Raquela (20 page)

The mountains of Carmel began to rise ahead, first bare-backed, like the wrinkled skin of dinosaurs, then covered with fir trees and boulders.

The driver called out, “Athlit,” and stopped. Raquela picked up her bag and cape and hurried down the steps.

Two doctors stood in front of a white ambulance on whose side she saw the words
MAGEN DAVID ADOM
. The shield of David. Palestine's Jewish Red Cross.

The doctors introduced themselves—Dr. Mossberg, Jewish Agency doctor in charge of health services in the camp; Dr. Altman, eye, ear, nose, and throat man. Each day, they explained, a different specialist came to the prison camp from Haifa.

Raquela and the doctors climbed into the ambulance for the mile drive down the access road.

The prison camp loomed before her. Wooden watchtowers, manned by British soldiers, pierced the sky. Rows and rows of barbed wire stretched around an arid, dusty landscape of brown wooden barracks.

At a barbed-wire gate the doctors produced their identity cards. A British soldier studied Raquela's ID card.

“You're a bloody sight prettier than this picture, ma'am.”

A second soldier made his personal examination. “And a hell of a sight easier on the eye than those people inside.”

Raquela ignored their compliments. “May I enter now?”

“No need to get huffy, ma'am. It's no fun sitting in this bloody heat guarding a bunch of illegal Jews.”

He stopped short, aware that the tall, attractive young nurse was also a Jew.

The gates were unlatched. Raquela followed the doctors, then stopped abruptly.

Hundreds and hundreds of people were milling together on a hot dirt road. Some were half naked; others wore tattered rags, like shipwrecks on an uncharted island. Only this was no island with tropical trees and lush green foliage. It looked more like the pictures she had seen of concentration camps transplanted onto a scrubby hillside.

Dirty brown wooden barracks stood in martial rows as far as she could see, interspersed here and there with army tents. No grass, no green. Even the tall scrawny palm trees looked dusty gray and threatening. The fronds sat atop gigantic trunks, sad, wilted, defeated, like the people she saw waiting to be released. To be liberated in the Promised Land.

At the right, near the entrance, Raquela saw the delousing station, with stalls where British soldiers were now delousing some people, spraying them from their heads to their toes with white DDT powder.

“The men and women are separated,” Dr. Mossberg told her. “The women are in the barracks at the left, down the main road; the men at the right. And over here, at the left, is the hospital compound.”

Each compound was surrounded by barbed wire. Camps within camps, Raquela thought dismally. Prisons within prisons. The British in their camp outside the perimeter. The women in their prison camp; the men in theirs. Even the whitewashed hospital was sealed off behind a tall barbed-wire fence with a wire gate through which they entered.

She felt as if a giant lock were being turned; she was trapped.

“This first hut,” Dr. Mossberg said as he led her into a white wooden barracks, “is the outpatient clinic. Here's where you'll find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of patients waiting for you at all hours of the day.”

She nodded dully. Some thirty people sat on camp chairs, their bare legs and thighs covered with open sores and impetigo. Flies and mosquitoes buzzed around them.

They led her through the four compartments of the hut: the patients waited in the first partition; they were treated in the second, gave birth in the third, and the fourth was the office of Dr. Herman Carr, the camp gynecologist.

She was in Dr. Carr's office, waiting to meet him, when a middle-aged woman in nurse's uniform burst in.

“I didn't believe you were ever coming. Every day they told me I was getting a replacement. They kept telling me ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.' I began to doubt you existed.”

“But it was only yesterday Dr. Yassky asked me to come.”

“Maybe everybody else turned him down. They must have heard what our life is like.”

“I don't understand—”

“Let's not waste any time. I'm due back at the British Government Hospital in Haifa. You'll be the only midwife here. Is there anything you want me to tell you?”

“I'd like to see the delivery room and the equipment.”

“What kind of equipment?”

Raquela was flustered. “Well, I mean, I know you must have clamps and sputum tubes. What about sterilized sheets and towels?”

“Where do you think you are? Mount Scopus? Who has anything sterilized here? You'll be lucky if you can get some sheets and towels from the government hospital. Then you'll have to boil everything. At least there's water.”

They entered the delivery room. Raquela saw a conventional white leather delivery table with stirrups. The midwife talked rapidly. “Here's a sheet. The only time a woman sees a sheet in Athlit is in this room or in the hospital. But you'll be able to sleep on a sheet—that's on condition you ever have time to sleep.”

Raquela decided to ask no more questions. Nausea overcame her. The heat. The grueling bus trip. The filth. The dust. The dark throngs of people moving back and forth in the camp, like sheep in a pen. The look of hopelessness and despair.

She leaned against the delivery table to steady herself. The nurse-midwife looked worried. “You're pale. Don't you feel well?”

“I'll be all right in a minute. I know you're anxious to leave. Just show me where I'm to sleep.”

They walked out the back door past a second barracks painted white. “This is the hospital,” her guide explained. “You'll have plenty of time to see this later.” They moved on to a third barracks, to the right of the hospital. This one was brown, like the barracks of the refugees, but it was partitioned into a chain of rooms—a dining room, kitchen, storage room for food, and three small bedrooms for the hospital staff.

“This is your room,” the midwife said. “You're right next to the storage. Don't worry about the food smells. You won't have much time to enjoy them.”

Raquela set down her bag.

“I'll just wash my hands,” she said, “and get right to work.”

“You're sure you're all right?” the midwife looked at her askance.

“Positively. Thank you.”

“You're pretty young to be sent to this hell on earth. I hope you last.…”

She picked up her carpetbag and walked out.

Raquela washed her hands and face. Her hair felt like straw under her cap. Her once-starched uniform stuck to her body. She pulled off her white stockings and changed to ankle socks. At least her legs would be cool.

She hurried to the hospital and went from bed to bed, introducing herself, talking to the patients, learning what she could of their illnesses.

Lunch was at one o'clock. She entered the barracks dining room, already crowded. A compact young woman in a spotless white shirt and pleated black skirt put out her hand.

“
Shalom
,” she said. Her voice was crisp. “I'm Ruth Berman. I'm the Jewish Agency liaison officer between the British and the refugees. Welcome to
Gan Eden
” (The Garden of Eden).

Raquela smiled. “
Gan Eden
with barbed wire.”

“After a while you won't notice the barbed wire. It's the other things that will bother you. But why should I frighten you? You've got plenty of time to discover for yourself.”

Raquela found herself attracted to the efficient-looking woman with black curly hair, sharp dark eyes, and good strong features. Ruth talked in clipped phrases, like a British officer. She had joined the Haganah in Haifa before her eighteenth birthday and was one of the first women to volunteer for the British army in 1942. She had risen swiftly to junior commander in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, serving in Egypt.

“I suppose you've toured our camp facilities here?” Ruth asked Raquela.

“Some of them.”

“Consider yourself lucky. It's pretty clean where you are in the hospital compound. And you're apart from most of the sounds and smells.”

“And you? Where do you sleep?”

“In the delousing station.”

“You're pulling my leg.”

“Not really. It's the partition next to the room where the British delouse all the newcomers with DDT powder.”

“How do you breathe?”

“Who breathes?” She shrugged her shoulders. “When the DDT gets too much for me, I sleep outside, in a tent.”

Raquela nibbled at the army rations the British served the staff—bully beef, pea soup, white bread, and coffee—and then left to make rounds in the barracks.

Down the length of the camp was a long dirt road called the Walkover. Here hundreds of people milled together, talking, shouting; some hurried, some stood apathetic; the hubbub seemed to have a chain reaction, as if the noise fed upon itself.

Raquela walked among them. Some stared at her curiously: a new face; someone from the outside world. Others brushed past her, turned in on themselves. They seemed to Raquela like people from another planet.

She felt hot anger. These people had come through so much—the blue numbers of the death camps were on their arms as they moved around her on the Walkover. They had survived. They had come to the Holy Land. They were on the holy soil. Yet it was denied them. No wonder some of them stared catatonically through the barbed wire. Where was reality? Here in the prison, or out there, just beyond the iron fence, in the Promised Land?

At seven, exhausted, Raquela returned to her room in the brown barracks.

From the top of her ankle socks to her skirt, her legs were blotched with mosquito bites. She was smearing them with calamine lotion when a woman wearing a tentlike sack made from an army blanket stood before her.

“My time has come,” she said.

“Come with me,” Raquela said. She led her through the compound to the first white wooden hut and into the delivery room.

She examined her on the delivery table.

“You still have time,” she said. How could she send a woman in labor back to one of the women's overcrowded, broiling barracks?

“You can stay here,” Raquela said softly. “I'll stay right here with you.

“I'm so worried. I've just arrived in Athlit.”

Raquela frowned. “I thought no new prisoners were brought here. I thought they were all transported to Cyprus.”

“Maybe so. I guess I'm special.”

“How's that?” Raquela helped her descend from the high delivery table and tried to make her comfortable in a chair.

“We were on a small boat. The British captured us outside of Haifa. Soldiers and sailors came on board with guns and tear gas. We were empty-handed. Some of our people picked up cans of food to fight them off. Many were wounded by the soldiers; two of our best friends were killed. Then the British pulled us into Haifa.”

Raquela shook her head in silence.

The woman moved her heavy body in the chair. “On the dock the British began to load the people onto big ships. We knew they were taking us to Cyprus. My husband went to one of the officers. My husband”—she chuckled—“the SS couldn't scare him; nothing scares him. He said to the officer, ‘My wife is due any minute. Do you want her to give birth on your prison ship? Can't you be human? Send her to a decent hospital in Haifa!' That's why I'm special. They put us in a jeep and brought my husband and me to Athlit.”

Raquela brought the woman a cold drink. Her name was Pnina Kaczmarek; her husband was Gershon. Growing more relaxed as she talked, she told Raquela she was born in Czechoslovakia. When she was fourteen, the Nazis had deported her with her whole family to the death camp in Auschwitz. Children of fourteen were almost always sent, by the infamous Dr. Mengele, directly to the gas chambers. Pnina pretended to be sixteen. She was sent to the barracks with the women strong enough to work.

Gershon, also fourteen, had made the journey to Auschwitz from the ghetto in Lodz, Poland. He, too, had lied that he was older.

They were both liberated in April 1945, nearly dead of hunger and typhus. They had made the pilgrimage back to their homes, found no one, and returned to Germany, where they met in a DP camp and fell in love. They married in the camp and vowed they would get to Palestine. The route had led to Athlit.

“How old are you now?” Raquela asked.

Pnina looked forty, but she had to be younger.

“Nineteen.”

Raquela averted her face. Four years younger than she, yet she looked older than Mama.

Pnina's voice began to tremble. “What if the war years did something to me? What if I have an abnormal baby?”

Raquela heard the panic mounting. “Don't be afraid. You've come through everything—Auschwitz, the war. You'll come through this.” She wiped Pnina's forehead with a damp cool cloth. “Just think. Your baby will be a Sabra.”

“I dreamed of this. That's why I insisted we get on that little overcrowded boat. I wanted my baby born in
Eretz Israel
. But who dreamed it would be born in a prison camp?”

“They can't keep you here forever. You'll be free soon.”

Pnina shut her eyes. “I hope I have a daughter. I'll name her Etya, for my mother. She died in Auschwitz. In the ovens.”

The contractions came closer together.

Raquela helped Pnina back on the table and delivered the baby.

“You have a daughter,” Raquela said.

Pnina's face, still wet with sweat, relaxed. She studied her baby, counted her fingers and toes, stroked her forehead and soft rounded cheeks.

Suddenly, Pnina was young and radiant.

“She's the image of my mother,” she said.
*

*
Twenty-five years later, Pnina's baby, Etya, became secretary to Dr. Moshe Prywes, Raquela's second husband.

TWELVE