September 1947. Two sections of one magazine. A boy behind wire. An actor among the Voices of the Dead. They would never meet.

There is a Yiddish word I have been thinking about for a long time. Beshert. It means meant to be. Not destiny in the grand sense, not fate with its heavy machinery, but something quieter. A thread you only notice after the cloth is finished. The thing that was always going to be true, woven in, waiting to be seen.

I want to show you a magazine.

It is dated Friday, September 19, 1947. The Answer: An American Weekly Dedicated to the Struggle for Hebrew National Liberation and the Independence of Palestine. Vol. V, No. 38. Ten cents. Published by the American League for a Free Palestine, the organization Ben Hecht had helped found to raise money and rally American support for the Jews trapped in displaced persons camps after the war.

It came in two sections that week. Both sections have something on the cover that belongs to my family.

Section One: A Boy Behind Wire

The front page of Section 1 carries the headline RESISTANCE REJECTS PARTITION. Underneath, two stories run side by side. On the left, “Bevin Saw Dollars in Exodus Affair.” On the right, “Irgun Refutes Lies Of British Agency.”

The British had intercepted the Exodus 1947 in July, boarded it off the coast of Palestine, and dragged its 4,500 Jewish passengers back to Europe. First to France. Then, when the refugees refused to disembark, to Germany, of all places. To the country that had spent six years trying to murder them. By September they were being loaded onto trains from Hamburg to the Poppendorf DP camp. Behind wire. Under guard. Again.

On one of those trains was a seventeen-year-old boy from Brody, in eastern Galicia. His town’s Jewish population had been almost entirely murdered. He had survived in the woods. He had made his way to a DP camp. He had believed he was going to Palestine.

Instead he was going back to Germany.

Somewhere along that journey, photographers got pictures of refugee boys pressing against the wire netting of a train window, a piece of the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)