38 – Rockingham County, N.H.
Moishe Cohen looked at the ten men in the lockup at the Rockingham County, New Hampshire, Jail. We have a minyan, he thought, referring to the ten Jews required as the minimum to conduct a prayer service under Jewish law. Despite his prominence in the leadership of the North Shore Jewish Community Center, or perhaps because of that prominence, Cohen felt obligated to take in a family from the ships. He lived in a large house on the waterfront in Marblehead, a yachting community north of Boston that had a substantial population of substantial Jews. Cohen had thought many times about selling the house after his wife, Zelda, passed away from breast cancer three years earlier, but he’d remained there more from inertia than any other reason. Cohen’s daughter lived in San Francisco, married to a Catholic, and couldn’t find room in her career to provide him with a grandchild, or even to visit Massachusetts.
There was plenty of room for the ben Mizrachi family in the nearly empty house. The three teenagers spoke English well, having attended Israeli schools their entire lives. Their parents, however, struggled to learn Hebrew after their arrival in Israel from Yemen. Their English was limited to a few phrases they’d heard in movies. It was unnerving for Cohen to greet the father, Walid ben Mizrachi, with a smile, only to have him smile back and stutter out, “Make my day,” with a grin across his face.
Cohen had toyed with the idea of asking them to remain at the house, of taking on their adoption to America as a mitzvah, a good deed. They’d lost everything they owned in Israel and barely escaped with their lives. It was nice having children around the house, nice to take them in wide-eyed awe to the shopping mall. And he could find a place for Walid in the business. Between his Yemeni background and his Israeli training, he’d have a good business sense.
Watching the startled ben Mizrachi family carted off by federal agents in the dark of the night was more terrifying to Cohen than even his own arrest had been. He did not expect to see them again, ever again. Like so many other Jews taken to camps who were never seen again. Cohen was placed on a yellow school bus, borrowed from the Marblehead Public Schools on extremely short notice that evening, that quickly filled with men pulled from their homes throughout the town. Frighteningly, the bus was driven by a soldier in a uniform. Cohen watched dozens of yellow buses rendezvous at some sort of military camp in nearby Reading, Camp Curtis Guild. He’d never heard of the place and, in fact, did not know there were any military “bases” in Massachusetts, but, then, what did he know of such things, he thought.
The buses parked in a large open area, engines were shut down and then, nothing happened. The men had to use a porta-potti next to the driver’s seat, in plain sight of all the men inside. Cohen was too embarrassed to use the device. The ache in his bowels only added to his discomfort.
Some men dozed as the night wore on. Cohen could not sleep. He recognized a few faces from synagogue and nodded to them. The man sitting next to Cohen made a few attempts at conversation, but the man was too scared to speak particularly clearly.
“I told Nadine we shouldn’t have gotten involved,” he said to Cohen. “Taking in fugitives. Hiding them in our house. And then when I saw on TV about those people being killed on that Coast Guard boat. I told Nadine we had to get rid of those people, we had to. But would she listen to me. God knows, does she ever listen to me. No way. So what does she do. She takes them shopping, to the North Shore Mall of all places.”
Cohen nodded, saying, “Good shops there, but expensive. I haven’t been there since Zelda, may she rest in peace, passed.”
He paused. Smiled. Remembering.
“No, that’s not right. I took the kids there last week. The kids.”
The ben Mizrachi children. It was nice having children in the house, nice having anybody else in the house. It was so empty since Zelda died.
“Yeah, well Nadine grew up around here and she grew up surrounded by Jews,” the man, Harry Mason as he’d introduced himself, continued. “I told her, I don’t know how many times, Nadine, I said, when you grow up the only Jews in a small town in Pennsylvania, like I did, you know better. I told her, Nadine, Jews better not rock the boat. I told her, Nadine, when Jews rock the boat, Jews are the first ones who fall in the water.
“That’s what I told her, but did she listen? Never. So what do you think they’re gonna do with us?”
Cohen shook his head. He had no idea why he’d been arrested, or even if he was arrested. He pretended to sleep, but full sleep evaded him.
Images returned to his mind, images he’d struggled for years to tuck safely away, images that had not surfaced in a decade or more. But Cohen was tired and Cohen was frightened and, since Zelda passed, Cohen was so lonely. But most of all, Cohen was an old man and old men’s memories are sharper the farther back they go.
The image that surfaced in Cohen’s mind was of a similar journey he took when he was fourteen years old, in Poland. Rather than a bus, he’d been on a train, in a freight car. And rather than being surrounded by men, the freight car was filled with families, old, young, children, men, women, girls, boys, strong, weak, healthy, sick, frightened. All frightened. All Jews. He’d spent a week in that freight car, a week with only the food they’d brought with them, a week with only the little water they’d brought in jars, a week using a pile of straw in one corner as the communal toilet.
He’d been with his mother, his father, his grandfather Shmuel, Shmuel his hero, and his two baby sisters, twins Emily and Sarah.
Finally, the train arrived at its destination, a railroad station in what looked like a small town. There were buildings in the distance and one tall smokestack, belching black smoke straight up into the windless sky, the darkest, blackest smoke Cohen ever saw.
As the people stumbled from the freight car, soldiers lined them up and they passed in front of a table at which two men sat, one in a German officer’s uniform, one wearing a white coat, like a doctor. When the Cohen family stood at the table, the officer gestured at Cohen’s mother and sisters and soldiers dragged them off to the side. The doctor glanced quickly at Cohen, his father, and his grandfather.
“Take the old one, too,” the doctor barked, and the soldiers took Shmuel, Cohen’s grandfather, and dragged him to where his mother and sisters stood trembling.
Cohen and his father were taken through a door and, eventually to a wooden barracks. His father lived five weeks and then did not awaken one morning. Cohen persisted. And persisted.
Cohen never saw his mother, his sisters or his grandfather again.
His eyes opened quickly and his head jerked forward as Cohen suddenly came awake. The images were so real. He’d seen the faces of his family and heard the cries of the people around him. Most frightening, however, he’d smelled smoke, a smell he’d inhaled every day for two-and-a-half years in that camp.
Sitting in the yellow school bus, as the eastern sky gradually lightened, surrounded by terrified Jews, Cohen smelled the smoke again and trembled. Shmuel, my hero.
This time, he thought, this time I’m the old man.
Meals were distributed to the men, some sort of military food in packages marked “Meals Ready to Eat.” Cohen’s bus was sent to the Rockingham County Jail over the border in New Hampshire. The men were ushered off the bus and into several group cells, ten or twelve to a cell.
Nobody told the men what was to happen to them. It was not discourtesy; it was just that nobody knew.
As the day wore on Cohen became increasingly confused, unable to nap, as most of the men were doing. His mind raced, jumping randomly, faster and faster from one thought to another as he lost all conscious control of his own thoughts.
I was a mensch, he thought. I survived for a reason. My life’s goal was to do good, to treat people the way God wants people treated. When other fabric mills left Massachusetts and moved to Carolina, to Alabama, to China, I stayed. I paid my people well. I provided health insurance. I produced good products, not schlock. I supported the synagogue. I gave money to Israel.
Why am I here? Why, after all these years and all I have done, why am I locked up surrounded by Jews who are locked up?
Cohen sat on the concrete floor and looked at his left forearm, at the row of numbers there. He smiled as he recalled the speech he’d given at the press conference a few days earlier. He recalled the words that brought a room full of news reporters, cameras, television lights and all, to absolute silence.
“Never again,” he mumbled out loud. “Never again, never again.”
Moishe Cohen closed his eyes, rolled his head back so his shut eyelids were facing heaven and silently asked Zelda what he should do.
“Not again, Zeldala. I can’t go through it again.”
Cohen stood, then slowly walked among the men to the far corner of the cell, where the toilet was located beneath a barred window. His trousers dropped to the floor. He knotted one pants leg into a loop and quietly placed it over his head. Climbing on the toilet seat, Cohen reached up on his toes and tied the other trouser leg to the window bars as high as he could reach.
Taking one last look at the men in the cell, dozing or talking softly among themselves in groups as far from the smelly toilet as they could get, Cohen whispered the prayer that had comforted him through his years in the German camp.
“Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad.” Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
Moishe Cohen, millionaire industrialist, stepped off the smelly toilet seat in the drunk tank of the Rockingham, New Hampshire County Jail and dangled from his knotted pants. He’d stopped breathing by the time anybody noticed the old man in the corner.