"Once I left my bike at someone's place. Grandpa got mad and strung the bike up in the garage for a couple of weeks to teach me a lesson. I don't think I'd ever been disciplined in my life before.”
I don't remember in those early years in exile discussing our changed circumstances with Ros or Jeff. Mum being with us provided a measure of security—she and I were close, always—and Jeff says it was that way for him too. "We were in survival mode," he says. "I knew it was tough. If I lost my shoes it was a major issue because Mum had to buy more and we didn't have the money. I never questioned the situation; I'm embarrassed to say that. For some reason I forgot about my father."
Well, we had been teleported to another dimension. "We might have been on Mars," Jeff agrees. "We were just trying to fit in. In those days immigrants on the North Shore were quite unusual." Not to mention a solo mother. "We were a very odd family. We either played in the vacant lots or down at the beach. It was a childhood I'm kind of nostalgic about."
Then Jeff went with Mum and Stew to Japan. "Even I could see Mum was under terrible stress," he says. "She was a wreck for a whole variety of reasons, physical and mental. Soon after we got to Japan I was told Dad had died. By then another five years had elapsed without him in my life. And I had Stew."With Jeff, Stew had perhaps the least complicated relationship in his life. They loved each other.
Jeff survived the sometimes wild expat life in Japan, where Mum and Stew partied hard at the Officers' Club. "I look back and see it probably wasn't the best example of parenting and we were lucky to come through it unscathed." When he was older Mum talked to him about it. "Up until that point she never let me know how desperate she had been—other than her anxiousness over money: I picked that up pretty quickly. We had nothing."
When our mother was dying her younger sisters asked her if they could send along the hospital chaplain. "Oh, all right," she said. She didn't like to say no. When her sisters had gone and the chaplain turned up, she whispered to me to send her away: "I can say my own Hail Marys." Whoever God was, she would face him on her own. He would understand she had taken the tough hand she was dealt and done her best.
My brother is built like the father he barely knew and moves like him, gracefully for a strongly built man—as if, as he goes about his business, he might break into a waltz. There are other similarities too. For my father in the good times the sky was the limit. Jeff's response when you wonder if some mad family occasion or travel arrangement is possible is always, "Everything is possible."
THE POSSIBILITIES SEEM LIMITLESS from the rooftop garden of Linda's apartment building on Manhattan's East Side. It's a warm summer evening. We've picked up salads at the Italian restaurant where my cousin is a regular, grabbed a bottle of wine, and settled in to contemplate the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. "Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps"—for Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby the bridge was built with the hope and money of the American dream. Uncle Sy a boy from Praga, left Poland and lived the dream in his mansion in New Jersey. His business, Skyflite Luggage on Communipaw Avenue in Jersey City was where my father went that last time to ask for money. Linda, who was there, remembers it. It took her a long time to tell me about it. "He took the money and he went away. It had to be before '67, so I would have been eighteen."
I want to know what she was told about my father's story. "They were in the cattle car from Warsaw going to Treblinka and somehow there was a window and he was small enough so they pushed him up," she says. "He lived in a cave kind of situation where he couldn't stand up." The box under the ground.
Her father said little about what had happened in Poland. "I heard he had tried to get his mother out of the ghetto. He had money then, and influence. He spoke to somebody who contacted her but she didn't want to leave her six other children."
Sy had not been an easy father. "You saw The Pianist, right? It changed my life. When I saw that movie all the anger I felt for my father was totally washed away. I can't blame him for being angry and drinking. Who wouldn't want to drink and forget?"
Linda remembered our family's implosion. "I believe your mother contacted my parents because she was distraught. Instead of being in the store your dad would be out feeding the birds.
"But of course your father was so damaged. I think your mother tried for a long time. I don't think she just bailed."
I ask Linda whether Sy and my father got on. "That's a good question. I don't know whether they loved each other but my dad felt a responsibility to take care of him."
It occurs to me how heavy that duty was. Linda also remembers phone calls from Paul as he became ill. "I used to shake; he was just terrifying. He and your father were of course driven by demons."
Joe helped Linda to understand, just as he helped me. "Dear Joe convinced me to accept my Dad. I had hated him for a long time because he was an alcoholic and he was abusive and driven. But if I knew that my family went into an oven, were incinerated, I think it would be a little hard to sleep."
A few years before her father died, Linda proposed a trip. "I said, 'Oh, let's go back to Warsaw. Will you take me?'" Her voice drops into the guttural timbre of Wichtel implacability: '"No. No.' He never would talk about it. He never wanted to go back. That was gone."
Linda was with her father when he was dying. I envy her that. But she is able to see a positive side to my father's story. "If he was found dead on the street that would have been very hard. That's not what happened. He was found, he was rescued, he was treated, he was buried in a grave with a marker." I still struggle to see those positives but it's a comfort to be with my cousins. We share so much history and they knew my father, although the longer this search goes on the more I suspect that no one really knew my father.
MANHATTAN MUST BE WHAT the lyricist of America the Beautiful'was thinking of when she wrote, "Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears." Here it still feels safe to be Jewish. The ferry to Jerry's home in New Jersey takes us close to the Statue of Liberty. "Mother of Exiles," the poet Emma Lazarus called her. We rush out on the deck to take blurred photographs. But despotism is in the air. Just before we arrive in New York in June 2015, Donald Trump has announced his run at the presidency, promising to "make America great again". One of his platforms is to cut back on the number of refugees and immigrants allowed in, but it's the welcome and promise Liberty represented to my family and millions of others that made America great in the first place.
Jerry and Jill's house, sprawling and low slung, is in Tony Soprano territory. We spend the day by the pool with their dogs, eating, swimming and talking. "I know that when my dad found out his brother was alive he was euphoric," Jerry says. "Anything he could do, he would do. He had money and was more than willing to shell it out. But there must have been tremendous resentment on Ben's part. He probably thought, 'This guy didn't go into the camps. He got here and survived. He made all his money. I got nothing.'" Jerry understood from what he was told that my father was mentally unwell from his experiences. "Well, okay, I would be pretty crazy, too, if I lived underground for years."
Of course Sy had guilt. "Listen, he survived and almost everybody was dead. On top of this he felt rejected because his mother wouldn't come to the US. That rejection may have been what triggered his lifelong insecurity.
"My father was very concerned about appearances. He wanted to create the impression we were Camelot, like the Kennedys. For a few years I had every toy you could imagine. I had an electric car that I used to drive around wearing a little hat and a camelhair coat."
Linda had related a story her father would tell them about Poland. "He was maybe twelve, riding horses with his father. Troops were coming, I don't know which, and they had to run into the woods on their horses and hide because the soldiers would kill the Jews."Jerry also recalled this story. If Sy was twelve, the year would have been around 1920. My father woul
d have been nine or ten. He and Sy had learned as little boys that there was always hiding in the woods, always someone after Jews, always someone out to get them.
"My dad was Jekyll and Hyde," Jerry tells me. "Early on he would be affable for a while, and then those affable periods got shorter and shorter."
Joe believed Sy was a kind and generous man. "I never saw that guy," Jerry says, "any more than I saw the guy who walked into hospitals and gave away everything in his pockets. That guy was long gone. If I ever argued my Dad said, 'There's only room for one man in this house. Get out.'I spent a lot of time out."
Sy gave Jerry a car for his seventeenth birthday but demanded the keys back every time they fought. Jerry was lifting weights in the basement with a friend one night. "Dad came down drunk and said to my friend 'Get out.'I lost it and told him he should go fuck himself. There was a quarry near our house and I was going to go to the edge and jump off. Show him. A little voice said, 'Yeah, but you'll be dead, so maybe you shouldn't do that.'"
Jerry took the next bus out of town with five dollars in his pocket and hung out with a tomato picker he met at a flophouse. Eventually he made his way back home. "When I got back, nothing from my father. It was like it never happened."
Like Sy, my father liked to put on the Ritz, although there were few opportunities. And the brothers were alike in other ways. Both spoke multiple languages. Both expected their children to achieve: my father took me to the library when I was twelve and tried to make me read Dickens; Sy drilled Jerry in maths, and played mathematical games with him. Both loved opera. "My dad would go to the opera and cry"Jerry tells me. Perhaps their adored mother had loved music.
My father told the doctors at Brockville that his business went on the rocks when shopping centres started selling suits off the rack. Sy had got into the same sort of trouble. He had made a lot of money during the war. "He had a gigantic factory with about a zillion sewing machines. The army requisitioned them and he had to go to work making uniforms and parachutes," Jerry tells me. But in the '60s he started losing money because luggage could be made more cheaply in places like Indonesia. "In 1966, when I was at college, he told me I had to come back and live in New York and go to New York University and help run the factory. You could see it just going down. It became harder and harder for him to keep up appearances. Part of that was 'I've got to give money to my brother' and that became impossible because he didn't have the money. But it's not like my father would ever say, 'That Ben, he's a pain in the ass.'We didn't have those kinds of conversations."
Jerry and a friend, a fellow economics student, proposed a rescue plan. "My father took one look at it and said, 'When you've been in this business as long as I have then you can tell me what to do.'"
Wichtel men weren't good at taking advice. "Yeah, he didn't have the ability to say, 'That was a mistake.' In my experience, if you want to have a long career and stay in business you have to be able to go, almost on a daily basis, 'Oops that was a bad idea.'Your father couldn't do it either."
By 1972 Sy was bankrupt. The factory was sold at auction.
Eventually, Jerry got some affirmation from his father. "We talked about his taxes over lunch in a restaurant somewhere off Broadway. It was the first time he ever acknowledged I could do something he couldn't. I was well into my twenties by then.
"And when he was dying he said to me, 'Maybe I wasn't such a good father after all. I could have done better.'A couple of years later it dawned on me I had got fucked again. He got to die peacefully, knowing he had made his peace with me. Okay, so I had this good five minutes. And the other thirty years, what about them? But then again I got to see my father as he died and you didn't get to see yours and that's something."
We talk about how fallout from the past has threatened Wichtel family ties. When Linda invited us all to her daughter's bat mitzvah, she shook off some of that legacy. Jill says Jerry was sceptical at first. "He said, Are you crazy? What do you think is going to happen with this?' But then it was not what we thought it was going to be and you were all there."
I envy Jerry and Linda their clarity, their ability to talk about everything with unflinching honesty. Jerry has stared down tough situations. There were the struggles with drugs and alcohol, but these are now decades in the past. When we meet he has recovered from major surgery. Given months to live in 2011, he had sought out a different doctor and lived for months near Cleveland Clinic, where he got a liver transplant and another shot at life. "All I wanted was a pitch to swing at," he says. He took a gamble. He jumped. He survived.
PLACES WHERE I NOW KNOW MY FATHER LIVED:
Warsaw, the place where he was born and grew up and which he saw destroyed.
Żelechów, the town near the place where he hid.
Stockholm, where he and Paul were sent after the war.
New York, where he was reunited with Sy
Montreal, where he first landed in Canada.
Vancouver, where he courted my mother and worked at English
Textiles
Montreal again, from where he tried to come to New Zealand.
Toronto, where apparently he worked at Gabrielle Motors.
Brockville, where, apart from three months in Embrun, he was aninvoluntary patient at the psychiatric hospital until he died.
Over the decades of searching for my father we have visited all these places, several more than once, except for Sweden. There seemed little point. All I knew was that, like many survivors, he and Paul had spent time there. Some Swedes were in sympathy with Hitler. Sweden's sales of iron ore contributed to the German war effort. German troops and weapons were allowed to cross the country to occupied Norway. But Sweden also took in 900 Norwegian Jews and offered asylum to 8,000 Danish Jews. Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who disappeared at the end of the war while a prisoner of the Russians, managed to save up to 100,000 Hungarian Jews.
After the war, Sweden accepted survivors for care and rehabilitation. "The Swedish residents of the city would crowd beside the gate and give us food and clothes, anything they thought might make us happy," recalled an Auschwitz survivor sent to Malmö by the Red Cross. Perhaps there was a degree of remorse.
I check lists online of Polish Jewish refugees who found "safe haven" in Sweden after the war. There is no sign of Paul or my father. Another steer from my brother-in-law Jim sends me to the archive of the Jewish Community in Stockholm in the Swedish National Archives. When I open the PDFs the archives send there is a photo of Paul from his Polish passport. He looks healthy and elegant. The file for my father is much thinner. No passport, no photo, just some documents in German, English and Swedish.
Paul's file shows that he was using the Polish version of his surname and that in late 1947 the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in Sweden was in correspondence with the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society in Montreal to help arrange his immigration to Canada. "We wish to advise you that Mr Janiszewski has a small manufacture of hand-bags and portfolios here in Sweden and would be able to take the whole workshop with the machines along with him to Canada. Besides he has got ... $3000 at his disposal." Like Sy, Paul is a maker of bags, although on a smaller scale. Joe told me that in Sweden he gave Dad a job.
Paul marries his second wife, Lillian, in Sweden and they have to reapply to immigrate as a married couple. They receive affidavits in support from Sabina and Sy. At some point Paul decides to go to the United States instead. "American Consulate decided to grant the Janiszewskis a visa on the basis of a sister's affidavit," reads the document. His occupation is listed as "workshop manager".
My father's file reveals that he too changed his mind, but in the opposite direction. He arrives in Stockholm by plane on February 6, 1946. He is now thirty-five. He is listed as "Jude", his occupation "Fabricator von stoff"—manufacturer of fabric. Within a few weeks he is living in a guesthouse, the Fredrikshef Pensionatet, at Styrmansgaten 4.
He applies first to go to the United States. In a letter in October to the Swedish Aliens Commission,
signed in his beautiful Polish calligraphy, he states he has telephoned the American Legation, who "as yet ... have no communication from Washington, but directly they hear they will telephone me. All formalities concerning my Visa, journey etc are completed."
From February 1947 he is a textile worker at a factory at Fridhemagatan 42, operated by a Victor Eriksen. He is paid ten krona, just under three US dollars a day. By August 26 his plans have changed. In a faint handwritten note at the bottom of another form the word "Canada" can be seen twice. In March he had sought permission to travel from Sweden to Copenhagen "to see friends". There is a photo of him sitting smiling in an open boat beside a pretty young woman. Perhaps she was emigrating to Canada. Perhaps she was the woman Joe said he had met in a displaced persons' camp.
Paul's file offers another of those fragments that generate more questions than answers: a letter from Estelle, who is living in Brooklyn. "Dearest Uncle Paul," she writes, "it is with a heart full of sadness that I am writing to you. Your life has been with so much trouble and upheaval that the thought hurts." She is writing on behalf of her mother, Sabina, Paul's sister. "As you know ... Mom depends on myself, Jack and Joe for some money each week. However she feels she would even live in Canada and make a place for you."
My father leaves Sweden for New York in September 1947. Eleven months later Paul is still in Sweden and planning to go to Canada. He may be in touch with my father, who is by then in Vancouver, with a wife and his first child on the way. Meanwhile Estelle is encouraging Paul to come to the US. "Because of the war situation, business is booming," she assures him. "I have a great deal of faith in you because I know you are an intellectual man with good common business sense."
Then Estelle's letter strikes a perplexing note. "For the first time in my life Abe Wichtel and I have drifted apart in our friendship. He always liked me, but now he and I do not agree." I know from Joe that Sy and Joe's sister Estelle were close, and would meet for lunch and tête-à-têtes at a restaurant in Central Park. "I told him that I would do all to bring you here," Estelle writes. "He answered, 'Go ahead, but don't bother me. I won't help.'"
Driving to Treblinka Page 18