Lilith
From CleanPosts
LILITH
In 1928 a girl child was born to Benjamin and Edith Gervasi in London while Benjamin was attending Imperial College. He named her Lilith because it was an interesting name.
“Interesting in the way 'Jezebel' or 'Medusa' or 'Typhoid Mary' is interesting,” Edith complained, but she knew she could do nothing to change Benjamin's mind, so her daughter was Lilith.
In Jewish legends, Lilith was Adam's first wife, created from the same soil at the same time as Adam, rather than from his rib like Eve, his second wife. Lilith left her husband when she refused to accept the missionary position that Adam insisted on doing, since it left the man on top. Cursed by God, Lilith became a she-demon who roamed the night looking for the souls of newborn infants to steal, but the prophet Isaiah foresaw that she would find rest in the Messianic Age.
As the decade of the 1930s wore on, Jews were systematically stripped of their civil rights on the Continent, and began to be moved into work camps that evolved into “racial hygiene” (extermination) camps, but nothing like that happened in Britain. There were Jews in Parliament. The Gervasi family had been royal subjects for many generations, and Benjamin Gervasi was a meteorologist with a speciality in numerical methods of mesoscale forecasting. He lived, unfortunately, before the proper tool for his work, the computer, had been invented.
Jews on the whole were rather rare in the United Kingdom. During the years of the Great Depression Benjamin Gervasi could only find work as a lighthouse keeper at Atherfield Lighthouse on the Isle of Wight, just a few miles off the southern coast of England.
This job, however, had several good points associated with it, Benjamin thought. First, his wife and eventually also his daughter aided him in his work. It became a family endeavor. Second, the lighthouse grounds doubled as a meteorological outstation. During daylight, they sent by Teletype hourly reports of temperature, humidity, cloud height, cloud formation, wind direction, and wind force to the Meteorological Office in London. This allowed him a small amount of satisfaction, to work within his chosen field.
Once a week when Benjamin was paid his salary, a small amount of petrol was delivered to power the engine that turned the lighthouse shaft. He was never tempted to divert even a small portion of this petrol to his motorcar, as he had no motorcar, but he did have to keep an eye out for certain neighbors who did. Every weekday morning Lilith trudged up the hillside to the nearest village for her Primary school, and sometimes her mother accompanied her when she needed to attend to shopping. On Shabbat they ceased from their labors and remained indoors. Very rarely, Benjamin would arrange transportation by bus and ferry, and they took such holidays as they could afford, often in the Lake District, camping in the high, treeless hills called fells that qualified as mountains in England.
In the lead-up to World War II British scientists were tasked to create a “death ray” based on radio waves to take down German bombers. They never quite managed a death ray, but in their research they found that metallic objects at great distances could reflect a radio pulse and the time delay displayed on an oscilloscope was a very accurate indication of distance. Rotating an antenna could pin down a target's position.
Thus was born RDF, or Range and Direction Finding, that later was dubbed RADAR. A network of RDF stations called Chain Home made all the difference in the Battle of Britain, which occurred over the summer of 1940.
Numerically the Luftwaffe had an edge over the Royal Air Force, but when the Luftwaffe attacked they had to hunt for RAF fighters, while the RAF (aided by Chain Home) knew exactly where the Luftwaffe was and could concentrate.
The Luftwaffe also had an edge when it came to the quality of their aircraft, but with Chain Home providing early warning of attacks, RAF pilots could rest until they were scrambled, use less fuel, and put less wear and tear on their aircraft.
As the Luftwaffe began to take heavy losses in bombers and also their fighter cover, they tried to attack some of the Chain Home stations, including one that was constructed nigh to the Atherfield lighthouse, but as the Gervasi family could attest, the antenna towers with their open structure were not very susceptible to blast damage from bombs, and the few that actually were knocked down were repaired within days while operators from nearby 'dummy' stations broadcast signals that fooled the Germans into thinking no damage was done at all.
The Luftwaffe tried flying lower, approaching England below the sight line of Chain Home stations, but the British used smaller RDF systems intended to direct gunfire against ships, and German losses continued to mount at an unacceptable rate.
So the Luftwaffe switched to night raids, knowing that even if they were detected, the RAF could do nothing about it, since the defending planes could not see the bombers in the dark when it came to the actual combat. The British quickly miniaturized the RDF systems and installed them on fighter planes, which rapidly ended German night bombing over England.
Since the battle took place over United Kingdom home turf, if an RAF plane was shot down, the British pilot could bail out and be back in the air flying another plane on the same day, if he was not injured. But if a German pilot bailed out over land, he was invariably captured, and if he bailed out over the Channel he was likely to die from drowning or exposure to cold.
When the Battle of Britain came to an end in October 1940 the British had lost only about 500 airmen while the Germans lost eight times that number. Nearly a thousand German pilots were captured. The Luftwaffe lost nearly two thousand planes and Hitler was forced to shelf his invasion plans indefinitely. In hindsight they were never realistic. Even if Germany had obtained a lasting command of the air, Britain was a maritime nation with an unmatched Navy that would have checked any sea crossing of the channel, which Germany was ill-prepared to make in any event. Hitler had been thwarted for the first time in the war. He turned his gaze to the East and began preparing the Barbarossa campaign against the Soviet Union.
The UK shifted emphasis from defense to offense, and during the course of 1941 it became clear to Bomber Command that night navigation to the correct target was a serious issue. In 1942 an electronic guidance system called Clarinet was developed that used two highly directional radio beams, one transmitting Morse code “dots” and the other one transmitting “dashes”, to be received by a single bomber flying in the lead of the wave (to minimize the chance of the Germans reverse-engineering the system from a downed plane). When the lead plane encountered the strongest part of the second signal of dashes, it dropped a load of marker flares, and the bomber wave dropped their bombs on these flares.
The weather was quite murky and wet, so the Admiral's inspection of the exterior of the lighthouse was necessarily cut short. While his driver waited in the car, Benjamin showed the Admiral the room where the Teletype and Clarinet transmitter was installed. Ramsay thanked Benjamin personally for his service to the King, and Benjamin, for his part, considered it prudent not to mention the assistance he received from his wife and daughter.
The Admiral's eyes were captivated by a wall chart, and he asked Benjamin to identify it.
“That's my moving five-day weather forecast for Undercliff, Sir, this little strip of land where the lighthouse is located. We're in a rain-shadow, you know. And a fog-shadow, if you will. The weather here is typically not quite as immoderate as it is for you Overners.”
Benjamin led the Admiral into the white octagonal tower to inspect the Clarinet antenna. He took him spiralling up the ninety-four steps to the top, where the huge crystal lens (chipped now by a 1943 air raid) slowly rotated, and they could see for thirty nautical miles out to sea. They could see the English Channel roiling with whitecaps from high winds which threatened to derail the invasion.
“And you do this weather forecasting as a sort of hobby?”
“Perhaps a bit more than just a hobby, Admiral Sir Ramsey. I'm trained as a meteorologist, and I'm a damn fine one, if you don't mind me carrying my own chair, so to speak. But with the war and all, I find myself . . . overqualified for the task I currently occupy. Now, I know we've all got to pull together to stop Jerry, and I'm sure other professional are in the same predicament, but all the same, one must use the skills one has been trained to use, or the mind gets in a bit of a rut.”
“I see.”
“It's not as sterile as one might imagine. By a strange fluke of geography and wind and water currents, the weather here at the lighthouse, which can be quite different from the rest of England or even the rest of the Isle of Wight, almost always corresponds to the weather on the coast of France, in the Normandy area. I've checked it for years, in every season, and the match is very good, more than eighty percent of the time, well outside the possibility of coincidence. I plan to publish a paper about it after the war.”
“Is that so? Remarkable! And what do you predict for Undercliff?”
“A twenty-four hour break in this weather, partly cloudy, winds drop to five knots. Then on the afternoon of the sixth of June we return to the same pattern. This forecast holds for here and the Normandy coast. Everywhere else along the English Channel there will be no twenty-four hour break. There will be only fog and rain and winds gusting to thirty knots.”
Sir Ramsey was suddenly filled with great admiration for Benjamin Gervasi, because Eisenhower's chief meteorologist had predicted the very same short break in the weather over Normandy, using B-17 aircraft far out over the Atlantic to gather the data, but General Eisenhower was dithering. The Admiral knew if he told the General the dough-nut hole in the bad weather was confirmed by a second independent source, it might be enough to make him decide to launch the invasion of France on the morning of June 6, just when the Germans were letting their guard down with intelligence of a solid week of terrible weather.
The Admiral asked, “Does the strange correlation of weather between Undercliff hold for the Pas-De-Calais?”
“Alas, no. I'm afraid that predicting the weather for Dover and Calais is more like a jigsaw puzzle, and my reports to the Weather Office are but one piece.”
The Admiral sighed, reluctant to proceed. There was one final duty Mr. Gervasi could perform for England, and it saddened the Admiral to deceive the man, but there was no choice. It was, in fact, the main reason for his visit. The net of operational deception woven around Operation Neptune had to be watertight.
“Then it is time to reveal the real purpose of my visit here, and why I have attended to this myself rather than send a staffer. What I'm about to tell you has the highest possible classification. You cannot mention a word of it even to your wife or daughter.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Mr. Gervasi, the following three weeks will be very lively ones for you, I'm afraid. You are no doubt aware that most of southern England has become one large armed camp containing millions of troops and all their supplies. As we get closer to the invasion across the Strait of Dover, which is set for June 20, you will find that your Clarinet task orders will be coming in at a much greater rate.”
“Daily rather than weekly?”
“Twice daily, I'm afraid. We will soon be bombing the landing areas more or less continuously. Now is the time we must make our greatest effort. I needed to tell you this, Mr. Gervasi, lest you think something has gone terribly wrong. And I could not trust this information to others.”
Benjamin assured the young admiral he understood his duty perfectly. And with that, they parted, but Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay felt thoroughly soiled.
The Germans were not complete idiots. Earlier in the year a U-boat captain, gazing at the shore of the Isle of Wight through his periscope, noted that the Atherfield lighthouse stopped flashing for hours. He noted the start and stop time, and a clever intelligence agent in Berlin realized this matched the start and stop time of the Clarinet signal originating from what they thought was a nearby tower. A second and third observation over the next two weeks verified the anomaly. In the early morning hours of June 3rd, a German sub surfaced just offshore, and commandos rowed ashore to raid the lighthouse, led by an SS captain named Felix Schaub who doubled as the political officer aboard the U-boat to ensure its loyalty to Hitler.
On this occasion Schaub wore his black pre-war Schutz Staffel uniform for the brutal psychological effect he knew it would have on the Gervasi family.
With Lilith and Edith whimpering in terror, tied up and threatened with pistols pointed at their heads, Benjamin demonstrated the Clarinet system to Captain Schaub, but to Benjamin's great surprise the Germans neither destroyed the gear nor tried to remove it to their submarine. Instead, Schaub pulled out a notebook and identified each member of the Gervasi family by name, and he told them he knew they were Jews. He said whether they lived or died would depend on the correct answer to precisely two questions: “What is the target of the planned invasion across the English Channel?”
Benjamin stiffened in dismay. He was confronted with the choice of losing his family or betraying the trust Admiral Sir Ramsay had given him. At the slightest nod from Schaub, the hammer was pulled back on the pistol pointed at Lilith's head.
Gervasi gave in. “Calais,” he said, and let out the breath he had been holding for nearly a minute.
“Goot,” Captain Schaub said. “And the timing?”
“June twentieth.”
The SS officer smiled and put his notebook away. “I'm a man of my word,” he said. “Neither you nor your wife nor your daughter will be killed. Now here is what I want you to do, Mr. Gervasi. From now on, when you get your orders to operate Clarinet, you will carry them out, but you will be a little sloppy when you align the antenna. Not too much! Perhaps just a fraction of one degree. Just enough to throw the bombing raid off by a few hundred yards. You will do this until the end of the war. And more importantly, you will tell no one that you are sabotaging the raids.”
“Or you'll come back and kill us?”
“Benjamin, I'm disappointed in you! What does a man have in this world if he fails to do what he promises he will do? You have my word of honor that neither you nor your lovely Edith nor your beautiful young Lilith will be killed. But they will be taken to the concentration camp near Saint-Malo in France were all the British Jews in the Channel Islands have been relocated.”
“No, I beg you!”
“They will not be mistreated there. But if we learn that a future air raid on Germany using the transmitter at this lighthouse is successful, things will not seem so good. But even then, my word will hold. Lilith and Edith will be transferred to a work camp deeper in France, perhaps even in Germany.” He closed the leaves of his notebook with a snap. “It is astonishing how much work you can get out of a Jew with a whip.”
Lilith and Edith were taken to Cherbourg, and by the evening of June 4 they were inducted into their first camp, a French farm that had been dubbed a clinic for racial hygiene. The Atherfield lighthouse was not the only Clarinet system that had been raided by Captain Schaub, but it was the only one whose operator remained alive after the raid. Schuab's report filtered up to Hitler, and the final piece of deception in the Fortitude operation was in place. Hitler reinforced the defenses in the Pas-De-Calais region and left only a skeleton force at Normandy.
It is common knowledge that Calais was a feint, and the real invasion took place on the beaches of Normandy on the morning of June 6, 1944. Two Panzer tank divisions, which might have driven the invaders back into the sea, were kept on a tight leash by Hitler, because he didn't trust his own generals. Hitler himself slept until noon on that day, and didn't release the Panzers until 4 PM, by which time the beachhead was relatively secure, and Allied aircraft dominated the skies to the point of forcing German tanks to move only at night.
But for two months the Allies became tied down in the Normandy region trying to break out of “hedgerow country” while the Germans attempted to contain them. When they finally did, the breakthrough was very near to the Saint-Malo area where Lilith and Edith were being held. To prevent their premature liberation, the Germans moved everyone in the camp to another one in France far from the front lines.
Benjamin Gervasi continued to operate the Clarinet system when orders came in over the Teletype, but he deliberately altered the requested target angle slightly, believing it to be the only way he could save the lives of his wife and daughter. The deception came to an end in September when Lilith failed to register for secondary school. The constable came calling, who found evidence of the German raid, and notified army intelligence, who squeezed the truth out of Benjamin. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay intervened personally to keep Benjamin out of prison, but he was sacked from his lighthouse job and gradually began to despair of seeing either one of his loved ones again.
After breaking out of Normandy Patton's 3rd Army moved across France at an unbelievable pace. Lilith and Edith found themselves being moved at least once a month, which was encouraging in a way, but the camps grew progressively worse the nearer they drew to Germany itself. Internment camps were abandoned for work camps. Work camp were evacuated and the Jews went to slave labor camps, and then punishment camps, and finally an extermination camp called Ohrdruf-Nord deep in the center of Germany proper, where Jews were to be worked to death constructing a railroad center that was never finished..
Along the way currency, gold, and jewelry (of which Lilith and Edith had none) were sent to the SS headquarters of the Economic Adminstration. Watches, clocks, and pens were sent to the troops on the Western, Eastern, and Italian fronts. Their civilian clothing was given to needy German families.
Lilith saw things that pushed far beyond any boundaries of human evil she thought where possible to exist. And Ohrdruf wasn't even the worst camp in the hellish constellation. Those were to be found further to the east.
Some men have a strong taste for sixteen year old female flesh. Lilith learned to trade her body for scraps of extra food. Some of this she ate herself, but it was purely business. The longer she could delay taking on the figure of a skeleton, the more likely she was to have more opportunities to trade her body for food. The rest of this extra food she gave to her mother.
This became a problem during the terrifying and humiliating appells, or inspections that followed roll call and lasted most of the day, when Lilith and Edith were found to be wasting away at a slower rate than their companion prisoners. They were successful in feigning weakness, but it was more difficult to hide their extra weight, and suspicion was raised. One time when the guns of Patton's tanks could be hard only forty miles away, and the twelve thousand inmates of the camp were being loaded onto cattle cars for transfer to Buchenwald, Edith Gervasi was discovered in possession of a little extra food.
The Germans did something to Edith Gervasi, a kind of crucifixion with ropes that was so much more terrible than anything Lilith had witnessed or imagined up to that point that the soul of the girl was seared, as though by a hot iron. For years afterward wanted to die just to erase the memory of it. Lilith the child in fact died just then, and another Lilith emerged who bore little resemblance to the one who had gone just moments before.
The Nazis didn't kill Edith in their treatment of her, but so much the worse for her suffering. Nazi renegades who went into hiding throughout the world after the war had little idea their most terrible, implacable huntress had truly been born on this day in a satellite camp of Buchenwald called Ohrdruf Nord
Lilith herself, as Edith's daughter, was to be stripped naked and clubbed to death before the still living eyes of Edith, to increase her suffering as she looked down from the Screaming Tree and begged to die.
In the undressing room Lilith seized a pistol from an SS officer named Eduard Farben and shot dead both him and a guard named Wilhelm Grabner. Other prisoners joined to attack other guards, but the SS called in reinforcements and got control of the situation again.
All the female prisoners were mustered together and marched for miles outside of the camp, barefoot, in the snow. They were kept outside at the position of attention until late in the afternoon, while they were threatened and ordered to reveal who had killed the two men. The information was not forthcoming, so they were ordered to run back to the camp. The laggards were beaten to a pulp with clubs. A thousand women died during this forced run, including Edith Gervasi, who was still in shock with crippled arms from the Screaming Tree.
The survivors were mustered together again for another roll call. The commander of the camp gave an order to flog the entire first row of prisoners because the exhausted and freezing women had poor posture. This first row included Lilith.
Listening to the screams of the prisoners being whipped before her turn was almost worse than the actual punishment.
She was stripped naked and held by two female guards over the whipping table while a third laid on the rawhide with a will. In later years Lilith said the agony of this punishment was indescribable, and so she never attempted to describe it. Only Round Robyn knew this, or what really happened to her mother, because Lilith allowed Round Robyn alone, out of everyone else in the Women's Democratic Forum, to Share.
Lilith lost count of how many strokes she received, and woke up in the camp hospital in only slightly less agony, with her entire back aflame. It would take four days before she could get more than a few minutes of uninterrupted sleep. She had lost a lot of blood and the slightest movement opened the scars and caused her to bleed again. So Lilith could not be moved from the hospital or walk under her own power and as the American forces drew very near, the entire camp descended into chaos. Lilith was left behind.
A day later Lilith did manage to stumble out of bed for one final task. Troops of the 89th Infantry Division of the US Third Army captured Ohrdruf-Nord on April 4, 1945. Among the many thousands of dead Jews whose burnt or decomposing bodies where strewn about, one female German guard lay on the ground with her head nearly twisted off the spine. She was the one who had laid the lash on Lilith's back.
After the war when Lilith had been sufficiently deloused and scrubbed, and proved her status as a British subject to the satisfaction of the Occupation, she was placed on a ship and sent home to her father. Meeting him on a dock at Portsmouth, she gazed upon him as though across a great gulf, which was the memory of the ordeal she had somehow survived. They were utter strangers to each other now.
Lilith was suffering from what would later be termed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It would be a long time before she could summon the will to begin to recover from her experiences.
No matter how much he pleaded with her, Lilith never spoke to her father or anyone else about what the Germans had done to her mother. Robyn got the memory wordlessly, directly from the source.
