Joe sends a photo of Sabina from her later years. An orthodox Jewish lady, she wears a wig and a pink satin blouse, and stares staunchly at the camera. I scan her face, searching for resemblances. I can see a likeness to my father’s mother. I can see my father and a little of myself. She has a mole on the bridge of her nose like me and my father. I was thirty-two when she died. I could have met her if only I’d known. If I wish to drive myself crazy that’s one of the things I think about. Chasing the past is a recurring bad dream, the kind where you always get there just too late.
At least I haven’t been too late to find Joe. “My mother would have mothered you because you are a Wichtel,” he writes, “made you chicken soup with noodles, kneidlach matzo balls, served you some form of chicken.
Albert and Sabina Lubell, parents of Solomon, Estelle, Jack and Joseph (Joe), New York.
“My father didn’t speak very much, but if he took a liking to you you would get a fur coat, or maybe a muff, or maybe a fur neck piece.” I suddenly remember that my mother had a lambswool coat, the mink that Mollie had sent, and a fox fur stole I still have. They probably came from Albert Lubell’s business.
“My mother could be an aggressive strong-minded woman,” Joe writes. “She was Yiddish in outlook and a religious Jew. It was best not to be anti-religious when she was around. She had a guilt complex about leaving Poland and having almost her entire family killed. I am very sorry you never met them. They were honest hardworking immigrants. We cannot undo what is passed.”
But to undo what has passed is exactly what I want. Finding Joe seems a miracle, so why not more miracles?
The next year, 2007, I meet Joe in person at the bat mitzvah of Linda’s daughter Mollie. The ceremony takes place in December. My son comes along and also my stepson, who is living in New York. My sister Ros and her son Karl complete the New Zealand contingent. From Canada, there is my brother Jeff, his wife Maureen, and their daughters Jocelyn and Nicola.
The sight of our boys wearing yarmulkes for the ceremony as my father had for Jerry’s makes me cry. I am undone again when they front up to do the duty of the strong and nerveless during the circle dance known as the hora, lifting Mollie and Linda high on chairs. There is to be a cousins’ reunion next day at the home of Joe’s brother Jack, but a blizzard blows in. A longer meeting will have to wait. But Linda has achieved what no one has for nearly fifty years: a formal event uniting the remnants of our two families.
JOE KEEPS UP A CONSTANT FLOW OF INFORMATION. I learn the family lived in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw on the east side of the river Vistula. “You can imagine if there was no World War II and no slaughter of our family how large and dispersed our family would be. I consider the New Zealand branch very important in preserving the remnants of the Jonisz family,” Joe writes.
Names that exist on no official list arrive. I learn that my grandmother Rozalia was one of ten children of Brandla and Yankel Jonisz. She married Jacob Joseph Wichtel, started her family at the age of sixteen, had seven children and was widowed in 1928.
Her sister Dora was married to Bernard Gastman, who had a shoe factory. They had five children. Her brother Salomon, a clerk at City Hall in Warsaw, married Bernard’s sister Dina. They had two children: Dora, one of our family’s three survivors of the Holocaust, and her younger sister.
Herszel was a vegetable dealer like his father Yankel. It’s not known how many children he had with his wife Maria. As for the tenth child, there are mentions of a Maria, married to a military man, and a Joseph, who was a cantor, but we can’t be sure. Berl (Bernard), wife unknown, had two children, ran a flour business and possibly had a farm. Faiga’s husband ran a hardware business and had the surname Pel. They had one child. Nothing is known of Szymon except that, like my father, he was in textiles. Sabina ended up in Brooklyn. Pawel (Paul) survived the war in Poland.
Yankel Jonisz and Brandla Jonisz, Warsaw, Poland, dates unknown.
These great-aunts and -uncles had a total of twenty-six children. Some of those children had children of their own, whose names we will never know. All in Poland would die in the war except for my father, his cousin Dora and his uncle Paul. Four generations, almost entirely erased.
After the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 the family in America had had some contact with their relatives in Warsaw. “We received a distress letter in Brooklyn,” Joe tells me. “It was in Yiddish. They wanted help to get out of Poland. The whole thing was impossible, at the time, to move such a huge family.”
Sabina and Albert went to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and asked for help. “The society tried, but then the Germans ordered that all Jews had to go to a ghetto and they cut off all communication at that point to the outside world.” Sabina could never talk about her lost family. “My mother crying before the large photos of her mother and father which hung in her bedroom I will never forget. She knew they were doomed.”
There is one last letter from the ghetto that still exists. Joe would have been eleven when his mother received it in 1941.
From the end of 1940 Warsaw’s Jews have been forced to live behind a wall up to ten feet high and topped with barbed wire and broken glass. They have been made to pay for the wall. The average daily food ration per person is 184 calories.
By 1941 the Einsatzgruppen, special units following the German army east, are systematically slaughtering Jews. They have a model in the pogroms of Eastern Europe. These pogroms also carry on, often with minimal help from the Nazis. In July 1941 up to 1,600 Jews—men, women, children and babies—are murdered by their neighbours in the Polish town of Jedwabne. After being subjected to taunts, humiliations, beatings and rape, most are locked in a barn and burned alive.
The sender of the last letter is my Great-aunt Faiga Pel. My father had told me there were twins in his family. When I look at the dates Joe has sent I see that his mother, Sabina, was born in 1898. So was Faiga. Sabina and Faiga were twins. The address is Pawia 61/56: Flat 61, 56 Peacock Street. It has come via the Lisbon office of HICEM, a Jewish aid organisation set up in 1927 to help European Jews emigrate.
It is signed by an official of the ghetto’s Judenrat, one of the Jewish councils set up by the Nazis. Such councils worked to help their fellow Jews but were forced by the Nazis to take part in organising their destruction. The system created what Primo Levi called the “gray zone”, a territory of ambiguity, of morality tipped upside down. Some of their leaders, like Łodź Ghetto’s infamous chairman Chaim Rumkowski, made obscene calculations—give up some for deportation in the hope of saving others who could work. In September 1942 Rumkowski gave one of the most terrible speeches in the history of human communication. Ordered to organise the handover of the old and the children to the Nazis, he said: “Brothers and sisters, give them to me. Give me your children ... Children above ten are saved. Let that at least be some consolation in your great pain.” When faced with a similar order in July that year, the head of the Warsaw Ghetto’s Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, had committed suicide in despair.
Sara Plagier, sixteen, gives an account of the deportation. “I saw two wagons full of little children drive past the open gate. Many of the children were dressed in their holiday best, the little girls with coloured ribbons in their hair. In spite of the soldiers in their midst, the children were shrieking at the top of their lungs. They were calling out for their mothers.”
The message from Faiga Pel to her twin sister Sabina is couched in the elaborately analgesic language allowed to those who have lost all human rights and whose words will be censored by their oppressors. “We ask politely to transmit from your sister thanks for the package which she received. She asked for further packages and mother asks for packages. The packages should be sent to Brandla Jonisz. Best greetings—sends her love and thank you very much, and asking for an answer soon by airmail.”“We ask politely”; “soon by airmail”: what desperation bleeds through those formal greetings.
The only way to know something of what my family endured is through written accounts of the ghetto
. Abraham Lewin, a school teacher, recorded the daily horrors in his diary, later published as a book, A Cup of Tears: “They emptied Dr Korczak’s orphanage with the Doctor at the head. Two hundred orphans... Many victims on Miła Street... In the evening a pogrom in the streets. A great many killed at various locations—Smocza, Pawia, Miła, Zamenhof and others.”
Faiga lived on Pawia Street, my father on Miła. Film from the time shows long lines of men loading emaciated naked bodies on wheelbarrows to take to mass graves. Adam Czerniaków described the starvation and sickness. “At 63 Pawia Street 450 people have died.” Faiga and many more of my family were at number 56.
The German word for relief packages sent to the ghetto was “Liebesgabenpakete”—”Love gifts”. We will never know if Brandla received the next love gifts from her family in New York. But we do know something of what was happening in the ghetto at the time Faiga sent her letter. “The Germans came, rounding up people every day,” survivor Zosia Goldberg wrote in her memoir Running Through Fire. “One day they said, ‘Everyone who is a redhead will go.’ Then the next day, ‘Everyone who is freckled.’ Another day, those with kinky hair; another, those with the Jewish nose; another, those who look like Gentiles; another, those who look beautiful. Then, those who are ugly, those with bow legs. Too old. All pregnant women. All women with little children. All men...”
Faiga’s letter is now in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with other Jonisz family material that Joe carefully kept over the years. He emailed me a copy. On the front is an official stamp bearing the Nazi emblem of a black eagle above an oak wreath, with a swastika at its centre. It is dated June 26, 1941. Two months later, on August 29, Brandla Jonisz had died of starvation, having given most of her rations to the younger ones. Joe tells me his family learned of Brandla’s fate from my father when he arrived in New York in 1947. I think of what he told me about his time in the ghetto: “You wake up and the person next to you is dead.”
JOE TELLS ME WHAT I MOST WANT TO KNOW—the story of my father. “Ben Wichtel was a young, very athletic man,” he writes. “They were en route to Treblinka, which was not a concentration camp but a killing centre about two hours north of Warsaw. There the Nazis established gas chambers to kill the Jews. Ben Wichtel jumped off the train.”
Jewish partisans in a forest in the Lublin area, where Ben Wichtel was liberated at the end of the war. He was with partisans and others who had escaped from ghettos and the nearby Majdanek concentration camp.
The trains had little windows with barbed wire but my father managed to get out. “He must have been very thin to do that,” Joe says.
He lived in the forest until the end of the war. I will learn from his post-liberation registration card, and from a list made when he was liberated, that he was with found with partisans and others who had escaped from ghettos and from the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin.
Did he fight? I ask Joe. “Of course he fought! He wouldn’t have survived if he didn’t fight.”
Joe tells me that after the war Sy searched and searched for family members, but after he found Ben the reunion in New York didn’t go well. “Your father came to my house with a guitar. Which was the wrong thing to do, by the way,” Joe says. He looked bohemian, not what was expected. He looked merry. “I can’t explain it. He looked fine. He didn’t look like he had a problem in the world.
“Everybody pleaded with him to stay in the New York area and everything would be fine, they would take care of him. Because he wasn’t all put together, you know. If you get out of the ghetto and all this crazy running around, you don’t expect to be perfectly stable. Jumping off the train, living like an animal for three years with a little terrorist group who ran around and tried to knock off Germans or steal things to survive...”
I had somehow imagined my father had just hidden in a box under the ground until liberation, but of course that could never have been true. He was young, strong, smart, and he had to eat, he had to live, had to fight. As my daughter Monika will put it, “That’s some Inglourious Basterds shit.”
We know only fragments of what my father saw and did. In Laurence Rees’ book The Holocaust, survivor Dario Gabbai talks about an SS guard, Otto Moll, who was particularly sadistic, even by the standards of Auschwitz. He liked to kill naked girls by shooting them “on their breasts”, the sort of scene my father had described.
What did my father have to do to survive? I might have been frightened of his rages but I had known him as a gentle man, opposed to violence. In my narrative he was a passive victim, but on this sort of voyage everything you think you know can turn out to be wrong.
To Joe, he was maddeningly stubborn. “Why in the hell didn’t he stay in New York? It didn’t make sense fifty years ago. It doesn’t make sense today.”
Everyone tried to persuade him to stay. Sy was making a lot of money. He had had government contracts during the war and his luggage business was going well. “He made your father a wonderful offer,” Joe says. “He was a very kind man and a very generous man. He was outstanding in intelligence and elegance.
“My mother pleaded with him in Yiddish. He was going so far away. It wasn’t around the corner. He would pay attention to no one. Your father was very handsome, musically talented and well spoken, all assets which would benefit him. Our family didn’t understand his move far off to Canada.” He recalled having once heard that my father may have been going to join a woman he’d met in a displaced persons camp.
On the positive side, Joe says, if Ben hadn’t gone to Vancouver he wouldn’t have met my mother. “And you and I wouldn’t be talking now.”
Sy, who had supported my father so far, arranged to send him money every month.
JOE UNDERSTANDS WHAT WAR CAN DO: he served in Korea in the 1950s, working with severely wounded soldiers in hospital, an experience that affected him deeply. He has spent years of his life researching and teaching about what happened to our family and all the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Nearly every time we talk he says, “God, how I hate those Nazi bastards.” His anger remains white-hot for his aunts and uncles and their children, for Rachele and Brandla, and for the survivors. “Your dad went through hell and back and never recovered from the Holocaust. He ran away from Jewishness, his heritage and his family.”
After my father left his aunt’s house in New York, Sabina said something that made an impression on seventeen-year-old Joe: “Er iz a krank mentsh”—He is a sick man. When she heard years later that my father was dead, she believed he had killed himself.
Joe and Barbara Lubell’s wedding in Brooklyn, New York, 1953. Standing, left to right: Sy and Mollie Wichtel, Lillian and Paul Jonisz; seated, Joe and Barbara.
The things Joe has told me suggest there was an unbridgeable gulf between the family members who, during the war, had been helpless and distraught but safe in America and those who turned up afterwards, having walked out of hell.
Dad’s Uncle Paul, who had survived by hiding out on the Aryan side of Warsaw, stayed in New York. “Uncle Paul wasn’t that good-looking,” Joe says, “but he had a certain... When he met you he’d take your hand, hold your hand and kiss it, and bow European style. Women just loved that stuff.” I remember the look in my mother’s eyes when she talked about how my father had courted her, kissing her hands and clicking his heels.
My father was twenty-nine when the war started. I ask Joe if he was married. Joe says he wasn’t. Later, during one of our long phone conversations, I ask him if he knows why. Possibly it was the hard times, he says. Maybe my father didn’t feel he could take on a wife. “Jewish women weren’t the easiest women to seduce and have sex with. That’s the way it was. You couldn’t have sex with them. You know men solve their problem by masturbation. ... Why are you laughing? That’s what they do.”
My father’s cousin Dora, the family’s youngest and only female survivor, ended up in Mexico but remained in touch with Joe and Barbara. They tell me what they know of her story. She was nineteen when the war
began. One day she managed to leave the ghetto to get medicine for her mother. While outside, she met a school friend who was a Catholic. The friend offered her the baptismal papers of her dead sister. When she told her mother, her mother told her to do whatever she could do to save herself.
She left the ghetto and was helped by the friend’s family. “She passed as a Christian,”Joe says. “The Nazis were looking for Jewish girls but you can’t tell a Jewish girl because Jewish girls aren’t circumcised like Jewish boys. A Jewish boy they would simply pull his pants down and if they saw the penis circumcised they would kill him. It’s easy to forget how terrible they were. They were animalistic. The whole thing is just a horror.”
Later Dora was rounded up with other girls by the Germans and sent to work in a factory.
PAUL WAS MARKED BY HIS EXPERIENCES. He became paranoid. “It isn’t difficult for me to understand why Uncle Paul, walking down the street with me in New York and suddenly looking at a New York City police car, said ‘Polizei!’ and became very upset,” Joe says. “He was having a flashback of his life in Europe when he was on the run.”
Paul had seen his first wife slaughtered in the street. He had met his second wife, Lillian, in a displaced persons camp. She was a survivor of Auschwitz who had been subjected to medical experiments. “Dr Mengele—do you know who he was?—Mengele used X-rays on women’s ovaries to see how much X-ray it took to make women unable to bear children.”
Possibly as a result of these experiments, Lillian died young of cancer. When she was in hospital, Barbara would visit her.
She told me Paul would take Joe for a walk so he could tell him “they” knew where he was and were following him. “Even though Paul managed to escape, he was not left undamaged. That is why, when he closed his business, he and Lillian went to Mexico.”
Driving to Treblinka Page 11