Exodus

Exodus by Leon Uris

CHAPTER ONE

NOVEMBER 1946

WELCOME TO CYPRUS

The airplane plip-plopped down the runway to a halt before the big sign: WELCOME TO CYPRUS. Mark Parker looked out of the window and in the distance he could see the jagged wonder of the Peak of Five Fingers of the northern coastal range. In an hour or so he would be driving through the pass to Kyrenia. He stepped into the aisle, straightened out his necktie, rolled down his sleeves, and slipped into his jacket. “Welcome to Cyprus, welcome to Cyprus …” It ran through his head. It was from Othello, he thought, but the full quotation slipped his mind.

“Anything to declare?” the customs inspector said.

“Two pounds of uncut heroin and a manual of pornographic art,” Mark answered, looking about for Kitty.

All Americans are comedians, the inspector thought, as he passed Parker through. A government tourist hostess approached him. “Are you Mr. Mark Parker?”

“Guilty.”

“Mrs. Kitty Fremont phoned to say she is unable to meet you at the airport and for you to come straight to Kyrenia to the Dome Hotel. She has a room there for you.”

“Thanks, angel. Where can I get a taxi to Kyrenia?”

“I’ll arrange a car for you, sir. It will take a few moments.”

“Can I get a transfusion around here?”

“Yes, sir. The coffee counter is straight down the hall.”

Mark leaned against the counter and sipped a steaming cup of black coffee … “Welcome to Cyprus … welcome to Cyprus” … he couldn’t for the life of him remember.

“Say!” a voice boomed out. “I thought I recognized you on the plane. You’re Mark Parker! I bet you don’t remember me.”

Fill in one of the following, Mark thought. It was: Rome, Paris, London, Madrid (and match carefully); Jose’s Bar, James’s Pub, Jacques’s Hideaway, Joe’s Joint. At the time I was covering: war, revolution, insurrection. That particular night I had a: blonde, brunette, redhead (or maybe that broad with two heads).

The man stood nose to nose with Mark, gushing on all eight cylinders now. “I was the guy who ordered a martini and

they didn’t have orange bitters. Now do you remember me?” Mark sighed, sipped some coffee, and braced for another onslaught. “I know you hear this all the time but I really enjoy reading your columns. Say, what are you doing in Cyprus?” The man then winked and jabbed Mark in the ribs. “Something hush-hush, I bet. Why don’t we get together for a drink? I’m staying at the Palace in Nicosia.” A business card was slapped into Mark’s hand. “Got a few connections here, too.” The man winked again.

“Oh, Mr. Parker. Your car is ready.”

Mark put the cup down on the counter. “Nice seeing you again,” he said, and walked out quickly. As he departed he dropped the business card into a trash basket.

The taxi headed out from the airport. Mark rested back and closed his eyes for a moment. He was glad that Kitty couldn’t get to the airport to meet him. So much time had passed and there was so much to say and so much to remember. He felt a surge of excitement pass through him at the thought of seeing her again. Kitty, beautiful, beautiful, Kitty. As the taxi passed through the outer gates Mark was already lost in thought.

… Katherine Fremont. She was one of those great American traditions like Mom’s apple pie, hot dogs, and the Brooklyn Dodgers. For Kitty Fremont was the proverbial “girl next door.” She was the cliché of pigtails, freckles, tomboys, and braces on the teeth; and true to the cliché the braces came off one day, the lipstick went on and the sweater popped out and the ugly duckling had turned into a graceful swan. Mark smiled to himself-she was so beautiful in those days, so fresh and clean.

… and Tom Fremont. He was another American tradition. Tom was the crew-cut kid with the boyish grin who could run the hundred in ten flat, sink a basket from thirty feet out, cut a rug, and put a Model A together blindfolded. Tom Fremont had been Mark’s best pal as long as he could remember for as far back as he could remember. We must have been weaned together, Mark thought.

… Tom and Kitty … apple pie and ice cream … hot dogs and mustard. The all-American boy, the all-American girl, and the all-American Midwest of Indiana. Yes, Tom and Kitty fitted together like the rain and springtime.

Kitty had always been a quiet girl, very deep, very thoughtful. There was a tinge of sadness in her eyes. Perhaps it was only Mark who detected that sadness, for she was joy itself to everyone around her. Kitty had been one of those wonderful towers of strength. She always had both hands on the rudder, always had the right words to say, always decent and thoughtful. But that sadness was there… . Mark knew it if no one else did.

Mark often wondered what made her so desirable. Maybe it was because she seemed so unreachable to him. The iced champagne—the look and the word that could tear a man to pieces. Anyhow, Kitty had always been Tom’s girl and the most he could do was envy Tom.

Tom and Mark were roommates at State University. That first year Tom was absolutely miserable being away from Kitty. Mark remembered the hours on end he would have to listen to Tom’s mournful laments and console him. Summer came, Kitty went off to Wisconsin with her parents. She was still a high-school girl and her folks wanted to dampen the fervor of the affair with a separation. Tom and Mark hitchhiked to Oklahoma to work in the oil fields.

By the time school started again Tom had cooled down considerably. To remain in Mark’s company one had to sample the field. The times between Tom and Kitty’s letters lengthened and the times between Tom’s dates on the campus shortened. It began to look like a strike-out for the college hero and the girl back home.

By their senior year Tom had all but forgotten Kitty. He had become the Beau Brummell of State, a role befitting the ace forward on the basketball team. As for Mark, he was content to bask in Tom’s glory and generally make a name for himself as one of the worst journalism students in the university’s history.

Kitty came to State as a freshman.

Lightning struck!

Mark could see Kitty a thousand times and it was always as exciting as the first. This time Tom saw her the same way. They eloped a month before Tom’s graduation. Tom and Kitty, Mark and Ellen, a Model A Ford, and four dollars and ten cents crossed the state line and sought out a justice of the peace. Their honeymoon was in the back seat of the Model A, bogged down in the mud of a back road and leaking like a sieve in a downpour. It was an auspicious beginning for the all-American couple.

Tom and Kitty kept their marriage a secret until a full year after his graduation. Kitty stayed on at State to finish her pre-nursing training. Nursing and Kitty seemed to go together, too, Mark always thought.

Tom worshiped Kitty. He had always been a bit wild and too independent, but he settled down to very much the devoted husband. He started out as a very little executive in a very big public relations firm. They moved to Chicago. Kitty nursed in Children’s Hospital. They inched their way up, typical American style. First an apartment and then a small home. A new car, monthly bills, big hopes. Kitty became pregnant with Sandra.

Mark’s thoughts snapped as the taxi slowed through the outskirts of Nicosia, the capital city that sat on the flat brown plain between the northern and southern mountain ranges. “Driver, speak English?” Mark asked.

“Yes, sir?”

“They’ve got a sign at the airport, Welcome to Cyprus. What is the full quotation?”

“As far as I know,” the driver answered, “they’re just trying to be polite to tourists.”

They entered Nicosia proper. The flatness, the yellow stone houses with their red tiled roofs, the sea of date palms all reminded Mark of Damascus. The road ran alongside the ancient Venetian wall which was built in a perfect circle and surrounded the old city. Mark could see the twin minarets that spiraled over the skyline from the Turkish section of the old city. The minarets that belonged to St. Sophia’s, that magnificent crusader cathedral turned into a Moslem mosque. As they drove along the wall they passed the enormous ramparts shaped like arrowheads. Mark remembered from his last visit to Cyprus that there was the odd number of eleven of these arrowheads jutting from the wall. He was about to ask the driver why eleven but decided not to.

In a matter of moments they were out of Nicosia and moving north on the plain. They passed one village after another, monotonously similar, made of gray mud-brick cottages. Each village had one water fountain which bore an inscription that it was built through the generosity of His Majesty, the King of England. In the colorless fields the peasants labored with the potato crop, working behind those magnificent beasts, the Cyprus mules.

The taxi picked up speed again and Mark sank back to his reveries.

… Mark and Ellens had gotten married a little after Tom and Kitty. It was a mistake from the first day. Two nice people not made for each other. Kitty Fremont’s quiet and gentle wisdom held Mark and Ellen together. They both could come to her and pour their hearts out. Kitty kept the marriage intact long after time had run out. Then it broke wide open and they were divorced. Mark was thankful there had been no children.

After the divorce Mark moved East and began banging around from job to job, having matriculated from the world’s worst journalism student to the world’s worst newspaperman. He became one of those drifters who inhabit the newspaper world. It was not stupidity nor lack of talent, but complete inability to find his niche in life. Mark was a creative man and the business of routine reporting cut that creativity. Yet he had no desire to attempt the life of a creative writer. He knew that his personality would not take the demands on a novelist. So Mark hung in limbo, being neither fish nor fowl.

Each week there was a letter from Tom, and it would be filled with enthusiasm and the vigor of his climb to the top. The letters were also filled with Tom’s love for Kitty and their baby girl, Sandra.

Mark remembered Kitty’s letters. A calm appraisal of Tom’s effervescence. Kitty always kept Mark posted on. Ellen’s whereabouts until Ellen remarried.

In 1938 the world opened up for Mark Parker. There was a post to be filled in Berlin with American News Syndicate, and Mark was suddenly transformed from a “newspaper bum” into the respectability of a “foreign correspondent.”

In this capacity Mark proved to be a talented journeyman. He was able to fill part of his desire for creativity by developing a style that labeled him as an individual-as Mark Parker and no one else. Mark was by no means a world-beater but he did have that one great instinct of a crack foreign correspondent: an ability to smell out a story in the making.

The world was a lark. He covered Europe, Asia, and Africa from one end to the other. He had a title, he was doing work he liked, his credit was good at Jose’s Bar, James’s Pub, Joe’s and Jacques’s Hideaway, and he had an inexhaustible list of candidates for his blonde-, brunette-, or redhead-of-the-month club.

When the war broke out Mark chased all over Europe. It was good to settle back in London for a few days where a stack of mail from Tom and Kitty would be waiting.

Early in 1942 Tom Fremont enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was killed at Guadalcanal.

Two months after Tom’s death, their baby, Sandra, died of polio.

Mark took emergency leave to return home, but by the time he arrived Kitty Fremont had disappeared. He searched for her without success until he had to return to Europe. To all intents she had disappeared from the face of the earth. It was strange to Mark, but that sadness that he always saw in Kitty’s eyes seemed like a fulfilled prophecy.

The moment the war was over he returned to look for her again, but the trail had grown cold.

In November of 1945, American News Syndicate recalled, him to Europe to coyer the war-crimes trials in Nuremberg. By now Mark was an established craftsman and bore the title, “distinguished” foreign correspondent. He stayed on, turning

in a brilliant series, until the top Nazis were hanged, only a few months back.

ANS granted Mark a much-needed leave of absence before transferring him to Palestine, where it* appeared local war was brewing. To spend his leave in the accepted Mark Parker fashion, he chased down a passionate French UN, girl he had met earlier, who had been transferred to the United Nations Relief in Athens.

It all happened from a clear blue sky. He was sitting in the American Bar, passing the time of day with a group of fellow newsmen, when the conversation somehow drifted to a particular American nurse in Salonika doing fabulous work with Greek orphans. One of the correspondents had just returned from there with a story on her orphanage. The nurse was Kitty Fremont.

Mark inquired immediately and discovered that she was on vacation in Cyprus.

The taxi began to move upwards, out of the plain, on a twisting little road that led through the pass in the Pentadaktylos Mountains. It was turning dusk. They reached the peak and Mark ordered the car to pull over to the side.

He stepped out and looked down at the magnificent jewel-like little town of Kyrenia nestled against the sea at the foot of the mountain. To the left and above him stood the ruins of St. Hilarion Castle, haunted with the memory of Richard the Lion-Hearted and his beautiful Berengaria. He made a mental note to come back again with Kitty.

It was nearing dark as they reached Kyrenia. The little town was all white plaster and red tiled roofs, with the castle above it and the sea beside it. Kyrenia was picturesque and remote and quaint to a point where it could not have been more picturesque or remote or quaint. They passed the miniature harbor, filled with fishing smacks and small yachts, set inside two arms of a sea wall. On one arm was the quay. On the other arm stood an ancient fortress rampart, the Virgin Castle.

Kyrenia had long been a retreat for artists and retired British Army officers. It was, indeed, one of the most peaceful places on earth.

A block away from the harbor stood the Dome Hotel. Physically the big building seemed outsized and out of place for the rest of the sleepy little town. The Dome, however, had become a crossroads of the British Empire. It was known in every corner of the world that flew a Union Jack as a place where Englishmen met. It was a maze of public rooms and terraces and verandas sitting over the sea. A long pier of a hundred yards or more connected the hotel to a tiny island offshore used by swimmers and sun bathers.

The taxi pulled to a stop. The bellboy gathered in Mark’s luggage. Mark paid off his driver and looked about. It was November but it was warmish yet and it was serene. What a wonderful place for a reunion with Kitty Fremont!

The desk clerk handed Mark a message.

Mark darling:

I am stuck in Famagusta until nine o’clock. Will you ever forgive me??? Dying with anxiety. Love.

Kitty

“I want some flowers, a bottle of scotch, and a bucket of ice,” Mark said.

“Mrs. Fremont has taken care of everything,” the room clerk said, handing a key to the bellboy. “You have adjoining rooms overlooking the sea.”

Mark detected a smirk on the clerk’s face. It was the same kind of dirty look he had seen in a hundred hotels with a hundred women. He was about to set the record straight but decided to let the clerk think anything he damned well pleased.

He gathered in the view of the sea as it turned dark, then he unpacked and mixed himself a scotch and water and drank it while he soaked in a steaming tub.

Seven o’clock … still two hours to wait.

He opened the door of Kitty’s room. It smelled good. Her bathing suit and some freshly washed hosiery hung over the bathtub. Her shoes were lined up beside the bed and her make-up on the vanity. Mark smiled. Even with Kitty gone the empty room was full of the character of an unusual person.

He went back and stretched out on his bed. What had the years done to her7 What had the tragedy done? Kitty, beautiful Kitty … please be all right. It was now November of 1946, Mark figured; when was the last time he saw her? Nineteen thirty-eight … just before he went to Berlin for ANS. Eight years ago. Kitty would be twenty-eight years old now.

The excitement and tension caught up with Mark. He was tired and he began to doze.

The tinkle of ice cubes, a sweet sound to Mark Parker, brought him out of a deep sleep. He rubbed his eyes and groped around for a cigarette.

“You sleep as though you were drugged,” a very British accent said. “I knocked for five minutes. The bellboy let me in. Hope you don’t mind me helping myself to the whisky.” The voice belonged to Major Fred Caldwell of the British Army. Mark yawned, stretched himself into wakefulness, and checked his watch. It was eight-fifteen. “What the hell are you doing on Cyprus?” Mark asked.

“I believe that is my question.”

Mark lit a cigarette and looked at Caldwell. He didn’t like the major nor did he hate him. “Despise” was the suitable word. They had met before twice. Caldwell had been the aide of Colonel, later Brigadier, Bruce Sutherland, quite a good

field officer in the British Army. Their first meeting had been in the lowlands near Holland during the war. In one of his reports Mark had pointed out a British tactical blunder that had caused a regiment of men to get cut to pieces. The second meeting had been at the Nuremberg war crimes trials which Mark was covering for ANS.

Toward the end of the war Bruce Sutherland’s troops were the first to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Both Sutherland and Caldwell had come to Nuremberg to give testimony.

Mark walked to the bathroom, washed his face with icy water, and fished around for a towel. “What can I do for you, Freddie?”

“CID phoned over to our headquarters this afternoon and told us you landed. You haven’t been issued credentials.”

“Christ, you’re a suspicious bunch of bastards. Sorry to disappoint you, Freddie. I’m here on vacation en route to Palestine.”

“This isn’t an official call, Parker,” Caldwell said; “just say we are a bit touchy over past relationships.”

“You have long memories,” Mark said, and began dressing. Caldwell mixed Mark a drink. Mark studied the British officer and wondered why Caldwell always managed to rub him the wrong way. There was that arrogance about him that stamped him as a member of that quaint breed, the Colonizer. Caldwell was a stuffy and narrow-minded bore. A gentleman’s game of tennis, in whites … a bashing gin and tonic and damn the natives. It was Freddie Caldwell’s conscience or the utter lack of it that bothered Mark. The meaning of right and wrong came to Caldwell through an army manual or an order. “You boys covering up some dirty work on Cyprus?” “Don’t be a bore, Parker. We own this island and we want to know what you want here.”

“You know … that’s what I like about you British. A Dutchman would tell me to get the hell out. You fellows always say, ‘please go to hell.’ I said I was on vacation. A reunion with an old friend.”

“Who?”

“A girl named Kitty Fremont.”

“Kitty, the nurse. Yes, smashing woman, smashing. We met at the governor’s a few days back.” Freddie Caldwell’s eyebrows raised questioningly as he looked at the connecting door to Kitty’s room, which stood ajar.

“Go give your filthy mind a bath,” Mark said. “I’ve known her for twenty-five years.”

“Then, as you Americans say-everything’s on the up and up.”

“That’s right and from this point on your visit becomes social, so get out.”

Freddie Caldwell smiled and set down his glass and tucked the swagger stick under his arm.

“Freddie Caldwell,” Mark said. “I want to see you when that smile is wiped off your face.”

“What in the devil are you talking about?”

“This is 1946, Major. A lot of people read the campaign slogans in the last war and believed them. You’re a dollar short and an hour late. You’re going to lose the whole shooting match … first it’s going to be India, then Africa, then the Middle East. I’ll be there to watch you lose the Palestine mandate. They’re going to boot you out of even Suez and Trans-Jordan. The sun is setting on the empire, Freddie … what is your wife going to do without forty little black boys to whip?”

“I read your coverage of the Nuremberg trials, Parker. You have that terrible American tendency toward being overdramatic. Corny is the word, I think. Besides, old boy, I don’t have a wife.”

“You boys are polite.”

“Remember, Parker, you ate on vacation. I’ll give Brigadier Sutherland .your regards. Cheerio.”

Mark smiled and shrugged. Then it came back to him. The sign at the airport., … welcome to Cyprus: William Shakespeare. The full quote was-“Welcome to Cyprus, goats and monkeys.”

CHAPTER TWO: During the hours in which Mark Parker awaited his long-delayed reunion with Kitty Fremont, two other men awaited a reunion of a far different sort in a different part of Cyprus. Forty miles away from Kyrenia, north of the port city of Famagusta, they waited in a forest.

It was cloudy, socked-in with no light from the sky. The two men stood in utter silence and squinted through the dark toward the bay a half mile down the hill.

They were in an abandoned white house on the hill in the midst of a forest of pines and eucalyptus and acacias. It was still and black except for a wisp of wind and the muffled unsteady breathing of the two men.

One of the men was a Greek Cypriot, a forest service ranger, and he was nervous.

The other man appeared as calm as a statue, never moving his eyes from the direction of the water. His name was David Ben Ami. His name meant David, Son of My People.

The clouds began to break. Light fell over the still waters of the bay and on the forest and the white house. David Ben Ami stood in the window and the light played on his face. He was a man of slight build in his early twenties. Even in the poor light his thin face and his deep eyes showed the sensitivity of a scholar.

As the clouds swept away, the light crept over fields of broken marble columns and statuary that littered the ground about the white house.

Broken stone. The mortal remains of the once-great city of Salamis which stood mighty in the time of Christ. What history lay beneath this ground and throughout the fields of marble! Salamis, founded in times barely recorded by men, by the warrior Teucer on his return from the Trojan Wars. It fell by earthquake and it rose again and it fell once more to the Arab sword under the banner of Islam, never to arise again. The light danced over the acres and acres of thousands of broken columns where a great Greek forum once stood.

The clouds closed and it was dark again.

“He is long overdue,” the Greek Cypriot forest ranger whispered nervously.

“Listen,” David Ben Ami said.

A faint sound of a boat’s motor was heard from far out on the water. David Ben Ami lifted his field glasses, hoping for a break in the clouds. The sound of the motor grew louder.

A flash of light streaked out from the water toward the white house on the hill. Another flash. Another.

David Ben Ami and the forest ranger raced from the white house, down the hill, and through the rubble and the woods till they reached the shore line. Ben Ami returned the signal with his own flashlight.

The sound of the motor stopped.

A shadowy figure of a man slipped over the side of the boat and began to swim toward the shore. David Ben Ami cocked his Sten gun and looked up and down the beach for signs of a British patrol. The figure emerged from the deep water and waded in. “David!” a voice called from the water.

“Ari,” he answered back, “this way, quickly.”

On the beach the three men ran past the white house and onto a dirt road. A taxi waited, hidden in the brush. Ben Ami thanked the Cypriot forest ranger, and he and the man from the boat sped off in the direction of Famagusta.

“My cigarettes are soaked,” Ari said.

David Ben Ami passed him a pack. A brief flame glowed over the face of the man who was called Ari. He was large and husky, in complete contrast to the small Ben Ami. His face was handsome but there was a set hardness in his eyes.

He was Ari Ben Canaan and he was the crack agent of the Mossad Aliyah Bet-the illegal organization.

CHAPTER THREE: There was a knock on Mark Parker’s door. He opened it. Katherine Fremont stood before him. She was even more beautiful than he remembered. They stared at each other silently for a long time. He studied her face and her eyes. She was a woman now, soft and compassionate in the way one gets only through terrible suffering.

“I ought to break your damned neck for not answering my letters,” Mark said.

“Hello, Mark,” she whispered.

They fell into each other’s arms and clung to each other. Then for the first hour they spoke little but contented themselves with looking at each other, with quick smiles, occasional pressing of hands, and affectionate kisses on the cheek.

At dinner they made small talk, mostly of Mark’s adventures as a foreign correspondent. Then Mark became aware that Kitty was steering all the conversation away from any talk of herself.

The final dish of cheeses came. Mark poured the last of his Keo beer and another of the many awkward silent periods followed. Now Kitty was obviously growing uncomfortable under his questioning stare.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s take a walk to the harbor.”

“I’ll get my stole,” she said.

They walked silently along the quay lined with white buildings and onto the sea wall and out to the lighthouse which stood at the narrow opening of the harbor. It was cloudy and they could see but dim outlines of the little boats resting at anchor. They watched the lighthouse blink out to sea, guiding a trawler toward the shelter of the harbor. A soft wind blew through Kitty’s golden hair. She tightened the stole over her shoulders. Mark lit a cigarette and sat on the wall. It was deathly still.

“I’ve made you very unhappy by coming here,” he said, “I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“I don’t want you to go,” she said. She looked away out to the sea. “I don’t know bow I felt when I received your cable. It opened the door on a lot of memories that I have tried awfully hard to bury. Yet I knew that one day this minute would come … in a way I’ve dreaded it … in a way, I’m glad it’s here.”

“It’s been four years since Tom got killed. Aren’t you ever going to shake this?”

“Women lose husbands in war,” she whispered. “I cried for Tom. We were very much in love, but I knew I would go on living. I don’t even know how he died.”

“There wasn’t much to it,” Mark said. “Tom was a marine and he went in to take a beach with ten thousand other marines. A bullet hit him and he died. No hero, no medals … no time to say, ‘tell Kitty I love her.’ Just got hit by a bullet and died … that’s it.”

The blood drained from her face. Mark lit a cigarette and handed it to her. “Why did Sandra die? Why did my baby have to die too?”

“I’m not God. I can’t answer that.”

She sat beside Mark on the sea wall and rested her head on his shoulder and sighed unevenly. “I guess there is no place left for me to run,” she said.

“Why don’t you tell me about it.”

“I can’t…”

“I think it’s about time that you did.”

A half dozen times Kitty tried to speak, but her voice held only short disconnected whispers. The years of terror were locked deep in her. She threw the cigarette into the water and looked at Mark. He was right and he was the only one in the world she could confide in.

“It was pretty terrible,” she said, “when I got the telegram about Tom, I loved him so. Just … just two months after that Sandra died of polio. I … I don’t remember too much. My parents took, me away to Vermont and put me in a home.”

“Asylum?”

“No … that’s the name they give it for poor people … they called mine a rest home for a breakdown. I don’t know how many months passed there. I couldn’t remember everything. I was in a complete fog day and night. Melancholia, they call it.”

Suddenly Kitty’s voice became steady. The door had opened and the torment was finding its way out. “One day the veil over my mind lifted and I remembered that Tom and Sandra were dead. A pain clung to me. Everything every minute of the day reminded me of them. Every time I heard a song, every time I heard laughter … every time I saw a child. Every breath I took hurt me. I prayed … I prayed, Mark, that the fog would fall on me again. Yes, I prayed I’d go insane so I couldn’t remember.”

She stood up tall and straight and the tears streamed down her cheeks. “I ran away to New York. Tried to bury myself in the throngs. I had four walls, a chair, a table, a swinging light bulb.” She let out a short ironic laugh. “There was even a flickering neon sign outside my window. Corny, wasn’t it? I’d walk aimlessly for hours on the streets till all the faces were a blur, or I’d sit and look out of the window for days at a time. Tom, Sandra, Tom, Sandra … it never left me for a moment.”

Kitty felt Mark behind her. His hands gripped her shoulders. Out in the water the trawler was nearing the opening between the arms of the sea wall. She brushed her cheek against Mark’s hand.

“One night I drank too much. You know me … I’m a terrible drinker. I saw a boy in a green uniform like Tom’s. He was lonely and crew-cut and tall … like Tom. We drank together … I woke up in a cheap, dirty hotel room … God knows where. I was still half drunk. I staggered to the mirror and I looked at myself. I was naked. The boy was naked too … sprawled out on the bed.”

“Kitty, for God’s sake…”

“It’s all right, Mark … let me finish. I stood there looking in that mirror … I don’t know how long. I had reached the bottom of my life. There was no place lower for me. That moment… that second I was done. The boy was unconscious … strange … I don’t even remember his name. I saw his razor blades in the bathroom and the gas pipe from the ceiling and for a minute or an hour … I don’t know how long I stood booking down ten stories over the sidewalk. The end of my life had come but I did not have the strength to take it. Then a strange thing happened, Mark. I knew that I was going to go on living without Tom and Sandra and suddenly the pain was gone.”

“Kitty, darling. I wanted so much to find you and help you.”

“I know. But it was something I had to fight out myself, I suppose. I went back to nursing, plunged into it like crazy. The minute it was over in Europe. I took on this Greek orphanage … it was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. That’s what I needed of course, to work myself to the limit. Mark

… I … I’ve started a hundred letters to you. Somehow I’ve been too terrified of this minute. I’m glad now, I’m glad it’s over.”

“I’m glad I found you,” Mark said.

She spun around and faced him. “… so that is the story of what has become of Kitty Fremont.”

Mark took her hand and they began walking back along the sea wall to the quay. From the Dome Hotel they could hear the sound of music.

CHAPTER FOUR: Brigadier Bruce Sutherland sat behind a big desk as military commander of Cyprus in his house on Hippocrates Street in Famagusta, some forty miles from Kyrenia. Except for small telltale traces-a slight roll around his middle and a whitening of the hair about his temples-Sutherland’s appearance belied his fifty-five years. His ramrod posture clearly identified a military man. A sharp knock sounded on the door and his aide, Major Fred Caldwell, entered.

“Good evening, Caldwell. Back from Kyrenia already? Have a chair.” Sutherland shoved the papers aside, stretched, and put his glasses on the desk. He selected a GBD pipe from the rack and dipped it into a humidor of Dunhill mix. Caldwell thanked the brigadier for a cigar and the two men soon clouded the room in smoke. The Greek houseboy appeared in answer to a buzz.

“Gin and tonic twice.”

Sutherland arose and walked into the full light. He was wearing a deep red velvet smoking jacket. He settled into a leather chair before the high shelves of books. “Did you see Mark Parker?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you think?”

Caldwell shrugged. “On the face of it we certainly can’t accuse him of anything. He is on the way to Palestine … here to see that American nurse, Katherine Fremont.”

“Fremont? Oh yes, that lovely woman we met at the governor’s.”

“So I say, sir, it all appears quite innocent … yet, Parker is a reporter and I can’t forget that trouble he caused us in Holland.”

“Oh, come now,” Sutherland retorted, “we all made blunders in the war. He just happened to catch one of ours. Fortunately our side won, and I don’t think there are ten people who remember.”

The gin and tonics arrived. “Cheers.”

Sutherland set his glass down and patted his white walrus mustache. Fred Caldwell wasn’t satisfied.

“Sir,” he persisted, “in case Parker does become curious and does decide to snoop around, don’t you think it would be wise to have a couple of CID men watching him?”

“See here, you leave him alone. Just tell a newspaperman ‘no’ and you’re apt to stir up a hornet’s nest. Refugee stories are out of style these days and I don’t believe he would be interested in their camps here. None the less we are not going to run the risk of arousing his curiosity by forbidding him to do anything. If you ask me I think it was a mistake for you to see him today.”

“But, Brigadier … after that trouble in Holland …”

“Bring the chess table, Freddie!”

There was something absolutely final about the way Sutherland said “Freddie.” Caldwell grumbled under his breath as they set up the chessmen. They made their opening moves but Sutherland could see that his aide was unhappy. He set down his pipe and leaned back.

“Caldwell, I have tried to explain to you that we are not running concentration camps here. The refugees at Caraolos are merely being detained on Cyprus until those blockheads in Whitehall decide what they are going to do with the Palestine mandate.”

“But those Jews are so unruly,” Caldwell said, “I’m certainly in favor of some good old-fashioned discipline.”

“No, Freddie, not this time. These people are not criminals and they’ve got world sympathy on their side. It is your job and mine to see that there are no riots, no outbreaks, and nothing that can be used as propaganda against us. Do you understand that?”

Caldwell didn’t understand. He damned well thought that the brigadier should be much tougher with the refugees. But no one wins an argument with a general unless he happens to be a bigger general and it was all so deep-so Caldwell moved a pawn forward.

“Your move, sir,” he said.

Caldwell looked up from the board. Sutherland seemed completely withdrawn and oblivious of him. It was happening more and more lately.

“Your move, sir,” Caldwell repeated.

Sutherland’s face was troubled. Poor chap, Caldwell thought. The brigadier had been married to Neddie Sutherland for almost thirty years, and suddenly she had left him and run off to Paris with a lover ten years her junior. It was a scandal that rocked army circles for months, and Sutherland must still be taking it hard. Terrible blow for the brigadier. He had always been such a decent sort of chap. The white face of Sutherland was lined with wrinkles, and little red veins on his nose turned bright. At this moment he looked all of his fifty-five years and more.

Bruce Sutherland was not thinking about Neddie, as Caldwell believed. His mind was on the refugee camps at Caraolos.

“Your move, sir.”

“So shall your enemies perish, Israel . , .” Sutherland mumbled.

“What did you say, sir?”

CHAPTER FIVE: Mark led Kitty back to the table, both of them breathless. “Do you know the last time I danced a samba?” she said.

“You’re not so bad for an old broad.”

Mark looked around the room filled with British officers in their army khakis and navy whites and their high and low English accents. Mark loved places like this. The waiter brought a new round of drinks and they clicked glasses.

“To Kitty … wherever she may be,” Mark said. “Well ma’am, where do you go from here?”

Kitty shrugged, “Golly, I don’t know, Mark. My work is finished at Salonika and I am getting restless. I’ve got a dozen offers I can take around Europe with the United Nations.”

“It was a lovely war,” Mark said. “Lots of orphans.”

“Matter of fact,” Kitty said, “I got a real good offer to stay right here on Cyprus just yesterday.”

“On Cyprus?”

“They have some refugee camps around Famagusta. Anyhow, some American woman contacted me. Seems that the camps are overcrowded and they’re opening new ones on the Larnaca road. She wanted me to take charge.”

Mark frowned.

“That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t meet you at the airport. I went to Famagusta to see her today.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I told her no. They were Jews. I suppose Jewish children are pretty much like any others but I’d just rather not get mixed up with them. It seems that there’s an awful lot of politics connected with those camps and they’re not under UN auspices.”

Mark was silent in thought. Kitty winked mischievously and waggled a finger under his nose. “Don’t be so serious . . , you want to know the other reason I didn’t meet you at the airport?”

“You’re acting tipsy.”

“I’m starting to feel that way. Well, Mr. Parker, I was in Famagusta seeing my boy friend off. You know me … one lover leaves by ship while another lands by airplane.”

“As long as you brought it up … who was this guy you came to Cyprus with?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Colonel Howard Hillings of the British Army.”

“Anything dirty between you two?”

“Dammit, no. He was so proper it was disgusting.”

“Where did you meet this guy?”

“Salonika. He was in charge of the British mission in the area. When I took over the orphanage we were short of everything … beds, medicine, food, blankets … everything. Anyhow, I went to him and he cut wads of red tape for me and we became friends for ever and ever and ever. He really is a dear man.”

“Go on. It’s getting interesting.”

“He got notice a few weeks ago that he was being transferred to Palestine and he had leave coming and wanted me to spend it with him here. You know, I’d been working so hard I’d completely forgotten I haven’t had a day off in eighteen months. Anyhow, they cut his leave short and he had to report to Famagusta to sail to Palestine today.”

“Future prospects as Mrs. Hillings?”

Kitty shook her head. “I like him very much. He brought me all the way to Cyprus to find the right setting to ask me to marry him …”

“And?”

“I loved Tom. I’ll never feel that way again.”

“You’re twenty-eight years old, Kitty. It’s a good age to retire.”

“I’m not complaining. I’ve found something that keeps me content. Mark, you’re going to Palestine too. There are a lot of officers here leaving for Palestine.”

“There’s going to be a war, Kitty.”

“Why … ? I don’t understand.”

“Oh, lots of reasons. Lot of people around the world have decided they want to run their own lives. Colonies are going out of vogue this century. These boys here are riding a dead-horse. This is the soldier of the new empire,” Mark said, taking a dollar bill from his pocket; “we’ve got millions of these green soldiers moving into every corner of the world. Greatest occupying force you’ve ever seen. A bloodless conquest … but Palestine … that’s different again, Kitty, there’s almost something frightening about it. Some people are out to resurrect a nation that has been dead for two thousand years. Nothing like that has ever happened before. What’s more, I think they’re going to do it. It’s these same Jews you don’t like.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like Jews,” Kitty insisted.

“I won’t debate with you now. Think real hard, honey … since you’ve been on Cyprus. Have you heard anything or seen anything that might be, well, unusual?”

Kitty bit her lip in thought and sighed. “Only the refugee camps. I hear they are overcrowded and in deplorable condition. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. Just say I’ve got an intuition that something very big is happening on Cyprus.”

“Why don’t you just say you’re naturally nosey by profession?”

“It’s more than that. Do you know a Major Fred Caldwell? He’s aide to Brigadier Sutherland.”

“Terrible bore. I met him at the governor’s.”

“He met me in my room before you got in. Why would a general’s aide be sitting on my lap ten minutes after I landed on a matter that is seemingly trivial? Kitty, I tell you the British are nervous about something here. I … I can’t put my finger on it, but five will get you ten it’s tied up with those refugee camps. Look … would you go to work in those camps for me for a few weeks?”

“Certainly, Mark. If you want me to.”

“Oh, the hell with it,” Mark said, setting down his drink, “us two kids are on vacation. You’re right … I’m nosey and suspicious by profession. Forget it, let’s dance.”

CHAPTER SIX: On Arsinos Street in Famagusta, facing the wall of the old city, sat a large and luxurious house belonging to a Greek Cypriot named Mandria, who was owner of the Cyprus-Mediterranean Shipping Company as well as owner of a great number of the island’s taxicabs. Mandria and David Ben Ami waited anxiously as Ari Ben Canaan cleaned up and changed into dry clothing after his swim ashore.

They both knew that the appearance of Ari Ben Canaan on Cyprus meant a top-level mission for Mossad Aliyah Bet. British policy for many years had been to exclude or extremely limit the Jewish immigration to Palestine. They had the Royal Navy to execute this policy. The Mossad Aliyah Bet was an organization of Palestinian Jews whose business it was to help smuggle other Jews into Palestine. However, as fast as the British Navy caught the Mossad boats trying to run the blockade the refugees would be transferred to detention camps on Cyprus,

Ari Ben Canaan, in a fresh change of clothing, entered the room and nodded to Mandria and David Ben Ami. The Palestinian was a big man, well over six feet and well built. He and Ben Ami had long been intimate friends but they played a role of formality in front of Mandria, the Cypriot, who was not a member of their organization but merely a sympathizer.

Ari lit a cigarette and got right to the point. “Headquarters has sent me here to stage a mass escape from the detention camps. The reasons are obvious to all of us. What is your opinion, David?”

The thin young man from Jerusalem paced the room thoughtfully. He had been sent to Cyprus months before by the secret army of the Jews in Palestine called the Palmach. He and dozens of other Palmachniks smuggled themselves into the compounds of refugees without the knowledge of the British and set up schools, hospitals, and synagogues, built sanitation facilities, and organized light industry. The refugees who had been turned back from Palestine to Cyprus were hopeless people. The appearance of young Palestinians of the Jews’ army infused new hope and morale. David Ben Ami and the other Palmachniks gave military training to several thousand men and women among the refugees, using sticks as rifles and rocks as grenades. Although he was but twenty-two years of age David was the Palmach commander in Cyprus. If the British had gotten wind that there were Palestinians inside the camps they kept quiet about it, for they did their guarding from the outside-having no desire to go into the hate-riddled compounds.

“How many people do you want to escape?” David asked.

“Three hundred, more or less.”

David shook his head. “We have a few tunnels dug but those lead to the sea. As you know by coming in here tonight, the tides are treacherous • and only strong swimmers can make it. Second, we move in and out through the garbage dumps. They are loosely guarded, but we could never get that many people through. Third, British uniforms and false papers … again, we can only get a few in and out at a time. Last, we crate some of our members up in boxes and send them to the docks. Mr. Mandria here owns the shipping company and his dock hands are on the alert for these crates. At this moment, Ari, I see no way to pull a mass escape.”

“We will find a way,” Ben Canaan said matter of factly, “but we only have a few weeks to complete this job.”

Mandria, the Greek, arose, sighed, and shook his head.

“Mr. Ben Canaan, you have swum ashore tonight and asked us to do the impossible … in two weeks, yet. In my heart,” Mandria said, touching his heart, “I say that it will be done, but! … in my head”-and Mandria tapped his skull with his forefinger-“it cannot be done.” The Cypriot clasped his hands behind him and paced the dining room. “Believe me, Mr. Ben Canaan”-he swung around and made a bravado sweep of the arm-“you Palmach and Mossad people can count on the Greeks of Cyprus to back you to the last drop of blood. We are for you! We are with you! We are behind you! Nevertheless … ! Cyprus is an island and it is surrounded by water on all sides and the British are not stupid or asleep. I, Mandria, will do everything for you, but still you are not getting three hundred people out of Caraolos. There are ten-foot walls of barbed wire around those compounds and the guards carry rifles … with bullets in them.”

Ari Ben Canaan arose and towered over the other two men. He had ignored much of Mandria’s dramatics. “I will need a British uniform, papers, and a driver by morning. You can start looking for a boat, Mr. Mandria. Something between a hundred and two hundred tons. David, we will need an expert forger.”

“We have a boy out in the children’s compound who is supposed to be a real artist but he won’t work. The rest of the stuff is primitive.”

“I’ll go out to Caraolos tomorrow and talk to him. I want to look over the camp, anyhow.”

Mandria was elated. What a man of action Ari Ben Canaan was! Find a ship! Find a forger! Get me a uniform and a driver! life was so exciting since the Mossad and Palmach had come to Cyprus, and he so loved being a part of the cat-and-mouse game with the British. He stood up and pumped Ari Ben Canaan’s hand. “We Cypriots are with you. Your battle is our battle!”

Ben Canaan looked at Mandria disgustedly. “Mr. Mandria,” he said, “you are being well paid for your time and efforts.”

A stunned silence fell on the room. Mandria turned as white as a sheet. “Do you believe … do you dare believe, sir, that I, I, Mandria, would do this for money? Do you think I risk ten years in prison and exile from my home? It has cost me over five thousand pounds since I began working with your Palmach.”

David stepped in quickly. “I think you had better apologize to Mr. Mandria. He and his taxi drivers and his dock hands take all sorts of risks. Without the help of the Greek people our work would be nearly impossible.”

Mandria slumped into a chair deeply wounded. “Yes, Mr. Ben Canaan, we admire you. We feel that if you can throw the British out of Palestine then maybe we can do the same on Cyprus someday.”

“My apologies, Mr. Mandria,” Ari said. “I must be over-tense.” He recited the words completely without meaning.

A shrill sound of sirens outside brought the conversation to a stop. Mandria opened the French doors to the balcony and walked outside with David. Ari Ben Canaan stood behind them. They saw an armored car with machine guns leading a convoy of lorries up the street from the docks. There were twenty-five lorries, in all, surrounded by machine guns mounted on jeeps.

The lorries were packed with refugees from the illegal ship, Door of Hope, which had tried to run the British blockade from Italy to Palestine. The Door of Hope had been rammed by a British destroyer, towed to Haifa, and the refugees transferred immediately to Cyprus.

The sirens shrieked louder as the convoy swept close to the balcony of Mandria’s home. The lorries passed one by one. The three men could see the jam of tattered, ragged misery. They were beaten people-at the end of the line-dazed, withered, exhausted. The sirens shrieked and the convoy turned at the Land Gate of the old wall and onto the road to Salamis, in the direction of the British detention camps at Caraolos. The convoy faded from sight but the shrieks of the sirens lingered on and on.

David Ben Ami’s hands were tight fists and his teeth were clenched in a face livid with helpless rage. Mandria wept openly. Only Ari Ben Canaan showed no emotion. They walked in from the balcony.

“I know you two have much to talk over,” Mandria said between sobs. “I hope you find your room comfortable, Mr Ben Canaan. We will have your uniform, papers, and a taxi by morning. Good night.”

The instant David and Ari were alone they threw their arms about each other. The big man picked the little man up and set him down as though he were a child. They looked each other over and congratulated each other on looking well and went into another bear hug.

“Jordana!” David said anxiously. “Did you see her before you left? Did she give you a message?”

Ari scratched his jaw teasingly. “Now let me see …”

“Please, Ari… it has been months since I have received a letter…”

Ari sighed and withdrew an envelope which David snatched from his hands. “I put it in a rubber pouch. The only thing I could think of tonight when I was swimming in was that you would break my neck if I got your damned letter wet.”

David was not listening. He squinted in the half light and slowly read the words of a woman who missed and longed for her lover. He folded the letter tenderly and carefully placed it in his breast pocket to be read again and again, for it might be months before she could send another. “How is she?” David asked.

“I don’t see what my sister sees in yon. Jordana? Jordana is Jordana. She is wild and beautiful and she loves you very much.”

“My parents … my brothers … how is our Palmach gang … what…”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I’ll be here for a while-one question at a time.”

David pulled out the letter and read it again, and the two men were silent. They stared out of the French doors at the ancient wall across the road. “How are things at home?” David whispered.

“Things at home? The same as always. Bombings, shootings. Exactly as it has been every day since we were children. It never changes. Every year we come to a crisis which is sure to wipe us out-then we go on to another crisis worse than the last. Home is home,” Ari said, “only this time there is going to be a war.” He put his arm on the shoulder of his smaller friend. “We are all damned proud of the work you have done in Caraolos with these refugees.”

“I have done as well as can be expected, trying to train soldiers with broomsticks. Palestine is a million miles away to these people. They have no hope left. Ari … I don’t want you antagonizing Mandria any more. He is a wonderful friend.”

“I can’t stand people patronizing us, David.”

“And we can’t do the job here without him and the Greek people.”

“Don’t be fooled by the Mandrias all over the world. They weep crocodile tears and they pay lip service to our millions of slaughtered, but when the final battle comes we will stand alone. Mandria will sell us out like all the others. We will be betrayed and double-crossed as it has always been. We have no friends except our own people, remember that.”

“And you are wrong,” David snapped back.

“David, David, David. I have been with the Mossad and the Palmach for more years than I care to remember. You are young yet. This is your first big assignment. Don’t let emotion cloud your logic.”

“I want emotion to cloud my logic,” David answered. “I burn inside every time I see something like that convoy. Our people locked up in cages like animals.”

“We try all sorts of schemes,” Ari said; “we must keep a clear head. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes we fail. Work with a clear mind, always.”

Even now they could still hear the sound of sirens over the breeze. The young man from Jerusalem lit a cigarette and stood for a moment in thought. “I must never stop believing,” he said solemnly, “that I am carrying on a new chapter of a story started four thousand years ago.” He spun around and looked up at the big man excitedly. “Look, Ari. Take the place you landed tonight. Once the city of Salamis stood there. It was in Salamis that the Bar Kochba revolution began in the first century. He drove the Romans from our country and re-established the Kingdom of Judah. There is a bridge near the detention camps-they call it the Jews’ Bridge. It has been called that for two thousand years. I can’t forget these things. Right in the same place we fought the Roman Empire we now fight the British Empire two thousand years later.”

Ari Ben Canaan stood a head taller than David Ben Ami. He smiled down at the younger man as a father might smile at an overenthusiastic son. “Finish the story. After the Bar Kochba revolution the legions of Rome returned and massacred our people in city after city. In the final battle at Beitar the blood of murdered women and children made a crimson river which flowed for a full mile. Akiva, one of the leaders, was skinned alive-and Bar Kochba was carried off to Rome in chains to die in the lions’ den. Or was it Bar Giora who died in the lions’ den in another revolution? I can get these revolutions mixed up. Oh yes, the Bible and our history are filled with wonderful tales and convenient miracles. But this is real today. We have no Joshua to make the sun stand still or the walls to come tumbling down. The British tanks will not get stuck in the mud like Canaanite chariots, and the sea has not closed in on the British Navy as it did on Pharaoh’s army. The age of miracles is gone, David.”

“It is not gone! Our very existence is a miracle. We outlived the Romans and the Greeks and even Hitler. We have outlived every oppressor and we will outlive the British Empire. That is a miracle, Ari.”

“Well, David-one thing I can say about the Jews. We certainly know how to argue. Let’s get some sleep.”

CHAPTER SEVEN: “Your move, sir,” Fred Caldwell repeated.

“Yes, yes, forgive me.” Brigadier Sutherland studied the chessboard and moved his pawn forward. Caldwell brought out a knight and Sutherland countered with his own. “Dash it!” the brigadier mumbled as his pipe went out. He relit it.

The two men glanced up as they heard the dim but steady shrill screams of sirens. Sutherland looked at the wall clock. That would be the refugees from the illegal ship, Door of Hope.

“Door of Hope, Gates of Zion, Promised Land, Star of David,” Caldwell said with a snicker. “I will say one thing. They do give those blockade runners colorful names.”

Sutherland’s brow furrowed. He tried to study out his next move on the board, but the sirens would not leave his ears. He stared at the ivory chessmen, but he was visualizing the convoy of lorries packed with agonized faces, machine guns, armored cars. “If you don’t mind, Caldwell, I think I’ll turn in.”

“Anything wrong, sir?”

“No. Good night.” The brigadier walked from the room quickly and closed the door of his bedroom and loosened his smoking jacket. The sirens seemed to screech unbearably loudly. He slammed the window shut to drown the noise but still he could hear it.

Bruce Sutherland stood before the mirror and wondered what was going wrong with him. Sutherland from Sutherland Heights. Another distinguished career in a line of distinguished careers that went on, the same as England itself.

But these past weeks on Cyprus something was happening. Something tearing him to pieces. He stood there before the mirror and looked into his own watery eyes and wondered where it had all begun.

Sutherland: Good fellow to have on your team, said the yearbook at Eton. Right sort of chap, that Sutherland. Proper family, proper schooling, proper career.

The army? Good choice, Bruce old man. We Sutherlands have served in the army for centuries… .

Proper marriage. Neddie Ashton. The daughter of Colonel Ashton was a clever catch. Fine stock, Neddie Ashton. Fine hostess, that woman. She always has the ear of the right person. She’ll be a big help to your career. Splendid match! The Ashtons and the Sutherlands.

Where the failure, Sutherland wondered? Neddie had given him two lovely children. Albert was a real Sutherland. A captain in his father’s old regiment already, and Martha had made herself a splendid marriage.

Bruce Sutherland opened the closet and put on his pajamas. He touched the roll of fat about his waist. Not too bad for a man of fifty-five. He still had plenty of punch left.

Sutherland had come up fast in World War II by comparison to the slow tedious advancements in the peacetime service. There had been India, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Middle East. But it took a war to show what he was made of. He proved to be an exceptional infantry commander. V-E Day found him a brigadier.

He put on his bedroom slippers and sank slowly into a deep chair and dimmed the lamp and he was filled with remembering.

Neddie had always been a good wife. She was a good mother, a tremendous hostess, and a woman cut out for colonial service in the army. He had been very fortunate. When had the break come between them? Yes, he remembered. It was in Singapore so many years ago.

He was a major when he met Marina, the olive-skinned Eurasian woman. Marina-born and made for love. Each man has a Marina hidden deep in his inner thoughts, but he had his in the flesh and she was real. Laughter and fire and tears and passion. Being with Marina was like being in a bubbling volcano ready to erupt. He was insane for her-he desired her wildly, madly. He threw jealous tantrums before her only to half sob, begging forgiveness. Marina … Marina … Marina … the black eyes and the raven hair. She could torment him. She could delight him. She could spiral him to heights he never knew existed on this earth. Those precious, magnificent moments of their trysts …

His hands had clutched her hair and pulled her head back and he had looked at her deep red sensuous lips … “I love you, you bitch … I love you.”

“I love you, Bruce,” Marina had whispered.

… Bruce Sutherland remembered the stunned hurt look on Neddie’s face as she confronted him with evidence of his affair.

“I won’t say this hasn’t hurt me deeply,” Neddie said, too proud for tears, “but I am willing to forgive and forget. There are the children to think of. There is your career … and our families. I’ll try to make a go of it with you, Bruce, but you must swear you’ll never see that woman again and that you’ll put in an immediate request for transfer from Singapore.”

That woman-that woman, you call her, Bruce thought-is my love. She has given me something that you or a thousand Neddies never could or never will. She has given me something no man has a right to expect on this earth.

“I want your answer now, Bruce.”

Answer? What could the answer be? A man can have a woman like Marina for a night, for a touch, but she is not real. There is only one Marina to a man … one to a lifetime. Answer? Throw away his career for a Eurasian girl? Bring scandal on the name of Sutherland?

“I will never see her again, Neddie,” Bruce Sutherland promised.

Bruce Sutherland never saw her again but he never stopped thinking of her. Perhaps that is where it all started.

The sounds of the sirens were very faint now. The convoy must be quite near Caraolos, Sutherland thought. Soon the sirens would stop and he could sleep. He began thinking of the retirement that would be coming in another four or five years. The family house at Sutherland Heights would be far too big. A cottage, perhaps in the country. Soon it would be time to think about a pair of good hunting setters and gathering rose catalogues and building up his library. Time to start thinking about a decent club to join in London. Albert, Martha, and his grandchildren would indeed be a comfort in retirement. Perhaps … perhaps he would take a mistress, too.

It seemed strange that after nearly thirty years of marriage he would be going into retirement without Neddie. She had been so quiet, reserved, and distinguished all those years. She had been so sporting about his affair with Marina. Suddenly, after a lifetime of complete propriety Neddie burst out frantically to salvage her few years left as a woman. She ran off to Paris with a Bohemian chap ten years her junior. Everyone sympathized with Bruce, but it really didn’t matter to him much. There had been no contact and little feeling for Neddie for many years. She could have her fling. They were quite civilized about it. Perhaps he would take her back later …… perhaps a mistress would be better.

At last the sirens from the convoy stopped. There was complete silence in the room except for the muffled shushing of the surf breaking on the shore. Bruce Sutherland opened the window and breathed in the cool crisp November air. He went to the bathroom and washed and placed the bridge of four teeth in a glass of solution. Damned shame, he thought, losing those four teeth. He had said the same thing for thirty years. It was the result of a rugby game. He examined the other teeth to satisfy himself they were still in good shape.

He opened the medicine chest and studied the row of bottles. He took down a tin of sleeping powders and mixed a double dose. It was difficult to sleep these days.

His heart began racing as he drank down the solution. He knew it was going to be another one of those horrible nights. He tried desperately to lock out or stifle the thoughts creeping into his brain. He covered himself in bed and hoped sleep would come quickly, but it was already beginning to whirl around and around and around in his mind …

… Bergen-Belsen … Bergen-Belsen … Bergen-Belsen … NUREMBERG … NUREMBERG! NUREMBERG! NUREMBERG!

“Take the stand and give your name.”

“Bruce Sutherland, Brigadier General, Commander of …”

“Describe, in your own words …”

“My troops entered Bergen-Belsen at twenty minutes past five in the evening of April 15.”

“Describe in your own words …”

“Camp Number One was an enclosure of four hundred yards wide by a mile long. That area held eighty thousand people. Mostly Hungarian and Polish Jews.”

“Describe in your own words …”

“The ration for Camp Number One was ten thousand loaves of bread a week.” “Identify…”

“Yes, those are testicle crushers and thumbscrews used in torture …”

“Describe…”

“Our census showed thirty thousand dead in Camp Number One, including nearly fifteen thousand corpses just littered around. There were twenty-eight thousand women and twelve thousand men still alive.”

“DESCRIBE … !”

“We made desperate efforts but the survivors were so emasculated and diseased that thirteen thousand more died within a. few days after our arrival.”

“DESCRIBE… !”

“Conditions were so wretched when we entered the camp that the living were eating the flesh of the corpses.”

The moment Bruce Sutherland had completed his testimony at the Nuremberg war crimes trials he received an urgent message to return to London at once. The message came from an old and dear friend in the War Office, General Sir Clarence Tevor-Browne. Sutherland sensed it was something out of the ordinary.

‘He flew to London the next day and reported at once to that huge, ungainly monstrosity of a building on the corner of Whitehall and Great Scotland Yard which housed the British War Office.

“Bruce, Bruce, Bruce! Come in, come in, man! Good to see you. I followed your testimony at the Nuremberg trials. Nasty bit of business.”

“I am glad it is over,” Sutherland said.

“Sorry to hear about you and Neddie. If there is anything at all I can do…”

Sutherland shook his head.

At last Tevor-Browne led up to the reason for asking him to come to London. “Bruce,” he said, “I called you here because a rather delicate assignment has come up. I must give

a recommendation and I want to put your name up. I wanted to talk it over with you first.”

“Go on, Sir Clarence.”

“Bruce, these Jews escaping from Europe have posed quite a problem. They are simply flooding Palestine. Frankly, the Arabs are getting quite upset about the numbers getting into the mandate. We here have decided to set up detention camps on Cyprus to contain these people-at least as a temporary measure until Whitehall decides what we are going to do with the Palestine mandate.”

“I see,” Sutherland said softly.

Tevor-Browne continued. “This entire thing is touchy and must be handled with great tact. Now, no one wants to ride herd on a bunch of downtrodden refugees, and the fact is … well, they have a great deal of sympathy on their side in high quarters-especially in France and America. Things must be kept very quiet on Cyprus. We want nothing to happen to create unfavorable opinion.”

Sutherland walked to the window and looked out to the Thames River and watched the big double-deck buses drive over the Waterloo Bridge. “I think the whole idea is wretched,” he said.

“It is not for you and me to decide, Bruce. Whitehall gives the orders. We merely carry them out.”

Sutherland continued looking out of the window. “I saw those people at Bergen-Belsen. Must be the same ones who are trying to get into Palestine now.” He returned to his chair. “We have broken one promise after another to those people in Palestine for thirty years.”

“See here, Bruce,” Tevor-Browne said, “you and I see eye to eye on this, but we are in a minority. We both served together in the Middle East. Let me tell you something, man. I sat here at this desk during the war as one report after another of Arab sellouts came in. The Egyptian Chief of Staff selling secrets to the Germans; Cairo all decked out to welcome Rommel as their liberator; the Iraqis going to the Germans; the Syrians going to the Germans; the Mufti of Jerusalem a Nazi agent. I could go on for hours. You must look at Whitehall’s side of this, Bruce. We can’t risk losing our prestige and our hold on the entire Middle East over a few thousand Jews.”

Sutherland sighed. “And this is our most tragic mistake of all, Sir Clarence. We are going to lose the Middle East despite it.”

“You are all wound up, Bruce.”

“There is a right and a wrong, you know.”

General Sir Clarence Tevor-Browne smiled slightly and shook his head sadly. “I have learned very little in my years,

Bruce, but one thing I have learned. Foreign policies of this, or any other, country are not based on right and wrong. Right and wrong? It is not for you and me to argue the right or the wrong of this question. The only kingdom that runs on righteousness is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdoms of the earth run on oil. The Arabs have oil.”

Bruce Sutherland was silent. Then he nodded. “Only the kingdom of heaven runs on righteousness,” he repeated. “The kingdoms of the earth run on oil. You have learned something, Sir Clarence. It seems that all of life itself is Wrapped up in those lines. All of us … people … nations … live by need and not by truth.”

Tevor-Browne leaned forward. “Somewhere in God’s scheme of things he gave us the burden of an empire to rule____”

“Ours not to reason why,” Sutherland whispered. “But I can’t seem to forget the Arab slave markets in Saudi Arabia and the first time I was invited to watch a man have his hands amputated as punishment for stealing, and somehow I can’t forget those Jews at Bergen-Belsen.”

“It is not too good to be a soldier and have a conscience. I won’t force you to take this post on Cyprus.”

“I’ll go. Of course I’ll go. But tell me. Why did you choose me?”

“Most of our chaps are pro-Arab for no other reason than our tradition has been pro-Arab and soldiers are not in a position to do much other than follow policy. I don’t want to send someone to Cyprus who will antagonize these refugees. It is a problem that calls for understanding and compassion.”

Sutherland arose. “I sometimes think,” he said, “that it is almost as much a curse being born an Englishman as it is being born a Jew.”

Sutherland accepted the assignment on Cyprus, but his heart was filled with fear. He wondered if Tevor-Browne had known he was half Jewish.

That decision, that horrible decision he had made so long ago was coming back to haunt him now.

He remembered that afterward he began to find solace in the Bible. There were those empty years with Neddie, the painful loss of the Eurasian girl he loved, and it all seemed to plunge him deeper and deeper into a longing to find peace of mind. How wonderful for a soldier like him to read of the great campaigns of Joshua and Gideon and Joab. And those magnificent women-Ruth and Esther and Sarah … and … and Deborah. Deborah, the Joan of Arc, the liberator of her people.

He remembered the chill as he read the words: Awake, awake, Deborah; awake, awake.

Deborah! That was his mother’s name.

Deborah Davis was a rare and beautiful woman. It was small wonder that Harold Sutherland was smitten with her. The Sutherland family was tolerant when Harold sat through fifteen performances of The Taming of the Shrew to watch the beautiful actress, Deborah Davis, and they smiled benevolently as he went over his allowance on flowers and gifts. It was a boyish fling, they thought, and he’d get over it.

Harold could not get over Deborah Davis, and the family stopped being tolerant. She defied an edict they issued for her to appear at Sutherland Heights. It was then that Harold’s father, Sir Edgar, traveled to London to see this amazing young woman who refused to travel to Sutherland Heights. Deborah was as clever and witty as she was beautiful. She dazzled Sir Edgar and completely won him.

Sir Edgar decided then and there that his son had been damned lucky. After all, the Sutherlands were known to have a tradition of inclining toward actresses and some of them had become the grandest dames in the family’s long history.

There was, of course, the touchy business of Deborah Davis being a Jewess, but the matter was closed when she agreed to take instructions in the Church of England.

Harold and Deborah had three children. There was Mary, their only girl, and there was moody, irresponsible Adam. And there was Bruce. Bruce was the oldest and Deborah’s favorite. The boy adored his mother. But as close as they were she never spoke of her own childhood, or of her parents. He knew only that she had been very poor and run away to the stage.

The years passed. Bruce took up his army career and married Neddie Ashton. The children, Albert and Martha, came. Harold Sutherland died, and Deborah moved along in age.

Bruce remembered so well the day that it happened. He was coming to Sutherland Heights for a long visit and bringing Neddie and the children. Deborah would always be in the rose garden or the conservatory or floating about gaily on her duties-smiling, happy, gracious. But this day as he drove up to Sutherland Heights she was not there to greet him nor was she anywhere about to be found. At last he discovered her sitting in darkness in her drawing room. This was so unlike Mother that it startled him. She was sitting like a statue, looking at the wall, oblivious to her surroundings.

Bruce kissed her on the cheek softly and knelt beside her. “Is something wrong, Mother?”

She turned slowly and whispered, “Today is Yom Kippur -the Day of Atonement.”

Her words chilled Bruce to the bone.

Bruce talked it over with Neddie and his sister, Mary. They decided that since Father had died she had been alone too much. Furthermore, Sutherland Heights was too big for her. She should move into an apartment in London where she could be closer to Mary. Then, too, Deborah was getting old. It was hard for them to realize, because she seemed to them as beautiful as when they were children.

Bruce and Neddie went off for his tour of service in the Middle East. Mary wrote happy letters that Mother was getting along fine, and the letters from Deborah told of her happiness to be in London near Mary’s family.

But when Bruce returned to England it was a different story. Mary was beside herself. Mother was seventy years old now and acting more and more strangely. A creeping on of senility. She could not remember something that had happened a day ago, but she would utter disconnected things about events that took place fifty years ago. It was frightening to Mary because Deborah had never spoken of her past to her children. Mary was most alarmed of her mother’s strange disappearances.

Mary was glad that Bruce had returned. He was the oldest and Mother’s favorite and he was so steady. Bruce followed his mother one day on one of her mysterious walks. It led to a synagogue in Whitechapel.

He thought it all over carefully and decided to leave her alone. She was old; he did not feel it proper to confront her with things that had happened over fifty years before. It was best to let it pass quietly.

At the age of seventy-five Deborah Sutherland lay on her deathbed. Bruce got back to England just in time.

The old woman smiled as she saw her son sitting on the edge of the bed. “You are a Lieutenant Colonel now … you look fine … Bruce, my son … I haven’t too many hours left…”

“Hush now, Mother. You’ll be up and about in no time.”

“No, I must tell you something. I wanted to be your father’s wife so badly. I wanted so much … so very very much to be the mistress of Sutherland Heights. I did a terrible thing Bruce. I denied my people. I denied them in life. I want to be with them now. Bruce … Bruce, promise that I shall be buried near my father and my mother …”

“I promise, Mother.”

“My father … your grandfather … you never knew him. When … when I was a little girl he would hold me on his lap and he would say to me … ‘awake, awake, Deborah; awake, awake …’”

Those were the last words Deborah Sutherland spoke. Bruce Sutherland sat in numb grief for a long hour beside the lifeless body of his mother. Then the numbness began to thaw under the nagging burn of a doubt that would not be kept out of his mind. Must he be bound by a promise he had made a dying woman? A promise he was forced to make? Would it be breaking the code of honor by which he had always lived? Wasn’t it true that Deborah Sutherland’s mind had been going on her bit by bit over the past years? She had never been a Jewess in life, why should she be one in death? Deborah had been a Sutherland and nothing else.

What a terrible scandal would be created if he were to bury her in a shabby rundown Jewish cemetery on the poverty side of London. Mother was dead. The living-Neddie, Albert and Martha and Mary’s family and Adam would be hurt deeply. The living had to be served.

As he kissed his mother farewell and walked from her room he had made his decision.

Deborah was put to rest in the family vault at Sutherland Heights.

The sirens!

The sirens from the convoy of refugees!

The sirens shrieked louder and louder and louder until they tore through his eardrums. Bergen-Belsen … Marina … Neddie … caged trucks … the camps at Caraolos … 1 promise, Mother … 1 promise, Mother …

A burst of thunder rocked the house to its very foundation, and the sea outside became wild and waves smashed up the shore and raced nearly to the house. Sutherland threw off the covers and staggered about the room as though drunk. He froze at the window. Lightning! Thunder! The raging water grew higher and higher!

“God … God … God … God … !”

“Brigadier Sutherland! Brigadier Sutherland! Wake up, sir! Wake up, sir!”

The Greek houseboy shook him hard.

Sutherland’s eyes opened and he looked about wildly. The sweat poured from his body and his heart pounded painfully. He gasped for breath. The houseboy quickly brought him a brandy.

He looked outside to the sea. The night was calm and the water was as smooth as glass and lapped gently against the shore.

“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ll be all right… .”

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Yes.”

The door closed.

Bruce Sutherland slumped into a chair and buried his face in his hands and wept and whispered over and over, “… my mother in heaven … my mother in heaven …”

CHAPTER EIGHT: Brigadier Bruce Sutherland slept the sleep of the tormented and the damned.

Mandria, the Cypriot, twisted and turned in a nervous but exhilarated sleep.

Mark Parker slept the sleep of a man who had accomplished a mission.

Kitty Fremont slept with a peace of mind she had not known in years.

David Ben Ami slept only after reading Jordana’s letter so many times he knew it by memory.

Ari Ben Canaan did not sleep. There would be other times for that luxury, but not now. There was much to learn and little time to learn it in. All during the night he pored over maps and documents and papers, absorbing every fact about Cyprus, the British operation, and his own people there. He waded through the stacks of data with a cigarette or a coffee cup continuously at hand. There was a calm ease, a sureness about him.

The British had said many times that the Palestinian Jews were a match for anyone on matters of intelligence. The Jews had the advantage that every Jew in every country in the world was a potential source of information and protection for a Mossad Aliyah Bet agent.

At daybreak Ari awakened David, and after a quick breakfast they rode in one of Mandria’s taxis out to the detention camp at Caraolos.

The compounds themselves stretched for many miles in an area that hugged the bay, midway between Famagusta and the ruins of Salamis. The garbage dumps were a contact point between the refugees and the Cypriots. The British guarded them loosely because the garbage detail was made up of “trusties.” The garbage dumps became trading centers where leather goods and art work made in the camp were exchanged for bread and clothing. David led Ari through the dumps where the early morning bartering between Greeks and Jews was already going on. From here they entered their first compound.

Ari stood and looked at the mile after mile of barbed wire. Although it was November it was chokingly hot under a constant swirl of blowing dust. Compound after compound of tents were stretched along the bay, all set in an area of low—

hanging acacia trees. Each compound was closed in by ten-to twelve-foot walls of barbed wire. On the corners there were searchlight towers manned by British guards armed with machine guns. A skinny dog began following them. The word “BEVIN” was painted on the dog’s sides-a bow to the British Foreign Minister.

It was the same scene in each compound they visited: packed with miserable and angry people. Almost everyone was dressed in crudely sewn purple shorts and shirts made from cloth that had been torn from the inner linings of the tents. Ari studied the faces filled with suspicion, hatred, defeat.

In each new compound Ari would suddenly be embraced by a boy or girl in the late teens or early twenties who had been smuggled in by the Palestine Palmach to work with the refugees. They would throw their arms about him and begin to ask questions about home. Each time Ari begged off, promising to hold a Palmach meeting for the whole group in a few days. Each Palmach head showed Ari around the particular compound he or she was in charge of, and occasionally Ari would ask a question.

For the most part, he was very quiet. His eyes were searching the miles of barbed wire for some key that would help him get three hundred people out.

Many of the compounds were grouped together by nationalities. There were compounds of Poles and of French and of Czechs. There were compounds of Orthodox Jews and there were compounds of those who banded together with similar political beliefs. Most compounds, however, were merely survivals of the war, with no identity other than that they were Jews who wanted to go to Palestine. They all had a similarity in their uniform misery.

David led Ari to a wooden bridge that connected two main portions of the camp by crossing over the top of the barbed wire walls. There was a sign on the bridge that read: welcome to Bergen-Bevin. “It is rather bitter irony, Ari, this bridge. There was one exactly like it in the Lodz ghetto in Poland.”

By now David was seething. He berated the British for the subhuman conditions of the camp, for the fact that German prisoners of war on Cyprus had a greater degree of freedom, for the lack of food and medical care, and just for the general gross injustice. Ari was not listening to David’s ranting. He was too intent on studying the structure and arrangement of the place. He asked David to show him the tunnels.

Ari was led to a compound of Orthodox Jews close to the bay. There was a row of outside toilets near the barbed wire wall. On the first toilet shack was a sign that read: Bevingrad. Ari was shown that the fifth and sixth toilets in

the line of sheds were fakes. The holes under the seats led under the barbed wire and through tunnels to the bay. Ari shook his head-it was all right for a few people at a time but not suited for a mass escape.

Several hours had passed. They had nearly completed the inspection. Ari had hardly spoken a word for two hours. At last, bursting with anxiety, David asked, “Well, what do you think?”

“I think,” Ari answered, “that Bevin isn’t very popular around here. What else is there to see?”

“I saved the children’s compound for last. We have Palmach headquarters there.”

As they entered the children’s compound Ari was once again pounced upon by a Palmachnik. But this time he returned the embrace with vigor and a smile on his face, for it was an old and dear friend, Joab Yarkoni. He whirled Yarkoni around, set him down, and hugged him again. Joab Yarkoni was a dark-skinned Moroccan Jew who had emigrated to Palestine as a youngster. His black eyes sparkled and a huge brush of a mustache seemed to take up half of his face. Joab and Ari had shared many adventures together, for although Joab was still in his early twenties he was one of the crack agents in the Mossad Aliyah Bet, with an intimate knowledge of the Arab countries.

From the beginning Yarkoni had been one of the wiliest and most daring operators in Mossad. His greatest feat was one which started the Jews of Palestine in the date-palm industry. The Iraqi Arabs guarded their date palms jealously, but Yarkoni had managed to smuggle a hundred saplings into Palestine from Iraq.

David Ben Ami had given Joab Yarkoni command of the children’s compound, for it was, indeed, the most important place in the Caraolos camp.

Joab showed Ari around the compound, which was filled with orphans from infancy to seventeen years of age. Most of them had been inmates of concentration camps during the war, and many of them had never known a life outside of barbed wire. Unlike the other compounds, the children’s section had several permanent structures erected. There was a school, a dining hall, a hospital, smaller units, and a large playground. There was a great deal of activity here in contrast to the lethargy in the other areas. Nurses, doctors, teachers, and welfare people from the outside, sponsored by money from American Jews, worked in the compound.

Because of the flow of outsiders, the children’s compound was the most loosely guarded in Caraolos. David and Joab were quick to capitalize on this fact by establishing Palmach headquarters in the compound.

At night the playground was transformed into a military training camp for refugees. The classrooms were turned from standard schools into indoctrination centers in Arab psychology, Palestine geography, tactics, weapons identification, and a hundred other phases of warfare instruction.

Each refugee receiving military training by the Palmach had to stand trial by a kangaroo court. The pretense was that the refugee had got to Palestine and had been picked up by the British. The Palmach instructor would then put him through an interrogation to try to establish that the refugee was not in the country legally. The refugee had to answer a thousand questions about the geography and history of Palestine to “prove” he had been there many years.

When a “candidate” successfully completed the course, the Palmach arranged an escape, generally through the children’s compound or the tunnels, to the white house on the hill at Salamis, whence he would be smuggled into Palestine. Several hundred refugees had been sent to Palestine that way, in groups of twos and threes.

British CID was not unaware of the fact that irregular things took place inside the children’s compound. Time and again they planted spies among the outside teachers and welfare workers, but the ghetto and the concentration camps had bred a tight-lipped generation of children and the intruders were always discovered within a day or two.

Ari ended the inspection of the children’s compound in the schoolhouse. One of the schoolrooms was, in fact, Palmach headquarters. Inside the teacher’s desk was a secret radio and transmitter which maintained contact with Palestine. Under the floor boards weapons were hidden for the military training courses. In this room papers and passes were forged.

Ari looked over the forgery plant and shook his head. “This counterfeit work is terrible,” he said. “Joab, you are very sloppy.”

Yarkoni merely shrugged.

“In the next few weeks,” Ari continued, “we are going to need an expert. David, you said there is one right here.”

“That’s right. He is a Polish boy named Dov Landau, but he refuses to work.”

“We have tried for weeks,” Joab added.

“Let me speak to him.”

Ari told the two men to wait outside as he stepped into Dov Landau’s tent. He looked over at a blond boy, undersized and tense and suspicious at the sudden intrusion. Ari knew the look-the eyes filled with hate. He studied the turned-down mouth and the snarling lips of the youngster: the expression of viciousness that stamped so many of the concentration-camp people.

“Your name is Dov Landau,” Ari said, looking directly into his eyes. “You are seventeen years old and Polish. You have a concentration camp background and you are an expert forger, counterfeiter, and duplicator. My name is Ari Ben Canaan. I’m a Palestinian from Mossad Aliyah Bet.”

The boy spat on the ground.

“Look, Dov, I’m not going to plead and I’m not going to threaten. I’ve got a plain out-and-out business proposition … let’s call it a mutual assistance pact.”

Dov Landau snarled, “I want to tell you something, Mr. Ben Canaan. You guys aren’t any better than the Germans or the British. The only reason you want us over there so bad is to save your necks from the Arabs. Let me tell you-I’m getting to Palestine all right and when I do I’m joining an outfit that’s going to let me kill!”

Ari did not change expression at the outburst of venom that erupted from the boy. “Good. We understand each other perfectly. You don’t like my motives for wanting you in Palestine and I don’t like yours for wanting to get there. We do agree on one thing: you belong in Palestine and not here.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. This Ben Canaan was not like the others.

“Let’s take it a step further,” Ari said. “You’re not going to get to Palestine by sitting here on your arse and doing nothing. You help me and I’ll help you. What happens after you get there is your business.”

Dov Landau blinked with surprise.

“Here’s the point,” Ari said. “I need forged papers. I need piles of them in the next few weeks and these boys here can’t forge their own names. I want you to work for me.”

The boy had been thrown completely off guard by Ari’s rapid and direct tactics. He wanted time to look for a hidden trick. “I’ll think it over,” he said.

“Sure, think it over. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

“And what will you do if I refuse? You going to try to beat it out of me?”

“Dov, I said we need each other. Let me make myself clear. If you don’t go along with this I’m going to personally see to it that you’re the last person out of the Caraolos detention camp. With thirty-five thousand people ahead of you, you’ll be too old and feeble to lift one of those bombs by the time you get to Palestine. Your thirty seconds are up.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“Because I said you could.”

A faint smile crossed the boy’s face, and he nodded that he would go to work.

“All right. You get your orders from either David Ben Ami or Joab Yarkoni. I don’t want you giving anyone a bad time. If you have any problems, you ask for me. I want you to report to Palmach headquarters in a half hour and look over their plant and let David know what special materials you’ll need.”

Ari turned and walked out of the tent to where David and Joab waited. “He’ll report to work in a half hour,” Ari said.

David gaped and Joab’s mouth fell open in awe.

“How did you do it?”

“Child psychology. I’m going back to Famagusta,” Ari said. “I want to see you two boys at Mandria’s house tonight. Bring Zev Gilboa with you. Don’t bother to show me out. I know the way.” .

David and Joab stared in fascination as their friend, the remarkable Ari Ben Canaan, crossed the playground in the direction of the garbage dumps.

That night in his living room Mandria, the Cypriot, waited, along with David, Joab, and a newcomer, Zev Gilboa, for the appearance of Ari Ben Canaan.

Zev Gilboa, also a Palestinian Palmachnik, was a broad-backed farmer from the Galilee. Like Yarkoni, he, too, wore a large brushlike mustache and was in his early twenties. Zev Gilboa was the best of the soldiers among the Palmach Palestinians working inside Caraolos. David had given Zev the task of heading military training for the refugees. With zest, with improvised weapons, and by using the children’s playground at night he had taught his trainees nearly everything that could be taught without actual arms. Broomsticks were rifles, rocks were grenades, bedsprings were bayonets. He set up courses in hand-to-hand fighting and stick fighting. Mostly he instilled tremendous spirit into the spiritless refugees.

The hour grew very late. Mandria began pacing nervously. “All I know,” he said, “I gave him a taxi and a driver this afternoon.”

“Relax, Mr. Mandria,” David said. “Ari may not be back for three days. He has strange ways of working. We are used to it.”

Midnight passed and the four men began to sprawl out and make themselves comfortable. In a half hour they began to doze, and in an hour they were all asleep.

At five o’clock in the morning Ari Ben Canaan entered the room. His eyes were bleary from a night of traveling around the island. He had slept only in brief naps since he had landed on Cyprus. He and Zev Gilboa hugged each other in the traditional Palmach manner, then he set right to work without offering excuse or apology for being eight hours late.

“Mr. Mandria. Have you got us our boat yet?”

Mandria was aghast. He slapped his forehead in amazement. “Mr. Ben Canaan! You landed on Cyprus less than thirty h6urs ago and asked me for a boat. I am not a shipbuilder, sir. My company, Cyprus-Mediterranean Shipping, has offices in Famagusta, Larnaca, Kyrenia, Limassol, and Paphos. There are no other ports in Cyprus. All my offices are looking for a boat for you. If there is a boat on Cyprus you will know it, sir.”

Ari ignored Mandria’s sarcasm and turned to the others.

“Zev, I suppose David has told you what we’re going to do.”

The Galilee farmer nodded.

“From now on you three boys are working for me. Find replacements for your jobs at Caraolos. Joab, how many healthy children are there in that compound between the ages of ten and seventeen?”

“Oh … probably around six or seven hundred.”

“Zev. Pick out three hundred of the strongest. Get them in the peak of physical condition.”

Zev nodded.

Ari arose. “It will be light in another half hour. I’ll need a taxi to start out again, Mr. Mandria. I think that man I had yesterday is a little tired.”

“I will drive you around, myself,” Mandria said.

“Good. We’ll leave just as soon as it turns light. Excuse me. I want to look over some papers in my room.”

He left as suddenly as he had entered. Everyone began talking at once.

“Then the escape is going to be made by three hundred children,” Zev said.

“It certainly appears so,” Mandria said. “He is such a strange man. He expects miracles … he doesn’t tell anything.”

“On the contrary,” David said, “he does not believe in miracles. That is why he works so hard. It seems to me that there is more to this than Ari is telling us. I have a feeling that the escape of three hundred children is only part of what is in his mind.”

Joab Yarkoni smiled. “We all have known Ari Ben Canaan long enough not to try to second guess him. We also have known him long enough to know that he knows his business. We will learn, in due time, just what Ari is up to.”

The next day Mandria drove Ari around Cyprus in what seemed to be an aimless chase. They drove from the sweeping Eastern Bay past Salamis and Famagusta clear to Cape Greco. In Famagusta he walked along the old wall and studied the harbor area, Ari barely spoke to Mandria the entire day, except to ask a pertinent question now and then. It seemed to the Cypriot that the big Palestinian was the coldest human being he had ever met. He felt a certain hostility, but he could not help admiring Ari for his absolute concentration and seemingly superhuman stamina. He must, Mandria thought, be a tremendously dedicated man-but that was puzzling because Ben Canaan seemed to show no traces of human emotion.

From Cape Greco they drove along the Southern Bay on the underbelly of Cyprus and then into the high jagged mountains where the resorts prepared for the winter season of skiing and ice sports. If Ben Canaan had found anything of interest he certainly was not showing it. Mandria was exhausted when they arrived back in Famagusta after midnight, but there was another meeting held with Zev, David, and Joab. Then Ari went into another all-night session of study.

On the morning of the fourth day after Ari Ben Canaan had swum ashore onto Cyprus, Mandria received a call from his Larnaca office to the effect that a ship had just come in from Turkey that fitted his specifications and could be purchased. Mandria drove Ari to Caraolos to pick up David and Joab, and the four of them drove off for Larnaca.

Zev Gilboa was left behind, as he was already at work selecting the three hundred children and setting up special training courses for them.

Mandria was feeling quite proud of himself as they drove along the Famagusta-Larnaca road. At a halfway point Ari was suddenly attracted by some activity taking place in a large field off to the left of the road. He asked Mandria to stop the car and stepped outside for a look. There was feverish building going on in what appeared to be a military barracks.

“The British are building new detention compounds,” David said; “they’ve reached the saturation point at Caraolos.”

“Why wasn’t I told about this?” Ari snapped.

“You didn’t ask,” Joab Yarkoni answered.

“The best we can figure,” David said, “is that they’ll begin transferring the overload from Caraolos in two or three weeks.”

Ari returned to the car and they drove on. Joab Yarkoni, who declined to try to second guess his friend, could nevertheless see that Ari was definitely intrigued by the new compounds. Joab could almost hear the wheels grinding in Ari’s brain.

The car entered the narrow bending streets of Larnaca and moved onto the waterfront road, lined with its neat two-storied white houses. They stopped before the Four Lanterns Tavern where the Turkish owner of the ship, a man named Armatau, awaited them. Ari insisted they forego the round

of drinks, the fencing for price, and general bartering that was so much a part of the normal business transactions. He wanted to see the ship immediately.

Armatau led them over the street to the long pier that jutted more than a half mile into the water. As they walked past a dozen or more trawlers, launches, and sailboats Armatau kept up a constant stream of talk over his shoulder. He assured them that the ship they were about to inspect was, indeed, a queen of the sea. They came to a halt near the end of the pier before an ancient wooden-hulled salvage tug that bore the faded name on her bow: Aphrodite.

“Isn’t she a beauty?” Armatau said, glowing. Then he held his breath apprehensively as four pairs of cold eyes surveyed the old scow from stem to stern. “Of course,” the Turk continued, “she is no racing cruiser.”

Ari’s practiced eye estimated the Aphrodite at a hundred and fifty feet in length and displacing around two hundred tons. By her general build and appearance she was in the neighborhood of forty-five years of age.

“Now just who was Aphrodite?” Joab Yarkoni asked.

“Aphrodite was the goddess of Love. She was washed up in the surf just a few miles from herefive thousand years ago,” David answered.

“Well, this old girl has sure had her change of life,” Joab said.

The Turk swallowed and tried to smile at the jibes. Ben Canaan spun around and faced him. “Armatau, I’m interested in one thing. It’s two hundred miles to Palestine. She’s got to make one run. Yes or no?”

Armatau threw up both arms. “On my mother’s honor,” he said, “I have made three hundred runs between Cyprus and Turkey. Mr. Mandria owns the shipping company. He knows.”

“It is true,” Mandria said. “She is old but reliable.”

“Mr. Armatau, take my two friends aboard and show them the engines.”

When the other three had gone below decks Mandria turned to Ari. “Armatau may be a Turk but he can be trusted.”

“What kind of speed can we get out of this thing?” Ari asked.

“Probably five knots-with a gale in her back. The Aphrodite is in no hurry.”

They went on deck and looked over the topside. She was half rotted away and long past the time it would have paid to repair her. Yet, despite the obvious qualifications there was something very sound about her. A solid feeling that she knew the tricks of the sea and had won many battles against it.

In a half hour David and Joab completed their inspection.

“This ship is an absolute abortion,” David said, “but I am positive she’ll make it.”

“Can we get three hundred aboard?” Ari asked. David rubbed his jaw. “Well … maybe, with a shoehorn.” Ari turned to Mandria. “We will have a lot of refitting to do. Of course it is necessary that we don’t attract any attention.”

Mandria smiled. He was in his glory now. “I have, as you may well know, very good connections. It is merely a matter of greasing the right palms and you can be sure that nothing can be seen, heard, or reported.”

“David. Send a radio message to Palestine tonight. Tell them we need a captain and a two-man crew.” “Is a crew of three going to be enough?” “I might as well tell you. You two boys and Zev are coming back to Palestine with me on this mud scow. We’ll fill out the crew. Joab! You’ve always had a tendency toward mature women. Well, you’ve got one now. You’re in charge of getting this thing refitted and stocked up.” At last he turned to Armatau, who was still bewildered by Ari’s rapid fire questions and commands. “O.K., Armatau, you can breathe easy, you’ve sold us this monstrosity-but not at your price. Let’s go into the Four Lanterns and lock this up.”

Ari jumped off the deck onto the pier and gave Mandria a hand. “David, you and Joab find your own way back to Famagusta. Mr. Mandria is driving me to Kyrenia after we finish our business.”

“Kyrenia?” Mandria said, startled. “Doesn’t that man ever get tired? Kyrenia is on the other side of the island,” he protested.

“Is something wrong with your automobile?” Ari asked. “No … no … we shall drive for Kyrenia.” Ari started off down the pier with Mandria and the Turk. “Ari!” David called, “what shall we name the old woman?” “You’re the poet,” Ari called back. “You name her.” Joab and David watched the three men disappear at the end of the pier. Suddenly they broke out in smiles and threw their arms about each other. “That son of a gun Aril He picks a fine way to tell us we are going home.”

“You know Ari. The scorner of sentiment and emotion,” David said.

They sighed happily, and for a moment both thought about Palestine. Then they looked about the Aphrodite. She certainly was a sorry old girl.

They walked around the deck examining the ancient hulk. “I’ve got a good name for her,” Joab said, “why don’t we call her the Bevin?”

“I’ve got a better name,” David Ben Ami said. “From now on she will be known as the Exodus.”

CHAPTER NINE: Mark pulled the rented car off the road and parked it. He had driven high up in the mountains directly over Kyrenia. An enormous jagged rock several hundred feet high rose to a peak before them. On the peak were the ruins of St. Hilarion Castle. It was a fairy castle, suggesting even in semicollapse the might and splendor of Gothic power.

Mark took Kitty’s hand and led her over the field toward the peak, and they climbed the battlements until they stood on the lower wall and looked into the castle yards.

They picked their way through royal apartments and great halls and stables and the monastery and fortifications. It was deathly silent, but the grounds seemed to be alive and breathing, with ghosts of the past whispering of another day filled with love and hate and war and intrigue.

For almost an hour Mark and Kitty climbed slowly up the peak toward the summit. Then at last they stood on the very top, perspiring and breathless, dazzled at the breathtaking panorama below them. Below was a sheer cliff that fell nearly three thousand feet to Kyrenia. On the horizon they saw the coast line of Turkey, and to the left and right the lush green forests and terraced vineyards and houses hanging on cliff edges. Below, the olive orchards’ leaves turned to a shimmering silver as zephyrs played through them.

Mark watched Kitty standing silhouetted against the sky as a cloud passed behind her. How very lovely she is, Mark thought. Kitty Fremont was the one woman in his world who was different. He had no desire to make love to her. Mark Parker honored little in the world. He wanted to honor Kitty. Moreover, she was the only woman he was absolutely comfortable with, for between them there was no pretense, no impression to make, no games to play.

They sat down on a huge boulder and continued to stare at the splendor all about them. The castle, the sea, the sky, the mountains.

“I think,” Mark said at last, “this is the most beautiful vista in the world.”

She nodded.

They had been wonderful days for both of them. Kitty seemed renewed since Mark’s arrival. She had enjoyed the wonderful therapy of confession.

“I am thinking something terrible,” Kitty said. “I am thinking of how glad I am that Colonel Howard Hillings was sent

off to Palestine and I have you all to myself. How long can you stay, Mark?”

“Few weeks. As long as you want me.”

“I never want us to become far away from each other again.”

“You know,” he said, “everyone at the Dome is certain we’re shacked up.”

“Good!” Kitty said. “I’ll put a sign on my door tonight in big red letters to read, ‘I love Mark Parker madly.’”

They sat for another hour, then reluctantly began working their way down from the summit to descend before it turned dark.

After Mark and Kitty had returned to the hotel, Mandria drove his car into Kyrenia to the harbor and stopped on the quay. He stepped outside with Ari and they walked to the docks. Ari looked across the harbor to the tower of the Virgin Castle which stood on the sea’s edge. They crossed over and climbed up inside the tower and from this vantage point could see the entire area perfectly. Ari studied in his usual silence.

The harbor had two sea walls. One ran out from the Virgin Castle and the tower where he now stood. Opposite him were the houses on the quay, and from that side the wall ran out to the sea so that the right and left arms of the sea wall formed a new circle, almost touching each other. There was a small break which was the entrance to the harbor. The inside of the harbor was tiny, not more than a few hundred yards in diameter. It was filled with small boats.

“Do you think we can get the Aphrodite inside the harbor here?” Ari asked.

“Getting it in won’t be a problem,” Mandria answered, “but turning it around and getting it out again will be.”

Ari was silent in thought as the two men walked back toward the car. His eye was on the little harbor. It was beginning to turn dark as they reached the car.

“You might as well drive on back to Famagusta by yourself. I have to see someone at the Dome Hotel,” Ari said, “and I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I’ll find my own way back to Famagusta.”

Mandria would have resented being dismissed like a taxi driver, but he was getting used to taking orders from Ben Canaan. He turned the ignition key and pressed the starter.

“Mandria. You have been a big help. Thanks.”

Mandria beamed as Ari walked away. These were the first words of kindness he had heard from Ben Canaan. He was surprised and touched.

The dining room of the Dome Hotel was filled with the strains of a Strauss waltz playing softly over the drone of British voices, the clink of glasses, and the whisper of the sea outside. Mark sipped his coffee, wiped his lips with his napkin, and then stared over Kitty’s shoulder intently at the figure who had entered the doorway. A tall man was whispering into the ear of the headwaiter, and the waiter pointed to Mark’s table. Mark’s eyes widened as he recognized Ari Ben Canaan.

“Mark, you look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” Kitty said.

“I have and he’s just about here. We are going to have a very interesting evening.”

Kitty turned around to see Ari Ben Canaan towering over their table. “I see that you remember me, Parker,” he said, taking a seat without invitation and turning to Kitty. “You must be Mrs. Katherine Fremont.”

Ari’s and Kitty’s eyes met and held. Several awkward seconds of silence followed, then Ari looked around for a waiter and called him over. He ordered sandwiches.

“This is Ari Ben Canaan,” Mark was saying, “he is a very old acquaintance of mine. I see that you seem to know Mrs. Fremont.”

“Ari Ben Canaan,” Kitty said. “What an odd name.”

“It is Hebrew, Mrs. Fremont. It means, ‘Lion, Son of Canaan.’”

“That’s quite confusing.”

“On the contrary, Hebrew is a very logical language.”

“Funny, it didn’t strike me that way,” Kitty said, with an edge of sarcasm.

Mark looked from one to the other. They had only met, and yet they were already engaged in the verbal fencing and maneuvering he himself so often played. Obviously Ben Canaan had struck either a sweet or a sour chord in Kitty, Mark thought, because she had her claws bared. ‘ “Strange that it wouldn’t strike you as logical,” Ari was answering. “God thought Hebrew was so logical He had the Bible written in that language.”

Kitty smiled and nodded. The orchestra changed to a fox trot. “Dance, Mrs. Fremont?”

Mark leaned back and watched Ben Canaan walk Kitty onto the floor, hold her, and lead her about with smooth gliding grace. For the moment Mark didn’t like the spark that had obviously struck the second they met: it was hard to think of Kitty as a mere mortal playing mortals’ games. They danced close to his table. There seemed to be a dazed look on Kitty’s face and it was unnatural.

Then Mark began thinking of himself. He had had the feeling that something was brewing on Cyprus from the moment he landed. Now it was confirmed by Ben Canaan’s appearance. He knew enough of the Palestinian to realize he was one of the top Mossad Aliyah Bet agents. He also knew that he was going to be approached for something, because Ben Canaan had sought him out. What about Kitty? Did he know of her only because she was with him or was there another reason?

Kitty was a tall girl but she felt lost in Ari Ben Canaan’s arms. A strange sensation swept over her. The appearance of this strapping, handsome man had thrown her oil guard. Now, in his arms only a moment after their meeting, she felt unraveled. The sensation was attractive-it had been many, many years. But she felt rather foolish at the same time.

The music stopped and they returned to the table.

“I didn’t think you Palestinians danced anything but a hora,” Mark said.

“I’ve been exposed to too much of your culture,” Ari answered.

His sandwiches arrived and he ate hungrily. Mark waited patiently for him to reveal the nature of his visit. He looked at Kitty carefully. She seemed to be regaining her composure, although she glanced at Ari from the corner of her eye as though she were wary and ready to strike.

At last Ari finished eating and said casually, “I have something I want to talk over with both of you.”

“Here, in the middle of the British Army?”

Ari smiled. He turned to Kitty. “Parker didn’t have a chance to tell you, Mrs. Fremont, that my employment is considered sub rosa in some quarters. Every so often the British even glorify us by calling us ‘underground.’ One of the first things I try to impress a new member of our organization with is the danger of making secret midnight rendezvous. I’d say there isn’t a better place in the world to discuss this.”

“Let’s move the party up to my room,” Mark said.

As soon as they had closed the door behind them Ari got right to the point. “Parker, you and I are in a position to do each other a good turn.”

“Go on.”

“Are you familiar with the detention camps at Caraolos?”

Both Mark and Kitty nodded.

“I have just completed plans for three hundred children to make an escape. We are going to bring them over here and load them aboard a ship in the Kyrenia harbor.”

“You boys have been smuggling refugees into Palestine for years. That isn’t news any more, Ben Canaan.”

“It will be news if you help make it news. You remember

the commotion over our illegal ship, the Promised Land?’

“Sure.”

“The British looked pretty bad then. We feel that if we can create another incident as important as the Promised Land we stand a chance of breaking their immigration policy on Palestine.”

“You just lost me,” Mark said. “If you can pull a mass escape from Caraolos how are you going to get them to Palestine? If they do escape then where is the story?”

“That’s the point,” Ari said. “They aren’t going any farther than boarding ship in Kyrenia. I have no intention of making a run for Palestine.”

Mark leaned forward. He was interested, and there was obviously more to Ben Canaan’s plan than first appeared.

“Let’s say,” Ari said, “that I get three hundred orphans out of Caraolos and on a ship in Kyrenia. Let’s say the British find out and stop the ship from sailing. Now-let’s say you have already written a story and it is sitting in Paris or New York. The minute those children board ship your story hits the headlines.”

Mark whistled under his breath. Like most American correspondents he had sympathy for the refugee’s plight. Mark would get the story, Ben Canaan would get the propaganda value. Was the story going to be big enough for him to become involved? There was no way he could seek instructions or talk it over. He alone had to evaluate and make the decision. Ari had thrown him just enough to whet his appetite. To question the Palestinian further could open the door to involvement. Mark looked at Kitty. She seemed completely puzzled by the whole thing.

“How are you going to get three hundred children from Caraolos to Kyrenia?”

“Do I take that to understand you are coming in?”

“Take it to understand I want to know. It doesn’t commit me to a thing. If I decide against it you have my word that anything said will not leave this room.”

“Good enough,” Ari said. He balanced himself on the edge of the dresser and explained his escape plan step by step. Mark frowned. It was daring, audacious, even fantastic. Yet -there was an admirable simplicity about it. For his part, Mark had to write a report and smuggle it out of Cyprus to the ANS Paris or London bureau. By some prearranged signal the report would be published at the exact moment the escape was taking place. Ari finished and Mark digested the plan for many moments.

He lit a cigarette, paced the room, and fired a dozen questions at Ari. Ari seemed to have considered aE the angles. Yes, there was a possibility of a sensational series of stories.

Now Mark tried to weigh the odds of Ari’s wild scheme. There was no better than a fifty-fifty chance of success. Mark took into account the fact that Ari was an extremely clever man and he knew the British thinking on Cyprus. He also knew that Ari had the kind of people working with him who would be most likely to pull such a thing off. “Count me in,” Mark said.

“Good,” Ari said, “I thought you’d see the possibilities.” He turned to Kitty. “Mrs. Fremont, about a week ago you were offered a job working in the children’s compound. Have you considered it?” “I decided not to take it.”

“Would you reconsider it now … say, to help Parker?” “Just what do you have in mind for Kitty?” Mark asked. “All of the teachers, nurses, and welfare people coming in from the outside are Jews,” Ari said, “and we must go under the assumption they are suspect by the British.” “Suspect of what?”

“Cooperation with the Mossad. You are a Christian, Mrs. Fremont. We feel that someone of your background and religion could move about more freely.” “In other words, you want to use Kitty as a courier.” “More or less. We manufacture quite a few papers inside the camp that are needed outside.”

Mark said, “I think I’d better tell you that I’m not too popular with the British. Sutherland’s aide was sitting on my lap the minute I landed. I don’t think this will affect me, but if Kitty goes to work at Caraolos it would be a cinch they’d suspect her of working with me.”

“On the contrary. They would be dead certain you would not send her to work at Caraolos.” “Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” Ari said. “Let us assume that the worst happens. Let us say Mrs. Fremont gets caught with forged papers. Absolutely nothing will happen to her except some embarrassment, an escort, and a free ticket away from Cyprus.”

“Just a moment,” Kitty said. “I’ve listened to you two divide me up. I am very sorry that I had to hear any of what went on here tonight. I am not going to work at Caraolos, Mr. Ben Canaan, and I am not getting mixed up in this scheme of yours.”

Ari looked quickly to Mark, who merely shrugged. “She’s a big girl.”

“I thought you were a friend of Parker’s.” “I am,” Kitty said, “and I understand his interest.” “I don’t understand your lack of it, Mrs. Fremont. This is the end of 1946. In a few months the war in Europe will

have been over for two years. We have people behind barbed wire under the most terrible conditions. There are children in Caraolos who have no idea there is a world outside barbed wire. If we don’t break this British policy they can well be behind barbed wire the rest of their lives.”

“That is just the point,” Kitty fired back; “everything connected with Caraolos is neck deep in politics. I am certain that the British have their reasons. I don’t wish to take sides.”

“Mrs. Fremont. I was a captain in the British Army and I hold a Military Cross for valor. To coin an old cliche-some of my best friends are British. The fact is that we have dozens of British officers and soldiers who can’t stomach what is happening in Palestine and who work with us twenty-four hours a day. This is not a case of politics but of humanity.”

“I doubt your sincerity. Why would you risk the lives of three hundred children?”

“Most human beings have a purpose for living,” Ari said; “there is no purpose in Caraolos. Fighting for your freedom is a purpose. We have a quarter of a million people in Europe who want to get into Palestine. Any one of them would board that ship in Kyrenia if given the choice.”

“You are a very clever man, Mr. Ben Canaan. I cannot argue with you. I don’t have your stock list of answers.”

“I thought you were a nurse,” he said sarcastically.

“The world is filled with suffering. I can give my services a thousand places just as needful as Caraolos, without the strings attached.”

“Why don’t you visit Caraolos and tell me that afterwards?”

“You’re not going to trick me and you’re not going to issue me challenges. I worked the night shift in a Cook County hospital, and more nights than not I’ve blotted up bodies off the receiving-room floor. You can’t show me anything at Caraolos that I haven’t seen before.”

The room became quiet. Ari Ben Canaan blew a long breath and threw up his hands in defeat. “I am sorry,” he said. “I’ll be in touch with you in a few days, Parker.” He turned for the door.

“Mr. Ben Canaan,” Kitty said, “are you quite certain that I won’t go telling this story to our mutual friends?”

Ari walked back and looked down into her eyes. She knew that instant she had said the wrong thing. A cruel little smile crossed his face. “I think you are just trying to be a woman and have the last word. I don’t misjudge people very often. I can’t afford to. I like Americans. Americans have consciences. As soon as yours begins to get the best of you, you

can reach me at Mr. Mandria’s and I’ll be glad to show you around Caraolos.”

“You are quite sure of yourself, aren’t you?” “Let us say,” Ari answered, “that right this minute I am surer of myself than you are.” Ari walked from the room.

It took a long time after Ari left for the impact of his visit to subside.

Kitty kicked off her shoes, at last, and sat back on the bed. “Well! You did say we were in for an interesting evening.”

“I think you made a wise choice by staying out of this thing.”

“And you?”

“It’s a day’s work. It could turn into something very big.”

“Suppose you had refused him?”

“Oh, they’d get another correspondent somewhere in Europe to come over to Cyprus. They are very resourceful people. I just happened to be conveniently here.”

“Mark,” Kitty said thoughtfully, “did I make a fool of myself?”

“I don’t suppose you made yourself any more foolish than a hundred other women have.” Mark said it deliberately to let Kitty know she had been obvious about her attraction to Ari.

“He is a gorgeous man. When did you meet him?”

“The first time was in Berlin in the early part of 1939. That was my first ANS post. He had been sent over by Mossad Aliyah Bet to get as many Jews out of Germany as he could before the war started. He was in his early twenties then. I saw him again in Palestine. He was in the British Army … this was during the war. There was some kind of undercover assignment. I don’t know exactly what it was. Since the war he has been heard of showing up all over Europe, buying arms, smuggling refugees into Palestine.”

“Do you really think he can get away with this utterly fantastic plan of his?”

“He’s a clever man.”

“Well … I’ll say one thing. This Ben Canaan doesn’t act like any Jew I’ve ever met. You know what I mean. You don’t particularly think of them in a capacity like his … or fighters … things of that sort.”

“How do you think of them, Kitty? The good old Indiana version. The little Jew boy named Maury who’s going to marry a little Jew girl named Sadie …”

“Oh, stop it, Mark! I’ve worked with enough Jewish doctors to know they are arrogant and aggressive people. They look down on us.”

“With what? An inferiority complex?”

“I’d buy that if you were talking about Germany.”

“What are you trying to say, Kitty-that we’re pure?”

“I’m saying no American Jew would trade places with a Negro or a Mexican or an Indian for that matter.”

“And I’m saying you don’t have to lynch a man to rip his insides out. Oh sure, the American Jews have it good, but just enough of your thinking and enough of two thousand years of being a scapegoat has rubbed off on them. Why don’t you argue it with Ben Canaan? He seems to know how to handle you.”

Kitty shot off the bed angrily. Then both she and Mark began to laugh. They were Mark and Kitty and they could not really be angry.

“Exactly what is this Mossad Aliyah Bet?”

“The word aliyah means to arise, go up, ascend. When a Jew goes to Palestine it is always referred to as an aliyah … always going higher than he was. Aleph or the letter a was used to designate the legal immigration. Bet or the letter b for the illegal. Therefore Mossad Aliyah Bet means Organization for Illegal Immigration.”

Kitty smiled. “My goodness,” she said, “Hebrew is such a logical language.”

For the next two days after Ari Ben Canaan’s visit Kitty was perturbed and restless. She would not admit to herself that she wanted to see the big Palestinian again. Mark knew Kitty well and sensed her irritation, but he pretended to carry on as though Ben Canaan had never entered the scene.

She did not exactly know what was disturbing her, except that Ben Canaan’s visit had left a strong impression. Was it that American conscience that Ben Canaan knew so well, or was she sorry about her anti-Jewish outburst?

Almost but not quite casually Kitty inquired when Mark expected to see Ari. Another time she made an unsubtle suggestion that it would be nice to go sightseeing in Famagusta. Then again she would grow angry with herself and resolve to wipe out any thought of Ari.

On the third night Mark could hear Kitty’s footsteps through the connecting door as she paced back and forth in her room.

She sat in the darkness in an overstuffed chair and puffed on a cigarette and decided that she would reason out the whole matter.

She did not like being drawn against her will into Ben Canaan’s strange world. Her entire approach to life had been sane, even calculating. “Kitty is such a sensible girl,” they always said of her.

When she fell in love with Tom Fremont and set out to win him it had all been a well-thought-out move. She ran a sensible home and served sensible meals on a sensible bud—

get. She planned to give birth to Sandra in the springtime and that had been sensible too. She stifled spur-of-the-moment impulses in favor of planned decisions.

These past two days seemed to make no sense to her at all. A strange man appeared from nowhere and told her an even stranger story. She saw that hard handsome face of Ari Ben Canaan with his penetrating eyes that seemed to read her mind mockingly. She remembered the sensation in his arms, dancing with him.

There was no logic to this at all. For one thing Kitty always felt uncomfortable around Jewish people; she had admitted as much to Mark. Then why did this thing continue to grow?

Finally she knew that she would continue to be disturbed until she saw Ari again and saw the camp at Caraolos. She decided that the way to beat this whole idea was to see him again and assure herself she was not mystically involved but had merely been jolted by a sudden and brief infatuation. She would beat Ari Ben Canaan at his own game on his own ground.

At breakfast the next morning Mark was not surprised when Kitty asked him to make an appointment with Ben Canaan for her to visit Caraolos.

“Honey, I was happy with the decision you made the other night. I wish you’d stick to it.”

“I don’t quite understand this myself,” she said.

“Ben Canaan called the shot. He knew you’d come around. Don’t be a damned fool. If you go to Caraolos, you’re in. Look … I’ll pull out, myself. We’ll leave Cyprus right away …”

Kitty shook her head.

“You’re letting your curiosity throw you. You’ve always been smart. What’s happening?”

“This sounds funny coming from me, doesn’t it, Mark, but it almost feels as if some force were pushing me. Believe me, I’m going to Caraolos to end all this … and not to start something.”

Mark told himself that she was hooked even though she was pretending she wasn’t. He hoped that whatever lay ahead would treat her kindly.

CHAPTER TEN: Kitty handed her passes to the British sentry at the gate and entered Caraolos at Compound 57, which was closest to the children’s compound.

“Are you Mrs. Fremont?”

She turned, nodded, and looked into the face of a young man who smiled and offered his hand. She thought that he

was certainly a much friendlier-appearing person than his compatriot.

“I am David Ben Ami,” he said. “Ari asked me to meet you. He will be along in a few moments.”

“Now what does Ben Ami mean? I’ve taken a recent interest in Hebrew names.”

“It means Son of My People,” he answered. “We hope that you will help us in ‘Operation Gideon.’”

“Operation Gideon?”

“Yes, that’s what I call Ari’s plan. Do you remember your Bible, Judges? Gideon had to select a group of soldiers to go against the Midianites. He picked three hundred. We have also picked three hundred to go against the British. I guess I may be stretching a point for the parallel and Ari does accuse me of being too sentimental.”

Kitty had braced herself for a difficult evening. Now she was disarmed by this mild-appearing young man. The day was closing and a cool breeze whipped up a swirl of dust. Kitty slipped into her topcoat. On the other side of the compound she could make out the unmistakable towering figure of Ari Ben Canaan crossing over to meet her. She drew a deep breath and steadied herself to fight off the same electric sensation she had felt the first time she saw him.

He stopped before her and they nodded silently. Kitty’s eyes were cold. She was letting him know, without a word, that she had come to accept a challenge and she had no intention of losing.

Compound 57 consisted mostly of the aged and very religious. They passed slowly between two rows of tents filled with dirty and unkempt people. The water shortage, Ben Ami explained, made bathing virtually impossible. There was also insufficient diet. The inmates appeared weak, some angry, some dazed, and all haunted by ghosts of the dead.

They stopped for a moment at an opened tent where a wrinkled old specimen worked on a wood carving. He held it up for her to see. It was a pair of hands, clasped in prayer and bound by barbed wire. Ari watched her closely for a sign of weakening.

It was squalid, filthy, and wretched here, but Kitty had prepared herself to accept even worse. She was beginning to be convinced that Ari Ben Canaan held no mysterious power over her.

They stopped once more to look into a large tent used as a synagogue. Over the entrance was a crudely made symbol of the Menorah, the ritual candelabra. She stared at the strange sight of old men swaying back and forth and reciting weird prayers. To Kitty it seemed another world. Her gaze

became fixed on one particularly dirty, bearded old individual who wept and cried aloud in anguish.

She felt David’s hand lead her away. “He is just an old man,” David said. “He is telling God that he has lived a life of faith … he has kept God’s laws, cherished the Holy Torah, and kept the covenants in face of unbelievable hardships. He asks God to kindly deliver him for ‘being a good man.”

“The old men in there,” Ari said, “don’t quite realize that the only Messiah that will deliver them is a bayonet on the end of a rifle.”

Kitty looked at Ari. There was something deadly about this man.

Ari felt Kitty’s disdain. His hands grabbed her arms. “Do you know what a Sonderkommando is?” “Ari, please …” David said.

“A Sonderkommando is one who was forced by the Germans to work inside of their crematoriums. I’d like to show you another old man here. He took the bones of his grandchildren out of a crematorium in Buchenwald and carted them off in a wheelbarrow. Tell me, Mrs. Fremont, did you see one better than that at the Cook County Hospital?”

Kitty felt her stomach turn over. Then resentment took over and she fired back, eyes watering with anger. “You’ll stop at nothing.”

“I’ll stop at nothing to show you how desperate we are.” They glared at each other wordlessly. “Do you wish to see the children’s compound or not?” he said at last. “Let’s get it over with,” Kitty answered. The three crossed the bridge over the barbed-wire wall into the children’s compound and looked upon war’s merciless harvest. She went through the hospital building past the long row of tuberculars and into the other wards of bones bent with rickets and skins yellow of jaundice and festering sores of poisoned blood. She went through a locked ward filled with youngsters who had the hollow blank stares of the insane.

They walked along the tents of the graduation class of 1940-45. The matriculants of the ghettos, the concentration camp students, scholars of rubble. Motherless, fatherless, homeless. Shaved heads of the deloused, ragged clothing. Terror-filled faces, bed wetters, night shriekers. Howling infants, and scowling juveniles who had stayed alive only through cunning. They finished the inspection.

“You have an excellent staff of medical people,” Kitty said, “and this children’s compound is getting the best of the supplies.”

“The British have given us none of it,” Ari snapped. “It has come as gifts from our own people.”

“You made the point right there,” Kitty said. “I don’t care if your facilities are manna from heaven. I came at the request of my American conscience. It has been satisfied. I’d like to go.”

“Mrs. Fremont …” David Ben Ami said. “David! Don’t argue. Some people find just the sight of us repulsive. Show Mrs. Fremont out.”

David and Kitty walked along a tent street. She turned slightly and saw Ari staring at her back. She wanted to get out as quickly as possible. She wanted to return to Mark and forget the whole wretched business.

A sound of uninhibited laughter burst from a large tent near her. It was the laughter of happy children and it sounded out of place at Caraolos. Kitty stopped in curiosity before the tent and listened. A girl was reading a story. She had a beautiful voice.

“That is an exceptional girl,” David said. “She does fantastic work with these children.”

Again laughter erupted from the children. Kitty stepped to the tent flap and drew it open. The girl had her back to Kitty. She sat on a wooden box, bent close to a kerosene lamp. Circling her sat twenty wide-eyed children. They looked up as Kitty and David entered.

The girl stopped reading and turned around and arose to greet the newcomers. The lamp flickered from a gust of air that swept in from the open flap and cast a dancing shadow of children’s silhouettes.

Kitty and the girl stood face to face. Kitty’s eyes opened wide, registering shock.

She walked out of the tent quickly, then stopped and turned

and stared through the flap at the astonished girl. Several

times she started to speak and lapsed into bewildered silence.

“I want to see that girl … alone,” she finally said in a

hushed voice.

Ari had come up to them. He nodded to David. “Bring the child to the school building. We will wait there.”

Ari lit the lantern in the schoolroom and closed the door behind them. Kitty had remained wordless and her face was pale.

“That girl reminds you of someone,” Ari said abruptly. She did not answer. He looked through the window and saw the shadows of David and the girl crossing the compound. He glanced at Kitty again and walked from the room.

As he left, Kitty shook her head. It was mad. Why did she

come? Why did she come? She fought to get herself under command-to brace herself to look at that girl again.

The door opened and Kitty tensed. The girl stepped slowly into the room. She studied the girl’s face, fighting off the urge to clutch the child in her arms.

The girl looked at her curiously, but she seemed to understand something and her gaze conveyed pity. ’

“My name … is Katherine Fremont,” Kitty said unevenly. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes.”

What a lovely child she was! Her eyes sparkled and she smiled now and held out her hand to Kitty.

Kitty touched the girl’s cheek-then she dropped her hand.

“I … I am a nurse. I wanted to meet you. What is your name?”

“My name is Karen,” the girl said, “Karen Hansen Clement.”

Kitty sat on the cot and asked the girl to sit down, too.

“How old are you?”

“I’m sixteen now, Mrs. Fremont.”

“Please call me Kitty.”

“All right, Kitty.”

“I hear that … you work with the children.”

The girl nodded.

“That’s wonderful. You see … I … I may be coming to work here and … and, well … I’d like to know all about you. Would you mind telling me?”

Karen smiled. Already she liked Kitty and she knew instinctively that Kitty wanted-needed-to be liked.

“Originally,” Karen said, “I came from Germany … Cologne, Germany. But that was a long time ago …”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

COLOGNE, GERMANY, 1938

Life is quite wonderful if you are a young lady of seven and your daddy is the famous Professor Johann Clement and it is carnival time in Cologne. Many things are extra special around carnival time, but something that is always extra special is taking a walk with Daddy. You can walk under the linden trees along the banks of the Rhine or you can walk through the zoo that has the most magnificent monkey cages in the entire world or you can walk past the big cathedral and stare up at those twin towers over five hundred feet high that seem to push right through the sky. Best of all is walking through the municipal forest very early in the morning with Daddy and Maximilian. Maximilian is the most remarkable dog in Cologne, even though he looks kind of funny. Of course, Maximilian isn’t allowed in the zoo.

Sometimes you take Hans along on your walks, too, but little brothers can be a nuisance.

If you are such a little girl you love your mommy, too,, and wish she would come along with you and Daddy and Hans and Maximilian, but she is pregnant again and feeling rather grumpy these days. It would be nice if the new baby is a sister because one brother is just about as much as a girl can bear.

On Sunday everyone, except poor Maximilian, who has to watch the house, gets into the auto and Daddy drives along the Rhine River to Grandma’s house in Bonn. Many of the aunts and uncles and bratty cousins gather every Sunday and Grandma has baked a hundred cookies, or maybe even more.

Soon, when summer comes, there will be a wonderful trip along the coast up north and through the Black Forest or to Brenner’s Park Hotel at the springs at Baden-Baden. What a funny name—Baden-Baden.

Professor Johann Clement is a terribly important man. Everyone at the university doffs his cap and smiles and bows and says, “Good morning, Herr Doctor.” At night there are other professors and their wives and sometimes fifteen or twenty students pack into Daddy’s study. They sing and argue and drink beer all night along. Before Mommy’s stomach started showing she used to like to joke and dance with them.

There are so many wonderful tastes and smells and feelings and sounds for a happy seven-year-old girl.

The best times of all were those nights when there would be no visitors and Daddy didn’t have to work in his study or give a lecture. The whole family would sit before the fireplace. It was wonderful to sit on Daddy’s lap and watch the flames and smell his pipe and hear his soft deep voice as he read a fairy tale.

In those years of 1937 and 1938 many strange things were happening you could not quite understand. People seem frightened of something and spoke in whispers … especially at a place like the university. But … these things seem quite unimportant when it comes carnival time.

Professor Johann Clement had very much to think about. With so much utter insanity all about, a man had to keep a clear head. Clement reckoned a scientist could actually chart the course of human events as one would chart the tides and waves of the sea. There were waves of emotion and hate and waves of complete unreason. They’d reach a peak and fall to nothingness. All mankind lived in this sea except for a few who perched on islands so high and dry they remained always out of the reach of the mainstream of life. A university, Johann Clement reasoned, was such an island, such a sanctuary.

Once, during the Middle Ages, there had been a wave of hatred and ignorance as the Crusaders killed off Jews. But the day had passed when Jews were blamed for the Black Death and for poisoning the wells of Christians. During the enlightenment that followed the French Revolution the Christians themselves had torn down the gates of the ghettos. In this new era the Jews and the greatness of Germany had been inseparable. Jews subordinated their own problems to the greater problems of mankind; they assimilated to the larger society. And what great men came from this! Heine and Rothschild and Karl Marx and Mendelssohn and Freud. The list was endless. These men, like Johann Clement himself, were Germans first, last, and always.

Anti-Semitism was synonymous with the history of man, Johann Clement reasoned. It was a part of living-almost a scientific truth. Only the degree and the content varied. Certainly, he felt, he was far better off than the Jews of eastern Europe or those in semibarbaric condition in Africa. The “humiliation oaths” and the Frankfurt massacre belonged to another age.

Germany might be riding a new wave but he was not going to turn around and run. Nor would he stop believing that the German people, with their great cultural heritage, would ultimately dispose of the abnormal elements which had temporarily got control of the country.

Johann Clement watched the blows fall. First there had been wild talk and then printed accusations and insinuations. Then came a boycott of Jewish business and professional people, then the public humiliations: beatings and beard pullings. Then came the night terror of the Brown Shirts. Then came the concentration camps.

Gestapo, SS, SD, KRIPO, RSHA. Soon every family in Germany was under Nazi scrutiny, and the grip of tyranny tightened until the last croak of defiance strangled and died. Still Professor Johann Clement, like most of the Jews in Germany, continued to believe he was immune to the new menace. His grandfather had established a tradition at the university. It was Johann Clement’s island and his sanctuary. He identified himself completely as a German.

There was one particular Sunday that you would never forget. Everyone had assembled at Grandma’s house in Bonn. Even Uncle Ingo had come all the way from Berlin. All of the children were sent outside to play and the door to the living room had been locked.

On the way home to Cologne neither Mommy nor Daddy

spoke a single word. Grownups act like children sometimes. As soon as you reached home you and your brother Hans were bundled right off to bed. But more and more of these secret talks had been taking place, and if you stood by the door and opened it just a crack you could hear everything. Mommy was terribly upset. Daddy was as calm as ever.

“Johann, darling, we must think about making a move. This time it is not going to pass us by. It’s getting so I’m afraid to go out into the street with the children.”

“Perhaps it is only your pregnancy that makes you think things are worse.”

“For five years you have been saying it is going to get better. It is not going to get better.”

“As long as we stay at the university … we are safe.”

“For God’s sake, Johann. Stop living in a fool’s paradise! We have no friends left. The students never come any more. Everyone we know is too terrified to speak to us.”

Johann Clement lit his pipe and sighed. Miriam cuddled at his feet and lay her head on his lap and he stroked her hair. Nearby, Maximilian stretched and groaned before the fire.

“I want so much to be as brave and as understanding as you are,” Miriam said.

“My father and my grandfather taught here. I was born in this house. My life, the only things I’ve ever wanted, the only things I’ve ever loved are in these rooms. My only ambition is that Hans will come to love it so after me. Sometimes I wonder if I have been fair to you and the children … but something inside of me will not let me run. Just a little longer, Miriam… it will pass… it will pass…”

NOVEMBER 19,1938

200 synagogues gutted!

200 Jewish apartment houses torn apart!

8000 Jewish shops looted and smashed!

50 Jews murdered! .

3000 Jews seriously beaten!

20,000 Jews arrested!

from this day on no jew may belong to a craft or trade!

from this day on no jewish child may enter a PUBLIC school!

FROM THIS DAY ON NO JEWISH CHILD MAY ENTER A PUBLIC PARK OR RECREATION GROUND!

A SPECIAL FINE OF ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS IS HEREBY LEVIED ON ALL THE JEWS OF GERMANY!

FROM THIS DAY ON ALL JEWS MUST WEAR A YELLOW ARM BAND WITH THE STAR OF DAVID!

It was hard to believe that things could get worse. But the tide ran higher and higher, and the waves finally crashed onto Johann Clement’s island when one day little Karen ran into the house, her face covered with blood anti the words, “Jew! Jew! Jew!” ringing in her ears.

When a man has roots so deep and faith so strong the destruction of his faith is an awesome catastrophe. Not only had Johann Clement been a fool, but he had endangered the life of his family as well. He searched for some way out, and his path led to the Gestapo in Berlin. When he returned from Berlin, he locked himself in his study for two days and two nights, remaining there hunched over his desk, staring at the document that lay before him. It was a magic paper the Gestapo had presented him with. His signature on the paper would free him and his family from any further harm. It was a life-giving document. He read it over and over again until he knew every word on its pages.

… I, Johann Clement, after the above detailed search and the undeniable facts contained herein, am of the absolute conviction that the facts concerning my birth have been falsified. I am not nOw or never have been of the Jewish religion. I am an Aryan and…

Sign it! Sign it! A thousand times he picked up the pen to write his name on the paper. This was no time for noble stands! He had never been a Jew … Why not sign? … it made no difference. Why not sign?

The Gestapo made it absolutely clear that Johann Clement had but one alternative. If he did not sign the paper and continue his work in research his family could leave Germany only if he remained as a political hostage.

On the third morning he walked from the study, haggard, and looked into Miriam’s anxious eyes. He went to the fireplace and threw the document into the flames. “I cannot do it,” he whispered. “You must plan to leave Germany with the children immediately.”

A terrible fear overtook him now for every moment that his family remained. Every knock on the door, every ring of the phone, every footstep brought a new terror he had never known.

He made his plans. First, the family would go to live with some colleagues in France. Miriam was nearly due and she could not travel far. After the baby came and her strength had returned they would continue on to England or America.

It was not all hopeless. Once the family was safe he could worry about himself. There were a few secret societies

working in Germany which specialized in smuggling out German scientists. He had been tipped off to one working in Berlin-a group of Palestinian Jews who called themselves Mossad Aliyah Bet.

The trunks were all packed, the house closed down. The man and his wife sat that last night in silence, desperately hoping for some sudden miracle to give them a reprieve.

But that night-the day before departure-Miriam Clement began having her labor pains. She was not permitted into a hospital so she gave birth in her own bedroom. Another son was born. It had been a difficult and complicated delivery and she needed several weeks to convalesce.

Panic seized Johann Clement! He had visions of his family being trapped and never able to escape the approaching holocaust.

He frantically rushed to Berlin to Number 10 Meinekestrasse, the building which housed the Mossad Aliyah Bet. The place was a bedlam of people trying desperately to get out of Germany.

At two o’clock in the morning he was led into an office where a very young and very exhausted man met him. The man was named Ari Ben Canaan and he was a Palestinian in charge of the escape of the German Jews.

Ben Canaan looked at him through bloodshot eyes. He sighed. “We will arrange your escape, Dr. Clement. Go home, you will be contacted. I have to get a passport, a visa … I have to pay the right people off. It will take a few days.”

“It is not for me. I cannot go, nor can my wife. I have three children. You must get them out.”

“I must get them out,” Ben Canaan mimicked. “Doctor, you are an important man. I may be able to help you. I cannot help your children.”

“You must! You must!” he shrieked.

Ari Ben Canaan slammed his fist on his desk and jumped up. “Did you see that mob out there! They all want to get out of Germany!” He leaned over the desk an inch from Johann Clement. “For five years we have pleaded, we have begged you to leave Germany. Now even if you can get out the British won’t let you into Palestine. ‘We are Germans … we are Germans … they won’t hurt us,’ you said. What in God’s name can I do!”

Ari swallowed and slumped down into his chair. His eyes closed a moment, his face masked in weariness. He picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk and thumbed through them. “I have obtained visas for four hundred children to leave Germany. Some families in Denmark have agreed to take them. We have a train organized. I will put one of your children on.”

“I … I … have three children …” “And I have ten thousand children. I have no visas. I have nothing to fight the British Navy with. I suggest you send your oldest who will be better able to take care of itself. The train leaves tomorrow night from Berlin from the Potsdam Station.”

Karen clung drowsily to her favorite rag doll. Daddy knelt before her. In her half sleep she could smell that wonderful smell of his pipe.

“It is going to be a wonderful trip, Karen. Just like going to Baden-Baden.”

“But I don’t want to, Daddy.”

“Well, now … look at all these nice boys and girls going along with you.”

“But I don’t want them. I want you and Mommy and Hans and Maximilian. And I want to see my new baby brother.” “See here, Karen Clement. My girl doesn’t cry.” “I won’t … I promise I won’t … Daddy … Daddy … will I see you soon?”

“We’ll… all try very hard …”

A woman stepped behind Johann Clement and tapped him on the shoulder. “I am sorry,” she said. “It is time for departure.”

“I’ll take her on.”

“No … I am sorry. No parents on the train.” He nodded and hugged Karen quickly and stood back biting his pipe so hard his teeth hurt. Karen took the woman’s hand, then stopped and turned around. She handed her father her rag doll. “Daddy … you take my dolly. She’ll look after you.”

Scores of anguished parents pressed close to the sides of the train, and the departing children pressed against the windows, shouting, blowing kisses, waving, straining desperately for a last glimpse.

He looked but could not see her.

The steel train grumbled into motion. The parents ran alongside, screaming final farewells.

Johann Clement stood motionless on the fringe of the crowd. As the last car passed he looked up and saw Karen standing calmly on the rear platform. She put her hand to her lips and blew him a kiss as though she knew she would never see him again.

He watched her tiny figure grow smaller and smaller and smaller. And then she was gone. He looked at the little rag doll in his hand. “Good by, my life,” he whispered.

CHAPTER TWELVE: Aage and Meta Hansen had a lovely home in the suburbs of Aalborg; it was just right for a little girl, for they had no children of their own. The Hansens were quite a bit older than the Clements; Aage was graying and Meta was nowhere as beautiful as Miriam but none the less Karen felt warm and protected from the moment they carried her drowsy little body into their car.

The train ride into Denmark had been bewildering. All she could remember was the stifled sobs of children all around her. The rest was a blur-standing in lines, being tagged, strange faces, strange language. Then waiting rooms, buses, more tags.

At last she was led alone into the room where Meta and Aage Hansen stood waiting anxiously. Aage knelt down and lifted her and carried her to the car, and Meta held her in her lap and fussed and petted her all the way to Aalborg, and Karen knew she was safe.

Aage and Meta stood back expectantly in the doorway as Karen tiptoed cautiously into the room they had prepared for her. It was filled with dolls and toys and books and dresses and records and just about everything one little girl could ever want. Then Karen saw the floppy little puppy on her bed. She knelt beside him and stroked him and he licked her face and she felt a wet nose against her cheek. She turned and smiled at the Hansens and they smiled back.

Those first few nights without her daddy and mommy were awful. It was surprising how much she missed her brother Hans. She nibbled at her food and just sat alone quietly in her room with the little dog she had named Maximilian. Meta Hansen understood. At night she lay beside Karen and held her and soothed her until her soft little sobs subsided into sleep.

During the next week a steady stream of visitors came with presents and made a great fuss over Karen and babbled in a language she still could not understand. The Hansens were very proud and she did her best to be nice to everyone. In a few more days she ventured out of the house.

Karen was terribly fond of Aage Hansen. He smoked a pipe like her daddy and he liked to take walks. Aalborg was an interesting place: Like Cologne, it had a river, called the Limfjorden. Mr. Hansen was a lawyer and very important and almost everyone seemed to know him. Of course, he wasn’t as important as her daddy … but few people were.

“Well now, Karen. You have been with us for nearly three

weeks,” Aage said one night, “and we would like to have a very important talk with you.”

He clasped his hands behind him and paced back and forth and talked to her in a very wonderful way so that she understood. He told her that there was much unhappiness in Germany and her mommy and daddy thought it would be better if she remained with them for the time being. Aage Hansen went on to say that they knew they could never replace her own parents but because God had not let them have children of their own they were very happy to have her and wanted her to be happy too.

Yes, Karen understood it all and told Aage and Meta she didn’t mind staying with them for the time being.

“And Karen, darling. Because we are borrowing you for a little while and because we love you so much, we wonder … would you mind borrowing our name?”

Karen thought about that. It seemed to her that Aage had other reasons. His question had that grown-up sound … like the sound of her mommy and daddy talking behind closed doors. She nodded and said that it would be fine with her too.

“Good! Karen Hansen it is, then.”

They took her hands as they did every night and led her to her room and put on the low lamp. Aage played with her and tickled her, and Maximilian got mixed up in the fracas. She laughed until she couldn’t stand any more. Then she got under the covers and said her prayers.

“… God bless Mommy and Daddy and Hans and my new baby brother and all my aunts and uncles and cousins … and God bless the Hansens who are so nice … and God bless both Maximilians.”

“I will be back in a few minutes to sit with you,” Meta said.

“That’s all right. You don’t have to stay with me any more. Maximilian will take care of me.” “Good night, Karen.” “Aage?” “Yes?” “Do the Danish people hate the Jews too?”

My dear Dr. and Mrs. Clement,

Has it already been six weeks since Karen came to us? What an exceptional child she is. Her teacher tells us she is doing extremely well in school. It is amazing how quickly she is picking up Danish. I suppose that is because she is with children her own age. She has already gathered a large number of girl friends.

The dentist advised us to have one tooth pulled to make

room for another. It was a small matter. We want to start her on some sort of music lessons soon and will write more about that.

Every night in her prayers ..

And there was a letter from Karen in big block print:

DEAR MOMMY, DADDY, HANS, MAXIMILIAN, AND MY NEW BABY BROTHER: I MISS YOU MORE THAN I CAN TELL YOU… .

Wintertime is a time for ice skating on the frozen banks of the Limfjorden and for building snow castles and for sledding and for sitting before a blazing fire and having Aage rub your icy feet.

But winter passed and the Limfjorden flowed again and the countryside burst into wild bloom. And summertime came and they all went away to the beach at Blokhus on the North Sea and she and Meta and Aage took a sailboat a hundred miles out.

Life was full and rich with the Hansens. She had a flock of “best” girl friends, and she loved to shop with Meta at the smelly fish market or stand beside her in the kitchen learning to bake. And Meta was so good in so many things like sewing or with studies, and she was a wonderful comfort at Karen’s bedside if there was a sudden fever or sore throat.

Aage always had a smile and open arms and seemed nearly as wise and gentle as her own daddy. Aage could be mighty stern, too, when the occasion demanded.

One day, Aage told Meta to come into the office when Karen was at her dancing lesson. He was pale and excited.

“I have just heard from the Red Cross,” he said to his wife. “They have all disappeared. Completely, no trace. The entire family. I cannot get any information from Germany. I’ve tried everything… .”

“What do you think, Aage?”

“What is there to think? They’ve all been put into a concentration camp … or worse.”

“Oh, dear God.”

They could not bring themselves to tell Karen that her entire family had disappeared. Karen was suspicious when the letters stopped coming from Germany, but she was too frightened to ask questions. She loved the Hansens and trusted them implicitly. Instinct told her that if they did not mention her family there was a reason for it.

Then, too, a strange thing was happening. Karen missed her family a great deal, but somehow the images of her mother and father seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer. When a child of eight has been removed from her parents

for such a long time, it gets harder and harder to remember. Karen felt bad sometimes that she could not remember more vividly.

At the end of a year she could hardly remember when she was not Karen Hansen and a Dane.

CHRISTMAS 1939

There was a war in Europe and a year had passed since Karen arrived at the Hansen house. Her bell-like voice carried a sweet hymn as Meta played the piano. After the hymns Karen went to the closet in her room where she had hidden the Christmas present she had made at school. She handed them the package proudly. It bore a label printed in her hand that read: to mommy and daddy from your daughter,

KAREN.

APRIL 8, 1940

The night was filled with treachery. A misty dawn brought the chilling sound of marching boots to the frontiers of Denmark. Dawn brought barge after barge of gray-helmeted soldiers creeping through fog-filled inlets and canals. The German Army moved in silently with robot-like efficiency and dispersed over the length and breadth of Denmark.

April 9, 1940!

Karen and her classmates rushed to the window and looked up at a sky black with thundering airplanes, which one by one descended on the Aalborg airdrome.

April 9, 1940!

People rushed into the streets in confusion.

“This is the Danish State Radio. Today at 4:15 the German Army crossed our frontier at Saed and Krussa!”

Completely shocked by the lightning stroke and its masterful execution, the Danes clung desperately to their radios to await word from King Christian. Then the proclamation came. Denmark capitulated without firing a shot in her own defense. The crushing of Poland had taught them that resistance was futile.

Meta Hansen pulled Karen out of school and packed to flee to Bornholm or some other remote island. Aage calmed her and persuaded her to sit and wait it out. It would be weeks, even months, before the Germans got the government functioning.

The sight of the swastika and German soldiers opened a flood of memories for Karen, and with them came fear. Everyone was confused these first weeks, but Aage remained calm.

The German administration and occupation forces made

glowing promises. The Danes, they said, were Aryans like themselves. They were, indeed, little brothers, and the main reason for the occupation was to protect the Danes from Bolsheviks. Denmark, they said, would be allowed to continue to run her own internal affairs. She would become a model protectorate. Thus, after the initial shock had subsided, a semblance of normalcy returned.

The venerable King Christian resumed his daily horseback rides from the Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen. He rode proudly alone through the streets, and his people followed his lead. Passive resistance was the order of the day.

Aage had been right. Karen returned to school and to her dancing lessons, and life resumed in Aalborg almost as though nothing had happened.

The year of 1941 came. Eight months of German occupation. It was becoming more obvious each day that tension was growing between the Germans and the people of their “model protectorate.” King Christian continued to irritate the conquerors by snubbing them. The people, too, ignored the Germans as much as they could, or, worse, poked fun at their struttings and laughed at the proclamations. The more the Danes laughed the angrier the Germans became.

Any illusions the Danes had had at the beginning of the German occupation were soon dispelled. There was a place for Danish machinery and Danish food and Danish geography in the German master plan; Denmark was to become another cog in the German war machine. So with the example of their fellow Scandinavians in Norway before them, the Danes, by the middle of 1941, had established a small but determined little underground.

Dr. Werner Best, the German governor of Denmark, favored a policy of moderation for the “model protectorate,” so long as the Danes cooperated peaceably. The measures against the Danes were mild by comparison to those of other occupied countries. None the less, the underground movement mushroomed. Although the members of the resistance could not hope to take on German troops in combat or to plan for a general uprising, they found a way to unleash their hatred for the Germans-sabotage.

Dr. Werner Best did not panic. He calmly went about organizing Nazi sympathizers among the Danes to combat this new threat. The German-sponsored HIPO Corps became a Danish terrorist gang for punitive action against their own people. Each act of sabotage was answered by an action by the HIPOS.

As the months and years of German occupation rolled by, Karen Hansen passed her eleventh and twelfth birthdays in faraway Aalborg, where life seemed quite normal. The re-

ports of sabotage and the occasional sound of gunfire or an explosion were only momentary causes for excitement.

Karen began to blossom into womanhood. She felt the first thrills and despairs that come with caring deeply for someone other than parents or a girl friend. Young Mogens Sorensen, the best soccer player in the school, was Karen’s beau, and she was the envy of every other girl. ’

Her dancing ability led her teacher to urge Meta and Aage to let her try out for the Royal Ballet in Copenhagen. She was a gifted child, the teacher said, and seemed to express through dance a sensitivity far beyond her years.

At the turn of 1943 the Hansens became more and more uneasy. The Danish underground was in communication with Allied Headquarters and was getting out vital information with regard to the location of essential war manufacturing plants and supply depots inside Denmark. They cooperated further by spotting these targets for the British RAF Mosquito bombers.

The HIPOS and the other German-sponsored terrorists stepped up reprisals. As the activity heightened, Aage began to ponder. Everyone in Aalborg knew of Karen’s origin. Although no move had as yet been made against the Danish Jews, a sudden break could come. He could be fairly certain, too, that the facts concerning Karen had been relayed to the Germans by the HIPOS. At last Meta and Aage decided to sell their house in Aalborg and move to Copenhagen on the pretext that there was a better position for Aage there and that Karen could receive better instruction in ballet.

In the summer of 1943 Aage became affiliated with a law firm in Copenhagen, where they hoped they could become completely anonymous among its million inhabitants. A birth certificate and papers were forged for Karen to prove she was their natural child. Karen said her good bys to Mogens Sorensen, and suffered the pain of a badly broken heart.

The Hansens found a lovely apartment situated on the Sortedams Dosseringen. It was a tree-lined street looking out on the artificial lake and crossed by numerous bridges which led into the old town.

Once the strangeness of resettlement had worn off, Karen loved Copenhagen. It was a fairyland on earth. Karen, Aage, and Maximilian would walk for hours and hours to see the wonders of the town. There were so many wonderful places— around the port past the statue of the Little Mermaid, along the Langelinie or through the bursting gardens of the Citadel or the gardens at the Christiansborg Palace; there were the waterways and the narrow little alleys crammed with ancient five-story brick houses. There were the never-ending streams of bicycles and that wonderful fish market at Gammel Strand,

so vast and noisome it put the one in Aalborg to shame.

The crown jewel in that fairyland known as Copenhagen was the Tivoli-a maze of whirling lights and rides and theaters and restaurants and miles of flower beds-the children’s band and the Wivex Restaurant and the fireworks and the laughter. Karen soon wondered how on earth she had ever managed to live away from Copenhagen.

One day Karen ran down her street, up the stairs, and threw open the apartment door. She flung her arms about Aage, who was trying to read his newspaper.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

She pulled him from his seat and began to waltz around the room. Then she left him standing dazed in the center of the floor and began dancing over the furniture and back to him and threw her arms around him again. Meta appeared in the doorway and smiled.

“Your daughter is trying to tell you that she has been accepted by the Royal Ballet.”

“Well now,” Aage said, “that is pretty good.”

That night, after Karen was asleep, Meta could at last pour out her pride to Aage. “They said she is one in a thousand. With five or six years of intensive training she can go right to the top.”

“That is good … that is good,” Aage said, trying not to show how very proud he was.

But not everything was fairylands and happiness in Copenhagen. Each night the earth was rocked by explosions caused by the underground, explosions that lit the skies, and dancing flames and the sounds of cracking rifles and stuttering machine guns filled the air.

Sabotage!

Reprisal!

The HIPOS began methodically to destroy places and things that were sources of pleasure for the Danes. The German-sponsored Danish terrorists blew up theaters and breweries and entertainment palaces. The Danish underground lashed back at places where the German war machine was being fed. Soon both the days and the nights were racked by the thunder of destruction and flying debris.

The streets were empty during German parades. Danes turned their backs on German ceremony. The streets were mobbed by silent mourners on every Danish national holiday. The daily horseback rides of the old King became a signal for hundreds upon hundreds of Danes to rally and run behind him shouting and cheering.

The situation seethed and seethed-and finally erupted! The morning of August 29, 1943, was ushered in with a blast

heard across Zealand. The Danish fleet had scuttled itself in an effort to block the shipping channels!

The enraged Germans moved their forces on the government buildings and royal palace at Amalienborg. The King’s guard fought them off. A furious pitched battle broke out, but it was all over rather quickly. German soldiers replaced the King’s guard at Amalienborg. A score of German field generals, SS and Gestapo officials descended on Denmark to whip the Danes into line. The Danish Parliament was suspended and a dozen angry decrees invoked. The model protectorate was no longer a “model,” if indeed it ever had been.

The Danes answered the Germans by stepping up their acts of sabotage. Arsenals, factories, ammunition dumps, bridges were blown to bits. The Germans were getting jittery. Danish sabotage was beginning to hurt badly.

From German occupation headquarters at the Hotel D’-Angleterre came the decree: all jews must wear a yellow

ARM BAND WITH A STAR OF DAVID.

That night the underground radio transmitted a message to all Danes. “From Amalienborg Palace King Christian has given the following answer to the German command that Jews must wear a Star of David. The King has said that one Dane is exactly the same as the next Dane. He himself will wear the first Star of David and he expects that every loyal Dane will do the same.”

The next day in Copenhagen almost the entire population wore arm bands showing a Star of David.

The following day the Germans rescinded the order.

Although Aage was not active in the underground the partners of his law firm were leading members, and from time to time he received information of their activities. At the end of the summer of 1943 he became terribly worried and decided that he and Meta must reach a decision concerning Karen.

“It is true,” Aage told his wife. “In a matter of months the Germans will round up all the Jews. We just don’t know the exact time the Gestapo will strike.”

Meta Hansen walked to the window and stared blankly down at the lake and the bridge to the old town. It was evening and soon Karen would be coming home from ballet school. Meta’s mind had been filled with many things she had been planning for Karen’s thirteenth birthday party. It was going to be quite a wonderful affair-forty children-at the Tivoli Gardens.

Aage lit his pipe and stared at the picture of Karen on his desk. He sighed.

“I am not giving her up,” Meta said.

“We have no right…”

“It is different. She is not a Danish Jew. We have records to show she is our child.”

Aage put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Someone in Aalborg may inform the Germans.”

“They won’t go to that trouble for one child.”

“Don’t you know these people by now?”

Meta turned around. “We will have her baptized and adopt her legally.”

Aage shook his head slowly. His wife slumped into a chair and bit her lip. She clutched the arms of the chair so tightly her hand turned white. “What will happen, Aage?”

“They are organizing to get all the Jewish people up to the Zealand beaches near the straits. We are purchasing as many boats as we can to make runs over to Sweden. The Swedes have sent word that they will accept everyone and provide for them.”

“How many nights I have lain awake and thought of this. I have tried to tell myself that she is in greater danger if she must flee. I tell myself over and over that she is safer here with us.”

“Think of what you are saying, Meta.”

The woman looked at her husband with an expression of anguish and determination he had never seen from her before. “I will never give her up, Aage. I cannot live without her.”

Every Dane who was called upon cooperated in a gigantic effort. The entire Jewish population of Denmark was whisked secretly north to Zealand and smuggled to the safety of Sweden.

Later that month the Germans made a sweep of Denmark to catch the Jews. There were none to be caught.

Although Karen remained unharmed in Copenhagen with the Hansens the responsibility of the decision weighed heavily on Meta. From that second on the German occupation became a prolonged nightmare. A dozen new rumors would send her into a panic. Three or four times she fled from Copenhagen with Karen to relatives on Jutland.

Aage became more and more active in the underground. He was gone three or four nights a week now. These nights were long and horrible for Meta.

The Danish underground, now directed and coordinated, turned its energies against German transportation. Every half hour a rail line was bombed. Soon the entire rail network of the country was littered with the wreckage of blasted

trains.

The HIPOS took their revenge by blowing up the beloved

Tivoli Gardens.

The Danes called a general strike against the Germans.

They poured into the streets and set up barricades all over Copenhagen flying Danish, American, British, and Russian flags.

The Germans declared Copenhagen in a state of siege!

From German headquarters at the Hotel D’Angleterre, Dr. Werner Best shrieked in fury, “The rabble of Copenhagen shall taste the whip!”

The general strike, was beaten down, but the underground kept up its acts of destruction.

SEPTEMBER 19, 1944

The Germans interned the entire Danish police force for failing to control the people and for overt sympathy with their actions against the occupation forces. The underground, in a daring raid, destroyed the Nazi record offices.

The underground manufactured small arms and smuggled fighters into Sweden to join Danish Free Forces. It turned its wrath on the HIPOS, dispensing quick justice to spoe of its members and to Danish traitors.

The HIPOS and the Gestapo went berserk in an aimless wave of reprisal murders.

Then German refugees began pouring over the border into Denmark. These were people bombed out by the Allies. They swarmed all over the country, taking food and shelter without asking; stealing and preying on the Danes. The Danes turned their backs on these refugees with utter contempt.

In April 1945 there were all sorts of rumors.

MAY 4,1945 “Mommy! Daddy! The war is over! The war is over!”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The victors entered Denmark-the Yanks and the British and the Danish Free Forces. It was a great week-a week of retribution to the HIPOS and the Danish traitors, to Dr. Werner Best and the Gestapo. A week of din and delirious joy, climaxed by the appearance of creaking old King Christian to reopen the Danish Parliament. He spoke in a proud but tired voice which broke with emotion.

For Meta and Aage Hansen the week of the liberation was a time of sorrow. Seven years before they had rescued a child from grave danger and they had raised her into a blossoming young woman. What a lovely girl she was! Karen was grace and beauty and laughter. Her voice was pure and sweet and she danced with magic wings on her feet. Now: the Day of Judgment.

Once in a fit of anguish Meta Hansen had sworn she would

never give Karen up. Now Meta Hansen was becoming a victim of her own decency. There were no Germans left to fight now, only her own Christian goodness. And Aage would fall victim, as he had to, to his Danish sense of honor. Liberation brought upon them a fear of the haunted nights and the life of emptiness that lay ahead of them without Karen. The Hansens had aged badly during the last seven years. It was apparent the moment they were allowed to relax from the tension of war. No matter how trying things had been there had always been room for laughter, but now while Denmark laughed there was no laughter for them. The Hansens wanted only to look at Karen, hear her voice, spend the hours in her room in a desperate attempt to gather for themselves a lifetime of memories.

Karen knew it was coming. She loved the Hansens. Aage had always done what was right. She had to wait for him to speak first. For two weeks after the liberation the gloom thickened. At last, one evening after another wordless meal Aage rose from the table and put down his napkin. His kindly face was wrinkled and his voice a listless monotone. “We must try to find your parents, Karen. It is the thing to do.” He walked from the room quickly. Karen looked to the empty doorway and then to Meta across the table.

“I love you,” Karen said, and ran to her room and threw herself on the bed and sobbed, hating herself for bringing this sorrow on them. And now she was hating herself for another reason. She wanted to learn about her past. In a few more days they sought out the International Refugee Organization.

“This is my foster daughter,” Aage said.

The case worker had been on her job only the few weeks since the liberation, but already she was becoming sick at the sight of couples like the Hansens and Karen. Day after day the woman was being forced to become a party to tragedy. In Denmark and Holland, in Sweden and Belgium and France, couples like the Hansens who had hidden and sheltered and raised children were now stepping forward to receive their bitter reward.

“You must be prepared for a long and difficult task. There are millions of displaced people in Europe. We have absolutely no idea how long it is going to take to reunite families.”

They left with her all the known facts, a list of all the known relatives, and the letters. Karen had a large family and her father had been a prominent man. The woman gave them a little hope.

A week passed, and two, and then three. June-July. Months of torture for Aage and Meta. They would stand in

the doorway of Karen’s room more and more often. It was frilly and soft and it smelled good. There were her ice skates and her ballet slippers and pictures of classmates and prima ballerinas. There was a picture of her beau, the Petersen boy.

At last they were called to the Refugee Organization. “We are faced with the fact,” the woman ‘said, “that all our initial inquiries have turned up nothing. This is not to be taken as conclusive. It means a long hard task. Were it my own decision I would absolutely forbid Karen to travel to Germany alone or even with Mr. Hansen. There is utter chaos inside Germany and you won’t find a thing that we can’t do from here.” The woman looked squarely at the three of them. “I must warn you about one thing. We have been receiving more and more reports each day that something pretty hideous has happened. Many Jews have been put to death. It is beginning to look as though the numbers may run into the millions.”

It was another reprieve for the Hansens, but what a ghastly thought! Were they to keep this girl only because over fifty members of her immediate family had been put to death? The Hansens were being pulled in two directions. The solution came from Karen herself.

Despite the love she had given and received from the Hansens, there had always been a strange, invisible barrier between them. Early in the German occupation when she was but eight years old Aage had told her she must never speak about being Jewish because it could endanger her life. Karen followed this order as she did all of Aage’s decisions because she loved him and trusted him. But even though she obeyed it she could not keep from wondering why she was different from other people and exactly what this difference was that endangered her very life. It was a question she could never ask and therefore it was never answered. Furthermore, Karen had been completely isolated from any contact with Jews. She felt herself to be like other people and she looked like other people. Yet the invisible barrier was there.

Her question might well have died, but Aage and Meta kept it alive inadvertently. The Hansens were faithful to the traditions of the Danish Lutheran Church and were very devout. Each Sunday the three of them went to church together, and each night before bedtime Aage read from the Book of Psalms. Karen treasured the little white leather Bible the Hansens gave her on her tenth birthday and she loved the magnificent fairylike stories, especially those in Judges and Samuel and Kings, which were filled with all the wonderment of great loves and wars and passions. Reading the Bible was like reading Hans Christian Andersen himself!

But reading the Bible only led to confusion for Karen. So many times she wanted to talk it all over with Aage. Jesus was born one of these Jews, and his mother and all his disciples were Jews. The first part of the Bible, the most fascinating to Karen’s mind, was all about Jews. Didn’t it say over and over again that the Jews were people chosen by God Himself to carry out His laws?

If this was all true then why was it so dangerous to be Jewish and why were the Jews hated so? Karen probed deeper as she grew older. She read that God often punished the Jews when they were bad. Had they been very bad?

Karen was a naturally curious girl, and so long as these questions arose she became more and more perplexed by them. The Bible became her secret obsession. In the quiet of her room she studied its passages in the hope of finding some answers to the great riddle.

The more she read, the older she became, the more puzzled she was. By the time she was fourteen she was able to reason out many of the passages and their meanings. Almost everything that Jesus taught, all His ideas, had been set down before in the Old Testament. Then came the largest riddle of all. If Jesus were to return to the earth she was certain He would go to a synagogue rather than a church. Why could people worship Jesus and hate His people?

Another thing happened on her fourteenth birthday. At that age Danish girls are confirmed in the church with a great deal of ceremony and celebration. Karen had lived as a Dane and a Christian, yet the Hansens hesitated in the matter of her confirmation. They talked it over and felt that they could not take upon themselves a matter that had been decided by God. They told Karen the confirmation would be set aside because of the war and the uncertainty of the times. But Karen knew the real reason.

When she had first come to the Hansens she had needed love and shelter. Now her needs had expanded into a longing for identification. The mystery of her family and her past ran parallel with this mystery of being Jewish. In order to take her place forever as a Dane she had to close the door on these burning questions. She was unable to do so. Her life was based on something temporary, an invisible wall-her past and her religion-always stood between her and the Hansens.

As the war drew to a close Karen knew that she would be torn from them. Wisely she conditioned herself to the shock of the inevitable parting. Being Karen Hansen was merely playing a game. She made the need of becoming Karen Clement urgent. She tried to reconstruct threads of her past life; to remember her father, her mother, and her brothers.

Pieces and snatches came back to her in dim and disconnected hazes. She pretended over and over again how the reunion with them would be. She made her longing constant.

By the time the war was over, Karen had conditioned herself completely. One night a few months after the end of the war she told the Hansens that she was gding away to find her parents. She told them she had seen the woman at the Refugee Organization and her chances of finding her family would be better if she moved to a displaced persons’ camp in Sweden. Actually the chances were the same if she stayed, but she could not bear to prolong the Hansens’ agony.

Karen cried for Aage and Meta far more than for herself. With promises to write and with the slim hope of another reunion with them, Karen Hansen Clement, aged fourteen, cast herself adrift in the stream of roamers of the backwash of war.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The dream was ruthless to the reality. The first month away from Denmark was a nightmare. She was frightened, for she had always been sheltered, but a dogged determination carried her on.

First to a camp in Sweden and then to a chateau in Belgium where there were armies of homeless, penniless drifters; inmates of concentration camps; those who fled and those who hid and were hidden and those who fought in the hills and forests as partisans and those legions of forced labor. Each day was riddled with rumors and new stories of horror. Each day brought a succession of new shocks to Karen. Twenty-five million people lay dead in the wake of war.

The trail led to the displaced persons’ camp, La Ciotat, on the Gulf of Lions in southern France a few miles from Marseilles. La Ciotat seemed a morbid place packed with lusterless concrete-block barracks which seemed to slosh in a never-ending sea of mud. The numbers of refugees multiplied daily. It was overcrowded, short of everything, and the specter of death seemed to haunt the inmates. To them, all Europe had become a coffin.

Genocide! A dance of death with six million dancers! Karen heard the names of Frank and Mueller and Himmler and Rosenberg and Streicher and Kaltenbrunner and Heydrich. She heard the names of thousands of lesser ones: Ilsa Koch, who won infamy by making lampshades out of human tattooed skins, and of Dieter Wisliczeny, who played the role of stockyard goat leading the sheep to slaughter, or

Kramer, who sported in horsewhipping naked women and some of whose handiwork she saw. The name of the greatest killer of them all came up over and over again: Eichmann, the German Palestinian who spoke fluent Hebrew and was the master of genocide.

Karen rued the day she had opened that secret door marked Jew, for behind it lay death. One by one the death of an aunt or uncle or cousin was confirmed.

Genocide-carried out with the precision and finality of a machine. At first the efforts of the Germans had been clumsy. They killed by rifle. It was too slow. They organized their transport and their scientists for the great effort. Steel-covered trucks were designed to lock in and gas to death prisoners en route to burial grounds. But even the gas vans proved slow. Next came the crematoriums and the gas chambers capable of killing two thousand people in a half hour-ten thousand on a good day in a major camp. The organization and planning proved itself and genocide proceeded on an assernbly-line basis.

And Karen heard of thousands of prisoners who threw themselves on the quick mercy of electrified barbed wire to cheat the gas chambers.

And Karen heard of hundreds of thousands who fell to disease and hunger, stacked-up emaciated corpses thrown into unmarked ditches, with logs placed between them and gasoline poured over them.

And Karen heard of the game of deception that was played to tear children away from their mothers under the guise of resettlement, and of trains packed with the old and feeble. Karen heard of the delousing chambers where prisoners were given bars of soap. The chambers were gas and the soap was made of stone.

Karen heard of mothers who hid children in their clothing, which was hung up on pegs before going into the chambers. But the Germans knew the ruse and always found the little ones.

Karen heard of thousands who knelt naked beside graves they had dug. Fathers holding their hands over the eyes of their sons as German pistols went off in the backs of their heads.

She heard of SS Haupsturmfuehrer Fritz Gebauer, who specialized in strangling women and children barehanded and who liked watching infants die in barrels of freezing water. She heard of Heinen, who perfected a method of killing several people in a row with one bullet, always trying to beat his previous record.

She heard of Frank Warzok, who liked to bet on how long a human could live hanging by the feet.

She heard of Obersturmbannfuehrer Rokita, who ripped bodies apart.

She heard of Steiner, who bored holes into prisoners’ heads and stomachs and pulled fingernails and gouged eyes and liked to swing naked women from poles by their hair.

She heard of General Franz Jaeckeln who conducted the massacre of Babi Yar. Babi Yar was a suburb of Kiev and in two days thirty-three thousand Jews were rounded up and shot-to the approval of many cheering Ukrainians.

She heard of Professor Hirts’ Anatomical Institute at Strasbourg and of his scientists, and she saw evidences of the deformed women who had been subjects of their experiments.

Dachau was the biggest of the “scientific” centers. She learned that Dr. Heisskeyer injected children with t.b. germs and observed their death. Dr. Schutz was interested in blood poisoning. Dr. Rascher wanted to save the lives of German air crews and in his experiments high-altitude conditions were simulated and human guinea pigs frozen to death while they were carefully observed through special windows. There were other experiments in what the Germans referred to as “truth in science” which reached a peak, perhaps, in the attempted implantation of animal sperm in human females.

Karen heard of Wilhaus, the commander of the camp at Janowska, who commissioned the composer Mund to write the “Death Tango.” The notes of this song were the last sounds heard by two hundred thousand Jews who were liquidated at Janowska. She heard other things about Wilhaus at Janowska. She heard his hobby was throwing infants into the air and seeing how many bullets he could fire into the body before it reached the ground. His wife, Otilie, was also an excellent shot.

Karen heard about the Lithuanian guards of the Germans who merely clubbed and kicked people to death and of the Croatian Ustashis and their violent killings of hundreds of thousands of prisoners too.

Karen wept and she was dazed and she was haunted. Her nights were sleepless and the names of the land tore through her brain. Had her father and mother and brothers been sent to Buchenwald or had they met death in the horror of Dachau? Maybe it was Chelmno with a million dead or Maidanek with seven hundred and fifty thousand. Or Belzec or Treblinka with its lines of vans or Sobibor or Trawniki or Poniatow or Krivoj Rog. Had they been shot in the pits of Krasnik or burned at the stake at Klooga or torn apart by dogs at Diedzyn or tortured to death at Stutthof ?

The lash! The ice bath! The electric shock! The soldering iron! Genocide! Was it the camp at Choisel or Dora or Neuengamme or

was it at Gross-Rosen or did they hear Wilhaus’ “Death Tango” at Janowska?

Was her family among the bodies which were melted to fat in the manufacture of soap at Danzig?

Death lingered on and on at the displaced persons’ camp at La Ciotat near Marseilles, France.

… and Karen heard more names of the land. Danagien, Eivari, Goldpilz, Vievara, Portkunde.

She could not eat and she could not sleep-Kivioli, Varva, Magdeburg, Plaszow, Szebnie, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Landsberg, Bergen-Belsen, Reinsdorf, Bliziny.

Genocide!

Fossenberg! Ravensbriick! Natzweiler!

But all these names were small beside the greatest of them all-Auschwitz!

Auschwitz with its three million dead!

Auschwitz with its warehouses crammed with eyeglasses.

Auschwitz with its warehouses crammed with boots and clothing and pitiful rag dolls.

Auschwitz with its warehouse of human hair for the manufacture of mattresses!

Auschwitz, where the gold teeth of the dead were methodically pulled and melted down for shipment to Himmler’s Science Institute. Auschwitz, where an especially finely shaped skull would be preserved as a paperweight!

Auschwitz, where the bones of the cremated were broken up with sledge hammers and pulverized so that there would never be a trace of death.

Auschwitz Which had the sign over the main entrance:

LABOR LIBERATES.

Karen Hansen Clement sank deep in melancholy. She heard till she could hear no more. She saw until she could see no more. She was exhausted and confused, and the will to go on was being drained from her blood. Then, as so often happens when one reaches the end of the line, there was a turning upward and she emerged into the light.

It began when she smiled and patted the head of an orphan and the child sensed great compassion in her. Karen was able to give children what they craved the most, tenderness. They flocked to her. She seemed to know instinctively how to dry a runny nose, kiss a wounded finger, or soothe a tear, and she could tell stories and sing at the piano in many languages.

She plunged into her work with the younger children with a fervor that helped her forget a little of the pain within her. She never seemed to run out of patience nor of time for giving.

Her fifteenth birthday came and went at La Ciotat. Aside

from the fact that she was just plain stubborn, Karen clung to two great hopes. Her father had been a prominent man, and the Germans had kept one “prestige” camp where prisoners were neither tortured nor killed. It was the camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. If he had been sent there, as well he might, he could still be alive. The second hope, a slimmer one, was that many German scientists had been smuggled out of the country even after being sent to concentration camps. Against these hopes she had the confirmed deaths of over half of her family.