Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  But the bar mitzvah marked the peak of his family’s fortunes. Five years after this Sy was in financial trouble. Linda and Jerry had to work at his factory when they weren’t at school. Jerry had to use his bar mitzvah cash to finish college.

  After the bar mitzvah, money still arrived from New Jersey for a time, but Uncle Sy and Auntie Mollie never visited us in Vancouver again.

  CHAPTER 5

  It’s snowing in Vancouver

  He is very lonely, and, as you know, without resources of any kind. Have you any news of his wife and children? We wondered if once again you could send him a little pocket money, so he could go to the canteen, or on a little outing during the summer months.

  Miss Crawford, social worthat we were going to New Zealand before the summer ker, Brockville, June 27,1968

  THE LAST TIME I SPOKE TO MY FATHER I was a bitch.

  By the summer of ‘64 there were tea stains on the ceiling of our house from the times my father would smash the table with his fist in a rage. I was thirteen. One night I was in the upstairs bathroom when he came home and banged on the door, furious, trying to get to his Milk of Magnesia. "I have stomach cancer!"

  He was suffering from a few things by then, I would discover, but not that. Maybe it was what his father, Jacob Joseph Wichtel, merchant of Warsaw, had died of in 1928, leaving Rozalia and their seven children to face what he couldn’t possibly have foreseen because who could?

  My mother would tell me in painful talks years later—I pressing, she crying—that Dr Greenberg had kept ringing her, saying, "You have to get Ben to come into the office." He told her my father was addicted to barbiturate painkillers.

  He would shout at her, blame her, belittle her, but still expect sex.

  I think she wanted me to have the raw evidence for the defence so as not to blame her for what happened. I would learn from my mother later that by then my father wasn’t working in the store anymore after he left the house in the morning. He was sitting in the park feeding the birds.

  My father fell asleep every night on the couch. My mother went to bed early. When Id go into the bedroom to say goodnight she was often crying. For lack of anyone else to confide in—as things got worse he forbade her from contacting their old friends, although sometimes she would sneak out—she confided in me. He wouldn’t tell her what was going on. There was no money. What would become of us?

  We had a dog that my father had brought home a couple of years earlier, a pure white Alsatian puppy that had been abused. The puppy was frightened of men and cringed when someone approached, especially if they were carrying something. Dad called the dog Duke. I took it as a sign of our family’s haplessness when we discovered the dog was in fact female and no one had noticed.

  We took to calling her Dukey so as not to confuse her. She remained resolutely untrained, hurling herself at the door when someone knocked, grabbing visitors by the arm. She never actually bit anyone but she looked capable of it. "Where the dog?" became the cry of the bakers and greengrocers who brought produce door-to-door. We would wrestle her into the basement but eventually she learned to turn the door handle and would erupt from the underworld like a hound from hell. In the end the delivery men tooted and waited outside in their vans.

  Dukey ate the Barbie doll of the girl next door. She chased cars until a neighbour opened the driver’s door in her face. Once, when my father was driving off without her, she ran after the car, sailed through the open driver’s window into the back seat, and sat up grinning. Dukey, like everything else, was reeling out of control.

  By now we had moved from West 43rd Street in Kerrisdale, the house where we had been happy for almost as long as I could remember, to Canterbury Crescent in a raw suburb of Vancouver’s North Shore, a newer cheaper whistle stop on our road to ruination.

  One night a man my father knew came to the house. Maybe it was the man who had sold us the house and left some money in, checking on his crumbling investment, or someone with whom Dad was trying to do a business deal. Dukey rushed him, snarling. The man shoved his fist into her mouth and down her throat. Astonished, she sat submissively at his feet. My father never tried to discipline her. Maybe he was soothed by her fierce protective loyalty: he didn’t like unexpected knocks at the door either. Each night my mother would give her a piece of toast and honey. Dukey would take it softly in her mouth, pad out to the backyard, and, in some misguided attempt to provide for an uncertain future, bury it.

  We children got on with growing up, negotiating the cracks opening up in what was left of our family life. Ros, eighteen months older than me, was asserting her independence. There was no reasoning with our father. An argument over the purchase of a Beatles LP saw her banished to her room for six weeks. After a few nights he brought home a guilty peace offering—Beatles posters for her bedroom wall. The middle child, I learned to keep out of the line of fire. Our home was not a democracy.

  My mother, the oldest of eight children in her family, had been made to leave school at fourteen to go to work. She was just grateful her children could read and write. With my father, it was, "You got an A? Why not A plus?" And, "You got A plus? Why not first in the class?"

  Comics were forbidden. I kept my stash—Archie, Little Lulu, The Twilight Zone—in the back of the wardrobe. One day I was caught in the hallway holding a contraband Beatles album—Please Please Me—behind my back as my father engaged me in an unusually lengthy conversation. I stepped away and backed casually into my bedroom as soon as I could. I thought I’d got away with it. When I revisit this memory years later I realise Dad had just been messing with me. The thought makes me smile.

  He adored my little brother, eight years younger than me, the longawaited boy, named Jeffrey Jay after the initials of his grandfather, Jacob Joseph. Mum would tell Jeff he wasn’t allowed any more ice cream, one of the select food groups he ate, along with hotdogs and cheese. "We men need to stick together," my father would say with a wink and get him a bowl while my mother fumed. It’s the only time I remember my father doing anything in the kitchen. My little brother was turning into a tyrant.

  The other families in Canterbury Crescent seemed young, and on the way up. We didn’t really fit in. There were new business schemes. My best friend Anne and I were paid to go around the neighbourhood collecting coat-hangers for a dry-cleaning venture that came to nothing. Our house was crumbling. My brother was five when the front yard was dug up to replace a leaking septic tank pipe, leaving an unfilled crater. One of his friends amused himself throwing rocks at the new pipe until it cracked. My father was beside himself, raging on the lawn. Neighbours came out to see what was up. I was mortified that Dad was making such a fuss. I didn’t know then that he had no money to fix the pipe. Now it’s an absurd metaphor: everything was going to shit.

  My mother got some sort of flu and took to her bed for what seemed like weeks. Then she developed dermatitis and Dad made us do the dishes. "Muzzer has sick hands," he said. I found a medical sample container in the car and understood it was a pregnancy test. My mother, then forty-three, fell down the basement stairs and had a miscarriage, a tiny something in the toilet bowl. It was an accident, she told me years later, and a relief. The prospect of another child in her unravelling situation had terrified her.

  She went to hospital for a few days. My father had to take care of us. He must have somehow got us dinner. He got mad at me for trying to do the dishes while perched on a kitchen chair, a sit-down protest at having to mind my little brother all day during the school holidays.

  As the end approached there were scenes. The house was up for sale. Mum innocently mentioned this to the previous owner. He wanted his money back. Dad was furious. There was shouting. He made her ring Uncle Sy and ask for more money. When, deeply humiliated, she got a refusal he berated her for being spineless enough to beg.

  Mum seldom seemed to leave the house. She, who had always seemed so stylish, suddenly looked dishevelled and defeated. They came and took away the piano.

  Jef
frey didn’t attend kindergarten as we had. We moved to a house in Highland Boulevard, a couple of blocks from Canterbury Crescent and opposite a primary school where he would presumably go when he turned six the following year. He spent his time screaming down our driveway on his bike, across a lethal main road and into the school’s entrance. Once he canned and ended up with a lip so swollen he looked like a duck. It felt as though no one was in charge.

  We didn’t know it yet but Mum was planning her escape.

  THE HOUSE IN HIGHLAND BOULEVARD was brand new and rented. It had a square of dirt for a backyard. Dukey’s paws and muzzle were always black. One day that last Vancouver summer I was making some Campbell’s Crème of Chicken soup in the kitchen when a stranger materialised in the doorway and gave me a fright. Uldis was a twentyone-year-old student. He was from Estonia and good-looking in a rangy, raw-boned way. He was supposed to be creating a lawn in our backyard. Perhaps we were being allowed to stay in the house rentfree in exchange for doing the garden and my father had delegated the job. It never occurred to me to ask. By that stage there were not many questions to which I wanted to hear the answers.

  One night we’re sitting watching television. The first documentaries about what is starting to be called the Holocaust are beginning to screen. There is footage of the Warsaw Ghetto, the emaciated bodies, children with haunted eyes in the streets of a civilised European city.

  "I was there," my father says. I turn to look at him. His eyes hold steady on the television screen.

  "What was it like?"

  "You would wake up in the morning and the person next to you is dead."

  I don’t ask who that person was because you don’t ask.

  There are images of a place called Auschwitz. "There were worse places," my father says.

  I am shocked into silence. I thought I knew at least something about his life until I sat with him and saw those pictures.

  I MUST HAVE TOLD THE KIDS at school that we were going to New Zealand before the summer holidays in June because I remember Paul Zaluski saying, "You’ll be eaten by the Mau Maus."My mother’s family in Auckland sends us copies of The New Zealand Herald. I have the ghost of a memory that the newspapers were sent so my father could look for jobs. The television page of the Herald reveals one channel that comes on at two in the afternoon and finishes at 10.30 p.m. with a prayer. I flatly refuse to leave, but our life in Vancouver has already ended. In the last two months I stop seeing my friends. We’re as good as gone.

  The tension in the house is unbearable. I start to get migraines and for the first time go on a diet. Maybe it seems like a plan to try to disappear. The diet is simple: sleep away as much of the day as you can; eat an orange, then nothing else until dinner.

  I spend my small window of waking time falling in love with Uldis. We talk about the Beatles. His favourite song is "I Saw Her Standing There": "She was just seventeen..." He gives me Freud to read. He seems particularly keen on the Id. Our discussions are thrilling. He says something about petting the dog, and, giving me a strange look, adds, "Oh, I shouldn’t have said petting." I don’t know what he is talking about.

  He takes my mother, Ros and me to a movie, The Incredible Journey, about a dog and cat who find their way home. We go to a drive-in for a burger and thick shake. I’m so nervous I can’t eat. He comes with us when we go to the Pacific National Exhibition. We smile when my father keeps saying, "Everybody stick togezzer" and joke behind his back about roping ourselves together like mountaineers on a dangerous slope. Dad always worries about losing us.

  I agree to go with Uldis on the rickety-looking wooden rollercoaster. I learn at thirteen that love will make you do any damn foolish thing. He leads me to the front car. The flimsy little bar that locks into place is totally inadequate. I keep flying forward, hanging on for grim death. He puts his arm across to hold me in.

  He teaches me to play his guitar. "Your fingers are so tiny," he says. No one has ever described anything about me as tiny before. Teenagers have just been invented. I model myself on the girls in Gidget and Bachelor Father, flinging myself on to the furniture in pastel pedal-pushers and arranging my legs in what I hope are attractively nonchalant postures. "Diana is flirting with Uldis," my father announces. Cheeks burning, I beat a retreat.

  At night I make Dad his hot milk for his stomach cancer and present it in one of the best glasses, set on a saucer with a folded white serviette. I don’t realise how alert we have become to my father’s towering presence, mercurial moods and odd Eastern European expectations until Uldis says, "I’ve never seen three women jump to attention like you do." He is leaving for a summer job as a forestry worker in the interior of British Columbia. The lawn isn’t finished. Maybe he’s had enough of the tension and the yelling and is jumping off our sinking ship. On his last night my father takes my mother out to a movie, Tom Jones. In these bad years this is completely unprecedented. He is trying to court her again, persuading her not to leave. She tells me later that he said to her, "This is my only mistake. Can’t you give me a second chance?"

  I have agreed to babysit for the people next door, not knowing it’s Uldis’s last night. I beg my sister to babysit in my place but I have to go. Before I leave Uldis nudges my foot with his guitar, which is lying on the floor, but we never get to say goodbye. The next morning I find a note under my bedroom door. "In case I don’t see you again—you are very sweet and wonderful—have fun, be careful and happy." Every day I go to the cupboard under the stairs to strum Uldis’s guitar and breathe the pine-cone smell of some work clothes he has left behind.

  We have to get rid of Dukey My mother puts an ad in the paper. A family come in their car with their other dogs to get her. We watch her anxiously staring at us out the back window of their car as they drive away. We weep. My mother, who survived her own chaotic past by not looking back, doesn’t think to get the people’s contact details. Dad is furious that Dukey has been taken away, destination unknown, and there is no way of finding out her fate. The phone keeps ringing from the ad. My mother can’t talk to the callers because she keeps bursting into tears. I have to take the phone and say, "The dog is gone." Dukey, I hope you had a good life.

  In these last months my father seems to become greyer, shakier, a nocturnal silent presence. He comes home one night with a gash in his head so bad it requires stitching. He says he walked into the edge of a heavy glass door at the bank. The meeting at the bank can’t have gone well.

  We begin to spend more time together watching television. No one is bothering to tell me to go to bed so I don’t. He likes to watch Meet the Press. We start to have late night talks about philosophy, politics and religion.

  We are living in a conservative Christian neighbourhood. I come home spouting what I have been told at school about Jesus (good) and communism (very, very bad).

  "Jesus was a great philosopher," my father says. "He was not the son of God."

  And the communists? "They aren’t the worst thing in the world."

  During these talks I learn to admire his mind. Then I go to say goodnight to my mother. She’s crying.

  Soon we’re packing our suitcases, just what we can carry. Dad is to stay behind and crate up our belongings to send to New Zealand. Even though I am really too old for them I take my Barbie and Ken dolls, my monkey with a plastic banana, and Cubbie, a stuffed toy that Uncle Sy and Auntie Mollie bought me from the Hotel Vancouver. Cubbie, my constant companion, is threadbare from an excess of affection. "Oh, what a nice rat you have," adults say, uncertainly.

  My mother packs nothing of any value. The amethyst brooch that was a gift from her aunt, the hand-me-down mink coat Mollie sent from New York, her engagement ring, all have long since been pawned. For some reason she takes a huge hatbox. It won’t fit in the planes’ overhead lockers and will cause farcical scenes as we get jammed in the aisles.

  My goldfish is named Dewey, after my initials DEW. On our last day I carry Dewey, sloshing unhappily in his fish bowl, around to Anne’s house. I
haven’t seen much of her over the summer. We promise we’ll write, and do for a while. Recently Anne tracked me down and came to visit me in New Zealand, bringing a new husband who is a former Mountie, and trailing traces of that other world behind the closed door. She couldn’t remember much about my father. I begged her to try: there’s almost no one left who knew him. Anne did remember something I’d forgotten. One day she and I had decided to write a story together. We were pleased with it and, always on the lookout for ways to get my father’s approval, I gave it to him to read. It was about a couple who got a divorce. Why did we write about that? Neither of us knew anyone who was divorced. Anne recalled that my father was not impressed with the theme.

  But she hardly ever saw him, she said. I always went to her place, with its Danish Modern furniture and clean-cut blond parents with normal accents, like a family from television. Her mother enrolled us in charm school. Our ship was going down and I was learning the ladylike way to get out of a car.

  I can’t remember much about the day we left. When we got to the airport I felt a little put out that my father paused to put some fiftycent pieces into an insurance machine that promised to pay out if we crashed. He always was a bit of a gambler. I don’t remember saying goodbye, just turning to wave when we went through the gate. It didn’t feel like a big deal: Dad was going to follow us to New Zealand. We would see him soon.

  We flew in a DC8 to Hawai’i, where we stayed a night in a hotel back from the beach in Waikīkī but were allowed to use the pool at the more expensive beachfront section. No one had thought to pack swimsuits so we bought lurid overpriced ones from a beach vendor. After the long flight the ground kept going up and down, as though we were in a lift. Next day we had pancakes for breakfast, then boarded a smaller plane to Fiji, followed by a Fokker Friendship to Auckland’s Whenuapai Airport. In that bucketing Fokker Friendship I developed a lifelong fear of flying.