Day After Night [Paperback]

Day After Night is an engaging, well-written work of historical fiction, looking at the lives and rescue of the Jewish women who were detained as illegal immigrants after attempting to find new homes in Palestine post-WWII. Some were fresh from the death camps of Nazi Europe, others from situations just as dangerous or degrading, yet they found themselves corralled into another prison camp, with more barbed wire and guards - this time British - with freedom tantalisingly close, yet still out of reach.

The losses suffered by these women during the holocaust, and their desire to find a new home, build new lives, sometimes seems to be their only common ground. Diamant wills onto the page four principal, disparate characters in Shayndel, Leonie, Tedi and Zorah, each with their own powerful story; each trying to find a path from the past into the future and though Anita Diamant clearly researched her book thoroughly, this is a much a tale of friendship, life, mourning and joy as it is a lesson in the Jewish post-war resettlement in Israel; both moving and fascinating.

It is difficult to say that I `enjoyed' this book - for one thing, the renewed awareness of the imperfect role of the British when it came to war administration was rather uncomfortable - but it is sad and redeeming and human and brave and makes the reader marvel at how life blossomed from the ashes of places like Auschwitz, how these women struggled out from under the enormity of the loss and fear, anger and shame, and faced what was ahead with hope and dignity.

"The nightmares made their rounds ages ago. The tossing and whimpering are over. Even the insomniacs have settled down. The twenty restless bodies rest, and faces aged by hunger, grief, and doubt relax to reveal the beauty and the pity of their youth. Not one of the women in Barrack C is twenty-one, but all of them are orphans."

This is the opening paragraph to this book and as soon as I read it I knew I was going to become a part of these womens lives for the next 300 pages: I had already lost my heart to them.

The book is set in a place called Atlit, a camp just outside the town of Haifa for detaining new arrivals after WW2 and before the state of Israel is declared. The people inside Atlit are mainly European Jews who have fled the places that killed their families and friends and tried to kill them, and turned to Palestine for a new life. There are four main characters in Day After Night: Tedi is a Dutch survivor who hid for much of the war and was raped repeatedly by the son of the family who hid her, Leonie is Parisian and survived by becoming a German soldiers prostitute after her family was killed, Zorah only just survived several years in a concentration camp and Shayndel from Poland hid in the forests for years as part of the resistence, killing soldiers where they could and marching people towards Palestine.

One of the things I liked about this book was that there was no really unecessary detail about what happened to the four girls in the holocaust. We see glimpses of their past, but more with a view to helping us see them as they are now, without gratuitous or sensational detail. It is important that we, as the reader, understand that these girls had an unspeakably horrific past but the book is not about the holocaust per se, but about what happened to them once they got to "The Promised Land"; how they were again detained behind barbed wire fences, with armed sentires in watch towers, knowing nobody and with uncerain futures. The girls themselves didn't want to share their past with their fellow detainees:

"She knew they were reluctanat to tell their own stories because all of them began and ended with the same horrible question: why was I spared? Everyone's mother had been gentle and devout, every sister a beauty, every brother a prodigy. There was no point in comparing one family's massacre to another's. Every atrocity was as appalling as the next: Miriam's rape, Clara's murdered husband, Bette's baby, who was suffocated so the rest of the family would not be discovered.It was unspeakable, so they spoke of nothing."

One night, the girls are woken from their beds and partake in an escape from the barracks. They are freed by the Palmach (Isreali elite stike force) and rehomed in a kibbutz. That night all the girls finally sleep deelply and dream - it is like they have finally allowed themselves to dare to dream; to dare to believe that there may be a better life out there waiting for them. I always love Epilogue's in a book: I have a need to know what happened to the characters I have grown to love, or at least travelled with for several hundred pages so I sighed with satisfaction at the end, of not only having just read a great book but also because I could put those girls to rest.

Although the characters in the book are made up, the actual story itself isn't. Atlit still exists (although it is now a museum and education centre) and they really did break out, with the help of the Palmach on 9th October 1945. After walking through forrests and up steep hills all night they finally reached Beit Oren, a kibbutz, where they were homed for the night. When the British turned up the next day, some 4,000 residents from Haifa formed a human sheild around the kibbitz and the soldiers finally left. From there, the several hunderd espcapees were rehomed in various kibbutzim around Palestine.

This book is insightful and heartfelt, with beautifully created characters. Haunting in places, this book reflects on life for women after escaping the Holocaust, and shows how their trials and tribulations were nowhere near over, even after reaching the "homeland" of Israel.