Things don’t go well in Embrun. He accuses the nurses and doctor of giving him “needles” to dope him, and contacts first a lawyer and then the police. “Patient called the police on three successive days from Casselman, Rockland and Long Sault, requesting they investigate immediately.”
Does that mean he actually went to these three towns? Casselman is seventeen minutes by car from Embrun, Rockland thirty-seven minutes and Long Sault forty-four minutes. During the war he didn’t take powerlessness without putting up a fight. He isn’t giving up this time either, but the strategies that served him then—running, resisting, trusting no one—are not working so well. “Patient became a public nuisance,” reads the report from Lapalme. And there is the handwritten note to the Psych: “This man simply cannot stay here.”
While my father is in the Lapalme Nursing Home my mother is trying to initiate divorce proceedings. I read in the Brockville file: “this hospital could not give further information regarding the above-named patient’s condition without the written consent of the next of kin.” She should contact the patient’s doctor at Lapalme Nursing Home, and also his legal guardian, the Public Trustee. It is a shock to realise that my mother, still my father’s wife, must go through the Public Trustee to get information about him.
When she tells us in the tiny living room of the house in Williamson Avenue that our father is in a psychiatric hospital in Canada, I am eighteen, living with my boyfriend. Why don’t I say, “What is this place?” Why don’t I write? When my mother goes to Japan, Philip and I have no parents to speak of, no place to call home: this is all I have to offer in my defence.
“Indigent” is how my father is described at the nursing home. He lacks the resources for even a little outing in the summer months. He is sent back to Brockville on June 22, 1969. “Condition of hair: grey, abundant. No apparent vermin.” He needs a haircut.
The home has sent a patient evaluation. “Behaviour: reserved. Demands attention: often. Complaining: often. Responses: sociable.” He is apparently fastidious in his personal habits. He has “strong prejudices about persons or things”. His smoking is “moderate”, his sexual interest “seldom”. He enjoys writing and TV. I wonder what he wrote and what became of it. Did he write to us? I worry there were letters we never received.
Back in Brockville he is assessed. June 25, 1969: “He worries about his future and presents paranoid ideas concerning his personal and family history.”July 3: “Psychological testing was attempted without success,” Dr G notes wearily. “Mr Witchell is a person of good appearance and manners and the impression given was that he is of at least average intelligence. He appeared very confused and unhappy with the way he has been shifted between institutions and is under the impression that certain of his relatives are after his money.”
There are other complaints. “He claims he is awakened every night and given ‘needles’ and that there is ‘a little engine’ used by the doctors to keep him awake nights. A check with the ward staff revealed this to be totally delusional.” It’s touching that Dr G has checked as to the existence of the “little engine”.
On September 8 there is a letter addressed to Dr B, the staff psychiatrist, signed by my father in a shaky hand. My niece Nicola has pointed out that the body of the letter is in a different handwriting; perhaps it was written with the help of the indefatigable Miss Crawford.
“I am taking the liberty to explain why I had the occasion to go to a lawyer in Brockville. After many futile attempts to explain my situation to several doctors I have no relatives who can help me, I felt I was left with no other choice than to seek the advice of a lawyer. Under no circumstances did I chastise or defame any of the hospital’s doctors.... for two years since I have been here I have had full privileges and have never abused them this being the first time I have lost my privileges. I realise now I made a mistake seeking a lawyer’s advice without permission, but I did so with no bad intentions and would like to apologise for it. I would appreciate it then very much, Dr B, if you would re-initiate my privileges, or at least give me some start on them again, so I could regain your trust.”
By then his clinical records show that my father, even within the rhythms and routines of the Psych, continues to be a displaced person. “He does not participate in recreational activities and does not work. He has no occupational therapy and no physical therapy. He has ground privileges but does not visit home.” Despite his attempts to explain his situation, they don’t seem to realise he has no home.
In his letter to Dr B he sounds reasonable, polite, desperate. He must have written again in November, although that letter is not in the file, just the blandly professional reply: “Dear Mr Wichtel, Thank you for your letter of 27th of November. I think that you should discuss your problem with your doctor.” But my father has tried that a month earlier: “Dear Sir, I am desirous of having an appointment with you at your convenience. There are some matters which I would prefer to discuss with you.”
Letters, lawyers, nothing helps. On November 26 my father is “very hostile and argumentative. He is suspicious and has the feeling everyone is mistreating him. Patient accuses ward personnel of giving him injections when he is fast asleep. He claims that someone burnt his clothes, which is not a fact.”
The following year, 1970, sounds like a war zone. My father “requires some supervision and is irritable at times. He shows mental deterioration. He does not work; no recreation. Hit on side of face by patient X.”
In September he is struck again, resulting in “a cut of approximately ɪ¼ inches on left cheek. X-ray examination recommended—negative. Notification not necessary. He has no visitors. No further action necessary.”
Clinical record, September 2, 1970. “Attendants’ notes state when he goes downtown very often he is looking for lawyers and complaining about mistreatment and persecution.”
In October 1970 he is offered L-Dopa, a new medication for Parkinson’s. The neurologist Oliver Sacks will write in his 1973 book Awakenings of the dramatic if short-lived effects of L-Dopa being administered in 1969 to patients who have been immobilised for decades in a sort of trance state by “sleeping sickness”—encephalitis lethargica.
On October 6 my father is “very uncooperative and refusing to undergo all these examinations, stating that he is not an experimental animal for the use of some new drugs on him. It was, and still at present, is impossible to explain or persuade him.”
He knows what sort of experiments can take place on people who have been deprived of their freedom. “He is obviously very delusional and paranoidal all the time in his thinking, is very unsatisfied with everything on the ward.”
The doctors can’t reach him. He is in the stream of history.
November 6: “He is very disabled and largely confined to a wheelchair.”
Later that month he is persuaded to start L-Dopa. Dr K notes he is “less hysterical and manipulating, occasionally he forgets about his ‘shakes’ too. Sharp-witted, clever, attention-seeking, becoming immediately the ‘lame bird’ when he finds the proper audience.” My father is back in the forest, trying every trick he knows to survive.
There are concerns relating to the new drug regime: “As a possible side effect... he is sweating profusely and we expect that he will lose some weight.”
From about November 22, there are further symptoms, including “a rapid reaction after the morning medication ... He became flushed, his pulse was running and he showed no temperature elevation.”
His doctor continues to attribute these symptoms to a reaction to medication. “Last night this man suddenly developed fever with no sign of cough or congestion practically and we put him under an antibiotic umbrella. Today he lapsed into a coma in the early morning hours and his condition is very precarious.”
It seems he also fell. An accident and injury report dated November 25 states he has a large bruise on the right side of his face. “Time and cause of injury unknown.”
His bedside nursing notes for Novemb
er 26 chart a vertiginous decline. 12.00: “Appetite good.” 0800: Juice, 702, accepted very slowly.” 0900: “Does not respond.” 12.30: “Breathing laboured and shallow.” 13.00: “Pronounced dead per Dr K. Body and clothing sent to morgue.” His only visitor was a priest. He gave him the last rites of a church of which he was not a member, in the name of a God he didn’t believe in. He was sixty years old.
Because of the fall and the bruising, an autopsy is ordered. Cause of death: “Acute bilateral broncho-pneumonia, 3-5 days. Contributing cause: psychosis with cerebral atherosclerosis. Parkinsonism.” The consultant who prescribed the new medication will later report: “The flush and sweats which he developed following his L-Dopa were due, I think, to his developing pneumonia and not side-effect from his medication.” The report does not speculate on whether the outcome would have been different had his pneumonia been diagnosed earlier.
From the Report of Institutional Burial, Department of Health for Ontario, Mental Hospitals Division: “The remains were buried in a suitably prepared grave and Father Farrell officiated. Relatives and friends present: None.” To read this is to feel like an accessory to a crime.
THE FILE HAS MUCH DETAIL of the kind that is full of devils. In the final summary of my father’s case, the Brockville doctor wrote: “During his hospitalization he showed a great amount of manipulation, hysterical behavior and was prone to babble silly ideas whenever he was able to catch a listener. When his plannings were upset or unsuccessful he was soon running into an hysterical, expansive state with paranoid colouring.”
In 2013 I get the chance to interview an American-born, Londonbased psychiatrist, Stephen Grosz, for the Listener. Grosz, whose father was also a Holocaust survivor, has written a lovely little book The Examined Life, in which he presents case studies of some of his patients. It is full of small perspective-altering epiphanies. Paranoia, Grosz notes, has its uses. He gives the example of a successful woman who, whenever she came home from a business trip, was plagued by fears that her door had been wired to blow up when she turned the key. It emerged that she hated coming back to a cold empty flat. It was better to feel targeted by nameless enemies out to destroy her than to feel no one was thinking of her. “Her paranoia,” Grosz writes, “shielded her from the catastrophe of indifference.”Maybe my father’s feeling that someone was always watching, always plotting against him, was better than feeling abandoned, forgotten.
The doctors noted impatiently that he was psychotic, paranoid, delusional, a public nuisance. Actually, his actions made perfect sense. Dreadful things had been done to him, twice. The Nazis and their collaborators had taken away his family and murdered them in cold blood: his mother Rozalia, his sisters and brothers, their children. Then, despite his best efforts to carry on, he lost everything again—his wife and children, his business, his freedom. He sought help from a lawyer, from the polizei. He still believed in a future where he could get some justice. Once again no one listened. The help never came.
CHAPTER l6
The Psych
Wanted To Come To New Zealand.
Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, Montreal, 1965
BROCKVILLE. WHY ON EARTH, the man at the ticket desk in the Montreal train station wants to know, do we want to go to Brockville? Long story, we say. We don’t tell it. Where to begin when each fact of the matter begs a metastasising mass of questions to which there are no reasonable answers? You could spend a lifetime trying to make sense of it.
I could have said my father was a Polish Jew who was in the Warsaw Ghetto and jumped from a train bound for Treblinka. I could have tried to explain that he was lost, twice. That everything he had was taken from him, twice. That he, a Jew, a survivor, a broken fighter at the extreme edge of human experience, ended up in a Catholic cemetery with nothing on the stone but a misspelt name, and dates that spanned an abyss, 1910-1970, with nothing of his true identity left. I could have given the sort of reply that makes a person wish they had never asked.
I could have said, "My father has been lost and we are going to find him” but then I would have cried in the Montreal train station. We say we’re looking for a family grave. The man shakes his head— Brockville!—and hands over the tickets.
It’s June 2015. We’d been planning to go back to Poland. More research, more dark tourism, more vodka. The idea was to set up in Warsaw for at least a week. Chris would seek out more monuments to murder and memorial, and we would continue our tour of the death camps of Eastern Europe. It’s our idea of a good time.
Then my father’s file arrived. For days after reading it I catch myself trudging along, staring at the ground. Grief, I find, has a metallic taste, like blood in the mouth.
There are phone calls to make to Brockville at dawn to account for the time difference. I am not sleeping anyway. The Ontario Ministry of Health, the undertakers, the cemetery—the bleak roll call of a lonely death. I start with the manager of Oakland Cemetery. His name is Dale Trickey This time I am on solid ground. I have dates. I have documentation.
"I’m calling from New Zealand,” I announce confidently. "My father was buried at your cemetery on November 30, 1970.”
"I’ll check my book,” Dale says. No, he says, when he comes back. No Benjamin Wichtel.
"How about Benjamin Witchell?”
No. "You must have the wrong year.”
"It can’t be wrong. I’m sitting here staring at the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital Statement of Death and the Report of Institutional Burial.”
"Hmm,” Dale says, "was he Catholic by any chance?”
"Well no,” I sigh. "But since you ask...” Cue the long story of a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who ends up claiming to be a non-practising Catholic for reasons that must have made sense at the time.
"Try Brockville’s St Francis Xavier Catholic Church,” Dale says. They have a section at the cemetery.
No, no Ben Wichtel or Witchell there either, says the woman at the St Francis Xavier office. The late Father Farrell officiated, I say. She knows of him, but again there’s no record. My father liked to fly under the radar, but even given the increasingly Kafkaesque convolutions of this search things are becoming farcical. Short of posthumous abduction by grave-robbing aliens, my father has to be there.
"Leave it with me,” Dale Trickey says. "Call me in a couple of days.”
There’s an email from Dale waiting next day at dawn. "Dear Diane, I found your dad’s grave in St Francis Cemetery, lot 26 section I. There is a small marker. Talk later.”
Lot 26, section one. After nearly half a century he is found. There’s joy, exhilaration, trepidation. What have I done? I fear the effect on my relationship with my sister, which has become increasingly fragile due to our different experiences of our family’s past. I fear the effect on everyone. The past now has a grave and a marker. His name is misspelled, no one at the hospital bothered to apply for an official death certificate, and the cemetery failed to record his burial, but there he is. I feel irrationally fond of Dale Trickey.
"We’re going to Brockville,” Chris says.
In the meantime I continue phoning every place in Brockville that might have a connection. I find out that the hospital where he died, the place the locals called the Psych, is now abandoned. There’s still a forensic unit for criminals on the campus. We can visit the grounds and look around but we can’t enter the old buildings.
Lapalme Nursing Home in Embrun, just over an hour’s drive from Brockville, where my father was sent for three torrid months, is long demolished. Someone suggests I ring the Township of Russell Public Library and check for records. The wonderfully helpful librarian—”We don’t get many calls from New Zealand”—says all the home’s archives have been destroyed but she knows the daughter of the family who used to run it. She emails back to say the daughter recalls my father’s name and will ask her mother and a retired nurse who worked there if they have any information. Then things go very quiet.
Eventually the woman reports that my father was there for
only a brief time and no one can remember much. I write pleading emails. I know he was a difficult client but even if there is nothing good to say I would love to have a chance to speak to anyone who was there at the time. No dice. Either they can’t remember him or would rather not. The librarian sends a photo from the 1960s of the brick building that is no longer there. We add a stop at Embrun to our improbable itinerary.
So our three weeks away will now begin with a week in Canada, followed by five days in Poland, with a day in Berlin on the way. Seeing we’re now going to be in North America we add a visit to New York and New Jersey to talk about developments with Jerry and Linda. Joe is not well, so no visit to Allentown this time. We’ll phone him from Manhattan.
Then it will be on to London and a Wolfson College anniversary at Cambridge. We could have delayed, planned a less hectic trip, but after waiting so long I cannot wait a moment longer. On hearing our crammed itinerary my six-year-old grandson Sam gives me a hard look. "If you are going to five countries, Di-nana, you should go for five weeks.” Even he thinks we’re mad.
Dale Trickey assures me the grave is there but it’s impossible to shake the feeling that it will turn out to be some sort of mistake. We first fly into Vancouver, with three days to look around the old family places. Being there sends me into the spiral of psychic dissonance that happens when past and present, kept carefully separate for so long, clash. Chris and I argue our way around the city.
Nicola is with us briefly. Like her father she’s a wonderful travel companion and a calming influence. She’s heading home to Prince Edward Island for a holiday from her veterinary course at Massey University and has a few hours before catching a plane to Toronto.
Driving to Treblinka Page 16