ALIYAH—GATHERING FROM DIASPORA:

And He will set up an ensign for the nations, and will assemble the dispersed of Israel, and gather together the scattered of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

—Isaiah 11:12

Chapter Twenty-One

Uzi Yarden

Marseille, France

September 1946

Uzi Yarden scanned his foreign surroundings. The huge Marseille port with its fleets of ships was now behind him, and he was walking along a row of gigantic weatherworn warehouses. Trucks chugged in both directions.

He stopped to stare at the landscape in front of him, then glanced at his map to verify that this was supposed to be the Jewish quarter. What had happened here? Where were the streets that ascended from the port, fanned out, and climbed up the hill? Piles of rubble stretched up the slope. A lone, distant bulldozer pushing white bricks, wood beams, and mangled iron was the only sign of life. Dread spread through Uzi. No use trying to guess which street would lead to the address where he would receive his momentous assignment: rescue Jewish orphans.

In his twenty-two years, Uzi had rarely traveled even as far as Haifa, eighty kilometers from his kibbutz, and had never imagined crossing the Mediterranean and landing in France, of all places. Nothing was familiar. The Haganah section leader in his kibbutz who briefed him had warned Uzi to expect the unexpected. How did one conjure up unexpected situations? What other scenes as shocking as the demolished Jewish quarter of Marseille might he encounter?

Uzi wiggled his toes in the leather shoes. They weren’t new, nor were they his. One of the toughest parts of his mission in France, it seemed, would be getting used to wearing shoes. Even when he’d trained to defend the kibbutz from infiltrators, he wore only sandals, the same pair he wore daily in the orange orchard. Only for milking duties did Uzi stuff his feet into whichever rubber boots had been left at the door, his bare feet sinking into cool, unidentified muck.

He stepped farther into the piles of bricks, shattered tiles, and smashed beams and tried to absorb the devastation of a vibrant community that was no more. His eyes searched the wreckage. There had been a world here under the layer of white plaster dust, streets teeming with craftsmen and vendors and lined with synagogues and schools and health clinics. A community with its own newspapers, music, and theater. What happened to the thousands of Jews who had lived here? Uzi guessed at the answer: deported to their death.

But where were their children?

Something bright in the rubble caught Uzi’s eye. He bent and picked it up. Even before he wiped off the dust, he knew that this small silver object was a mezuzah, a case containing a holy scroll that was attached to the doorway of every Jewish home. He closed his palm over it, felt its sharp edges, a symbol of this lost neighborhood, then put it in his pocket.

Uzi’s apprehension about this assignment rose. No one at the kibbutz members’ meeting had questioned Uzi’s suitability for it. There was no one else to send—and no time to waste. The liberation of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps eighteen months earlier had revealed the horrors of the Holocaust. The guilt of having done nothing while this slaughter was going on in Europe gnawed on the collective consciousness of the tiny yishuv, six hundred thousand Jews living in Eretz Israel. The only thing they could do was rescue those who’d survived, especially the children—traumatized and orphaned—and bring them home.

Uzi rechecked his map. One thing he was good at was navigation. He had tracked the footsteps of the fedayeen, Arab guerrillas who infiltrated his kibbutz and murdered a family in their sleep. He had participated in a raid on a British prison in Jaffa to release jailed Haganah comrades. Uzi’s glance confirmed the sun’s zenith, farther north than Israel’s, then he placed his finger on the spot where he was now wasting time dawdling. He scrutinized the map one square centimeter at a time, reading the impossible-to-pronounce French street names. And here it was, rue Saint-Savournin.

The woman at the orphanage rose from behind the reception desk of what once had been a small hotel. A map of the British Mandate for Palestine hung above the cubbyholes that had once held keys, the map’s boundaries still showing what was today Transjordan. Uzi swallowed the lump that formed in his throat every time he saw this evidence of the British repudiating their mandate, handed to them by the League of Nations, to create a homeland for the Jews. Instead, the British handed 76 percent of that land to the Hashemites to create Jordan—and blocked Jews from entering the remaining 24 percent.

The plump, middle-aged woman wore a brown skirt and a cardigan and had an orange scarf tied at her neck. She hurled herself against Uzi. “The boy from the Holy Land,” she exclaimed in Yiddish. “What a blessed sight.”

He was relieved that she didn’t address him in French. He was fluent only in Hebrew. The English he’d studied in school for eight years was used only on the rare occasions he dealt with his country’s British rulers, which he’d done most recently to obtain a passport. The French words he extracted from the dictionary during his Mediterranean crossing were unpronounceable. At least he had picked up Yiddish from his grandparents’ bickering.

“What am I doing speaking Yiddish? Here we learn Hebrew in preparation for immigration to Eretz Israel,” the woman said in Hebrew. “Shmi Miriam.” She held Uzi at arm’s length to examine his face, then reached up and passed her fingers through his unruly curls the way his mother still did.

“Shmi Uzi,” he responded. “Got instructions for me?”

“What’s your experience?”

“Milking cows.”

She laughed. “Who is experienced in recovering orphans hidden in a foreign land? It was never done in human history.”

He smiled to conceal his apprehension. Resourcefulness had been the key in his upbringing. You think on your feet. You assess the situation, come up with a solution—then you act on it. You learn fast by executing the task. There was no blueprint to follow in this far-fetched project, but there was one certainty: the underground Haganah couldn’t become entangled in bureaucracy. The official Jewish organizations acquiesced to the British rulers and their monthslong waits for entry certificates that weren’t forthcoming. Just when Jewish survivors were crawling from the ashes with no place to go, the British had placed a quota on their entry. What were the anguished, bewildered, and scarred survivors supposed to do?

The only way to bring them into the Promised Land was to smuggle them in, which was why the Haganah had become involved.

“How do I go about collecting children,” Uzi asked Miriam, “short of playing my flute like the Pied Piper?”

“You don’t collect. You search high and low—and find them.”

Her response gave him no clue on how to proceed.

Just then, a class was let out somewhere, and the squeals of children reached the room. Miriam stepped to the window and beckoned him.

“Look at them. They are alive—and they are ours. We won’t let the Catholic Church finish Hitler’s job. The gonifs want to steal our children. They think they can baptize them, and that’s the end of the story? That our people will give up on our future?”

The only Christian Uzi had ever known was his father’s Christian Arab friend who lived in Nazareth. “Isn’t baptism just sprinkling water on the head?” Uzi asked. “Nothing permanent like circumcision, right?”

“A few drops of water and some Latin words, and it’s their excuse not to hand children back to their Jewish relatives.”

Uzi scanned the boys and girls running about, ranging in age from eight to perhaps fourteen, and tried to comprehend their devastated lives. Most were scrawny, their cheeks hollow. Yet they chased balls and took turns at the swings and the seesaw like children everywhere. He caught sight of a small boy standing alone, his back to the wall, his head bowed, holding a spoon. A girl with twin braids stood several meters away, talking to her spoon as if it were a doll.

“What’s with the spoons?” Uzi asked.

“They’re concentration-camp children. If you had a spoon, you could scoop from the soup bowl. No spoon and you starved.”

The words churned in Uzi’s head. He couldn’t imagine the pain of these children, dazed and lost, their parents gone without a trace, struggling for survival all alone with a spoon as their only lifeline. That’s why I’m here, he thought. To replace the spoons with toys and laughter.

Uzi rubbed his face, felt the prickling of his unshaven cheeks. How did one approach a strange child whose language one didn’t even speak and take him or her to the Holy Land? He glanced past the yard. A jumble of run-down buildings showed the pounding of sea winds in the crumbling plaster of their façades, as they did in Tel Aviv and Haifa on the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. There was no answer in the sliver of blue sky hanging over them.

“I saw the ruins,” Uzi said. “Shocking.”

“Our cursed city. In January 1943, twelve thousand French policemen, by order of the Vichy government, evacuated the Jews. I was in the mountains with a Christian friend when twenty-three people from my family were sent to their death: my grandfather, my parents, my three brothers and one sister, my aunts, uncles, cousins—”

“Awful.” The word seemed hollow to Uzi.

She pointed to the yard. “When you sail back, you’ll take the older children with you.”

“I don’t see young ones.”

“Sadly, we can’t care for them here, so we relinquish them to OSE. That’s the formal Jewish-French organization that runs orphanages. They send the little ones for adoption with Jewish families in England or America.” She sighed. “I wish they’d send them to Eretz Israel, but they don’t believe that we have any future there.”

“Do you operate alone? Where are the adult refugees?”

A spark gleamed in her eyes. “The Americans helped us open the first Zionist displaced-persons camp in Marseille, and now two thousand people are preparing to immigrate to the Holy Land—”

She was interrupted by an aide who whispered something in her ear. Miriam turned to greet a woman wearing heavy makeup, her bleached hair piled on top of her head like a large bird’s nest. Even Uzi, who rarely noticed women’s attire, could tell that her bright pink dress was too tight and too short. She nudged forward a boy of about nine years old. His eyes were wide with fright.

Miriam exchanged barely a couple of sentences with the woman before she reached into her pocket, withdrawing a few bills. The woman accepted them and departed. Miriam crouched in front of the boy and talked to him, then the aide rested a gentle hand on his shoulder and led him away.

“Did you just buy this kid?” Uzi asked Miriam.