Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  The exiled German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. There could, it seems, be comic books, including Art Spiegelman’s graphic telling of his father’s story, Maus. In 1940 in Gurs, an internment camp in southwest France, Horst Rosenthal made a booklet entitled Mickey Mouse in Gurs, using Mickey as a stand-in for himself. “I have no papers,” Mickey explains to a gendarme. “I’m international.”

  Rosenthal was murdered at Auschwitz.

  Jews being marched to the Umschlagplatz for deportation to Treblinka after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that began in April 1943. Although German soldiers set fire to the ghetto building by building, pockets of resistance continued for almost a month.

  Jerry Seinfeld wondered whether it was all right to make out while watching Schindler’s List. My father wanted us to laugh at his stories of fooling young German soldiers in the Polish forest. The doomed historian and archivist Emanuel Ringelblum took the time to record ghetto jokes in his remarkable journal. In one a police chief comes to the apartment of a woman to take away her belongings. She pleads that she is a widow with a child. He says he will take nothing if she can guess which of his eyes is the artificial one.

  She guesses the left. The police chief asks her how she knew. “Because that one has a human look,” she answers.

  Mostly, though, there aren’t a lot of laughs for the dark tourist in Berlin. Memorials are everywhere, not only to Jews but to others murdered by the Third Reich: homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, the disabled. No amount of memorials explains why, in living memory, the people of a civilised European culture colluded in first the persecution and then the mass slaughter of their friends, colleagues and neighbours.

  During the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as buildings burned and people held off the Germans, the Catholic newspaper Prawda Młodych (Young People’s Truth) saw an opportunity for Jewish redemption. “Prayer for those being killed, making them aware that their present suffering may constitute a great sacrificial pyre bringing swifter renewal, removing the curse from a nation that was once the chosen people... Their souls will be cleansed and redeemed by the baptism of blood, equally important and holy as the baptism of water.” Any reason will do, or no reason.

  WE STAY IN A LITTLE PENSION in one of Berlin’s “gayborhoods” run by a Polish woman who mothers us and clucks over our inability to make much impression on her breakfasts of boiled eggs, cold meats, breads and cheeses. One day we take a trip to Bad Arolsen to visit ITS, the International Tracing Service. ITS began in 1943 as a registration and tracing service for missing persons.

  To get to Bad Arolsen takes six hours on a train, return. This is ambitious, even by our standards. But after one nothing after another, here there is something. The place is the world’s largest Nazi archive, holding more than thirty million documents about the fate of seventeen and a half million people, the scrupulously detailed paperwork of the Third Reich. It includes documents relating to forced labour used by German churches and businesses. For decades the archives were restricted on the ground of privacy. When we visit they have been fully open for only two years.

  Here you can study the vocabulary of mass murder. “The load should be nine to 10 per square metres,” reads a letter about the requirements for trucks used to kill the disabled. The load. We see a concentration camp lice control card: each prisoner is listed, along with the number of lice found. There’s a camp death book recording the killing of prisoners at two-minute intervals over an hour and a half. “Look at the date,” archivist Udo Jost says of one entry, “April 20, 1942. The birthday of Adolf Hitler and they make a present to the Führer.”

  I know there will be little evidence of my family among these records. My cousin Joe applied for information in the 1980s and found nothing. There was no registering of those who were sent to Treblinka, no numbers or names. But at the end of our visit some staff members come to speak to me. They move in close, bring a box of tissues. Two documents have been found. One is a list in French of survivors in Poland. It includes “Wichtel, Benjamin, à Varsovie.”

  The other document, compiled by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, contains the names of survivors who have been put in touch with relatives in America. On one side is listed “Wichtel, Benjamin from Warsaw.” On the other: “Wichtel, A.S., New York, N.Y.”The list is dated September 1944. Uncle Sy has found his brother.

  CHAPTER 14

  Uncle Paul

  “I know you. You are a Jew and let’s go.”

  Uncle Paul’s account of a life in hiding

  AT JOE’S URGING, PAUL JONISZ (Janish once he got to America) wrote his wartime story. The original in his baroque old-world hand is with other family material at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Some of the story is written in English, inflected with Polish and Yiddish. The parts written in Polish have been translated and summarised by the museum.

  The documents I receive, Notebook One and Notebook Two, are a mix of Paul’s words and the translator’s. Paul tells his story in the cool manner I have come to recognise from the accounts of many survivors.

  “I am born in Warsaw City, which is known as a beautiful city situated on the large river Vistula. My father was very well known because of his import business in grain and vegetables in freight wagons.”This was my great-grandfather Yankel Jonisz, who did well by supplying the military.

  “[He] obtained a good and honest name. As a result, my father receives a gold medal from the existing government.”The Jonisz pride is there in Paul’s voice, even on the page: a successful man; a good and honest name. It’s the same family pride I hear on the phone whenever I speak to Joe, the pride I heard the night Uncle Sy called at two a.m. and said, “Never forget you are a Wichtel.” It was in my father’s voice when he spoke of his successful brother: “He has a mansion. They will spoil you rotten.”

  To a child’s ear all that pride sounded a little boastful. I had a New Zealand mother. To her it wasn’t done to big-note. Now there’s a different way to hear it. Successful, honest, recipient of a gold medal: see, we were good and useful citizens. What did we do to deserve to be destroyed?

  Paul, ten years older than my father, studied bookkeeping and on a course met his future wife, seventeen-year-old Barbara. Her Polish name was Bronisława, Bronka for short. “We used to be always together since our mentality was different from the rest of our families,” Paul writes, hinting at tensions. Maybe it wasn’t just the war that kept those who survived from cohering as a family.

  At twenty-one Paul was in the Polish army. Barbara’s parents won a lottery and moved to Germany. Paul followed and studied in Hamburg. Two years later he returned to Warsaw. Even in 1925 German Jews were experiencing the beginning of the end. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published that year. The Nazi Party began to build a mass movement. “Bad consequences from [Hitler’s] propaganda,” is the way Paul puts it. “Hitler started his brutal job.” Barbara’s parents soon returned to Warsaw as well.

  Paul and Barbara bumped into each other at the movies. Reunited. “Our joy was wonderful.” They married in a private ceremony in Barbara’s parents’ apartment. There’s no talk of his orthodox Jonisz family being invited.

  The couple’s happiness was short-lived, thanks to the “housepainter, a brutal murderer with the name A Hitler”. On September 1, 1939 the war against Poland began. “We didn’t expect his murder plan so quickly.”

  Paul and Barbara, living in a beautiful five-room apartment on the corner of Marszałkowska and Wilcza Streets, knew what was happening to Jews in Germany. Soon in Warsaw “the SS men came to Jewish apartments with whips”. Jews were dragged from their homes and made to work, repairing utilities damaged by the German attackers. Paul will not write about the Holocaust in general: he knows many books have already been written. “But I like to mention that Poles believed ... the hate was against the Jews only, making a big mistake by not helping enough with weapons, food and medication.”

  The situation worsened with shocki
ng suddenness. Ghettos were built, announcements made. “All Jews must move from their apartments to the ghetto ... Every Jew must wear a band with the Jewish symbol. Under these circumstances the Jews realised how tragic the situation is, and their fate is doomed.” Some escaped to Russia. Paul doesn’t say why he didn’t try to escape. Maybe Barbara wouldn’t leave her parents.

  He and Barbara moved to a small apartment in the ghetto. Barbara was secretary for women in the ghetto’s third section. Paul became chairman of a section of ZTOS, an activist organisation to help the poor and sick. These self-help bodies, and others like CENTOS for the care of orphans, were organised by, among others, Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian and politician known for his Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, the journal he kept secretly to record the mounting horror. These activist groups operated behind the façade of official organisations. Hundreds worked for them. The salary: a bowl of soup.

  Paul mentions none of his Jonisz family, although by the end of August 1941 his mother Brandla has died of starvation and been buried at the Jewish Cemetery in Okopowa Street. The translator records: “Paul writes that he was unable to find out what exactly happened to his large family and to his wife’s family.”

  By this time Paul and my father will have known what was happening to Jews in other parts of Poland—the massacres by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS paramilitary death squads. As recorded in the book Who Will Write Our History? about Emanuel Ringelblum, by late January 1942 farewell letters were arriving in the ghetto from Jews about to be deported from other places. One contained an ominous coded message about Treblinka: “Uncle [the Nazis] was building a new house very near to you.”

  In late March and early April the Warsaw Ghetto underground learned of the plan for total extermination and began to plan armed resistance. My father said he was in the underground. It was on April 23 that the head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, refused to sign orders to deport children. For Paul the memory is still bitter. “Czerniaków returning home commits the same day suicide. ... not one voice was to hear from still free Europe and USA in order to help the growing tragic situation of the Jews in Germany and Poland. The USA, British or French could have bombed the gas chambers in concentration camps and saved millions of innocent people!”

  Until I found my cousin Joe in 2006, I had thought it was Paul who had jumped from the train with my father. I learned it was another man, identity unknown. The section of Paul’s diary translated from Polish tells of his own escape, beginning with the day his street was blockaded. All the inhabitants of the apartments had to come down to the street. Here a selection was made. Men and women were separated, children and parents.

  “Paul, standing among the men, was sure he is sentenced to death,” the summary says. He is thirty-nine, fit, well dressed. Each man has to pass the head of the Gestapo and his entourage. “When Paul passed by the master of life and death, he pushed him with his horsewhip towards the group going to the death camp.” Barbara, not among the women selected, bribed a Jewish policeman with a gold coin, got a white doctor’s coat and managed to pass it to Paul. He put it on and strolled away. Walk, don’t run.

  On September 21, 1942 the couple’s luck ran out. Their house at 24 Nowolipie Street was surrounded by SS, gendarmes and Ukrainian units. Paul and others barricaded themselves behind a wardrobe. Germans and Ukrainians entered the apartment and took things, including items from the wardrobe, but miraculously failed to discover the door behind it.

  After a few hours it seemed the “action” was finished. “A neighbour told Bronka that all is over and she should cross the street to the other side where it’s safer. The very moment Bronka stepped out she was stopped by a Jewish policeman.”

  Paul rushed over with a bribe but it didn’t work. There was a fight. “My wife was kidnapped by a Jewish policeman—which I almost killed—and he called in two Ukrainians with two rifles and they took me by force and kept me several hours on the wall of a building. The Ukrainians saw my gold watch which they took away by force including my gold chain.” At that moment Paul saw his wife shot.

  Joe fills in the story. “Paul’s wife Barbara was ordered for ‘resettlement’. When she failed to report, the Kapos—Jewish Police—came to the apartment in the ghetto and dragged [her] out on to the street. She was screaming so she was shot by an SS guard in front of Paul. That made him determined to escape.”

  Put into a slave labour gang, Paul looks for an opportunity to escape. He has managed to hide some gold coins and a diamond in the thick soles of his shoes. As his group of labourers marches on Leszno Street towards Żelazna Street, he takes his chance. “It was dark, late in the evening. I got a good place to run from the group.”

  He goes to the house of a friend, Dr Leszczyński. “[He] asked about my wife Bronisława and after the tragic news became very upset.” On the street again he has to bribe two Polish men who guess he has escaped from the ghetto and threaten to take him to the Gestapo. In the end he gives the men money he had hidden in his hat. He begs for a little back for a tram ride. They give him twenty złoty and leave him alone.

  Joe has told me Paul was the member of the family most likely to pass as gentile. He wasn’t religious. He’d studied in Germany and spoke the language. He used the more Polish-sounding name Pawel Janiszewski. But his account makes clear that betrayal was an everpresent threat.

  He sleeps on mattresses in damp basements. At one point he goes to the superintendent of his old apartment on Wilcza Street. “The super came out and started to cry. ‘Mr Paul, you are alive.’” He is given a room in the building by a woman who believes he is a Polish officer in hiding from the Nazis. He has a hiding place he gets to by crawling through the doors of a sideboard. “This small niche in a large room performed the most important role in my life on the other side.”The superintendent, Mr Władysław, is accused of hiding Jews and tortured by the Gestapo for two weeks but gives no one away. Someone gives Paul work making lace.

  With the ghetto uprising finally crushed, the Nazis turn their attention to Poles. “Doctors, engineers, and professors started to disappear without any information about what was happening to them. ... It wasn’t Jews anymore and the kidnapping of Poles from the streets and apartments was a daily job for the Nazis.”

  He has a succession of close calls. Looking into a shop window he notices a man following him. He moves away. “He moves also right after me, crying loud... ‘I know you. You are a Jew and let’s go.’ I was young and still able to take action so I hit him with my heavy bundle right in his face and he lost the eyeglasses and fell on the street ... I took a cab and ran quick to a coffee shop under the Domański Restaurant, resting about two hours.”

  There is another scrape as he travels to deliver lace to salesmen. “Two hoods probably recognised me that I must be Jewish [although] I was well dressed with dark glasses and a Polish moustache.” He forces himself on to a crowded tram. “But one hood ran after me in the back and the other was hanging in the front on the stairs ... I made a big noise that a robber was after me and this caused a panic in the tram. I was moving fast forward and came to the guy in the front. Again with a big blow to the face he ran away.” He gets off at the next stop, takes a three-seat bicycle, and goes into a restaurant, “resting there for several hours”.

  By now looking like a Pole is not much help. During one roundup he takes a risk and ducks into a Germans-only cafe. “[I] took inside a German newspaper and ordered a sandwich, soup and beer. After 2½ hours the kidnapping was over and I was able to reach my location.”

  He witnesses the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. From August 1 to October 2, with the Russians approaching, the Polish resistance forces fight to try and liberate Warsaw from the Germans: “Every building was a funeral home and no help from the Red Army.” The roof of the house in Wilcza Street catches alight. “I was in charge and ordered the tenants to get pails with water from the street ... We were able to save the building.”

  The Jews fight courageously, finally evoking back-han
ded affirmation from their fellow Poles. A report in the underground press sees the fighting as “in no way the reaction of victims defending themselves but ... undoubtedly a conscious act of will, carried out in the name of human honour and dignity. For this reason ... the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto should be awarded full respect and support.”

  When the uprising is finally crushed, Poles are given twenty-four hours to get out of the city. “Big columns of people without to see an end. One gestapo with a strong whip attacked a priest, crying Arbeiten!’ You must work. The blood began to flow from the priest’s face ... and he fell down on the street.” Paul tells the Gestapo in German that the priest has been working a few blocks away. “The Gestapo stopped the beating ... I saved the life of this priest.”

  Paul and a few other men take the opportunity to escape again. He knows a man in a nearby repair shop and the SS don’t see them walking down the hill towards it. From the window he watches the “colossal columns of people”; they remind him of “the thousands of Jews—men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto—[who] went without resistance to concentration camps to die in gas chambers.” The shop owner feeds them for a fee, then gets them a horse and cart. Paul ends up in Opacz, a village twenty kilometres from Warsaw, where he hides in a barn during searches.

  The Red Army will finally liberate Warsaw on January 17, 1945.

  AFTER THE WAR PAUL, like my father, went back to Warsaw. “He writes that he felt like an ancient man,” says the translator of his diary, “completely exhausted by the experiences of the previous six years, death of his wife and the rest of his family.”

  Jews didn’t always receive a warm welcome. Paul found his wartime business partner, who owed him money. “Wróbel expressed surprise that he was still alive and claimed he didn’t owe him any money. In addition, he didn’t say a word about the death of Paul’s wife and her whole family, which Wróbel knew for many years. Finally Wróbel paid a few gold 10 ruble coins, which was a small part of what he owed.”