Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  I’m working on it. During one of my random internet trawls of our family names I unearth a piece by a University of Maryland academic about transmitted trauma. The professor has read online an essay I wrote about my father and the game I made up to play with him, in which he was a homeless man at the door and my sister and I brought him in from the cold. He sees this as an acting-out of my father’s Holocaust experience.

  “We neglect the degree to which the child and adolescent needs to know and feel the inner reality of the parent, even if this reality includes horror. Without this access, everything feels phony, unreal, including the child him or herself. If the parent has been horrified, then the child needs to be horrified too if they are to be securely attached.

  “He and his children seem to have been able to play-act his duality, his frightening strangeness that was also a closeness, in a way that worked to contain the horror. Had this part not been shared, the young girl would have been less attached, not only to her father but to life itself.

  “There are many ways to interpret her story,” the professor concludes. “One is that her father gave her a great gift.”

  In the game I was trying to ask my father about the past he couldn’t talk about and he was trying to share it. While I’m grappling with this I have two vivid dreams. In one I’m in a high room. Perhaps it’s the Sargeson Fellowship room in Albert Park, where I have worked on this book. My father is there. For some reason, we have to get out of the room. “You have to jump from the window,” he says. “No, it’s too high,” I plead. “You have to go down there and catch me.” In the end we run down the stairs together. In my haste to get down I knock into him and he nearly falls.

  In the other dream my father is sitting beside me. He reaches out and takes my hand. I ask him, “Is it okay that I’m telling your story?”

  After these dreams, as with earlier ones in which I see my father in a crowd or on a bus, I wake flooded with relief, electrified by love. Some people would say my father has visited me. I wish I could believe this but I’m my father’s daughter so I can’t. But maybe in remembering him fully and giving in to the pain, he’s at the door again and I have invited him in.

  I hope that when I read his last letter I wrote back.

  CHAPTER 8

  A call in the night

  His condition is very precarious.

  Clinical record, Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, November 26, 1970

  SUMMER 1971. The phone rings and rings. At two a.m. it’s never good news. Uncle Sy and Auntie Mollie are calling from New Jersey. My sister and I stand in the hallway of the old villa near the corner of Dominion Road and Balmoral Road where we are flatting and learn that our father is dead.

  How did they get our number? We’re students, living a nomadic life and not in the phone book. We don’t think to ask. Maybe they have already spoken to our mother in Yokohama but that’s unlikely: my sister remembers that Sy and Mollie were shocked to learn from us that Mum was in Japan and we were in New Zealand fending for ourselves.

  What do I remember about the call? Almost nothing. I was numb, stunned. Mollie and Sy gave us their phone number. We lost it. Everything to do with my father ended up getting lost, or thrown out. Just as his presence used to sizzle through the house like an unearthed electric current, reminders of him had a dangerous wattage. The shaky equilibrium of our new life required the door to the old one stay closed.

  “He died a few months ago,” Sy said. “It was pneumonia. All he left were a few papers.”

  I didn’t ask why we hadn’t heard sooner. Now I know that Sy had gone bankrupt; he and Mollie had had to move from their mansion and were no longer in contact with my father. No one was in contact with my father. I will find a document that states: “Family could not be reached.” It took a while for the authorities to track his brother down.

  At the end of the call Sy says to me, “Never forget you are a Wichtel.”

  Why didn’t I think to ask for the papers about Dad’s death? Why weren’t they sent to us? Mum may have said she didn’t want them, those reproachful postcards from her painful past. Later, when I begin looking for my father, I ask my cousins Jerry and Linda if they saw any of the papers in their parents’ effects. They didn’t. Maybe Sy couldn’t bear to keep them, either.

  It seems incomprehensible that we didn’t even think to ask Sy for the name of the place where our father died. We could have written, made calls, found out what had happened to him. It will be over forty years before I write the letters and make the calls. “The living are more demanding.” Primo Levi wrote. “The dead can wait.”

  WE PHONE MUM. She doesn’t say she will get on a plane and come to New Zealand and I don’t ask her to. The next night I go to bed and cry for hours. That is it: no cards, no flowers, no condolences. I don’t recall any of my mother’s family mentioning this turn of events. In that respect my father’s death was like that of his family in Poland: it left no trace.

  There is only an oblique reference to the death in my mother’s letters from Japan: “Next time you write would you also send me the address of Mollie and Sy. I can’t remember the house number, don’t even know if they are in the same place. I would like to write them.

  Have you written them yet? We really should keep in touch with them I suppose as they were very good to us. I’m a coward I suppose but I hate the thought of opening up the past again.”

  “Of course we won’t forget you. What a thing to say,” she writes in reply to what must have been a reproachful letter from me.

  I find something else in the letters. A year earlier, a ghost from our old life has passed through Auckland. “Imagine seeing Dr Greenberg,” my mother writes. Dr Greenberg had been our family doctor, the one who said, “You have to make Ben come into the office.” One of those who tried to help him.

  “Life is strange isn’t it,” she continues. “Am looking forward to seeing them here. I suppose he was amazed I was living in Japan. Yes, it would bring back poignant memories which I’m not looking forward to.”

  My mother’s letters show how much she wants my sister and me to come and live with her in Yokohama. Stew can get us there for free on Japan Airlines while we are still students. “For cripes sake don’t worry about money!” he writes. I don’t even consider going. I fled home at seventeen, moved into a flat, and have been supporting myself ever since. I am doing a BA at Auckland University. There’s no turning back.

  NEVER FORGET YOU ARE A WICHTEL, Uncle Sy had said. The name has been nothing but trouble. Just before I left home I went to a pub—the Victoria Hotel—with my best friend Judith so she could meet a boy. She told her parents we were going to the movies; I was the alibi. I was seventeen. The legal drinking age was twenty-one. I ordered vodka, the only drink I could think of. I stood clutching the glass, radiating guilt.

  A cop made a beeline and marched me outside.

  “What is your surname?” he said, pen poised over notepad.

  “Wichtel,” I said.

  “Do you expect me to believe that? Your mother’s maiden name?” he sneered.

  “Scantlebury,” I sighed. I was going down.

  Judith and Johnny came out to try and help. “It’s okay, we know her.”

  “Well, what’s her name then?”

  Certain I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to give my real name, they could only say, “Ahh... we don’t know.”

  I got on the bus alone and cried all the way back to Takapuna. The cop rang next day and asked to speak to a parent. Luckily my mother was still around. He was astonished to find the phone number I had given was real, that I’d been idiotic enough to tell the truth, and that one family could have two such improbable names. He must have thought this was punishment enough because that was the end of my brush with the law.

  In reality my mother had amassed enough names to pass for an international secret agent: Patricia Valentina Pattle Murray Izett Scantlebury Wichtel Downey. There was an excess of names on my father’s side too. Many of
his family had both Hebrew and Polish names. My grandmother was Rozalia and Rachele, my father Benjamin and Bronisław. We knew my father’s only remaining brother as Sy but on official documents he is Abraham Szlama Wichtel.

  I gave up my name when I got married in the ‘70s but, despite the endless bother it causes me, claimed it back when my husband and I split. W-i-c-h-t-e-l: I learnt early to automatically spell it out. Over the years, I’ve had letters addressed to Witchell, Wincell, Mitchell, Twitchell, and Wotchpell. During my life as a television critic I’ve had hate mail addressed to almost every anagrammatic permutation and vengeful pun, including “you stupid Bitchtel”. One plus: when a reader writes in to berate me for a minor error I am almost always able to reply, “Thank you for the feedback, and by the way my name, which you have spelt incorrectly, is Wichtel.”

  ONE YEAR IN THE LATE ‘60S, before I know my father is dead, I move flats nine times. My boyfriend Philip and I live in abject poverty. I clothe myself in vintage men’s white dress shirts and mouldering fur coats from op shops. There are epic parties, with bands and light shows. Someone has a wind-up gramophone. Entertainment is doing the Charleston around the lounge to a 78 of “The Varsity Drag”. Some of our flatmates are classical musicians so we eat crumpets in the overgrown garden serenaded by violin and oboe. The toilet is also in the garden. To wash our clothes we boil up an old copper in the shed.

  Parents are best avoided. A flatmate’s mother is appalled when she opens a bathroom door and finds the bath piled with dirty dishes we’ve hidden for her visit. “My son cannot live like this!” she says to me accusingly. As the only female present, I am clearly responsible for the comfort of her layabout boy.

  There are, of course, drugs. I’m usually the timorous one—reality is rocky enough. We know people who die of overdoses but my friends aren’t in that dangerous league. It’s less Easy Rider, more The Young Ones. One Sunday afternoon there is a motorbike convoy to Titirangi, where someone has spotted masses of dope growing wild. I hate this kind of expedition, always fearful of being caught and having to go through the names again, but too scared of being judged straight and boring to refuse to go. The boys stuff pillowcases with the illicit greenery. Back at the flat they spread the windfall on the roof of the laundry shed to dry: highs for all; fortunes to be made.

  It turns out to be catnip. When it comes to grand moneymaking plans, my hippie surrogate family seems as hapless as my real one. The only substance-related emergency is when two of our rock musician flatmates put what they think is sugar in their tea, not noticing the bag is labelled “borax”. We take them to hospital and listen to them vomit.

  Fortunately it’s 1969 and no one needs to grow up. There are Jumping Sundays in Albert Park: agitprop theatre and dancing in fairy rings to the Frank E Evans Lunchtime Entertainment Band, which plays revolutionary numbers like “If You Knew Suzie” and “I’ve Never Seen A Straight Banana”. Led by Tim Shadbolt, we are against nuclear bombs and the war in Vietnam, but mostly we are united by a sense we are living in a ridiculous little country. Women can’t go into most public bars, the movie of James Joyce’s Ulysses can be seen only in gender-segregated audiences. When I refuse to stand for “God Save The Queen”, an old woman pokes me with her umbrella.

  BEING STATELESS, HOMELESS, FATHERLESS can be a lifestyle choice. I wasn’t alone in starting from scratch. I developed an obsession with the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell—orphaned, siblings lost along the way, living always in the shadow of madness and death, had somehow created a new family, their own world. “Arrange whatever pieces come your way,” Woolf had written. Out of nothing, something.

  Philip started various companies with names like Cerebral Vortex. That one may have been the poster-printing business. The posters were printed in Brown’s Mill in Durham Street, and he schlepped them around the country in a Hillman Imp that kept breaking down.

  Decades later a guy would come up to me at a media event and say, “Nerve Centre Light Works” and I would make a spectacle of myself by screaming involuntarily. This was a business Philip set up to create psychedelic light shows. Baking soda, food colouring and oil were smeared between glass slides and the slides put into a projector. The heat would produce kaleidoscopic, pulsating, amoeba-like shapes that, depending on what you’d ingested, more or less blew your mind. I learned to help out and we worked at events involving bands like Ron and Alistair Riddell’s Original Sun.

  There were anarchic entertainments organised by the university arts society: medieval banquets, complete with straw on the floor, dogs, and on one infamous occasion a stripper. Caterina De Nave, who would later clear the way for women in the television industry, rode around on a motor scooter decorated with a daisy and projected movies on the wall of the Student Union building. Alan Brunton, soon to create the experimental theatre troupe Red Mole, read poetry to jazz. We once visited the grim house in Boyle Crescent where the poet James K. Baxter lived but he wasn’t at home. All the bedrooms had locks on their doors.

  There were Hiroshima Day events and demonstrations against the Vietnam War but the world seemed largely absurd. I had an ingrained mistrust, possibly inherited from my father, of rigid ideology. Mao and Stalin could not be my heroes: any country that wouldn’t let you leave was a prison camp. The world seemed best explained by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. When Vladimir said, “To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears!” and Pozzo says, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” I understood that Beckett knew something about the Shoah.

  Mostly, though, I had no connection with anything Jewish, although I gravitated to pockets of continental culture. Our group haunt was Babel, a coffee shop upstairs in Victoria Street run by an immigrant, Odo Strewe. Odo had fled Nazi Germany but we never talked about that.

  I SOMEHOW FINISH MY DEGREE but don’t bother with the graduation ceremony: for years afterwards I will not be able to bring myself to go near the university, afraid I will die of nostalgia. Philip and I are thinking, for practical reasons, of getting married. At Christmas I go to Yokohama to visit Mum and Stew. Our family are the only foreigners in their neighbourhood. No one speaks English. Babies cry at the sight of my mother with her blonde hair. The air is so polluted we blow black stuff out of our noses after walking outside. I smoke, cry, can’t breathe. Beset by insecurity I wait for mail that takes weeks to come. I have a small breakdown and imagine that the ramshackle existence back in Auckland, by then the only sense of home I have, will be gone by the time I return.

  When I get back in February 1970, Philip is still there. We move to a flat in Balmoral Road and are living there when my mother and Jeff come to stay. Mum and Stew are planning to return, and Mum is looking for a house on the North Shore. I am anxious in case Nana finds out I am living with my boyfriend. “It’s not really any business of the family what you do, but as you say it’s best not to upset Nana at this stage,” my mother has written. “However we will deal with that when the time comes, if it is necessary.”

  Next year Philip and I take off to Europe after Stew gets me a free ticket from Japan Airlines. We work in London temping as telephonists, jobs that come with a crash course in Britain’s class system. At a West End law firm I am told off by a partner for not giving him his messages as he passes by: he doesn’t seem to notice I am not the woman who usually sits there. Later, when he sees a man in a turban delivering something, he goes to his office and rings the switchboard. “Are you all right?” he says pointedly. I assure him I can cope. I am from New Zealand.

  My next job is at Westminster Social Services, where no one seems shocked to see a mother and children who have been sleeping rough all night. A man who phones isn’t happy with the person I put him through to. He knows where I work, he yells, and will be waiting. At the end of work days I stick my head out the door, scan the horizon and run for the tube station.

  For a while we stay with Philip’s mothe
r, who is working as housekeeper for a newly rich family and has a flat in the basement of their flash townhouse. She doesn’t get on with the wife. “Provincial slut,” she mutters, referring to the woman’s home management standards rather than her morals. Philip’s mother is one of the few people who acknowledges my Jewish heritage. “She’s a real New York Jewess,” she will say of some friend. “You will know what I mean, Diana.”

  Philip and I take off to Amsterdam, buy a Kombi van that leaks oil, and drive around Western Europe. Once, on a train, we meet a couple of men from Poland. I tell them my father came from Warsaw. I don’t say he was Jewish. “Oh, Poland is beautiful. You must go there,” they say. That seems a mad idea. We stay in Europe for a few months but I am homesick for a home I don’t really have.

  Back in Auckland in 1972 we get married. I take a job as a teacher and we move into Philip’s parents’ home, a sort of elegant 1950s shed in Devonport’s Glen Road. His father is living in Canada. His mother comes back from London and sometimes lives downstairs.

  Glen Road never feels like home. In truth, my life never feels like my life until I have my first baby, in 1976, in a little maternity hospital in Auckland’s East Coast Bays. In those days you stayed in the hospital for ten days. Babies are kept in a glass-fronted nursery and brought to you for feeding. I elbow aside my visitors so I can gaze at my son through the window. My mother, who’s said she’d brain the first one of us to make her a grandmother, is broadsided by emotion. “I didn’t know it would be like this,” she keeps saying. Neither did I. I am twenty-six and can’t even take care of myself. I call the baby Benjamin after my father.

  I go back to university, get an MA in English and tutor. Life opens up. I am too busy to think often of the past, but armed with a beautiful boy with the Wichtel build who sees no obstacle he can’t climb, it seems closer. I am getting ready to start looking for my father.