresh, yet no matter how deeply I sucked the briny sea air, I couldn’t dispel the poison that seethed in my lungs, or the gurgling of my guts, which still protested at having been dragged out of bed.
Words will not express these agonies. Our deeds will!
Only last week, the Palestine Post reported mass deportations of Jews from Warsaw. Now, even the most recalcitrant doubts in the most optimistic minds had been dispelled. Now, in July 1942, the entire Yishuv viscerally understood the fate of European Jewry—and remained collectively powerless to substantially change it.
I felt nauseous, and spit over the balcony rail into the garden below. I tried to distract myself by surveying London Square—tasteful and newly completed. The black asphalt of HaYarkon Street gracefully arched its back around a switchback and glided down to the sea, leaving behind a deeply shaded garden on one side, and a beach-facing kiosk on the other. At night, the garden’s shade turned to shadow, and the venue had quickly become popular for nighttime trysts. The lack of streetlights under Tel Aviv’s wartime blackout contributed markedly to the garden’s seclusion and mystique. I spit again over the railing.
“The perception of powerlessness breeds desperation.” I recalled my father’s words at the train station on Chmielna Street in Warsaw, the morning I left for Palestine. His hands felt comfortingly heavy on my shoulders. He looked deep into my eyes with a fatherly knowledge and love that made me look away in shame. “You are in what Nietzsche called the ‘hour of the great contempt,’ but you are not desperate, my son. And though I understand why you feel powerless, I also know to the depths of my soul that you are not.”
The sea breeze flowed past me, leaving my face cooled, my back sweat-soaked, and my insides still gurgling. Voices surged in waves from the bar. My father had expected me to overcome myself like Nietzsche’s ubermensch, yet I’d devolved from would-be redeemer of Zion to conniving embezzler. Now, in a pathetic attempt to redeem myself, I’d become a low-level office cog in the Zionist machine. To complete the picture, I was in love with an Australian officer. If anyone ever discovered our relationship, I would face not only immediate dismissal from my job at Kofer HaYishuv, but likely covert execution by Hagana or Irgun operatives as a collaborator.
Truly, my deeds spoke louder than my words. I was powerless, I realized with a sudden visceral pang of longing for my father’s embrace. Why had I been unable to meet his gaze that day, that last time I saw him? What had I been—or what had he made me—ashamed of?
My stomach flip-flopped again, this time with more determination. My return trip through the packed bar was less convivial as I pushed past the obstacles that the revelers had become. Unshed tears clawed at the backs of my eyes, seeking release.
The voices from the bar pursued me closely across the fresh asphalt of HaYarkon Street, yet abated in the sudden quiet of the hidden garden that lay in the embrace of the elevated road’s curve. The noise from the bar faded, as did the thrum of the Mediterranean’s gentle summer waves. As my nausea subsided, I found a bench in the shadows, sat, and was immediately overcome by sadness so deep that it could not but burst forth.
I doubled over and wept into my hands as I had not wept in years. I wept for the countless unavenged corpses of Polish Jewry—people I had lived with, grown up with, nodded to on the streets of Praga. I wept for the years lost following my abandonment of home and family. I wept for the look of disgust in my father’s eyes when he confronted my true face, yet simultaneously for the comfort of his cool hand on the back of my neck, along with my mother’s warm palm on my cheek. I wept for Samuel, who—if he was even alive—doubtless yet carried the soul-scratching disappointment of a spurned younger brother. I wept for the ideals that had brought me to Palestine—then questionable in their loftiness, now quashed and unrealized. I wept for Sean, whom I’d seen only once in the past weeks. Most of all, I wept for my utter powerlessness in the face of love and death. I was no one’s ubermensch. I had overcome nothing. I was as alone as I’d ever been in a lifetime of loneliness. I wept, and my stomach churned afresh.
“Oi! This one’s just ‘ad a fight wif his boyfriend, that’s wha’ I say!”
The slurred voice, and the loud guffaws that followed it, split the fabric of the silent park. Above on the roadway, the phut-phut of a British Austin staff car meandered by indifferently. Still higher above, the half moon slipped demurely behind a thin summer cloud.
“Awww, the poor lad! Maybe what ‘e needs is some cheerin’ up, mates! Eh?”
I wasn’t scared as the group of four clearly drunken British soldiers surrounded my bench. Certainly, the area was deserted. High walls muffled the street noises from above, as they would any noise from within the garden to outside ears. The streetlights sat dark, and the moon fell behind its veil of clouds. Yet I knew that picking on homosexuals in the area of London Square was a regular pastime for Mandatory Cro-Magnons. It was demeaning, but generally physically harmless.
Generally.
Only when I rose to slink away, and was pushed rudely back down by a calloused hand, did I begin to feel fear.
“Oi! Where do you think you’re going, Sally? We was just going to cheer you up. So boys, what do we think would make Daisy here most happy? What do queers like to do most? Let me think here....”
***
“Powerlessness is a conscious decision,” my father had reiterated as we parted.
Had I consciously chosen to be bent over the back of a park bench, my trousers around my knees? One beer-soaked soldier pinioned my arms, another my legs. A third’s shorts-clad leg rested on the bench, using one tobacco-smelling hand to immobilize my head against his knee, and the other to cover my mouth tightly. The fourth took his time undoing his belt. Was this my choice? Had I somehow influenced this fate, through action or inaction, thought or deed? Or had my metaphorical powerlessness simply corporealized, its noxious fumes escaping into the outside world like exhaust from a poorly-tuned engine?
“Now then, Fanny, be a good girl and hold still, wot?” The fourth soldier hocked and spit luridly into his hand, and reached down to put the lubricant to good use on himself. “There we are. Now, don’t you get the idea that I prefer this, right? But a bloke’s gotta grab opportunity when it presents itself, right boys?”
The other soldiers gruffly concurred.
The pressure on my abdomen from the bench’s hard back set off a wave of fresh cramps. The soldier’s hand slipped from its tight grip over my mouth to cover my nose as well, and I writhed, struggling to breathe.
You were wrong, Father. Powerlessness is not a decision. It is imposed.
The coolness of the soldier’s saliva touched me, and I cringed. I clenched my buttocks with all my might, and bucked against the hands holding me, driving the wedge of the bench back further into my midsection. Desperate, I wrenched my head from the soldier’s grasp, turned it to draw a blessed and ragged breath, and found myself face-to-face with the trench knife sheath strapped to his calf, its restraining strap hanging loose from the struggle.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the fourth soldier approach me. I felt the pressure and heat of his body against me, pushing me further into the bench, turning the pain in my gut into red-hot agony. The three soldiers were engaged in the action now, and less attentive to their restraining duties. I clenched tighter, fighting the fourth soldier with all the resistant force I could muster. He began to pant in anticipation, using his hands to spread my buttocks and bending drunkenly low to line himself up.
That’s when I realized that powerlessness, even if imposed, need not be accepted. The constraints of any situation, however ugly, can always be manipulated, however slightly. Microscopic advantages, some even as small as intestinal bacteria, can always be leveraged.
As the soldier’s face came in line with me, I suddenly relaxed and released what I’d been holding back. The immense pressure on my abdomen from the bench, together with my doubled-over posture, amplified the explosive effect. The noise was deafening by bodily standards, the smell overpowering, and the blast radius of hand grenade scale. The soldier who had been about to rape me staggered back, gagging. He tripped over his lowered shorts and fell gracelessly to the ground, cursing and wiping his face ineffectually.
The other soldiers each raised an arm against the smell, and I used the opportunity to wrench my own arms free. I snatched the trench knife from its holster next to my face. Without hesitation, I slashed wildly at the soldier still holding my head. A gurgling sound followed, not unlike that which emanated from my bowels, and something warm and sticky flowed over me. I pushed myself up off the bench, reeling from the pain in my abdomen, half-blinded by what I quickly realized was the soldier’s blood, and tangled in my own trousers, which were still around my ankles.
The moon slithered guiltily from behind its cloud and illuminated the scene. The air was a miasma of feces and blood. Another car drove by above, backfiring on the climb from the beach. The soldier that had been holding my head lay slumped over the bench, motionless. The would-be rapist struggled with his shorts, the brown stain covering his chest and head visible even in the dim light. The other two soldiers had run out of the garden, leaving their comrades to fend for themselves.
The rapist overcame the fight with his shorts, rose, and briefly met my eyes.
With my face likely unrecognizable with clotted blood, I advanced threateningly.
Sensing the desperation of this blood- and shit-covered figure brandishing a bloody trench knife, he retreated silently like his comrades.
I expected to hear the trill of his whistle echoing off the white buildings, followed by a hoarse cry of, “Murder! Murder!” Instead, I heard only the echo of the waves and distant voices from the balcony of the Armon, where I had stood eons previously.
I dropped the knife and bent to pull up my pants, ignoring the filth caking my legs. I wiped the remaining blood from my eyes with my still-damp handkerchief, and assessed the situation quickly, my mind surprisingly clear. Obviously, my attackers—especially the one covered head-to-waist in my shit—would be hesitant to throw themselves under the wheels of British military justice. They would more likely prefer to leave the mysterious death of their colleague a mystery.
Suddenly, to my amazement—even through my shock, pain, and fear, and even as the soldier’s blood dried on my face and congealed in my hair—I smiled.
Who’s powerless now?
I had advantages that could be leveraged. I would no longer be imposed upon. Tonight, I had done the imposing, and would continue to do so.
Words will not express these agonies. Our deeds will!
Still smiling, I took off at a run into the welcoming darkness, whose power, like my own at that very moment, seemed limitless.
