by Ramona Koval
Ötzi might have been a herdsman driving sheep and goats around his valley, well prepared for hunting and gathering some of his food, repairing his tools (his damaged arrow shaft) and clothing, and spending days away, making campfires at night. But in his last few days he’d been on the run, descending from up high, possibly to his settlement, then leaving again to scale the mountain to a much higher level. Wounds on his hands and head tell of a fight just before his death. His pursuers must have caught up with him, the arrow was shot—and now I could see it behind an unhealed wound, in an X-ray sitting on my computer screen.
Analysis of Ötzi’s clothing, broken arrowheads and knife revealed the blood of four people: two different individuals on his arrow, a third on his knife blade and, on the left side of his jacket, the fourth. One theory is that he shot two people with his arrowhead and carried the wounded body of another on his shoulder. A rival theory suggests that he was the object of a ritual sacrifice: otherwise, why had he been left with such a valuable axe? Here he was on my screen, an accident of time and weather and nature and luck, having preserved his last few days in the vessel of his body; and here I was, nearly five and a half thousand years after his death, trying to piece together his story and relate it to my own.
A few years later the Genographic Project was offering an even more detailed analysis. I sent them another sample. After waiting a few months I got the result. I could claim an identification as a member of the subclade K1a1b1a. I shared this subclade with a fifth of other Ashkenazim, seldom with other populations, although it was present in some Romani groups. Was I now a gypsy, too? Ötzi and I shared the mitochondrial marker 10978G, in common with everyone in the K1a1b1a subclade.
I read in the report’s accompanying notes that ‘most members of this group stem from a group of individuals who moved northward out of the Near East. These women crossed the rugged Caucasus Mountains in southern Russia, and moved on to the steppes of the Black Sea.’ How did they do it? Who did they travel with, and what did they take with them? The trips would have taken many generations, after establishing a camp and settling into an area, hunting it out and moving on. I could be as sure of my connection with them as I was with Mama, the mitochondrial DNA link unbroken.
Following this line of thought, I began to think that it might not matter who my father was. I could imagine myself fifty thousand years back, connected to women who lived around the Mediterranean and whose offspring found their way up to the Volga region, through what became Persia and southern Russia. Or perhaps they were already settled there and met a Jewish trader from the south, coming up through Turkey with an eye on the Silk Road, the geography of multiple genetic mixing over centuries. I have no idea when any of them might have set off.
The Ur-mothers were deep in the past, yet it seemed to be a solid connection to think about. Pinning down exactly what a feeling of connection meant was tricky. When I met Australians overseas, I felt connected by shared language and some shared aspects of culture. Provided they were not too different from me, I could feel they understood me a little, at least. But what about a Romanian woman who had the same subclade connection to the foremothers through mitochondrial DNA: was there more to connect me with her than with a random Englishwoman who shared my language and perhaps my cultural references? This business of identity was fraught with both confusions and delicious possibilities.
The results in the report reflected not just the mitochondrial DNA from my K1a1b1a line, but the rest of the DNA in my cell nucleus, too. I learned that my genes derived from populations around the Mediterranean (fifty-seven per cent), Southwest Asia (twenty-three), Northern European (seventeen) and Sub-Saharan Africa (two).
The largest component was the signal from the Neolithic populations expanding outwards from the Middle East about eight thousand years ago from the western part of the Fertile Crescent. The next component was picked up when ancestors moved from the eastern part of the Fertile Crescent, as Europeans mixed with those from Southwest Asia. The smallish seventeen per cent Northern European fraction is most likely from the earliest hunter-gatherers of Europe, who were making a late transition to agriculture. The two per cent Sub-Saharan African fraction was found mostly in Bantu speakers, but small numbers are found in Tunisian and Egyptian populations. Perhaps the strangest results of all were the distribution of my hominid genes: 1.8 per cent Neanderthal, 3.8 Denisovan, the rest Homo sapiens.
I learned that my gene distribution was most like a reference population of current-day Bulgarians, followed by a population of current-day Lebanese. This, I felt, accorded with what I’d discovered so far—my lineage derived from a group of Middle Eastern Jews who travelled across Turkey and into the Caucasus and the south of Russia, mixing a bit with the indigenous women there, thus picking up my K1a1b1a mitochondrial DNA from my mitochondrial mothers, and forming the cultural and religious foundations of the Ashkenazi population that I trace my more recent family history from.
I thought about how tanned I could get in summers past, a nod to my mostly Mediterranean skin. And about my two per cent Sub-Saharan African genes, and whether my curls were from there. Since Max and Alan and their families were all from the same small region of Eastern Europe as the rest of my family, we were all as related to each other as any second or third cousins could be.
I was relieved to have so few Neanderthal genes, as some people have up to three per cent, although I was worried that this was a speciesist attitude of which I should not be proud. I didn’t find the reconstructions of their appearance from skeletal remains particularly attractive, but evidence from Neanderthal burials suggests that they may have been sympathetic beings who cared for their injured confreres, and buried their dead with ritual and flowers. They seemed simple, and sweet. I reproached myself. Dad’s voice came back to me: You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives!
And wasn’t I trying to do just that, engaged in a giant act of brushing aside those relatives with whom I could not make a connection and searching for people who might stand in their place? As fascinating as I found the story of Ötzi and the last days of his life, I knew that the five thousand years since his death had sanitised the story for me and made it hard to feel genuinely connected to him, despite our common genes which I carried in every one of my cells.
My desire to fill out Max’s story took me back to a time which was much better documented, but which also contained the horror and fetid smell of recent events. I was drawn, despite my misgivings, to immerse myself in it once again.
14
A good job in the infirmary
I NEEDED a thread to follow through the labyrinth of Max’s Auschwitz story. All I knew of my quarry was the tattooed number on Max’s arm: 76200. I’d been searching the archives for testimonies of men who were in the same ‘transport’ from the ghetto in Mława to Auschwitz. I’d found Leon Kruger, whose number was 76370; Rubin Soldaner, 76619; and several others, all numbered in alphabetical order. Order was everything: Alles in Ordnung.
Kruger made a point that struck me. He said that after he’d spent some time in the camp, his number showed that he was ‘an old-timer’. It was a miracle to live in Auschwitz for a day, much less a month or a year. Even German soldiers viewed such an old number with something like respect. The man who had this number inked on his arm must be tough, strong and lucky. So Max was tough, strong and lucky, too.
Rubin Soldaner was one of Max’s fellow witnesses in the Paulikat trial, but I might have missed his testimony had I been looking for his name in the Yunis memoir of Mława, where he was referred to as Reuven Soldanar. I was constantly being led off track by careless or phonetic spellings, and changes of names and identities. Soldaner emerged as I searched for mentions of tattoo numbers I had arbitrarily chosen to be between 76000 and 77000. I was unnerved to be using the Nazi classificatory system for my research, but what else could I do?
As it turned out, Rubin Soldaner’s story was important, the stuff of the best courtroom dramas. Bo
rn in the village of Szrensk, twenty-five kilometres from Mława, he was five years younger than Max. He was chosen to work as a personal slave for Walter Paulikat, who was in charge of the ghetto. Soldaner cleaned Paulikat’s quarters and his office, chopped wood for him, shined his boots, prepared his shaving water in the mornings, groomed and fed his four horses, and mucked out the stables. He later reported being beaten constantly by Paulikat, no matter how diligently he’d done his tasks.
Once, he had asked why these beatings continued and Paulikat answered by showing him one of his hands with half a finger missing. He’d fought in the Spanish Civil War on Franco’s side, he said, and his finger had been bitten off by a man he called ‘a Jewish Communist’, so Soldaner had to pay for it.
At the trial, when Soldaner was giving evidence, Paulikat said that he didn’t recognise the man who claimed to be his personal slave.
Soldaner reported saying, ‘You don’t remember me? You used to beat me up every single night because a Jewish guy bit off half your finger. Let him raise his hand and show the court—see if half a finger is missing.’
Paulikat was asked to raise his hand, and everyone in the court could see that Soldaner was correct.
They gave Paulikat a life sentence. ‘You know what a life sentence is?’ Rubin Soldaner says in his testimony. ‘He had to register his presence in the police precinct each week, and that was his life sentence.’
I wondered if Max ever learned of this, or if he continued to believe that the group of survivors who’d joined together to testify in the trial had ‘got him’. Paulikat would merely have visited his former workplace once a week, making a mockery of the idea of ongoing punishment. Perhaps he continued to have a beer with his old colleagues, silently cursing the inconvenience of having to report to them while making a joke of his sentence.
Rubin Soldaner said he’d been in Auschwitz between November 1942 and January 1945, after which he was rounded up and taken on one of the infamous ‘death marches’. When the Russians were rumoured to be coming to liberate the camp, those in charge sought to cover up what went on there. Six thousand prisoners were marched the twenty-five kilometres to Dachau; half of them were killed along the way.
I didn’t know if Max was on the march. Some stayed behind in the camp, too sick to walk, even though the Nazis told them they’d buried gelignite around the camp perimeter, so that all the evidence of the atrocities would be obliterated.
More delicate people, Rubin Soldaner said, couldn’t handle life in Auschwitz. He said that if your life in Poland was rough before the war, you had a better chance of survival in the camp. He was living in Block 7A with many others from Mława. They were taught to be bricklayers and plasterers, in order to build extensions to the camp. He was proud, in a way, that those buildings were still standing decades after the war.
If you knew someone who worked in ‘Canada’, the warehouse that processed clothes and belongings—the goods and valuables of those who arrived in Auschwitz and were stripped of everything, including their hair, and then sent to be murdered—they might steal something and trade it. You might have a chance of getting extra food, which meant extra time, and perhaps you might live till the war was over. This black economy was punishable by death, but those who knew how to trade and who were lucky were able to sustain themselves.
‘Everything was a miracle,’ Rubin Soldaner said.
Alan had told me that Max made uniforms in Auschwitz, but I needed to check if this was possible. Maybe he worked as a bricklayer with the other men from Mława who survived with him to testify at Paulikat’s trial? I also needed to investigate Alan’s report that Max had ‘a good job’ in the infirmary. How did he get it? What might a tailor have done in an infirmary?
Perhaps I was being too literal. Some survivors said in their testimonies that they’d lied about having certain skills and had watched what others did, learning on the job. They’d survived not because they were trained, but because they were skilled bluffers and fast learners.
If you had food, you survived; if you didn’t, you died. If you got sick, you died. One of the men whose testimony I heard wore a stolen suit from ‘Canada’ under his striped camp uniform. On the forced march to the camp at Dachau they stayed in a barn for the night. He left before dawn under cover of darkness and shed his striped pyjamas. ‘I kept walking,’ he said. ‘I was now a civilian.’
Hersh Forma—or Harry Forman, as he later became—was another of Max’s group to give evidence against Paulikat. He was also in Block 7A in Auschwitz, and helped build the women’s camp and the SS camp. He said that everything in Auschwitz was done by prisoners: the baking, the slaughtering of meat. ‘A camp is a city, it’s a big place.’ He talked of his number, too: ‘Our numbers made people realise we were “old soldiers” and people knew we were experienced.’
Harry Forman said that the decision to go on the death march was the worst one of his life, as he almost died in the four months between leaving Auschwitz and finally being liberated by the Americans. He said that the Gestapo did not give up trying to kill them till the last possible minute.
I didn’t know what he meant by the worst decision of his life: did he have agency in deciding whether to stay or go? Those left in the camp were the sick and the dying, and typhus was common, but in the end they were liberated nine days after the march began—much earlier than those who were marched away from the advancing Russians. Maybe Forman was ill and could have stayed, but thought his chances were better with the marchers?
After the war the survivors roamed the countryside looking for food, first asking for it and then, when they were denied, killing chickens they’d taken from local farmers. Now the Allied forces were the occupiers, and no one dared complain. The remnant people of the camps registered for rations and got coupons from various places. They used the survival skills they had learned in Auschwitz.
I thought about Max and how he had lived in the years before his arrival in Melbourne to set up with his brother. He must have thought, as Mama did, that Australians had no idea how hard life had been for the new arrivals, and could not imagine what they had seen and survived. On reaching Melbourne, Mama thought she had fallen into a child’s garden of verses. How could his brother or any of those who had escaped early begin to understand Max’s story? Like me, they wouldn’t have grasped the language of silence that Jacob Rosenberg had described.
Fitfully, I began searching Google with the keywords ‘Auschwitz + infirmary + tailor’. The photographs I found made me queasy and my gut exploded in liquid reaction. I remembered Dad showing me photographs like this once when I was a child. He was trying to get me to sympathise with him, to understand him, but I was only eight.
I still think he was wrong in doing this. Mama was furious with him. After that day, I was afraid of the wardrobe in which he kept the glossy commemorative magazine with the gold-embossed Hebrew letters on the cover. I wanted the wardrobe doors to be closed, any wardrobe door in any room, especially at night when I was going to sleep.
Curiosity about my beginnings now took me to the depths of the filth and depravity of the infirmary at Auschwitz. Was this where Mengele carried out his experiments with twins and typhus? Where babies were killed at birth, and others died from phenol injected directly to the heart? Maybe these were the scenes that Isabel remembered when she told me about being punished for not wanting to have children and for having abortions. I found it hard to sleep and, when I did, I sometimes had nightmares.
I dreamed I was in my white cotton nightie, riding a bicycle to meet a friend. I passed by a paddock with a large horse. I knew it had something to do with me, but at the same time it was not my responsibility. I saw that there were scars and welts on the horse’s flanks, evidence of some terrible cruelty visited upon it. I knew that someone had given me the horse, but I hadn’t wanted it, so I had left it in this paddock with plenty of grass and water.
The sky was darkening, and I encouraged the horse to take off and gallop to the far end
of the paddock. As he picked up speed I saw that his coat was moth-eaten, and his welts and scars were weakening; and, as I watched, his belly opened up and all the liquefied innards spilled out, and the animal collapsed. I knew he was dying and wondered if I should ride the bike to get a vet; and I also knew I could do nothing for the animal, that horses die every day; and that I had to get to my appointment, even though I was still in my nightie, which might well catch in the wheels; and I got on the bike and rode away. I told myself again that it was not my fault.
As his ninetieth birthday approached, Dad refused to wash for twelve days straight. His wife decided it was time. She and her daughter and son-in-law found a bed in a nursing home in a faraway suburb, but Dad baulked at getting in the car. My older daughter was summoned: by some miracle she coaxed him and he followed her into her car and she drove him there. This was all conducted without my presence. I had no power, no influence, and no inclination to be involved.
I visited him the following day. He was the only patient in a double room, a tiny man in bed. His food was delivered and they sat him propped up at the edge of the mattress, his feet hanging over the side, but he would not eat. He had been washed and his hair had been cut, yet he was not shaven. That was too much, his wife told me. She was smoking a cigarette, against the rules, and she had the air of an elderly Marlene Dietrich, with a gravelly, accented voice. She had come for lunch, as they let spouses eat there, and she was complaining that he didn’t want to sit in the dining room. She was acting like she’d made reservations in a fancy restaurant and the maître d’ hadn’t given them a table yet. Was she a little demented, too?