“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.