Day After Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

plants of the land,” Nurit
     began. “We will start with the biblical flora and continue with the trees that our
     people are planting, along with all the vegetables we have under cultivation. I myself
     spent the weekend planting bougainvillea in my garden. Do you know bougainvillea,
     my friends? I passed a whole day searching for just the right plant for my garden,
     but it was worth it. I tell you, it is the most beautiful of all flowers.”
    Zorah stood up abruptly and knocked over her chair. “What the hell do we care about
     your garden?” she said as she stamped away.
    “How do you say ‘pain in the ass’ in Hebrew?” someone muttered.
    Laughter followed Zorah as she walked off. She thought she would pass the rest of
     the morning trying to read the Hebrew newspaper she had “borrowed” from Nurit’s bag
     last week. But it was too hot inside the barrack, so she wandered the grounds and
     kept her face turned toward the fence so no one would be tempted to talk to her.
    Eventually, Zorah found herself near the front gate where a small crowd was watching
     the morning’s departures. Arrivals were unpredictable. If the British intercepted
     an illegal vessel, a train or a convoy of buses would arrive and two or three barracks
     would fill with refugees.
    But people left the camp almost every day. It seemed to Zorah that most of them spent
     no more than a week in Atlit. If you had the right credentials, the Jewish Agency
     would present you to the authorities as “legal” under the infuriating quotas the British
     had set for Jewish immigration to Palestine. But thosenumbers were a moving target, and there appeared to be different rules for children,
     who were released as soon as a relative came to claim them.
    Zorah also noticed that whenever a private car pulled up to the camp, the “sister”
     or “brother” it had been sent for would be carried away without acquiring the stamp
     or seal or signature that kept others waiting. This was called
protectzia,
a word she learned not in any of her Hebrew classes, but from Goldberg, a gruff,
     gray-haired Jewish guard who worked in Atlit in order to search for clues about his
     mother’s extended family in Germany. Goldberg was known to give away cigarettes, which
     made him one of the few people Zorah sought out.
    She counted twenty-three people waiting to leave, bundles and suitcases piled around
     them. The children were the first to go, seven in all, walking stiffly beside people
     who were total strangers to them. Among them was Maxie, a ten-year-old who had been
     caught stealing shoelaces and matches. A grim-faced woman wearing an ugly black wig
     had her hand on the back of his neck and was pushing him along.
    “Good riddance to that little shit,” said Lillian, touching her fingers to the corners
     of her crimson lips.
    “Shame on you,” said a woman beside her. “Stealing probably kept him alive in Buchenwald.”
    “Well, I don’t know what good it did him in here,” Lillian replied, with a bold stare
     that proclaimed that she, for one, would not be intimidated by the mere mention of
     a death camp.
    “What on earth could he trade for in this place?” Lillian demanded, as she glared
     down at her black Oxfords, tied with twine. “He’ll be stealing wallets and purses
     and God knows what else as soon as he gets the chance. That poor woman has no idea
     what she’s taking in. Then again, did you see her? Likemy great-great grandmother, from the shtetl. And that wig? Horsehair! I’m sure of
     it. What a horror.”
    “Lillian,” Zorah said. “You really should write a book of proverbs. I suggest you
     start with, ‘If you don’t have something spiteful to say about a person … why bother?’”
    “And you are too clever for your own good,” Lillian said.
    Zorah watched as six young men crowded around the cab of a dusty flatbed truck, arguing.
    “He comes with us,” shouted a tall, skinny inmate, pointing at a boy with a