The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Old enemies are everywhere. In Etti’s barracks there are four Jews and the rest are Poles. These Americans group DPs according to nationality not persecution. The hatred is so thick you couldn’t cut it with a sharp knife. Etti hates the Poles even more than she hates the Germans – because of the betrayal, because a long time ago before living memory she had Polish friends, because they so strenuously denied her when her need for them surpassed the threat of death. A cupboard, a corner, the dark beneath a bed, she would have crouched anywhere if it were offered. But until she met the farmer it was not. ‘You want to kill us?’ her former friends would say.‘You want our blood on your hands?’

  And what of the blood on Polish hands? she wonders.What of that invisible stain?

  There’s no leaving this camp and no place to hide. Etti passes the mornings wandering the perimeter of the area, avoiding the faces of her enemies. In the early afternoon when most of the people are elsewhere, she returns to her space in the long Nissen hut, wraps herself in a blanket like she did with the quilt in Paul’s barn and transports herself into her imaginings. One day she observes a Jewish woman stealing food from the possessions of one of the Poles. Etti deliberately makes a sound. The woman whips around but when she sees it is Etti visibly relaxes. ‘If they had stolen only food from me,’ she says,‘I wouldn’t be stealing from them now.’

  Etti hears the situation is no better in the British camps.Why can’t people understand what they’ve been through? But far from understanding, these Americans actually want gratitude. For what? Why should any seventeen year old be grateful to be alive? Seventeen year olds expect to be alive. And where’s the gratitude in having survived everyone and everything you’ve ever held dear only to find yourself still at the bottom of the pile? Easy for the Poles and Balts and Germans to be grateful, they’ve chosen their displacement, but no one wants the Jews, not even when there are so few left. Although one of the Americans, his hands roving through Etti’s blonde hair and over the soft skin of her neck, tells her she’ll have no trouble.‘You don’t look Jewish,’ he says.

  Then all of a sudden conditions change, and all because of Earl G Harrison, one of the few heroes to emerge from Etti’s war. President Truman himself sent Mr Harrison to investigate conditions in the DP camps in Germany and Austria, and as a result of his report, special camps were quickly established for Jews. In early Autumn Etti arrived at the Jewish camp at Landsberg.

  ‘And here my Cinderella story begins,’ Etti would say. ‘Here comes my prince.’

  ‘Not that she made it so easy,’ Henry would add at this point in the story.‘She was hardly in this world when I met her.’

  In the first weeks after Etti arrived at Landsberg she kept to herself. She shared a cubicle with three other girls, all of whom like Etti preferred silence to airing their memories. She was eating well, had a period for the second time in her life, checked the lists for names she might recognise, put out searches of her own, built a small garden, started to learn English, acquainted herself with the operations of the black market, and kept her mind pinned firmly to the present. Not that she had any alternative, none of the Jewish DPs were going anywhere fast. She couldn’t help but wonder if the situation were any different in the non-Jewish camps, whether large numbers of Poles and Lithuanians and Germans and Ukrainians were at this very moment on their way to America or Britain or Canada. She still had no preference as to where she wanted to emigrate, but was now thinking Palestine might well be the best option. For if there was one thing she was learning, it was that no one but Jews would welcome other Jews.

  Although even among Jews, she discovered, there were some more welcome than others. German and Austrian Jews placed themselves at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Hungarians, then the French and so on down to the Polish Jews at the very bottom. There was a hierarchy of suffering too, in which people who had not been incarcerated in a concentration camp were assumed to have faired well in the suffering stakes. Best not to talk, she decided, best not to attempt any explanation. So when Henry, still Heinrich then, first called out to her – clear what he said despite his garbled Yiddish – she made no sign of having heard, just continued on her way.

  Henry was not so easily deterred. Next he called out in borrowed Polish, still no response. Finally he put speech aside, hurried past her, turned and stood in her path.

  ‘You,’ he said in his Germanised Yiddish.‘You want some cake?’

  Etti stopped because she had no choice, saw the cake in his palm and deciphered his speech. She could not raise her gaze to his face and neither did she want to. She just stood there waiting for him to step aside. Then she felt his hand on her arm, felt him open her fist, felt the cake in her palm, and knew that if it were anything other than food she would have pulled away. But it was food, and food demanded a response. She closed her fingers over the cake, stepped off the path and retreated to an area at the outer rim of the huts. The cake was delicious.

  ‘And I was still learning then,’ Henry would always say.

  Despite his usual reticence about the past, Henry liked to tell how as a young man in Berlin he had been apprenticed to a Jewish pastry-cook, how he had learned enough about kosher cooking to bluff his way into a job in the Landsberg kitchens. And a good thing it was too, for Etti said she married him primarily because he knew how to cook. But in truth she married him because she had no one else. No one emerged from the searches she put out through the DP network, and Henry, who was older and stronger, had no one either.

  ‘So you weren’t in love when you married?’ Laura had once asked her mother.

  Etti was scornful. ‘This “in love” you think is so special, it happens only in the pictures. Cary Grant and Hedy Lamar, did you ever see them in a DP camp? And with eyes you can see your father is no Cary Grant, not even Clark Gable, despite the teeth. And back in those days the teeth they weren’t so good. But I respected him and he could cook, and he was kind and good.This was what I was wanting: kindness and goodness. And when there was time, the love would come.’

  And so it did. Etti and Henry’s marriage had been full of love.

  Laura sat quiet and pensive savouring her mother’s story, in particular the happy ending. The drill of peak-hour traffic on the flyover filled the air, and the rattle of a distant train. Outside the sun was low. The rain had eased to the east, the air was fresh and crisp. Her mother’s words lingered comfortably. She was grateful to Nell for forcing the issue.

  ‘It’s a hell of a story,’ Nell said, flipping through the transcript.

  ‘And what a film it would make.’

  Laura smiled but remained silent. She wanted to stay with her mother’s words a while longer. There had been nothing more to learn, she kept saying to herself. Nothing more to learn.

  ‘A perfect human interest story with a happy ending,’ Nell continued.‘Set against an important historical context. Etti’s Story. I can see it in lights. International funding: European, Australian, and if we could find a positive role for an American, some American dollars as well.’

  And still just a smile from Laura. Etti had no secrets while she was alive and of course would not have left behind a cache to explode after her death. Laura should never have doubted her.

  She gazed outside, how different was the situation with her father. And as a cool breeze blew in through the open door, she was reminded of those evenings when she would pop in to see him after work and find him at his marble bench, the radio switched to the news station, and Henry murmuring to himself, invariably in German.

  ‘The deep waters they are running still,’ Etti used to say about her husband.

  With no children of her own, Laura had only the one family. With her parents’ death and her brother’s disappearance behind his beard and hat, her family was gone. In the failing light she looked across to Nell. This woman would never replace family, but when it came to love and support, she gave in abundance. ‘Enough love to be a Jew,’ Nell had once joked. Laura now stretched
out her arm and laid her fingers to the side of Nell’s neck, drew her close and kissed her. Then, with glasses of wine, the two of them went outside to the deck.

  Rainbow lorikeets flew overhead in flashes of noisy brilliance. Under the darkening sky the two women sat with their thoughts, sipping their drinks.

  It was Nell who broke the silence.

  ‘Your father was not an easy man to know.’

  Laura had been thinking much the same thing – a little resentfully it must be said. And now feeling guilty, as if Nell had read her mind.

  ‘Survivors like my mother made a life out of their memories,’ she said, determined to make amends. ‘While others, my father among them, could only live if they deliberately forgot.’

  Although she wished it had been otherwise, for his choices had been her losses.‘When he shut down his language,’ she now added, ‘he also shut down his past.’

  ‘But to such an extent?’

  Laura unpinned her heavy mass of curls, let the hair fall briefly over her shoulders, then twisted it back into a tighter knot. She knew what Nell was implying. So much evidence in recent years of how only the strong survived, and how survival always came at a cost. She took Nell’s hand and held it a moment before replying.

  ‘If he wanted to keep his secrets, then so be it. There’s nothing I wouldn’t forgive him.’

  But even as she spoke, Laura knew she was lying. It was true, there was nothing she would not forgive him, but now he was gone there was nothing she did not want to know. She thought of the American, that hard little woman, and felt again the temptation to discover who she was. This woman had known Henry, and no matter what she might have said, it was clear now to Laura that her visit halfway across the world was specifically to see him. This woman had lost both parents in the Holocaust. Henry had admitted to knowing her father. There were people alive in the world who had more information about Laura’s own father than Laura did herself. She was prepared for the worst, although if asked could not have said what that might be, but suddenly she needed to know what in Henry’s past was so explosive that half a life had to be shut down.

  Part III

  THE NEW CENTURY

  Hooked on the Holocaust

  Early in the new millennium Alice Carter’s son, Raphe, is standing at the lip of a volcano on an island off New Zealand, gazing into a blast of billowing ash and steam. You need to choose carefully whom you take to a volcano, he thinks, as he watches a long-established husband and wife team who began their quarrel back on the mainland, continued it throughout the ninety-minute boat journey, suspended it briefly when they first stepped on the island and again a short time later when forced to don gas masks. Now against the hiss and rush of the volcano they are shouting at each other and shoving too, and Raphe wishing they would take their blustering to a safer part of the island.

  He turns ever so slightly to remove the couple from view. He mustn’t let them spoil this visit, this highly symbolic visit, he reminds himself, to mark the new century. He redirects his attention to the fizzing crater, trying to forge the physical connection he always feels when in the presence of a volcano. All around him is ash and cracks and plumes of steam, and the hiss and bubble of boiling water. Against such devastation he has a sense of being so small, neat too, in his jeans and cropped jacket, his thick dark hair slicked back from his face, and his red sweater so bright against the deep grey of the island. He turns further from the feuding couple and deeper into the boiling landscape, and at last he feels himself settle.

  Raphe Carter loves volcanoes. Their power, the detonated shock of them, their utterly inescapable lethal beauty promote in contrast an exquisite peace. It was precisely because of this he had wanted to mark the new century with a new volcano, set the right tone from the beginning. For only with the whole of the earth’s innards heaving and raw do his abbreviated family history and sorry absence of relatives, even his unremitting failure at relationships become irrelevant. Only here is the truth about his grandfather, Martin Lewin, drowned out by a larger noise. Of course he loves volcanoes, with their reliable respite from a life stretched on the rack.

  He glances again at the couple. So intent are they on their hatred they seem unaware of how close to the edge they are. A little shove from him, a little nudge from her and only one of them will be walking back to the boat. Raphe pictures it now all so clearly, but instead of the warring couple, it is he and Laura Lewin who visit a volcano and only one of them returns. And in a flash his sense of peace explodes.

  A couple of years earlier, following the second of her heart attacks and not long before her death, his mother had revealed how his grandfather had died.

  Her exact words were: ‘When I went to Australia, I met the man who killed my father.’

  Alice had paused, just the briefest of moments, but long enough for the words to strike. Raphe’s grandfather, his alter ego, the one member of her family she had bequeathed to him, his own guardian angel. And when she told the story it was not as if his grandfather were being killed all over again, it was as if he were being killed for the very first time.

  She related the events of Martin Lewin’s death as calmly as if she were describing a visit to an art gallery. She told the tale so vividly Raphe might have been in that German wood himself, along with his grandfather and the man who should have been Martin’s saviour but was not. The story was long in the telling and Alice extremely weak. Sometimes her voice dropped to a whisper but she never faltered. Only when she was finished did she succumb to exhaustion, sinking into her cushions, her eyes firmly shut.

  Some time passed before she spoke again.‘Now Henry Lewin’s dead too.’

  Although not before he’d led a full and active life, Raphe was thinking, eighty-five years of a full and active life. He clenched on his hostility, and asked whether this Henry Lewin had shown any repentance. His mother had shrugged as if to say:What would be the point? How could a man repent an action that had provided him with his own life?

  Raphe was outraged.‘So in similar circumstances he might do the same again?’

  Again his mother shrugged.‘I don’t know. I think he was sorry for what he’d done.’

  ‘And what about the son and daughter? Any contrition there?’

  His mother doubted they even knew the truth. ‘He seemed too close to the daughter, Laura, to want to upset her, and too distant from the religious son to bother.’

  Passions are buxom, rambunctious things which rarely play second fiddle to reason. His beloved grandfather, the best part of himself: Raphe’s rage sparked and boiled and burst through his skin and clung to him like ash from a volcano. And revenge, how he longed for revenge, he, who would have preferred a more admirable response but simply couldn’t find it in himself. Certain wrongs would always be wrongs, murder in the past was no less murder now, and most crucial of all, no one had paid for his grandfather’s death and someone damn well ought to.

  ‘Jehovah is a kind and benevolent judge compared with you,’ Alice used to say when as a boy Raphe would pass judgment on another child, or a relative, or the man who ran the drugstore; in fact, anyone who acted contrary to Raphe’s definition of right. While still in elementary school Raphe had decided to study law when he grew up, and that had remained the plan until he went to college and suddenly opted for English and history. His father was unhappy about the decision, he saw no future in it, but his mother was clearly pleased. She’d often talked about her own father’s love of books, and here was her son following in his footsteps.

  He told his parents he had lost interest in the law, but in truth, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, and with crowds jostling for air on death row, the law had failed to live up to his expectations. Words, he decided, were more powerful; words, as history had so persuasively demonstrated, could drive people to commit unpardonable atrocities; and words, Raphe concluded after immersing himself in literature and the grand historians, could also bring about a better world. He loved words, he loved everything about them.
Above all, he loved their independence and durability – both vital attractions for a young man with aspirations.

  Raphe still carried in his wallet his reading list of 1978, the books which convinced him to toss in the law and become a scholar. They included Canetti’s Auto da Fe, Sontag’s Against Interpretation, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Goethe’s Faust, and Kafka’s The Trial. He had read and reread these luminaries, memorising the passages which spoke most urgently to him, and with their words filling his mind, he was convinced he had not simply found his mission but also possessed the ability. Twenty years on he still believed words could change the world, although not his words, not an academic in Holocaust studies with a side in volcanoes. And while a glance at last year’s reading list might suggest he had only himself to blame, he knew he was not alone in believing, or wanting to believe, that an appreciation of great works would translate into an ability to produce the same himself. But he was disappointed:one always wants to achieve the best and he knew he had fallen well short of that. Although in the bright hours of his dreaming he still saw himself walking among those same luminaries he had long admired.

  If he had fallen short of his dreams, he believed it was not entirely his fault. His had been a fraught life, one which for the first dozen years had been shot through with silence; even at forty-two he still suffered the deprivations of his early years. Juno, his live-in partner and personal critic, accused him of using his childhood to excuse all his adult failings. ‘And how bad was it really?’ she said. ‘You received ample love, plenty of food, a fine education. You had a roof over your head, a substantial one from what I’ve gathered. In fact, you never wanted for anything much at all.’