Day After Night

“You speak Hebrew?” Tedi asked.

“Hebrew and Arabic. I have English, and a little Farsi, too.”

Another man, who bore a striking resemblance to Arik, the Hebrew teacher, reached for a three-cornered cookie. “My mother makes something like this.” After tasting it, he grimaced.

Tedi laughed. “Your mother’s are better, yes?”

“Hers are sweeter.” He reached out to touch her hair and said, “You are sweet, too.”

Tedi stepped back. “I will get you something better.”

She sent one of the kibbutz boys over with strudel. The guards waved at her, mouths full, and the Arik look-alike held up a sticky thumb.

Tedi waved back and then walked through the kitchen to the back door. She passed Tirzah and a group of kibbutzniks who were smoking and talking far too fast for her to understand.

“Good night,” Tedi said. “Many thanks.”

The clearing in front of the dining hall, noisy with laughter and music, was full of dancers, but Tedi was too tired to join in. Her face ached from smiling back at the stares and comments from the kibbutzniks. She wondered if she would always be treated as a curiosity: the tall blonde Jewess.

She walked toward the eastern fence, which faced onto a half-plowed field, pungent with the smell of broken sod and crushed weeds. The mountains were a dark shadow in the moonless night.

After the closeness inside the dining hall, the air was sweet and cool. She took a deep breath and turned her face to the sky. It seemed impossible that these could be the same stars she had looked up at six months ago, impossible that she was seeing them through the same eyes.

On the night of her escape, the icy air had hit her like a slap in the face, harsh but welcome after the fetid heat and terror inside the boxcar. There had been a full moon that night, which seemed as outsized and unreal as a paper cutout in a theater set.

After ten of them had squeezed through the floor of the cattle car, they found themselves facing an enormous field, flooded with moonlight. Tedi saw the others start to run but then drop to the ground, disappearing in the weeds. She followed suit, lying on her back and staring up at the moon as the sound of boots grew closer. One of the soldiers had a bad cough. One of the others swore as he stumbled over a rail tie. They seemed in no hurry and Tedi realized that they were unaware there had been an escape.

Her fingers burned in the cold; she wished she had thought to bury her hands in her armpits, but she didn’t dare move. She became terrified that she might sneeze. Go away, she prayed. Go away.

Finally, the engine coughed back to life and the train pulled out, but Tedi waited until she heard someone else move before she dared lift her head. They scrambled for a line of trees, where they huddled close and rubbed each other’s hands back to life.

Tedi sank down and sat in the dust of Atlit. After the Germans marched into Amsterdam, Tedi’s best friend had told her, “You’re so lucky. You look like a poster girl for the Hitler Youth.” Gertrude had said it without malice, but Tedi was ashamed. A few weeks later, her parents announced that they were sending her into hiding at a farm outside Utrecht.

“I don’t want to go,” she wept. “I want to stay with you. Why don’t you send Rachel instead?” But the decision had been made; her sister was too young to go to strangers. They would find somewhere else for her as soon as they could.

On the night before she was to leave, Tedi’s mother sat on the bed beside her and brushed her hair. “You will be all right, sweetheart,” she said, “but our Rachel has no chance of passing.”

The memory of her mother’s words sent a chill up Tedi’s back. She tried to think about something else, but tonight she was too tired to fight the past. Rachel had been as dark as Tedi was fair, intellectual where Tedi was artistic, moody where she was sunny. Tedi was the favorite daughter, and both of them had always known it.

“I’m sorry,” Tedi whispered.

Two days after her little group escaped from the death train, a group of British soldiers found them, gave them tea, and wrapped them in blankets before putting them on a truck headed for the Displaced Persons center in Landsberg. There she found more barbwire, more barracks, and endless lines in which she waited to talk to officers and Red Cross workers and black-market “fixers,” who flourished in the chaos. She was sure that someone could help her get home, which was all she could think about. So many of the others talked about getting to America or Palestine, Argentina or Canada; she wondered if she was the only Jew in Europe who wanted to stay.

Her mother had said they were all to return to the apartment on Bloemgracht as soon as they could; that was the plan for “after.”

Tedi got as far as the train depot in Stuttgart, which is where she ran into Arne Loederman, her father’s business partner for seventeen years, since she was a baby. It took her a moment to recognize the frail old man calling her name. He wept at the sight of her, skin and bones.

He told her that he had been in Bergen-Belsen. He had seen her father, mother, and Rachel there; her Uncle Hermann, Auntie Lu, and their sons, her cousins, Jakob and Hans, too. He raked his fingers down his cheeks and looked at the ground. He didn’t have to say it.

Tedi shivered, as cold as she’d been in the moonlit field. Even her fingers were numb. It was not a surprise. She had known they were dead, felt it even as she insisted on getting back to Amsterdam.

Mr. Loederman held his arms out to her and held her close, weeping bitterly on her shoulder. She did not return his embrace or cry and finally, he pulled away. He took both her hands in his. “You must travel back to Amsterdam with me, Tedi,” he said, without meeting her eyes. “Half the business belongs to you. You remember Pim Verbeck, the old foreman? He promised to take care of things for us. Whatever is left will be your inheritance. I will take care of you.”

But Tedi said, “I am going to Palestine.”

Mr. Loederman’s eyes filled with fresh tears. “I suppose I would do the same if I were younger. You must write to me when you get there. I will send you what I can. Here.” He tried to press a few coins into her hands.

Tedi would not take them. “I have to go,” she said. “Wait. Let me buy you something. Food, a pair of shoes, something.”