Buried secrets cast long shadows, even if it takes decades to unearth the treasure of truth

 Esther Krausz as told to Shoshana Gross

The door is heavy and solid, but I can see my father’s distorted face through the smeared panes of glass. He is a wavering shape, just beyond the place. I don’t know where I am, but I know I’m not home. I am three years old, and sadness chokes me.

Last night, a woman at the place beat me because I wet the strange bed, but I can’t find the words to tell my father. He smiles reassuringly, waves, and his straight back disappears in a blur of tears. I cry hysterically, and no one can comfort me.

The memory ends.

It’s my earliest remembered experience, but I never asked my father any questions about the place. Time blurs in my three-year-old mind, but I eventually returned home to my father’s words, “Esther, dus is Mami,” and my smiling mother handing me the rare treat of a rosy apple. The thrilling present banished lingering curiosity, and in any case, it was a time when people didn’t ask. Everyone was busy surviving and rebuilding.

But buried secrets cast long shadows, even if it takes decades to unearth the treasure of truth.

Coming to Israel

The year: 1948, before Israel declared independence.

The place: A rickety ship sailing into the Port of Haifa under the cover of darkness.

The people: A young couple with nothing but their precious daughter and wistful dreams of a new life after the terrors of the concentration camps.

“Destroy your ID papers!”

Word raced through the tense mass of survivors crowded on the deck. It was wrenching to toss the new, hard-won ID papers issued after the war by various Jewish organizations, but the Haganah representative was adamant.

“This is a smuggling operation,” he said. “The British don’t want Jews to live in Israel. You’ve already been detained in Cyprus for months. Do you want to go back?”

The shredded documents bobbed on the waves and slowly sank.

We crept into our Land like thieves in the night, identities disintegrating at the bottom of the sea.

Israel was a world bursting with second chances. In May of 1948, Israel proclaimed its independence, and with the end of British rule, and a miraculous victory in Israel’s War of Independence, a tidal wave of immigrants and refugees poured into the tiny country.

At 32, my Romanian father had already lost a wife and child to the Nazis, so his new wife and daughter were doubly precious. The Israeli interim government was issuing ID papers for new olim, and my father was determined not to be drafted into the manpower-hungry Israeli army. After surviving Auschwitz, he desperately wanted to be home with his wife and child. He added ten years to his birthdate, morphing into a spry 42-year-old, old enough to avoid the draft, and he would go on to baffle American doctors with his excellent health at increasingly “advanced” ages.

I was young, but I remember a world pulsing with a vivid cacophony of so many Jews. There were post-World War II Europeans, exotic (to my eyes) Sephardim and Teimanim fleeing the Arab countries, and late-arrival survivors escaping the crushing burden of Communism. It was a melting pot of people and life, European tongues blending with Israeli and Arabic accents under the burning desert sun.

After Israel’s War of Independence, frightened Arabs fled from the cities and towns. There was no new construction in the fledgling country, so we were given an abandoned Arab home. My father was originally told to move into a specific apartment, but when he inspected our new home, he wasn’t excited. In the house next door, my father found two spacious bedrooms and an enclosed backyard. Ever resourceful, my father simply switched the brass numbers hanging on the doors, and after months of being in a DP camp, we had a home of our own.