by Alan Collins
Diners who had paused to hear the news now resumed eating, but Joshua felt there was an air of deep concern. All the huffing and puffing of vows to destroy Israel was starting to become reality. When the greetings were over, Joshua was issued with a steel helmet and a gas-mask — and a set of identity badges to hang around his neck. Avi led him off to the print shop, which now bore a plaque in honour of Jacob and Pnina Kaiser. The familiar whoosh and thump of the printing presses was a welcoming sound. It was immediately apparent that mobilisation had already commenced. The plant was mostly staffed by women.
He spent his first night at Kibbutz Jezreel in Ilan’s parents’ house. They proudly called themselves Sabras, the name native-born Israelis adopted. Ilan’s mother explained, ‘‘Like the prickly pear — tough on the outside, juicy and sweet inside!’’ Ilan’s father was a reserve officer. Not until later that morning did Joshua find out that Ilan was a lieutenant in a tank corps. He wore his uniform with a swaggering pride that curiously embarrassed Joshua. As he left the house on a sweltering morning to join his unit, he joked with Joshua, telling him to look after the girls while he was away.
Joshua never saw him again. As his tank screamed across the Sinai Desert toward the Suez Canal, it struck an Egyptian landmine.
The kibbutz Succot Day party was notable for an absence of young men. Joshua should have revelled in the situation but felt very uneasy. It was like stealing when a friend’s back was turned. The celebrations petered out early in the evening.
Nurit came to his rescue. ‘‘Let us walk, Joshua.’’ It was almost a command. She took his arm and led him out of the hall, down the road to the kibbutz gate where they were challenged by the guard. Joshua offered to carry Nurit’s Uzi but she refused, telling him it was against regulations. ‘‘Wherever I go, it goes,’’ she said rather wistfully. She led him up a hillside to a crest crowned with craggy pine trees. The breathless quiet of the night depressed him even before they reached the lonely grave. It was a small mound with a stone slab, its perimeter marked by white-painted stones brought from the nearby wadi. There was no headstone but the slab bore the inscription in Hebrew:
Pnina Kaiser, 1928-1948
“I Arose, a Mother in Israel”
Nurit translated it for him. ‘‘This is taken from Judges Chapter 5, verse 7,’’ she said. ‘‘The story of Deborah, hero, judge and prophetess.’’
Joshua did not hear her; he crouched on the ground in utter sadness and let the tears roll down his cheeks. The face that rose up before him was a luminous amalgam of Peggy and Toni. They merged in his mind’s eye until one was indistinguishable from the other.
Nurit put her hand on his head. ‘‘Come, Joshua, it is time to leave.’’ They walked arm-in-arm down the hill.
Nurit said, ‘‘You know, Joshua, war is only days away. I beg you, do not even think of taking part. Above all else, you are the last survivor of your family. You must go on, it is a sacred duty.’’
The next day, Joshua was in the print shop. Alongside him were young men and women from half a dozen different countries. A huge run of over 100,000 leaflets went flying through the presses. A huge run to be dropped from aircraft with the warning to threatening surrounding Arab countries not to start something they could not finish.
But the Arab nations, exhorted by their leaders to ‘‘throw Israel into the sea’’ were in a frenzy. From Syria in the north to Jordan in the west, with the largest nation of all, Egypt, massing along the banks of the canal, they were preparing for all-out war. Even Joshua, a tyro in military matters, could not mistake what was inevitable.
In the early hours of June 5, Israeli radar screens indicated the approaching flights of Egyptian planes and armoured units moving towards the Israeli border. Israel’s forces, under the command of Major-General Yizhak Rabin, had been mobilised since May 20. He now ordered the Israeli air force to make a pre-emptive strike which effectively destroyed the Egyptian air power before it could be airborne. The Jordanian guns pounded Jerusalem while Syrian soldiers, from their secure positions on the Golan Heights, poured shells down on the Israeli settlements.
It was a war which a small country with its back to the sea had no option but to win or become a footnote in history. On the third day of the war, Israel captured the whole of Jersu-alem, which since the British Partition had been a divided city.
In six days, it was all over.
Joshua mourned the death of Ilan. He was among the 777 Israeli dead, 2586 wounded, 17 prisoners — with 15,000 enemy casualties and a remarkable tally of 6000 prisoners.
The kibbutz fields were rich with crops to be tended. Joshua took his place in the groves — much, he imagined, as Jacob and Pnina had done before him. There was still one obligation he had yet to fulfil. When the tumult of war had finally died down, then he would leave the kibbutz and discover his beginnings.
FIFTEEN
The image of that pristine grave on a hillside in the Jezreel Valley stayed with Joshua as he worked alongside other volunteers. There was a wonderful feeling of unity that had no need of the impassioned messages contained in Laura’s satchel of leaflets. Although he got on well with the volunteers, Pnina’s grave gave him a bond with the land the others did not have.
Now he wondered at his own depth of feeling at his first sight of Pnina’s grave. He had known of it since his childhood but his father, Jacob, had grieved very privately and clothed his sorrow in prayer. In the short time he spent under Mrs Piper’s roof in Bathurst, Joshua never heard her talk about Peggy but she must have spoken often of her to Toni who knew every last detail of her aunt’s Israel adventure — for that was how Toni saw it. Curiously, Peggy’s violent death did not affect the girl; it was, as she told him, ‘‘like when the movie fades to black — you know it’s the end yet you can feel somehow it’ll all come right’’.
In May 1962, the first trees were planted on the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, at Yad Vashem which means ‘‘a monument and a name’’. By July 1967, the carob trees had grown high enough to form a canopy which shielded Joshua from the Mediterranean sun as he walked the perimeter of the garden. His tree (as he now thought of it) stood proudly in the freshly turned earth, its young, uncurling fronds a brilliant green.
It had been worth the struggle with this country’s brash officialdom. Mrs Rothfield had obtained a copy of Peg’s birth certificate from Jacob, who also gave Joshua a copy of their marriage document. The witnesses were Avi and Nurit; they gave Joshua a copy of the minutes of the Kibbutz Jezreel account of the action that lead to Pnina’s selfless sacrifice in an attempt to save the life of an Arab fighter. This the officials accepted only after exhaustive cross checking.
Then came the kindly but persistent questioning of Joshua’s interest in the matter. The officials made him comfortable, offered him cold lemonade, yet never relented in their quest for the truth. They had been asking these questions for four years now, trying not to be blase about the horror stories told them by relatives of courageous people who went to their deaths to save Jews from the Nazi murderers.
Finally it was agreed — Pnina Kaiser would be honoured. In that garden of the brave, hers would be the only name from far-off Australia.
Buchenwald, in north-west Germany, had been the first concentration camp to be liberated by the British and US armies in April 1945. From a peak inmate population of 82,000, less than 20,000 were barely alive. Of the survivors, there were 550 Austrian Jews. Among them were Joshua’s future parents, Moritz and Hilde Waldstein. They were separated the entire time they were in Buchenwald from 1942. The desperate messages that passed between them kept their hopes alive.
Moritz Waldstein had entered Buchenwald a robust man of great physical strength. In the camp, he shovelled coal into furnaces for cremating bodies. In the documents so carefully preserved at Yad Vashem, Joshua read the report of the New York Times correspondent, the first journalist to enter the camp:
It is a neat brick building. To enter it you walk through a courty
ard where stand the gibbets on which a dozen men could be hanged at once. Facing the multiple gibbet was a rustic setting where the SS could sit at ease over their wine and enjoy the hangings. At the side of the death house is a stairway leading into a basement. This basement is paved with concrete sloping toward drains and equipped with hoses. Beside the stairway, a chute led down into this basement on the outside. Prisoners told me that it was the practice of the SS executioners to bring truckloads of Jews into the courtyard and drop them one by one down the chute. At the bottom, one SS guard slipped a noose around the victim’s neck while his companion brained the victim with a club then dragged his body across the floor to a large electrically operated elevator. Calculated, mechanised murder.
With trembling hands Joshua handed the report back to the clerk at Yad Vashem. He said, hoarsely, ‘‘Do I have to read more?’’ The clerk pushed it back to him without speaking. Joshua read on:
When the elevator was filled, its cargo was hoisted to the floor above, where stand six neat, coal burning furnaces for cremating them. Three bodies could be put in each at one time.’’
The clerk removed the document from Joshua’s nerveless fingers.
‘‘They needed a very strong man for that task. The Nazi records show that Moritz Waldstein was that person. Only a few weeks before the Americans liberated the camp, he was too weak to work and was to have been killed like the others. It’s interesting, is it not, that the methodical Germans ordered that any male whose weight fell below 35 kilos should be exterminated. Their term, not mine,’’ he added apologetically.
Joshua hardly dared breathe. He wanted to ask about his mother but trembled at the prospect. In the cavernous cool of Yad Vashem Archives, 50 million items were stored and 30,000 testimonies were mute sentinels locked in filing cabinets. Here, among the remnants of six million dead, he had found his father and mother. He asked to be excused for a while and hurried out into the blinding sunshine. Once more he walked among the carob trees with their small bronze plaques bearing the names of the Righteous.
By mid-afternoon he returned. The male clerk had gone and a middle-aged woman now sat there smoking an acrid Israeli cigarette which not only made Joshua nauseous, but reminded him of Ilan. She put it in an ashtray where it continued to burn fiercely. Despite her formidable appearance, the woman was full of understanding. ‘‘My name is Nina. I too am a survivor. I come from Holland. If you look at the names of those in the Avenue of the Righteous, you will see Gretel Rieksvalt. She saved my life.’’
She took the binding from a folder and riffled through it. ‘‘In Buchenwald,’’ she began slowly, ‘‘they discovered tattooed human flesh used as souvenirs or lampshades. I tell you the worst first, Mr Waldstein …’’
Joshua felt the blood drain from his face. He stared at Nina.
‘‘What did you call me? Am I truly Mr Waldstein? Am I the last Mr Waldstein? Why was I singled out to be a survivor?’’ He put his head down on the cold plastic and sobbed deeply.
Nina sat calmly until Joshua raised his head. She went on: ‘‘Ironically, again we must be grateful for those bastards’ efficiency. Your mother’’ — she ran her finger down the page and attempted to soften the information to come — ‘‘Mr Waldstein, the records show your mother was saved because … because she was a beautiful young woman and the Nazis, despite all their talk of ‘filthy Jews’ kept her …’’ The sentence hung in the smoke-laden air. ‘‘After the liberation,’’ Nina told him, ‘‘the Red Cross searched the camps in western and eastern Europe and brought the survivors out to another, lesser, hell — the Displaced Persons’ Camps. In Trieste, in Italy, your parents were reunited. The records — always the damned records,’’ she cursed, ‘‘they showed that your father was in such poor health that he died two months before you were born.’’
Silently, she left the room, taking with her the smelly ashtray.
Joshua looked around. The room was like any other devoted to systematic record-keeping except that here were records of death on an unprecedented scale. Unable to resist, he drew Nina’s file towards him. He opened a ledger-like book. It was headed:
BUCHENWALD GESTAPO DISTRICT 6
5 APRIL 1942
The columns were headed
JEW — HOMOSEXUAL — COMMUNIST — IMBECILE
Then followed names and personal details. In a fever of anxiety, Joshua searched through the names. The Germans had made it easier for him by the simple device of recording every Jewish male with the second name Israel and every Jewish woman with the second name Sarah. Beneath his searching finger, Joshua found them:
WALDSTEIN Moritz, Israel: textile engineer.
Address: Albert Koenigstrasse 19, Wien.
WALDSTEIN Hilde, Sarah [same as above].
Transported: February 6, 1942.
File No. VCC/J 148.
Nationality: Jew.
The first wave of revulsion had now past. To his shame, Joshua began to experience a detachment from the horror laid out before him. The dispassionate description of mass annihilation, by its sheer enormity, served to distance him from it. As he scanned the columns of names he came across other Waldsteins who may or may not have been of his family.
Joshua was already thinking like a survivor. Like someone plucked from the sea. He experienced the euphoria of one chosen to live when others had perished.
And he had a name.
Had Peggy had the time to read more on the miserable scrap of paper his mother had clutched in the cabin of the ‘‘Athene’’ that morning nineteen years ago, she might have deciphered the name Waldstein. Maybe she did. Joshua tried to imagine himself in her situation. Could she have foreseen that Hilde Waldstein would not survive the hazardous landing, the guns of the British blockade or even the terror of a new life once more under threat of death?
Peggy, with her strong streak of country commonsense, had intuitively absorbed only what she wanted to know and not a jot more.
An electric bell sounded through the building. Nina reappeared and saw the documents open at the place where Joshua had been reading. She came around the desk and said, ‘‘You are not going all the way back to Kibbutz Jezreel tonight, Mr Waldstein. Tonight I take you home with me and you will eat with my family.’’ Perhaps in anticipation of Joshua’s objection, she added, ‘‘I have a son your age and mmm, a daughter, Ronit, a bit younger.’’ She grinned at him, a gesture Joshua would not have thought possible earlier in that momentous afternoon.
The two of them went out. Joshua asked diffidently if he could show Nina the tree in honour of Pnina Kaiser in the Avenue of the Righteous.
‘‘I have already seen it, Joshua.’’ She was tall enough to put an arm around his shoulder. ‘‘It rather makes you a part of our country, don’t you think?’’
Acknowledgments
Makor Jewish Library and Resource Centre, Melbourne.
Mr K. Rathner whose parents
perished in the Holocaust and who showed me
family documents.
Ms Astrid Turner
and the Ranger at Abercrombie Caves, Bathurst, NSW.
SOURCE MATERIAL
The quotations in Joshua Part 3 Chapter 15 are from ‘‘The Black Book’’ Published by Duell, Sloan & Pierce, New York 1946.
First published 2001 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 2008, 2011
www.uqp.com.au
© Alan Collins
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any foram or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset by University of Queensland Press
Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Collins, Alan, 1928–2008
A promised land?
A823.3
ISBN 9780702232442 (pbk)
ISBN 9780702258411 (pdf)
ISBN 9780702258428 (epub)
ISBN 9780702258435 (kindle)