Cherbourg, France

Late December 1969

It’s past midnight. Solange, the talkative blind woman, has fallen asleep on one of the two beds in the room. The storm outside roars. Sharon pulls an upholstered chair next to Claudette’s wheelchair, and the two of them stare out the large window into the darkness. Only the outlines of the five Saars are visible in the canal. Their engines haven’t yet blasted. Despite her trepidation, Sharon no longer wants to see the operation aborted. All will be lost. Israel won’t have its full naval fighting capacity for the next war. Its shores—the Mediterranean Sea, bordered by Egypt on one side and Lebanon and Syria on the other, and the Red Sea, flanked by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea—will be unprotected.

There is no movement on the docks. A couple of streetlamps throw yellow cones of light webbed sideways by sheets of rain. Sharon knows that in a residential building on the other side of the canal, Kadmon is watching through his binoculars. Limon is in his suite somewhere in this hotel, probably twisting the radio dial in search of weather forecasts from France and England.

At Sharon’s side, Claudette fidgets and lets out a groan.

“May I help you get into bed?” Sharon asks. “You’ll be more comfortable.”

“And miss seeing my son navigating a boat for Israel?” She smiles. “Did you see his blue tattoo?”

Sharon lets out a little laugh. She loved seeing Danny open himself so graciously to the unexpected gift of meeting Claudette. She loved witnessing the tenderness mixed with play between them. She also loved how, after she walked him to the elevator, they stole one more moment together. This time they kissed long and hard. Now the memory of his lean, muscular body as she pressed into him arouses the whole of her.

“Are you his girlfriend?” Claudette asks.

“Almost. Hopefully soon.” Sharon places her hand on her heart to still it. “When all this is over.”

When the news of the Saars’ escape breaks in a few days, she’ll call Uzi Yarden and convey the regards of the woman who was once his landlady. And when Sharon is back in Israel, she will check Yad Vashem’s archives for records of Isaac Baume and Raphaël Baume—the names Claudette gave her. She’s learned that Raphaël had a sister who was deported and probably perished, but a younger brother had been sheltered in a monastery. How amazing would it be if he had survived?

At two in the morning, Sharon slaps her own cheeks to fight off sleep. She helps Claudette to the bathroom, then splashes cold water on her own face and thinks of the men in the boats below, all awake, all waiting. Returning to her seat by the window, Sharon wishes again that she believed in prayer.

While Claudette dozes off in her wheelchair, Sharon contemplates the journey she has made in Danny’s convoluted history—and in her own. It all comes down to belonging, belonging to something larger than herself. For some people, it’s belonging to a shared faith; for others, a shared ideology. For some, it is a matter of love; for others, a matter of family. But her arc of belonging—and Danny’s—comes from their national spirit, one defined not by the Holocaust but by the common destiny of connecting with the past, present, and future of the Jewish people. Belonging to Israel is central to their identity.

Just then she hears the blasts—the blessed blasts of twenty engines firing in a thunderous burst. “Hooray!” she calls out.

In her bed, Solange sits bolt upright with a loud yelp. Claudette claps enthusiastically. She pushes herself out of the wheelchair, grabs the windowsill, and stands. Solange comes over and puts her arm around her waist, propping her up. Sharon leans against the window, the cold glass pressed against her burning forehead.

Mast lights come on. Two by two, the first four boats begin to glide forward, the fifth one close behind. Claudette narrates the scene for her friend. A hundred meters out, darkness swallows the boats. In the storm, Sharon can’t even make out the light of the sentry watchtower. She holds her breath, recalling the young man to whom she handed the cognac; he was as bewildered as her fresh recruits. No doubt he had been placed on duty to free the senior staff to go home for their Christmas Eve dinner.

She hopes that the rest of Limon’s and Yaniv’s gambles prove equally prescient.

All is silent except for the breathing of the three women and the roaring wind outside. In her head, Sharon accompanies the Saars sailing against the ferocious waves through the harbor, past the French navy port, then to the ancient set of breakers, after which they are met with mountain-high waves.

At any point, they might be intercepted by the French navy. Will they be forced back to harbor by cannon fire?

Thirty minutes pass. And then, under the lamppost’s cone of illumination, Sharon spots a lone figure in a long coat, its collar turned up. Moka Limon is holding on to the post with one hand and waving goodbye with the other.

“They’re out!” Sharon cries.

“My Benjamin,” Claudette says, awe in her voice. “How proud Isaac Baume would be to see his grandson a captain of a Jewish boat!”

Postscript

The last five Saars slipped out of Cherbourg undetected in a gale-force-nine storm at two thirty on Christmas morning. Several hours later, a visiting British journalist noticed their absence and notified his editor in London. It took two days before the international newswire buzzed with the scoop. By then, the Saars were being refueled off the shore of Portugal via another Israeli invention: all five boats suckled like puppies simultaneously from a mother ship that had been waiting for them. Since the boats had supposedly been sold to a company in Norway, media outlets sent helicopters to search the North Sea. It wasn’t until the Saars passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean that their destination become apparent. Against maritime laws, the Saars carried no flags or identifying numbers, but as they passed Gibraltar, the British signaled to Kimche, Bon voyage!

The French were furious at the deception, though a quick internal scrutiny of the paperwork confirmed that no French law had been broken. The French defense minister Michel Debré (Catholic grandson of a rabbi) ordered the French air force to bomb the boats, but the chief of staff refused the order. President Georges Pompidou decided not to escalate the incident that had already made a mockery of the French in the international media. The press praised the Israelis for their ingenuity and upheld Israel’s right to the contracted purchase.

This novel is a fictional imagining of the preceding fifteen months. I took the liberty of altering the timing of Saar Six’s departure and fictionalizing the characters while staying close to the historical background. I have constructed situations based on real-life personalities: Moka Limon, Félix Amiot, and Duchess Silvia de Castellane. For an accurate historical account of the Boats of Cherbourg, I invite readers to check out the articles in the Jewish Virtual Library and excellent books written by Abraham Rabinovich (English) and Justin Lecarpentier (French).

The Saars participated in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which Israel nearly lost on all fronts but the sea. The ships employed the newly developed Israeli sea-skimming, anti-ship missiles—Gabriels—that changed naval warfare and won Israel’s victory over both the Egyptian and Syrian navies.

With the help of advanced sonar technology, the submarine Dakar was found between Cyprus and Crete thirty-one years after it disappeared. The cause of its sinking was determined to be a mechanical malfunction, not a hostile attack. The deaths of the sixty-nine men were “swift and violent.” When it was found, in late May 1999, Israel finally went into official mourning.

Youth Aliyah, under the early leadership of Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah, rescued over twenty thousand Jewish children before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust. These youngsters grew up to leave their marks on Israel’s military, political, economic, agricultural, scientific, cultural, and academic maps.

Hadassah continues to operate youth villages in Israel for at-risk children.

Author’s Note

In May 2018, I visited the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum in Haifa in the company of Admiral Hadar Kimche. The year before, I conducted extensive interviews with this modest then-eighty-nine-year-old commander of the legendary story of the Boats of Cherbourg. Hadar (who asked me to address him by his first name) introduced me then to over a dozen officers who had been involved in the breakout. On the 2018 Haifa visit, he took me to view one of the twelve missile-carrying boats, Saars, that had caused an international crisis in 1969 and four years later brought Israel naval victories in the Yom Kippur War.

I had not anticipated how the mere name of the museum would affect me, a reminder of the tight connection between the clandestine immigration to Palestine before the State of Israel was established in 1948 and the Israeli navy that was created upon the country’s birth. Four aging, barely floating vessels that had been refurbished after the Holocaust to transport thousands of Jewish survivors from Europe to the Promised Land were once again pressed into service, this time for the nascent Israeli navy.

Having grown up in Israel as part of its first generation, I had been fed detailed accounts of the clandestine immigration—Jews entering the country illegally because the British, who had been given a mandate in 1922 by the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations) to administer the land for the purpose of creating a home for the Jews, had reneged on the directive. Not only had they handed 76 percent of the Jewish-designated land to the Hashemites (creating Jordan), but in the wake of the Holocaust—when over three million displaced Jewish survivors who had escaped the Nazis’ incinerators had no place to go—Britain blocked the Jews’ entry to the remaining 24 percent of the land they had named Palestine.

Both this gross injustice and the heroism of the thousands who defied the British blockade were infused into my DNA, as were the horrors of the genocide of six million Jews that preceded it.

In 1969, twenty-one years after Israel was born, the astounding breakout of the Boats of Cherbourg dominated international headlines. The boats, all commissioned, designed, and paid for by Israel, had been built in a private shipyard in a Normandy port, but their delivery was blocked due to a new French arms embargo on Israel. Two years later, in 1971, I learned that a small project I worked on while serving in the Israel Defense Forces had played a minuscule part in the vision, daring, and flawless execution of the boats’ escape.

Only twenty years later did the Israeli navy declassify the identity of the person who had executed this heroic operation: Admiral Hadar Kimche.

What I instantly noticed on this visit, as I read the museum’s full name through the prism and wisdom of the passing five decades, was how all of these events—the Holocaust in Europe, the clandestine immigration to Palestine, and the escape of the Boats of Cherbourg—were interwoven and how close, timewise, they had been. In the spectrum of human history, and even in the shorter arc of the Jews’ exile for two thousand years from their homeland, these three events occurred in the span of less than thirty years. Only the blink of an eye.

And then I read the inscription at the museum entrance, and the significance of history came rushing in, like a tidal wave:

Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen.

—Psalm 77:19

Even on land, history’s footprints can disappear just as quickly as if they were marked on water—and more so as the globe entered yet another century.

In the context of the clandestine immigration, there was a human-interest story that had touched me deeply but seemed to not have been fully explored:

While growing up in Tel Aviv, on rare occasions I encountered Holocaust orphans who had been saved by Youth Aliyah. All older than me, they had been absorbed in youth villages or kibbutzim or were brought to Israel by surviving relatives.

Such was my friend David’s adopted older brother, a nameless five-year-old who was handed to David’s father by a monk. Since no one had come to claim this boy, the monk said, would this Jew take him? Such was Charlotte, who, at age four, was saved by a Red Cross nurse from Vel d’Hiv (where the Jews of Paris had been rounded up and deported to Auschwitz)—only to be removed from that second mother’s home at age eight by an organization that placed her in a Jewish orphanage. Such was Miriam, who had been baptized by the time her Jewish father returned. When the twelve-year-old refused to leave her new family, he kidnapped her and took her to Palestine, where her distraught mother, who had lost two other children, waited. Such was Jacob, who for years labored on the farm of his Christian rescuers, abused and starving, receiving no schooling or medical care, until he was bought with cash by a Youth Aliyah agent.

There are as many unique, heartbreaking stories as there are children who survived. I did not want to tell another Holocaust story but to explore what happened afterward. How were these children found? Did an agent from the Jewish community in Palestine—the yishuv—knock on the door of every farmhouse and ask whether by any chance there was a Jewish child he could take across the sea to a place where people spoke a language the child wouldn’t understand? Yet it happened, and in this novel I set out to explore not stories of trauma and loss, but a Youth Aliyah agent’s journey to heal these children’s scarred hearts.

The Boy with the Star Tattoo links all these events that have dwelled in my psyche. Each episode in this extraordinary historical saga stands on its own. Woven together, they create a story of the resilience and fortitude of the Jews who reasserted their right to self-determination in their own homeland. Without Israel, we Jews would have been the Kurds and Romani of the world—landless, oppressed, disrespected, and exploited. Israel continues to offer refuge to Jews whenever the need arises, and given that, along with the nation’s achievements in science, technology, and medicine, Jews everywhere can walk tall. We belong.

Talia Carner, January 2024

Acknowledgments

My very first thanks are to my hero Rear Admiral Hadar Kimche, who in 1969 commanded the escape of Israel’s boats from Cherbourg, Normandy. Since I first met him in 2017, he has been generous with his time and knowledge. He introduced me to other officers, including Commander Eli Kama, Captain Arieh Ronna, Lieutenant Commander Gadi Ben Zeev, and others who are no longer with us—Major General Micha Ram (1942–2018) and Major General Shlomo Erell (1920–2018)—all of whom shared with me fascinating details about the project.