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.