All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (31 page)

Elie with his friends Dov and Lea Judkowski in Florence, 1953.

Sharing some light moments with friend Teddy Pilley (with bow tie) and other interpreters, Geneva, 1953.

Summit Conference, Geneva, 1955. Elie is front row left.

At the Western Wall in Jerusalem with Dov, immediately after the Old City was recaptured in the Six-Day War.

Shortly after the war, at Sharm-el-Sheikh with Mordehai Bar-On, Moshe Dayan’s chief of staff.

At a rally for Soviet Jews in New York, 1968.

With four Israeli Prime Ministers
(counterclockwise):
David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin.

With President Lyndon Johnson, 1964.

The new immigrants had some surprises for me. As I talked to them in the absorption centers, towns, and villages, I began to hear complaints and recriminations that left me disappointed and disillusioned. There were protests against bureaucracy, economic hardship, and housing shortages. That much I could understand. But the problem ran deeper. “They don’t like us, won’t accept us,” some told me. Astonished, I asked them to elaborate, and when they did, it hurt.

They said “it” had been going on since 1945. That in Palestine too, survivors of the camps were treated like outcasts, victims to be pitied at best. They were given housing and commiseration, but little respect. They were made to feel that they themselves were to blame for their suffering: They should have left Europe earlier, as they had been advised to do, or risen up against the Germans. In other words, the immigrants were seen to embody what young Jews in Palestine refused to be: victims. As such they represented the saddest image in Jewish history: the weak, stooped Jew in need of protection. They personified the Diaspora and its indignities.

“We came here hoping to escape humiliation,” a former teacher from Lodz told me. “But in their eyes I am human wreckage,” a former merchant from Radom told me sadly.

Things had gotten steadily worse since 1948. Proud Israelis sometimes openly manifested their contempt for the new immigrants, the
olim ’hadashim
. “Six hundred thousand of us defeated six well-equipped Arab armies. Six million of you let yourselves be led like lambs to the slaughter.” How to explain it to them? How to tell them that they didn’t understand, could never understand?

They looked down on the new immigrants, who were seen as cowards and smugglers, and schemers who dreamed only of enriching themselves illicitly, of deceiving the government and sowing disorder in the land. Some were even told that they weren’t fooling anyone, that since they survived, they had probably been members of the Judenrat or, worse, kapos.

It doesn’t seem possible, but at school pupils called their immigrant classmates
sabonim
, little “soap cakes.” It wasn’t their fault. It is never the children’s fault. They were only repeating what they had heard at home. Zionism’s heroic virtues had been so lauded and the disasters of the Diaspora so decried that the two now seemed incompatible: Zionism was great, beautiful, and honorable; the Diaspora had perverted and dishonored man, leading him to Auschwitz. In the kibbutzim surviving children and children of survivors were urged to forget the past, to jettison the memory of their suffering. That was not only healthier but essential if they were to refashion a new life within the community.

In this atmosphere little attention was paid to the Holocaust. For many years it was barely mentioned in textbooks and ignored in universities. In the early fifties, when David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues finally decided to pass the Knesset bill creating Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, the emphasis was on courage. Resistance fighters were presented as a kind of elite, while the victims—the dead and survivors alike—deserved at best compassion and pity. Allusions to the fate of the victims were rare, especially in public. The subject was considered embarrassing.

This unhealthy, demoralizing state of affairs aroused in me an uneasiness that I could not shake. It tarnished my joy at breathing the air of Jerusalem. I vainly sought to regain my equilibrium. It occurred to me that it might help to write an article on the subject, but when a former Irgun emissary I had known in France asked me not to mention him in any article I might write, I understood. I decided to keep my disenchantment to myself.

Still, I decided to extend my stay, and the old question of what I would live on reasserted itself. I stayed with cousins and friends here and there. Itzu Junger, my friend from Sighet, loaned me his room in a Tel Aviv suburb, a sort of windowless cage in which you could spend no more than a few hours without risking suffocation. But it was better than nothing. I went to see Joseph, my first employer, who now worked in the editorial offices of
Herut
. He offered me a temporary position until I could find something else. “But I don’t plan to stay long,” I told him. “Besides, I’m not a member of this political party” He smiled. “You expected to be writing editorials, maybe?” At least it would help me perfect my Hebrew. For three or four weeks I was half proofreader, half errand boy. Then one day I ran into a friend from Paris in the hallway, and he suggested I come with him to Beer-Yaakov,
where there was a children’s home. I jumped at the chance, and soon became a full-time counselor. I wondered what Niny would think if she saw me in her role.