I read Anita Diamant’s Day After Night because the review in Publisher’s Weekly a few months ago. The story sounded fascinating, about four women who meet in Atlit after the war. Two of them were in the death camps in Europe, one managed to hide–not unscathed–in Paris, and one was a resistance fighter in Lithuania.
It’s painfully ironic that so many Jewish people who arrived in Palestine after the war (and before the founding of Israel) ended up in detention camps with barbed wire while the British tried to sort out who was who and maintain immigration quotas. There are a couple of scenes in the book when new arrivals freak out at the sight of barracks and more wire fences. It’s just heartbreaking. The story starts a few weeks before a mass breakout that reminded me a lot of the movie Exodus, based on the novel by Leon Uris. Only without Paul Newman.
Until the breakout, we are treated to scenes of camp life, starting with the horribly evocative showers. Then there is the spying, as survivors try to find the Christians who are, for some reason, trying to hide in Israel. And there are the machinations of the Jewish Agency and the Palmach, who are ferrying people out of Atlit as soon as they found places for them at the kibbutzim around the country. Along the way, the back stories of the four main characters are revealed. We also get to know a little bit about the political situation that keeps the survivors and refugees in the camps, but only a little.
The problem with this book is the the characters don’t really evolve much past two dimensional. The characters are there to represent different experiences of and reactions to the Holocaust. Sometimes, their dialog turns into speeches. It’s a surprisingly slim book to try and contain so much. The plot and the characters suffer for it. When I reached the end, I wished that there had been more to this book. With four characters and this historical setting, Day After Night should have been bigger. As it is, this book is just a glimpse into Atlit and the aftermath of the Holocaust.