Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  He talked about having to walk miles through snow, praying all the way, to get to school. He was so clever, he said, that he was asked to help teach the other children. There was pride in his voice when he said his father had been a Talmudic scholar. He never said when he stopped believing in the god of Judaism, or in any god.

  He talked about his family having to hide at night in a potato field during some sort of pogrom. He was a little boy. Someone stole his blanket.

  He wrote to me once in Polish, in my new autograph book, and signed himself, with a flourish, Bronislaw. Before that I didn’t know he had another name, his Polish name. Bruno for short.

  ONE DAY WHEN I WAS NEARLY THIRTEEN I was about to leave School early to go by bus to the orthodontist with my mother, who never learned to drive, when a boy said, "Kennedy has been shot." He had heard it in the staffroom, he said, and some teachers were crying. I didn’t believe him—boys had a lot of wrong information—but when we got downtown newspaper vans were prowling the streets with loudhailers and people were ducking into churches to pray. Camelot was over, and I didn’t need braces.

  By then we were living in Canterbury Crescent, our second to last house, part-way up Grouse Mountain. My little brother called the sparkly night-time view over the city from our picture window "TV Land". For the next two weeks I spent as much time as I could watching the news coverage, which was going on twenty-four hours a day. For once my father didn’t say, "Turn off the television. Read a book." I remember the bloodstains on Jackie Kennedy’s pink suit, the pillbox hat that somehow stayed on through everything, the look on her face as Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. I had never seen a man shot dead live until two days later Jack Ruby stepped out of the crowd at Dallas police headquarters and murdered Lee Harvey Oswald. It was when I watched this coverage that I felt television’s power.

  I was haunted for years by the Zapruder footage that showed Jackie crawling with such purpose on to the back of the car. Was she seeking help or trying to escape, planning to jump for her life from the moving car?

  My father loved to watch politics and currents affairs, so he and I had been glued to television through earlier international crises too— the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. There had been air-raid warning drills. People down the road dug up their backyard and built a bomb shelter. My father seemed unbothered but I was terrified. When I left the house to visit my friend Anne I pulled my sweater over my mouth to keep out the nuclear fallout.

  The air of impending doom in the world in general seemed to be descending on our family in particular. There were adolescent battles with my father. "Be an individual!" he pronounced. This meant wearing the brown brogues he had bought me, rather than pleading for the fashionable shoes I wanted. When I needed a new dress he took me to the ladies’ fashion store of an immigrant friend. The dresses were for middle-aged women. The friend was probably doing him a favour because by then we couldn’t afford new clothes.

  One morning while my mother was doing the dishes I nagged her about runs in my stockings. She told me I had to just wear them. I kept nagging. She threw a plate on the floor and it smashed with such force that a piece of porcelain flew out and cut the inside of my anklebone, which bled and bled. I was shocked. I’d never seen my mother like that. "What have I done?" she wailed. For years afterwards I would look at my foot and say, "Hmm, you can still see that scar where you threw the plate at me," and she would say, "My own daughter! How could I have done that?"

  I know now that she was going under, we were going under, and she was trying to protect us. We were about to move again, to a rented house where we would have to give away the dog and I would be with my father for the last time.

  CHAPTER 2

  Making it up

  Patient married a girl from New Zealand in 1949. They met in Vancouver.

  Clinical record, Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, 1967

  IN LATER LIFE MY MOTHER would advise against doctors: "They’ll only find something wrong with you." She wasn’t too sold on looking back either. Old photos made her feel sad.

  One story she would tell was how she met Ben. She was on her OE at a time when most Catholic girls her age who weren’t in a convent were married and producing children. She had an aunt who had ended up living on Canada’s Vancouver Island—the aunt, possibly, who gave her the amethyst brooch I played with when I was ill, which was quite often in those days, when every child got chickenpox, mumps, measles and scarlet fever.

  IN 1948 MY MOTHER Patricia Valentina Scantlebury—she was born on Valentine’s Day—was pretty, blonde, twenty-nine and single. The oldest child in her family, she had helped to bring up seven siblings, plus her Aunt Alma’s three boys. For years she never went anywhere without a toddler trailing behind and never had a bed to herself. That bed was often wet by morning.

  During the war she had worked for a tobacco company, W.D. and H.O.Wills. Her coming-of-age party in 1940 at the family home in Roseneath, Wellington, was approvingly recorded in an Evening Post social column, "Here and There", which still exists online. "In the lounges gladioli and coreopsis were artistically arranged." Mum and especially her younger sister Pam were always good at flower arranging. "The guest of honour sang several songs."

  Ethel Scantlebury (second from right) with her daughters Rosemary, Patricia, June and Wendy. This photograph was probably taken before Patricia left for Canada in 1948.

  Patty and Pam were gadabouts, and pals of Selwyn Toogood, who would become a New Zealand institution as the host of the radio, and later television, show It’s In The Bag. Pamela Scantlebury is listed as a co-star in Toogood’s first screen performance—in drag—in a short film called Oh! Mr Gadd. An ad hailed the film as "Wellington’s first talkie!"

  My mother had stories of trying to be a socialite on slender working-class means. Her dodgy dentistry let her down at a party when a particularly enthusiastic greeting to a friend —"Keith!"—sent a false tooth flying across the dance floor. There was the time the elastic of her handstitched silk French knickers gave way and they fell off as she walked up Lambton Quay. She stepped out of them and kept walking, a survival strategy of stoic forward momentum in the face of adversity that she would maintain.

  During the war the girls were enlisted to entertain American soldiers at dances and put on entertainments to welcome young evacuees from the blitz. Nana would offer homesick boys a home-cooked meal and her gruff maternal care. Romance inevitably blossomed. My mother became engaged to an American soldier. After he got appendicitis he was shipped off back to the States and she never heard from him again.

  A stint working for the military in New Caledonia produced no new fiances, and soon she was on the run from a country that suddenly seemed too small. She took almost nothing when she set off from Auckland on board the Wairata in 1948. She wasn’t to know she wouldn’t be coming home.

  The passenger list shows Patricia Valentina Scantlebury arrived in San Pedro, California, on March 27. The Wairata had sailed from Auckland via "Rapotonga"—Rarotonga. Among others listed as "in transit to Canada" are a minister of religion, an apartment-house owner, and several women whose "Calling or Occupation" is listed as "Home Duties". My mother’s is "Steno-clerk". No home duties yet.

  In Canada she stayed with her aunt for a while and then went to live in Vancouver city on the mainland, combatting loneliness with slabs of apple pie at a local diner. She got herself a job working for my father at English Textiles, the fabric-importing business his brother Sy had helped set him up in. Almost immediately my father was courting her. In New Zealand she was used to going out with boys whose idea of a good time was to get drunk and vomit out the back of the dance hall. My father would arrive at the door of her rooming house, elegant in his beautifully tailored English textiles, carrying a bouquet of flowers, kiss her hand, and smartly click his heels in the old-world way.

  Ben Wichtel with Rosalind, his first child, in the backyard at home in Vancouver, May 1949.

  Soon
my father opened a tailoring store, also called English Textiles, at 734 West Pender Street. He and Pat were two people with no desire to look back, washed up in a city where they had no one. Sy and Mollie came up from New York for the registry office wedding; they would later give them an album of wedding photos to mark the occasion. Mum looked lovely in her chic tailored grey suit—no doubt from English Textiles—and a little hat with a fashionable dotted halfveil. My father looked handsome and debonair. My mother told me he had insisted she became pregnant before he would marry her. He was nearly forty and had lost everything. He wasn’t messing around.

  My sister was born in May 1949. She was named Rosalind Lydia, RL—the initials of her Polish grandmother Rozalia. There are photos of Mum and Dad sitting in garden chairs on the lawn of their first house, receiving guests who have come to see the firstborn. My mother is wearing a satin dressing gown, a hand-me-down from Mollie. In one photo Dad, holding his baby daughter, has an expression of such open-faced joy I almost don’t recognise him. They are happy.

  Mum was good at making a home under any circumstances. After a few culinary disasters with Depression-era standbys such as creamed tinned salmon and rissoles, which appalled my father, she would master a hybrid cuisine: meat and three vegetables with gefilte fish on the side. Jewish friends came to the rescue with recipes. On a rare occasion when Sy and Mollie made another trip from New York, she cooked a turkey. It was a bit on the dry side but her baked cheesecake with sour cream and crushed pineapple topping saved the day. It helped that Dad couldn’t care less about keeping kosher.

  I remember my mother mostly in the kitchen and Dad in the living room. They went out together only rarely, once to see a production of The King and I. Dad brought home the record and I learned to sing the whole thing. I still can. There was something about Yul Brynner’s funny accent, his autocratic ways, and his creative use of the English vernacular—"When I sit, you sit. When I kneel, you kneel. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera!"—that reminded me of Dad. Deborah Kerr’s Anna, attracted to the king, exasperated by him, desperately trying to understand him, reminded me of Mum.

  We had little contact with our New Zealand family. Our grandmother Ethel, Ettie to those who dared, sent a book, The Adventures of Hutu and Kawa, that featured plump little pōhutukawa fairies. As Hutu and Kawa paddled about in their canoe the worst they had to reckon with was a Fearsome Bush Hawk. We lived in a world of grizzly bears, snakes and other creatures out to kill you.

  Four generations of the New Zealand family during 1951 visit by Patricia Wichtel and her daughters. Left to right: Pamela Church (née Scantlebury) with her son James; great-grandmother Annie Murray with Diana; Patricia; Rosalind Wichtel; grandmother Ethel Scantlebury, Ewen Street, Takapuna, Auckland.

  I don’t recall many photos of my mother’s family—maybe they made her feel sad—but there was one of her sister June. My mother was the oldest child in her family and June was next. June was always different. Patty and Pam would arrange dates for her but she yearned for the religious life. The path to it was rocky but June eventually became a nun with the Sisters of Mercy; her religious name was Sister Mary Regis. In the picture her sweet smiling face was elaborately swathed in her nun’s wimple.

  I was six when June died of cancer. Mum cried. I remember seeing June’s last letter to her. She told Mum not to be sad. "I am in the hands of God and I am not afraid." I would sneak into Mum’s room to get out the letter and read it. June asked her to bring up her girls in the Catholic faith but this didn’t happen. Mum was never religious, although she did allow my sister and me to be baptised when she brought us to New Zealand for a visit, aged two and six months respectively, and her sisters swooped in and carried us off to church.

  She was afraid to tell Dad she was bringing two little Catholics back home to Canada but when she finally confessed he said it was okay: we were just girls. When they had a son the boy would be left to him and would not be baptised. I wonder if he would have given Jeff a bar mitzvah.

  MY FATHER TOOK TO HIS NEW COUNTRY. He was fascinated with Indian—First Nation—culture. There were Sunday drives to seek out performances, and once he took us to visit an old man he knew who was a chief and lived in a house under a bridge. On these drives into the countryside my father would admire the rugged British Columbia landscape. "Look girls, how majestic!"This would set off a monologue from my mother that I’d hear so often I could chant along: "Oh yes, but it’s not as beautiful as the green rolling countryside of New Zealand." My mother was homesick.

  When I was eighteen months old and Ros was three, my mother’s sister Rosemary came to stay. I have often wondered what Auntie Rosie, then twenty-two, made of our family. After I start searching for my father in earnest, I go to see her in the apartment where she lives with her younger sister, my Aunt Wendy. They’ve shared a home since they were both widowed. Rosie is one of the few people who remember my parents as a couple.

  "Don’t hold back," I say over tea and Wendy’s cheese scones. I want to know everything.

  "I got to know Ben very well," Rosie says. "We had our scraps. He would come home on a Saturday afternoon and say to me, ‘Have you mowed the lawns yet?’"

  "Was he joking?" I ask.

  "No, he meant it. Oh, we used to have fights. He would blow his stack, or I would."

  Rosemary Scantlebury visits for Christmas, 1951.

  Her language could be a bit choice, she says, "typical Kiwi language".

  I ask her how my mother reacted to these scraps.”I don’t remember where she was," she says, "probably in the kitchen cooking." Keeping her head down.

  My father could be tricky, I say.

  "Yes, that’s right. I used to think, what the hell are you telling me what to do for?"

  She found him a bit strange, she says. "After what he’d been through during the war that wouldn’t be surprising."

  Did he ever talk to her about what he had experienced?

  "No," she says.

  She saw the other side of him too, Daddy Angel Face. "He was lovely. We used to have a lot of fun—go out on Sunday drives, picnics, that sort of thing. We played canasta all the time. He loved a game of cards and he loved to win."

  He also had a bit of an eye for the ladies, she says.

  Flirtatious?

  "He was flirtatious, yes." She laughs.

  "Did you like him?" I say.

  "Of course I did. Yes, I did. He was very likeable," she says.

  "Patty wouldn’t have married him had he not been," says Wendy, who never met my father. There is fierce loyalty among the Scantlebury siblings.

  In those days my father was working long hours at his store in Pender Street. "He was very good to me," Rosie says. "I think he was quite delighted to have me there for a while but then maybe he got a bit jealous. And that’s when I thought, oh yes, I’ll move on, and I went flatting." Before she went, she tells me, my father offered her a mink coat if she would stay. He didn’t want my mother to be lonely.

  I ask Rosie if my parents were happy. "They seemed to be very happy, yes," she says. "I think he loved her very much."

  While she was working in Vancouver Rosie would pop in for a chat at English Textiles in her lunch hour, or take my father out for coffee. "I can still see him standing outside his shop. Just standing there, smoking a cigarette, watching the world go by."

  After Rosie left, my mother’s youngest brother Richard, who was in the navy, stayed with us for a few days. After him there were no more visitors from New Zealand.

  My father’s interactions with my mother’s family were minimal. Once he borrowed a home movie camera and we performed awkwardly for a film to be sent to New Zealand. And I remember a conversation with my grandmother on that rare, ruinously expensive and distressing thing, a long-distance phone call. Perhaps it was after June died. "Hello, Muzzer," my father said. It felt sad to hear him say this to a woman at the end of the Earth who he had never met, and in the end never would.

  HOW HAD A YOUNG CATHOLIC WOMAN
from New Zealand ended up on the other side of the world, married to a Polish Jew ten years older, a man who had survived horrors she would spend a lot of time trying to learn about in her quest to understand him? In my mother’s family, too, there was a painful absence that was never spoken of. Secrets and silences roll down the generations like something in the cells that can’t be unlearned. When she was five, my mother had been sent to live with her grandmother for a while. Her beloved father, an artist who painted her little pictures, disappeared from her life. At first he sent her a few paintings, then nothing. She became a naughty child, whipped by the nuns at school. She was hurt, angry. Maybe, when she took off to Canada she still was.

  I knew a little about Mum’s family on her maternal side. Her great-great-uncle, John Joseph Wood, composed the music for the national anthem, "God Defend New Zealand". His friend Thomas Bracken, a poet, wrote the words, strangely passive for a pioneering nation. "God of nations at thy feet / In the bonds of love we meet / Hear our voices we entreat": three lines in and we are already grovelling on the floor, begging for mercy. There’s a family story told by my mother’s cousin John that it was really Wood’s wife Fanny who came up with the tune.

  I knew little about Mum’s father. I used to say, "You probably have some family out there. We should try to find them."

  "No," she would say, "I have enough family."

  After she died I discovered that her father, Andrew Pattle Izett, had been both an artist and a journalist. He had married twice, neither time to my grandmother. His mother, my mother’s birth grandmother Sarah Izett, was a feminist who ran her own business and was involved in the women’s movement and progressive politics. Her birth grandfather James Izett was also a journalist. He had once been horsewhipped outside the Bank of New Zealand in Christchurch after someone took offence at an article he had written in the gossip rag he edited. Mum would have been astonished to know I tracked down a copy of her grandfather’s book Maori Lore and bought it for ninety dollars.