“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.
I am grateful to family members of the Israeli team in Cherbourg: Yossi Wexler-Halfon, son of Brigadier General Yitzhak Wexler-Halfon; Orni Ben-Dor, daughter of Commander Zeev Bar-Zeev Farkash; Captain Sheli Shahal, daughter of Commander Haim Shahal; Tami Ozri, daughter of Rear Admiral Hadar Kimche; and Esther Tabak, wife of Commander Moishe Tabak. Their stories about living in Cherbourg gave me the nuanced flavor of life there.
My thanks also to seamen Moshe Levi and Avraham Avizemer, whose perspectives added color, and Avi Brillant, son of Commander Edmond Wilhelm Brillant, who added his engineering expertise.
An amazing coincidence happened when a friend, the French journalist Serge Farnel, attended a writers’ conference. At lunch, he sat across from the aging Yves Bonnet, former deputy for La Manche in the National Assembly and a member of France’s Committee for National Defense and the Armed Forces. Farnel’s initiative opened for me a channel to experts on the French side of the saga: in 1969, when the event described in this book took place, Yves Bonnet was in charge of French security in the region. He introduced me to M. Pierre Balmer, CEO of Constructions Mécaniques de Normandie (CMN, the shipyard founded by Félix Amiot, where the boats were built), who invited me to visit the highly secure facility, now manufacturing nuclear submarines. The visit gave me the in-person experience of the vast place, down to its smell of machine oil. Standing in front of a life-size sculpture of the controversial Félix Amiot, I knew that he would be a character in my novel.
The librarians at the Library of Cherbourg and Bibliothèque Départementale de la Manche helped me search microfiche, but it was Justin Lecarpentier who generously shared with me his trove of photographs, original documents, and archived film clips. An author of several books about the Cherbourg affair and Félix Amiot’s biographer, he produced and aired, in 2019, the fiftieth-anniversary documentary about the event. Justin continued to patiently answer my questions as they popped up.
And finally, on the French side, I would like to thank the charming René Moirand, former journalist at La Presse de la Manche, who covered the Cherbourg event. Even though he had caught a whiff of the upcoming escape, he did not break the news. Moirand invited me and my husband for a weekend at his country home in the French Alps and regaled me with stories that gave me both his inside view as a townsperson and the international aspect of the event.
My two visits to Cherbourg were memorable because of my hosts Michel Niciejewski and Emmanuel de La Fonchais, owners of the magnificent bed-and-breakfast La Manoire de la Fieffe. I can’t imagine a better writing retreat than their beautiful manor set in botanical gardens.
The second thread of this novel, that of Youth Aliyah, was launched with a primer about France’s Holocaust history by Eliot Nidam-Orvieto at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Israel. I first learned from him about the search to rescue Jewish orphans and the custody battles with the Church that baptized many. My thanks, too, to Ariel Sion, archive director, Bibliothèque du Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris; Boaz Cohen, chair, Holocaust Studies Program, Western Galilee College, Israel; and Katy Hazan and Dominique Rotermund, Œuvre de secours aux enfants Archives and History, Paris, France. All of them helped me understand the post–World War II mood in France and how Jewish children became caught in the competition to replenish the lost populations of Europe. The only former Youth Aliyah agent I could find still alive was Idith Yanai-Charuvi; she gave me an inside understanding of the process of rescuing Jewish orphans in Europe and bringing them to Israel.
The second French location of the novel, the Loire Valley, began with a passing comment by Olivier Vidal, a French architect living in New York, about Château de Valençay and the story of Duchess Silvia de Castellane. On my visit to the château, Fanny Chauffeteau, assistante de conservation, gave me a guided tour to its secret chambers and hidden turrets.
With the COVID-19 pandemic grounding me, I selected the specific villages in the Loire Valley where the rest of the plot unfolded with the help via Zoom of tour guide Manuel de Croutte, concierge Summer Jauneaud, and historians Susan Walter and Simon Brand. Finally, in late 2021, my daughter, Eden Yariv Goldberg, drove me to visit these locations. Thank you all for the introduction to this history-filled region.
For additional information, I thank Keren Haliva and Dalit Hasson for their feedback regarding women in IDF Intelligence in the late 1960s; Dr. Charles Polit for medical information regarding disability; and Lisa McLaughlin, for her lesson about the use of fieldstone in house construction.
