Authors: Cynthia Freeman
“But she’s not German, is she?”
Gunter paused, forced a smile. “We’ve been married for so long, I have difficulty remembering that she’s not.”
“If you can remember, where does she come from?”
“From Equatorial Africa.”
“Tell me how you met.”
“Well … it was during the First World War. I was stationed in the Middle East There’s really little else to tell.”
“How well did you know her during that time?”
“How well? Herr Stein, she was my chief surgical nurse and I had known her for a year, two, I’m not sure—”
“Thank you for your information. Now will you be kind enough to summon Frau Hausman?”
“She really has not been well lately—”
“I’ve just given you an order. I wish to see Frau Hausman.
Immediately
.”
Gunter went upstairs and found Sheine in a deep sleep. He stood at her bedside, breathing hard … dear God, what could he do? No one knew about her, he kept telling himself. Trying to rationalize … this was a harsh procedure now followed in the cases of
all
Germans married to foreigners … He sat on the edge of her bed, took her hand gently in his, stroked her hair and kissed her gently. Her eyelids fluttered. “How nice, Gunter, what a nice way to awaken me …”
Get to it, he told himself. “Darling, I wanted you to rest, but there’s a gentleman downstairs that would like to ask you a few questions. Now please don’t worry—”
She was now fully awake … and she understood. “They’ve come to take me away, Gunter. I know they’ve come to take me—”
“
No
, darling. It’s just routine questioning of foreign subjects married to Germans.”
She got out of bed, dressed, and suddenly, as she looked at herself in the mirror, felt surprisingly calm, almost peaceful. The awful fear that had whipped her all these years was abruptly gone. As she reached in the closet to take her coat, Gunter said quickly, “What are you doing? … you don’t need your coat.”
“I think you’re wrong. I have a feeling, Gunter. I won’t be returning for a long time …”
Slowly she walked down the staircase, Gunter at her side. When she reached the living room she said, “You’ve asked to see me?”
“Yes, Frau Hausman. If you will be kind enough to accompany me to headquarters.”
With Gunter at her side she followed Stein out to his waiting car, and the three were driven to Gestapo headquarters.
When they arrived, Stein seated himself behind his desk, leafing through a large, yellow-paged case history. Gunter and Sheine sat on the opposite side of the desk. Both were thinking about Erich.
Gunter tried to convince himself that when this was over Sheine and he would return home and the reasons that brought them here tonight would be done and over. In his heart he suspected otherwise…
The door to the adjacent room opened and, between a complement of two guards, Dr. Ludwig Breslauer was brought in. In front of Stein, on his desk, was Sheine Rabinsky’s psychiatric case history, assembled by Breslauer.
Gunter cursed himself for having sent Sheine those many years ago to Breslauer—a Jew. All of his records had now been confiscated. If not for that mistake, Elsa Beck Hausman would not now be here.
The questioning of Sheine and Ludwig Breslauer went on and on until the early hours of the morning, despite that Stein well knew all the answers. His sadism, though, was piqued … he dearly loved to see them squirm.
Sheine was taken away without even being able to whisper “I love you,” to Gunter.
Beyond grief, he went home to contemplate not so much the fate of Sheine—he now knew its inevitability, and that he was helpless to do anything about it—but to dedicate himself to somehow getting Erich out of the country.
But time had run out for that too. Stormtroopers broke down his door, demanded Erich Dieter Hausman. Gunter thought he would go out of his mind … “
He is not here, he is not here
—” He was knocked to the floor by a rifle butt as two of the troopers ran up the stairs, methodically opened each door, until Erich was found.
He followed them, asking, “Why are you doing this to
me?
What have I done? I am a German, a son of the Fatherland—”
A hard slap across his face made him lose his balance, toppled him over.
“Get up, you Jew bastard, son of a Jewish whore. Get up and follow me.”
Totally bewildered, he obeyed. On the way out he looked at his father, looked for an explanation that, of course, could not be given.
Gunter listened to the staff car drive away, sat down heavily in his chair, then realized his mother was standing there, brought by the commotion in Erich’s room. Now she seemed as bewildered and disbelieving as Erich was about the accusation that he was a Jew. She lashed out at Gunter, “Did you
know
when you married her what she was?”
He nodded.
“You
knew,
and you brought that… that Jewish woman to live in
my
home … My God … how could you have done it, disgraced us, destroyed your own family for …
that…?
”
Gunter looked up at his mother. At the moment he wanted to kill her. He ran out of the house, got into his car and drove through the streets of Berlin, then onto the highway until he came on a German convoy. Accelerating, he drove faster and faster and, in one blinding moment of hatred, rammed into the moving vehicle. Both went up in flames. Gunter, a father who could not save his son, a husband who could not save his wife, could no longer justify living. At least he could take a few of their murderers with him….
Sheine and Erich were taken to Auschwitz where, mercifully, Sheine died … At least, Erich thought, she had not lived long enough to be tortured the way others were that he lived to see. He prayed for one thing—to stay alive long enough so that he could revenge himself against those who had once made him believe that he was a member of their murderous “superior” race. That day
would
come, and for that, he would survive.
W
HEN DOVID RETURNED TO
Palestine he found that Reuven and Joshua had joined the
British
army. Zvi too. And then he got the explanation. It seemed the charity of Britain was boundless when it became a matter of its own pressing needs. The war was going badly for them. Rommel was very close to Alexandria. Reuven was an important, knowledgeable officer in Syria. And Reuven and the Jews welcomed the opportunity to fight for Palestine
against
the Germans, even in the British army. Ben-Gurion recommended it and the Yishuv listened.
Reuven quickly recruited, trained and led his men into action … and along with British and Australians … the Australians were wonderfully fierce and courageous fighters … put Rommel out of business so far as using Syria as an invasion base for Palestine was concerned.
But Reuven ached for Pnina. He was also bone-tired, and damned lonely….
When he did manage to get to her, when she saw him getting out of his army jeep, she ran to greet him, took him in her arms and just held him quietly, tightly. As though afraid she might lose
him
if she ever took her arms away.
Finally, taking him by the hand, she ran to the house, where Dvora was baking bread. Hands full of flour, Dvora reached up and kissed him, nearly as excited, and grateful, as Pnina to see him.
That evening they tried to catch up on their lives. Ari said, “You made quite a splash for yourself in Syria …”
Reuven laughed. “We didn’t do so bad, considering we had foreign units who didn’t always get the same signals. But we did accomplish what we set out to do, and let me tell you … Zvi did a fine job. You should be proud. He told me to send his love … he seems busy with a very pretty blond sabra in Haifa … He said you’d understand.”
Ari laughed. “After a battle like that, who wouldn’t understand … Do you think he’s serious about her?”
“Well … he didn’t come back for Aunt Dvora’s baked bread. Joshua sends his love too, but he wanted to go into Jerusalem to see our father….”
The next week Pnina and Reuven lived an idyll. They hiked the countryside, made love among the eucalyptus. When they worked together in the fields they shared a pleasure in the feel of a plow in their hands instead of a gun.
It was over too soon … Reuven was needed in Jerusalem, and Pnina went back to her unit with the Palmach.
During the war the Yishuv had courageously supported the British, as it had in the First World War. Thanks in part to the great efforts of the Yishuv, Rommel never reached Alexandria. No other community, no country had given so much and received so little … The British, afraid that if the Jews were too applauded, too appreciated, they might use this against the British when bargaining for a homeland later on. When the British needed spies in the Balkans, they turned to the Jews to train them as parachutists. Thirty were sent behind the enemy lines and not one was found alive.
The Arabs … as fickle as the British … noted that the winds of war were turning in favor of the British and against the Germans. The Germans were no longer their liberators. Haj Amim el Husseini ran off to Hitler’s Germany. The Arabs now declared war on Germany … how else to get a vote at the peace conferences, to block the Zionists in Palestine. As for the Zionists, their only vote was the number of their dead. Their only hope … to try to prove to the world that they had made a great contribution, that they deserved a long-promised homeland.
But an ill wind began to blow for the Yishuv—its name was Ernest Bevin, the new Labour government’s foreign minister. It had been hoped that Britain’s Labour party would be sympathetic to the Yishuv’s plight, but Bevin was especially ill-suited to deal with the imponderable tangle of Palestine and the remnants of the Nazi Holocaust. When the world was finally compelled to face up to the horrors of the concentration camps, Bevins’s comment, in answer to the clamor of the displaced persons to be sent to Palestine, was: “If the Jews for all their suffering want so badly to get to the head of the queue, I believe that it presents a danger of another anti-Semitic reaction through it all. Were the British government to be allowed into Palestine, and resettle even in detention camps for the time being, you understand it would be at the expense of British taxpayers. That, of course, could constitute a minimum of two million pounds. And those are pounds that war-torn Britain can scarcely afford.”
Following the bitter disillusionment with the Labour party, in September of 1945, President Harry S. Truman received from Clement Attlee, the new British prime minister, a negative reply to his request to allow the immigration of one hundred thousand Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. A few days later the Labour government ruled that Jewish immigration to Palestine would not exceed eighteen thousand a year. The whole western part of the land of Israel would become a country with an Arab majority. The Jewish Yishuv was to be frozen into a minority of one third. To enforce the White Paper restricting immigration, a flotilla of the British navy month after month prevented Jewish refugees from Europe from reaching the country.
For the Yishuv the White Paper spelled an end to the Zionist adventure. It also spelled an end to the restraint the Haganah had used. It stirred up the already explosive tensions in the more aggressive factions in the country—among which was the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which now came more and more to prominence.
In April, 1939, three refugee ships full of half-dead Jews who had somehow escaped from Germany and Roumania reached the shores of Palestine, and were turned back by the British. In November two battered tramp steamers, the
Pacific
and the
Milos
, arrived in Haifa with eighteen hundred Jews, and once again the passengers were not allowed to disembark. The British surrounded them, announced that they would be sent to the island of Mauritius for the duration of the war. They were transferred to the British steamer
Patria.
On the day the
Patria
was scheduled to sail there was an explosion aboard and more than two hundred people were blown to bits or drowned within the safe haven of Haifa port while their relatives and much of the population of Haifa watched with horrified eyes … among them Joshua Landau, who, standing on Mount Carmel, high above the panorama of Haifa, observed thrashing bodies drowning in the water, dead being dragged into boats by fishhooks.
The press of such events had brought the two factions of the Yishuv closer—the Haganah and the Irgun. Passiveness was no longer tolerable.
Joshua sat in the meetings and was impressed that, at long last, the Yishuv was beginning to take the initiative. The memory of the
Patria
and those dismembered victims was seared in his brain.
He went to headquarters to see Binya Yariv, Reuven and his father and announced, “I’ve an idea that I
think
might work.”
Dovid thought of Chavala. She, too, usually had a plan.
“So, what’s the plan?” Yariv asked.
“Usually the passengers on illegal ships coming out of Europe during the war carried only about two hundred or so people. How about a ship large enough to carry ten thousand people, or more?”
“And where are you going to get such a ship?” Reuven pressed him.
“In America.”
“America?” Yariv looked at Dovid.
“Yes … you meet a lot of people in Jerusalem. The other evening I just happened to be sitting in a café and, well, who do I meet but a great big bruiser … bigger and much fatter than Reuven. But, anyway, it turns out he’s a Jew and his name is Harvey Rosen, and can you guess what business he’s in?”
“A shipbuilder?” Reuven said.
“Close. He owns ships, and just the kind we need. He’s got a tramp steamer, perfect condition, weighs about eleven thousand tons, about five hundred feet long. It can take on about ten thousand, stripped clean except for bunks.”
Dovid said, “I always get a little nervous when I hear about things being too perfect. All right …
suppose
this ship is everything your friend Harvey Rosen says, how do you expect to get that size ship into any harbor in Palestine with the British on your tail?”