A Life Worth Living (20 page)

Gaby was outside on the cement patio, nursing yet another cup of coffee, watching the slow bustle of the morning rush in Shiloh, when she thought she heard the phone ring inside. She cocked her head toward the house to listen. It rang again. She dropped her mug on the floor, and ignoring the breaking of the crockery, ran inside.

“Hello,” she said breathlessly, hoping it was Henny calling about the woman from Yad Vashem.

“Hello, can I talk to Gaby?” said an unfamiliar woman’s voice.

“Yeah. I mean, I’m Gaby.”

“Hello, Gaby. This is Elanit Ben-Shimon. Henny Hoffinger gave me your number. I hear you’re interested in working for Yad Vashem?”

“Yes,” Gaby said, ready to launch into a passionate speech about how she felt linked with the victims of yore, starting with Baby Gruna and all of the six million dead.

“Good. We actually are in need of some extra help right away, if you’re available. We had someone, but then she went back home. I doubt she’s coming back, and we are backed up here.”

“Okay,” Gaby said hesitantly. Elanit wanted to hire her without asking any questions? She didn’t even have a chance to say her I’m-named-after-a-Holocaust-victim speech. This seemed too good to be true.

“Can you come in today, and we’ll get you started?”

“Okay,” Gaby said again. She dutifully wrote down the directions to the research center’s office, and hung up the phone. If she would hire her that easily, there had to be a catch. What had she gotten herself into?

Whatever it was, this was a chance to earn money for Rafi’s
tefillin
and bar-mitzvah. She was not about to pass it up.

Without any idea of the type of office atmosphere it was going to be, she picked the safe route, and dressed in the most professional outfit she could find amongst Serena’s castaways; a baby blue sweater set and a black pleated skirt. She brushed her hair into a half-pony and put on the most minimum of makeup.

After sending a quick text to her mother, she caught the bus to Jerusalem and settled in for the ride, wondering what would be expected of her.

At the Central Bus Station, she took the bus to the office, located in a gleaming glass building on
Shazar Boulevard, in the business district of Jerusalem. Gaby walked into the marble lobby and asked for Elanit. She was directed to an office down the hall. The door was half-open, and Gaby cautiously poked her head inside.

Elanit was on the phone talking in rapid Hebrew, taking a break only to gulp some coffee. When she noticed Gaby, she waved her inside. Gaby gazed around the small, cluttered room while standing awkwardly against the doorframe, waiting for Elanit to get off the phone. Iconic posters of the Holocaust fought for wall space with touristy promotional pictures of
Israel.

Finally, Elanit got off the phone and smiled broadly at Gaby, motioning her to sit on one of the black office chairs facing her desk. She was a thin, middle-aged woman, with wild curly hair and olive-toned skin, unmarked by any makeup. “Hello, you must be Gaby,” she said in fluent English with just a hint of an accent.

“Yes,” Gaby said, smiling politely.

“
Na’im Me’od.
I’m Elanit, the director of the Recovery Project here at Yad Vashem. I want to talk to you about Yad Vashem and what we do here. Afterwards, you can tell me if you’re interested in working for us.”

Gaby nodded, waiting for Elanit to elaborate.

Elanit looked straight at Gaby. “Yad Vashem is the number one stop for Holocaust education. We are working on a huge project right now, and we need all the help we can get. One of the main missions of Yad Vashem has been to identify every victim of the Holocaust. The Recovery Project has identified 4.2 million victims so far. What makes our job so difficult is that in many of the areas of the former Soviet Union, some 1.5 million Jews were simply shot to death where they lived and there were no lists or records. Now, your job will be to assist in the research effort; whether it is with interviewing survivors, cataloging victims, or updating our research engine.”

Gaby nodded and Elanit continued, “Right now, we are dealing with complaints from the
Chareidi
community that they are not represented accurately in Yad Vashem, so we are working on fixing that. I thought you would be a good fit, because Henny told me about your Orthodox background and that English is your native language. I would like you to work on transcribing testimony from religious survivors that was recorded in English. How are you with that?”

“Good, that sounds good,” Gaby said quickly. Whatever the work was, she wasn’t going to turn it down. She would have said she could do the work even if the transcripts were in Hungarian.

“Okay.” Elanit looked at her critically. “Now, some people might characterize our work as depressing, but it’s important to remember that this is essential work for many reasons. Firstly, to chronicle the evil that occurred to make sure it never happens again, and to commemorate the victims so that their lives will not be forgotten. But it’s more than that. It’s about documenting the survival of the human spirit, how even in the depth of despair, there can be moments of greatness, the will to overcome evil and the desire to live against all odds. However, there is something you need to be aware of. Some people can get…” Elanit tapped her fingers against her desk, as if searching for the word. “I hope you are aware of the health hazards of the job, so to speak.”

“What do you mean?”

“You will be dealing with a lot of graphic material, covering many painful topics, such as the genocide of entire communities, the death of young children, family separation, and public humiliation.” Elanit looked at the ceiling as she rattled off the list. Then, she looked at Gaby, appraising her quizzically. “Your youth could work for you or against you. Would you consider yourself as a sensitive type?”

Gaby shook her head. She needed this job, no matter how morbid it might be. “No, not at all. I can handle this. I learned a lot about the Holocaust when I was in school. I’ve always been very interested in the lives of Holocaust victims and survivors. I’m actually named after a child victim, so…”

“That’s nice,” Elanit interrupted, without elaborating on what was nice about being named after a child who had been brutally killed. “Your hours will be eight to five and the pay is four thousand
sh’kalim
. You will be paid on a monthly basis.”

Gaby sucked in her cheeks so that her mouth won’t gape open. Why do people say that it’s hard to make money in
Israel? In just one month, she’ll have enough money to buy Rafi his
tefillin
. And, not to rub it in, but it was pretty cool that she was going to be working for an institution like Yad Vashem. There was no way anyone else she knew was doing anything even half as prestigious. All those girls back home were pushing paper around a desk, and she was going to be doing something important, though she still wasn’t clear exactly what that thing was.

“Although our office is not located in the actual museum, I would recommend you take in a visit soon, so you can see the big picture of what we do. Admission is free.”

“Why aren’t you located in the museum?” Gaby was curious enough to ask.

“There are a lot of tourists and celebrities who visit the museum, and we don’t want the commotion to be a distraction.”

Gaby nodded, and then realized that Elanit was still waiting for her to agree to the position.

“Yes, that sounds great,” she agreed quickly.

Elanit gave her a brief, knowing smile and sent Gaby to the HR office to fill out some forms and be given a login and password for the database. Then she was sent to another office where she was told to find Cobi, who would help get her started.

The door to Cobi’s office was propped open, and she could hear voices talking in a mixture of Hebrew and English. The room was fairly plain, painted the same clean white and floored with the same speckled tile as everywhere else in
Israel, but it was bathed in light that streamed in from the two large opened windows. The light, combined with the light blond wood of the desks, gave the room an almost ethereal feeling, like you were floating instead of standing in place.

When her eyes got used to the light, she saw two twentysomethings sitting at desks pushed against the wall. A third desk stood against the perpendicular wall. They perked up when she walked in, brazenly checking her out.

Gaby felt a little silly in her corporate uniform in front of the two of them, a girl – cute in a curvy, fresh-faced way, with short black hair kept out of her face with a flowered headband and thick black frames – and a young man, his red curly hair grown out to comical proportions, wearing a gray, woolen skinny tie on top of a white t-shirt.

“Hi,” she said.

“
Shalom
,” the girl said. Her face was friendly and welcoming, and Gaby immediately relaxed.

“Hi, I’m Gaby. I just started here,” Gaby offered.

“Oh,
madhim
! We were hoping to get someone soon. We’re so backed up,” the girl said. “I’m Tali, and that’s Cobi.” She pointed to Cobi, who smiled in greeting.

“You spoke to Elanit?” Cobi asked.

“Yeah, she said I should work on the tapes from the testimonies of Orthodox survivors in English.”

“
Sababa
. You can have them all.” He began sorting through CDs stacked in a pile on his desk. “Here you go.” He handed her a pile of about ten CDs.

Gaby looked at them dumbly. “What am I supposed to do with them?”

“You go sit at that desk,” he said in an exaggeratedly slow tone, pointing to the empty desk. “You put the CD in the computer like this, and you put in the headphones like so, and you start typing.”

“Really? I just start?” She was sure there would be some type of formal training period first.

“Yeah,” Cobi said in a normal voice. “First, you type it on this program.” He opened up a file on the computer. “Then, afterwards, we have to sift through the information and categorize the dates and the people, and we put it in the database.” He adjusted the light on the monitor and shifted it downward. “Keep your computer screen position down like this, so you can see the text.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Why is it so bright here?”

“Sometimes you need light to dispel the darkness,” he said sagely and Tali laughed.

Gaby sat down and stared at the blank form. What a wonder that, of all things, her religious background and the mere fact that she grew up in the United States helped her get her first real job. There was no time to ruminate about the series of coincidences that brought her here, though. In front of her stood the stack of CDs, waiting to be transcribed.

Cobi had gone back to his desk and was playing music, something folksy she didn’t recognize. Taped to the wall above his desk was a black-and-white poster of a group of young refugees on a ship, arms around each other’s necks and huge smiles on their faces.
HATIKVAH
was scrawled on top. Tali had pasted a large cut-out of a colorful butterfly on top of her space. Gaby looked up at her blank wall, still waiting to be decorated.

She put her earphones in and pressed play. Then, just as the date was stated, she stopped it. Soft music was coming out of Cobi’s computer and he was tapping his keyboard to the rhythm.

“What are you playing?” she asked Cobi.

“
Hallelujah
.”

“Oh, I love Jeff Buckley!”

“No,” said Cobi, with a much-put-upon sigh. “Leonard Cohen was the one who composed it.”

He looked at Gaby, sitting at her desk, not making a move to start her work, and said, “You know what, he has this great other song. It’s called
The Partisan
. Here, let me play it for you. It’ll help get you in the mood.” He scrolled through his song list and selected the song, raising the volume so Gaby could hear the mournful singer, crooning of resistance, death, and the price of freedom.

After it was done, Gaby sat quietly.

“Nobody does it like Leonard Cohen, right?”

Gaby managed a half smile. If it was possible, she was even more apprehensive about delving into all these painful stories than she was before she heard the song.

“Go get them, tiger,” Cobi said with a wink.

Still, Gaby just sat there.

“Just start,” Tali said. “Don’t be scared.”

Gaby smiled, embarrassed to be caught so anxious in front of these two cool-as-a-cucumber veterans. Then, she plugged her ears again with the ear buds, took a deep breath, and pressed play.

Gaby took off her headphones and groaned. This last transcript was tough. She reviewed the notes she had typed while watching the filmed interview. The survivor was a diminutive man who had grown up in the hills of
Czechoslovakia, and spoke in a stoic, unemotional voice about how he had lost his wife and children, and then remarried and moved to Israel, where he started another family. Now, his descendants numbered in the dozens. If his four older children had still been alive, he would have at least four times as many descendants.

It was hard to absorb the destruction. She couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to have children and not be able to take care of them, but to watch them suffer and die. How did survivors wake up every day and continue living?

She opened up a web browser and started surfing idly, letting her mind relax as she looked over meaningless pictures of celebrity make-ups and break-ups. She vaguely thought of going on Facebook, but she had gotten bored of the repetition and mindless chatter that her old New York friends thought was essential to post. Who really cared about what you ate for dinner and if you got a good deal on a sleeveless dress at Banana Republic?

The Israelis she knew, like Shira, Devorah Leah and Hillel, tended not to have much of an Internet presence, only updating their profiles sporadically. She had once, guiltily, tried to internet-stalk
Saar late one night when she was the last one in the office, but he, unsurprisingly, was nowhere to be found.

Elanit walked into the office and immediately Gaby straightened up and clicked the browser shut. Elanit was a no-nonsense woman and didn’t take kindly to small talk or down-time while on the job. “Gaby, you have a minute?” Elanit asked.

“Yeah, of course,” Gaby said, hoping Elanit hadn’t caught her spacing out.

Elanit came over to Gaby’s computer and pulled up the last report Gaby had uploaded. She began scrolling through the report, highlighting text. “Look here, and here, and here. What do you see?”

Gaby looked askance at Elanit, then at the backs of Tali and Cobi who were assiduously ignoring the two of them. She looked backed at the screen. “Um, I don’t know. A report?”

“You need to be more careful about spelling and grammar errors. I don’t want to waste time fixing all your mistakes.”

Gaby’s mouth opened, but nothing came out as she struggled to find an excuse to defend herself with. Finally, she mumbled, “But there’s no spell-check on this program.”

Elanit looked at her with disapproval. “So spell-check it yourself.”

Gaby pursed her lips as she looked at the pages of report she had painstakingly written, listening to an audio file over and over again as she scrambled to get every detail of the story of a family with five young children as they fled from place to place, trying to stay ahead of the Nazis. “I thought I was doing a good job,” she said softly.

“I didn’t say you weren’t doing a good job. But part of doing a good job is making sure your work is error-free.”

“Okay,” Gaby said, trying not to feel deeply hurt. She had been so proud of the work she had done so far, and now Elanit was telling her it wasn’t good enough.

“Listen, I normally only hire college graduates, and I took a chance on you. You need to prove to me that I didn’t make a mistake.”

“Okay,” Gaby said again, looking down at her keyboard. Was this where it was going to start all over again? Someone telling her she wasn’t good enough?

“Good. Have a good night,” Elanit said, and left the office.

Gaby bit her lip and stared bitterly at her computer. She was working as hard as she could. Going over the lengthy document and trying to proofread it herself seemed like an impossible task. It seemed easier to just get up and leave all the horror stories behind. She wasn’t getting paid enough to stick this out.

“Don’t get upset,” Tali said. “She yells at everyone all the time.”

“Really?” Gaby asked, hoping Tali wasn’t saying that just to make her feel better.

“Yeah. She yelled at me for not dressing professionally.”

“What about you?” Gaby asked Cobi.

“Nobody yells at me, baby,” Cobi said, peering intently at his screen.

“Nice try. She yelled at him for his English. She told him if he doesn’t improve his vocabulary, she’ll fire him.”

“No way. She said that?” Gaby’s eyes widened in delighted shock. Not that she was happy they got criticized, but it was nice to know she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t completely up to par.

“Yes, she did,” Cobi said proudly.

“So what did you do?”

“I started reading books in English to get better.”

“Oh,” Gaby said, deflated. She had been hoping for details of some mega blow-out, not that Cobi had shaped up rather than get shipped out.

“There is no need to be offended if she gives you rebuke. Elanit doesn’t mince her words,” Cobi slowly said, articulating each word carefully. “But at least you know she’s being frank with you.”

“Wow, I see the books really helped,” Gaby said. “Is your English good enough to proofread my notes?” she added, ignoring the fact that she was the only native English speaker in the group.

“Here, I’ll show you a trick.” Cobi came over to Gaby’s computer, and standing so close to her she could smell his cologne, he cut and pasted the whole file into a Microsoft Word document. All of Gaby’s mistakes were immediately highlighted in glaring red and green squiggles. “Now, before you submit anything to Elanit, just go through the Word doc and fix your mistakes.”

“That’s a great idea,” Gaby said gratefully. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Cobi said, pushing Gaby’s desk chair straight so she faced her computer. “Now get to work.”

Gaby laughed and turned back to her screen. She put her hands on the keyboard and, following Cobi’s advice, got back to work.