Day After Night

Leafing through a fly-specked folder in the one-room hut, she picked up a photograph of four young women. “Could these girls have been among the ones who were rescued?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” said Gershon, Beit Oren’s unofficial historian, an unbowed, still-handsome elderly man whose recent illness had not dimmed his smile or the light in his blue eyes.

“I was not here at that particular time,” he said. “I was back in Romania, helping to bring more of our people to Israel. It is possible that these girls could have been among the group from Atlit, but there are only a few of us left from those days, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve got the best memory of the bunch.” He smiled. “Perhaps someone at the museum can tell you. They have computers there, you know.”

Gershon cleaned his glasses and took another look at the picture.

Shayndel and Leonie stand at the center, hip to hip, arms around each other’s shoulders. Their heads are tilted, almost touching. They are the same height and wear similar white, short-sleeved blouses; even their smiles seem to match, except for the fact that Leonie’s eyes are open so wide, she seems haunted.

Leonie hated having her picture taken. Her husband—a doctor she met in ’46—would beg and tease to get her to smile for the camera, but she would always turn away. After ten childless years, they divorced, and Leonie never remarried. For forty years, she worked as a clerk in a Tel Aviv hospital; when the staff was assembled for its annual portrait, Leonie hid in the last row.

Shayndel gazes straight into the lens. Her grin leaps off the paper, still infectious even after forty years.

It is the same forthright expression she wore in the early pictures of her with Malka and Wolfe in Europe. The same in the later family snapshots, sitting between her son, Noah, and her daughter, Tedi.

Tedi stands to Leonie’s right. She is a full head taller than the others, a blonde beacon with a tentative smile. She blinked just as the shutter closed. Her hand is raised as if to wave.

Shayndel was pregnant when she found out that Tedi had been killed in the Egyptian attack on Negba.

At Shayndel’s left, Zorah seems to be moving toward the camera, her right shoulder ahead of the left. Although her lips are pressed together, not quite smiling, her eyes are dancing. She looks younger and more carefree than anyone else in the picture.

Meyer was killed in ’48, weeks after the declaration of Israel’s statehood, and Zorah married a Polish survivor. They raised two sons in a cramped, three-room Jerusalem apartment, and she worked in the library at Hebrew University until her death. At the memorial service, students and professors recalled her infallible memory, her green raincoat, and the way she pressed candied dates on anyone who walked into her cubicle. Shayndel read the obituary, which reported that the distinguished cardiologist, Dr. Jacob Zalinksy, delivered a moving eulogy about her abiding friendship with his mother.

Gershon pointed at Zorah. “See how this one hides her arm behind her back? She must have been a survivor from the camps.”

“But she looks so happy,” said the American.

“Why not?” he asked. “She was alive. She had made it to the land of Israel. From the look of this picture, she had friends. She was young, pretty.”

“That sounds like a happy ending.”

“I hope she was happy. I hope all of them were,” said Gershon as he slid the picture back into the folder. “But that wasn’t the end.

“That was just the beginning.”