Naomi Weiss has heard her father's stories so many times she could tell them herself. Her mother, though, is an enigma, a memory shrouded in repression and time.

By the time Naomi was 8, her mother was beginning to experience the first small signs of the multiple sclerosis that would kill her in her mid-50s, when Naomi was a teenager.

Naomi can only surmise much of what happened to her mother during the war. The facts are fairly few.

The Feldmann family lived in Novy Bohumin, a town in Czechoslovakia. Gerda was 15 when the Nazis sent the truck to take her to the labor camp. She was the same age as Anne Frank, Eric Weiss points out, and was eventually sent to the same typhus-cursed camp, Bergen-Belsen.

Gerda's sister, two aunts and young cousin had managed to flee before then to Palestine. The rest of the family was caught up in the horror of the Holocaust.

Gerda was 22, bone-thin and sick with typhus when Allied soldiers, victorious over Hitler, marched into Bergen-Belsen with the Red Cross in tow.

By then, Gerda had lost her youth, most of her family and any reserves she might have had against disease. She told her family only that she cried and that a British soldier tried to dry her tears. She was horrified for years that the handkerchief might not have been clean.

She was sent to a hospital in Sweden to recuperate for a year. When she was well enough, she made her way to Palestine to join what little family she had left.

Neither Naomi nor Eric Weiss know how she got to Palestine. She probably traveled by train to the Mediterranean and then caught one of the ships in the flotilla steaming between Europe and Tel Aviv, transporting Jews to what more and more of them were convinced was to be their homeland.

The British, who controlled Palestine, struggled to keep order. They limited immigration and turned back many ships filled with illegal immigrants. Gerda Feldmann wouldn't have had to worry about that. With family in Palestine, she had British permission to come.

When she stepped off the gangplank at Tel Aviv, she must have been overwhelmed with relief but perhaps dismayed at what she saw.

Tel Aviv, founded by the Zionists in 1909, might have seemed shabby to her, a town hastily thrown up on the khaki-colored landscape. She had come from a land of rolling green hills and medieval cathedrals.

"Tel Aviv was built up quickly, and it has no architectural style," Eric Weiss says. "But it's charming. I loved it."

"Some writer said Tel Aviv was like a chest of drawers with the drawers pulled out," says Frances Mayer, Eric's sister. "It was very ugly to us. People pulled up boxes to live in.

"But it wasn't dangerous. There was no crime even, much less Nazis."

Tel Aviv was then, and is now, a bustling city where drivers honk their horns and pedestrians rush from place to place. Now, resort hotels have sprung up along the sandy Mediterranean beach. Then, the cars shared space with donkey carts and camels.

On Saturdays, the beach, with fine brown sand framing a turquoise sea, was crammed with sunbathers and soldiers on furlough.

There, Gerda and Eric met. He was nine years older, handsome, worldly and educated. He was with a group of soldiers, she with a bunch of girls. Someone knew someone, Eric remembers, so they all went to lunch. She picked at her food. He found out she came from Bohemia, and his father was from Austria, another Bohemian country.

Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company