Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  On my mother’s birth certificate her first names are given as Patricia Valentina Pattle and her surname as Murray, like her mother. The first question my aunts asked me when I began digging into my mother’s background was whether their mother had been married to Andrew Izett. I had to tell these devout Catholics that when she had her first three daughters my grandmother was living in sin.

  June and Pam had both been babies when Andrew Izett left. As far as they knew, their father was William Rymell Scantlebury, known as Scan. June would discover the truth when she first tried to enter the convent. My mother remembered her being sent back home, locking herself in her room and crying. The nuns must have found out about her irregular lineage.

  Despite my grandmother’s best efforts, the past had caught up with her. By the time I knew her she was an austere presence, with perfectly coiffed hair, blue-rinsed into shades that seemed inspired by the hydrangeas in her garden. She never went to church. Maybe she had dug in her toes after being labelled a sinner and having her children judged. As she got older she would grab my hand as I went by, holding it in a vice-like grip that I understood expressed a desperate affection.

  She had a formidable will. My mother told me that when state houses were first introduced she went to sign up for one. By then, along with the three Izett girls, there were five more children with Scan. When things didn’t go her way, Nana sat down on the council steps and refused to move until she got a house.

  At age eighty-seven and in hospital facing a leg amputation, she turned her face to the wall and died. I had never once, in all the years, heard her speak of my father.

  Scan carried on alone in a small flat, where I discovered he could play the piano beautifully. One day my mother discovered his underwear was full of bed bugs. He, too, eventually needed a leg amputated. He took it well. When Mum brought him over from the hospital for dinner, he insisted on unwrapping the stump to show us. He still liked a gin. "The tide’s out," he’d say when Mum tried to keep his consumption down. "Don’t drown it," when the tonic went in. He was a man of the sea.

  My mother encountered her birth father Andrew Izett again only once. When she was eighteen he tracked her down through Auntie Alma, who had a soft spot for him, and asked for a meeting. It wasn’t a good experience. "He was just an old balding man I didn’t know," she told me. She never spoke a word to her mother about the meeting and never saw him again, preferring to remember with love the father who had doted on her as a small girl, carried her around, and made paintings for her.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the basement

  Patient was always a devoted family man.

  Clinical record, Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, 1969

  IN FIRST GRADE OUR TEACHER MRS BLINKHORN sent me out of the classroom for talking, then came out and shook me hard. "Are you going to cry or do I have to make you?" she hissed. When we were naughty she spanked us over her knee. Once she said, "Has anyone got a loose tooth?", then made us line up so she could pull out the offending teeth. My mother took all this as normal—she had been whipped by the nuns. We probably didn’t tell Dad. He would have got mad.

  I avoided going to school when I could and watched television in the basement. Here I could see anything I liked. My favourite was I Love Lucy. The early episodes are the work of a comic genius in her prime, and the mismatch of Lucy and Ricky felt familiar. Like Lucy, Mum could be a bit ditzy Handsome exotic Ricky, his authority often subverted, had a strange accent and was given to blowing his stack. He seemed a sort of Cuban, conga-drum-playing version of my father. I was always looking for my father, even when he was still there.

  Most of what I know about anything I learned in this basement. It was marginal territory, a place of liberty and a certain amount of subterranean terror. It was where our pet white mouse disappeared, to be sighted once in the washing basket and then never again. There was a rec room, and a door into the undeveloped badlands where there was a washing machine, and a big black furnace that smelled of oil and the underworld.

  There was also a small box of photographs that belonged to my father. In a family with little physical evidence of a history, this was noteworthy. Mostly I remember a lot of snapshots of pretty women. "My girlfriends," Dad would say, a little wistfully. "Cherchez la femme." I asked if any were his dead sisters. He said they weren’t but I still liked to scan the faces for resemblances. I always suspected there was more to it.

  Incidents that were unaccountable, even by our family’s standards, happened in the basement. One day my father came home with a projector and we assembled for a screening of a film called The Audition. A lot of young women with huge, scary-looking, barely covered breasts paraded around. They were apparently trying out for some sort of show. I remember Dad saying he had got the film from a friend. According to my mother he was a pushover in business, forever making suits for people who couldn’t pay. Perhaps the film was a bizarre form of payment in kind. It swiftly went back to wherever it had come from.

  A deck of cards with similarly attired women turned up in our dining room about the same time. It didn’t feel right to play Snap or Old Maid with them. Our friends looked at us oddly. Sometimes I think that my parents, in free fall from their pasts, lacked boundaries.

  There were books in the basement. One story, "The Rocking-Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence, I read over and over. A beautiful woman has no luck: "She married for love, and the love turned to dust." She raises her children in a house that to her small son Paul forever whispers, "There must be more money!" Driven by the whispers and wanting his mother to be happy, Paul rides his rocking horse frantically and suddenly knows for sure which horses will win at the races. He starts winning and keeps riding until, in a final feverish trance, he picks a derby winner, makes a fortune, and dies of a brain fever.

  Our house whispered too. My father must have realised that being beholden to his brother Sy wasn’t going to work out in the long term. I remember him saying, "If I only had $100,000." Once, on our annual excursion to the Vancouver fair, Dad parked the car on the way out and ducked in to place a bet at the racetrack. We waited and waited until finally he came out with a win: $200. We celebrated with hamburgers from the White Spot drive-in, delivered to the car on clip-on trays. Dad was happy when he had money in his pocket: the house stopped whispering for a while.

  At one point he must have had another windfall because he decided to glamorise the rec room. Workmen came and put in seats with lids where our toys could be tidied away. A bar went in the corner and a red modernist chaise longue arrived. When it was done, my parents threw a New Year’s Eve party. There was music, cigarette smoke, the buzz of tipsy conversation. I tasted my first olive out of someone’s martini. Afterwards Mum and Dad, unusually merry and affectionate, came and tucked me into bed.

  Soon enough the rec room resumed its semi-feral state. The new couch acquired a large perfectly symmetrical hole where a smouldering cigarette butt, dropped by my father when he fell asleep watching television, had drilled down into it. "The house might have burned down," my mother wailed. Having escaped the might of the Third Reich, my father could have died in his sleep on his hopeful red modernist chaise longue.

  CHAPTER 4

  The bar mitzvah

  Two sisters and three brothers were killed during World War II Patient has one brother living in New Jersey, USA. He is a wealthy businessman who owns a luggage factory.

  Dr FS, Brockville, June 15,1967

  "Baruch atah, Adonai / Eloheinu, Melech haolam..."

  My father is suffering. He is trying to hold on to a candle and keep it together. His hands, his voice, his whole body is shaking. I am nine and not embarrassed by him, although there are times when I am. The intense foreignness of the occasion and the astonishing sight of my father in a prayer shawl and skullcap—tallit and kippah—have made him seem less like himself and, somehow, more. I’ve never even seen him wear a hat, let alone a yarmulke, as it’s called in Yiddish. I’ve never seen anybody wear one. We’ve neve
r been into a synagogue before.

  My cousin Jerry is thirteen and now he is a man. This is a very big deal apparently. I haven’t seen Uncle Sy and Auntie Mollie since they visited briefly when I was five. We have never met our cousins Jerry and Linda. Vancouver isn’t that far from New Jersey but in the fraught geography of our family it has been too far.

  The trip to New Jersey has been a long time in the planning. My mother has bought a new outfit, and had her teeth capped and her hair done. Ros and I have had our hair permed and we have new party dresses. My sister’s is satiny and eggshell blue. Mine is white and gauzy with embroidered rosebuds on the bodice. I think we look nice.

  "They live in a mansion," my father declares. "Wait until you see. They have servants. They will spoil you rotten." He is giving us this gift of this brother who is alive, this brother who is a success.

  With a mix, on my part, of wild anticipation and inexplicable dread, we fly to New York. It’s my first time on a plane. Jeff, who is about to turn two, won’t sit still and is into everything; later my mother will find airline cutlery he has stashed in her flight bag. She doses him with Phenobarbital and eventually he’s rendered unconscious on my seat, so I spend the rest of the flight wandering up to the toilet for want of anything else to do.

  Auntie Mollie is there to meet us at the airport with her chauffeur. By now, such has been my father’s build-up, I’m expecting a New York version of the Queen but Mollie is casual in slacks and odd footwear she calls moon shoes, which she says are very comfortable. She has the distracted air of a woman with the social event of her life to plan.

  When we get to the house it is vast, with woodland behind. We walk into the atrium, which has a marble floor—the stage, I will discover, for family dramas that outdo our own.

  Sy and Mollie belong to a synagogue. Years later, Jerry’s wife Jill will tell me a story. When she and Jerry were high school sweethearts, Sy went to check out her family. The conversation went like this:

  —What Temple do you belong to?

  —We don’t belong to a Temple.

  —What do you mean? You have to belong to a Temple to belong to a country club.

  —We don’t belong to a country club.

  —You don’t belong to a country club? What do you do?

  Jill’s parents were socialists.

  Mollie and Sy spent a lot of time at their country club: social status was important to them. But even in the 1960s many such clubs were "restricted", mostly unofficially but in some cases blatantly. Up to the early 1970s the Baltimore Country Club had signs that read, less as a warning than a selling point: "No Dogs, No Colo reds, No Jews." In a Groucho Marx story, possibly apocryphal, Marx goes into a club with his daughter, sits down and watches her swim. A man leans over and says, "This club is restricted. Your child will have to get out of the pool." Groucho replies, "She’s only half Jewish. Let her stay in up to her waist."

  The country club was a privileged man’s world. "In the card room there were very serious games going on," Jerry will tell me. "In an afternoon you could make or lose enough money to buy a Cadillac." There were rules. Talk too loud and you got a letter. Walk too fast and you got a letter. "I had portfolios of letters," Jerry says.

  Although Dad likes to splash money about when he has it, he is more of a socialist. At Sy and Mollie’s house I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole into a world where everything is out of scale. There is a butler. Ros and I share a room with Linda, who is beautiful and eleven but seems older. Jerry is handsome and very nice to me. It’s a place, like in the movies, where children have their own bathroom. They have the first colour television I have ever seen; everyone on it is a futuristic shade of green.

  We are given into the care of some sort of handyman, who takes us off with my mother for ice cream. The cone has eight scoops of different flavours. Everything here comes in many flavours.

  It soon becomes clear we won’t do. My mother is sent to have her hair re-dyed in brown and blonde stripes and Mollie gives her one of her dresses to wear. Ros and I must have new dresses too. We are taken to a fancy shop, where a woman looks at my spherical body and thinks what it needs is a stiffly crinolined cloud of chiffon with spaghetti straps. With my gappy front teeth and puppy fat, I look like a chubby chipmunk in a tutu. Rosalind looks grown-up and pretty.

  Members of the Wichtel family at Jerry Wichtel’s bar mitzvah. Left to right: Jerry, Sy, Diana, Rosalind, Mollie, Ben, Linda, Patricia, Pierre Hotel, New York, 1960.

  There’s a lot of shopping. I’m allowed to choose a toy and select a new type of doll called Barbie. She’s wearing a black strapless gown and has a microphone because she is a singer. She also comes with a strapless bathing suit: she is so preposterously proportioned she doesn’t need the support. I find her facial features pointy and mean but I am captivated by her clothes, beautifully detailed with tiny buttons and snaps. I will play with her until I’m far too old for dolls. She will travel with me back to Vancouver and eventually on to New Zealand, where my brother and his friend, going through a phase of designing torture methods, will wreck her.

  Jerry and Linda have their own bathroom. Linda lets us play with her stuffed animal collection. Jerry shows me his bar mitzvah presents. We have given him a selection of ties from English Textiles. Our ties suddenly seem as wrong as our dresses.

  At dinner there is something awful called caviar, which Uncle Sy makes me try. I’m allowed a sip of champagne. I’m beginning to have serious reservations about the tastes of rich people. After dinner we are allowed into the den, a room the size of half our house. Uncle Sy has a stern manner but he lets me play with the crystal chess set.

  When we go to the Temple, I’m transfixed by the names, inscribed on the wall, of my dead grandmother and grandfather Jacob and Rozalia, and their children—Dad’s and Sy’s brothers and sisters Maurice, Cheniek, Szymon, Tola and Fela. Dad has told me these names but I’ve never seen them written down before.

  The bar mitzvah is followed by a ball at one of the fanciest places in New York, the Pierre Hotel, across from Central Park on Fifth Avenue and 61st Street. The hotel, modelled on a French chateau, has the motto: "From this place hope beams." We are driven there in a black limousine. Outside, the city sparkles and hums.

  For some reason the ballroom is decorated as a resort with floral beach umbrellas. I spend most of the night alone. Still, I’m allowed to wear lipstick. The older girls jump all over Jerry, perching on his knee and kissing him for the camera. Late in the evening Paul, my father’s uncle, sweeps me up and waltzes me around the floor. I recognise him from the photographs of Dad and him in Sweden after the war: he survived too. His dancing style is so frenetic the rough edges of my crinoline rub my skin raw where he grasps my waist. I escape as fast as I can and put on more lipstick.

  The photographs of the night present a united family front. In one, Mollie, Sy and my mother sit at a table while Paul and his wife Lillian stand behind. Paul is saying something and Dad is shooting him a sceptical sideways look. In another family shot Auntie Mollie, in her strapless white ball gown, is as radiant as a bride. Later she will ask to be buried in this dress. Sy, stylish in his greying crewcut, looks away from the camera. My father and mother have their arms around Linda and the taut suggestion of a smile. Ros looks slender and poised. I look like I’m trying to hide behind her. Jerry, the bar mitzvah boy, fixes the camera with a quizzical challenging gaze. At some point in the evening he will go AWOL, taking off with friends for cocktails at the Copacabana next door.

  Jerry Wichtel and admirers at his bar mitzvah, 1960.

  Mollie and Sy Wichtel (sitting, centre) at their son Jerry’s bar mitzvah with, from left standing: Paul Jonisz (aka Janiszewski), his wife Lillian, Ben Wichtel; and sitting at right, Patricia Wichtel.

  After the ball we’re supposed to stay on for a few days but everything implodes. My brother Jeffrey turns two but there is no party. There is yelling behind the closed door of the library. My father goes home to Vancouver by himself wit
hout saying goodbye. We stay on for a day or two, then also leave on the long train journey north. Mollie and Sy arrange a stateroom, and a suitcase full of games and toys. There’s a glass-roofed observation car. My mother has been given money to tip the porters. I leave a trail of fifty-cent pieces wherever I go, happy not to feel the poor relation for a while. At dinner, the lamb chops come with paper frills. I never want to get home.

  THERE WAS AN INDELIBLE POWER in the sight of my father looking so alien, so Jewish, so fragile that day at the bar mitzvah. I know now that he was being honoured. As Jerry’s only surviving uncle on his father’s side, he was given an Aliyah—an ascending to Israel, or in this case to the bimah, the pulpit, to chant a blessing before or after a reading of the Torah. He would have been called by his Hebrew name, Binyamin Ben-Yaacov.

  Bless Adonai who is blessed.

  Blessed is Adonai who is blessed now and forever.

  He was doing a good deed for what was left of his family, fulfilling an obligation. Both brothers were generous when they had the means.

  Jerry will later tell me that in the early days Sy would give away a lot of money. When I meet our cousin Joe—who knew Sy as Abraham or Abe—he tells me, "In Yiddish we say Abe Wichtel was a mensch and performed many mitzvahs. He was a true human being and performed many acts of kindness, thereby receiving God’s blessing."