Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  Paul went to Łódź, where he opened a textile factory. He returned to his old apartment on Wilcza Street on weekends but became ill and depressed. What was there in Poland for him?

  “Many Jews started to think of emigration. Paul received a telegram from his nephew from the US, who found out he was alive. He started to think of immigration to the US. Life in a communist country looked less and less attractive. Private initiative in Poland was crushed by the new government and Paul didn’t want to live in such a country.

  Benjamin Wichtel (left) and his uncle, Paul Jonisz, sometime between February 1946 and September 1947.

  In mid 1946 Paul liquidated all his businesses in Poland and left it forever. He considered his survival a miracle, never to be forgotten.” After the war Paul reunited with my father, and they were sent to Sweden to recuperate. I have a photograph of them sitting close together, beaming. It’s a proper studio portrait. Perhaps they wanted to document their continued existence with something more than a snapshot.

  I’ve only just noticed that in the photo my father is wearing a thick gold ring with a single gem on the little finger of his left hand. I remember that ring. He told me it was from before the war. He never wore it in Canada: it lived in my mother’s jewellery box.

  He also had an embossed gold watch that he sometimes let us look at, with a back that opened so you could see the precise movements of its mechanism. I remember being told it had belonged to his father. By the time we left Canada, grief and bad luck had achieved what Hitler couldn’t and the ring and the watch were pawned.

  Paul’s account ends: “As the only survivor of my and my wife’s families, in hiding on the Aryan side, I constantly repeated that the world will never forget and never forgive the Germans for what they did to us.” There is no mention of my father or Dora. Was this deliberate? In Maus, Art Spiegelman tells the story of his father Vladek Speigelman, who had to pay a cousin to help him. “You don’t understand,” Vladek tells his son. “At that time there wasn’t anymore families. It was everybody to take care for himself.”

  After all Paul and my father had endured, together and apart, they had not stayed in touch. They had not remained friends. I had danced with Paul at Jerry’s bar mitzvah without really understanding I was dancing with a miracle, the uncle of another miracle. Paul died in New York in 1993. On our visit there in 1990 someone told me he was far too mentally unwell to be visited. I should have written to him. I should have gone to see him.

  Uncle Paul, you were a mensch. May your memory be a blessing.

  CHAPTER 15

  On the rocks

  He stated he was frightened and persecuted all his life.

  Clinical record, Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, May 1967

  ON MAY 23, 1967, the police found my father wandering the streets in Cornwall on the St Lawrence River, Canada’s easternmost city, trying to cross the international bridge into the United States. He must have been making one last trip to ask Sy for help. Maybe, nearly three years after we left, he was going to look for us at the mansion in New Jersey where we’d been together for Jerry’s bar mitzvah, where he’d gone earlier, running through the house calling our names. On the Medical Practitioner’s Certificate for the Admission of a Mentally I11 Patient he is listed as Benjamin Wetchell: “Appearance: Melancholy.”

  Clinical notes: “Patient stated he went ‘on the rocks’ two years ago when he went bankrupt.” Two years ago: 1965. We were in New Zealand. Does that mean that until he went “on the rocks” he was still planning to come and join us?

  WHEN MY FATHER’S FILE arrived from the Archives of Ontario in March 2015 I began to understand the silences and secrets in many families. But silence was no longer an option. As my daughter and my niece had said, “You cannot not know where your father is.”

  I redoubled efforts to find him, firing off emails in all directions, possibly sounding completely mad. I am still doing this. “Hello. I’m a complete stranger from the ends of the Earth. I wonder if there is anyone there who might remember my father?” I can’t seem to stop.

  We knew he had died in a mental institution in Canada. From the dusty attic of memory I retrieve a possible location: my mother, I’m sure, had mentioned Ontario. But both Jeff and I have tried Ontario before, looking for his death certificate. There wasn’t one. Jeff had tried Quebec—Dad had spent time in Montreal—and British Columbia, just in case.

  How can there be no death certificate? We were sending off for one nothing after another. Someone told me that in the old days the bodies of psychiatric patients without families were sometimes sent for medical research. Or they were just buried in unmarked graves. That would be right. Our family has form when it comes to unmarked graves.

  Chris’s brother-in-law Jim had been researching the Byzantine complexities of Chris’s family and also quietly making some enquiries, employing his lawyer’s mind and forensic research skills on behalf of my family. He suggested trying the Archives of Ontario.

  “We don’t get many enquiries from New Zealand,” wrote the very nice French Canadian woman at the archives, as if she’d just had an access-to-information request from Mars. She came back asking for the names of my father’s parents and any siblings. She came back again, asking for Uncle Sy’s dates of birth and death. It was beginning to seem as though she was on to something. I didn’t dare ask. I didn’t dare hope.

  The archives don’t normally inform you by email of the outcome of a search: you either get a letter in the mail or you don’t. The archivist emailed. She had found my father. Something was in the mail.

  I expected a letter, a few index cards. The information took two weeks to arrive. I walked around in a state of suspended being, barely breathing. On the day it came I missed a text from Chris: “Package from Canada on dining room table.” He couldn’t understand why I was dawdling home while he was sitting staring at this unexploded ordnance from the past. I finally read his text while waiting for the ferry. “Wasn’t going to have wine,” I texted, “but am now.”

  The file, frayed en route, was erupting from the envelope. One hundred and fifty-eight pages: an agonising account of a life on the rocks. Clinical records, medical tests, notes from his social worker and his doctors that lurched from professional to compassionate to wits’ end. One page from a nursing home to which he’d been sent read in its exasperated entirety: “This man simply cannot continue to stay here.” From May 26, 1967 until his death on November 26, 1970, except for about three months when he was unleashing havoc at the Lapalme Nursing Home in Embrun, Ontario, my father had been in a psychiatric hospital. Once again he had been, in the bland designation given to him after he was liberated, a displaced person. A misplaced person. Lost. He was buried on November 30, my birthday.

  I sent copies of the file to my sister Ros and my nephew Karl. I sent a copy to my brother Jeff, his wife Maureen, and his daughter Jocelyn. Chris read it. My daughter and I read it together, weeping. Our boys, the two Bens, read it. My niece Nicola, Jeff’s younger daughter, read it at our house and, always cool-headed in a tight corner, pointed out things I’d missed.

  You miss what you need to miss.

  BROCKVILLE: IT’S A LITTLE TOWN in the Thousand Lakes region of Eastern Ontario, a four-hour drive from Toronto, where my father’s last address is recorded. He had been living in Toronto for a while. His last listed job before he became too unwell to work was, he told the doctors at the psychiatric hospital, at Gabrielle Auto Company, a business of which I can find no record. We children never knew that. I don’t know if my mother did.

  The former Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, Ontario, Canada, 2015.

  The locals referred to the hospital as the Psych. It opened in 1894 as the Eastern Hospital for the Insane, and when we go there the abandoned Victorian building will look precisely like something with a name like that.

  After decades of having nothing, I have my father’s post-mortem. “External marks of violence: ɪ) large ecchymosis [bruise] of the right temporal an
d periorbital area; 2) right subconjunctival haemorrhage; 3) abrasions to right wrist, elbow and lateral thoracic wall.”

  He had fallen over before he died. On other occasions, he had been attacked by other patients, their names redacted in the file. October 9, 1967: [X] pushed him to the floor Monday evening. [X] admits this upon questioning.” February 1970: “Hit on side of face by patient [Y].”

  When he was picked up in Cornwall in May 1967, he had four suits, a topcoat, one pair of briefs. He had the suspenders and armbands I remember him always wearing. He had a gold-coloured tie clip, glasses, and it seems little else. “His behaviour is rather pitiful as he is looking around slowly ... Patient makes a pleasant appearance in his way of not overemphasising his presence here,” read his clinical notes from a few days after he is picked up. There is a trace of compassion: “Patient appears rather insecure and somehow bewildered in his own well-worn and shabby clothing.” English Textiles, fallen on hard times. “Patient displayed paranoid tendencies and wondered why I did not make enquiries into his past and his business. He assumed that I wanted to overlook this failure in his past.”

  This failure in his past. “Can’t you give me another chance?” he had asked my mother.

  Among his belongings is also listed “ɪ Jewish cap”. I never knew him to own a yarmulke, a kippah, never saw him wear one except the time when he read from the Torah at Jerry’s bar mitzvah.

  Despite the “Jewish cap”, the conference report of the Ontario Department of Health, Mental Health Branch, in June 1967 describes him as “57 years of age; Roman Catholic; Merchant; Married.” It is noted that he was in the Polish underground during the war. But it soon becomes clear that my father never tells his doctors the full extent of what he survived. Clinical summary, June 1967: “He stated he was always very close to his family, but he recalls many hardships and heartbreaking experiences during the war years. His mother, two sisters and three brothers were accidentally killed during the war.”

  Accidentally. There was not yet a common language for Holocaust survivors to talk about what had happened to them. There was shame and humiliation. The word Holocaust, and the particularity of the Jewish genocide, was only just coming into use, due in part to the Eichmann trial in 1961.

  In 1946 a Russian-born American psychology professor, David Boder, went to Europe to interview, mostly with anthropological detachment, survivors. Largely ignored for fifty years, his recordings began to attract attention after they were transferred to tape by the Library of Congress in 1995.

  When an interviewee mentions Auschwitz, Boder doesn’t know what or where that is. When a survivor, Nellie, talks about stragglers being shot during the march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, Boder says, “What, were they shooting them like sentenced people, putting them to the wall?” Oh no, Nellie says. “All the route was bordered with corpses, you see.”

  Boder didn’t see. He had no notion of the soldiers of a civilised country picking off prisoners for convenience, for sport. The survivors were returning from another dimension. Even twenty years later, no one seemed to think the experiences of a Jewish man who went through the war in Poland and somehow lost his entire family might inform his current pathology.

  Sometimes in the records my father is Jewish. “Mr Wichtel is of Hebrew faith,” writes Miss Crawford, his social worker, in May 1968. She is sending a letter on his behalf to a Mr Bronstein of the Hebrew Benevolent Society. There seems to be an avoidance of the word “Jew”. Perhaps my father was by then frightened of being seen as Jewish. I’ve wondered about the two spellings of his name in the file. Maybe he encouraged the “Witchell” version when presenting himself as a Catholic. Perhaps, having landed up in a place with few Jews, he could get more help from the local Catholic Church. On the run, Uncle Paul grew his “Polish moustache”.

  Miss Crawford sounds kind. She spells his name correctly. When she writes to Mr Bronstein she notes: “He is without friends, family and financial resources.” She talks him up: “He has been a person of good ability speaks several languages ... but is somewhat lost in our setting.” In that entire huge file my father is most recognisably himself when Miss Crawford writes about him. I search to see if she is still alive but can find no trace of her.

  She notes he has a wife and children. “We believe them to be in New Zealand ... Mr Wichtel has been very independent and is hurt and confused by the rejection of both his wife and his brother.” She asks Mr Bronstein for a small grant of money.

  My father sometimes offers alternative versions of reality. After his bankruptcy, according to the history in his hospital notes, his family moved to Toronto. In fact, we were gone: he went alone. “After he went bankrupt, and later was unable to work, his wealthy brother offered his home to the patient’s family. Mrs Witchell continues to live with these relatives in New Jersey. ... The brother is ... putting the two girls through university.” This would account for the letters we got when I was fourteen, sent via Sy and Mollie. He seemed to think we were in New Jersey living the high life, not shipwrecked on Milford Beach. Later in his clinical notes I read: “He spoke of an impending divorce though at one time he stated that his wife and children were in New Zealand. His memory is somewhat blunted and in mood he is depressed.”

  Those caring for him have simply taken down what my father said. His wife and children are being taken care of by his rich brother. We girls will be put through university. His family is gone and his brother’s wife is to blame: “The patient reports that he couldn’t get on with his sister-in-law and left the home.” He was constantly reminded by his sister-in-law, he tells the doctors, “that his brother had become ‘a business tycoon’ and he was a failure.” He believes she has people watching him and reporting to her. “He thinks that information has reached the hospital as to his character and that he has been disgraced by it. He also feels this information has been withheld from him.”

  It’s as if the horror he has kept at bay by building a family, working at his store, playing his balalaika, has finally overwhelmed him. When the Nazis set out to destroy the Jews of Europe, one of the first things they did was take away their means of making a living. Financial ruin has tipped my father back into that abyss. “Patient was always independent, and his pride is hurt that he cannot support his family but has to depend on his brother to do it.” Maybe it’s best to think his brother is caring for us. That way he is still providing for us. “I will do my best for you, you can be sure,” he had written to us.

  THE NARRATIVES WE CONSTRUCT TO GET BY: until the arrival of the file, I could believe the version in which he had become insane, beyond all reach, nothing we could have done. End of story. But then everything I thought I knew turned out to be wrong.

  In these elliptical accounts some answers can be found. Sy, despite his own collapsing business and marriage, had continued for a time to help my father. Miss Crawford writes asking him for money. My mother in later life told me she destroyed the correspondence she had with Brockville. She couldn’t bear to keep it. The letter from Miss Crawford to Uncle Sy makes you see why she might burn such letters, so as to never have to read them again: “He is very lonely,” Miss Crawford writes. “Have you any news of his wife and children? We wondered, too, 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.”

  Information about his life before he met my mother is minimal, just the names of his father and mother. The names of his children are not recorded. There is a document from the newly formed Department of Manpower and Immigration confirming he is a Canadian citizen. The medical conference when he is admitted to Brockville has concluded he is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and psychosis caused by cerebral arteriosclerosis—hardening of the arteries of the brain.

  On July 19, 1967 there are signs of optimism. “He states that he feels a lot better since treatment was started... He can now use a spoon and fork very steadily... He proudly shows how he can do this.”

&nbs
p; October 27, 1967: “He confessed today he was a little frightened (he anticipated that we would be giving him E.C.T.) but he denies being depressed and indeed he was quite cheerful at interview.” Attempts are being made to place him back into the community. That month he is moved to Ward G, a more open part of the hospital. A letter is sent to Sy seeking permission for him to have a bunion operation so he can wear his sandals.

  By February 1968 an exasperated note is creeping into the medical conference reports. “He is now constantly insisting that he leave the hospital to resume his occupation. However, his physical condition is deteriorating and he is quite delusional.” As a compromise, Miss Crawford attempts to organise a place for him in a Jewish home in Toronto, or to get financial assistance for him to live in the community there.

  In April 1968, a wrenching detail: “May go to Wizard of Oz downtown.” An internet search confirms there was a production by the Brockville Operatic Society that month. The movie The Wizard of Oz screened on television every Easter when I was a child. Our family would watch it together: Judy Garland clicking the heels of her ruby slippers, chanting, “There’s no place like home.”

  As plans advance for my father to try independent life back in Toronto, he grows anxious. “He had mixed feelings of wanting to leave hospital and of being very afraid of the future alone in the community,” Miss Crawford writes on May 8. The plan is eventually abandoned. “Since then, Mr Wichtel has been very quiet going about his business around the hospital.”

  It’s all downhill in 1969. He is prescribed Valium (tranquilliser), Artane (tremors), Peritrate (angina), Maalox (acid stomach), Paraldehyde (sedative for sleep), and Tarasan (anti-psychotic). In March Sy is sent a letter: “We are pleased to advise you that your brother Benjamin Witchell was admitted to Lapalme Nursing Home in Embrun Ontario on March 12 under the Homes for Special Care Programme.” It is hoped the nursing home will be a better environment for him. “Rate Paid to Home $8.50 per day. Estimated cost of comforts and clothes per year $120.00. Pin Money on Hand: Nil.”