KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
and brought to the orphanage in December. Behira Zakay recalled being picked up by Natke Gold and Uta Greik, both of whom were about seventeen years old and had been Dror members before the war. When they were released from a labor camp, they started working for Dror. “We came because they told us that we could immigrate to Is- rael with these children,” said Zakay. About seventy children, mostly orphans, stayed in three or four rooms, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Chana Haklay recalled that their meals were served on enamel plates, which she took offense at: “I had the feeling only dogs get food on such plates.” Two Jews from the Russian army, Leon Rubinstein and Yasha [last name not recorded], immigrated to Israel with them. Arie Medlinger, the youngest of the children who later went to Kibbutz Yagur and were subsequently known as the Dror group, survived the war with his mother, posing as a Polish family, first outside the Warsaw ghetto and later in the town of Kielce. Two weeks before the Russian army liberated Kielce, his mother died of typhus and was buried under her Polish pseudonym, Maria Ja- bobska. (Many years later, Medlinger found her grave and gave her a Jewish burial at Kibbutz Yagur under her real name, Rosa.) Medlinger was considered too young to go to Israel, but a young woman at the Dror orphanage, Haviva Rosenberg, agreed to take him. “Ever since I had been a child and heard about hachsharas training people for life on a new settlement,” he said, “I’d wanted to live in a country that was only for Jews. It was winter. I collect- ed my belongings in a blanket, threw them out of the window, and [Haviva] took me.” They all remembered being smuggled with the other Dror chil- dren, early in 1946, across the Polish border into Czechoslovakia and posing as Greek refugees returning to Greece. They spoke in Hebrew, not Polish, but Peleg recalled that “the Poles knew who we were and said, ‘You are JewishI Don’t pretend!”’ Many Polish Jews received Greek papers, and the frontier patrols mistook Hebrew for Greek and let them through. “After a time, Greek authorities, un- aware that such a large ‘Greek’ colony existed in Poland, wondered why none of these people reached Greece.” 4 The Czechs, Peleg Jewish!
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