One of her paintings is called Poetry of the Jail. Enclosed by barbed wire ten naked ghostly figures, sexless, indistinguishable from each other, huddle together, imagining—remembering—freedom. Freedom is having red hair that takes up half the sky. Freedom is your breasts glowing like full moons, glistening like melons washed by monsoon rain. In the exhibition catalogue Marc Chagall is cited and not only for colour reasons. (‘When Matisse dies,’ Picasso said once, ‘Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour is.’) It’s also because of the persistence of human figures in the woman’s work, no matter the symbolism and her wild playing with colour and form. ‘Drop me into an abyss,’ she says, ‘and I find human expressions and experiences to paint.’
Colours of her prison work: pinkish reds, eyeshadowy blues and purples (think teenage girls, pre-sophisticates), lemon yellows, enshrouding whites.
‘I remember thinking about her going to prison,’ the Chaplain says, ‘for hiding her grandson while her daughter-in-law and people around her were thugs and drug dealers. She’d lost her son. I understood her so clearly, why she did it. The whole situation was insane. I cannot get my head around it.’
Chaplain comes to the woman’s house. Chaplain’s kids are little. They bring a kosher picnic, and plastic plates, and they befriend the woman’s mother and husband—‘a beautiful, gentle soul’. The woman’s mother’s lungs were destroyed in the hiding. She can breathe better in this house far away from traffic, surrounded by trees. The house, thinks the Chaplain, is like something in a movie. ‘With a cellar, an attic, surrounded by forest, and no heating.’ The driveway is so steeply angled they are frightened to drive their old eight-seater van up to the entrance. They park at the bottom and walk. Chaplain asks to see the room where the boy was hidden. She’s surprised: looks like a boy’s room. ‘It had a door that looked like part of the wall. A bit like where people were hidden during the war. Otherwise,’ she says, ‘it was a lovely room with wooden walls.’ A psychologist who researches hidden child survivors of the Holocaust sees the room when she comes to interview the woman for her dissertation. For her the parallels are uncanny and she writes: ‘To step into her home in a remote part of Melbourne where she lived with her husband and elderly mother was to experience a stepping back in time to Poland under the Nazi regime. There was nothing ostensibly in the environment which provoked this image, yet the atmosphere was unquestionably so.’
Psychologist was thrown too by the driveway’s steepness. Oh boy. Did it ever require some kamikaze driving.
The grandparents are forbidden from seeing their grandson for nine years until he is twenty-one and can make his own choices. They have no money or avenues left to fight the court’s order. The woman tries to ‘develop rage for’ the boy’s mother but that’s easier said than done. She was the one to search for the mother in the first place while the boy’s father was still alive. To deprive a child of a living mother is a travesty—that’s what she believed and why she went looking. A child’s mother may be absent, troubled, have a drug problem, but still you have to try. The woman’s own mother is her biggest hero. The bond they have—had it from day one—is sacred. ‘My mother survived bravely,’ she says. ‘My father was an exceptionally brave man who simply couldn’t survive. My mother lived till ninety-eight and could have lived another ten. She had cancer and they refused to do chemo because of her age, which I cannot forgive them for.’
She cannot hate the boy’s mother: ‘My son said she had rocks in her head. That man could have easily killed her. One more punch another time and she could have been dead. She lost her teeth. Her children had to clean up pools of blood after their mother was beaten to a pulp.’ This mother was a victim too but she, no, didn’t, couldn’t, protect her boys (from what the woman understands the man spared his daughter, left her alone, it’s impossible to know for sure). The mother has ‘sunk into trouble’, the woman says. It is possible to sink into trouble you know.
If only the woman could have known the man was out of jail when she went looking for the boy’s mother. Yes, she did offer to adopt, at her own son’s funeral actually. No-brainer it seemed like: the boy had always been with them and this way he’d be safe, looked after, raised with knowledge of their history and customs, and the house could go to him when they were dead. The ‘tug of war’ only started a certain while after the motorcycle accident. One factor—you can speculate about others—was the traffic accident compensation, a considerable amount, to be paid out to each child of the parent killed.
Rage she cannot feel for the boy’s mother she feels for the institutions supposed to keep all children safe. She feels it for Australia: ‘I came to this country thinking it was a civilised society. How wrong I was. It’s a wild, wild West. A modern country filled with barbarians. How else could such a terrible injustice occur, and my two grandsons be put in mortal danger by the lawmakers of this country?’ The other grandson always lived with the mother; she has no history with him, no deep connection. Only love and a sense of intolerable injustice.
Attached to a feature article in a long since defunct independent magazine are photographs of the woman in the forest near her house. She is looking up at sky, to the ground, into the distance, down the camera. In yet another photograph she stands next to her husband, he’s in a suit, her in a white blouse, she is cradling a dog. The woman’s mother, still alive, is sitting in front holding a photograph of the boy in a bow tie. Behind the three of them are the woman’s works. Startling, large, vortex-like.
‘What happened to me is not normal, is it?’
When we first make contact her voice on the phone takes me by surprise. Young, girlish, with a vibrancy in it I didn’t expect, a femininity. A few minutes into our conversation someone is at the door, she’s apologising (‘I’m terribly sorry, Maria’) and going to see who is there, while dogs bark, and on the dogs go for ten minutes. I imagine police. Ripping into the house. We live in the same city but she feels far away. I tell her I know she is worried about her grandsons, I promise to do no harm, whatever I write will be scrubbed clean of identifying details. ‘Don’t worry about me, Maria, I am a survivor in my life, I have enough strength for this,’ she says. ‘It’s a terribly powerful thing to be a survivor. I am a little person structurally but I do possess a tremendous spirit. I had to deal with all sorts of experiences. For other people—too much. For me—no.’ The grandson, an adult now, is back in that house police once strived to save him from. I won’t speak to him. He is not ready, she says. ‘He is yet to learn how to be a survivor.’
The woman tells me, Warsaw was all rubble after the war. Things were exploding all the time. Walking around was really dangerous. We were walking in this city of rubble, she says, and I had a little bag of treasures, broken glass and somesuch. And I found this doll. My mother was terrified because the doll was so ugly but I absolutely loved it. I clutched it in my arms. I mean, what were the chances of me, a Jewish child, being alive after the war, being alive in Warsaw, and finding this doll?
In the woman’s painting of that postwar moment the child is wearing a bonnet and her hair is in careful curls, as if she came from a world where children were dainty things, dressed-up cherubs. Not gassed, killed point-blank, thrown against walls, starved, handed over for medical experiments. The doll’s face is below her Adam’s apple. She is holding it tight. The ugly, dirty, flaccid cloth doll.
We arrange to meet. Crossed wires, me at the wrong place, right time, she doesn’t own a mobile phone and I am about to go, thinking que sera sera, when a fire at a nearby station—second time it happened to me in twenty-five years in Australia—halts all trains. A taxi home would be two hundred bucks. I get on a bus to make my way to a different station, alternative train line, two stops in my phone rings. We are meant to meet after all. She is tiny.
I knew someone from the genocidal wars of Bosnia who refused, for the longest time, to get herself a mobile phone. I thought a phone in your pocket is another layer of protection. For he
r it was the opposite. Maybe after certain kinds of experiences it is simply not possible to ever feel safe again and the best you can hope for is to feel inaccessible. Hidden. The woman has a coffee in a takeaway cup in a cafe near the place where we finally meet. My five-fruit juice has an orange lid. She says her coffee is so bad it’s good. I say my juice is as you would expect. We can talk but no recording. ‘They said I did something outrageous. What they did was a million times more outrageous. If there was a medal for outrageous they would get the medal.’ They: Judge, Detective Senior Constable, media, Department of Human Services, Family Court, County Court, Australian public, the country of Australia.
She thinks someone somewhere down the line got bought, I am less sure. What she wants to know is who was paying who, who intimidating who. I am thinking a miscarriage of justice in the world of abused and neglected children is as common as primary school nits. Part of the problem, as criminologist Kerry Carrington writes, is ‘the administrative apparatus surrounding the children’s courts [does] not distinguish between neglected children or delinquent children’. Children get taken away when they shouldn’t, abused in foster families or institutions, left in danger with their own families, forced to be someone else’s responsibility, pushed up and down the chain like containers of mercury. Plus most kids would choose sticking with their family over safety so it’s fraught on all sides. Surely the wilful blindness around the boy’s predicament was partly structural, bureaucratic, the system’s stretched and faltering, no, let me put it differently—the system is fucking plenty of children up; it’s kind of impersonal.
I ask a handful of people who know some of what happened how could it end up like this? For four months with redhot zeal a boy is searched for only to be fed to wolves once found. People reply (a) the justice system is broken and makes a heap of mistakes, (b) the media just wants a good story, (c) the judge was probably an old Australian fuddy-duddy and the fuddy-duddies don’t like ’em foreigners and especially ’em foreigners not playing along with our system, (d) the cop looking for the boy must have felt humiliated, and (e) there is something we don’t know. I’d like to ask the detective (unlikely he’d give me much) but can’t. I swore to do nothing to make the boy or family unsafe. The woman counts the Detective Senior Constable as an enemy for life.
A retired senior journalist tells me cops would have been pissed off with the woman—she made them look like fools, lied to them repeatedly, broke the law. More than pissed off enough for them to turn on her. As for the Judge, journalists knew he had a troubled domestic life and shared an unspoken agreement to not mention it, both out of compassion and so as not to piss him off.
‘He is not corrupt,’ the journalist says, ‘there is nothing on him.’
There is an (f) here too that no one mentions: her. In this country, grandmothers—go ahead, ask around—don’t play cat and mouse with police, don’t have rooms in their houses undetectable by special fibre-optic cameras, don’t provide someone else’s ID when apprehended, don’t mis-steer court registrars when quizzed about grandkids’ whereabouts (I am referring here to sworn testimony by the woman and her husband during the first month of the boy’s ‘disappearance’ that they had no idea where he’d got to).
Her foreignness. But no one cares. Half the population here has a parent born elsewhere, so say the parent-born-elsewhere stats I’ve been inserting every time I give one of my ‘multicultural’ talks. Yet certain foreignnesses are not dissolved in the balmy Australian air. They remain solid, determining of what happens to people so marked when they brush against the hard surfaces of banks, courts, police stations, universities, workplaces or the softer (more porous?) surfaces of shops, trains, city streets. In no nation on this planet is this not the everyday usual. Still you have to ask—why what she did felt so foreign here, like such anathema? Children taken away from their families, and families, driven berserk by fear, grandmothers included, trying to hide their kids from authorities (in the bush, under the house, with other families, skin covered with mud)—how foreign is this story? How outside the range of easily conjurable? Surely it is one of the key stories of this WILD, WILD WEST country too.
Grandmothers feel like they have responsibilities and obligations to their grandchildren and that responsibility is being ripped away from us. Grandmothers put their hands up, they say we’re here. And generally they had shared care of these children. They were primary carers of these children and they are bypassed… These are women who are educated women, they’ve got degrees, they’ve got no criminal history, they’ve got no drug or alcohol issues and these people are overlooked. They are going to court for months… Then the Department and the Magistrate decides no and that’s how it goes.
So goes an interview on Radio National with a representative of Grandmothers Against Removals, a network of grandmothers fighting the mass removal of indigenous children from their families by, in their words, ‘child protection services, police, and juvenile prisons’. It’s February 2015.
Psychologist’s parents were kids, Jewish, in World War II, both surviving in hiding. This—hidden Jewish children—is her lifelong subject. She cannot fail to recognise, when she interviews the woman for her dissertation, how the woman describes her year in the potato pit almost ‘as if her mother’s memories were her own’. And, for the woman, when her mother used to talk about what happened she’d feel like her mother’s experiences were her experiences. After the war the mother showed her places: where she was born, where her father and brother were killed, where the mother fainted and the lady Catholic doctor saw her and subsequently hid them. The potato pit was no longer there but the rest she could see. In every bit of their conversation the Psychologist, who has spent much of her adult life immersed in child survivors’ stories, cannot escape a feeling, ‘an eerie sense of history repeating’.
‘No, no, I wasn’t hiding him,’ the woman said to the Psychologist.
But then, sometime later, ‘for me the Holocaust continues in a miniature form’.
‘She was so young when she was hidden,’ the Psychologist tells me, ‘that language wasn’t there. When it is pre-verbal, and when experiences and emotions do not have language attached to them, they go inside our body and we do not have the same awareness of them.’
Here is a way to make pieces fit—the woman’s childhood and the makeshift dungeon, the pit and the Deer Park Women’s Correctional Centre, half a century and a different continent later. A particular way of thinking about trauma hands it to us. First look away from what happened to the boy. Focus on the woman: like the Judge, the Court Psychologist, the Detective Senior Constable did. Accept that the woman continues to be traumatised (this cannot but be true) by what happened to her during the war, and has been acting out. Faced with danger, she digs a potato pit for her grandson in the middle of suburban Australia. She treats police like an SS squad. Judge is, I don’t know, some high-up Nazi. Behind him the machinery of the complicit State is churning over like a song. The boy’s mother is like one of those Poles who denounced their Jewish neighbours out of fear and greed, not sadism, not adherence to some ideology. In other words the woman’s behaviour and judgment are impaired by trauma. (‘Impaired’ too harsh? Consider ‘profoundly affected’.) Maybe if the Court Psychologist talked in court about the war, not her grief, the Judge would have been not so resolute in his condemnation.
Mention the war.
Don’t.
‘The reason I speak with such disgust about the so-called justice system here,’ the woman says to me, ‘is not because I am some poor victimised traumatised child survivor and this is just another layer. No, this has nothing to do with my old trauma. What I am telling you is that something absolutely terrible, tragic happened in Australia and the justice system let it happen, made it happen.’
Can you see what she is saying?—do not use the horrors of my childhood to cancel out what happened to my grandson, do not use my trauma to cover up the vast compounded injustice that smashed my family. Here,
in this country. Don’t use my tragedy to mask your moral failure. When the woman says, as she does repeatedly, that the war is not over for her, you can take it that she is trapped in the past inside that old war she was not supposed to survive, or you may contemplate that WAR is a word for her grandson being sent back to his torturer while she is deposited in jail. In the name of justice, huzzah! War is the two of them waiting nearly a decade to see each other again.
Jail is the last thing it’s about for her.
She says, they killed my little brother by smashing his head on the pavement. They cannot hurt me anymore because I am already so hurt. ‘What,’ she says, ‘could they do to me, how long could they jail me for? Hundred years?’ I lost my whole family apart from my mother in the Holocaust, she says.
It is about the boy.
She pulls out a photograph. ‘Look at his eyes. He came back to us at twenty-one. Already an alcoholic. He went through such things. Didn’t tell me most things. He cannot talk about them. If he even mentions anything, he is not himself, he cannot bear mentioning it.’
If it is in any sense about her, it is about her not honouring a promise to her son to protect his child and keep together what is left of the family.
After what her mother did to protect her.
In Australia everything is turned on its head—who’s in jail and who’s not, what counts as a crime, the good guys get pounded, the bad guys are whipped with feather dusters. My husband, she says, he’s in his seventies. Works twelve-hour shifts, pays taxes, so that the man who abused her grandson can get ‘a nice relaxing time in jail, good meals’. And so he ‘can watch TV with all the movies in which they kill each other and cut each other and eat each other and he can have a lovely rest, get himself healthy and well, and get ready to come out and start terrorising my grandsons’.
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