Raquela (21 page)

T
he next morning, Raquela crossed the hospital compound, passed a few people already out on the Walkover, and entered the bathhouse. It was Ladies' Day.

Inside the long tin building, she secluded herself in one of the shower stalls, grateful for the privacy, letting the warm water cascade over her body and hair as she covered herself with lather.

She changed into fresh clothes, a new uniform to begin the day. She had been one of the first in the bathhouse; now dozens of women were queuing up in front of the shower stalls. She saw a few women standing in front of a gray-white asbestos partition in the center of the bathhouse. Curious, she walked toward them. They were scrawling their names on the partition. She looked closer. Hundreds of names were on the asbestos wall, some with the dates of their arrival in Athlit, some with drawings of the ships on which they had made the journey.

Her eyes fastened on a single line:
DAVID POLAK—BERLIN, BUDAPEST, BERGEN-BELSEN
.

In six words the man called David Polak had recorded the story of his life: Born in Berlin. Escaped to Budapest. Was deported to Bergen-Belsen. Refused to die. Was liberated. Dreamed of Palestine. Sailed to
Eretz Israel
. Ends up—the irony of survival—in a prison camp called Athlit.

She no longer felt clean. She had washed the dirt of Athlit off her body; now she was returning to it. She walked slowly back to the hospital compound and immediately began making rounds.

With the shortage of doctors and nurses, she worked not only as the camp's midwife but as a regular nurse. It was the nurses who decided when a doctor was needed; then they called the doctor who was on duty for the day.

In the heat of mid-afternoon a scantily clad woman entered the clinic. “My friend has terrible cramps. She's in our barracks, vomiting. She's very hot; she must have a fever.”

“I'll come with you,” Raquela said.

Mobs of people were swarming back and forth on the Walkover as they crossed the dirt main street to the women's compound, surrounded by barbed wire, and entered one of the brown wooden barracks.

Raquela gasped. In opening the door they had pulled aside a hanging blanket. A couple lay naked on a cot, making love.

She hurried past them to the bedside of the sick woman, who was writhing in pain. Raquela felt her stomach, pressing her fingers, probing. She diagnosed the illness as gastroenteritis endemic to the Middle East. She would not need to call the doctor. She took a supply of sulfaguanidine tablets out of her bag, gave her seven to take at once with a glass of water, and assured her she would return every four hours with four more pills.

Several other women lay on the cots, watching in silence. Now they called out to Raquela, each with a different complaint—headaches, rashes, infected mosquito bites. She treated them and suggested they come to see her again in the clinic. She tried to forget the couple making love. She dared not look to see if they had covered themselves.

The smell of stale and rancid food filled the barracks. Half hidden under some of the pillows were pieces of bread, herring, and remnants of army rations. She had learned that although the soldiers, doctors, nurses, and Jewish Agency representatives were given bully beef, the refugees were given dairy foods, since the British army could not supply kosher food or utensils.

“Why do you put this bread and herring under your pillow?” she finally asked the woman who had complained of a headache. “Don't you get enough food in the dining room?”

The woman looked at her in surprise. “Of course there's enough to eat. But I never finish a meal. I always take some of it back with me. How do you know if there's bread today, there will be bread tomorrow?”

The worst disease was boredom.

All day the people herded up and down the Walkover, endlessly waiting. Occasionally they glanced up at the hill outside the camp that separated them from the sea. They hated the hill. It was the hill that blocked the cool breezes from the Mediterranean. It was on the hill that most of the wooden search towers stood, looming over the landscape. Beyond the hill, a few yards away, lay freedom.

But there were no days of boredom for Raquela.

On call at any hour, she sometimes worked around the clock. The first few days she tore the pages from her small desk calendar and drew a red circle around May 1, 1947, the day her four weeks' stay was scheduled to be over.

But soon she forgot the calendar. In Athlit time was not marked by the chronology of day following day. Time, like boredom, was a disease marked by crises. Or by desperate attempts to escape.

A few prisoners succeeded by furrowing under the barbed wire. But most were caught and arrested by the ever-vigilant sentries in the watchtowers and in the huge soldiers' camp outside the barbed wire.

Each month a few hundred were allowed to leave legally. Under the White Paper, fifteen hundred certificates were allotted every month until the day, envisioned by the White Paper, when no more Jews would be allowed to enter Palestine. The war had sidetracked the original date—1944—when all immigration was to have ceased, and with it the end of the homeland.

The fifteen hundred certificates were given to the Jewish Agency to administer: seven hundred fifty for the Jews in Europe and the DP camps, and seven hundred fifty for the refugees in Athlit and Cyprus. The rule in the camps was “first in, first out.” Any missing refugees were deducted from the quota.

At four in the morning, a week after her arrival, Raquela walked out into the night air. The camp lay in darkness, the searchlights making eerie circles on the Walkover.

She saw a figure moving about with a flashlight. It was Ruth Berman.

“What are you doing out here at four in the morning?” Ruth asked. “Is someone sick?”

“I needed fresh air. My room is so stifling I can't sleep. But what are
you
doing up at this hour?”

“Making my nightly head count,” Ruth said crisply. “I make two a day: the first one at ten
P.M
., and this one at four in the morning.”

Raquela, dressed in a cotton robe, walked beside her. “I thought the men and women are all locked up inside their barracks after supper. Locked in for the whole night.”

“That doesn't mean,” Ruth said, “they won't hide someplace before the lockup and make a try to get out of here. It's bloody lucky the British trust
me
to make the head count. How would you like to have British soldiers unlock the women's barracks every night to make the check? You might have more business than you can handle in your delivery room.”

“I won't be here that long.”

Ruth put a key in each barracks door, entered quietly, and made her check. When the head count was finished, they started back toward the hospital compound. A soldier in a watchtower beamed his light on them.

“They greet me this way every night,” Ruth said. “They're victims, too. They're taking orders from Whitehall. You can't blame all the British people for Bevin's anti-Semitism. I got to know a lot of British soldiers when I was with the army in Egypt. Decent, humane, compassionate. The policy is monstrous, not the boys. Never forget, these British soldiers are not Nazis. They're interning our people; they're not killing them.”

Raquela glanced up. It seemed to her the sentries were waving to them. “Looks as if your coming out here every night helps them get through their boredom.”

The circle of light followed them like a spotlight on a darkened stage.

“Bismarck wrote you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them,” Ruth said. “These boys up there in the search towers are sitting on their bayonets. And most of them hate it. But they've got to keep watch twenty-four hours a day.”

“Who can blame the people for trying to escape?” Raquela said.

“Sure, but the British can't afford another breakthrough like the one the Palmach pulled off less than two years ago. You remember when Nahum Sarig and Yitzhak Rabin freed more than two hundred refugees slated to be deported to Africa?”

“I remember very well.” Raquela's voice was muffled.

She felt a pang of homesickness; she was home again. It was Friday night in Mama's living room; Jacob was telling of the breakthrough in Athlit.

Ruth seemed to sense her quietness. “If you're not ready to go to sleep, why don't we have a cold drink in my tent. That's where I go when I can't sleep.”

The tent had a wooden table, a few chairs, a narrow cot. Ruth lit a kerosene lamp and placed it in the center of the table. A warm amber glow suffused the darkness.

She poured
gazoz
into two glasses. They sat for a while in silence.

Raquela realized she had a need to talk to someone, to clarify her own feelings. Ruth, ten years older than she, sensitive and philosophic despite her no-nonsense air, made her feel comfortable.

“The first time,” Raquela said slowly, tentatively, “the first time I saw a man and woman making love, I was in shock. But now, after a week, I hardly notice it.”

Ruth nodded. “Camps dehumanize people. That's what the Nazis tried to do: dehumanize our people. What you see is sex. Physical contact. Not love. They need to prove to themselves they're alive.”

She refilled their glasses.

“When the war ended,” Ruth said, “I was coldly hysterical. Every time I saw a Jewish survivor, I felt guilty that I was alive. We should have done more to save our people. We should have marched on Whitehall. We should have marched on the White House. We should have screamed, ‘Save our people!'”

She stopped and stared into the light. “Now, when the Jewish Agency asked me to come here, I felt maybe at last I could do something for the survivors. Then I saw the things that you're seeing now. The results of the Nazi dehumanization. People with no belief in the future, apathetic, quarrelsome, no morals. I tried to bribe some of the women with chocolate bars if they would wash their hair. I change my clothes three times a day. They don't care what they look like.”

Raquela looked out the tent flap. The camp was still dark; the people were still asleep. Soon they would begin milling again, hiding food, making love, waiting, waiting. Jerusalem, only eighty miles away, seemed light-years distant from the bedlam in the hot, overcrowded camp.

Ruth went on. “One day I called some of the older people—those in their thirties—to my tent, and I said, ‘why do you behave this way?'

“‘Madame Ruth,' they said—that's what they call me when they're trying to be polite—‘Madame Ruth, what do you want from us? Who remained alive in the concentration camps? A few, by a miracle. And there were very few miracles. Maybe once we're out of here, we'll change, we'll do the things you'd like us to do. But for now, leave us alone, Madame Ruth. Leave us alone.'”

A few days later, a group of men burst into the hospital.

“What do you want?” Raquela asked.

“We suspect you've got a Nazi hiding in one of your beds.”

“A Nazi? In Athlit? Have you lost your senses?”

One of the men drew her aside. “Some of the people think they recognized a Nazi. Why not? It would be a good cover for an SS man wanted for war crimes. He throws away his uniform, poses as a Jew, gets into a DP camp, and then boards a ship for Palestine. You must let us search. If you have a Nazi here, you must let us find him.”

Silently Raquela led them to the men's ward. They approached the first patient. She watched as one of the refugees drew down his eyelids. Then he raised the patient's arms, leaning down, examining him closely.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“Two tiny letters:
SS
. They tattooed those two letters on their eyelids or inside their armpits.”

They went from patient to patient. In the fifth bed they found a man squeezing his arms under the blanket. They forced his arms apart.

His tattoo was in his right armpit.

They stretched the skin to make certain. Then they called Raquela. There it was:
SS
. Tiny, but indelible. The hated Sturmstaffel. The Storm Troopers.

The men pulled him off the bed. He lay trembling on the floor, pleading, “Don't kill me. Don't kill me.”

Raquela felt weak with nausea and fear. Would the men torture him, as they must have been tortured? Would they kill him?

“What will you do?” she whispered.

“We'll turn him over to the British. Too bad we can't do to him what he did to our people. But the Allies, we hope, will try him for war crimes. If they call us as witnesses, the people who recognize him can testify how many hundreds of Jews he killed with his own hands.”

Two weeks passed. There were no telephones in Athlit. She wondered how Dr. Yassky would get word to her to come back. Perhaps he would send a replacement. Then she could go home. She could call Arik immediately.

She saw herself sitting on the divan in his room on Mount Scopus. His arm was around her. The dirty wooden barracks fell away. She felt warm and clean and loved.

A few nights later a woman in labor entered the hospital compound. Raquela placed her stethoscope on the woman's abdomen.

“You're carrying a big baby.”

The woman was too weary to answer. Raquela listened to the baby's heartbeat. It sounded faint. She examined the woman. Her pelvis was far too small for the large baby she was carrying.

“Just lie here and try to relax,” Raquela said soothingly. “I'll be with you in a moment.”

She hurried through the partition to the office, praying silently that Dr. Carr, the gynecologist, would be there.

“He's gone home to Haifa,” a nurse told her. “You know his wife just had a baby.”

“Get any kind of transportation,” Raquela ordered. “We've got to get this woman to the hospital in Haifa right away. Only a caesarean section can save her baby.”

Raquela returned to the delivery room. She dabbed the woman's face with a damp cloth. Minutes passed.
Arik, I need you
.