Moshe Oren is an Israeli writer, journalist, and editor. In the early 1970s he worked as a journalist in London, […]
The Secret
They sailed out on the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), about a kilometer and a half from the shore, to scatter flowers at the site of the tragedy. Flowers in memory of the dead. But before that, when they’d boarded the fishing boat at Kibbutz Ein-Gev, he’d turned to the captain. “Are there enough life jackets today?” he’d wondered with a smile. The captain had smiled back, and he knew why. Seventy years ago, on a warm night in 1943, on these very waters, and in a similar fishing boat, one of the most painful tragedies in pre-state Israel occurred. Eleven men and women, all members of kibbutzim and moshavim, died in the Kinneret en route from Degania-Alef to Ein-Gev, an incident that would come to be known as the Dairy Farmers Disaster.
It happened during the first national dairy farmers conference in Palestine. Participants came from far and wide and assembled in Kibbutz Degania-Alef, the site of the first dairy farm in the country. His wife’s grandmother, representing her kibbutz, was there. At the conclusion of the conference, there was a surprise in store for the participants: a nighttime sail on the Kinneret. A big fishing boat came from Ein-Gev, with a smaller boat in tow. On the shore, in the dark, about two hundred people squeezed onto the two vessels. They set sail at nine p.m. under a full moon. For some unknown reason, the smaller boat started taking in water, and when it was about a kilometer and a half from the Ein-Gev shore it started sinking. The crew on the lead boat had never experienced a situation like this, and many of the passengers, war refugees from Eastern Europe, had never learned to swim. Total chaos ensued, and, in this state of affairs, tragedy is inevitable. The lead boat arrived at Ein-Gev with the survivors, and the search for the others continued throughout the night and the following day. One of the bodies recovered several days later was of his wife’s grandmother…
Seventy years later, the children of that night’s victims get together in Degania. They have never met, and only few of them have ever spoken about their experiences – then, and since then. Now they come onto the stage and talk. Elderly people in their eighties reliving the disaster. Even today it is unbearably difficult. And most difficult of all is the secret.
Hadassah is the only child of her father who drowned in the Kinneret. She didn’t know because no one told her. Father went to America, they said. Years later she would learn the truth, but not from her mother or the grownups. The children in her kvutza (age group) would tell her.
Gideon came to the kibbutz to visit. His father, he told the kibbutz children, was traveling the world. He’d be coming home soon. And even the children knew that Gideon’s father had drowned in the Kinneret. That he was buried in the kibbutz cemetery. And how was it that they knew, and Gideon, his son, didn’t?
Yardena was three months old when she lost her father. Three years later her mother remarried, and for many years Yardena knew this man as her father. She called him Aba from as far back as she can remember. When she was nine years old, during a quarrel in her kvutza, one of the boys blurted out the truth to her face. Yardena burst into tears and ran to tell her mother, who had no choice but to disclose what had been kept hidden from her all these years…
Elderly people stand at the microphone, struggling to hold back their tears. Some succeed, others less so. Memories rise to the surface, and the wounds are still open, deep down inside. He takes his wife’s hand in his. Both of them were yet to be born when all this happened, but the stories they are hearing touch them, move them. His wife squeezes his hand. And what about your secret, she whispers.
His secret, even after all these years, still remains a mystery to him. It started when the first reports about his father began coming, months after he had vanished into thin air. This was in the early summer of 1952, and it was now obvious that he was in jail in Prague, awaiting trial. For what reason, nobody knew yet (it would be revealed in time). But his father was alive, thank God, and his whereabouts were known. His daughter (14 years old) already knew. It was impossible to keep anything from her. But what should his four-year-old son be told? In the closed community of the small kibbutz, this kind of decision was not only his mother’s to make. All the community members would be party to it, and it is they who would ensure its implementation. The prevailing inclination in those days was not to talk about things unless you had to. After all, the last thing anybody wanted was to harm a young child facing an extended period of time without his father. And nobody knew when or how it would all end. So, it was simply better not to say anything, and if the child asked (his mother or his kvutza’s housemother) there would be only one answer: Aba was working abroad as an emissary, and would be away for quite a long time.
No documentation of these decisions would ever be found (perhaps they were “oral law” from the outset), but years later, almost miraculously, he would discover a written testimony, and it would be found in a prime minister’s diary…
In the spring of 1955, during the Passover holiday, he traveled with his mother to the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, and that night, as was his custom, the prime minister wrote in his diary:
R came with her young son to stay with us during the Passover holiday, at our prior invitation. The boy is seven years old, and has a sharp and remarkably developed mind. He writes poems, and is interested in everything. He does not know about his father’s fate, believes him to be an emissary abroad, and craves his return.
(Moshe Sharett – Personal Diary, 12.04.1955)
The following night the prime minister wrote:
Seventh day of Passover. I engaged with the little boy for a while this morning, and my wife Tzipora drove him and his mother, together with Livia from Hadassim who is staying with us, to Mount Herzl… for lunch. R and the boy sat with all the guests, who had been warned beforehand not to ask any questions, to behave as if everything is in order…
(Moshe Sharett – Personal Diary, 13.04.1955)
And the secret, as the prime minister’s diary attests, was alive and well (does not know about his father’s fate / believes him to be an emissary abroad / not to ask any questions / behave as if everything is in order). Now, with written proof in his hand, he would be able to make an accounting. He was four years of age when it became known that his father was in prison in Prague. In the spring of 1955, he was seven. In other words, the secret was three years old, and still in force! In hindsight, no matter which way he looked at it, it was an inconceivable story.
Think of the effort required, he tells himself, all the way down the line. Since his father was a topic better not discussed, a thick protective blanket was spread over and around him, a veil of silence. Or silence and silencing, to be more precise. No one talked about that in front of the boy or in his presence. And that included everyone: his mother, his sister, his kvutza’s housemother, his schoolteacher, the night watchwoman (if and when he calls out to her in the night), even the night guards. It was fine to speak to the boy about everything else in the world – but not about that.
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And the children in his kvutza, what about them? There were twelve of them, and no one could talk about that in front of them either. In turn, their parents also became part of the circle of silence (and their older brothers and sisters), taking extra-special care during afternoon tea, when the children went to their parents’ homes, where there was a radio, and sometimes they all listened to the news.
And how, he wonders now, did they manage to hide the newspaper from him? Because the whole kibbutz read the newspaper (Al Hamishmar) that was put into the members’ mailboxes each morning. And he’d been reading from a very early age, everything he could lay his hands on, and certainly the newspaper (the sports pages before anything else). For several years his father was the hottest item on the news, and his name appeared in the newspaper headlines every other day. So how, in God’s name, did they manage to conceal it from him? And from the boys and girls in his kvutza? And the fact is he didn’t know. And the fact is they didn’t know. And it had been more than three years…
Over the years, he would repeatedly wonder about it all, until he reached the inevitable conclusion: it was down to him too (not only them). He must have played a part in it. Sometimes a person doesn’t know simply because they prefer not to, consciously or unconsciously.
Tom Stoppard, his favorite playwright, can possibly serve as an example here. While he had been seven, maybe a bit older, when his secret was discovered, Stoppard didn’t discover his until he was fifty-six! Which makes it even stranger considering he’s such an inquisitive man (Clive James wrote that he was the smartest man he’d ever met).
Tom and his slightly older brother were born in Czechoslovakia to Jewish parents. When World War Two broke out, the entire family fled to Singapore, and just before the Japanese occupation of Singapore, his father put his wife and two sons on a ship bound for India (he himself was killed in an aerial bombing a few days later). In India, his widowed mother met and subsequently married a British officer. The man, a professed racist, forbade her to talk about her origins, about her past – to anybody, including her sons. After the war they returned to England, and the Stoppard boys were raised as English gentlemen to all intents and purposes. Tom, in his writing style, in his artistic choices, would go on to become the epitome of an English gentleman of the London stage. And throughout all those years, his mother hid the truth from her two sons.
It was only in 1993, in a prearranged clandestine meeting, that a young relative from Germany came to the National Theatre in London to disclose to the astonished Stoppard his mother’s family tree. On that day, he learned for the first time about his Czech past and his Jewish origins. One night about a year later, during a writers conference in Prague, when he returned to his hotel an unfamiliar young man was waiting for him in the lobby clutching an old photograph album. The young man, his mother’s sister’s grandson, showed him, for the very first time, photographs from another world, from a past he knew nothing about: his mother as a little girl in her parents’ home, his parents as a young couple smiling at the camera, and dozens of relatives he’d never met…
And this begs the question: is it really possible? Is it possible to conceal a past like that, facts of life like these, from a man like Stoppard – and for so many years? It defies common sense, it defies logic. Maybe somewhere, deep down inside, he simply didn’t want to know.
His own secret remained well kept until sometime in 1955. That’s when Danny arrived on the scene…
Danny was one of the “outside kids” in the kvutza, children who weren’t born on the kibbutz, but came from the city for a variety of reasons (in time, these children would account for half of their kvutza). Danny was older than the other children, an intelligent and inquisitive boy, self-assured. Maybe he’d heard something at home, or seen something in the newspaper, or picked up a hint of something from his adoptive family. One way or another, Danny found out. And since he could see no logic in the matter, he decided to do something about it. The only questions remaining were what and how, and the solution he found was impressive, to say the least.
Toilet paper was not yet in use in those days (not in the children’s house, anyhow), and every morning, quite early, the housemother would sit down and cut out squares of newspaper. Dozens of squares that she stacked in the wooden boxes hanging beside the toilets (there were two of them in their house). And if you think about it, in this, too, caution was required in terms of what she cut out, and what mustn’t be allowed to find its way into the boxes. What Danny did, every time he went to the toilet, was simply fill in the blanks…
Because Danny knew a well-known secret: the boy reads, and a lot – anything and everything, all the time, on the toilet as well. And these squares of newspaper, in the wooden box on the wall, were the only reading material to be found there. So, with a lot of patience, of persistence, Danny made sure to bring his own newspaper squares (hidden in his trouser pockets), and feed the wooden boxes with that secret, confidential information. With everything the grownups took great care to hide from the boy. And in the end, it worked! Sitting on the toilet one day, the boy put his hand out to grab the fateful, absolutely forbidden paper square. And he smoothed the paper on his knee, and read…
Sixty years later he would try to go back, to remember: What had he thought? What exactly had he felt? Had the world come crashing down around him? Had he leaped up from the toilet seat and screamed? Had he run to his mother’s home (clutching the incriminating evidence) and demanded an explanation? The absolute truth?
The answer to all these questions, surprising (or impossible) as it may seem, is a simple no. OK, so now he knew, and the big secret, what of it? It’s strange, he realizes, but there (on the toilet seat), and at that moment, it didn’t even enter his mind that it was actually that. And it would be quite some time before he really understood.
Over the years, questions would surface: Had his father known about all this? Had his mother told him (when he returned from Prague)? He simply doesn’t know, even today. He never asked. Now, he tells himself, let’s see you explain it…
And maybe, he would tell himself years later, maybe the answer should be sought in a different, much heavier secret. The one that was hidden from him all those years. The one he’d never be able to decipher.
In the late 1920s, his father left Poland with one of his brothers (he came here, to Palestine, while his brother crossed the ocean and ended up in California). Their parents, two brothers, and a sister remained in their small hometown of Podhaijce. More than a decade later they all perished in the Holocaust. And his father never spoke about it, not a single word. And he (fool that he is) never asked. The time will come, he kept telling himself, the right time… He thought of doing it right after they returned to Israel from Hawaii, but his father didn’t wait for him. Following two strokes in quick succession his father died while he was still on a small island in the middle of the Pacific. So, as it turned out, he’d missed the boat. They would never talk about it, ever. And that dark secret of his childhood, he thinks now, shrinks and becomes almost inconsequential by comparison. And all the questions he’d felt he had to ask, about his secret, maybe they got stuck because of the other one, bigger and more bitter by far, the question that had never been asked?
And after all this, at the end of the day, he remains with a profoundly painful sense of missed opportunity. And how, in God’s name, did he let it happen? If only he knew. Because that, too, remains a secret to him, maybe the saddest one of all.
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