Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  Witek's mother got the older boys to burn Dudek's vermin-infested clothes. Semi-conscious, he was put in a bath. "My mother held him with one hand and with the other hand she washed him, and she kept crying, telling him the words I will never forget: 'Dudek, Dudek, my children and I already have losses in this war. Forgive us, we will give you whatever we have but we can't keep you here in our home.'

  "Then my brother said, as if to himself, 'If our father had been alive, Dudek would have stayed with us.'Mother looked into my eyes and at my oldest brother and she said, 'Do you think the same?'We said we did. And she said, 'Well, Dudek stays with us.'"

  These two Polish men who have never met before, Witek and the translator Krys, are weeping together.

  The Lisowski house was busy, with a shop at street level. Dudek, hidden upstairs, was unable to go outside or even move during the day. Eventually, he was smuggled out of Praga to an aunt who was hiding with farmers. There he worked in the fields with the cows and lay low. Before he left he begged Witek to give him his birth certificate as proof he wasn't Jewish. "He promised me when he is caught by Germans he will eat it." So for several months Dudek became Witold Lisowski. "Tac." Witek smiles. "Yes."

  This arrangement put Witek and his family in mortal danger. Jewish boys could be easily identified, and Dudek was nearly caught once when he declined to strip and swim with his fellow cowherds.

  Dudek's sister Rachela was sent to live with nuns but she couldn't bear to be separated from her mother and returned. Both she and her mother were murdered at Treblinka.

  Dudek survived and emigrated to Israel. For some years he lost touch with the Lisowskis: relations were not good between Israel and Poland. Witek went on to become director of the Museum of the Polish Army, and it was here he met some people who knew Dudek. The two friends arranged to meet again and Dudek brought a group of young Israelis on a trip to Warsaw. Witek went to meet the plane. "All the youth, when they got off the jumbo jet they encircled me on the tarmac," he tells us. Dudek had told them the story.

  Dudek wanted to meet old Polish friends but as a Jew he was unsure of his welcome. Witek organised some surprise visits. Dudek was greeted like a brother. "They cry on each other," Krys translates. Later Witek, a Roman Catholic, visited Dudek in Israel. "My brothers have passed away," Witek says softly. "Dudek was my brother."

  Witek tells us little about his own family's suffering in the war except what happened near the end. "They say there are no miracles but try to imagine the house where we lived, which was Dudek's shelter—two or three months later in the Warsaw Uprising the house was completely gone."

  The whole city was on fire. The Russians had already liberated the east side of the river Vistula, where Dudek and my father were. On the west side the Germans were still in charge. All Poles were marched out under SS escort. Paul, still trying to pass for Aryan, was among them.

  "We believed they would kill us," Witek says. "Then we heard a big noise, louder, louder. We could still see in the distance the fire of our house. We all thought the end of world was coming. "What they were hearing were a hundred Allied bombers. "The SS were afraid of those bombers and ran away." The Lisowskis took their chance, ran for the forest and were eventually liberated.

  Witek, a former air force man, has something else to add. Krys struggles as he translates: "Among those flying crews there were New Zealanders," he says. "Many died on our soil." For a few moments none of us can carry on.

  Thanks to Witek, Anna, Krys and the woman in the hijab, by the time we meet Krys again next morning in the cafe of our hotel there has been a thawing in my relations with this soil. We've had breakfast and are ready to go. The first stop is Warsaw University. My father told the people at Brockville that he did a year there, studying business. Perhaps he didn't carry on because, even before Hitler, restrictions were being placed on Jews in academic institutions. We find a file for a Bronisław Wichtel, a sweet-faced young scholar in round glasses, but this is not my father. He could be a relative, maybe a nephew.

  Next stop is the Jewish Cemetery in Okopowa Street, used by better-off Jews since the late eighteenth century. It contains an estimated 250,000 graves, though only about a third of the headstones remain. I thought I was prepared for this visit but I find, as always in Poland, that I'm prepared for nothing. I have brought with me photos of our family headstones, numbered, from a website, but the place is vast and in the heat of summer like a jungle. Over decades of neglect, nature has brought riotous life to this place of the dead. We have had to spray ourselves for ticks.

  Fortunately Krys has rung ahead and made an appointment with the director, Przemysław Szpilman. After the war, with most documentation in Warsaw destroyed, huge efforts began to index graves.

  The Jewish Cemetery in Okopowa Street, Warsaw, 2015.

  When he became director in 2003, Szpilman set to work cleaning up areas of the cemetery and creating an online database. He is related, he says, to Władysław Szpilman, the Polish musician whose account of his survival as a Jew in Warsaw became a book, and then the film The Pianist

  In yarmulke, overalls and gumboots, Szpilman looks like a sort of Jewish lumberjack and sets a cracking pace, leading Chris down paths, then plunging into the undergrowth. Krys walks with me as I hobble along and we're soon completely lost. Eventually we hear yoo-hooing and fight our way through a tangle of vegetation to a headstone we could never have located by ourselves. It is a double stone for my great-grandfather, Chaim Dov Wichtel, and my grandfather, Jacob Joseph Wichtel. I find myself taking the headstone in an atavistic embrace, pressing my cheek to the sun-warmed stone. I'm in the stream of history. "Take a picture!" Krys tells Chris, but the moment has passed. I'm back in 2016 and self-conscious.

  Double gravestone for Chaim Dov Wichtel and his son Jacob Joseph Wichtel, Jewish Cemetery, Okopowa Street, Warsaw, 2015.

  We move on to the small headstone of my great-grandmother, Brandla Jonisz, who starved to death in the ghetto. The date is August 29,1941. How could she, a prisoner of the ghetto, have been buried here in 1941? Szpilman says that early on Jewish families could pay to bring their dead out of the ghetto for burial and attend their funeral. The Nazis were still trying to maintain the fiction that those imprisoned were in the hands of normal human beings and living some sort of normal life.

  We pause to pay our respects at the site of a mass grave of prisoners of the Warsaw Ghetto near the cemetery entrance. In the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum there are photographs of the filling of mass graves here. In 1941 a German army sergeant, Heinrich Joest, decided to take his Rolleiflex and record what was happening to people in the ghetto. The photos were discovered by a journalist in the 1980s. Bodies lie at the bottom of a pit. A young Jewish boy pauses in his work of dragging bodies to the pit to have his photo taken. Joest's caption on another photo reads: "Between all of the bodies of adults thrown into the grave, lay also [that of] a small dead child."

  Some of my family may be in this grave. Not everyone managed to live, or wanted to live, to make it on to the train to Treblinka.

  There is also a statue that can be viewed only through tears. In The Pianist, Władysław Szpilman writes of happening upon the very scene that it depicts: doctor and writer Janusz Korczak and the orphans he cared for being led by an SS man to the Umschlagplatz to board a train to Treblinka. A twelve-year-old is playing his violin. The little ones are singing. Kosczak, who was given the opportunity to save himself but refused, is carrying the smallest. "I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans' hearts," Szpilman writes, "the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, 'It's all right, children, it will be all right.'"

  I struggle to find words for the charged atmosphere in places like this. "My heart felt heavy and full at the same time," my daughter Monika will say when she goes to this cemetery the following year. Her boyfriend Sean managed to capture in his photographs the haunted,
clamouring silence. "The atmosphere of that place was transcendental," he said, "probably the only time I have found that word appropriate."

  For the rest of the day we carry on, looking at as many of the addresses as we can. In some places the old buildings are long gone. Mila 8, at the epicentre of the uprising, was bombed or burned to the ground. Was my father taken from there to the Umschlagplatz?

  Chłodna 34 may not be the actual building that was there before the war, but in this place my father walked and lived in fear for his life. Janusz Korczak and his orphans were just across the road at Chłodna 33.

  Before December 1941 part of Chłodna Street was in the ghetto. After that the road separated the "big ghetto", with the poorest people, from the "little ghetto", where the intelligentsia and the better-off lived and the Judenrat was based. A wooden footbridge was built in early 1942 near Chłodna 23 and 26 to allow Jews to cross from one side to the other. It lasted only six months. As the ghetto was liquidated and its residents slaughtered, there was no need for so much space.

  We stop for a beer at a café at Chłodna 34. Krys starts talking to a man who is there with his laptop, having a drink. It turns out he works on a website that shows how buildings lost in the war once looked. In Warsaw the past is never far away.

  We wander along the road to an installation constructed in 2011 at the place where the bridge was. A Footbridge of Memory by architect Tomasz Lec consists of two poles with optical fibre strung between them. At night the fibre recreates the outline of the bridge in light. In windows in the poles there are images of ghetto life.

  In Praga, where there was much less destruction, we find Wrzesińska 2, home of the Jonisz family. It was here that Yankel and Brandla brought up their ten children in a nine-room apartment, and here that my grandmother Rozalia returned as a widow. The place looks abandoned but there are satellite dishes. Someone lives here with our ghosts.

  My father would have known this place as home. It's a large brick block, five storeys high, with small balconies. A lane with a vaulted ceiling runs through the middle. The door to the stairs is open so we sneak in. The place is in bad shape. In the lobby most of the old letterbox doors hang off their hinges. I remember that the family hid some valuables—my father's ring and watch among them perhaps—in the basement, which Uncle Paul was able to retrieve and use to survive. When he arrived in America he still had a few small diamonds sewn into the hem of his coat.

  The nine-room apartment in Wrzesinska Street, Praga, Warsaw, where Yankel and Brandla Jonisz brought up their ten children, and where Rozalia Wichtel returned as a widow.

  I walk up the stairs thinking of the people who were driven from this house, then slaughtered. Molecules of desolation mix with dust motes in shafts of sunlight.

  CHAPTER 19

  Żelechów

  Has delusions of persecution.

  Dr V, Certificate of Renewal under the Mental Health Act, Brockville, December 23,1969

  WHAT DO I NOW KNOW OF MY FATHER'S LIFE DURING THE WAR?

  He jumped from a train to Treblinka and rolled down a bank into snow.

  He ran. (Sometimes, after the war, he still ran in his sleep.)

  He ate eggs raw. He ate potatoes he dug up, along with the dirt.

  He ate horse meat.

  He ate anything he could find.

  He saw many tragic things.

  He saw a woman have her breasts shot off.

  He and a companion met young German soldiers and tricked them by pretending to have pistols in their pockets. The soldiersbrought them food.

  He was in the underground resistance.

  He hid in a box under the ground in the vicinity of Żelechów.

  IN 2014, GOOGLING "WICHTEL" AND "HOLOCAUST", as I do a lot with the urgency of a strung-out addict seeking a hit, I'd found a new document on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, a slightly different version of the registration card I already had from Anna. It recorded: Beniamin Wichtel. Date of birth: 1910. Father's name: Jakób. Mother's name: Rozalia. Place During War: Żelechów.

  Krystyna Duszniak has described Żelechów to me as "a small village near Garwolin ... a real pre-war shtetl [that] hasn't changed all that much today." We head there on our last day with Krys. He brings his friend Janek along for the hour-and-a half drive from Warsaw. Janek, a small humorous man in his early seventies, is an expert on Jewish cemeteries. "His nickname is indicative of the interests he indulges in," Krys says dryly. "Cemetery Hyena."

  Janek speaks better English than he lets on, and his interests prove wide-ranging. When we get to Krys's car there's what I take to be a parking ticket under the wipers. In fact it's an advertisement for entertainment involving underclad ladies. With a serene smile and an air of scholarly interest, Janek tucks it into his folder. It takes me all day to figure out that he has no Jewish heritage because when we enter a ruined Jewish cemetery, he pulls out a carefully folded yarmulke. He tells me later he wears it out of respect for the dead.

  Żelechów was a place of Jewish settlement from the early 1700s. At the beginning of the Second World War, seventy percent of the residents were Jewish. Now, as far as I know, Jewish population: none. Many Jews fled here from the advancing Nazis. When troops arrived on September 12,1939, Jews were attacked in the streets and their property looted. Houses were torched, and on September 13 the synagogue burned.

  This is the territory where Samuel Olshak's partisan unit operated. "Janek speculates that those who jumped off the train probably knew that in Żelechów there was a partisan group they could join without being afraid they were joining Polish partisans, who were quite often not friendly to Jews and even killed Jews themselves," Krys says.

  Janek thinks my father and the man who escaped with him might have jumped near Małkinia, the last big transportation junction, where the engine was moved from the top of the train to the rear to go in the opposite direction, to Treblinka. "They probably jumped off not far from there because in those areas they were given some chance to survive—the train went into forest." My brother-in-law Jim has identified another possibility, the small village of Urle. This was another place where Jews jumped because it was surrounded by forest. My father could have made his way to the Żelechów area from there.

  There were more jumpers than anyone thought. A German historian, Tanja von Fransecky, in her study Jewish Escapes from Deportation Trains, identified at least 764. The Jewish activist Leo Bretholz described using a urine-soaked sweater to bend the bars on the window of the cattle car he was in. It could be done.

  The book The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City has accounts of jumpers taken from the archives of Israel's World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, Yad Vashem. "The boldest went first, mainly young boys who had no one from their families with them," reads one account. Others were presented with a dreadful choice. "Those who felt they would still be able to jump but could not part with their nearest and dearest were particularly distressed."

  Jumpers were sometimes encouraged. Joe said my father had talked of others helping to push him out the window. But some faced bitter reproach from those they were about to leave behind. My father may have faced just such an agonising dilemma. When I asked that question "How could you leave your mother on the train?" he had not answered.

  IF WE'D COME TO ŻELECHÓW a few years earlier we would have seen more of the small wooden shtetl houses where the Jewish inhabitants lived. A few remain but a renewal has been going on. The rynek—town square—one of the largest in Europe, still has its original undulating cobbled surface, over which we bucket as it makes alarming contact with the undercarriage of Krys's car.

  Janek speaks of a man he knows, a survivor from a similar village. When the man returned to his home after the war he asked about his sister, who had been hidden with some local Poles. He learned she had been given away to the Germans by someone who had claimed to be a saviour. "How could a person start living again next to such betrayers?" Janek says.

  We go to the Jewish cem
etery. Just a few headstones are left, enclosed by a wire fence to keep the ghosts in or the vandals and anti-Semites out. To me these empty silent wild places speak louder than the grandest monument about what happened to the Jews. As usual there is no official sign or memorial, just a notice put there by a Jewish organisation. "On September 30,1942, the Jews were deported to Treblinka ... Over 300 of them they murdered later in the town and buried in this cemetery. Their memory is a blessing." Nearby are the ruins of a mikveh, a ritual bath. No sign there either. The only monument is to non-Jewish Polish heroes.

  Grażyna Frankowska, a former teacher and principal of the local school, has lived in Żelechów all her life, and preserves the history of the town, including Jewish history, in a memorial chamber at the community centre. She lives not far from the centre of town in a modest house with her daughter's family. Krys and Janek greet her with kisses on the hand; Krys uses the formal honorific Pani Professor (Madam Professor). In the parlour, surrounded by files of photos and documents, we are offered cherry cordial in tea glasses, pound cake, and the district's spectacular strawberries.

  Grażyna tells us, in unstoppable streams of sibilant sing-song Polish, that many of the cemetery's headstones were used during the war to pave a courtyard of the local police station. After the war the owner of the building said he would return the headstones to the cemetery.

  Grażyna Frankowska, a former school principal who preserves the history, including Jewish history, of Żelechów, the town near which Ben Wichtel hid underground in a forest during the war.

  He didn't keep his word. The stones ended up in a dump somewhere.

  Grażyna was born during the war so she doesn't remember much first-hand, but her parents and other family members lived in this place and seventy percent of their friends and neighbours, the people whose shops they frequented, were led off and killed. I get Krys to ask Grażyna what the older generation might have said about what happened to their Jewish neighbours but my question seems to get lost in translation.