Exodus

One day several dozen new people entered the camp and the place seemed to transform overnight. The new people were Palestinians from the Mossad Aliyah Bet and the Palmach who had come to take over the interior organization.

A few days after they arrived, Karen danced for her youngsters-the first time she had danced since the summer. From that moment on she was in constant demand and one of the most popular figures in La Ciotat. Her renown spread even as far as Marseilles where she was invited to dance in an annual Christmas presentation of the Nutcracker Suite.

CHRISTMAS 1945

The pangs of loneliness of her first Christmas away from the Hansens were terrible. Half the children in La Ciotat had come to Marseilles to watch her dance in a special performance. Karen danced that night as she had never danced before.

When the performance was over a Palestinian Palmach girl named Galil, who was the section head at La Ciotat, asked Karen to wait until everyone had left. Tears streamed down Galil’s cheeks. “Karen. We have just received positive confirmation that your mother and your two brothers were exterminated at Dachau.”

Karen tumbled into a sorrow even deeper than before. The undaunted spirit which had kept her going vanished. She felt the curse of being born a Jewess had led her to the mad-ess of leaving Denmark.

Every child in La Ciotat had one thing in common. Every one of them believed their parents were alive. All of them waited for the miracle which never came. What a fool she had been to believe!

When she was able to come to her senses several days later she talked it all over with Galil. She did not feel she had the strength to sit and wait until she heard that her father was dead also.

Galil, the Palestine girl, was her only confidante and felt that Karen, like all Jews, should go to Palestine. It was the only place a Jew could live with dignity, Galil argued. But,

with her faith destroyed, Karen was about ready to close the door on Judaism, for it had brought her only misery and left her as Karen Hansen, a Dane.

At night Karen asked herself the same question that every Jew had asked of himself since the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed and the Jews were dispersed to the four corners of the earth as eternal drifters two thousand years before. Karen asked herself, “Why me?”

Each day brought her closer to that moment when she would write the Hansens and ask to return to them forever.

Then one morning Galil rushed into Karen’s barrack and half dragged her to the administration building, where she was introduced to a Dr. Brenner, a new refugee at La Ciotat.

“Oh, God!” Karen cried as she heard the news. “Are you certain?”

“Yes,” Brenner answered, “I am absolutely positive. You see, I knew your father in the old days. I was a teacher in Berlin. We often exchanged correspondence and met at conventions. Yes, my dear, we were in Theresienstadt together and I saw him last only a few weeks before the war ended.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A week later Karen received a letter from the Hansens stating that there had been inquiries from the Refugee Organization as to her whereabouts, as well as questions as to whether the Hansens had any information about her mother or brothers.

It was assumed that the inquiries came from Johann Clement or from someone in his behalf. Karen surmised from this that her father and mother had been separated and he was unaware of her death and the death of the brothers. The next letter from the Hansens stated that they had replied but the Refugee Organization had lost contact with Clement.

But he was alive! Every horrible moment of the months in the camps in Sweden, Belgium, and La Ciotat was worth it now! Once again she found the courage to search for her past.

Karen wondered why La Ciotat was being supported by money from Jews in America. After all, there was everything in the camp but Americans. She asked Galil, who shrugged. “Zionism is a first person asking money from a second person to give to a third person to send a fourth person to Palestine.”

“It is good,” Karen said, “that we have friends who stick together.”

“We also have enemies who stick together,” Galil answered.

The people at La Ciotat certainly looked and acted much like any other people, Karen thought. Most of them seemed

just as confused by being Jewish as she was.

When she had learned enough Hebrew to handle herself she ventured into the religious compound to observe the weird rituals, the dress and prayer of those people who were truly different. The vastness of the sea of Judaism can drown a girl of fifteen. The religion was based on a complex set of laws. Some were written and some were oral. They covered the most minute of subjects, such as how to pray on a camel. The holiest of the holy were the five books of Moses, the Torah.

Once again Karen turned to her Bible. This time what she read seemed to throw new light and have new meaning for her and she would think for hours about lines like the cry of the prophet Isaiah: “We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noon day as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men. We roar like bears, and mourn sore like doves … we look for salvation, but it is far off from us.”

These words seemed to fit the situation at La Ciotat. Her Bible was filled with stories of bondage and freedom, and she tried to apply these things to herself and her family.

“Look from heaven and see how we have become a scorn and a derision among the nations; we are accounted as sheep and brought to the slaughter to be slain and destroyed or to be smitten and reproached. Yet, despite all this, we have not forgotten thy Name; we beseech thee, forget us not …”

And again the path would end in confusion. Why would God let six million of His people be killed? Karen concluded that only the experiences of life would bring her the answer, someday.

The inmates of La Ciotat seethed with a terrible desire to leave Europe behind them and get to Palestine. The only force that kept them from turning into a wild mob was the presence of the Palmachniks from Palestine.

They cared little about the war of intrigue that raged about them between the British and the Mossad Aliyah Bet. They did not care about British desperation to hold onto the Middle East or oil or canals or traditional cooperation with the Arabs.

For a brief instant a year earlier everyone’s hopes had soared as the Labour party swept into power and with it promises to turn Palestine into a model mandate with open -immigration. Talk was even revived of making Palestine a member of the British Commonwealth.

The promises exploded as the Labour Government listened to the voice of black gold that bubbled beneath Arab sand. The decisions we’re delayed for more study, more commissions, more talk, as it had been for twenty-five years.

But nothing could curb the craving of the Jews in La Ciotat to get to Palestine. Mossad Aliyah Bet agents poured all over Europe looking for Jewish survivors and leading them through friendly borders with bribes, forgery, stealing, or any other means short of force.

A gigantic game was played as the scene shifted from one country to another. From the very beginning France and Italy allied themselves with the refugees in open cooperation with the Mossad. They kept their borders open to receive refugees and to establish camps. Italy, occupied by British troops, was severely hampered, so France became the major refugee center.

Soon places like La Ciotat were bulging. The Mossad answered with illegal immigration. Every seaport of Europe was covered by Mossad agents who used the money sent them by American Jews to purchase and refit boats to run the British blockade into Palestine. The British not only used their navy but their embassies and consulates as counter-spying centers against the Mossad.

Leaky little boats of the Mossad Aliyah Bet, overloaded with desperate people, set out for Palestine, only to be caught by the British as soon as they entered the three-mile zone. The refugees would be interned in yet another camp, this one in Atlit in Palestine.

After Karen learned her father was alive she, too, became swept up in the desire to get to Palestine. It seemed natural to her that her father would come to Palestine also.

Although she was only fifteen she was drawn into the Palmach group, whose members held nightly campfires and told wonderful stories of the Land of Milk and Honey and sang wonderful oriental songs right out of the Bible. They joked and spun tall yarns all night long and they would call, “Dance, Karen, dance!”

She was made a section chief to take care of a hundred children and prepare them for the moment a Mossad boat would take them to run the blockade into Palestine.

The British quota for Palestine was only fifteen hundred a month, and they always took old people or those too young to fight. Men grew beards and grayed their hair to look old, but such ruses usually didn’t work.

In April of 1946, nine months after Karen had left Denmark, Galil gave her the great news one day.

“An Aliyah Bet ship is coming in a few days and you and your section are going on it.”

Karen’s heart nearly tore through her dress.

“What is the name of it?” “The Star of David,” Galil answered.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: British CID had a running acquaintance with the Aegean tramp steamer, Karpathos. They knew the instant the Karpathos was purchased in Salonika by the Mossad Aliyah Bet. They followed the movements of the eight-hundred-ton, forty-five-year-old tramp to Piraeus, the port of Athens where an American Aliyah Bet crew boarded her and sailed her to Genoa, Italy. They observed as the Karpathos was refitted into an immigrant runner and they knew the exact instant she left and sailed toward the Gulf of Lions.

The entire southern coast of France was alive with CID men. A twenty-four-hour watch was thrown around La Ciotat for signs of a large-scale movement. A dozen major and minor French officials were bribed. Pressure came from Whitehall to Paris to prevent the Karpathos from getting inside French territorial waters. But British pressure and bribes had no effect. French cooperation with Aliyah Bet remained solid. The Karpathos moved inside the three-mile zone.

The next stage of the game was set. A half-dozen trial runs were made from La Ciotat to trick and divert the British. Trucks were donated by the French teamsters and driven by French drivers. When the British were thoroughly confused, the real break was made. Sixteen hundred refugees, Karen’s section included, were sped out from La Ciotat to a secret rendezvous point along the coast. The entire area was blocked off from outside traffic by the French Army. The trucks unloaded the refugees on a quiet beach and they were transferred by rubber boats to the ancient Karpathos, which waited offshore.

The line of rubber boats moved back and forth all night. The strong hands of the American crew lifted the anxious escapees aboard. Palmach teams on board quickly moved each boatload to a predesignated section. A knapsack, a bottle of water, and an obsession to leave Europe was all the refugees had.

Karen’s children, the youngest, were boarded first and given a special position in the hold. They were placed below deck near the ladder which ran to the deck. She worked quickly to calm them down. Fortunately most of them were too numbed with excitement and exhaustion and fell right off to sleep. A few cried, but she was right there to comfort them.

An hour passed, and two and three, and the hold began to get crowded. On came the refugees until the hold was so packed there was scarcely an inch to move in any direction.

Then they began filling up the deck space topside and when that was crammed they flooded over onto the bridge.

Bill Fry, an American and captain of the ship, came down the ladder and looked over the crush of humanity in the hold and whistled. He was a stocky man with a stubbly beard and an unlit cigar butt clenched between his teeth.

“You know, the Boston fire department would raise hell if they ever saw a room like this,” Bill mumbled.

He stopped talking and began to listen. From the shadows a very sweet voice was singing a lullaby. He pushed his way down the ladder and stepped over the bodies and turned a flashlight on Karen, who was holding a little boy in her arms and singing him to sleep. For an instant he thought he was looking at the Madonna! He blinked his eyes. Karen looked up and motioned him to take the flashlight off her.

“Hey, kid … you speak English?” Bill’s gruff voice said.

“Yes.”

“Where is the section head of these kids?”

“I am the section head and I’ll thank you to lower your voice. I’ve had enough trouble getting them quieted down.”

“I’ll talk as loud as I want. I’m the captain. You ain’t no bigger than most of these kids.”

“If you run your ship as well as I run this section,” Karen snapped angrily, “then we will be in Palestine by morning.”

He scratched his bearded jaw and smiled. He certainly didn’t look like the dignified Danish ship’s captains, Karen thought, and he was only pretending to be hard.

“You’re a nice kid. If you need something you come up on the bridge and see me. And you be more respectful.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“That’s all right. Just call me Bill. We’re all from the same tribe.”

Karen watched as he climbed the ladder, and she could see the first crack of daylight. The Karpathos was crammed with as many people as she could hold-sixteen hundred refugees, hanging from every inch of her. The half-rusted anchor creaked up and slapped against the sides of her wooden hulk. The forty-five-year-old engines coughed and sputtered and reluctantly churned into action. A fog bank enshrouded them as though God Himself were giving cover, and the old ship chugged away from the shores of France at her top speed of seven knots an hour. In a matter of moments she was beyond the three-mile zone and into the waters of no man’s land. The first round had been won by the Mossad Aliyah Bet! A blue and white Jewish flag was struck to the mast, and the Karpathos changed her name to the Star of David.

The boat bounced miserably. The lack of ventilation in the overjammed holds turned everyone pale. Karen worked with

the Palmach teams feeding lemons and applying compresses to stave off a major epidemic of vomiting. When lemons failed, she went to work quickly with the mop. She found that the best way to keep things quiet was to sing and invent games and tell funny stories.

She had the children under control but by noon the heat worsened and the air grew more rancid, and sobn the stench of sweat and vomit became unbearable in the semilit hold. Men stripped to shorts and women to their brassieres, and their bodies glistened with sweat. An outbreak of fainting began. Only the unconscious were taken up on deck. There was simply no room for the others.

Three doctors and four nurses, all refugees from La Ciotat, worked feverishly. “Get food into their stomachs,” they ordered. Karen coaxed, coddled, and shoved food down the mouths of her children. By evening she was passing out sedatives and giving sponge baths. She washed them sparingly, for water was very scarce.

At last the sun went down and a breath of air swept into the hold. Karen had worked herself into exhaustion, and her mind was too hazy to permit her to think sharply. She fell into only a half sleep with an instinctive reflex that brought her awake the second one of her children cried. She listened to every creak of the old ship as it labored for Palestine. Toward morning she dozed off completely into a thick dream-riddled sleep filled with annoying confusion.

A sudden roar brought her awake with a start. She looked up the ladder and it was daylight. Karen pushed her way up. Everyone was pointing to the sky where a huge four-engined bomber hovered over them.

“British! Lancaster Bomber!”

“Everyone return to your places and be calm,” the loudspeaker boomed.

Karen rushed back to the hold where the children were frightened and crying. She began singing at the top of her voice urging the children to follow:

Onward! Onward to Palestine

In happiness we throng, Onward! Onward to Palestine

Come join our happy song!

“Everyone keep calm,” the loudspeaker said, “there is no danger.”

By noontime a British cruiser, HMS Defiance, appeared on the horizon and bore down on the Star of David, blinker lights flashing. A sleek little destroyer, HMS Blakely, joined the Defiance. The two warships hovered about the old tramp as she chugged along.

“We have picked up our royal escort,” Bill Fry said over the loudspeaker.

By the rules of the game the contest was over. Mossad Aliyah Bet had gotten another ship out of Europe and onto the high seas. The British had sighted the vessel and were following it. The instant the Star of David entered the three-mile limit off Palestine she would be boarded by a British landing party and towed off to Haifa.

On the deck of the Star of David the refugees hooted at the warships and cursed Bevin. A large sign went up which read: hitler murdered us and the British won’t let us live! The Defiance and the Blakely paid no attention and did not, as hoped, miraculously disappear.

Once her children were calmed, Karen had more to think about. Many of them were becoming quite sick from the lack of air. She went topside and inched her way through the tangle of arms, legs, and knapsacks up to the captain’s bridge. In the wheel room Bill Fry was sipping coffee and looking down at the solid pack of humanity on deck. The Palmach head was arguing with him.

“Jesus Christ!” Bill growled. “One thing we get from Jews is conversation. Orders aren’t made to be discussed. They are made to be obeyed. How in the hell you guys going to win anything if you’ve got to talk everything over? Now I’m the captain here!”

Bill’s outburst hardly fazed the Palmach chief, who finished his argument and walked off.

Bill sat mumbling under his breath. He.lit a cigar butt and then saw Karen standing rather meekly in the doorway.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said, smiling. “Coffee?”

“I’d love some.”

“You look bad.”

“I can’t get too much sleep with the children.”

“Yeah … how you getting along with them kids?”

“That’s what I came to talk to you about. Some of them are getting quite sick, and we have several pregnant women in the hold.”

“I know, I know.”

“I think we should have a turn on deck.”

He pointed down to the solid cluster of bodies. “Where?”

“You just find a few hundred volunteers to exchange places.”

“Aw, look now, honey, I hate to turn you down, but I’ve got a lot on my mind. It just ain’t that easy. We can’t start moving people around on this can.”

Karen’s face retained a soft sweetness and her voice showed no anger. “I am going back down there and I am taking my

children on deck,” she said. She turned her back and started for the door.

“Come back here. How did a sweet-looking kid like you get so ornery?” Bill scratched his jaw. “All right! All right! We’ll get them brats of yours topside. Jesus Christ, all I get is arguments, arguments, arguments!”

That night Karen led her children to a place on the fan-tail of the ship. In the cool and wonderful air they fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

The next day the sea was smooth as glass. Dawn brought more British patrol planes, and the now familiar escort, the Defiance and Blakely, were still there.

A tremor of excitement ran through the ship as Bill announced that they were less than twenty-four hours from Eretz Israel-Land of Israel. The mounting tension brought on a strange quiet that lasted far into the day. Toward evening the Blakely moved very close to the Star of David.

A booming British voice cut over the water from the Blakely’s loudspeaker. “Immigrant ship. This is Captain Cunningham of the Blakely here. I want to speak to your captain.”

“Hello, Blakely,” Bill Fry’s voice growled back, “what’s on your mind?”

“We would like to send an emissary aboard to speak to you.”

“You can speak now. We’re all mishpocha here and we got no secrets.”

“Very well. Sometime after midnight you will enter the territorial waters of Palestine. At that time we intend to board you and tow you to Haifa. We want to know if you are going to accept this without resistance?”

“Hello, Cunningham. Here’s the picture. We’ve got some pregnant women and sick people aboard here and we would like you to accept them.”

”We have no instructions. Will you accept our tow or not?”

“Where did you say?”

“Haifa.”

“Well I’ll be damned. We must be off course. This is a Great Lakes pleasure boat.”

“We will be compelled to board you forcibly!”

“Cunningham!”

“Yes?”

“Inform your officers and men … you can all go to hell!”

Night came. No one slept. Everyone strained through the darkness for some sight of shore-the first look at Eretz Israel. Nothing could be seen. The night was misty and there were no stars or moon and the Star of David danced on brisk waves,

Around midnight a Palmach section head tapped Karen on the shoulder. “Karen,” he said, “come up to the wheelhouse with me.”

They threaded their way over the prone bodies to the wheelhouse, which was also packed with twenty of the crew and Palmach section heads. It was pitch black inside except for a bluish light from the compass. Near the wheel she could make out the husky outline of Bill Fry.

“Everyone here?”

“All accounted for.”

“All right, pay attention.” Bill’s voice sounded in the darkness. “I’ve talked it over with the Palmach heads and my crew and we’ve reached a decision. The weather off Palestine is socking in solid … fog all over the coast. We are carrying an auxiliary motor aboard capable of boosting our speed to fifteen knots. In two hours we will be inside territorial waters. If this weather stays bad we’ve decided to make a run for it and beach ourselves south of Caesarea.”

An excited murmur raced around the room.

“Can we get away from those warships?”

“They’ll think this tub’s the Thunderbird before I’m finished,” Fry snapped back.

“How about radar? Won’t they keep us on their screens?”

“Yeah … but they ain’t going to follow us too close to shore. They’re not going to risk beaching a cruiser.”

“How about the British garrison in Palestine?”

“We have established contact with the Palmach ashore. They are expecting us. I’m sure they’ll give the British an interesting evening. Now all of you section leaders have had special instructions at La Ciotat in beaching operations. You know what to expect and what to do. Karen, and you other two chiefs with children … better wait here for special orders. Any questions?”

There were none.

“Any arguments?”

There were none.

“I’ll be damned. Good luck and God bless all of you.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A wind-driven mist whistled around the ancient and abandoned port of Caesarea, Palestine, and its heaps of rubble, broken walls, and moss-covered harbor which was in use four hundred years before the Christian era.

For five long centuries Caesarea-built by Herod in honor of Caesar-had been the capital of Roman Palestine. All that was left was ruin. The wind howled and churned up the

water into a swirling foam which dashed against rocks jutting far into the sea.

Here the revolution against Roman tyranny ended with the slaughter of twenty thousand Hebrews and their great sage, Rabbi Akiva, who had called his people to fight for freedom with Bar Kochba, met his martyrdom. The Crocodile River still flowed to the sea where Akiva ‘was skinned alive.

A few yards south of the ruins were the first buildings of a collective Jewish fishing village named Sdot Yam (Fields of the Sea). This night no fisherman or his wife slept.

They were all crouched throughout the ruins and they silently, breathlessly strained their eyes to the sea. They numbered two hundred and were joined by two hundred more Palmach soldiers.

A flashlight signal blinked out from the ancient Tower of Drusus which jutted into the surf, and everyone tensed.

Aboard the Star of David, Bill Fry’s teeth tightened on a cigar stub and his hands tightened on the wheel of the old ship. He zigzagged her in slowly, inching past treacherous reefs and shoals. On deck the refugees pressed toward the rail and steeled themselves.

The Star of David shuddered and creaked as her timbers slashed into a craggy boulder! A single flare spiraled into the air! The melee was on!

Everyone scrambled over the sides, diving into shoulder-high water, and began fighting foot by foot through the surf toward the shore line several hundred yards away.

As the flare burst, the fishermen and Palmachniks scrambled from their cover and waded out to meet the refugees. Many slipped and fell into potholes or were overturned by a sudden wave and went down on slimy rocks, but nothing could stop them. The two forces met! The strong hands from the shore grabbed the refugees and began dragging them in.

“Quick! Quick!” they were ordered. “Take off your clothing and change into these at once!”

“Throw away any identification papers!”

“Those dressed, follow us … move … move … move!”

“Quiet! No noise!”

“No lights!”

The refugees tore the drenched clothing from their bodies and put on the blue uniforms of the fishermen.

“Mingle … everyone mingle… .”

On deck of the Star of David, Karen handed children down to the Palmachniks one by one as fast as they could make a trip in and come back out. Strong, sure-footed men were needed to hold the children in the surf.

“Faster … faster …”

There were uninhibited cries of emotion from some who fell on the holy soil to kiss it.

“You will have plenty of time to kiss the ground later but not now … move on!”

Bill Fry stood on his bridge barking orders through a megaphone. Within an hour nearly everyone had abandoned the Star of David except for a few dozen children and the section chiefs.

Thirty kilometers to the north a Palmach unit staged a devastating assault on some British warehouses south of Haifa in an effort to divert the British troops in that area away from the beaching operation at Caesarea.

On the beach the fishermen and Palmachniks worked rapidly. Some of the refugees were taken into the village and others to trucks which sped them inland. . As the last of the children was handed over the rail of the Star of David, Bill Fry tore down the ladder to the deck and ordered the section heads over the side.

Karen felt the icy water close over her head. She balanced on her toes, treaded water for a moment, and found her direction. She swam in close enough to find footing. Ahead of her, on the beach, she could hear confused shouts in Hebrew and German. She came to a huge rock and crawled over it on all fours. A wave washed her back into the sea. Now she worked to solid ground and pushed in foot by foot against a driving undertow. Downed again on all fours she crawled closer to the shore.

A piercing sound of sirens!

An ear-splitting crackle of rifle fire!

On the beach everyone was dispersing!

Karen gasped for breath as she emerged into knee-high water, holding her side. Directly before her stood a half dozen khaki-clad British soldiers with truncheons in their hands.

“No!” she shrieked. “No! No! No!”

She hurled herself into the cordon screaming, clawing, and kicking with fury. A strong arm seized her from behind and she was wrestled into the surf. Her teeth sank into the soldier’s hand. He yelled in pain and released her. She flung herself forward again fighting like a savage. A second soldier held his truncheon high and brought it down and it thudded against her head. Karen moaned, went limp, and rolled unconscious into the water.

She opened her eyes. Her head throbbed horribly. But she smiled as she looked up into the face of stubble-jawed, bleary-eyed Bill Fry.

“The children!” she screamed, and spun off the cot. Bill’s hands grabbed her.

“Take it easy. Most of the kids got away. Some of them are here.”

Karen closed her eyes and sighed and lay back on the cot again.

“Where are we?”

“British detention camp … Atlit. It was a wonderful show. More than half the people got away. The British are so damned mad they rounded everybody up and herded us off here. We got crew, fishermen, refugees … everybody mixed up in this mess. How do you feel?”

“I feel horrible. What happened?”

“You tried to whip the British Army singlehanded.”

She pushed the blanket off and sat up again and felt the lump on the side of her head. Her dress was still damp. She stood and walked, a bit wobbly, to the tent opening. There were several hundred more tents and a wall of barbed wire. Beyond the barbed wire were British sentries. “I don’t know what came over me,” Karen said. “I’ve never struck anyone in my life. I saw those soldiers standing there … trying to stop me. Somehow the most important thing that ever happened, happened that moment. I had to put my foot on Palestine. I had to or I’d die … I don’t know what came over me.” She sat down beside him.

“Want something to eat, kid?”

“I’m not hungry. What are they going to do with us?”

Bill shrugged. “It will be light in a few hours. They’ll start processing us and asking a lot of damned fool questions. You know the answers.”

“Yes … I keep repeating that this is my country to whatever they ask.”

“Yeah … anyhow, they’ll keep you here a couple or three months and then they’ll turn you loose. At least you’re in Palestine.”

“What about you?”

“Me? Hell, they’ll throw me out of Palestine same as they did the last time. I’ll get another Mossad ship … try another run on the blockade.”

Her head began to throb and she lay back but she could not close her eyes. She studied Bill’s grizzled face for many moments.

“Bill… why are you here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re an American. It’s different with Jews in America.”

“Everybody is trying to make something noble out of me.” He patted his pockets and pulled out some cigars. They were ruined by the water. “The Aliyah Bet came around and saw

me. They said they needed sailors. I’m a sailor … been one all my life. Worked my way up from cabin boy to first mate. That’s all there is to it. I get paid for this.” “Bill…” “Yeah …” “I don’t believe you.”

Bill Fry didn’t seem to be convincing himself either. He stood up. “It’s hard to explain, Karen. I love America. I wouldn’t trade what I’ve got over there for fifty Palestines.” Karen propped up on an elbow. Bill began pacing the tent and groping to connect his thoughts. “We’re Americans but we’re a different kind of Americans. Maybe we make ourselves different … maybe other people make me different … I’m not smart enough to figure those things out. All my life I’ve heard I’m supposed to be a coward because I’m a Jew. Let me tell you, kid. Every time the Palmach blows up a British depot or knocks the hell out of some Arabs he’s winning respect for me. He’s making a liar out of everyone who tells me Jews are yellow. These guys over here are fighting my battle for respect … understand that?” “I think so.”

“Well, damned if I understand it.”

He sat beside Karen and examined the lump on her head. “That don’t look too bad. I told those Limey bastards to take you to a hospital.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

Later that night the Palmach staged a raid on the Atlit camp and another two hundred of the refugees escaped through a gaping hole blown in the barbed wire. Karen and Bill Fry were not among the escapees.

When the full report of the Star of David episode reached Whitehall the British realized they had to change their immigration policy. To date, the illegal runners had brought in loads of a few hundred. This ship had carried nearly two thousand, and the greater part of them had escaped in the beaching at Caesarea and the subsequent raid on Atlit. The British were faced with the fact that the French government openly supported the Jews and that one out of every six Jews in Palestine had entered illegally.

And so the British were caught in a tangle. They were as far away from a final answer on the Palestine problem as they ever had been, and so it was decided that the Jews must be turned away from Palestine and not kept at Atlit. The camps on Cyprus were established as a direct result of the pressure of illegal immigration and specifically of the success of the Star of David expedition.

Karen Hansen Clement was sent to the island of Cyprus on a British prison ship and interned in the Caraolos camp. But

even as the Karpathos/Star of David lay wedged in the rocks off the shore of Caesarea and the surf pounded her to bits, the Mossad Aliyah Bet speeded up their operations, planning for more ships and larger numbers of refugees to follow in the wake.

For six more months the young girl stayed in the swirling dust of Caraolos and worked among her children. Her time in the succession of DP and internment camps had done nothing to harden or embitter her. She lived only for the moment when she could once again see Palestine … Eretz Israel… . The magic words became an obsession for her too.

Many hours had passed when Karen finished telling her story to Kitty Fremont. During the telling a rapport had been established between them. Each detected the loneliness and the need for companionship of the other.

“Have you heard anything further about your father?” Kitty asked.

“No. Not since La Ciotat, and that was very long ago.”

Kitty looked at her watch. “Goodness … it’s past midnight.”

“I didn’t notice the time,” Karen said.

“Neither did I. Good night, child.”

“Good night, Kitty. Will I see you again?”

“Perhaps … I don’t know.”

Kitty stepped outside and walked away from the building. The thousands of tents were still now. A searchlight from the watchtower swept over the waves of canvas. Dust kicked up and blew around her feet and she tightened her coat. The tall figure of Ari Ben Canaan walked toward her and stopped. He handed her a cigarette, and they walked silently over the bridge out of the children’s compound. Kitty stopped a moment and looked back, then continued on through the old people’s area to the main gate.

“1 will work for you on one condition,” Kitty said, “that that girl does not go on the escape. She stays in this camp with me.”

“Agreed.”

Kitty turned and walked toward the sentry house quickly.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The plan which David had romantically called Operation Gideon moved into action. At Caraolos a large batch of bills of lading and British army identification cards were forged by Dov Landau and given to Kitty Fremont. She carried them from the camp and turned them over to Ari Ben Canaan.

The delivery of the bills of lading enabled Ben Canaan to complete the first phase of his scheme. During his survey of Cyprus he had become familiar with a large British supply depot on the Famagusta road near Caraolos. It was a fenced-in area containing several acres of trucks and other rolling stock and a dozen enormous warehouses. During the war the depot had been a major supply base for the Allies in the Middle East. Now some of the stock was still being shipped to British forces in that part of the world. Other stock had been declared surplus and had been bought up by private consignees. There was always some measure of movement from the depot to the Famagusta harbor.

Mandria’s Cyprus-Mediterranean Shipping Company was the agent for the British Army on Cyprus. In that capacity Mandria had a stock list and numbers of all the materials stored at the depot. He also had a very adequate supply of bills of lading.

On Thursday at 8:00 a.m., Ari Ben Canaan and thirteen Palmachniks, all dressed in British uniforms and carrying British papers, pulled to a halt before the main gate of the depot in a British truck. Zev Gilboa, Joab Yarkoni, and David Ben Ami were in the “working party.”

Ari, who was carrying papers as “Captain Caleb Moore,” presented a list of requisitions to the depot commander. Ari’s “working party” had been detailed to gather the listed material and take it to the Famagusta docks for shipment aboard the SS Achan.

The forgeries were so perfect that the depot commander did not for a moment remember that Caleb was a spy for Moses in the Bible and that the Achan, a nonexistent ship, carried the same name as the man who stole the treasury at Jericho.

The first item the bills of lading called for was twelve trucks and two jeeps. They were rolled out of their parking area and checked out to “Captain Caleb Moore.” The “working party” then moved from warehouse to warehouse, loading their twelve new trucks with everything that would be needed for the Aphrodite/Exodus to make her trip to Palestine with three hundred escapee children.

Joab Yarkoni, who was in charge of fitting the ship, had drawn up a list of things which included a late-model radio receiver and transmitter, canned foods, medical supplies, flashlights, small arms, water cans, blankets, air-conditioning units, a loudspeaker system, and a hundred other items. Joab was very sad because Ari had insisted he shave off his big black mustache. Zev’s mustache met the same fate, for Ari feared this would identify them as Palestinians.

In addition to supplies for the Exodus, David took a few tons of the things most urgently needed in Caraolos.

Zev Gilboa nearly went to pieces when he saw the British arsenal. In all his years in the Palmach they had always needed arms, and the sight of so many lovely machine guns and mortars and carbines was almost more than he could stand.

The “working party” moved with clocklike precision. Ari knew from Mandria’s lists where everything was located. Joab Yarkoni rounded out the afternoon’s work by taking a few cases of scotch and a few of brandy and a few of gin and a few of wine-for medicinal purposes.

Twelve brand-new trucks crammed with supplies supposedly headed for the Famagusta harbor, where both supplies and trucks would be put aboard the SS Achart. Ari thanked the British commander for his excellent cooperation, and the “working party” left six hours after it had entered.

The Palmachniks were flushed with the ease of their initial victory, but Ari did not give them time to rest or be too proud of themselves. This was but a beginning.

The next stop of Operation Gideon was to find a base for the trucks and material they had stolen. Ari had the answer. He had located an abandoned British camp on the outskirts of Famagusta. It had apparently been used once by a small service unit. The fence was still up, two wooden office shacks and the outhouses remained. Electric wiring from the main line was still in.

During the night and for the next two nights all the Palmachniks from Caraolos came to this camp and labored feverishly pitching tents, cleaning the area, and generally making it appear to be once again in service.

The twelve trucks and two jeeps were painted the khaki color of the British Army. On the doors of each vehicle Joab Yarkoni drew an insignia which could be mistaken for any one of a thousand army insignias and the lettering: 23rd Transportation Company HMJFC.

The “company” office had enough actual and forged British papers and orders strewn about to give it an authentic look.

In four days the little camp with the twelve trucks looked quite natural and unimposing. They had taken enough British uniforms from the depot to dress the Palmachniks adequately as soldiers and enough of everything else to stock the camp completely.

As a finishing touch Joab Yarkoni put a sign over the entrance gate which read: 23rd Transportation Company HMJFC. Everyone sighed with relief as the sign raising officially dedicated the encampment.

Zev looked at the sign and scratched his head. “What does HMJFC stand for?”

“His Majesty’s Jewish Forces on Cyprus … what else?” Joab answered.

The pattern of Operation Gideon was set. Ari Ben Canaan had had the utter audacity to form a fake unit of the British Army. Wearing a British uniform, he had established Mos-sad Aliyah Bet headquarters in broad daylight on the Famagusta road, and he was going to execute the final phases of his plan using British equipment. It was a dangerous game, yet he held to the simple theory that acting in a natural manner was the best cover an underground agent had.

The next phase of Operation Gideon became fact when three Americans from a merchant freighter landed in Famagusta and jumped ship. They were Mossad Aliyah Bet men who had received training during the war in the United States Navy. From another ship came two exiles of Franco Spain. Often former Spanish Loyalists worked Aliyah Bet ships. Now the Exodus had a crew, the balance of which would be filled out by Ari, David, Joab, and Zev.

Hank Schlosberg, the American skipper, and Joab set to the task Of refitting the Exodus into an immigrant runner. Larnaca was a small port and Mandria certainly knew the right way to produce silence over any unusual activity around the Aphrodite at the end of the pier.

First, the cabins, holds, and deck were stripped clean of cabinets, bins, shelves, furnishings, and trimmings. The ship was turned into a shell from stem to stern.

Two wooden shacks were constructed on deck to serve as toilets: one for the boys and one for the girls. The crew’s mess hall was converted into a hospital room. There would be no formal mess hall or galley. All food would be eaten from cans. The galley was converted into an arsenal and storeroom. Crew’s quarters were taken out. The crew would sleep on the small bridge. The loudspeaker system was hooked up. The ancient engine was overhauled thoroughly. An emergency mast and sail were constructed in case of engine failure.

There were Orthodox children among the three hundred, and this posed a particular problem. Yarkoni had to seek out the head of the Jewish community on Cyprus and have “kosher” food especially processed and canned for them according to dietary law.

Next an exact cubic measurement of the hold was taken, as well as a surface measurement of deck space. Shelves seventeen inches apart were built in the hold. These would serve as bunks and allow each child room to sleep on his stomach or back but not the luxury of rolling over. They computed an

average height for the children and allotted four feet, eleven inches per child and marked it off down the shelves. The balance of the deck space in the hold and topside was also marked off, allowing a child just enough room to move an inch or two in each direction while asleep.

The lifeboats were repaired. Large holes were cut into the sides of the ship and wind pipes constructed so that air would be driven into the hold by electric fans. The air-conditioning units taken from the British depot were also fitted in. Air had to be circulated at all times in the packed quarters to prevent mass vomiting.

The work moved along smoothly. The sight of a half dozen men working on the old salvage tub appeared quite natural in the Larnaca harbor.

Loading supplies would pose another problem. Ari did not want to risk sending the khaki-colored trucks onto the dock, as he felt they were certain to attract attention. When the majority of the refitting had been completed the Exodus stole out of Larnaca each night to a rendezvous cove a few miles away in the Southern Bay. Here trucks from the 23rd Transportation Company HMJFC would come filled with supplies taken from the British depot. A constant stream of rubber boats moved from shore to ship all night until the Exodus was filled, inch by inch.

At the children’s compound at Caraolos, Zev Gilboa carried out his part of Operation Gideon. He carefully screened three hundred of the strongest boys and girls and took them in shifts to the playground, where they were toughened up by exercises and taught how to fight with knives and sticks, how to use small arms and to throw grenades. Lookouts were posted all over the playground, and at sight of a British sentry a signal would, change the games of war into games of peace. In three seconds the children could stop practicing gang fighting and start singing school songs. Groups not working out on the playground would be in the classroom learning Palestinian landmarks and the answers to mock questionings of “British Intelligence.”

At night Zev would take them all to the playground and build a bonfire, and he and some of the Palmachniks would spin stories and tell the children how wonderful it would be for them in Palestine and how they would never live behind barbed wire again.

There was a hitch in Operation Gideon, but it developed among Ari’s closest lieutenants: David, Zev, and Joab.

Although David was a sensitive boy and a scholar he feared no man when aroused. He was aroused now. The first expedition into the British depot had gone so well that he, Zev, and Joab felt it was sacrilegious to leave as much as a

shoestring in it. He wanted to run 23rd Transportation Company trucks into the depot around the clock and take anything not nailed down. Zev envisioned even taking cannons. They had gone so long on so little that this windfall was too great a temptation.

Ari argued that greed could ruin the whole plan. The British were sleeping but not dead. Twenty-third Transportation Company trucks should appear from time to time for the sake of naturalness, but to attempt to drain the depot would be to hang them all.

None the less he could not hold them down. Their schemes began to sound wilder and wilder. Joab had got so cocky that he even went so far as to invite some British officers to the 23rd Transportation Company for lunch. Ari’s patience ran out and he had to threaten to send them all back to Palestine in order to get them into line.

In a little over two weeks after the beginning of Operation Gideon everything was ready to go. The final phases of the plan-Mark Parker’s story plus getting the three hundred children to Kyrenia-awaited word from the British themselves. The final move would be made when the British opened the new refugee camps on the Larnaca road and began transferring inmates from Caraolos.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Caldwell, Sutherland’s aide, went into the office of Major Allan Alistair, who was the Intelligence Chief on Cyprus. Alistair, a soft-spoken and shy-appearing man in his forties, gathered a batch of papers from his desk and followed Caldwell down the hall to Sutherland’s office..

The brigadier asked Caldwell and Alistair to be seated and nodded to the intelligence man to begin. Alistair scratched the end of his nose and looked over his papers. “There has been a tremendous step-up of Jewish activity at Caraolos in the children’s compound,” he said in a half whisper. “We analyze it as a possible riot or breakout.”

Sutherland drummed his fingers on the desk top impatiently. Alistair always made him nervous with his quiet, hush-hush ways and now he droned on through several more pages of information.

“Dear Major Alistair,” Sutherland said when he had finished, “you have been reading to me for fifteen minutes and the theme of your story is that you suspect that some dire plot is being hatched by the Jews. During the past two weeks you have attempted to plant three men inside the children’s compound and five men elsewhere inside Caraolos. Each one

of your master spies has been detected within an hour and thrown out by the Jews. You have read to me two pages of messages which you have intercepted and which you cannot decode and you allege they are being sent from a transmitter you cannot locate.”

Alistair and Caldwell glanced at each other quickly as if to say, “The old man is going to be difficult again.”

“Begging the brigadier’s pardon,” Alistair said, leaning forward, “much of our information is always speculative. However, there has been concrete data handed down which has not been acted upon. We know positively that Caraolos is riddled with Palestinian Palmach people who are giving military training on the playground. “We also know positively that the Palestinians smuggle their people into Cyprus at a place near the ruins of Salamis. We have every reason to suspect that the Greek chap, Mandria, is working with them.”

“Blast it! I know all that,” Sutherland said. “You men forget that the only thing that keeps those refugees from turning into a wild mob is the fact that these Palestinians are there. They run the schools, hospitals, kitchens, and everything else at that camp. Furthermore they keep discipline and they prevent escapes by letting only certain people go in and out. Throw the Palestinians out and we would be begging for trouble.”

“Then hire some informers, sir,” Caldwell said, “and at least know what they are planning.”

“You can’t buy a Jewish informer,” Alistair said; “they stick together like flies. Every time we think we have one he sends us on a wild-goose chase.”

“Then crack down on them,” Caldwell snapped; “put the fear of God into them.”

“Freddie, Freddie, Freddie,” Sutherland said in dismay, fighting his pipe. “There is nothing we can do to frighten those people. They are graduates of concentration camps. You remember Bergen-Belsen, Freddie? Do you think we can do anything worse to them?”

Major Alistair was beginning to be sorry that he had asked Fred Caldwell to come in with him. He showed absolutely no latitude in his thinking. “Brigadier,” Alistair said quickly, “We are all soldiers here. None the less I’d be less than honest if I reported to you that everything was peaceful at Caraolos and that I thought we’d be wise to continue to just sit and wait for trouble.”

Sutherland rose, clasped his hands behind him, and began to pace the room thoughtfully. He puffed his pipe for several moments and tapped the stem against his teeth. “My mission here on Cyprus is to keep these camps quiet until our government decides what it intends to do with the Palestine mandate. We are not to risk anything that could bring adverse propaganda.”

Fred Caldwell was angry. He simply could not understand why Sutherland chose to sit and let the Jews drum up trouble. It was beyond him.

Allan Alistair understood but did not agree. He favored a quick counterblow to upset any Jewish plans in Caraolos. None the less, all he could do was present the information; it was up to Brigadier Sutherland to act upon it. Sutherland, in his estimation, was being unreasonably soft.

“Is there anything else?” the brigadier asked.

“Yes, one more problem now, sir.” Alistair thumbed through his papers. “I would like to know if the brigadier has studied the report on this American woman, Katherine Fremont, and the correspondent, Mark Parker?”

“What about them?”

“Well, sir, we are not certain if she is his mistress, but the fact that she has gone to work at Caraolos certainly coincides with his entry into Cyprus. From past experience we know that Parker has anti-British leanings.”

“Rubbish. He is an excellent reporter. He did a splendid job at the Nuremberg trials. We made a costly blunder once in Holland and the man found it and reported it. That was his job.’

“Are we correct in assuming, sir, that it is quite possible Mrs. Fremont’s going to work in Caraolos may have something to do with helping Parker do an expose of the camp?”

. “Major Alistair, I hope that if you are ever brought to trial for murder the jury will not hang you on such evidence as you have just placed before me.”

Little red patches dotted Alistair’s cheeks.

“This Fremont woman happens to be one of the best pediatric nurses in the Middle East. She was cited by the Greek government for doing an outstanding job in an orphanage in Salonika. That is also in your report. She and Mark Parker have been friends since childhood. That is also in your report. It is also in your report that the Jewish welfare people sought her out. Tell me, Major Alistair … you do read your reports, don’t you?”

“But… sir…”

“I haven’t finished. Let us assume that the very worst of your suspicions are well founded. Let us assume that Mrs. Fremont is gathering information for Mark Parker. Let us say that Mark Parker writes a series of articles about Caraolos. Gentlemen, this is the end of 1946 … the war has been over for a year and a half. People are generally sick and tired of, and rather unimpressed with, refugee stories. What will impress people is our throwing an American nurse and

newspaperman off Cyprus. Gentlemen, the meeting is concluded.”

Alistair gathered his papers together quickly. Fred Caldwell had been sitting in cold and fuming anger. He sprang to his feet. “I say we kill a few of these sheenies and show them just who is running this show!”

“Freddie!”

Caldwell turned at the door.

“If you are so anxious I can arrange a transfer to Palestine. The Jews there are armed and they are not behind barbed wire. They eat little men like you for breakfast.”

Caldwell and Alistair walked briskly down the hall. Freddie grumbled angrily under his breath. “Come into my office,” Alistair said. Freddie flopped into a chair and threw up his hands. Alistair snatched a letter opener from his desk and slapped it in his open palm and paced the room.

“Ask me,” Caldwell said, “they ought to give the old boy his knighthood and retire him.”

Alistair returned to his desk and bit his lip hesitatingly. “Freddie, I’ve been thinking for several weeks. Sutherland has proven utterly impossible. I am going to write a personal letter to General Tevor-Browne.”

Caldwell raised his eyebrows. “That’s a bit risky, old boy.”

“We must do something before this bloody island blows up on us. You are Sutherland’s aide. If you back me up on this I’ll guarantee there will be no repercussions.”

Caldwell had had his fill of Sutherland. Alistair was a relative of General Tevor-Browne through marriage. He nodded. “And you might add a good word for me with Tevor-Browne.”

A knock on the door brought in a corporal with a new batch of papers. He gave them to Alistair and left the office. Alistair thumbed through the sheets and sighed. “As if I didn’t have enough on my mind. There is a ring of organized thieves on the island. They are so damned clever we don’t even know what they are stealing.”

General Tevor-Browne received Major Alistair’s urgent and confidential report a few days later. His immediate reaction was to recall Alistair and Caldwell to London and to call them on the carpet for what amounted to mutiny; then he realized that Alistair would not have risked sending such a letter unless he was truly alarmed.

If Tevor-Browne was to follow the advice of Alistair and make a quick raid on Caraolos to upset any plans the Jews might have, he had to move quickly, for although he didn’t know it, Ari Ben Canaan had set the day, hour, and minute for taking the children out of Caraolos.

The British announced that the new facilities near Larnaca

were ready and a general evacuation of many of the overcrowded compounds at Caraolos would begin in a few days. The refugees would be moved by truck at the rate of three to five hundred per day over a ten-day period. Ari chose the sixth day as the day.

No tunnels, no crates, no garbage dumps. Ari was just going to drive up to Caraolos and take the children out in British trucks.

CHAPTER TWENTY

DELIVER IN PERSON TO KENNETH BRADBURY CHIEF, ANS LONDON BUREAU

Dear Brad:

This letter and enclosed report from Cyprus are being delivered to you by F. F. Whitman, a pilot with British Intercontinental Airways.

D-Day on Operation Gideon is five days off. Cable me at once that you have received the report. I have used my own discretion on this thing. I feel that it can turn into something very big.

On D-Day I will send a cable to you. If my cable is signed mark that means that everything went off according to schedule and it is O.K. to release the story. If it is signed Parker then hold off because that means something went wrong..

I promised F. F. Whitman $500 for safe delivery of this to you. Pay the man, will you?

Mark Parker

MARK PARKER DOME HOTEL KYRENIA, CYPRUS

AUNT DOROTHY ARRIVED SAFELY IN LONDON AND WE WERE ALL HAPPY TO SEE HER. LOOKING FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU.

BRAD

Mark’s story sat safely in the London ANS bureau, to be released on signal.

Kitty moved from the Dome Hotel to the King George in Famagusta when she went to work at Caraolos. Mark decided

to stay put at the Dome in order to be on the spot in Kyrenia when the Exodus came in.

He had driven to Famagusta twice to see her. Both times she was out at the camp. Mandria confirmed what Mark suspected. The young refugee girl went to work as Kitty’s aide. They were together all day long. Mark became worried. Kitty should have more sense than to try to bring her dead child to life through this girl. There seemed to him to be something unhealthy about it. In addition there was the business of her carrying forged papers out of Caraolos.

There were only a few days left until Operation Gideon moved into the final phase. The tension harassed Mark, and Kitty’s strange behavior harassed him even more. He made a date to meet her at the King George in Famagusta.

As he drove to Famagusta his nerves were on edge. It had all gone too easily. Ben Canaan and his gang of bandits had run circles around the British. The British were aware that something was happening but they could not for the life of them seem to find the outside workers. Mark marveled at the finesse and skill of Ben Canaan and the courage of the Palmachniks. The outfitting of the Exodus, the training of the children had gone off perfectly. It would indeed be the biggest thing of his career, but because he was part of it all he was very worried.

He reached Famagusta and parked beside the King George Hotel, which was much like the Dome in that it sat on a beach with terraces overlooking the water. He found Kitty at a table looking out at the sea.

“Hello, Mark,” she said, and smiled and kissed him on the cheek as he sat beside her.

He ordered drinks and lit a cigarette and one for Kitty. She was absolutely radiant. She seemed ten years younger than she had that first day in Kyrenia.

“I must say, you look the picture of happiness,” she said in deference to his sour expression.

The drinks arrived.

“Are you on pins and needles for the big moment?”

“Sure, why not?” he snapped.

Their eyes met over the tops of their glasses. Kitty set hers down quickly. “All right, Mr. Parker. You are all lit up like a road sign. You’d better start talking before you explode.”

“What’s the matter? You mad at me? You don’t like me any more?”

“For goodness’ sake, Mark. I didn’t think you were so thin skinned. I’ve been working very hard … besides, we agreed it would be best not to see too much of each other during the last two weeks, didn’t we?”

“My name is Mark Parker. We used to be friends. We used to talk things over.”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at.”

“Karen … Karen Clement Hansen. A little refugee girl from Denmark via Germany.”

“I don’t think there is anything to discuss …”

“I think there is.”

“She’s just a lovely child I happen to like. She is my friend and I am her friend.”

“You never could lie very well.”

“I don’t wish to talk about it!”

“You’re asking for trouble. The last time you ended up naked with a marine in bed. This time I think you’re going to have the strength to kill yourself.”

Her eyes dropped away from Mark’s glare. “Up to the past few weeks I’ve been so sane all my life,” she said.

“Are you trying to make up for it all at once?”

She put her hand on his. “It has been like being born all over again and it doesn’t make sense. She is such a remarkable girl, Mark.”

“What are you going to do when she goes on the Exodus! Are you going to follow her to Palestine?”

Kitty squashed out her cigarette and drank her cocktail. Her eyes narrowed in an expression that Mark knew. “What have you done?” he demanded.

“She isn’t going on the Exodus. That was my condition for going to work for Ari Ben Canaan.”

“You damned fool … you damned fool, Kitty.”

“Stop it!” she said. “Stop making something indecent out of this. I’ve been lonely and hungry for the kind of affection this girl has to give and I can give her the kind of understanding and companionship she needs.”

“You don’t want to be her companion. You want to be her mother.”

“And what if I do! There’s nothing wrong with that either.” •

“Look … let’s stop yelling at each other … let’s calm down. I don’t know what you have figured out, but her father is probably alive. If he isn’t, she has a family in Denmark. Exhibition number three … that kid is poisoned like they poison all of them. She wants Palestine.”

Kitty’s face became drawn and her eyes showed a return of sadness and Mark was sorry.

“I was wrong not to let her go on the Exodus. I wanted to have her for a few months … to gain her complete confidence … to let her know how wonderful it would be to go to America. If I could be with her a few months I’d be sure of myself….”

“Kitty … Kitty … Kitty. She isn’t Sandra. You’ve been looking for Sandra from the moment the war ended. You were looking for her in Salonika in that orphanage. Maybe that’s why you had to take Ben Canaan’s challenge, because there were children at Caraolos and you thought one of them might be Sandra.”

“Please, Mark … no more.”

“All right. What do you want me to do?”

“Find out if her father is alive. If he isn’t, I want to adopt her and get her to the States.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said. He spotted Ari Ben Canaan, dressed as Captain Caleb Moore, coming through to their terrace. Ari walked quickly to their table and sat down. The Palestinian was his usual cold expressionless self. The instant Kitty saw him, her face lit up.

“David just contacted me from Caraolos. Something has come up that requires my immediate attention. I think under the circumstances that you had better come with me,” he said to Kitty.

“What is it?” both Mark and Kitty said together.

“I don’t know exactly. The Landau boy, the one who does our forgeries. He is now Working on the transfer papers for getting the children out. He refuses to do any further work until he speaks to me.”

“What do you want me for?” Kitty asked. “Your friend, the little Danish girl Karen, is about the only person who can talk to him.”

Kitty turned pale.

“We must have those papers completed in the next thirty-six hours,” Ari said. “We may need you to talk to the boy through Karen.”

Kitty stumbled from her chair and followed Ari blindly. Mark shook his head sadly, and his troubled glance remained on the empty doorway for many moments.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Karen stood in the classroom that was Palmach headquarters. She stared angrily at the boy with the soft face, blond hair, and sweet appearance. He was a little small for seventeen years and the softness was deceptive. A pair of icy blue eyes radiated torment, confusion, and hatred. He stood by a small alcove which held the papers and instruments he used for his forgeries. Karen walked up to him and shook a finger under his nose. “Dov! What have you gone and done?” He curled his lip and

grunted. “Stop growling at me like a dog,” she demanded. “I want to know what you have done.”

He blinked his eyes nervously. No use arguing with Karen when she was angry. “I told them I wanted to talk with Ben Canaan.” “Why?”

“See these papers? They are forgeries of British mimeographed forms. Ben Ami gave me a list of three hundred kids here in our compound to be listed on these sheets for transfer to the new camp at Larnaca. They aren’t going to the new camp. There’s a Mossad ship out there someplace. It’s going to Palestine.”

“What about it? You know we don’t question the Mossad or the Palmach.”

“This time I do. Our name isn’t listed. I’m not going to fix these papers unless they let us go too.”

“You’re not sure there is a ship. Even if there is and we don’t go they have their reasons. Both of us have work to do right here in Caraolos.”

“I don’t care whether they need me or not. They promised to get me to Palestine and I’m going.”

“Don’t you think we owe these Palmach boys something for all they’ve done for us? Don’t you have any loyalty at all?”

“Done for us, done for us. Don’t you know yet why they’re breaking their necks to smuggle Jews into Palestine? You really think they do it because they love us? They’re doing it because they need people to fight the Arabs.”

“And what about the Americans and all the others who aren’t fighting Arabs? Why are they helping us?”

“I’ll tell you why. They’re paying for their consciences. They feel guilty because they weren’t put into gas chambers.” Karen clenched her fists and her teeth and closed her eyes to keep herself from losing her temper. “Dov, Dov, Dov. Don’t you know anything but hate?” She started for the door.

He rushed over and blocked her exit. “You’re mad at me again,” he said. “Yes, I am.”

“You’re the only friend I’ve got, Karen.” “All you want to do is go to Palestine so you can join the terrorists and kill… .” She walked back into the room and sat down at a desk and sighed. Before her on the blackboard was this sentence chalked in block letters: the

BALFOUR DECLARATION OF 1917 IS THE BRITISH PROMISE OF A

Jewish homeland in Palestine. “I want to go to Palestine too,” she whispered. “I want to go so badly I could die. My father is waiting there for me … I know he is.”

“Go back to your tent and wait for me,” Dov said. “Ben Canaan will be here soon.”

Dov paced the room nervously for ten minutes after Karen had gone, working himself up to greater and greater anger. The door opened. The large frame of Ari Ben Canaan passed through the doorway. David Ben Ami and Kitty Fremont followed him. David closed the door and locked it.

Dov’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I don’t want her in here,” he said.

“I do,” Ari answered. “Start talking.”

Dov blinked his eyes and hesitated. He knew he couldn’t budge Ben Canaan. He walked to the alcove and snatched up the mimeographed transfer sheets. “I think you have an Aliyah Bet ship coming into Cyprus and these three hundred kids are going on it.”

“That’s a good theory. Go on,” Ari said.

“We made a deal, Ben Canaan. I’m not fixing these papers for you unless I add my name and the name of Karen Clement to this list. Any questions?”

Ari glanced at Kitty out of the corner of his eyes.

“Has it occurred to you, Dov, that no one can do your work and that we need you here?” David Ben Ami said. “Has it occurred to you that both you and Karen have more value here than in Palestine?”

“Has it occurred to you that I don’t give a damn?” Dov answered.

Ari lowered his eyes to hide a smile. Dov was tough and smart and played the game rough. The concentration camps bred a mean lot.

“It looks like you’re holding the cards,” Ari said. “Put your name on the list.”

“What about Karen?”

“That wasn’t part of our deal.”

“I’m making a new deal.”

Ari walked up to him and said, “I don’t like that, Dov.” He towered over the boy threateningly.

Dov backed up. “You can beat me! I’ve been beaten by experts! You can kill me! I’m not afraid. Nothing you do can scare me after the Germans!”

“Stop reciting Zionist propaganda to me,” Ari said. “Go to your tent and wait there. We’ll give you an answer in ten minutes.”

Dov unlocked the door and ran out.

“The little bastard!” David said.

Ari nodded quickly for David to leave the room. The instant the door closed Kitty grabbed Ari by the shirt. “She , isn’t going on that ship! You swore it! She is not going on the Exodus!”

Ari grabbed her wrists. “I’m not even going to talk to you unless you get control of yourself. We’ve got too much to cope with without a hysterical woman.”

Kitty pulled her hands free with a fierce jerk.

“Now listen,” Ari said, “I didn’t dream this up. The finish of this thing is less than four days off. That boy has us by the throat and he knows it. We can’t move unless he fixes those papers.”

“Talk to him … promise anything, but keep Karen here!”

“I’d talk till I’m purple if I thought it would do any good.”

“Ben Canaan … please … he’ll compromise. He won’t insist on Karen’s going.”

Ari shook his head. “I’ve seen hundreds of kids like him. They haven’t left much in them that’s human. His only link with decency is Karen. You know as well as I do he’s going to be loyal to that girl. …” .

Kitty leaned against the blackboard where the words: the

BALFOUR DECLARATION OF 1917 IS THE BRITISH PROMISE …

were written. The chalk rubbed off on the shoulder of her dress. Ben Canaan was right; she knew it. Dov Landau was incorrigible but he did have a strange loyalty for Karen. Mark had been right. She had been a damned fool.

“There is only one way,” Ari said. “You go to that girl and tell her the way you feel about her. Tell her why you want her to stay on Cyprus.”

“I can’t,” Kitty whispered. “I can’t.” She looked up at Ben Canaan with a pathetic expression.

“I didn’t want anything like this to happen,” Ari said. “I am sorry, Kitty.” It was the first time he had ever called her Kitty.

“Take me back to Mark,” she said.

They walked into the hall. “Go to Dov,” Ari said to David. “Tell him that we agree to his terms.”

When Dov got the news he rushed over to Karen’s tent and burst in excitedly. “We are going to Palestine,” he cried.

“Oh dear,” was all that Karen could say. “Oh dear.”

“We must keep it quiet. You and I are the only ones among the children who know about it.”

“When do we go?”

“A few more days. Ben Canaan is bringing some trucks up. Everyone will be dressed like British soldiers. They’re going to pretend to be taking us to the new camp near Larnaca.”

“Oh dear.”

They went out of the tent, hand in hand. Dov looked out over the sea of canvas as he and Karen walked in and out amone the acacia trees. Thev walked siowlv tnward the nlav—

ground, where Zev had a class of children practicing knife fighting.

Dov Landau walked on alone along the barbed-wire wall. He saw the British soldiers marching back and forth, back and forth. Down the long wall of barbed wire there was a tower and a machine gun and a searchlight.

Barbed wire-guns-soldiers––

When had he been outside of barbed wire? It was so very long ago it was hard to remember.

Barbed wire-guns-soldiers––Was there a real life beyond them? Dov stood there and looked. Could he remember that far back? It was so long ago-so very long ago––

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

WARSAW, POLAND, SUMMER 1939

Mendel Landau was a modest Warsaw baker. In comparison with Dr. Johann Clement he was at the opposite end of the world-socially, financially, intellectually. In fact, the two men would have had absolutely nothing in common except that they were both Jews.

As Jews, each man had to find his own answer to the relationship between himself and the world around him. Dr. Clement clung to the ideals of assimilation up to the very end. Although Mendel Landau was a humble man he had thought out” the problem, too, but had come to an entirely different conclusion.

Mendel Landau, unlike Clement, had been made to feel an intruder. For seven hundred years the Jews in Poland had been subjected to persecution of one kind or another, ranging from maltreatment to mass murder.

The Jews came to Poland originally to escape the persecution of the Crusaders. They fled to Poland from Germany, Austria, and Bohemia before the sword of “holy” purification.

Mendel Landau, like every Polish Jew, well knew what had followed the original flight of the Jews into Poland. They were accused of ritual murder and witchcraft and were loathed as business competitors.

An unbroken series of tribulations climaxed one Easter week when mobs ran through the streets dragging each Jew and his family from his home. Those who would not accept baptism were killed on the spot.

There was a Jew’s tax. Jews were forced to wear a yellow cloth badge to identify themselves as a race apart. A thousand and one statutes and laws aimed at suppressing the Jews stood on the books. The Jews were moved into ghettos and

walled in to keep them isolated from the society around them.

In these ghettos something strange happened. Instead of dying slowly, the faith and culture of the Jews deepened and their numbers multiplied. Sealed off forcibly as they were from the outside world, the Jews turned more and more to the laws of Moses for guidance, and these laws became a powerful binding force among them. Inside the ghetto they governed themselves and developed closer-knit family and community ties which continued even after the ghettos were outlawed.

For those who ruled Poland the ghetto was only part of the answer of how to deal with the Jews. Jews were prevented by law from owning land or belonging to dozens of trades and crafts in which they might offer significant economic competition.

The Jews, locked in their ghettos, made ready scapegoats for any Polish disaster. Periodically mobs, goaded by blind hatred and fed on fear, tore into the ghettos and killed and whipped the Jews and smashed their homes and belongings until Jew beating became an accepted, if not honorable, pastime of the Poles.

Four centuries of Jew baiting came to a climax in 1648. v During a Cossack uprising half a million Jews were slaughtered; the frenzy of the slaughterers was such that Jewish infants were often thrown into open pits and buried alive.

The Dark Ages, which came to an end in western Europe, seemed to linger on over the Polish ghettos. The enormous tragedy of 1648, together with hundreds of years of continuous persecution, created strange phenomena within the ghetto walls.

Throughout Jewish history, whenever events were black and hope all but vanished, a dozen or so self-styled “messiahs” would arise among the people and proclaim themselves their saviors. In this darkest of moments after the 1648 massacres a new group of “messiahs” stepped forward. Each claimed to have been sent in fulfillment of the prophecies of Isaiah. Each had a strong following.

With the messiahs came the Jewish mystics, a cult dedicated to finding Biblical explanations for the centuries of suffering. In their desperation for salvation the mystics concocted weird interpretations of the Bible based on mysticism, numerology, and just plain wishful thinking. They hoped through an involved system called the Cabala to find a way for God to lead them from the wilderness of death.

While the messiahs proclaimed themselves and the Cabalists looked for hidden meanings, a third sect arose in the ghettos: the Hasidim, who withdrew from the rigors of normal

life and lived only for study and prayer. By submerging themselves in prayer they managed to lift themselves from the pain of reality into religious ecstasy.

Messiahs-Cabalists-Hasidim-all born of desperation.

Mendel Landau knew all this. He also knew there had been periods of enlightenment when the burden eased and the laws relaxed. Poland’s own history was blood-marked. The Poles had struggled for freedom in a series of wars, revolutions, and plays of power. Parts of Poland’s borders were torn away, and there was always an invasion-or the threat of invasion. During these Polish struggles the Jews took up arms and fought alongside the Poles, placing the cause of the larger nation above their own.

Much of what Mendel Landau knew was now ancient history. It was 1939 and Poland was a republic. He and his family no longer lived in a ghetto. There were over three million Jews in the country and they formed a vital part of the national life.

The oppression had not stopped with the formation of a republic. It only varied in degree. There was still unequal taxation for the Jews. There was still economic strangulation. The Jews continued to be blamed by most Poles for causing floods when it rained and drought when it was dry.

The ghetto was gone, but to Mendel Landau anywhere he lived in Poland was a ghetto. It was a republic, indeed, but since 1936 Mendel Landau had seen pogroms; and anti-Jewish rioting in Brzesc, Czestochowa, Brzytyk, Minsk Ma-zowiecki; and he knew the snarl of the hoodlums who specialized in smashing Jewish shops and cutting Jewish beards.

And so Mendel Landau and Johann Clement came to different conclusions. After seven centuries in Poland, Mendel Landau was still an intruder and he knew it.

He was a simple and rather modest man. Leah, his wife, was the plainest of women, a hard-working and devoted mother and wife.

Mendel Landau wanted something to give his children as a heritage. He did not have the fervor of the Hasidim for prayer, nor did he believe in messiahs or in the numerology of the Cabala.

Mendel retained only a measure of faith in his religion. He kept the Jewish holidays as most Christians keep Easter and Christmas. He accepted the Bible for its historical value as a story of his people rather than as a basis for worship. And so he could not offer his children even a deeply rooted religion.

What Mendel Landau gave his children was an idea. It was remote and it was a dream and it was unrealistic. He gave his children the idea that the Jews must someday return to Palestine and re-establish their ancient state. Only as a nation could they ever find equality.

Mendel Landau worked hard as a baker. His world consisted of feeding a family and providing them with shelter, education, clothing, and love. He did not believe, in his wildest moments, that he would ever see Palestine, nor did he believe his children would ever see Palestine. But he did believe in the idea.

Mendel was not alone among the Polish Jews. Of Poland’s three and a half million Jews, there were hundreds of thousands who followed the same star, and from them spouted the wellspring of Zionism. There were religious Zionists, labor Zionists, small militant Zionist groups, and middle-class merchant Zionists.

Because he was a trade unionist, Mendel’s family belonged to a labor-Zionist group who called themselves the Redeemers. The entire social life of the Landaus revolved around the Redeemers. From time to time there were speakers from Palestine, there was recruiting work, there were books and pamphlets and discussions and songs and dances and endless hope to keep the idea alive. The Redeemers, like other Zionist groups, ran agricultural centers where boys and girls could be trained to work the land. And every so often the Redeemers sent a group to Palestine to cultivate newly purchased land.

There were six members of the Landau family. There were Mendel and his wife Leah. There was the oldest son, Mundek, who was a strapping boy of eighteen and a baker himself. Mundek was a natural leader and was a section head in the Redeemers. There were the two girls. Ruth, who was seventeen, was horribly shy as Leah had been. She was in love with Jan, who was also a leader of the Redeemers. Rebecca was fourteen, and there was little Dov, who was the baby of the family. He was ten and blond and wide-eyed and actually too young to be a member of the Redeemers. He idolized his big brother Mundek, who patronizingly allowed him to tag along, to meetings.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

After manufacturing a series of border incidents the Germans invaded Poland. Mendel Landau and his eldest son Mundek went into the army.

The German Wehrmacht ripped Poland to shreds in a campaign that lasted only twenty-six days. Mendel Landau was killed in battle along with more than thirty thousand other Jewish soldiers who wore the uniform of Poland.

The Landaus were not allowed the luxury of prolonged sorrow for this was a time of peril. Mundek returned from

the gallant but futile defense of Warsaw as head of the Landau family.

The same moment the Germans entered Warsaw, the Redeemers met to discuss a course of action. Most of Poland’s Jews, being more hopeful than realistic, felt nothing would happen to them and adopted a “wait and see” attitude. The Redeemers and other Zionist groups throughout Poland were not so naive. They were positive that grave danger lay ahead with Germans in occupation.

The Redeemers and many of the other Zionist groups decided to stay together and to take group action which would be binding on them all. Some groups chose to flee to the illusion of safety in the Soviet Union which had moved in to gobble up the eastern half of Poland when the Germans invaded. Other groups began an underground operation, and still others worked on the establishment of an “underground railway” for escape.

The Redeemers voted to remain in Warsaw and build up resistance inside the city and remain in contact with other Redeemer groups throughout’ Poland. Mundek was voted the military leader although he was not yet nineteen. Jan, Ruth’s secret love, was made Mundek’s second in command.

The moment the Germans established themselves in power and Hans Frank became governor, an immediate series of laws were levied against the Jews. Worship, forbidden; travel, limited; taxation, excessive. Jews were thrown out of public office, civil or elective. Jews were barred from bread lines. Jews were barred from public places. Jews were taken out of schools.

There was talk of a revival of the ghetto.

With the restrictive laws the Germans embarked upon a campaign of “enlightenment”’ for the Polish population, This campaign fostered the already prevalent opinion that the Jews had started the war; and the Germans claimed further that the Jews were responsible for the German invasion, which was designed to save Poland from “Jewish Bolsheviks.” Warsaw and the other cities were plastered with posters depicting bearded Jews violating nuns and other scenes of Jewish “depravity.” Beard cutting, profaning synagogues, and public indignities against the Jews were encouraged.

BERLIN, GERMANY

In Berlin the top Nazi officials wrestled with the “Jewish problem.” Several theories were advanced. Heydrich, the SD Chief, favored holding the Jews for ransom and then deporting them en masse. Schacht, the financial wizard, preferred a slow draining of the financial assets of the Jews. Many ideas were presented and discussed. An old plan of

shipping all the Jews to the island of Madagascar was revived for consideration. Others would have preferred to send, the Jews to Palestine, but the British blockade made that impossible.

SS Colonel Eichmann had long done “resettlement” work among the Jews. He had been born in Palestine and spoke fluent Hebrew and therefore seemed the most obvious man to be put in charge of the final solution of the Jewish problem. Headquarters were established at Kurfuerstenstrasse 46. The first thing that was apparent was that until a final solution was reached a mass resettlement program was called for. Most of the Nazis agreed that Poland was the natural place for resettlement. First, there were already three and a half million Jews in Poland. Second, they would encounter little or no public indignation as they would in western Europe.

Hans Frank, the German governor, objected to having more Jews dumped in Poland. He had tried to starve the Polish Jews and he had shot and hanged as many as he could. But Frank was overruled by the top planners in Berlin.

The Germans cast a dragnet all over Poland to catch the Jews. Raiding parties tore into villages and the smaller towns and rounded up the Jews at a moment’s notice. They were packed onto freight trains, often without-being able to take anything with them, and sent to the large population centers.

A few Jews learned of the roundups in advance and either fled or tried to buy their way into Christian homes. Very few Poles ran the risk of harboring a Jew. Others extorted every penny from the Jews and then turned them over to the Germans for a reward.

Once the Jews were “resettled,” an edict was issued ordering every Jew to wear a white arm band bearing a Star of David.

Poland wasn’t like Denmark. The Poles made no objection to the edict, and the Jews wore the arm band and the Star of David on their backs as well.

WARSAW, WINTER 1939

These were hard and bitter days for the Landau family. The death of Mendel Landau, renewed talk of reviving the ghetto, the resettlement program of the Germans, and the shortages made life very difficult.

One morning, early in 1940, there was a knock on the door of the Landau home. Polish Blue Police who worked with the Germans were outside. They abruptly informed Leah Landau that she had two hours to pack her belongings and move to another section of Warsaw which had been set aside for the Jews. There would be no compensation for the house and barely time to gather together what Leah had saved in over

twenty years of married life. The Landaus and all the rest of the Jews in Warsaw were resettled in an area in the center of the city near the main rail line.

Mundek and Jan moved quickly and were able to get an entire three-story building to serve as home and headquarters for over a hundred members of the Redeemers. The Landau family of five had a single room furnished with cots and a pair of chairs. The bathroom and kitchen were shared with ten other families.

The Jews were pressed into a tiny area that ran only twelve blocks in length from Jerozolimksa Street to the cemetery and was a bare six blocks wide. The Redeemers were situated in the Brushmakers’ district on Leszno Street. Leah had managed to hoard a few jewels and valuables which might be useful later, although there was no immediate financial need, for Mundek continued to work as a baker and the Redeemers’ pooled their food resources in a common kitchen.

Jews from the provinces poured into Warsaw. They came in long lines, carrying all they were allowed to take in sacks or wheelbarrows or pushcarts. They unloaded in trainload after trainload at the siding near the Jews’ quarters. The small area became packed. Jan’s family moved in with the Landau family. There were nine now in the single room. The romance between Ruth and Jan became an open secret.

The Germans had the Jews set up a council to govern their area, but it quickly became an instrument for carrying out German orders. Other Jews who felt it better to “go along” with the Germans joined a special Jewish police force. The population in the compressed area swelled to over half a million people.

At the end of 1940, one year after the conquest of Poland, the Germans put many thousands of Jews into forced-labor battalions. A brick wall ten feet high was built around the Jewish area in Warsaw. Barbed wire was strung atop the wall. The fifteen exits were guarded by Polish Blues and by Lithuanians. The ghetto had returned to Poland! Almost all traffic from the ghetto outside the wall ceased. Mundek, who had held a job on the outside, was now unemployed. Rations inside the ghetto were cut to a level that could barely feed half the population. The only families who seemed to stand a chance of obtaining food were those who held “labor” cards and worked in one of the dozen forced-labor battalions or industries.

The creation of the ghetto brought panic. Some Jews began to trade their fortunes for food and some tried to escape to Christian homes. But most escape attempts ended in death or betrayal from the other side of the wall. Life inside the wall gradually became a day-to-day struggle to stay alive.

Mundek Landau emerged as a leader. Because of his importance among the Redeemers he obtained a license from the Jewish Council to run one of the few ghetto bakeries. Thus, through a continuation of united action, his group managed to keep alive and fed.

All was not blackness inside the ghetto. A very fine symphony orchestra gave weekly concerts, schools ran on schedule, little-theater groups were formed. There was always a choice of debates and lectures. A ghetto newspaper was printed and ghetto money became a legal means of exchange. Secret religious services were held. The Redeemers played a major part in keeping these services and activities going. Although little Dov wanted to be more active in the Redeemers, the rest of the Landau family forced him to get as much schooling as he could.

MARCH 1941

Eighteen months after the invasion of Poland, the final decision for a solution of the Jewish problem was handed down by Adolf Hitler. The order was verbal. Six weeks later SD Chief Heydrich announced the Fuehrer’s decision at a secret conference of SS, SD, and other Nazi officials at Gross-Wannsee.

The final solution was genocide.

SS Colonel Eichmann, the resettlement expert, was put in charge of eradicating the Jews from the face of Europe.

Within a few months the Einsatzkommandos-Action Commandos-were mobilized into Einsatzgruppen-Special Action Groups-and they swept into Poland, the Baltics, and occupied Russian territory on their mission of genocide. The initial efforts of the Special Action Groups followed a pattern. They rounded up Jews, took them to an isolated area, and forced them to dig their own graves. They stripped them and forced them to kneel beside their graves and shot them in the head.

The climax of the activities of the Special Action Commandos took place in the Russian city of Kiev in a suburb called Babi Yar where thirty-three thousand Jews were rounded up and shot over immense pits in a period of two days.

The Einsatzgruppen had a great measure of success because there was no opposition from the local population, which, to some degree, shared the Germans’ feelings toward the Jews. The massacre of Babi Yar was carried out midst the cheers of many approving Ukrainians.

It became apparent that the methods of the Einsatzkommandos were not sufficient for the over-all plan of genocide. Shooting was slow and clumsy. Furthermore, the Jews were

not complying by starving to death in large enough numbers.

Eichmann, Paul Blobel, Himmler, Streicher, and dozens of other top Nazis worked out a huge master plan. The plan called for careful selection of secluded sites near railheads and population centers. Camps to be built on these sites would be designed by the best engineers at the lowest cost so that the executions could be carried out on an assembly-line basis.

Top personnel from old established concentration camps inside Germany would be promoted to take over the new establishments.

WINTER 1941

The Warsaw ghetto saw death in numbers that eclipsed even those in the pits at Babi Yar. People by the tens and hundreds and thousands starved or froze to death. Infants too weak to cry died by the hundreds, and old men died by the hundreds too weak to pray. Every morning the streets of the ghetto were strewn with new corpses. The sanitation teams walked through the streets with shovels and stacked the corpses onto pushcarts. Infants, children, women, men: piled up and wheeled off to the crematoriums to be burned.

Dov was now eleven years old. He quit school to prowl for food when Mundek’s bakery was closed. Even groups like the Redeemers were in dire straits. Dov learned the tricks of staying alive in a ghetto. He moved about, listened, and acted with the cunning of a wily animal. The Landau kettle was empty for long periods of time. When none of the family or the Redeemers could get together a meal Leah traded off a piece of her hoarded jewelry for food.

It was a long and a cruel winter. Once, when they had gone for five days without food, the Landaus finally had a meal, but Leah’s wedding band was missing from her hand. Then their fortunes took an upswing, for the Redeemers got hold of a horse. It was old and bony and forbidden by their religion as food, but it tasted wonderful.

Ruth was nineteen. When she married Jan that winter she was too thin to be really pretty. They spent their honeymoon in the single room they shared with the four other Landaus and three members of his family. But apparently the young couple was able to find some time alone somewhere, for in the springtime Ruth was pregnant.

One of Mundek’s major responsibilities as leader of the Redeemers was keeping contact with the outside. Money could be used to bribe the Polish Blue Guards and the Lithuanians, but Mundek reckoned that the money should be saved for more important things. He set out to establish routes in and out of the ghetto “under the wall” through the sewers. It was

dangerous to go into Warsaw, for Polish hoodlum gangs were constantly on the lookout for escaped Jews to extort or turn in for reward money.

The Redeemers had lost five members who had been caught beyond the wall. The last one, captured by hoodlums and turned over to the Gestapo and subsequently hanged, was Ruth’s husband, Jan.

Little Dov was wise to the ways of survival. He went to Mundek with the proposition that he be allowed to take up the job of courier through the sewers. Mundek would not hear of it at first but Dov persisted. His blond hair and blue eyes made him the least Jewish-looking of them all. He would be least suspect because of his age. Mundek knew that Dov was cagey and competent, but his heart would not let him let his younger brother do it. Then, when Mundek lost his sixth and seventh courier inside of a few days, he decided to let Dov have a try. Mundek reckoned that they all flirted with death each day anyhow. Leah understood and did not object.

Dov proved to be the best courier in the ghetto. He established a dozen alternate routes “under the wall.” He became at home in the fetid, slimy, putrid waters that ran beneath Warsaw. Each week Dov took that journey in the blackness through shoulder-high filth. Once “under the wall” he made his way to an apartment at Zabrowska 99 to a woman he knew only as Wanda. After a meal he would return to the sewer, carrying with him pistols, ammunition, money, radio parts, and news from other ghettos and from the partisans. When he wasn’t making his weekly trip Dov liked to stay at Redeemer headquarters where Mundek and Rebecca spent most of their time. Rebecca’s job was forging travel passes and passports. Dov liked to watch her and soon began working along with her. It was not long before it was discovered that Dov had a remarkable aptitude for copying and duplicating. His eye was sharp and his hand was steady, and at the age of twelve he was soon the best forger among the Redeemers.

LATE SPRING 1942

The Germans took a significant step toward the “final solution” of the Jewish problem by erecting several camps designed for the carrying out of mass exterminations. To handle the Jews from the Warsaw area, thirty-three acres were set aside in a place secluded from general view, called Treblinka. Two main buildings contained thirteen gas chambers. There were quarters here for workers and German personnel and there were enormous field plots for burning corpses. Treblinka, one of the first such camps, was a forerunner of more efficient models that followed.

JULY 1942

July brought a day of mourning for all Jews. Those in the Warsaw ghetto and the other ghettos in Poland mourned perhaps more deeply than other Jews. It was the day of Tisha B’Ab, an annual Jewish holiday commemorating the destruction of the Temples by the Babylonians and Romans in Jerusalem. For the fall of Jerusalem to the Roman invaders nearly two thousand years before had signaled the end of the Jews as a nation. The Jews were thenceforth dispersed to the far corners of the earth. They were, from that day on, a Diaspora.

Tisha B’Ab 1942 coincided with major steps in the “final solution” of the Jewish problem.

As the Jews of Warsaw mourned both their ancient and present plight German patrols whisked into the ghetto and stopped before the building housing the Jewish Council. To all outward appearances the Germans seemed to be making another roundup for the forced-labor battalions. But this time something sinister was in the air. For the Germans wanted only old people and very yourig people. Panic swept through the ghetto as oldsters were herded in and the Germans sought out children, most of whom were torn from their mothers’ arms.

Those rounded up were gathered at the Umschlagplatz and then marched off to Stawki Street near the rail sidings, where a long line of freight cars stood in readiness. Dazed and shocked crowds gathered. Some frantic parents were kept separated from their children at gun point, and several times the Germans shot to kill.

The children were laughing and singing. The German guards had promised them a picnic in the country. This was an event! Many of them could hardly remember being outside the ghetto.

As the train rolled off toward Treblinka the “final solution” was at hand. Tisha B’Ab-1942.

Two weeks later Dov Landau came back from Wanda’s apartment at Zabrowska 99 with a shocking report. The report stated that those who had been rounded up on Tisha B’Ab and in five subsequent roundups had been sent off to death in gas chambers in a place called Treblinka. Further information from other ghettos around Poland reported the existence of other such camps: Belzec and Chelmno in the Cracow area, and Maidanek near the city of Lubin were in operation or being readied. It appeared, said the report, that a dozen more camps were under construction.

Mass murder in gas chambers? It did not seem possible! Mundek, as head of the Redeemers, met with half a dozen other Zionist groups in the ghetto and issued a joint decree

for everyone to stage an immediate uprising and break

through the wall.

The plea was emotional rather than practical. The Jews had nothing to fight with. Furthermore, everyone who held a card in a labor battalion had convinced himself that it was a passport to life.

The main reason that no uprising could be staged was that there was no support for it in Poland outside the ghetto. In France, the Vichy government had absolutely refused the Germans’ demands that French Jews be turned over to them. In Holland, the unanimous feeling of all the citizens was to hide their Jews. In Denmark, the King not only defied German edicts but the Danes evacuated their entire Jewish population to safety in Sweden.

If the Poles did not agree to the extermination of their Jews, they did not disagree. If they disagreed, they did nothing to show it. Only a very small minority of Polish people would shelter an escaped Jew.

Inside the ghetto, each different organized group of Jews embraced a different philosophy. The religious and the labor people argued. The conservatives and the left-wingers argued. Jews liked to argue. In ghetto life argument and debate had always been a great pastime. But now the time of greatest peril had come. Mundek’s Redeemers joined all the diversified groups in forming a unified command. The combined organizations carried the initials ZOB, and had the momentous task of saving the rest of the Jews in the ghetto.

Dov made one trip after another to Wanda’s apartment at Zabrowska 99. On each trip through the sewers he carried a message from ZOB to the Polish underground begging for help and for arms. Most of the messages were never answered. The few answers that were received were evasive.

Throughout that horrible summer while the Germans continued rounding up Jews for Treblinka the ZOB worked desperately to stave off total annihilation.

One day early in September, Dov had a particularly dangerous trip into Warsaw. After leaving Wanda’s he was spotted by four hooligans who chased him into a dead-end alley and demanded to see his papers proving he wasn’t a Jew. The boy had his back to the wall, and his tormentors closed in on him to pull off his pants to see the circumcision, the sure identification of a Jew. As they set to pounce, Dov took out a pistol he was carrying back to the ghetto and with it killed one of the hooligans and chased the others off. He darted away and soon found the safety of the sewer.

Back at Redeemer headquarters the boy broke down under delayed shock. Mundek tried to comfort him. Dov always felt warm and wonderful with his brother near. Mundek was

almost twenty-one now, but he was gaunt and always tired-looking. He had been a good leader and he worked beyond the limits of exhaustion. He had kept almost the entire Redeemer group intact and had never let their fighting spirit flag. The brothers talked quietly. Dov calmed down. Mun-dek put his arm around Dov’s shoulder and they walked from headquarters to their apartment. Mundek talked about Ruth’s baby, which was due in a few weeks, and how wonderful it was going to be for Dov to be an uncle. Of course, everyone in the Redeemers would be aunt and uncle to the baby but Dov would be the real one. Thefe had been many marriages in the group and there were already three babies-all new Redeemers. Ruth’s baby would be the finest of them all. Things were bright, Mundek told Dov, because they had found another horse and there would be a real feast. Dov’s trembling passed away. As they neared the top of the stairs Dov smiled at Mundek and told his brother that he loved him very much.

The instant they opened the door and saw the expression on Rebecca’s face they knew disaster had struck. Mundek finally got his sister coherent enough to talk.

“Mother and Ruth,” she cried. “They were taken out of the factory, Their work cards were invalidated and they were marched off to the Umschlagplatz.”

Dov wheeled around for the door. Mundek grabbed him. The boy screamed and kicked.

“Dov! Dov! There is nothing we can do!”

“Momma! Momma! I want to go to Momma!”

“Dov! Dov! We can’t look at her being taken away!”

Ruth, eight months pregnant, cheated the gas chambers of Treblinka. She died in the agony of childbirth and her baby died with her in a cattle car so packed it was impossible for her to lie down.

At Treblinka, SS Colonel Wirth, the commandant, was furious. There had been another breakdown in the mechanism at the main gas chambers and another trainload of Jews was en route from the Warsaw ghetto. Wirth had been proud that Treblinka had the best record for dispensing “special treatment” of all the camps in Poland. His engineers informed him that it would be impossible to get things into working order again before the train arrived from Warsaw.

To make matters worse, both SS Colonel Eichmann and Himmler himself were due on personal inspection tours. Wirth had planned to hold special gassings in their honor.

He was forced to round up all the old, obsolete gas vans he could find in the area and send them to the rail siding to meet the train. Generally the covered vans could accommodate only twenty people, but this was an emergency. By forcing the

victims to hold their hands over their heads the Germans could make space for another six or eight Jews. The Germans discovered that there were still several inches between the tops of the heads and the ceiling of the van. In this space they packed another eight or ten children.

Leah Landau was in a daze of grief over Ruth’s death as the train pulled to a siding near Treblinka. She and thirty others were taken from the cattle car and forced with whips, clubs, and dogs to get into one of the waiting vans and hold then-hands high. When the van held an absolute maximum the iron door was shut. The truck started into motion, and in a matter of seconds the iron cage was filled with carbon monoxide. Everyone inside the van was dead by the time the trucks entered Treblinka and halted before the open pits where the bodies were unloaded and the gold extracted from the victims’ mouths.

At least Leah Landau had cheated the Germans, for her gold teeth had been extracted long before and exchanged for food.

Winter was coming once again and the German roundups were becoming more and more frequent.

The entire ghetto moved into cellars, taking everything of value with them. The cellars expanded and some, like the Redeemers’, became elaborate bunkers. Dozens, then hundreds, of bunkers sprouted and connecting tunnels began to weave through the earth.

The sweeps of the Germans and their Polish Blues and Lithuanians netted fewer and fewer Jews for Treblinka.

The Germans became angered. The bunkers were so well concealed they were nearly impossible to locate. At last the commander of Warsaw himself entered the ghetto one day to speak to the leader of the Jewish Council. He was angry and demanded that the Jewish Council assist the Germans in speeding up the resettlement program by locating the cowards who hid from “honest labor.” For over three years the Jewish Council had been trapped and torn between carrying out German edicts on the one hand and trying to save their people on the other. Now, shortly after the German demand for assistance, the leader of the Jewish Council committed suicide.

It was winter in the ghetto again.

Mundek’s Redeemers were assigned to plan the defense of a section of the Brushmakers’ district. Dov spent his time either in the sewers or in the bunker forging travel passes. Actually his trips “under the wall” allowed him one or two decent meals a week at Wanda’s. On his trips out of the ghetto he now led old people or others unfit for combat. On his trips in he carried arms and radio parts.

During the winter of 1943 the death rate became appalling. Out of an original five hundred thousand who had been put into the ghetto, only fifty thousand were alive by the end of the year.

One day in mid-January, Mundek and Rebecca took Dov aside before he was scheduled to descend into the sewer on a trip to Wanda’s.

“It seems that we don’t have much of a chance just to sit around and talk these days,” Mundek said.

“Dov,” Rebecca said, “we all talked it over here and took a vote while you were in Warsaw the last time. We have decided that we want you to stay on the other side of the wall.”

“You have something special for me to do?” Dov asked.

“No … you don’t understand.”

“What do you mean?”

“We mean,” Rebecca said, “that we have decided to send certain members out to stay.”

Dov didn’t understand it. He knew the Redeemers needed him. No one in the entire ZOB knew the sewer routes as well as he did. If the ZOB was preparing to stage a defense then he would be more valuable than ever. Besides, the papers and travel passes he forged had helped get over a hundred people out of Poland. Dov looked at his sister and brother questioningly.

Rebecca pressed an envelope into Dov’s hands. “You have money there and papers. Stay with Wanda until she can find you a Christian family to live with.”

“You didn’t take a vote. This is your idea and Mundek’s. I won’t go.”

“You will go and that is an order,” Mundek said.

“It is not an order,” Dov answered.

“It is an order from me as head of the Landau family!”

The three of them stood in the tiny earthen room in one corner of the bunker. It was very quiet. “It is an order,” Mundek repeated.

Rebecca put her arms around Dov and stroked his blond hair. “You have grown up, Dov. We have not had much chance to spoil you, have we? I have watched you go into the sewers a hundred times and I have watched you bring us stolen food. We haven’t given you much of a boyhood.”

“It is not your fault.”

“Dov,” Mundek said. “Please don’t deny Rebecca and me this one thing we want. We have not given you much. You must let us try to give you your life.”

“Mundek, Rebecca. I don’t care as long as I am with you.”

“Please … please … understand us. One of the Landau family must live. We want you to live for us all.”

Dov looked at the brother he worshiped. Mundek’s eyes pleaded.

“I understand,” Dov whispered. “I will live.”

He looked at the package and slipped it into a canvas so that it wouldn’t get wet in the sewers. Rebecca crushed his head against her bosom. “We will meet in Eretz Israel,” she said.

“Yes … in the land of Israel.”

“You have been a good soldier, Dov,” Mundek said. “I am proud. Shalom, I’hitraot.”

“Shalom, I’hitraot,” Dov repeated.

Dov Landau spent his thirteenth birthday in the sewers beneath Warsaw wading to Wanda’s apartment with a heart so heavy it nearly broke. In another day and another world it would have been his bar mitzvah.

JANUARY 18,1943

Three days after Dov left the ghetto for the temporary safety of Wanda’s apartment the Germans, Polish Blues, and Lithuanians converged on the ghetto. With only fifty thousand Jews left they began rounding up Jews for the final phase of the “final solution.”

The Germans and their cohorts ran into a hail of bullets from ZOB defensive positions. They fled, leaving heavy casualties.

The news spread through Warsaw like wildfire!

The Jews were staging an uprising!

That night every ear in Warsaw was tuned to the secret ZOB radio which repeated this appeal over and over and over again:

“Fellow -Poles! Today we struck a blow against tyranny! We ask all our brothers outside the ghetto to arise and strike against the enemy! Join us!”

The appeal fell on deaf ears. But from ZOB headquarters on Mila Street the flag of the Star of David was raised. Alongside it fluttered the flag of Poland. The Jews of the ghetto had chosen to fight to the death beneath a banner which had been denied them in life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Germans were chagrined at having been chased from the ghetto. Konrad, Gestapo chief of the ghetto security detail, reported to Hans Frank, the governor of Poland, that the matter would be cleared up in two or three days. The Polish people, who

had been told previously that the Jews were cowards, were

now told that the fighting had been the work of a few lunatics and sex deviates-the types who raped Polish girls.

ZOB assumed control of the ghetto and disposed of the Jewish Council. The fighters made a swift and merciless reprisal on all known collaborators and then moved into set defensive positions.

Hans Frank decided he would not play into ZOB’s hand by making an attack on the ghetto. The Germans decided to laugh1 off the attack and minimize it. They cut loose with a propaganda barrage and asked the people of the ghetto to come forth for voluntary resettlement and guaranteed they would be given decent treatment in exchange for “honest labor.”

ZOB issued an order informing the Jews remaining in the ghetto that they would be shot if they conformed with the German request. There would be no more evacuation.

After two weeks of quiet the Germans moved patrols in once again to round up Jews. This time they came heavily armed and moved with extreme caution. From carefully prepared positions the ZOB opened fire. Again the Germans fled beyond the wall.

The Germans decided to think it all over. Their press and radio were indignant over the Jewish Bolsheviks who were causing all the trouble. While the Germans wailed the ZOB tightened their defensive setups and desperately continued to plead for help from the Polish underground. They expanded their plea to the general public, but no arms came, no underground help came, and only a few dozen volunteers crossed into the ghetto “under the wall” to fight.

The German staff mapped one big crushing assault to wipe out the remains of the ghetto. The day they picked for the attack was the beginning of Passover, the Jewish holiday cele-. brated in commemoration of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt under the leadership of Moses.

At three o’clock in the morning, three thousand crack SS troops flanked with Polish Blues and Lithuanians threw a ring around the entire ghetto. Dozens of searchlights crisscrossed to pick out possible targets for German mortars and light artillery. The barrage lasted until daylight.

At dawn the SS launched their assault over the wall. Converging from several sides they penetrated deep into the heart of the ghetto without resistance.

From hidden barricades, from house tops, from windows, the ZOB-men and women-turned loose a barrage of small-arms fire at point-blank range against the trapped and surrounded Germans. For the third time the Germans scurried from the ghetto.

In blind fury the Germans came back into the ghetto with

tanks, and the tanks were met with a storm of gasoline-filled bottles which turned the iron monsters into flaming coffins. With the tanks disabled the German SS troops were forced to flee again; this time they left several hundred dead in the streets.

The ZOB fighters rushed out of hiding to take the German guns as well as their uniforms.

Konrad was dismissed and SS General Stroop was called in to take command. He was ordered to destroy the ghetto so thoroughly that no one would ever again dare challenge the power of the Nazis.

Stroop mounted attack after attack, day after day. Each new attack utilized a different strategy and hit from a different direction. Each attack and each patrol met the same fate. They were repulsed by the ZOB, whose members fought like madmen-house by house, room by room, step by step. They refused to be taken alive. Homemade land mines and booby traps, violent counterattacks, raw courage beat the Germans out of the ghetto every time they entered. Ten days passed and the Germans were desperate for a victory. They made a concerted attack on the ghetto’s lone hospital-entered, shot every patient, blew up the building, and claimed they had destroyed ZOB headquarters.

ZOB teams dressed in uniforms of German soldiers they had killed and used this device to trick, trap, and ambush their enemy. They crossed out of the ghetto time and time again to hit the Germans from the rear by raiding their arsenals.

The Germans continued their attacks and soon, by the sheer weight of their numbers and arms, made themselves felt. The ZOB could not replace a fallen fighter; once a defensive position was destroyed there was no choice but to retrench; they could not replace ammunition as fast as they were expending it. Still, with the power on their side, the Germans were unable to get a foothold inside the ghetto. ZOB began calling upon many of the Jews not in fighting units to escape into Warsaw, for there were not enough rifles to go around.

Wearing a captured uniform, Mundek led an attack on the Pawiak Prison and freed all the inmates.

The three-day cleanup Konrad had promised had stretched into two weeks. On the fifteenth day after the first German assault Rebecca Landau was fighting in a building in the Brushmakers’ district a few blocks from Redeemer headquarters. A direct mortar hit killed every defender but her. Under sustained mortar fire the walls of the building collapsed and she was forced into the street. As the Germans closed in on her and cut off all possibilities of retreat, she

reached beneath her dress and withdrew a hand grenade. Running at three Germans, she pulled the pin, and killed them and herself.

After three weeks Stroop was forced to change his tactics. He had drawn heavy casualties and the Nazis were unable to cover up the valiant action of the Jews with propaganda. Stroop pulled his troops back, reinforced the ring of men and armor surrounding the ghetto, and declared a state of siege. He brought in heavy artillery which blasted into the ghetto at near point-blank range in a determined effort to knock down all the buildings which the Jews had used so well as defensive positions. By night Heinkel bombers saturated the ghetto area with incendiary bombs.

Mundek returned to the Redeemer bunker after a staff meeting at ZOB headquarters. He and his fighters were half dead with exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. Many were badly burned. They gathered around him.

“German artillery has knocked down just about every building. What is standing is burning,” he said.

“Have we been able to establish contact with the underground?”

“Oh yes … we’ve made contact, but they aren’t going to help us. We cannot expect any more food, ammunition, or water than what we have on hand. Our communications are about ruined. In short, my friends, we can no longer fight according to a fixed plan. Each bunker is on its own. We will try to keep contact with ZOB through runners, but we will each plan and execute our own ambushes and encounters with the Germans when they come back.”

“How long can we hold out like this, Mundek? We have only thirty people left and ten pistols and six rifles.”

Mundek smiled. “All of Poland held out for only twenty-six days. We have done that well already.” Mundek assigned his guards, rationed what little food was left, and mapped out a dawn patrol.

Ryfka, one of the girls, picked up a battered accordion and began playing a soft, slow tune. In that dank and slimy bunker ten feet beneath the earth the remaining Redeemers sang in a strange and wistful blend of voices. They sang a song that they had learned as children ax Redeemer meetings. The song told them that the land in Galilee in Eretz Israel was beautiful and that wheat grew in the fields and the grain bent softly in the wind. In a bunker in the Warsaw ghetto they sang of the fields of Galilee that they knew they would never see.

“Alert!” a sentry called down as he spotted a lone figure weaving in and out of the flames and rubble. The lights went out and the bunker became black and

silent. There was a knock in code. The door opened and closed and the lights were turned on again.

“Dov! For God’s sake! What are you doing here?”

“Don’t send me away again, Mundek!”

The two brothers embraced and Dov wept. It felt good to have Mundek’s arms around him again. Everyone gathered about Dov as he relayed the final tragic news that the Polish underground definitely would not come in and that everyone else on the outside was being very quiet about the uprising.

“When I came back,” Dov said, “the sewers were filled with people just lying in the muck. They are too weak to stand up. They have no place to go. No one wants them in Warsaw.”

And so little Dov returned to the ghetto and a very strange thing happened. All over Warsaw and the surrounding countryside Jews who had managed to escape and live as Christians were beginning to return to the ghetto for the last-ditch stand. They had concluded that it was a privilege to be able to die with dignity.

MAY 1943

At last the furious bombardment stopped.

The fires went out.

Stroop moved his SS troops in once again, but this time they held all the cards. The Jews had no defensive positions or communications or fixed plans and almost no food, water, or arms. The Germans worked systematically, cutting off one section at a time and cleaning out bunkers one by one with cannon fire and flame throwers until the section was completely destroyed.

They tried hard to capture prisoners to torture into revealing the exact location of the bunkers, but the ZOB fighters preferred to burn alive rather than surrender.

They threw open the sewer lids and pumped the sewers full of poison gas, and soon the slimy waters were filled with bodies.

Still the ZOB fought on. They lashed out of their bunkers on swift and deadly raids when they could find a German patrol. Suicide squads hurled themselves into certain death. German casualties mounted until the number was in the thousands.

Stroop pressed on relentlessly. When the Jews became ineffective as a fighting force they kept going on instinct alone.

On May 14, Mundek held a meeting of the remaining twelve Redeemers in his group. He gave them two choices. One was to remain and fight to the last man. The second was to try the sewers where Dov might be able to lead them to safety and a remote chance of reaching a partisan unit.

Dov convinced Mundek he could work around the areas of the sewers that were being gassed.

He made his way in “under the wall,” but as he approached Zabrowska 99 instinct told him something was wrong. He walked straight past the building. His sharp eye picked out a dozen men who were watching Zabrowska 99 from various vantage points. Dov did not know whether or not Wanda had been taken by the Gestapo but he did know the place was unsafe.

It was late at night when he returned to the ghetto. It was difficult even for him to locate the bunker, for there were no streets or buildings left, only rubble. As he approached he smelled the now familiar odor of burning flesh. He went beneath the ground and lit a candle he always carried in the sewer. Its flickering light bounced off the walls. Dov walked from one end of the bunker to the other and knelt low with his candle each time he came to a body. Direct hits from the flame thrower had charred the still smoking bodies so badly he could not identify them. Dov Landau wondered which of the burned corpses was his beloved brother, Mundek.

May 15, 1943. ZOB radio broadcast its last message: “This is the voice of the Warsaw ghetto! For God’s sake, help us!”

May 16, 1943. Forty-two days had passed since the Germans had made their first attack. Four months had passed since the ZOB arose and chased the Germans out. As a last gesture SS General Stroop dynamited the Great Synagogue on Tlamatzka Street. It had long been the symbol of Judaism in Poland. As the Temple of Solomon once fell to the Romans, so had the Tlamatzka Synagogue fallen. The Germans announced that the problem of the Warsaw ghetto had reached its final solution.

The devastation had been absolute. Nothing stood in the entire area above a man’s eye level. Stroop announced the capture of sixteen pistols and four rifles. Further, that the ruins of the buildings would make good material. There were no prisoners.

Even in this most meticulous of massacres there were ZOB fighters who refused to die. Even in the rubble the battle went on. The Jews who had somehow survived began to find each other, and in twos and threes they formed “rat packs” and attacked German patrols by night. The Germans and the Polish Blues swore the ghetto was haunted by ghosts.

Dov found six other Jews. They went from bunker to bunker until they were all armed. They moved from place to place but the stench and the sight of death was everywhere. At night Dov led them through the sewers “under the wall” where they made quick raids on food stores.

The Jews were rebelling in a dozen other places around Poland, but their risings all met with the same fate. Too little, too late, no support.

During all the daylight hours Dov and the six others remained below ground in a newly carved-out bunker. For five long and harrowing months neither Dov Landau nor any of his comrades saw the light of day. One by one they died -three on one raid in Warsaw, two by suicide, one of starvation.

Dov was the last one alive. At the end of the fifth month a German patrol found him close to death. His appearance was not even that of a human being. He was revived sufficiently to be dragged to Gestapo headquarters for questionings, which always ended in beatings. The Gestapo could get nothing from him. Dov Landau, age thirteen, ghetto rat, sewer rat, rubble rat, and expert forger, was marked for resettlement. Destination: Auschwitz!

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Dov Landau was put into an open gondola car with sixty other Jews. The Gestapo refused to believe that he had stayed alive without outside help for five months in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto. The train moved southward over the icy countryside in the dead of winter toward Auschwitz.

BERLIN, GERMANY, 1940

SS Lieutenant Colonel Karl Hoess entered the office of SS Colonel Eichmann, who had been given the task of carrying out the final solution of the Jewish problem. Eichmann showed Hoess the master plan which was the culmination of the combined brainwork of all the top Nazi officials.

The entire continent of Europe was interlaced with concentration camps and political prisons. Every occupied country was well saturated with Gestapo establishments.

Another network of three hundred “combination” camps spanned Europe. Half of them were reserved for Jews.

SS Lieutenant Colonel Karl Hoess was impressed with the intricate planning that went into genocide.

Despite all these camps and their carefully chosen locations, the blueprinters felt they were going to run into a special problem, and this was why Hoess had been called to Berlin. The Nazis knew they would have tremendous difficulty trying to run extermination camps in western Europe. Furthermore, Poland was more or less centrally located in relation to the Balkans and western Europe. A final, major camp was needed, one that would serve as a “master model.” In addition to Jews to dispose of there were Russian, French, and

other prisoners of war, partisans, political enemies in occupied countries, religious fanatics, especially Christians of the Catholic faith, gypsies, criminals, Freemasons, Marxists, Bolsheviks, and Germans who talked peace, liberalism, trade unionism, or defeatism. There were suspected foreign agents, prostitutes, homosexuals, and many other undesirable elements. All these had to be eliminated to make Europe a fit place for Aryans to live.

Such a camp as Eichmann spoke of would handle all these people. Eichmann informed Hoess that he was to be rewarded for his years of faithful service as a Nazi by being given command of the new camp. Eichmann pointed on the map to a small Polish town near the Czech border. A town called Auschwitz.

The train bearing Dov Landau and heading south for Auschwitz rolled to a stop at Cracow, a rail center. At a siding on the outskirts many more cars were joined to the train. There were cattle cars holding Jews from France and Greece and coal cars holding Jews from Yugoslavia and Holland and there were open gondolas holding Jews from Italy for resettlement. It was bitter cold. The biting wind and the snow whipped through Dov in the open gondola and all that pro-j tected him against it was his torn shirt and some little warmth ‘ of bodies packed together.

BERLIN, GERMANY, 1940-41

When the Nazis selected Hoess to command the camp at Auschwitz, the major clearing house and extermination factory, they knew well the caliber of the man they had. Hoess had had a long career in the concentration-camp system beginning way back in 1934 when Hitler first rose to power. More recently he had been second in command of the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Hoess was a meticulous man and systematic and he carried out orders without questioning them. Furthermore, he was not bothered by hard work.

Twenty thousand acres of land were cleared of farms and villages in the Auschwitz area and fenced off. The best construction men, engineers, scientists, and transportation experts and the best of the elite storm troopers went to work on the massive project. An area called Birkenau, two miles from the main Auschwitz camp, was selected as the site of the gas chambers. Birkenau was well secluded and had its own rail sidings. The site was picked because of its accessibility by rail from western Europe, eastern Europe, and southern Europe. The little town of Auschwitz was completely undistinguished and lay in a basin of eternal mud at the entrance to the Silesian mining district. In erecting the camp system the Nazis had to overcome a major objection from their own colleagues.

The German Army needed all the railroads and rolling stock it could get its hands on to execute a war on the eastern front. They did not like this nonsense of using valuable rail space to cart Jews all over Europe. The Nazis were just as adamant that the final solution of the Jewish question was as important as running the war. The question was taken to Hitler, who sided with the SS, SD, Gestapo, and other Nazi elements against the German Army High Command.

Hoess assumed command of Auschwitz and traveled to Treblinka to study the methods of extermination. He concluded that Treblinka’s commander, SS Colonel Wirth, was a clumsy amateur and said’ as much. The executions at Treblinka were carried out with carbon monoxide, which was inefficient; the machinery was always breaking down and it used up valuable petrol. Furthermore, Wirth was not systematic and he did not use any measure of deception, so that there were constant rebellions on the part of the Jews. Finally, Hoess felt, Treblinka had been poorly designed if only three hundred people could be executed at one time.

When the chambers of Birkenau were opened at Auschwitz, Hoess conducted extensive tests on the first “guests.” He and his scientists concluded that Cyklon B, a crude prus-sic acid gas, did the job the best. He ordered huge quantities of it from the International Insecticide Company in Hamburg.

The Birkenau chambers were designed to hold three thousand people at one time, and with utmost efficiency ten thousand people a day could be exterminated, depending on weather conditions.

The train bearing Dov Landau was now nearly fifty cars long. It stopped at the town of Chrzanow, the last before Auschwitz. One out of five persons on the train was already dead. Other hundreds were frozen to the sides of the cars and unable to move without tearing off the flesh of arms or legs. Many women threw their children over the rail beds and screamed to the curious onlooking peasants to take them and hide them. The dead were removed and stacked in six new cars added on at the end of the train. Dov, though in very bad condition, was keen and alert. He knew exactly what to expect, and he knew that if he ever used his wits he must use them now. The train rolled on again. Auschwitz was an hour away.

AUSCHWITZ 1941-42

Hoess worked to perfect the operation at Birkenau. First he worked out a system of deception that would keep the victims calm to the very end. Lovely trees, lawns, and flower beds were planted around the buildings which hpused the gas chambers. There were signs everywhere in many languages which read: sanitation center. The main deception used was that the victims were going to be inspected and given a delousing shower before being issued new clothing and sent to labor camps at or around Auschwitz.

Under and around the gas chambers neatly laid-out dressing rooms had been built. There were pegs with numbers for hanging clothing. Everyone was told to “remember his number.” Hair was cut for “delousing” and the victims were requested to remove their eyeglasses before entering the sanitation “shower.”

Everyone was issued a bar of soap with a number on it. They were marched naked, three thousand at a time, down long corridors. A dozen mammoth doors ran along the corridors. The doors opened, revealing enormous “shower rooms.” |

Most of the guests were too numb to realize quite what was happening and entered the shower rooms quietly. Some began to examine the bar of soap and found it was made of stone. Others discovered the shower heads on the ceiling were fake and that there was no drainage for water.

Often a last-minute panic broke out but the Germans were ready now with storm troopers who clubbed and whipped the reluctant into the “shower rooms.” The iron doors were bolted shut.

A can or two of Cyklon B was dropped into each “shower room” and it was all over in ten or fifteen minutes.

Then came the Sonderkommandos. These were cleanup squads of inmates from Auschwitz. They emptied the gas chambers and removed the corpses to the crematoriums. Gold teeth were pulled and rings taken before the burnings. These would be melted down and sent to Berlin. Often a well-shaped skull would be taken for sale to the German guards as paperweights.

Little attention was given to pictures of families or love letters that were found in the clothing. The troopers were most interested in searching through the linings where jewelry was often hidden. Often an infant was found hidden in the clothes and designated for the next “shower.”

Hoess was good to his troops. They worked hard when a large trainload came to Birkenau and were rewarded with extra rations and schnapps. His system worked with great

efficiency and he never seemed fazed. He did not even get upset when Colonel Eichmann unloaded a quarter of a million Hungarian Jews on him practically without warning.

Hoess pressed his scientists and engineers for greater efficiency and lower costs. His architects had blueprinted elaborate expansion plans. One was for a gas chamber with a floor that could be lifted hydraulically like an elevator to another level where the crematorium was situated. Other plans were designed to increase the Birkenau capacity to forty thousand executions a day.

The greatest bottleneck at Birkenau was the disposal of corpses. At first they were taken directly from the gas chambers to open fields and buried in pits and covered with lime. The stench became unbearable. The SS troops forced the Jewish Sonderkommandos to dig up all the pits and burn bodies, then crush the bones. Again, open field burning proved too foul-smelling, so inside crematoriums had to be constructed.

The train bearing Dov Landau passed through Auschwitz and came to a halt at the siding at Birkenau.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Dov was half dead with hunger and blue with cold, but his years of constant contact with danger and death had sharpened his instincts so that even in this state he was alert to survive. Dov knew that the next hour would spell life or death.

The doors of the cattle and freight cars were opened and those like him in open cars were ordered over the top with harsh guttural commands. The miserable victims dragged themselves onto a long platform and faced a line of storm troopers who stood in readiness with clubs, whips, pistols, and vicious dogs straining at their leashes. The whips cracked out in the cold air and brought screams of pain. The truncheons thudded against skulls, and pistols shot into the bodies of those too weak to walk.

A line was formed, four abreast down the length of the platform, and directed toward a huge station room. The line pressed to the room at a slow but steady pace.

Dov looked around him. To his left were the trains. Beyond the trains on the road outside the station room he could observe a line of waiting trucks. The trucks were not enclosed so they could not be gas vans, Dov assumed. To his right, past the line of guards, Dov could see the neatly groomed lawns and trees around the brick gas chambers of Birkenau.

He studied the shapes of the buildings and their conelike chimneys and he knew the area to his right held extermination chambers.

The line pressed on. A nausea born of fear racked him. A man staggered and fell, unable to arise. Two snarling dogs were turned loose and ripped the man to pieces. His shrieks set Dov to trembling. He fought to gain control; he knew that he must show no fear.

His line moved into the station room. The large line was split into four single lines, and each line moved toward a desk set up at the far end of the room. A German doctor sat behind each desk, and around each doctor stood a dozen guards and assistants. Dov fixed his attention on the desk ahead of him to try to find out what was happening.

The doctor quickly looked over every person as he or she stepped to the desk. The doctor would then order the person to go off in one of three directions.

The first way was out an exit on the right side of the room. Dov began counting; seven out of ten people were sent out that way. These people were old or children or appeared in bad condition. Since he assumed the buildings on the right were gas chambers, he came to the conclusion that those being sent out the right exit were going to be put to death immediately.

The second way was out an exit on the left side of the room. This exit led to the outside where the line of trucks was waiting. About two out of ten went that way and all of them appeared fit and well. Dov assumed they were being sent to the labor camp.

The right door meant death and the left door meant life! There was also a third group. These people, one in ten or even more, were mostly young women, some quite beautiful. A few teenage boys were ordered to join this group. Dov was certain the girls would be used as German field whores and the boys for homosexual activities with the German officers.

He drew in a dozen deep breaths as his line inched forward. He was a pack of bones and he knew he didn’t stand much of a chance of being sent through the left exit to the labor camp.

In the next line a woman screamed and half a dozen guards converged on her and flung her to the ground and ripped away her skirts. The woman had been trying to hide an infant.

“Right… right… right… right…” the doctor kept ordering the victims.

Dov Landau stopped before the desk.

The doctor looked up and glanced at him. “Go to that exit on the right,” he said.

Dov smiled softly. “You are making a mistake, Doctor,” Dov said with infinite calm. “I am an expert forger and counterfeiter. Write your name down on that piece of paper and I’ll show you.”

The doctor sat back, stunned. Dov’s coolness impressed him, for he obviously knew what awaited him. The youngster had put a sudden halt to the monotonous death march. The doctor caught his bearings and a smirk crossed his lips. Two guards grabbed Dov and began to drag him away.

“Wait!” the doctor commanded. He looked at Dov again and ordered him to turn around. For a second he became tired of the foolishness. The boy was making a clever bluff. He was about to order him out of the right exit, but his curiosity got the better of him. The doctor scribbled his name on a pad.

Dov wrote out six duplications of the signature and returned the pad. “Which one of those did you write?” Dov asked.

Half a dozen guards peeked over the doctor’s shoulder and stared in amazement. The doctor looked at Dov again and then whispered to a guard who walked off.

“Stand over here to one side,” the doctor snapped.

Dov stood by the desk and watched the line of people move toward him. He looked at them being condemned at the rate of four a minute.

Dov looked into the eyes of the guards and he looked at their truncheons and at the snarling dogs. He glanced at the right-hand exit and whistled a shaky tune half beneath his breath.

Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. The line coming in from the platform seemed never to end.

The guard returned with another man who was obviously a high-ranking officer, Dov thought, for his chest was filled with medals. The doctor handed the pad of signatures to the officer, who studied it for a full minute.

“Where did you learn this?” the officer snapped.

“In the ghetto at Warsaw.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“Passports, travel cards, any kind of paper. I can duplicate anything.”

“Follow me.”

Dov passed through the left-hand door. As he got into the car and drove off toward Auschwitz a Main he seemed to remember Mundek’s words: “One of the Landaus must live through this.” In a few moments the car passed through the

main gate of Auschwitz. The sign over the entrance of the camp read: labor liberates.

The main compound was set in an area that wallowed in mud. There was acre after acre of frame wooden barracks which were isolated from each other by high walls of electrified barbed wire.

These acres of barracks fed manpower into some thirty subsidiary slave-labor camps. Each inmate wore a black and white striped uniform and an identification color on his arm and left breast. A pink badge was worn by homosexuals, a black badge by field whores, a green badge by criminals, violet badges for clergymen, red for Russians and Poles, and the traditional Star of David for the Jews.

Dov received another badge at Auschwitz. It was a tattooed number on his left forearm. Dov Landau was now a black and white striped Jew number 359195.

labor liberates. Dov Landau celebrated his fourteenth birthday in Auschwitz and his gift had been his life. He was quite fortunate for of all the tens of thousands of prisoners at Auschwitz, Dov’s small group of forgers were among the elite. His particular section was given the task of engraving and printing counterfeit United States one-and five-dollar bills for use by German agents in western countries.

After a short time at Auschwitz Dov wondered if it would not have been better to have died at Birkenau.

Here the inmates were underfed, worked into living skeletons, and stacked on shelves for their five hours’ sleep a night. Disease ran wild. Prisoners were tortured, driven insane, beaten, and degraded, and every known atrocity conceived by man was committed.

Here each morning found dozens of inmates who had hanged themselves by their own belts or thrown themselves on the quick mercy of the electric wire. The flogging blocks were in constant use and naked buttocks were lashed in public at roll calls.

Here the penal colony lived in single black cells and were fed only oversalted vegetables to induce unquenchable thirst.

Here in Block X, Nazi doctors Wirthe, Schumann and Clau-berg kept the human raw material for their pseudo-scientific experiments. Polish prisoner Dr. Wladislaw Dering performed castrations and ovarectomies ordered by his German masters as part of their insane program to find a way to sterilize the entire Jewish race.

This was Auschwitz and this was Dov Landau’s gift of life.

LABOR LIBERATES.

“One of the Landaus must live through this,” Mundek had said. What did Mundek look like? He could hardly remember. Or Ruth or Rebecca or his mother and father? He could not

remember his father at all. The memories grew hazier and hazier until he could remember nothing but death and terror and he did not know that there was a life where death and terror did not exist.

A year passed. The trains came in and out of Birkenau. The deaths at the labor camps around Auschwitz from torture and disease and hunger were nearly as appalling as those at Birkenau. Somehow he managed to cling to his sanity and that animal instinct to survive.

Even in this blackest of pits there were some rays of hope. There was the prison orchestra. There was a flourishing underground and they had a radio receiver. Even here a man could find a way to get to a woman. SUMMER 1944

There was a strange new stirring throughout Auschwitz. Dov could often look into the sky and see Russian bombers, and the secret radio began reporting German defeats. Hope, however dim, found its way through the muck and torture. Each new Allied victory sent the German guards into a murderous frenzy until the prisoners almost dreaded word of German defeats. At Birkenau activity speeded up until the gas chambers were in operation almost around the elock. AUTUMN 1944

The feeling now was that Germany was going to lose the war. They were being beaten on all fronts. But as they lost on the battlefield the appetite for extermination grew. Colonel Eichmann threw every possible resource into finishing his mission of genocide. OCTOBER 1944

The Sonderkommandos at Birkenau staged a wild uprising in which one of the crematoriums was blown up. Each day in new uprisings the Sonderkommandos snatched SS guards and their dogs and threw them into the crematoriums. At last every Sonderkommando was executed and a call went out for a new group from Auschwitz.

His back to the wall, Eichmann made a final gesture. Twenty thousand Jews, the cream of Jewry, who had been under guaranteed protection at the Czech camp of Theresienstadt, were ordered transferred to Birkenau for extermination.

The Jewish death toll at Birkenau mounted and mounted until the count reached nearly a million Poles, fifty thousand Germans, a hundred thousand Dutch, a hundred and fifty thousand French, fifty thousand Austrians and Czechs, fifty thousand Greeks, two hundred and fifty thousand Bulgarians, Italians, Yugoslavs, and Rumanians, and another quarter of a million Hungarians.

Each day during the macabre race for total annihilation came a call for more and more Sonderkommandos.

NOVEMBER 1944

The counterfeit shop was abruptly closed down in Auschwitz and everyone was sent to Birkenau to work as Sonderkommandos.

It was Dov’s new job to wait in the corridor of the gas chambers until a gassing was over. He and other Sonderkommandos stood by until the shrieks of agony and the frantic pounding on the iron doors stopped. They waited another fifteen minutes for the gas to clear. Then the doors of the gas chambers would be opened. Dov had to go to work with ropes and hooks to untangle the hideous tangle of arms and legs and drag them out for reshipment to the crematorium. After the bodies were removed he had to enter the chamber and hose it down and get the room ready for the next batch of victims who were already in the dressing rooms, being prepared.

For three days Dov worked at this gory task. Every ounce of his strength was sapped, and now that stubborn, defiant will to live that had carried him through seemed to fade. He dreaded that instant when the iron chamber door opened and he was face to face with the tangle of corpses. He dreaded it worse than the thought of the ghetto or the sewers. He knew he would not be able to stand to see that horrible sight much more often.

Then a startling thing happened!

The Germans ordered the crematorium ovens dismantled and the gas chambers blown up! The Allies were advancing from the west and the Russians were coining from the east. Now the Nazis made frantic efforts to cover up their crimes. Pits of bodies were exhumed all over Poland and the bones crushed and scattered. Desperately needed transportation was used to get the Jews inside Germany.

JANUARY 22, 1945

The Russian Army entered Auschwitz and Birkenau and liberated them. The orgy of murder was over. Dov Landau, aged fifteen, was one of fifty thousand Polish Jews who had kept alive out of three and a half million. He had kept his promise to his brother.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: The Russian army physicians who examined Dov were astonished that he had been able to live through the years of privation and punishment with-142

out incurring permanent damage. He was weak and undersized and he would never have great stamina but with proper care he could be brought up to reasonable condition.

The injury to his mind was something else. The boy had been kept alive by an indomitable spirit. Now that he could relax after six years of constant strain a flood of memories surged through his brain day and night. He became morose and slipped into melancholia and his mental state approached the thin borderline that separates the sane from the insane.

The barbed wire was torn down and the chambers and the ovens were gone but the memories would never leave him. And the* frightful smell seemed always to hang over him. As he looked at his arm with the blue tattooed number he relived that grotesque second when the doors of the gas chamber were flung open. Time and time and time again he saw his mother and his sister Ruth being removed from such a chamber at Treblinka. Time and time again he held that flickering candle close to the smoldering bodies in the bunker in the Warsaw ghetto and wondered which one was Mundek. Over and over again he saw the skulls the Germans used as paperweights as his mother and his sister.

The Jews remaining at Auschwitz huddled together in several barracks. Dov could not comprehend that there was a world of the living without depravity and torture. A world of food and warmth and love was beyond him. Even the news of the German surrender brought no scenes of joy at Auschwitz, for there was no joy in victory.

Dov Landau’s memories festered into hate. He was sorry the gas chambers were gone for he could visualize lines and lines of German SS troopers and their dogs being marched into them.

The war was over but no one quite knew what to do or where to go. Warsaw? It was a hundred and sixty miles away and the roads were clogged with refugees. Even if he got to Warsaw, what then? The ghetto was rubble and his mother and father and sisters and Mundek were all gone-all of them were dead. Day after day Dov sat by the window without speaking a word. He stared out at the eternal pall that clung to the Silesian countryside.

One by one the Jews at Auschwitz ventured out to return to their homes. One by one they came back to Auschwitz with a final crushing disillusion. The Germans were gone but the Poles were carrying on for them. There were no cries of Poles for three and a half million murdered. Instead the cities were covered with posters and the people screamed, “The Jews brought this war on us … the war was started so that Jews could make a profit … the Jews

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are the cause of all our troubles!” There were no tears for the dead but there was plenty of hatred for the few survivors. They smashed Jewish shops and beat up Jews who tried to return to their homes and property.

And so-those who ventured out of Auschwitz came back. They sat in the muck-filled compounds, shattered, half mad, and tragically waited to rot together. The memory of death never left them. The smell from Birkenau was always there.

SUMMER 1945

A man walked into Auschwitz and was greeted with suspicious snarls. This man was in his early twenties. He was husky and had a big black mustache and wore a snow-white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. He walked with a wonderful step that seemed to tell everyone that he was a free man. An assembly was called on the grounds and they gathered about him.

“My name is Bar Dror, Shimshon Bar Dror,” he called out. “I have been sent from Palestine to take you people … home!”

For the first time in the memory of many there was an outburst of happiness and tears of joy. Bar Dror was mobbed with a million questions. Many fell on their knees and kissed his hands and others just wanted to touch him, to hear him, and to see him. A free Jew-from Palestine! Shimshon Bar Dror-Samson, Son of Freedom-had come to take them home!

Bar Dror took charge of the compound with a vengeance. He told them that it would be some time before they could move out, but until the Mossad Aliyah Bet found a way for them they would do better to live like dignified human beings.

A new surge of life transformed the compound. Bar Dror organized committees to put the place into decent shape. School was started, a theatrical group organized, a small orchestra formed and dances held, a daily news bulletin printed, and endless discussion carried on about Palestine. Shimshon even started a model farm near the compound to begin agricultural training.

Once the new spirit had been instilled and the camp was self-governing, Shimshon Bar Dror set out on treks in search of other Jews to lead them to the base.

As Shimshon Bar Dror and other Mossad Aliyah Bet agents worked untiringly to gather the Jews together and get them out of Poland, another force was working just as hard to keep them in Poland.

Throughout Europe the British embassies and consulates put pressure on every government to keep their borders

dosed to these refugees. The British argued that it was all a plot of the world Zionists to force their own solution on the Palestine mandate.

As the undercover battle raged between the British and the Mossad Aliyah Bet, the Polish government issued an astonishing edict; it proclaimed that all Jews were to remain in Poland. The Polish government reasoned that if the few remaining Jews were allowed to leave they would confirm to the world that the Poles were continuing their persecution-as indeed they were-even after the German extermination program. Thus the Jews were locked in a country that did not want them and locked out of the country that did want them.

Winter came to Auschwitz and morale broke apart at the seams. All the good work of Bar Dror went for nought. The Palestinian held meetings to try to explain the political battle that raged around them, but the survivors would not listen. They did not care about politics.

In the dead of winter another Aliyah Bet man entered the camp, and he and Bar Dror made a gambling decision. The two men called the section leaders together and told them to prepare to abandon the camp.

“We are going to head for the Czech border,” Bar Dror said. “It is not too long a journey but it will be difficult. We can only go as fast as the slowest man and we must stay off the main roads.” Bar Dror opened a map and traced a route that would take them through the Carpathian Mountains and the Jablunkov Pass, a distance of seventy miles.

“What happens when we reach the border?” someone asked.

“We have Aliyah Bet men buying off the Polish border patrol. If we can get through to Czechoslovakia we will be safe for the time being. Jan Masaryk is a friend. He will not let them chase us out of Czechoslovakia.”

They left Auschwitz in the middle of the night, striking off the main road-a tragic line of survivors streaming forth, with the strong holding up the weak and carrying the young. The straggling procession pushed over fields of snow, driving their beaten bodies for six harrowing days. Then they drove themselves up into the biting winds of the Carpathian Mountains, with the Palestinians miraculously keeping them all alive and moving them on and on closer to the border.

Along the frontier other Aliyah Bet men worked feverishly to spread bribe money among the Polish guards, and as the ragged caravan pressed to the boundary the guards, with their pockets stuffed, turned their backs and the Jews poured through into Czechoslovakia.

On they marched through the freezing cold until they

passed through the Jablunkov Pass and assembled at the bottom, exhausted, feet bleeding, hungry, and in need of medical attention. A special train had been chartered by the Mos-sad Aliyah Bet. The escapees were taken aboard to waiting warmth, food, and attention. The first leg of the perilous journey was over.

When a Jew entered Palestine legally he surrendered his passport to the Aliyah Bet so that it could be used again. Five hundred such passports were distributed to the escapees from Auschwitz. In addition to the passports the Aliyah Bet had collected visas for Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, and other South American countries. These “documents” would hold the British at bay for a while.

British CID got wind of the five hundred Jews who had crossed from Poland and relayed the news to the Foreign Office at Whitehall. Whitehall sent an urgent dispatch to the British ambassador in Prague to take the matter up with the Czech Foreign Minister, Masaryk, and have the train stopped. The British ambassador was granted an immediate meeting with Masaryk and demanded that the Jews be returned to Poland. He pointed out that the entire Mossad operation was illegal, contrary to Polish law, and had been sponsored by the Zionists in an effort to force the issue over Palestine.

Masaryk smiled. “I do not know much about oil pipelines, Mr. Ambassador,” he said, “but I do know about human pipelines.”

Masaryk was known to be outspoken in behalf of the Jews. The ambassador implied that British displeasure could be displayed in a more “practical” manner.

“Mr. Ambassador,” Masaryk said, “I will not comply with this or any other British threat. So long as I am Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia the borders of my country are open to the Jews with or without visas and with or without passports.”

The ambassador reported to Whitehall that the train could not be stopped. It rolled on toward Bratislava, the town where the borders of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria came together.

Again the British attempted to stop it, but this time it crossed into Austria under the personal protection of a sympathetic American military commander.

In Vienna the travelers stopped for much-needed rest and medical attention. They were issued clothing in a giant re-staging area that had been established by American Jews to help the European survivors.

In Italy, the next stop, the Mossad Aliyah Bet had the open cooperation of the public and the Italian officials, but

movement was hampered by the fact that the country was occupied by the British.

Paradoxically some of the British occupation forces consisted of units of Palestinian Jews. The Palestine Brigade of the British Army and its units stationed all over occupied Italy had long been considered model troops by the British command. Aliyah Bet agents from Palestine integrated with these units, and soon the Palestinian soldiers were busy establishing refugee camps, helping with illegal ships, and the like. For formal purposes the Palestine units were commanded by army officers, but for practical purposes the units were under the command of the Aliyah Bet and Palmach. Shimshon Bar Dror had been an army sergeant in one such unit and used his British army papers to travel back and forth to Poland to round up refugees.

It was springtime when Dov’s group of Auschwitz refugees embarked on another train that moved into the Austrian Alps and crossed into Italy through the Brenner Pass.

The train stopped near Lake Como outside Milan at a very isolated siding. Although the refugees had been warned that they would be met by men wearing British uniforms panic nearly broke out. The survivors could not comprehend men in fighting uniform wearing a Star of David on their arm. The Star of David had always been the insignia of the ghetto. No Jews, except in the ghetto uprisings, had fought under a Star of David for nearly two thousand years.

They debarked from the train apprehensively. The soldiers were kind and some spoke Yiddish and all spoke Hebrew and they were gentle but they seemed to be of a different breed of Jew.

A week after their arrival in Milan, Dov’s group of a hundred people were taken from a small camp in the dead of night. They were transported in British trucks driven by members of the Palestine Brigade. The convoy dashed to a secret rendezvous point along the coast where it met another three hundred refugees who had assembled from other camps. From nearby La Spezia harbor a tiny vessel moved out to meet them.

The ship dropped anchor offshore and was loaded by rubber boat. It sailed and got out of the three-mile limit and was soon trailed by the ever alert British Navy.

There was something baffling about the Gates of Zion. Unlike all the other refugee ships, this one was not heading for Palestine. Its course, instead, was toward the Gulf of Lions on the southern coast of France. Neither the British nor the refugees aboard the Gates of Zion had the slightest idea the vessel was a part of a gigantic plot.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Bill Fry sat at a table at Miller Brothers’ Restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland. He dropped a handful of oysterette crackers into a big steaming bowl of clam chowder and stirred it. He toyed with the soup for a moment but he had no appetite. “Jesus Christ,” he thought. “I wonder if I can get that piss-pot across the Atlantic Ocean.”

Bill Fry had earned a reputation as the most successful captain in the Mossad Aliyah Bet. His beaching of the Star of David at Caesarea had opened a new era in the illegal immigration war. It had forced the British to start the Cyprus detention camps. This had been a turning point, for the Mossad had run one shipload after another into Palestine as fast as the British turned them back, and now another crisis was brewing. Mossad Aliyah Bet had run in so many illegals that the camp in Cyprus was bursting.

Flushing with success and determined to break the British exclusion policy, the Mossad dreamed up a wild scheme and chose Bill Fry to execute it.

The largest of the illegal fleet to date had been his Star of David, which carried under two thousand passengers. Other ships carried from a few hundred to a thousand. The Mossad figured that if they could run the blockade with a ship holding upwards of five thousand refugees it would be a staggering blow for the British.

Bill was commissioned to find a ship that could do the job, outfit it, and take five thousand refugees from the big center at La Ciotat in southern France. It was felt that the ship should be purchased in the United States or South America where the British would not be suspicious. British CID simply had the European ports too well covered. Mossad agents covered South America while Bill himself searched the Gulf ports and the east coast. It became obvious that they weren’t going to get much of a ship for the money they had to spend. So Bill had taken a gamble and now he was worried. He had purchased an overaged, obsolete steamship which had seen service only on the Chesapeake Bay in an overnight run between Baltimore and Norfolk. The ship, the General Stonewall Jackson, an oversized pleasure cruiser, had never sailed the ocean. The only thing Bill could think of that was decent about the ship was that it had been bought cheap.

The white-coated waiter hovered over Bill’s table. “Is something wrong with the chowder, sir?”

\

“Huh? Oh, hell no … it’s fine,” he mumbled, and shoved a spoonful into his mouth.

Had the purchase of the obsolete bay liner been a mistake? At this moment it was being fitted in Newport News, Virginia, to hold 6850 refugees.

Bill sighed. There was the other side of the picture. Suppose he could get seven thousand refugees out of Europe at one crack! It would just about explode the British policy!

Bill shoved the bowl of chowder away and asked for the check. He picked up the dead cigar butt from the ash tray and relit it and once again read the telegram from Newport News: THE JACKSON IS READY.

At Newport News the next day Bill assembled his crew of Palestinian Palmach and Aliyah Bet, American Jews, sympathetic Spanish Loyalists, Italians, and French. He inspected the ship and ran a short shakedown cruise around the lower bay, then revved up her engines and made for the Atlantic Ocean.

Within three hours the Jackson developed engine trouble and had to return to Newport News.

During the next two weeks Bill made three more attempts. The moment the old ship got far from her natural habitat, she rebelled and had to be taken back to port.

Bill told the Aliyah Bet people he had made a mistake. The Jackson simply could not make it. They urged him to check her over in dock for another week and make one last try.

On the fifth attempt the entire crew held its collective breath as the obsolete steamer chugged past Cape Henry into deep waters of the Atlantic-and continued to chug.

Twenty-two days later the Stonewall Jackson wheezed up the Gulf of Lions to the. French harbor of Toulon, which stood forty miles from Marseilles and only twenty miles from the big refugee camp of La Ciotat.

There had been a teamster strike in France, and the British CID who were watching La Ciotat relaxed for a moment, assuming that there would be no movement without trucks. Furthermore, there had been no reports of illegal ships coming from any European ports since the Gates of Zion, Dov’s ship, had landed at Port-de-Bouc several weeks earlier.

The British were caught napping.

They had no advance notice of the Jackson because she had been purchased and fitted in the United States and to date no Aliyah Bet ship had been large enough to navigate the Atlantic. When the Jackson was due to arrive at Toulon the Aliyah Bet went to the head of the French Teamsters’ Union and explained the situation. The Teamsters’ head secretly rounded up drivers and trucks and during the middle of their strike they rushed in and out of La Ciotat transport-ing sixty-five hundred refugees to Toulon-among them Dov Landau.

British CID discovered the secret at the last moment and descended upon Toulon. They passed out enormous bribes to port officials to delay the departure of the Jackson long enough for them to contact London for instructions.

Mossad Aliyah Bet men made counterbribes to the officials to get the ship on the seas, and the Jackson, now renamed the Promised Land, ran the blue and white Star of David to her mast top in open challenge.

Hasty meetings took place at the Admiralty, Chatham House, and Whitehall. The implications of the situation for British policy were clear, and it was obvious that the Promised Land had to be stopped at all costs. The British issued angry threats to the French. British warships waited outside Toulon. The French answered by granting permission to the Promised Land to sail.

The Promised Land set out from Toulon mid the cheers of the refugees aboard her. The instant she passed the three-mile zone she was escorted by two waiting British cruisers, the Apex and Dunston Hill.

For the next three and a half days Bill Fry steered the Promised Land straight for Palestine. Her long thin smokestack puffed and her engines groaned and her decks bulged, and her watchdog cruisers watched.

The Apex and Dunston Hill kept in constant radio contact with the Admiralty in London. As the Promised Land edged to within fifty miles of the Palestine coast, the British broke the rules of illegal blockade. The Apex came close to the steamer and sent a salvo over her ancient bows. The cruiser’s bull horns blasted and her loudspeaker sent a voice over the water: “Illegal ship! Stand by to be boarded!”

Bill Fry bit his cigar. He grabbed a megaphone and stepped onto the bridge. “We are on the high seas,” he shouted. “If you board us here it will be piracy!”

“Sorry, chaps, just following orders. Are you going to accept a boarding party peacefully?”

Bill turned to his Palmach chief who was standing behind him. “Let’s give these bastards a reception.”

The Promised Land turned on full steam in an attempt to sprint away from the cruisers. The Apex moved alongside her, then cut in sharply and her steel bow rammed the ancient steamer amidships. The blow splintered deep into the steamer’s hull over the water line and she shuddered under the impact. The Apex sent out machine-gun fire to drive the refugees off the deck and make it clear for a landing party.

British marines, wearing gas masks and carrying small

arms, poured over the bow of the Promised Land and moved back to the superstructure. Palmachniks unrolled accordions of barbed wire in the path of the British and then loosed a barrage of rocks on them, followed by streams of water from pressure hoses.

The British were swept back to the bow by the attack. They fought off the Palmach with small arms and called for reinforcements. More marines boarded, this time with wire cutters. Another attack mounted toward the superstructure. Again the water hoses pushed them back and again the British returned, under cover of machine-gun fire from the Apex. They reached the barbed wire and cut it in time to receive scalding steam jets from the Palmach. Now the Palmachniks jumped to the attack and drove the British back. They overpowered the marines and threw them into the sea, one by one.

The Apex stopped the attack to fish their men out of the water, and the Promised Land, a huge hole in her side, chugged off once again. The Dunston Hill chased her down and pondered the advisability of another ram. The steamer might well go down with one more blow. It was too dangerous to risk. Instead, the Dunston Hill poured on heavy-caliber machine-gun fire that raked the decks clean of refugees and Palmach. The Dunston Hill’s boarding party came up amidships on ladders. A wild hand-to-hand brawl followed. With flailing clubs and an occasional pistol shot, the British pressed the attack toward the ladder leading up to the captain’s bridge.

Meanwhile, the Apex recovered and raced to the scene again. The two cruisers boxed the steamship in. The Apex party boarded again behind a tear-gas barrage, and with the Dunston Hill marines pressing from the other direction the Palmach was driven back.

Dov Landau was in the fight. He and other refugees were guarding the top of the ladder near the captain’s bridge. They pushed the British down the ladder half a dozen times until the tear gas and, finally, small arms drove them off.

The British had control of the deck now. They reinforced their position and held the refugees and Palmach off at gunpoint while another party stormed into the wheelhouse to gain command of the ship.

Bill Fry and five of his crew greeted the first three men who entered the wheelhouse with pistols and angry fists. Although he was completely cut off, Bill continued fighting until British marines dragged him from the wheelhouse and beat him unconscious with clubs.

After four hours of fighting, with eight of their men dead

and a score wounded, the British gained control of the Promised Land. Fifteen Jews were killed, among them the American captain, Bill Fry.

A general order for secrecy was issued at Haifa harbor in Palestine as the Dunston Hill towed the Promised Land in. The old steamship was listing badly. The entire Haifa dock area was flooded with British troops. The Sixth Airborne Division was there and they were armed to the teeth. But in their attempt at maintaining the secrecy, the British did not know that the Jews had broadcast a full account of the boarding of the Promised Land over their radio.

As the ships approached Haifa Bay, the Jews in Palestine called a general strike. Troops and tanks were required in the dock area to form a barrier between the refugees and Palestine’s angry Jews.

Four British prison ships, Empire Monitor, Empire Renown, Empire Guardian, and the Magna Charta waited to effect an immediate transfer of the refugees from the Promised Land. But the very instant the Chesapeake Bay liner was towed into port, the harbor area and the entire city of Haifa shook under the impact of a mighty blast! The Empire Monitor was blown to pieces! This act was accomplished by Palmach frogmen who swam in and attached a magnetic mine to the ship’s sides.

The Promised Land docked and the transfer operation began at once. Most of the refugees had had the fight knocked out of them. They went quietly to delousing sheds where they were stripped, sprayed, searched for weapons, and moved quickly on to the three remaining prison ships. It was a tragic procession.

Dov Landau and twenty-five others locked themselves into a hold, armed themselves with pipes, and defied the British to the very end. The hold was pumped full of tear gas; and Dov was carried from the Promised Land by four soldiers, still struggling, cursing, and fighting. He was thrown into a barred cell on the Magna Charta.

The prison ships were packed even more tightly than the Promised Land had been, and that same night they sailed from Haifa with the two cruisers, Dunston Hill and Apex, as escort.

If the refugees were sent on to Cyprus to the already crowded camps there, then the Jews would have won their point. Sixty-five hundred more Jews would have been taken out of Europe and added to the evergrowing numbers waiting on Cyprus to go to Palestine.

“The refugees from the so-called Promised Land on the Empire Guardian, the Empire Renown, and the Magna Charta are to be returned to their port of embarkation, Toulon,

France. Henceforth any other illegal blockade-runners that are caught will also be returned to their ports of origin.”

The Palmachniks and Mossad Aliyah Bet people who were with the refugees on the three ships knew what.they had to do. If they debarked and returned to Toulon and if the British rode out the storm, then there would be no more illegal immigration.

The order for secrecy went out in Toulon as the prison ships steamed into the Gulf of Lions and dropped anchor offshore.

Simultaneously the Palmach chiefs on each of the prison ships handed the British captains a message; each one was to the effect that “We will be taken ashore only by force.”

The commander of the prison ships radioed to the Admiralty in London for instructions. Whitehall immediately turned on the toughest diplomatic pressure they could, short of breaking the Anglo-French alliance. They warned the French not to attempt to take sides with the Jews and to allow the British to carry out the debarkation by force. For four days messages and instructions flew between London and the prison ships and between Paris and London. Then the French government handed the British its dramatic decision.

“The government of France will not allow or be a party to the forcible removal of the refugees. If the refugees desire to return to France of their own free will, they are most welcome.”

The French had taken a stand with the Jews, even at the risk of rupturing relations with the British. The refugees were exhilarated by the news. To a man, they renewed their Vow to stay aboard the ships. The British, recovering from the shock, informed the refugees that they would either debark at Toulon or sit in the Gulf of Lions until they rotted.

Aboard the Empire Guardian, Empire Renown, and Magna Charta, the Jews dug in. The Palmachniks organized schools, taught Hebrew, compiled news, started a theater, and generally tried to keep things going. The French government kept up a daily stream of barges between the ships and Toulon to supply the refugees with good food and medical care. A dozen babies were born. At the end of a week, the refugees were holding fast.

On shore newsmen were getting curious about the three ships and were irate over the curtain of silence. One night an Aliyah Bet man swam ashore from the Empire Guardian and gave out the full story to the French press.

The story swept through France, Italy, Holland, and Denmark. Editorial insults were hurled at the British, in all four countries.

London braced itself against the onslaught of public resentment from the continent. They had expected it. They had, in fact, prepared for everything except the doggedness of the refugees. Conditions on the prison ships were of the worst. The atmosphere was sweltering and there was a good deal of sickness. Nevertheless, the refugees refused to come ashore. The British crews, who did not dare venture into the caged sections of the ship, were beginning to get uneasy. At the end of the second week the Jews were still holding fast and the clamor in the press was reaching a crescendo.

Three weeks passed. Four weeks passed.

At last the story began to lose its impetus. Then, the first Jew came ashore without being forced. He was dead. The whole issue was reignited. The captains of the three ships reported that the refugees seemed more determined than ever and the pressure on Whitehall mounted hourly. If more corpses were brought ashore it would be very bad.

The policy makers decided to take another tack. They asked that the refugees send in delegations to talk it all over. Their plan was to try to find a compromise that might let them out of the whole affair without losing face. From all three ships they received the same answer from the Palmach chiefs:

“We will settle for nothing more nor less than Palestine.”

The affair went into its sixth week. When the second corpse was brought ashore the British issued an ultimatum to the Jews either to come ashore or suffer the consequences. It was not clear what those consequences were to be, but when the refugees again remained steadfast the British had to take direct action:

“The Empire Guardian and the Empire Renown will set sail from Toulon at once. The destination of these two ships will be Hamburg, Germany, in the British occupation zone. The inmates of these two ships will be removed peacefully or otherwise and be detained at Dachau until further notice.”

As the two ships passed through the Straits of Gibraltar on the journey toward Germany, Mossad Aliyah Bet made feverish plans to load up two more ships with fifteen thousand refugees and make a run for Palestine. For as the Renown and Guardian landed on German soil, world opinion against the British reached a tidal peak. It was a somber victory for the Aliyah Bet.

As a last face-saving gesture the British let the third prison ship, Magna Charta, discharge its refugees at Cyprus, where they were sent to Caraolos. Dov Landau was fortunate to pass his sixteenth year at Caraolos rather than Dachau, but the boy was a study of hate.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Dov Landau spent his seventeenth birthday in yet another prison-Caraolos. He ushered in this birthday as he ushered in every day. He lay on his cot and stared at nothing and spent the day without uttering a word. He had not spoken to anyone since he had been dragged from the hold of the Promised Land. During the long weeks in Toulon harbor his hatred had grown.

At Caraolos a dozen welfare people and doctors and teachers and Palmachniks tried to reach him and break through his wall of bitterness, but Dov trusted no one and wanted no one near him.

By day he lay on his cot. By night he fought off sleep, for sleep always brought the recurring dream of that moment the doors of the gas chambers opened at Auschwitz. For hours on end Dov would stare at the blue tattooed numbers on his left forearm: 359195.

Across the path from his tent there lived a girl, and she was the most beautiful girl he ever remembered seeing. Of course, women could not be beautiful in the places he had been. She was in charge of many younger children and she always smiled when she saw him and she did not seem angry and aloof toward him as everyone else did. She was Karen Hansen Clement.

Karen saw Dov and made inquiries as to why he did not take part in school and other activities. She was warned to keep away from him, for he was said to be an “incurable” and maybe even dangerous.

Karen took this as a challenge. She knew Dov had been in Auschwitz, and her compassion seemed limitless. She had done amazing things with youngsters before, and although she knew it might be better to leave Dov alone her curiosity grew each time she went to her tent and looked over at his.

One day Dov lay on his cot, staring, and the sweat poured from him for it was very hot. He felt someone’s presence and jumped up instinctively and tensed at the sight of Karen standing near him.

“I wonder if I could borrow your water bucket. Mine has a leak and the water trucks will be coming soon.”

Dov stared and blinked his eyes nervously.

“I said I wonder if I could borrow your water bucket.”

Dov grunted.

“What does that mean? Yes or no? Can you talk?”

They stood and looked at each other like a pair of gamecocks. For that instant Karen was sorry she had come. She

took a deep breath. “My name is Karen,” she said. “I am your neighbor.”

Dov still did not answer. He glared.

“Well… may I use your bucket or not?”

“Did you come here to slobber over me?”

“I came here to borrow your bucket. You are certainly nothing to slobber over,” she snapped. ’

He spun away and sat on the edge of his cot and chewed his fingernails. Her abruptness disarmed him completely. He pointed to his bucket on the floor and she picked it up. He glanced at her quickly out of the corner of his eye.

“What is your name? I’d like to be able to call you something when I bring your bucket back.”

He did not answer.

“Well?”

“Dov!”

“Karen is mine. Perhaps you can call me that and we can say hello. At least till you learn to smile.”

He turned very slowly but she was gone. He walked to the tent door and watched her moving toward the British water tanker which had just passed through the gate. She was beautiful.

It was the first time in many months that an outside event had been able to penetrate Dov Landau’s absorption in himself. This Karen was completely different from the others who had come to see him. She was abrupt and snippy and afraid-yet there was a tenderness that radiated from her too. She did not gush over him or recite words she didn’t feel. She was a prisoner at Caraolos but she did not complain or seem angry like all the others. Her voice was sweet, yet it was very stern.

“Good morning, Dov,” Karen said. “Thank you for the use of your bucket.”

He grumbled.

“Oh yes, you are the one who growls instead of talking. I have a little boy like you in my kindergarten class. But he pretends he is a lion.”

“Good morning!” Dov shouted at the top of his lungs.

Dov knew what time she got up in the morning. He knew when she went to the wash racks and when she came and went from her classes. He slipped into her tent one day and looked around for her bucket and examined it. It had no hole in it at all. He would lie on his cot all day and wait anxiously for the sound of her footsteps coming down the catwalk. He would sneak to the tent door and steal a glance in her direction. Often, Karen would glance at his tent, too, and their eyes would meet for a brief instant. Then Dov would

become angry with himself for being taken in and for showing weakness.

The days passed but they were different now. He was still silent and sullen but often his thoughts veered from death and hate and he could hear the children in the playground nearby and he could hear her voice speaking to them. It seemed strange to Dov. In all the time he was at Caraolos he had never heard the children playing until after he met her.

One night Dov stood by the barbed wire and watched the searchlights sweep through the tents. He often stood and looked, for he still did not want to sleep. On the playground the Palmach had built a campfire and there was singing and dancing. Once he used to sing and dance those songs at Redeemer meetings, but he did not want to hear them now. Mundek and Ruth and Rebecca had always been there.

“Hello, Dov.”

He whirled around and saw the dim outline of Karen standing near him. Her long hair blew in the breeze and she tightened a ragged shawl about her shoulders. “Would you like to come to the campfire with me?” She pressed closer and he turned his back. “You like me, don’t you? You can talk to me. Why don’t you go to school and join our gang?”

He shook his head.

“Dov …” she whispered.

He spun around and faced her, watery-eyed. “Poor Dov!” he screamed. “Poor crazy Dov! You’re just like all the rest of them! You just talk prettier!” Dov grabbed her and put his hands on her neck and tightened his fingers on her throat. “You leave me alone … you leave me alone …”

Karen looked him straight in the eye. “Take your hands off my throat… this instant.”

He dropped his hands. “I was only trying to scare you,” he said. “I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

“Well, you didn’t scare me,” she said, and walked off.

For a week after that Karen did not look at him or speak to him. He was seized with terrible restlessness. Dov was no longer able to spend the hours in sullen and morbid silence. He paced back and forth all day long. Why did he let the girl break into his thoughts! He had his memories and he had been alone with them! Now he could not think!

One evening Karen was on the playground when one of her children fell in a game and started to cry. She knelt beside him and put her arms about him and soothed away the boy’s tears. For some reason she looked up and saw Dov standing over her. “Hello,” he said very quickly, and walked away.

Despite the continued warnings of many to leave him alone,

Karen knew she had penetrated a great darkness. She knew the boy was desperate and trying to communicate and that his “hello” was his way of saying he was sorry.

A few evenings later she found a drawing on her bed. She held it to the candlelight and saw a picture of a girl kneeling and holding a child, and barbed wire was beyond her. She crossed the path to Dov’s tent and when he’ saw her he turned his back.

“You are a very good artist,” Karen said.

“I ought to be,” he snapped. “I got plenty of practice. George Washington and Lincoln are specialties of mine.”

He sat on his cot uncomfortably and bit his lip. Karen sat beside him. He felt funny, for he had never been so close to a girl other than his sisters before. Her finger touched the blue tattoo on his left arm. “Auschwitz?”

“Why do you bother with me?”

“Did you ever think that I might like you?”

“Like me?”

“Uh-huh. You are very good-looking when you aren’t sneering, which is quite seldom, I must admit, and you have a very nice voice when you aren’t growling.”

His lips trembled. “I … like … you. You’re not like the rest of them. You understand me. My brother Mun-dek used to understand me.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.” Dov sprang to his feet and whirled around. “I hate these goddam British. They’re no better than the Germans.”

“Dov!”

His sudden explosion ended as quickly as it had started.

Yet, it was a beginning. He had blown off steam. It was the first time in well over a year that he had spoken more than one or two words. Karen watched him shrink back into that strange dark world of his.

Dov wanted to see Karen often because she was tender and she could listen to him and understand. He would talk quietly for a while and then burst forth with an impulsive short tirade of hate and then he would withdraw into himself.

Karen began to confide in him and tell him about how she was going to meet her father again in Palestine. Since she had left the Hansens she had always worked so long and hard with the youngsters she had never really formed a close friendship. Dov seemed proud that she would tell him all these things, and it was strange but she rather enjoyed talking to him.

And one day a great thing happened. Dov Landau smiled again.

When they spoke together he wanted to talk about nice things to her. The way she spoke … about the Hansens … the Danes … the children she loved … about her hope of reunion with her father … made him want to be able to talk like that too. But he could remember nothing nice, and before the war, 1939, was so long ago he could remember nothing about it at all.

Karen was careful with subjects that Dov did not mention. She never asked about Auschwitz or the ghetto.

After several weeks she came to him one day with a mission. “Dov, I have a favor to ask.”

Immediately Dov turned suspicious.

“The Mossad people know you were in Auschwitz and they have also found out that you are an expert counterfeiter.”

“So?”

“There is a new man here from Palestine. Joab Yarkoni tells me he wants to talk to you. His name is Ari Ben Canaan. He needs passports and documents and could use your services.”

“So that’s it! That’s why you made friendsl So you could get me to work.”

“Oh, shut up, Dov. You don’t even believe that yourself.”

“Well,” Dov grumbled, “if they want me so badly they can come and ask me themselves.”

“How can anyone ask you anything when you won’t even talk to them?”

“And why should I work for them?”

“Because they’re working for you.”

“Hell they are. They’re working to save themselves.”

“All right. Take your side of it. They are no worse than the Germans, and if you could make American dollars for them you can certainly make passports for the Mossad.”

“You’re always so damned smart with the answers.”

“Dov. I’ve never asked a favor of you. What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them I might, but a lot of things have to be made clear.”

Karen took his hand and smiled. “Why don’t you make them clear? Ben Canaan is waiting for you.”

“I’ll see him here.”

Dov secretly liked Ari Ben Canaan. He was direct and to the point and let Dov know that if he didn’t work he was going to be the last Jew out of Caraolos. But more, Dov liked that quality of leadership in the man-the same quality Mun-dek had had. He went to work in the Palmach headquarters in one of the schoolrooms. Still, to everyone else in Caraolos but Karen, Dov Landau was incorrigible. He spoke only in anger. She was always called upon to calm his sudden eruptions.

She saw in him things that no other person saw-wonderful strength and pride. There were other things that she could not explain that made her like him very much.

Two and a half weeks after Ben Canaan’s arrival on Cyprus, David Ben Ami gave Dov a list of three hundred names of children to be fixed on documents resembling British transfer orders. The three hundred were supposed to be moved from Caraolos to the new compounds near Larnaca. Dov knew that this was the escape! Neither his name nor the name of Karen was on the list of transferees.

Dov told David that he wanted to speak to Ben Canaan, and it was then that he put his demands to Ari that he and Karen be included in the escape. And Ari agreed to his demands.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: The final steps in Operation Gideon were twenty-four hours away.

Ari Ben Canaan called a meeting of his chiefs in the home of Mandria, their Cypriot compatriot.

David Ben Ami gave Ari the transfer papers that Dov Landau had just completed. Ari looked them over and commented that the boy was a real artist. The papers could have fooled anyone. David reported that he had taken care of the hundred odds and ends, from security to putting kosher food on the ship for Orthodox children.

Joab Yarkoni, the Moroccan, reported that all the trucks were in ready condition and could be moved from the 23rd Transportation camp to Caraolos in twenty minutes. He gave the elapsed time of trial runs from Caraolos to Kyrenia by several alternate routes.

Zev Gilboa said that the three hundred and two children would be loaded on the lorries in a matter of minutes after the convoy arrived at Caraolos. He would brief the children as to what was going to happen a few minutes before the trucks departed.

Hank Schlosberg, the American skipper of the Exodus, said he would take the ship out of its Larnaca berth at dawn and steam up to Kyrenia and be there at least a full hour or two before the convoy was due to arrive.

Mandria reported that he had a system of lookouts posted along the escape route who could notify the convoy of any unusual British activity. He also had watchmen on a half dozen alternate routes. Mandria said that he would wait, as ordered, in Famagusta in his home. The minute the convoy passed through he would telephone Mark Parker in Kyrenia.

Ari rose and looked over his lieutenants. They were nervous, all of them. Even the usually placid Yarkoni was looking

at the floor. Ari did not congratulate them or wish them luck. There was time for congratulations. As for luck, they’d make their own.

“I did not want to make the escape for three more days until the British themselves began moving children from the children’s compound. Nevertheless we have received information that Major Alistair is suspicious of our activities. We even have reason to believe he has gone to London for instructions over Brigadier Sutherland’s head. Therefore we must make our break at once. Our trucks arrive at Caraolos at nine o’clock. By ten o’clock I hope we have loaded the children and are passing your house here in Famagusta. The minute we turn off the Larnaca road we have two crucial hours. We have no reason to believe our convoy will be stopped. Our trucks are well known all over Cyprus. But . we must act under the assumption that we are under suspicion. Any further questions?”

David Ben Ami, the sentimentalist, could not let the occasion pass without proposing a toast. Ari tolerated the younger man’s frivolity. “Le chaim,” David said, raising his glass. “Le chaim,” the rest of them answered. “I have heard that le chaim from you boys often,” Mandria said. “What does it mean?”