Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Postscript
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Glossary
About the Author
Also by Talia Carner
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Mediterranean Sea
October 1946
She crouches on the top deck, surrounded by hundreds of people squeezed together. All have fallen silent since the ship arrived at the easternmost reach of the Mediterranean Basin. In the moonless night, the sky and sea merge into one inky darkness. Judith’s eyes strain to penetrate it and glimpse the shoreline. Oh, how her parents and sisters had prayed for this safe haven when trying to flee the Nazis’ clutches. I’m doing it for you, she mouths, careful not to utter a sound. The ship’s engines are quiet now. The hum that filled Judith’s ears for nine days in this ancient vessel doesn’t subside; it echoes in the pounding of blood in her temples. She has known fear. Terror has been her constant companion these past six years, since she was eleven. Now there’s a new fear: of being intercepted by the British, who control Palestine and block the entry of Jewish refugees. Her yearnings to reach Eretz Israel might come to naught. What will happen to her then? The land is so close that Judith can almost taste the juice of its oranges.
A heavy chain is lowered with a muffled clatter, and Judith jolts with the ship as its anchor latches onto the bottom of the sea. Next to her, an eight-year-old girl whimpers. Judith hugs her against her side and places her finger on the girl’s lips. They have practiced every night for this long hour of silence. The most difficult part is yet to come. The next steps will be filled with great risks—their only hope to reach freedom.
Anxiety hangs like a cloud over the passengers’ collectively held breath. Judith passes her hand over the heads of the twelve children clustered around her like frightened birds. She mothered them in the Marseille displaced-persons camp and has bonded with them through her games and storytelling and playing her flute. They are all eight- to ten-year-olds except for one four-year-old boy, who is smart and obedient. The coming hour is the test that no one is allowed to fail. A child who panics and loses control puts hundreds of passengers in peril.
Salty mist rolls in. The ship bobs in the quiet night; the only sound is the lapping of waves against its sides. The calm is deceptive, auguring danger. The threat of discovery lurks in the soft breeze that caresses Judith’s burning face and the sleek surface of the water—either might carry the faintest of voices to a British patrol boat.
In the tight space, Judith pulls the little boy onto her lap. He clings to her for comfort, opening in her an equal measure of love. Her lips brush his hair.
The muted strokes of paddles below the ship make her raise her head. Her group, composed of herself and the youngest children, will debark first. Someone touches her shoulder, and Judith rises, readjusts the straps that tie her bundle and the canvas bag holding all their shoes to her back. She lifts the boy and takes the hand of the nearest child; the rest of her charges form a tight chain behind her. The boy’s father, one of the organizers, will be among the last to leave the boat, and Judith prays that he will make it to shore before they are spotted. In the darkness, a young man climbs up the ladder on the side of the ship and carries the boy down. At the railing, an Israeli woman silently directs Judith’s other children to scramble down themselves. Judith follows.
Strong arms grab her back at the last rung and lower her gently onto a bench in a rowboat. More children and their leader quickly fill the boat. Two men her age take the oars, and Judith’s heart swells with pride at the sight. These are Haganah members. Heroes. She trusts each one. Whatever else she does in her new home, she will strive to join their ranks.
First, though, she must guide her charges over the next crucial hurdles. If the British detect them on water or on land, soldiers will descend on them, force them back onto the ship, and send them back to the cursed Europe that loathes those it hasn’t killed. Or the British will lock them up behind barbed wire in their newly built camps on the island of Cyprus.
After barely escaping the gas of the extermination chambers, they would be back in a concentration camp with no hope of escape.
Three empty rowboats skim by in the near darkness, bound for the ship to collect immigrants, as her small vessel makes its way toward the shore. Each swoosh of breaking water increases the thumping of Judith’s heart. Will any of them reach safety before they are exposed?
Her journey began so long ago, on that summer day in Lyon when the police raided her Jewish school. Judith had been in the lavatory. She’d heard cries and peeked out to see her classmates being shoved into the yard. She ran up three flights of stairs to the roof. Below, parents rattled the locked school gates, screaming. As blood pumped through her veins, Judith vaulted onto the roof of the adjacent building. Her long, thin legs carried her from one roof to the next, past her neighborhood, until she no longer heard the screaming. She pried open an attic window and hid there for a day and a half, until hunger and worry for her parents and sisters sent her back over the rooftops.
The street was quiet when she reached her family’s building. Light shone in the kitchen window. Her parents cried with relief and covered her with kisses. The Vichy government had a quota of Jews to deport, they’d told her, grief-stricken. Her twin sisters, two years younger, had been taken.
Next morning, their housekeeper bleached Judith’s dark hair blond and took her to her own village. A business associate had made arrangements to hide her parents elsewhere, she was told.
After the war, Judith waited for them to come for her. They knew where she was. But they never showed up.
Suddenly, light floods the shore. A shudder runs through Judith at the sight of a searchlight bathing the white sand and gliding slowly across its expanse. Fear of discovery stifles her awe at this first glimpse of the land of her dreams. The light ascends a cliff, caresses its fissures, and casts ghostly shadows under boulders and clusters of shrubbery. The beam is still lingering on the cliff, searching, when Judith hears the lapping sounds of swimmers beside her boat. The four men and women each grab two of the smallest children and dash through the shallow waves to the shore. Judith tucks the hem of her skirt into her waistband, raises the bag of shoes, and lowers herself into the thigh-high water. It welcomes her with a surprising warmth. She quickly helps the rest of her children debark, then wades to the shore.
Their saviors are counting the seconds, she knows, so when a young man carrying the little boy guides them onto the sand and whispers to her in Yiddish, “I’ll be in front, you’ll bring up the back—run fast,” she sprints with her well-trained children across the sand to the cliff, where he ushers them into a deep crevice.
She’s dreamed of the moment when her feet touch the soil of the Holy Land, but now that it is happening, there’s not a second to spare for a prayer of thanks. Her heart pounding, Judith squeezes the children against the sandstone rock. The wet, half-naked body of their rescuer is pressed against them as a new searchlight crawls along the beach they’ve just crossed. A thin rivulet of sand cascades onto Judith’s shoulder. The seconds tick away in her head.
When the searchlight begins its arc upward, away from them, the young man touches Judith’s hand. “Ready?” he whispers. His breath is warm, and a pleasant shiver travels through her as he hands her the boy. He scrambles up the steep crevice and stops on the first ledge to take the boy back from her, then grabs the arm of the next child that Judith pushes up. She climbs last. The cliff slopes away, and they crawl fast toward the flat surface.
They’ve just reached the top when their leader whispers, “Down!” and they all flatten themselves on the pebbly ground between clusters of knee-high prickly shrubs. Just then, a new beam of light bursts to life and plunges across the top of the cliff. It grazes their backs. They all hold their breath, their arms tucked underneath themselves, the curvatures of their bodies blending with the uneven surface. No one moves. A stone pricks Judith’s cheek, breaking her skin. Her heart hammers so hard, she’s afraid it might explode. She prays that the children will tolerate the stones’ rough edges. If her group is exposed, it will doom all those who follow.
The searchlight goes dark, and blackness drops on her like a lead cape. She touches the nearest child, the agreed-upon signal, and they all get up. With no time to dust off the sand and pebbles, they break into a run across a plowed field. As her eyes readjust to the darkness, she sees the nearby silhouettes of more people rushing in the same direction.
A pinprick of a flashlight beam directs them to a waiting truck. Quickly, their rescuer helps them climb onto its bed. The wooden benches are not screwed to the truck bed. She places the boy on the floor, props him up between her legs, and puts her arms, like protective wings, around the kids beside her. We’re here, she tells herself, hardly believing it. Thank You, God. She breathes in a lungful of the Holy Land air. The first of many millions to come, she knows.
