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By Laurel Corona
 SAN DIEGO—“It is a perfectly forgettable compound of wooden barracks and buildings set out in rows on a scant square acre surrounded by weeds and potato fields. But the place offered a grim welcome to the exhausted remnant of the Final Solution, who could barely see past its barbwire fences, three of them, in fact, concentric lines that scrawled a crabbed and painful hieroglyphic across the sky. ..."
In Day After Night, Anita Diamant brings us into the world of that exhausted remnant of survivors. Their answer to Europe was to leave it behind forever, only to discover that they were unwanted as well in Eretz Israel--by Biblical right, their promised home. In the hot, parched British internment camp at Atlit, they found themselves imprisoned once again as intruders and aliens, entangled victims of the British Mandate and its waffling promises to Jews and Arabs alike.
“Not one of the women in Barrack C is twenty-one, but all of them are orphans," we learn on the opening page. The book follows the story of four of these women. Tedi is a tall, blonde Dutch Jew who had been in hiding until a hostile neighbor turned her in. An escape from a train heading to Bergen-Belsen saved her from almost certain death. Leonie is a strikingly beautiful young Frenchwoman, hiding a shameful secret about how she had survived the war. Zorah is the only one of the four who is a concentration camp survivor. When the woman who had been her rock through that horrendous time dies shortly before liberation, Zorah sheds her last illusions and ideals and becomes the voice of the nihilist at Atlit. Finally, there is Shayndel, whose story is based on Abba Kovner’s Partisans of Vilna--a hunch I was able to confirm in recent correspondence with Diamant.
The four represent a wide range of Jewish experience during the war, but Diamant brings in other characters as well to depict the complex psychological and physical realities faced by survivors. Though female characters predominate, the men struggle to reassert their manhood and reclaim their future through cocky posturing and largely ineffective flirtation. Secondary female characters also have their own harrowing stories and uncertain future. Illegally at Atlit, a Polish Christian passes as the Jewish mother of an orphan boy she promised to protect, and a suspected former kapo at a concentration camp flails and rants nonstop at her demons.
Diamant structures the plot with great sensitivity to the way people's stories are (or aren’t) revealed in real life. At the beginning she allows the reader to see no more than the way the characters appear to others at the camp as they all mark time waiting for something—anything--to happen. Little by little she feeds the reader bits and pieces of each character’s back story,
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starting with the things that would be easiest for them to tell, and then only deep in the novel revealing the secrets that haunt them.
Their outward demeanor and countenance, whether cheerful and outgoing or quiet and self-contained, might give others in the camp the impression that the main characters have things under control, while in fact unimaginable turmoil is eating each one alive. Everyone feels guilty, not just for specific actions or failures to act, but for surviving when so many did not.
Even when the novel reaches its closing pages, the pain and guilt has still not all been revealed. Shayndel breaks down just outside the kibbutz she dreamed of reaching with her brother, and she has to be brought back to the world of the living by Leonie.
"Nothing is certain,” her friend says. “I know that you are smart enough and brave enough to face whatever will happen. . . .That may be the only thing I am sure of."
Day After Night works backward as a narrative by unpeeling the layers of each prisoner’s story, but Diamant uses an actual October 1945 event to move the action forward as well. The rescue by the Palmach of more than 200 Atlit detainees was a well-coordinated effort to save a group of Iraqi Jews from deportation, and in the process, liberate the entire population of the camp. The daring night escape to nearby Kibbutz Beit Oren, the immediate protective scattering of refugees to kibbutzim all over the territory, and the successful breaking of the British siege of Beit Oren by students and others from nearby Haifa, all make a thrilling climax for the book.
It’s a bittersweet one as well. Characters we have come to care about experience such rapid upheaval and dispersement that the reader participates in their sadness at having no time to say goodbye. Perhaps the best evidence of Anita Diamant’s brilliance as a writer is her ability to make us feel not as if we simply know her characters well, but that we are one of them, living alongside them, wondering, hoping, despairing, and finally moving on.
Diamant (The Red Tent, The Last Days of Dogtown) is superb at finding the unheralded and untold story, and in choosing her subject not from the war years but from the period immediately afterward, she has once again done a great service to Jewish history.
A new book by Anita Diamant is always something about which to sit up and take note, and this is no exception. Achingly well written and historically important, Day After Night is a must-read for those seeking a fuller understanding of the Holocaust and the birth of the nation of Israel.
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