Day After Night

When they arrived, they found Tirzah standing beside Tedi.

“Look at how this girl uses a knife,” she said, picking up a potato skin that had been peeled in a single strip. “At last I have someone who knows what she’s doing.”

“A compliment from our chef?” Shayndel let the insult pass amid the good feeling and aroma of the holiday kitchen. She wished Leonie were there, too.

“I was always good with my hands,” Tedi said, as she finished another potato. “I used to make doll clothes at home. My teacher said I should be an artist.”

“Maybe you’ll become an artist here,” Shayndel said. “A sculptor, perhaps! There must be great art in Eretz Yisrael, don’t you think, Tirzah?”

Tirzah wiped up the potato skins and threw them into the garbage bin. “There are many more important things to do to insure that Jews will never again be treated like cattle. So there will be a place in the world for people like you.”

“What do you mean by that?” said Zorah. “‘People like you’?”

&n

bsp; “Nothing,” Tirzah said and turned back to the stove. She found it difficult to face these women. She knew they had suffered unimaginable horrors and wanted to feel more compassion for them. She wished she could embrace them, like the volunteers who came to Atlit purely out of kindness, to cut hair and polish nails, or play with the undersized, nervous children.

Zorah glared. “People like us,” she repeated. “You think that if you had been there, you would have fought the Germans and saved yourself, and your elderly parents, too. You know nothing about what happened.

“I want to know where you were when the Germans came for us, year after year. Where were the Allies? Where was your English soldier boyfriend?”

The only sound came from the big pot of soup on the stove, rattling in a boil against the lid. Tirzah silently cursed herself for having said anything. She tried to limit her exchanges with survivors to the task at hand. She knew only the bare outline of Shayndel’s story, though Tirzah approved of the way she held herself and her willingness to work hard. But Tirzah could not abide the victims—the ones who stared blankly or the ones who spit fire. She was disgusted by their nightmares, their tears, and their horrible tattoos. It was wrong of her, of course. She was ashamed and confused by the anger they brought out in her, and sometimes she thought her assignment in Atlit was a kind of punishment for the hardness of her heart. She had never been easy with people, guarded and aloof even as a child. She married Aaron Friedman only because she was pregnant, and when he walked out two weeks after Danny was born, Tirzah’s family blamed her. She moved to a kibbutz where no one knew her, and refused to speak to her parents or her brother for years.

“You have no answer to that question, do you?” Zorah smirked. She grabbed another potato as if she were going to strangle it and promptly cut a deep gash into her thumb.

“No blood on the food,” said Tirzah, handing her a towel. “Go have the nurse see to that.”

Zorah banged out of the room and the three women worked in silence. Tirzah retreated to the back of the kitchen.

“Zorah is a hard case,” said Tedi after a few minutes.

“She was in the camps,” Shayndel said. “Sometimes, early in the morning, I hear her crying in her sleep.”

“And yet, that girl with the baby—remember her? She was in Buchenwald,” Tedi said, wiping her hands on a towel. “I don’t recall her name, but she was sweet as honey. How do you explain that?”

“Enough talking,” Tirzah said. “There’s too much to do.”

Zorah kicked at the dust and was halfway to the infirmary before she realized that she was virtually alone. There were no boys playing soccer, no men loafing in the shade, shirtless in the afternoon heat. The benches behind Delousing were empty of women fanning themselves, chatting, or dozing.

The infirmary was shuttered, but Zorah’s cut had stopped bleeding. She was not about to go back to the kitchen, which meant there was nothing to do but return to her barrack. As she opened the door, a skirt caught her full in the face.

“Sorry.” A girl wearing only a slip rushed over to retrieve it. “I was trying to catch that.”

The place was a madhouse. It seemed like every piece of clothing had been tossed up into the air and left where it had fallen, with dresses, skirts, blouses, and underwear scattered everywhere. Women rushed from one end of the room to the other, eyes shining, hands outstretched. Everyone was talking at once.

“This might fit you.”

“Let me try that!”

“Would you tie this for me?”

There was a queue beside Leonie’s cot, as girls waited for her to adjust a belt, smooth a wrinkle, or turn up a sleeve, and then pronounce them, “Tres jolie. Very pretty.”

Zorah lay down on her cot and faced the wall, but even with a pillow over her head, there was no blocking out the giddy banter of dressing, primping, and praising.

“Mascara! Where did you get that?”

“My turn.”