‘This I remember,’ my father informs me. ‘The refugees from Łódź. I had an aunt who took in some poor people. Gave them food and a bed.’
By the end of 1939 more than 80,000 Poles and Jews from areas annexed by Germany had been deported into the occupied General-Government, the rump part of Poland ruled by Governor Hans Frank. In some towns the total number of refugees outnumbered the local Jewish residents. The transports arrived by rail, carting densely packed loads of middle-class Jews from annexed towns in Austria, or from the occupied cities of Łódź, Płock and its environs. By early 1942, Nazi policy was preparing for total annihilation by liquidating smaller towns and concentrating Jews in larger population centres. Scarce resources and overcrowded conditions rapidly led to the eruption of typhus and other epidemics. In towns like Starachowice–Wierzbnik, soup-kitchens and Jewish welfare societies were established to aid the hungry, while resident families opened their doors to the incoming people. In desperation, the Jewish Council of Elders submitted an appeal to the offices of the Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry’s overseas relief agency, whose Polish branch continued its operations by borrowing money locally or through underground channels.
Together, my father and I read the exchange of letters between the Judenrat of his town and the Joint Distribution Committee in Warsaw:
The Council of Elders
Starachowice–Wierzbnik
25 February 1940
The Director,
American Joint Distribution Committee, Warsaw.
Over the last few weeks we have been attempting to travel to Warsaw with the aim of seeking financial help from you for the poor people of our town. However, we are unable to get out of here.
As a result of the exceptional situation in Wierzbnik, our trip has been impossible. Recently we tried to get out via Radom, where we stayed for a few days, but because of heavy snowfalls, we were unable to travel.
The situation of the Council whose responsibility it is to look after the people here is simply tragic. All of our funds have been exhausted and today our hands fall down as we can no longer assist those calling for help.
An even greater misfortune for our town is the ever-increasing wave of deportees from Łódź and its surrounds, whom we have to provide with food and accommodation.
We await a sincere and speedy reply to our request.
Simcha Mincberg
‘Today our hands fall down …’ I repeat.
‘Nebech,’ is all my father can say, the Yiddish word for ‘pitiful’, forgetting for a moment that he was once part of that same pitiful past.
In Mincberg’s view, the tragedy was compounded by Starachowice’s location as the last railway station for the region, turning it into the most convenient point for the relocation of refugees who were overburdening the limited resources of his community. After a series of three appeals to the offices of the Joint Distribution Committee, signs of assistance were finally pledged to the Judenrat offices:
American Joint Distribution Committee,
Warsaw
3 June 1940
The Jewish Council of Elders,
Starachowice–Wierzbnik.
We received your letter of 7 May together with your reports for March and April.
After becoming acquainted with the above reports we are ready to grant you financial aid for the running of a kitchen, for approximately the amount you request.
It is only as a result of our not having the funds we need, that we cannot send you the money immediately. We will send it as soon as possible. Therefore the visit of your delegates to Warsaw is absolutely unnecessary.
With regards,
American Joint Distribution Committee.
‘It’s obvious,’ my father says, ‘they had no money to give us. Every town in Poland was begging.’
The promise of assistance was greeted with gratitude, but there were further delays. On behalf of his Council, Mincberg made one final attempt to spur the Joint Committee into action.
The Council of Elders
Starachowice–Wierzbnik
19 June 1940
The Director,
American Joint Distribution Committee, Warsaw.
It was with great happiness that we received your letter of 3 June, granting us the subsidies so necessary for our social assistance here.
Unfortunately, three weeks later, we have still not received the money, during which time our situation has worsened considerably. We find ourselves on the threshold of a great catastrophe—all the men of the town, and part of the women, are daily employed in unpaid forced-labour works, which makes it impossible for them to earn money.
It is a burning issue now, our request for help, otherwise we face the threat of the destruction of our people.
We turn to you in desperation, hoping you will understand our tragic predicament. We ask for speedy help—if it does not come immediately, it will be too late.
The Chairman
Simcha Mincberg
‘What did they know of destruction in 1940?’ my father comments. ‘Only a madman would know.’
We peruse the next item on the list of complaints, as if the SS Mayor were criticising us personally.
Item Three
According to directives, the Jewish Council of Elders is obliged to take care of members of its religion who are in need of help. Despite my admonition I have ascertained that homeless and mentally deranged people wander about on the streets in completely ragged clothes, barefoot, etc.
So too was the local synagogue in disarray, leaving an ‘unaesthetic impression’ on the town’s appearance.
‘Of course it looked ugly,’ my father jumps up after I explain ‘unaesthetic’. ‘They burned the synagogue on the night after Yom Kippur.’
It was September 1939 when his synagogue was torched by the invading German army. Yet the Council of Elders was reluctant to demolish its remains, despite the fact that the site was ‘endangering public safety’.
‘They burn the Shul and then expect us to clean up the mess,’ my father explodes. ‘What chutzpah!’
The accusation of neglect stemmed not only from German officials, but also from certain Jewish activists critical of the Judenrat. One local resident even complained of the Council’s unpopularity, pointing at its ‘flawed administration’ and divisive policies.
‘Nusink’s changed,’ my father comments about the intrigue in his town, ‘not before, not during, and not even after.’
We enter into a brief discussion about the machinations of the Melbourne Jewish community, its political struggles, my father’s pride in my brother Johnny’s achievements as a communal leader. ‘My son the President,’ my mother likes to boast.
‘They probably would have chosen you as an Elder,’ I once said to my brother.
‘Don’t worry,’ he joked, ‘I’d have looked after you.’
Item Four
Today eighteen Jews requisitioned for forced labour did not appear.
The Council of Elders reported the following persons:
… Bekiermaszyn, Leibush …
In order to resolve the situation I request the punishment of the above-mentioned persons …
My grandfather’s name appears on this list compiled by the Judenrat and delivered to the Mayor of Starachowice–Wierzbnik on 20 January 1940. The list was forwarded to the Regional Commander with the recommendation that the Judenrat be fined 1000 złoty.
‘Who told you?’ my father demands, grabbing the paper from my hand. It is written in German. He deciphers its contents from similar Yiddish words. And anyway, there are only two words on the document that interest him. He repeats them in a prayer-like whisper: ‘Leibush Bekiermaszyn. Leibush Bekiermaszyn.’
I try to humour him: ‘At least they spelt his name properly.’
He scowls, and I realise how deeply buried is his pain. I have always pitied myself for the grandparents I do not have, rarely considering my father’s own orphaned state. I identify him as a survivor�
�a parent with a tragic past—but not as parentless. He never before spoke of his mother or father; they are faceless and nameless, evoked for the purpose of synagogue rituals when he is called to the Torah as Yosef ben Yehuda-Aryeh—Joseph, son of Judah the Lion.
Most of the town’s male Jews were employed daily, without remuneration or payment in food, and used for various menial tasks, such as clearing snow in public places. My grandfather would have been deemed eminently suitable for mandatory work: he was forty years of age. He does not appear on the Judenrat lists exempting Jews from work, either because of old age or health factors. He simply refused to present himself for compulsory labour.
My father understands it as an act of resistance. ‘See!’ he says. ‘We didn’t go like sheep to the slaughter.’
My father used the same words to describe his own actions one Sunday afternoon in Melbourne. I was a child at the time, and overheard my parents arguing in the kitchen with their friends. I could only pick up snippets of the Yiddish conversation—something about a neo-Nazi rally; how could it happen here? In Australia? After the war? One survivor bared his arm. He pointed at his numbered tattoo, shouting, ‘Never again.’ So they piled into a car, leaving me at home with my mother who pretended they had gone off to Mendel’s house to play cards. My father returned in the evening, his hair dishevelled. He was carrying a black umbrella which he triumphantly waved in the air. ‘Bastards,’ he said, ‘Hitler bastards.’ My mother tried to calm his nerves, while he continued to tell his heroic story. ‘We tore off his swastika, and pushed the antisemite into the Yarra River with our umbrellas.’ He turned on the television, anxious to hear if the evening news had reported this act of Jewish resistance, organised from the suburbs of Melbourne.
Three months after Leibush and the others defied orders, the Wierzbnik police station sent a gendarme to expand the authority of the Jewish Council of Elders.
My father seems excited by this latest piece of information. His anger has dissipated.
‘This I didn’t know.’ He ponders the image of his father digging snow in the icy Wierzbnik winter. ‘So cold it was,’ my father remembers, ‘even the rivers were frozen.’
For my father, the rivers have not thawed, until now, when his words break out from their glacial silence, releasing a torrent whose flow runs backward into his darkest nights.
‘Nebech, nebech.’ He returns to his chant: ‘Leibush Bekiermaszyn. Leibush Bekiermaszyn.’
His eyes have refocused on my document, drawn to the letters that make up the sound of his father’s name, but his mind has travelled to another time and place, far from Melbourne, far from me.
XV
And then in one second everything changed for us: my father went to Szydłowiec to deliver some glass for the shop, and on the way they stopped him in a horse and wagon. They took everything away, they kicked him, they beat the driver. Everything. But that wasn’t the worst.
Soon after they came back to our house. Late at night they started to hit everybody, my sisters, me, they hit us all, but mainly they wanted my father. My father was hiding at a friend’s place, and they were drunk and hitting us, harder and harder. I called out in German, ‘I don’t know where he is, I don’t know,’ but they only beat me more. They didn’t believe me. They broke everything in the house, all the glass, still beating my younger sisters. They smacked me on the face. I was only a young boy at the time, but I didn’t cry. I couldn’t cry when I was young; now I have no problem, but it must have been my nature then not to cry. So when they beat me, I was quiet. They left such a mess, all the glass broken, on the floor. They left but promised they’d come back again.
The next time they came back he was arrested and taken to jail. So we asked a Jewish man to help us; he knew my father, his name was Kogut, a tailor, and he knew people at the police station because he made suits for them. He found someone from the Gestapo who we could bribe, and every day we paid more and more. A week went by, another week, and we would go on foot to the station where there was a little jail, and we brought my father food. I remember, it was a Saturday: we prepared to carry a cholnt for my father, his favourite food, but we were told not to: ‘He’s coming out,’ they told us. ‘Any day, he’ll be at home.’ So we didn’t go, but he never came home again. One day, a truck came and took him away, with two other Jews, and later Kogut was taken too. We tried so hard. We gave them more money, and more money, but nothing helped. He was gone. Soon after we got a letter saying that he was in Buchenwald: he wrote it himself, saying he was happy, that he is working but needs more money to buy food. We sent him what he wanted, but who knows if he ever received it? Who knows if he ate enough food? We didn’t even know if he was alive.
High on the northern slopes of Ettersburg is a mountain range whose peak cannot be seen from the train which heads toward it on 22 August 1940. Beneath the mist lies a pathless maze of beech, oak and pine forests, in the middle of which there is a clearing surrounded by barbed wire. The enclosure is encircled by wooden watch-towers which peer onto neatly aligned barracks, arranged in rows of five, around a majestic oak tree whose branches are said to carry the muse of the German national poet, Johann Wolfgang Goethe. It is a symbolic site in an inhospitable wasteland, just north of Weimar in the heart of the Thuringian landscape where Germany’s experiment with social democracy once flourished before surrendering to the spirit of the new Reich.
The 640 passengers on board the train heading for Buchenwald are all Polish citizens. Amongst these prisoners, marked out in red pen on the list which enumerates their personal details, can be counted fifty-two Juden, a small piece of information appended to their general classification as Poles. One of them, Leib Bekiermaszyn, was placed under arrest on 12 August 1940, although the exact charges laid against him are not specified. As a Jew, he simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, the victim of a singular petty grievance avenged by the Starachowice Gestapo which incarcerated him at the local Security Police jail. After languishing in a prison cell for two weeks with three other Jewish citizens, he was sent on to Fort VII in Posen where there were 1100 Poles from the same, or a neighbouring, region. In the system of classifications, he has been variously labelled a Jew, a Pole, a Polish Jew, and a political Jew. When the red document officially placing him under ‘protective custody’ (Schützhaft) was thrust before his eyes, he had no choice but to affix his signature to it.
The journey in the railway carriage from the Posen fortress to Buchenwald covers a tortuous terrain which Leib Bekiermaszyn endures under the watchful eye of the accompanying police detachment. The train finally grinds to a halt at the railway station overlooking the city of Weimar, offering comforting thoughts of relief from the regime of hunger, thirst, and paralysis. The doors are pulled open, unlocking a flood of densely packed passengers who fall to the ground where they are forced to remain for hours. The official reception committee brandishes wooden clubs. From there, Leib is led on a seven-kilometre trek to his ultimate destination in the high altitudes of the Ettersburg Mountain, marching double-step the entire distance with his hands clasped behind his neck until he arrives, weak from fatigue, at the political department of the camp. He is handed a personal questionnaire and a number by which he will be known from now on: five thousand five hundred and three.
Prisoner Number 5503 informs the SS official in the Records Office that he is Leib Bekiermaszyn, a Jew, currently residing in the Polish town of Starachowice in the administrative area of Iłża. His exact date of birth is unknown, but he says that he was born some time in the month of March, in the year 1900. He is indeed married, and his wife’s name, he records, is Hinda Bekiermaszyn, of Starachowice–Wierzbnik, who resides on the Market 20, an appropriate address for a prisoner who subsequently records his profession as Kaufmann, a merchant. When asked for his own last place of residence, he responds: ‘same as wife’, adding that he has left behind four children whose names are not catalogued. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I did not belong to any political organisation
,’ and a thick black line also crosses out the section dealing with ‘other affiliations’. All that counts is that he is a Jew, a fact underscored by the second appearance of the word Jude on his registration documents, boldly underlined and followed by an emphatic exclamation mark accompanied by a score of cane lashes to his backside.
The integration procedure is continued in the bath-house, where each of the prisoners sets his clothes in a pile. Leib passes through a room where his hair is clipped, after which he steps into an ice-cold shower, and from there, still naked, marches back through the parade grounds. He then dresses in a new set of clothes which will serve as his wardrobe for the remainder of his stay: underwear, shirt, pants, trousers, a jacket and a cap, all of which are distinguished by the blue and white stripes running through them and to which are added a pair of shoes with no consideration for size. On his left chest, he notices the familiar six-pointed star composed of two triangles coloured in red and yellow. This uniform replaces his older belongings which have been sent to the Personal Property Room in the eventuality of release.
Prisoner Number 5503 is assigned to Block 29, along with nine other arrivals, all of them Jews. Their new home is a wooden construction divided into a day and night wing; the sleeping room is designed to contain up to two hundred residents on bunks built three decks high. The prisoners are also given a partitioned section of a collective locker which contains their sole personal possessions: a metal bowl, a pot and a single spoon.
The day is completed by the evening roll-call where Leib is joined on the parade grounds by more than seven thousand fellow inmates. He stands outside at attention for many hours, anticipating the sound of the numbers, ‘five-five-zero-three,’ at which point he gives a stilted shout which is submerged by the call for the next prisoner. In the previous month before Leib’s arrival, thirty-four prisoners had failed to respond to their prompt, and were finally accounted for on the gallows. The roll-call ends with a collective rendition of the ‘Buchenwald Song’, commissioned in 1938 by SS Commandant Rödl and set to a lively marching tune by a Viennese Jewish cabaret performer imprisoned in the camp. In a harmony produced by a choir of seven thousand fatigued men clad in their stripes, and accompanied by a brass band, the words can be heard across the enclosure, even past the electrified fences. The sound is carried by the wind which blows along the peaks of the Härtz mountains beyond which the peasants are returning home from ploughing their fields:
The Fiftieth Gate Page 7