Free Day After Night by Anita Diamant Page B

insult pass amid the good feeling and
     aroma of the holiday kitchen. She wished Leonie were there, too.
    “I was always good with my hands,” Tedi said, as she finished another potato. “I used
     to make doll clothes at home. My teacher said I should be an artist.”
    “Maybe you’ll become an artist here,” Shayndel said. “A sculptor, perhaps! There must
     be great art in Eretz Yisrael, don’t you think, Tirzah?”
    Tirzah wiped up the potato skins and threw them into the garbage bin. “There are many
     more important things to do to insure that Jews will never again be treated like cattle.
     So there will be a place in the world for people like you.”
    “What do you mean by that?” said Zorah. “‘People like you’?”
    “Nothing,” Tirzah said and turned back to the stove. She found it difficult to face
     these women. She knew they had suffered unimaginable horrors and wanted to feel more
     compassion for them. She wished she could embrace them, like the volunteers who came
     to Atlit purely out of kindness, to cut hair and polish nails, or play with the undersized,
     nervous children.
    Zorah glared. “People like us,” she repeated. “You think that if you had been there,
     you would have fought the Germans and saved yourself, and your elderly parents, too.
     You know nothing about what happened.
    “I want to know where you were when the Germans came for us, year after year. Where
     were the Allies? Where was your English soldier boyfriend?”
    The only sound came from the big pot of soup on the stove, rattling in a boil against
     the lid. Tirzah silently cursed herself for having said anything. She tried to limit
     her exchanges with survivors to the task at hand. She knew only the bare outline of
     Shayndel’s story, though Tirzah approved of the way she held herself and her willingness
     to work hard. But Tirzah could not abide the victims—the ones who stared blankly or
     the ones who spit fire. She was disgusted by their nightmares, their tears, and their
     horrible tattoos. It was wrong of her, of course. She was ashamed and confused by
     the anger they brought out in her, and sometimes she thought her assignment in Atlit
     was a kind of punishment for the hardness of her heart. She had never been easy with
     people, guarded and aloof even as a child. She married Aaron Friedman only because
     she was pregnant, and when he walked out two weeks after Danny was born, Tirzah’s
     family blamed her. She moved to a kibbutz where no one knew her, and refused to speak
     to her parents or her brother for years.
    “You have no answer to that question, do you?” Zorah smirked. She grabbed another
     potato as if she were going to strangle it and promptly cut a deep gash into her thumb.
    “No blood on the food,” said Tirzah, handing her a towel. “Go have the nurse see to
     that.”
    Zorah banged out of the room and the three women worked in silence. Tirzah retreated
     to the back of the kitchen.
    “Zorah is a hard case,” said Tedi after a few minutes.
    “She was in the camps,” Shayndel said. “Sometimes, early in the morning, I hear her
     crying in her sleep.”
    “And yet, that girl with the baby—remember her? She was in Buchenwald,” Tedi said,
     wiping her hands on a towel. “Idon’t recall her name, but she was sweet as honey. How do you explain that?”
    “Enough talking,” Tirzah said. “There’s too much to do.”
    Zorah kicked at the dust and was halfway to the infirmary before she realized that
     she was virtually alone. There were no boys playing soccer, no men loafing in the
     shade, shirtless in the afternoon heat. The benches behind Delousing were empty of
     women fanning themselves, chatting, or dozing.
    The infirmary was shuttered, but Zorah’s cut had stopped bleeding. She was not about
     to go back to the kitchen, which meant there was nothing to do but return to her barrack.
     As she opened the door, a skirt caught her full in the face.
    “Sorry.” A girl