Where the Desert Meets the Sea

by Werner Sonne

He’d spent the final months of the war as a young army doctor in the Pacific, where they were still fighting for weeks after the last guns in Europe had already fallen silent, and he’d seen what the atomic bomb in Hiroshima had done to the people there. At first, he hadn’t seen the newsreel footage from the camps with names he’d never heard before: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau. Only when he returned to New York was it clear to him what had happened in Europe. He had never been a devout Jew. The only time his family actually ever practiced was on Yom Kippur and a little bit at Hanukkah, to compensate for the Christmas festivities all around them. But after the war, David started becoming interested in his own history, his roots. His grandparents had emigrated from Ukraine at the end of the nineteenth century; he remembered them still speaking Yiddish at home. After the war, the news kept growing that attested to the unimaginable: the Nazis had killed millions of European Jews. Systematically. It had made David feel like a Jew for the first time, a survivor of a race the Nazis had designated for total extermination. So, when he read in the New York Times about Hadassah Hospital, he applied on impulse. That was a year ago now, in early 1946.