The Blurb:

“Atlit is a holding camp for “illegal” immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place. Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.”

What I thought:

“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.

I picked this book up for two reasons: 1) I had previously read and loved Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent and 2) having lived in Israel for two years back in the early-mid ’90′s I am fascinated and passionate about reading books set here.

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.

The camp at Atlit

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.

I’m not Jewish, and my family have never suffered anything so appalling and barbaric as what happened to Jewish families (among others) in WW2, but you don’t have to be Jewish to empathise with something so horrific as this. Nearly everyone I met in Israel had some member of their family who was or knew someone who was one of the first immigrants back in WW2.  One memory will stay with me forever: in 1993 Steven Spielberg released his film, Schindlers List, staring Liam Neeson. I went to see the movie at a cinema in Ra’anana, Israel where I lived and worked, with an English friend. The rest of the audience were locals. At the end of the film,   the black and white turns to colour and some of the very characters that were played on screen and survived the holocaust, place stones on Schindlers grave. I have never experienced anthing like what happened next: soft weeping became breathless sobs; people hugged one another and once the credits had rolled and the lights had come on, the entire aurdience was still in their seets – now in complete silence.

This book was sent to me for review by Simon and Schuster. Thank you!