Driving to Treblinka

by Diana Wichtel

  Austerlitz, the title character in W.G. Sebald’s novel about memory and the Holocaust, is a small child when he is sent away on the Kindertransport to England. He grows up to forget his past, only to find the past won’t forget him. "I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all," he says, "only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead."

  I think about these things as three generations gather to commune with a past that suddenly feels more vivid and pressing than the present. I think about what my father, a person displaced, was going through in Brockville. Eva Hoffman has written: "Fury at having been persecuted may burst out suddenly in behaviour that strikes others as perplexing or unwarranted."

  From some voyages there is no return. In my father’s years at the Psych the past finally outran him. He was back in the ghetto, back in the forest. He sometimes thought we had been sent to safely with his brother, who would care for us and educate us. At other times he believed his brother’s wife was spying on him, out to destroy him, because clearly someone was. "He stated he was frightened and persecuted all his life," his doctors wrote. They put it down to psychosis.

  IT’S JUNE IN BROCKVILLE. The young cousins from all over and their partners are happy to be together, a rare event. They play with the dogs, drink beer, take photographs to post on Facebook and Instagram. There is also an invasion of the absurd. At the eleventh hour, an email arrives from Tammie: "Hi Diane, Dale just popped over to the Cemetery Plot and noticed the bag was off. He did put another one back on. I am sorry the only thing I could find was a plastic bag." She adds a sad face emoticon. The covering we will remove with great solemnity from my father’s headstone is a black rubbish bag. I think that would have made him laugh. Linda informs us it’s Father’s Day in Canada. This time we have no trouble finding the spot. There’s the rubbish bag. Tammie and Dale have, touchingly added a festive ribbon. The day is warm and windy. The soundtrack is provided by birds, the odd car hooning up the cemetery drive, and Monika’s Sean on guitar.

  Jeff undoes the ribbon. Ros and I pull off the rubbish bag. The headstone looks solid, enduring, like the memorial shards dedicated to unnamed murdered Jews we saw all over Europe. This stone will leave no one in any doubt about who, however improbably, is buried here.

  Sean plays Elvis’s "Love Me Tender", the only pop song my father admitted to loving, and Du, Du Liegst Mir Im Herzen: "You, you are in my heart/You, you are in my mind. "My brother speaks first. "We need to acknowledge all the difficult journeys we’ve had both physically and spiritually to get us all here today. In our own ways we have all tried to honour the memory of Benjamin Hersz Wichtel, but our inability to be with him in his final years when he needed us most is a heavy scar on our hearts."

  I say a few words about the search that got us here, the generosity and honesty of those here and those who couldn’t make it, in offering support and sharing painful memories. One of the hardest things to read in my father’s file was the account of his funeral in 1970. "Family and friends: none." Now look.

  Jerry speaks of two brothers: "When Ben came to my bar mitzvah, he brought a million ties. When I went to a bar mitzvah, I brought a suitcase," he says. "We grew up in a house of smoke and mirrors. My father was omnipotent ... We were told he was surprised and thrilled that Ben had survived ... Ben was presented to us as financially irresponsible, demanding, and unable to manage a business. The unfortunate irony is that was true of both brothers."

  He speaks of meeting my father only twice in all those years, at the bar mitzvah and when he came knocking at the door, alone, one night. "We were all children. We had no power or control over any of it. Now we, the living, have come together, hoping to find some closure and some peace."

  Wichtel family and partners dedicate the headstone for Ben Wichtel, St Francis Xavier Cemetery, Brockville, Ontario. Left to right: Ros Bartleet, Jill Wichtel, Mollie Wichtel, Jerry Wichtel, Linda Wichtel, Diana Wichtel, Chris Barton, Sean Fleet, Monika Barton, Jeff Wichtel, Blair Ellis, Maureen Wichtel, Jocelyn Wichtel, June 19, 2016.

  Tears are shed. My daughter, who can cry at the sight of an old man out walking his sausage dog, is our official weeper for the day. She has lived through the hopeful highs and crashing lows of the search, never mind the epigenetic legacy. "I bullied Mum, I downright bullied her because I couldn’t believe that we didn’t know," she says. "It was heartbreaking for her and all of his children, and then for the next generation who wanted to know where our granddad was.

  "I’ve got to thank all his kids for never giving up, and I’m not sorry for bullying you, because we are here. And Ben, Granddad, I don’t really know what to call you but I’m so glad we are here. You are a hero in my eyes. I’m sure there must have been times in your life when you felt like you failed but you didn’t. We’re here to assure you of that. Not only did you not fail but you triumphed and we will never stop telling your story."

  My sister-in-law Maureen reads a message from Nicola to her grandfather: "I wanted to take a moment to let you know how proud I am to be a Wichtel. To hold the name of a man who lost everything to the wars of other men; the name of a man who fought so valiantly for survival in the most dismal of circumstances; the name of a man who brought my father and beautiful aunties into this world; the name of a man who taught me just how unfair life can be, and to never take for granted the people you love. ... You have, and always will be, a strong presence in my life. May you sleep soundly once and for all."

  Never forget you are a Wichtel, my sister and I were told in the middle of the night nearly half a century ago.

  My sister Ros speaks of loss and compassion. As Sean plays "Oh My Papa", the song our father loved to hear his daughters sing, we place stones on his headstone.

  Blair and Jeff’s daughter Jocelyn makes sure these unorthodox proceedings are recorded. The partners Chris, Maureen, Jill, Sean and Blair step in to take care of one or the other of us in the moments when things get messy. As I write, eighteen months later, I’ve only just felt able to look at the recording for the first time.

  Later my daughter will do what her generation does so naturally: put it all out there. She posts a photo of the headstone on Facebook "Last year my family found my long-lost grandfather’s grave after half a century of searching. Today I finally stood in front of it for the first time and we unveiled a beautiful new headstone with all our names on it so he wouldn’t have to be alone anymore."

  The names: Loved father of Rosalind, Diana and Jeffrey. Honoured grandfather of Karl, Benjamin, Benjamin, Monika, Jocelyn, Nicola and great-grandfather of Sam, Ruby, Ari.

  Headstone for Ben Wichtel, St Francis Xavier Cemetery, Brockville, Ontario, June 19, 2016.

  The words we put together: "Benjamin Hersz Wichtel, May 16, 1910 – November 26, 1970. Holocaust survivor, survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, fighter in the forests of the old world who started again in the new."

  NEARLY HALF A CENTURY TOO LATE, it’s done. There’s a lunch in Brockville, where I feel giddy with release of tension. We say goodbye to the dear American cousins. We will see Linda soon when we go to Pennsylvania to visit Joe. Meanwhile the rest of us will go to Ottawa, where it turns out that an afternoon at a vast crazy waterpark near Cornwall—where my father was picked up—is not a bad way of dealing with being intermittently ambushed by grief. We stay a few nights at Jeff and Maureen’s new home in Guelph, where my father’s misspelt grave marker from the Psych rests under a tree in the garden. The first spring it was there Jeff took a photo of daffodils growing where it lay. They were not planted, he said, nor were they growing there the year before.

  After Monika and Sean head back to London, Jeff, Maureen, Ros, Chris and I hit the road for Allentown, Pennsylvania. There’s a palaver at the border as we are ordered out of the minivan so border control can pay unnerving attent
ion to our clutch of New Zealand passports. The variety of roadkill we encounter driving south is arresting: deer, a porcupine, and a sight that’s hauntingly sad and, say the Americans, rare: a young bear, the pale soft pads of its paws turned upwards to the sky.

  In Allentown we have lunch with Joe, Barbara—"My adorable wife," Joe calls her—their daughter Elyse and her family. Joe, now eighty-six, is more frail than when we saw him last and relies on an oxygen supply, but his spirit and humour are unvanquished. "Why didn’t we know each other earlier?" he says.

  In 2011, the last time Chris, Jeff and I visited, we attended a ceremony where Joe received a Human Relations Award from the City of Allentown for his work as a Holocaust educator at local colleges. "You can’t tell the Hitler story enough," he tells me. "Young people find it unbelievable because it is unbelievable—the best Germans devising the best method of conducting mass murder and the participation of ordinary Germans, Ukrainians, Hungarians, volunteers to kill the Yid."

  Joe Lubell, who never stopped fighting against forgetting, Allentown, Pennsylvania.

  At the ceremony, attempts to wind up Joe’s speech as he set about laying into the Republicans had proved futile. Our cousin has conducted an implacable war against cultural and historical amnesia and all manner of bullshit. He’s only recently retired from his work because of his health. Over lunch there’s a lively discussion of the political situation. Some like Hillary Clinton, some prefer Bernie Sanders. Of course none of us believe that Donald Trump will be elected.

  Before we leave, Linda tells Joe how much his wisdom and understanding have meant to her, that he changed her life. I’ve told him this too. There’s still much to be understood and relationships to be healed, but the mitzvah that Joe has helped make happen has been done.

  On January 30, 2017, seven months after our visit, I hear from Elyse that Joe has died. I never get the chance to tell him there has finally been contact with the family of our other cousin Dora, the one who survived the war in Poland with the papers of her Catholic school friend’s dead sister. Two years after I posted a message on a likely-looking Facebook page, Dora’s grandson Nir Herszenborn, who lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, finds it. He sends a text. Minutes later we’re talking face-to-face online.

  Nir knows the basics of Dora’s story but little more. When he was ten, his teacher suggested to the children in his class that they ask their grandparents about their wartime experiences. He rushed home and asked his grandmother. She burst into tears.

  Although he’s been to Poland, Nir didn’t manage to find the family graves or the house in Praga. I send him photos. A short while later he puts me in touch with his father Felipe, one of Dora’s two sons. Felipe tells me that in the ghetto Dora’s mother Dina was forced to make a devastating decision. "My grandmother had to choose which of her two daughters would be able to survive better outside the ghetto. Since my mother was the oldest she was chosen. They bribed the guards at the gates and so she was able to escape." She lived. Her parents and sister died at Treblinka.

  Felipe’s father, Israel Herszenborn, was also in the Warsaw Ghetto. "He survived exactly the same way as your father. He escaped from the ghetto and survived as a warrior in the wilderness."

  When the war ended, Dora was working as a maid for a Communist politician, Wladysław Gomułka, on an estate near a village in Poland. There was a parade. Israel was with the Russian Army, marching under the Star of David as part of a group of Jewish fighters. "My mother was very excited to see Jewish fighters so she went up and kissed my father. He said, ‘Well she’s a very nice-looking girl so I think I will stay with her.’ They stayed together for fifty-two years."

  At Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, a cattle wagon used by the Nazis to transport Jews to death camps has become a Memorial to the Deportees. During the mass deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka of 1942–43, up to 100 people were crammed into each wagon. Ben Wichtel jumped from a window like this.

  Felipe and I, newfound cousins, children of survivors, smile at each other via our online video chat. This is a happy family story to share. I tell him I wish wed known each other earlier. He says, "I think it’s a very great blessing to meet in this time."

  It is. After Dora died her two sons lost contact with their Jonisz family. Now more pieces of the family puzzle have found each other in cyberspace. Joe would have been happy about that. I’d spoken to him on the phone about a week before he died. We didn’t talk much about the past.

  "How’s the writing going?" he’d asked.

  "You’re an important part of the story, Joe," I told him.

  "I know," he said.

  DANIEL MENDELSOHN TOLD ME what he wanted to avoid when he wrote The Lost. "I’ve read a number of Holocaust non-fiction books where they skate, I think, dangerously close to ‘What I got out of the Holocaust’." He’s right. There’s no personal growth to be had in that fathomless void.

  I’ll hang on to the guilt. Along with love, it’s all I have to offer my father. In this sort of story it’s the ones who don’t feel any guilt you need to watch out for.

  People say, "Well, you must have got some closure." There’s no closure. It’s better to stay in the stream of history. That’s where he is. It’s where he’s always been.

  "WHO IS THAT, DI-NANA?" Sam is six and has noticed for the first time the photograph on the chest of drawers in our bedroom. "That’s your great-grandfather, my father," I say. "He’s your dad’s grandfather Benjamin. Your dad is named after him."

  "Is he dead?"

  "Yes, he died a long time ago."

  "What happened to him?"

  I open my mouth to speak, close it again and change the subject. Who could put that horror and tragedy into the head of a sweet funny six-year-old?

  Later I tell my daughter-in-law Carolyn I’m not sure what to tell him, or when. She reminds me there’s another story I could tell, just as my father told us stories about stealing eggs and pretending to have guns and tricking young German soldiers in the woods.

  "Polish Jews had three options," Matthew Brzezinski writes in his book Isaac’s Army, an account of resistance and survival in occupied Poland. "They could run. They could hide. Or they could take up arms and fight. The only other alternative—to do nothing—resulted in almost certain death."

  Death also found most of those who ran, hid and fought, but many, even young children on their own, did it anyway. "They refused to submit to evil, or to give up on life, and this made them exceptional individuals—not just as Jews or Poles, but as humans," Brzezinski writes. "Statistically they were the ‘one percent’, the very few who took their fate into their own hands and beat the odds."

  There is the unbearable narrative I have lived with: my father was hunted and imprisoned; almost everyone he loved was humiliated, starved, beaten, stripped, robbed, murdered; everything and everyone he had was taken from him, twice; he went crazy.

  But there’s never only one story. My father was a badass. He fought for life. After the ghetto, after the train to Treblinka, he still managed to work, play his balalaika, sing, click his heels and fall in love. He survived to help others when he could, to make a family that goes on. Benjamin jumped. Next time Sam asks, I will tell him the story.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to Mary Varnham of Awa Press, who rang one day and said, "You have an unusual family background. Would you like to write about it?" To Jane Parkin, who provided another pair of eyes on the manuscript. And to designer Keely O’Shannessy.

  I am grateful to the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship for four magical months of writing on the edge of Albert Park in the company of birds and my ghosts; to Bauer Media and the New Zealand Listener for readily allowing me time off to write; and to Steve Braunias, for encouraging my first tentative attempts at this story. Special thanks to Brian Boyd for support and encouragement from the start, and to Finlay Macdonald for his expert advice and acute perspective.

  Thanks to the Archives of Ontario; Citizenship and Imm
igration Canada; the Swedish National Archives; POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.

  For help and kindness beyond the call of duty, I’m grateful to Kathrin Flor at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany; Krystyna Duszniak of Lost Histories in Melbourne; Anna Przybyszewska Drozd of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw; Krzysztof Malczewski, our indefatigable guide in Poland; Przemyslaw Szpilman of the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw; Grazyna Frankowska in Żelechów; Witold Lisowski, who shared his family story; Claire Dionne at the Russell Branch—Township of Russell Public Library, Ontario; Dale and Tammie Trickey in Brockville, Ontario; Sandy and Margo Thomson in Vancouver; in Montreal, Alan Greenberg of the Jewish Genealogical Society and Janice Rosen of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society.

  Warmest thanks to friends made through the Auckland Second Generation Group, especially Deborah Knowles, Lilla Wald, Naomi Johnson and Sara Nevezie, and to Anne Hartwell, who provided renewed friendship, memories from Vancouver, and old letters.

  This book is about family. To my father and mother, who told me what they could of what they went through, I owe everything. My deepest gratitude goes to my aunts Rosemary McKinstry and Wendy Perrier; my brother-in-law Jim Stevenson, who generously offered his invaluable research skills; my wonderful cousins Linda Wichtel and her daughter Mollie Wichtel; Jerry and Jill Wichtel for their memories and their courage; the late Joe Lubell, my dear friend, teacher and bridge to the past, who never stopped fighting against forgetting. His memory is a blessing. And to his wife Barbara and their family; my cousins in Mexico, Nir Herszenborn and his father Felipe Herszenborn, for sharing memories of Dora Jonisz. I’m deeply grateful to my sister Ros, with whom I have shared this history for so long; to my brother Jeff, who so wholeheartedly makes so much possible, and his wife Maureen; and to my fierce, amazing nephew and nieces: Karl Bartleet and his partner Jasmine Kim, Jocelyn Wichtel and her partner Blair Ellis, and Nicola Wichtel.