Now, at last, sensing a future where she could look at people and not fear their stares, Renia began to feel a tingle of joy.
Benito was waiting for them at the Istanbul station, with another comrade whom Renia named only as V. Everyone was elated; they all stayed together at an inn. V barraged them with questions about people he knew. He happily bathed Muniosh, who’d arrived with the first group; he was constantly busy, trying to reach the handful of remaining Jews across Europe. He “cried like a baby” hearing their stories of loss. V was desperate to get Zivia out of Poland, but she would not budge. She still had so much work to do, her letters said. She needed to stay put.
Jews roamed freely through the streets of Istanbul. Nobody was after them, nobody pointed fingers. Renia spent a week marveling at how strange this was, to not be suspect, to not be hunted. Then, a boat ride across the Bosporus Strait, a train across Syria, stops in Aleppo and the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
On March 6, 1944, Renia Kukielka, a nineteen-year-old stenographer from J?drzejów, arrived in Haifa, Palestine.
Part 4
The Emotional Legacy
Interviewer: How are you?
Renia: [Pause] Usually, I’m fine.
—Yad Vashem testimony, 2002
We had been liberated from the fear of death, but we were not free from the fear of life.
—Hadassah Rosensaft, a Jewish dentist who stole food, clothing, and medication for patients at Auschwitz
Chapter 30
Fear of Life
The one who survives will be like a leaf cast about by a gale, a leaf that doesn’t belong to anyone and has lost its mother tree, which has died. . . . The leaf will fly with the wind and won’t find a place for itself, neither finding the old leaves it used to know, nor a patch of the old sky. It’s impossible to accrete to a new tree. And the poor leaf will wander, recalling the old, though very sad, days, and ever longing to return, but it won’t find its place.
—Chajka Klinger, I Am Writing These Words to You
March 1944
Renia made it to the homeland, foggy, elated. She had left Poland a fugitive, wanted by the Gestapo, and was now in her dreamland. After a rehabilitating stay at Kibbutz Givat Brenner’s sanatorium, where Renia continued writing her memoirs, she settled with comrade Chawka at the verdant Kibbutz Dafna, in the Galilee region. （The same kibbutz is described in Leon Uris’s novel Exodus.） Here, at last, with her fellow six hundred kibbutzniks, she felt comfort, “as if I’d arrived at the home of my parents.” Many Zionist movement survivors came to Israel, finally joining the kibbutzim for which they’d prepared. Even non-Zionist survivors were attracted to the kibbutzim, not for their ideology but for providing work, pride and, structure to their lives.
And yet. There were still differences, difficulties. As relieved as she was to end her wandering and be free to sing the songs she’d suppressed for years, Renia was still weighed down by torment and the memories of those lost. “We feel like we’re smaller and weaker than the people around us,” she wrote shortly after arriving. “Like we don’t have the same right to life as they do.”
Like many survivors, Renia did not always feel understood. She traveled through Palestine, giving talks about her experience in the war, speaking at venues ranging from the Haifa amphitheater to the dining rooms of local kibbutzim, telling the world about the extermination of Polish Jewry. In a testimony for the National Library of Israel given in the 1980s, Renia recalled that she’d once been asked to speak at Kibbutz Alonim. She began to tell her story in Polish and Yiddish, when her speech was interrupted by a commotion. The moment she stopped talking, the audience members moved the chairs and tables. What was going on? It turned out, they were preparing for a dance. The music blared. Renia felt so offended, she rushed out, not sure if they simply didn’t understand her language or didn’t care.