Sunrise West (10 page)

Our next port of call was Cinecittà in Rome, the Italian equivalent of Hollywood. All the studios were standing empty, so our escorts thought it a convenient place to stop for a respite from our journey. We arrived at midday and were welcomed once again by the NKVD — the same squad we had encountered previously; evidently they had overtaken us. This time its spokesman was a beefy, imposing
colonel. He was bandy-legged, and his broad chest was adorned with many gold buttons. Like the blond young woman on the earlier meeting, he walked up and down to inspect the trucks. In the process he delivered a peripatetic speech, which concluded with an absurd question.

‘Men!' he shouted passionately. ‘Thanks to Stalin, our father, you've made it through the war. We know what you're up to — Palestine — and we cannot stop you by law from betraying the land of your birth. But before we can let you go on, there is a serious matter we need to resolve. We have to know if any of you ever belonged to the Nazi Party, the SS, or any other antisemitic movement.'

Majer Ceprow, who had never before revealed himself as a quick-witted man, responded quietly in Yiddish: ‘Maestro will next ask us if there are any Catholic Protestants among us, or God-worshipping atheists, or maybe Christian Jews!'

‘Colonel,' our transport leader intervened, ‘these men are Jewish, and they are all former inmates of concentration camps.'

‘That does not answer my question!' came the curt reply.

While this was going on, I had caught sight of the Yiddish-speaking Russian blonde, who had been relegated to the back of the detachment, and my eyes were now focused on her pretty face. I had the uncanny feeling that a battle was raging within her, a struggle perhaps between duty and defiance.

We moved out by moonlight, after being transferred to a goods train once again. The night was warm and the shutters of our carriage were left wide open. We rushed
through a pastoral world unknown to me, pushing relentlessly further, further, towards the heel of the Apennine Peninsula. Lying on a heap of straw, lulled by the rhythmic clatter of the wheels, I dozed off. I dreamed that I suddenly felt a touch on my shoulder. It was the young Russian woman. ‘I must speak to you before it's too late,' she whispered. ‘I've heard your singing — it's good, it keeps the devil at bay. But I've also heard your silence, a bottled-up message on the sea of slaughtered time, seeking a shore to uncork its great lament.

‘My name is Dina,' she went on, ‘daughter of Jacob the shepherd and sister to twelve brothers. One day I walked out into the fields to meet with the local maidens, and among them was a young Komsomol member, Vanya, builder of a new world. He swore eternal love, but then without warning threw me to the ground and defiled my innocence. I was devastated, yet my father advised caution.
This is the land where only wrong is right
, he said. For three days my enraged brothers refused to break bread. I expected something vile to happen. Then war came, and they went off to defend our motherland. When their corpses were brought back, our father died of a broken heart. I was left alone, and pregnant, with an old and ailing mother. Before long she too passed on. Because of my knowledge of languages I was conscripted to do what I am doing.

‘As you can see,' Dina continued in my dream, ‘on the way to building a better world, mankind destroys everything that is good. I don't know how this will ever end. But when you enter the promised land, don't forget me. And should I ever come to you, embrace me, please, because this
will be a time of loving. And teach me to restore, because this will be a time of restoring. Then we can all run back to our old father Jacob, and tell him:
Your favourite son Joseph is very much alive, and so too is his noble legacy.'

 

 
Light
 

From the railway platform of a town outside of Rome I spotted my old school friend, Mendel Goldman. He was on a train that was about to move off in the opposite direction. When I waved he jumped out of his carriage and came running, and we fell into each other's arms. ‘Are you by yourself?' he asked.

‘No, I'm with Zakhor.' I introduced them. Mendel and I sat down on a bench together.

‘You look like a ghost,' he said. ‘Are you sick?'

‘I'm not too well.'

‘Here, take this, take it all!' he ordered amicably, thrusting a suitcase into my hand. ‘It contains a hundred thousand lire.' This was then the equivalent of perhaps a hundred American dollars. ‘You've got to eat. And if you run short of money — here, sell this!' And he dropped his silver-plated watch into my lap. ‘I'll catch up with you some time.' He squeezed my shoulder and darted to board his train, which had begun to move. Stunned, I peered into the suitcase. As well as the money, it contained a silky white shirt.

Zakhor came up to sit beside me. ‘What a marvellous friend!' he said. ‘What a fellow! How long have you known each other?'

‘Ever since school — we were in the same class for a year, and our friendship continued in the ghetto.'

‘He certainly seems a generous, caring man.'

‘He is. He was never a top student, but he was always a top human being.'

‘Makes sense,' Moshe agreed. ‘Some people believe the mind can accommodate only so much intellect and so much nobility, and that to seek a large measure of both in a single person is a futile exercise.'

He paused to reflect while I took this in. ‘Genius,' he resumed, ‘is seldom noble. You only need to think, in our own tradition, of the thirty-six righteous men of each generation, without whom the world could not be sustained. It is said that they are mostly simple, unlearned folk — cobblers, tailors, carpenters, dreamers — whose charity and compassion have filled out every inch of their being.'

Our odyssey would soon be coming to a close. The last leg of the journey would bring us to our destination, a DP (displaced persons') camp that had been established at Santa Maria di Bagno. This was a tiny coastal village on the heel of the Italian boot, and had formerly been a summer retreat for Mussolini's Fascist elite. The countryside sped past, and I cannot recall too many details of the landscape. But what still nestles vividly in my memory is the locomotive's surreal whistle at sunset, and earlier, the thick dusky fog that had come in from the Adriatic, reducing visibility to nil.

We had been travelling for hours. And then suddenly — heavily, lazily — the train rumbled to a stop.

‘We have run out of rail,' the engine-driver announced, illustrating our position with vivid pointings and gesticulations. ‘If I go further I drive into the sea. They said you will be picked up here, but maybe they have forgotten you.'

At this point something happened that could almost be described as a pantomime. Our transport leader, Aron Sokolowicz, a Yiddish-speaking Talmudist, went over to the engine-driver and, with a mixture of gestures and broken words, managed to explain that he was responsible for us and that God would never forgive him if he left us here, out in the open. The middle-aged Italian was close to tears. ‘What do you want from me?' he pleaded, raising his heavy, soot-black palms. ‘I have a wife and a
piccolo bambino
. I have to go home.'

For a few tense moments the two men stood facing one another. Aron understood the driver's problem, and the driver understood Aron's predicament. Then all at once, without any further discussion, the Italian jumped back into his cab and called out, ‘
Andiamo, amici!
' and with a joyful whistle the train began to reverse, its locomotive now pushing the wagons back north instead of pulling them south.

‘This could only happen in Italy,' Zakhor told me.

We had travelled like this for some twenty minutes when, out of the darkness beside the tracks, there appeared a cluster of lights, bobbing and weaving in an eerie formation. As we drew closer it became clear that the lights were in fact large electric torches carried by a group of men: our reception committee, obviously overlooked by the
driver on our way down. The train came to an abrupt halt. We heard warm greetings — ‘
Shalom! Shalom!
' — from all around us. A short while later, outlined in the torchlight, two hundred silent men marched off to their new place of sojourn.

 

 
Santa Maria
 

The house in which we lived at Santa Maria di Bagno stood in a near-semicircle of houses facing the Gulf of Taranto and its raging waters. Our only close neighbour was the fisherman Giuseppe, who could always tell precisely the time of day, and could accurately forecast the weather by glancing at the sky. ‘This sea,' he said, pointing at the nervous white foam, ‘is eager to invade our land, but it will never ever happen, never ever. And do you know why? Because this mad treacherous sea has great respect for our holy little white church which we built on the hill. Listen on Sunday morning to its lovely bell, and you will understand.'

All the houses had beautifully designed marble floors. From sunrise to sunset you could hear their cool polished whisper of discontent against the footsteps of the restless strangers whom fate had brought to these picturesque shores. We lived in groups, shared collective kitchens, and ate together in large halls — in general our life carried echoes of a
kibbutz
in Palestine, or perhaps of our ancient tribal history. Only important couples, whose men held leading positions, were entitled to separate rooms.

The weeks went by.

Mendel, who by then had also arrived at Santa Maria, was a stubborn individualist, with plans that he often kept to himself. Collective life went against his very grain; he was a natural Bedouin who needed freedom and open spaces, and room to unfurl his entrepreneurial spirit. One morning after a sleepless night, as he sat across the table with folded arms and arched brows, he asked quite unexpectedly: ‘How would you like to go to Naples, see Capri, explore a bit of Italy? I hope you haven't forgotten the Polish song about Capri that we used to sing as school-boys! —
Remember Capri, the island of lovers
...'

‘I haven't, Mendel, of course not. But those were different times, times of great dreams, dreams of conquering the world. Now we are facing a new game, a new life.'