Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  This is odd: we know from Paul's account of his wartime experiences that Sy made contact with him as soon as he knew he'd survived. And Paul's file suggests Sy had already provided an affidavit for him. "Don't let that bother you," Estelle continues. "I am sure you will have success wherever you go. In fact, I fervently hope that you will someday soon prove to Abe Wichtel that he was wrong." Paul and Lillian sail to the United States on the SS Gripsholm and arrive in 1951.

  Something seems to have happened to sour the relationship between the two branches of the family, although it's clear the ties were never entirely broken since Paul and Lillian attended Jerry's bar mitzvah, and when Sy was dying Linda took him to Far Rockaway to see Sabina, with whom he had once been so close.

  WE UNDERSTAND MORE OF THE TIMELINE that brought my father to Canada when, after years of frustrating searches, we finally get his immigration papers in 2017. They show he arrived in New York from Sweden on American Airlines on October 6,1947, three years after being liberated by the Red Army in the vicinity of Lublin, about 170 kilometres south-east of Warsaw. A month later he left New York and drove or was driven, possibly by Sy, to Canada. He crossed the border at Lacolle in Quebec with a temporary visa and travelled on to Montreal. Three months later he was in Vancouver. Another month later, March 1948, he seems to have gained permanent residency as a landed immigrant under the Canadian government's "displaced persons initiatives", a policy of allowing entry to various European displaced persons.

  By September 1948 he has married my mother. She is pregnant: just under eight months later my sister is born. Making up for lost time. In 1952 he is applying for Canadian citizenship. In the photo that accompanies the application he looks relaxed and elegant in his English Textiles and a jaunty bow tie. By April 1954 he is a Canadian citizen.

  ON OUR LAST DAY IN NEW YORK we go to look at the annual Pride Parade before heading to the airport to catch our flight to Berlin. Two thousand and fifteen is no ordinary year. The Supreme Court has legalised same-sex marriage. Rainbow flags and balloons decorate shops. Throngs of triumphant people greet each other with "Happy Pride!" and "It's a great day to be alive." It is.

  It is not, though, a great day to try to get to JFK airport. We abandon our gridlocked taxi and join a crowd of panicked people pulling suitcases, who can see Penn Station but can't cross Fifth Avenue to get to it. Eventually a policeman helps us across. We miss our connection to the Airtrain and finally make it to the airport ten minutes before our flight closes. After a breathless check-in we make for the bar. The bartender takes an age to concoct our two Bloody Marys. Each has salt around the rim, a small organic garden of vegetable matter, and a row of olives on a stick. He sees us looking doubtfully at his magnum opus. "It's on the house!" he declares, and brings us a couple of vodka shots for good measure.

  We toast the crazy cocktail, the roaring, honking, gridlocked eternal pride parade that is New York City and pour ourselves on to the plane back to Europe, the Old World.

  CHAPTER l8

  Rooted in this soil

  The survival of'1,000 Jews in the area where Jews were massacred in the hundreds of thousands is an act surpassing human understanding.

  Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, August 31,1944

  IT HAD BEEN A PLEASANT enough trip until then, watching from the window of our packed compartment on the Berlin-Warszawa Express as the scenery morphed from manicured German vistas to the more shambolic Polish countryside. We'd popped along to the dining car for żurek, sour rye soup, and Żywiec beer, our traditional kick in the guts to remind ourselves we are in Poland. Afterwards I went to find the bathroom. The entrance to the carriage was jammed with people trying to connect to the erratic wi-fi. Among things I now know about Poland: never carry your backpack in front of you on a crowded train. You won't see the small stairwell to the carriage exit before your foot disappears down it. I was flung backwards, hard against the door. If it hadn't been properly shut I might have added to the black comedy that sometimes accompanied our brand of tourism by flying from a moving train in Poland.

  A young man grabbed my arm, but not before my right knee twisted at a sickening angle. It announced with an agonising stab that putting any weight on it was not a plan.

  "Knee," I hissed at Chris when I managed to hop and drag myself back to the carriage. "Bad."

  He flinched. We'd been here before. There was the time I had to be forklifted on to a plane in Queenstown after a family skiing trip. The doctor's racy account of my accident—"This lady, who is a journalist from Auckland, was skiing in a lesson at Cardrona when a snowboarder flashed in front of her and distracted her"—caused such hilarity it ended up pinned to the staff noticeboard at the Wanaka medical centre. Then there was the monster haematoma acquired in Akaroa when, sitting blamelessly on a stationary horse, I was kicked in the leg by another.

  Our few days in Poland would involve wandering the streets of Warsaw searching out old addresses and trekking through cemeteries gone feral with neglect. We were stuffed.

  In Warsaw a bemused porter helped Chris heave me off the train. We lurched into a pharmacy. None of the staff spoke English. I stared helplessly at a stand of support bandages. A beautiful young fellow customer in a hijab who could speak English took pity on me, gently negotiating with a surly pharmacist to sort out a bandage and a truckload of painkillers. Warszawa: place of the kindness of strangers.

  At our little attic hotel in Chmielna Street, more kindness. Our host rushed to fetch his anti-inflammatory gel and ice packs. Chris prepared to call our insurers and arrange an early flight home. Give it a night, I said. By morning the knee took a little weight, although I moved with the grace and pace of a geriatric gastropod. The psychic pain I feel when in Poland now made flesh, I hobbled on.

  Luckily, the first day involved mostly sitting down. We visited the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute. Emanuel Ringelblum was a mild-mannered historian and activist who fought to stay alive in the Warsaw Ghetto, or, if not, to preserve the truth of what happened there. He was the founder of the Oneg Shabbat Archives, a collection of clandestine documents—diaries, photographs, monographs, underground newspapers—written by valiant people in extremis and hidden in cupboards, milk cans, the ground. It includes Ringelblum's own journal, originally published in 1952 in Yiddish, and in 1958 in English as Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto.

  Ringelblum escaped to the Aryan sector of Warsaw shortly before the uprising but was betrayed by a Pole. The Gestapo shot him, his wife Yehudit and their twelve-year-old son Uri in Pawiak Prison on March 7,1944.

  An Oneg Shabbat poster reads: "He who fights for life has a chance of being saved: He who rules out resistance from the start is already lost, doomed to a degrading death in the suffocation machine atTreblinka ... We, too, are deserving of life! You merely must know how to fight for it!"

  The archive contains the last requests of people going to their deaths: "I only wish to be remembered," writes educator Israel Lichtenstein. "I wish my wife to be remembered, Gele Sekstein. ... I wish my little daughter to be remembered. Margalit is 20 months old today. She has fully mastered the Yiddish language and speaks it perfectly ... She too deserves to be remembered."

  Krystyna Duszniak, a Melbourne historian who specialises in researching Polish Jewish families and whose knowledge has proved invaluable, has put us in touch with Anna Przybyszewska Drozd, a genealogy expert at the institute. Anna has turned up some treasures. Before our trip, the arrival in my inbox of the registration cards of Paul and my father had had me letting out a spontaneous shriek of triumph, then tears: these were the sort of documents I thought were lost forever.

  Anna tells us the cards began as a grassroots initiative. "There are little groups of people who come out of some kind of hiding. They heard, oh, there are some Jewish people in Lublin, let's go," she says. Local committees took names and sent the lists on to the Central Committee of Polish Jews. The names had to be written on the back of any old documents that could be found.
There was no paper left in Warsaw.

  I have been able to make out some of the information on my father's card. In 1939 he lived at 34 Chłodna Street and 9 Miła Street. In 1942 his address is simply "Ghetto". Krystyna had already translated the next passage: "After the ghetto, he hid as a Jew in the Garwolin County," she said, "which makes sense in the light of what he told you."

  Partisans and those who escaped ghettos and trains hid in the forests in that area. Among those found near where my father was liberated were survivors from the Majdanek camp on the outskirts of Lublin.

  A Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent, in a bulletin filed from Lublin on August 30,1944, reported: "German prisoners of war and officers associated with [Majdanek] camp told the correspondents that hundreds of children were among the exterminated victims. One of them testified that he was in charge of shipping to the German State Bank all the gold, jewellery, rings, watches and other valuables of which the victims were stripped. ... It must be remembered that survival of Jews in Poland under the Nazis is in itself a miracle. The survival of 1,000 Jews in the area where Jews were massacred in the hundreds of thousands is an act surpassing human understanding."

  The correspondents were not just reporting, they were also helping survivors, compiling lists designed to put them in touch with relatives in the United States and Palestine. It was such a document I had been given in 2010 at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, listing my father among the survivors and Sy as his relative in New York.

  An act surpassing understanding. Help to survive was sometimes available to those who had managed to escape. Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of hide-outs dispersed through the forest, Polish families providing food in return for payment. "In these cases, the partisans also protected the Jews in hiding from blackmailers and informers who might try to hand them over to the Germans."

  Others joined partisan groups to fight. The chapter on Żelechów in Pinkas Hakehillot Polin—Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities, Poland— refers to a Jewish partisan unit commanded by a Samuel Olshak in the forest nearby: "Several young people who fled the ghetto when it was liquidated, or who had managed to jump from the trains during the deportation to Treblinka, found their way to that unit." One may have been my father.

  Some Jewish partisans joined up with communist units. Others were killed by anti-Semitic Polish partisan units or by the Germans— including, in 1944, Olshak. For a Jew in the forest, enemies could come from anywhere. The Jewish partisans used the Hebrew greeting "Amcha" as code when they met a stranger. It means "your people, your nation". A reply from a stranger of "Amcha" vastly improved your chances of living.

  All we know for sure is that my father was in this area. We know he was liberated there by the Red Army in late July 1944, one of those whose survival was reported in the JTA bulletin as miraculous. There was anti-Semitism in the ranks of Soviet partisans but the arrival of the Red Army helped save my father's life.

  Paul's registration card included the names of his parents, my jonisz great-grandparents: Chaim Jakob (known as Yankel) and Brandla Frydman. It confirmed the address of the apartment where Paul lived with his wife Barbara before they were herded into the ghetto and Barbara was shot in the street: Flat 19, 29A Wilcza Street. Unlike my father's card, Paul's didn't mention his time in the ghetto.

  Anna deduced that by 1933 my grandmother Rozalia had moved back to the nine-room family apartment at 2 Wrzesińska Street in the Praga district; Sy gave this as her address in his passenger manifest when he went to New York that year. She must have moved there to be with her parents after my grandfather Jacob Joseph Wichtel died—my father said of cancer; others were told tuberculosis—in 1928.

  AFTER THE GERMANS there were few Jews left in Warsaw. My father told me he went back to see if anyone else had survived. We know from his registration card that he stayed in Flat 5,263 Growchowska Street, Praga. What hope and dread must have been in his heart. Information about the fate of a family wouldn't have been easy to discover. Anna said in most cases people learned that everyone had been killed. "But then we have these miracles. Because we see Benjamin jumped." Benjamin jumped. It is only when Anna says this that it occurs to me other members of our family on the train may have tried to jump too.

  During our conversation we traverse some of those still raw sensitivities. We discuss the use of term "Polish death camps", which is bitterly resented by Poles, with some justification. When the Germans and their then Soviet allies invaded in 1939, the eastern Polish territories became western Soviet republics and the western territories part of the Reich. Central Poland became a "General Government" ruled by the Germans. The death camps were German camps in occupied Poland.

  She says she's angered, too, by the idea she hears sometimes in her work that all Poles were murderers. When I say that my Great-aunt Sabina got out before the war she corrects me. "No, not 'got out'. 'Emigrated'please." She doesn't like the implication there was a need for Jewish Poles to 'get out' in 1933, before Hitler set his sights on Poland. "Every little sentence and word is creating another reality." But in fact there was anti-Semitism in Poland in the pre-war era, in every era.

  We mention the Jewish revival which, as we found in Kraków in 2010, was taking place in the absence of actual Jews. "More and more people in Poland accept their Jewish roots. Some of them dream about it," Anna says. "People admire the Jewish culture somehow because it's also the bridge to the past, which was killed during the communist time. Jews were killed in Poland, yes. But also Polish culture was killed in Poland." It sounds a little like convict chic in Australia: some of those who might once have disliked Jews now wish to be one.

  Museums also create a reality. Since we were last in Warsaw, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews has opened near the monument to the ghetto heroes where we wandered on our last trip. The museum's address is 6 Mordechaja Anielewicza Street, named for Mordecai Anielewicz, the "Little Angel" who died in the bunker at partisan headquarters, Miła 18, where we paid our respects at a memorial stone that rests on the rubble.

  My father's registration card shows that between 1939 and 1942 he lived first twenty minutes' walk from here at Chłodna 34, then five minutes' away at Miła 8. By the autumn of 1942 he was still clinging to life in the ghetto, one of those described by Emanuel Ringelblum as "the dead on furlough". We don't know what date he and the rest of the family were put on the train or trains to Treblinka. Sometime in 1942 is most likely, although my father talked about snow, so it could have been as late as January 1943.

  The museum is a defiant structure of concrete, glass fins and copper mesh by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma. The entrance leads into a cavernous void. Many architects of Holocaust-related buildings reach for the void. An undulating wall represents the parting of the Red Sea: divine deliverance from slavery; the help that never came.

  We go downstairs to experience a subterranean story of the Jews of Poland, a "directed maze" through time, told artfully with a lot of high tech. It's a moving story and the building is breathtaking but it feels a little empty. It's one of those museums that displays mostly reproductions, with few actual artefacts to provide a dialogue between the living present and the relics of the past. But maybe hidden below ground and empty is the perfect metaphor for how history worked out for the Jews in Poland.

  At the museum I am privileged to see a face and hear a story from wartime Warsaw. Poland supplied the Reich with plenty of enthusiastic local helpers in its task of making the country Judenrein, free of Jews, but it also had the highest number of any country of people who, at risk of summary execution of their entire family, helped save Jews, those whom the state of Israel would later call Righteous Among the Nations.

  The museum's resource centre arranges for me to meet Witold Lisowski. Witek, as he is known, kisses my hand in the courtly manner of a Polish gentleman. We sit smiling at each other for a while, waiting for our guide Krzysztof, known to us as Krys, to come and translate. After Krys relays the bleak ess
entials of my father's story, Witek says something to me in Polish. Krys translates: "He says the drama of your father's later life is rooted in this soil." Tears already and we've just begun.

  Witek's family also lived in Praga. We have something else in common: Witek too lost his father when he was young. He was killed fighting the Germans. With war still raging, his mother travelled 100 kilometres to find his grave, buy his body from German soldiers, and bring him home.

  Praga in those days was forty-two percent Jewish. The Lisowskis were close to their Jewish neighbours, the Inwentarz family. Witek, eight when the war started, was a friend of Josef Inwentarz, known as Dudek, who was a couple of years older. With the German occupation, the local Jewish families were imprisoned in the Ludwisin Ghetto and left to starve. Witek's older brother Janek used to sneak into the ghetto to take their friends what he could. Witek found out about this only after the war. "My brother was afraid to tell about it to us, to mother, because she would be angry. It was too dangerous."

  When the ghetto was liquidated, Dudek's mother arranged for him to stay with a Polish family but the sons in the household threatened to turn him in. He worked for a while in the countryside but, fearing betrayal, ran away again and hid in the woods for as long as he could, surviving by eating food left in troughs for horses and pigs.

  Winter was coming. A young boy on his own, near death, he risked seeking out a friend. "I was just getting back from Scouts and he came out from behind a jasmine bush and called to me," Witek says. "Although we had spent all our childhood playing in the same sandpit I didn't recognise him. When I got just one metre from him he falls down. I took him in my arms and brought him home. He was very, very starved so he was light and it was not a big deal to carry him."