When the day awakes,
before the sun smiles,
the columns march
to the day’s toil,
into the breaking dawn.
And the forest is dark and the heavens red,
and we carry in our bags a piece of bread
and in our hearts, in our hearts the sorrows.
O Buchenwald, I can never forget you
because you are my fate.
Whoever leaves you, he alone can measure
how wonderful freedom is!
O Buchenwald, we do lament and wail,
whatever our fate may be.
But we want to say yes to life,
for some day the time will come when we are free!
Leib is in his bunk lying on a straw mattress, contemplating his first dinner: bread, margarine, and a small piece of sausage. His head rests on a flimsy pillow and his body is covered by two thin chequered blankets which will serve him well until the winter sets in. His eyes finally close as the camp song whispers its cry for freedom:
And the night is hot
and my sweetheart far away,
and the wind sings softly
and I love her so.
O Buchenwald,
O Hinda. O Wierzbnik.
XVI
‘What do you mean, you know what he wore?’
I repeat: ‘I can show you what your father wore when he arrived in Buchenwald.’
My father seems angry at this latest discovery.
‘Do you know when he went to the toilet? The colour of the gatkes he wore under his pants? Maybe you can tell me when I last showered or what I did everyday in Auschwitz?’
‘You were a kutscher,’ I remind him.
‘Don’chu dare. Don’chu dare tell anyone, it’s not your business.’
There is nothing predictable or logical about the elements in his life which he regards as shameful. I would tease him with playful allusions about those very private matters, threatening to expose the myriad habits about which a husband and wife, or children and parents, learn from a lifetime of intimate contact.
‘I have nothing to hide,’ my mother gloats.
The kutscher business, however, I had not expected. He explains his shame.
‘A horse-driver,’ he translates, ‘like somebody today who drives trucks. What will they say?’
So it was the class thing that bothered him, an uncharacteristic reaction for a person who disdains snobbery. Not that his job transporting potatoes by horse and cart could be considered a lowly chore. Measured by Auschwitz standards, it had its privileges. In fact, the job placed him quite high on the camp hierarchy where access to food, even vegetable peel, elevated a person to regal status. Yet he saw it from the viewpoint of a suburban Melbourne Jew, who sought to put the old life behind him.
He tries to make me share his sense of exposure.
‘Why don’t you write how I used to bring you Cornflakes to bed every night? Or how we used to go to Frank’s toy shop every week? Go on, tell them how spoilt you were as a child.’
‘Not my fault,’ I complain. ‘What did you want me to do, rebel against your kindness?’
‘You resisted when you needed to,’ my mother counters, ‘when we wouldn’t do what you had come to expect.’
I know the story she is about to tell, word for word, about the time I went into the toy shop, scanned the shelves and after half an hour announced: ‘Now what haven’t I got?’
‘It was one of the few times we smacked you,’ she adds, although I can clearly recall other occasions when she chased me around the house with a tea towel.
My mother is more adept than my father in choosing the right moment to explore her sons’ vulnerabilities. She drops her innocent questions at exactly the right second, drawing on information stored in that part of her memory reserved for vindictiveness.
‘You should have finished medicine,’ she will say to my brother, twenty years later. He is now married with five children, successful, but not a doctor. When he brought his first-year medical coat home she waltzed it around the house, a white angel of the night. But he hung it in the cupboard and went to live in Israel. She refused to return the coat or his diagnostic bones until he returned seven years later. We called them her skeleton in the cupboard.
‘I should have been an historian,’ she says, ‘the things I could write about you and your brother.’
‘The only thing that’s interesting about us is our parents,’ I answer her.
‘No, I don’t think so, every person is interesting in their own way.’
I know what is coming next. She says it first in Russian, then translates her words into English. ‘All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’: the opening sentence from Anna Karenina.
‘I love Tolstoy,’ she would tell her sons, less as a point of information than as a boast—despite her meagre education, she was capable of reading the classics. ‘In many languages,’ she adds, ‘which is more than you can do with your university degrees.’
This is inevitably followed by: ‘I always thought of myself like Anna Karenina, a poor deprived little child.’
Anna Karenina was anything but poor or deprived, but my mother tends to project her own stories of atrocity and survival on to a panoply of literary heroines—Zhivago’s Lara, Marjorie Morningstar, Scarlett O’Hara, and an assortment of headstrong women drawn from Danielle Steel romances. Her favourite, though, is Anna Karenina, a character she frequently returns to in a red hard-bound edition sequestered in her bedside drawer.
‘I always cry when I read these books,’ she remarks. Over time, I came to understand her ploy of dramatising the suffering of these women so that ultimately she could disclose the emptiness of their trauma.
‘If Tolstoy could tell my story,’ she would say, ‘Anna Karenina would have thrown herself under the train much earlier in the book.’
For in the end she has always believed that no one really suffered like her; not even her husband who was in Auschwitz.
‘It was different for me, I was just a child, I had no one.’
As for my brother and me, we were the indulgent children born to a lucky generation in Australia.
‘What do you know of pain?’ she ribs us. ‘When I was your age …’
She lists our privileges in order to highlight her own suffering and deprivations: our private education, our pilgrimages to Surfers Paradise, our television sitcoms.
I know she is right. The only pain I knew as a child was located deep in my stomach, a sharp dagger which frequently incapacitated me and only disappeared in my adult years after I left home and married. And there was the pain of displaced identification. I invented a biography for myself from elements of my parents’ lives, characters more valorous than any protagonist found in fiction. As a child, I even gave myself a number, imagining myself as a ghetto fighter. When I was their age, I would think, reversing my mother’s refrain. I did not always survive in the stories I created, but I ensured I left behind a heroic legacy. I wanted to be turned into a bronzed statue, like the one of Mordecai Anielewicz, symbol of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. I blew up the Auschwitz crematoria, smuggled explosives through the sewers, organised a partisan force in the Ukrainian forests.
What was I doing? I now ask myself. Was it Australia I wished to escape, its suburban dross and culture of leisure? In the absence of a Holocaust, I was compelled to create my own. Trains, of which there was no shortage in Melbourne, were a favoured object for my mental manipulations. The rambling green trams moving toward the yawning jaws of Luna Park veiled a fate which terrorised my mind, while inside happy Australians flew over the sea-side on Ferris wheels licking fairy-floss from their fingers.
I turned my own bedroom into a horror-house of memories. My parents never knew of the Nazi memorabilia I collected, photographs of massacred bodies, candelabras in the shape of swastikas I lit at night to accompany my dreams. I even planned with my friends to raid the offic
es of a neo-Nazi organisation located in the Melbourne business district. We fantasised about entering at night and daubing red swastikas on the front door. During the day, I actually visited their bookshop, pretending to be a fascist sympathiser as I browsed through antisemitic leaflets, asking questions about the World Jewish Conspiracy. I would drop hints about my real identity.
I wanted to be caught.
Perhaps all those of my generation, the sons and daughters of survivors, bear the wounds of unresolved guilt. My house is the house that was burned, my life the life that was not spared. It points to an absence which makes us defiant, expressed in the simple act of wanting children as replacements for those unborn. Behind the pose, we are lost. I lose myself along the signposted routes of Melbourne; I confuse east and west, finding myself on freeways when I was looking for a side street. Someone once told me this is a metaphor for my generation.
My parents do not see the metaphor. They call me dreamy, a lange leitung, a long connection let loose somewhere in space.
As for the rest, it is better they do not know. Is it fair to ask my parents to deal with my nightmares, the dying children strewn along the sanitised pavements of our suburb, surging into Glick’s bagel shop and Josie’s second-hand store? As far as Luna Park, where it ends.
Perhaps it all ends when I return memory to them. Only then can I assume responsibility for their stories. First I must give in order to take.
And give generously, details and details, fecks and fecks.
Like my grandfather’s clothes. My father still wants to know, despite the intimacy such knowledge can bring.
A cap.
A pair of shoes.
Socks.
Trousers.
A coat.
Two shirts.
Underwear.
‘What colour underwear?’ he wants to know.
‘What kind of face?’ I want to know.
XVII
Leib Bekiermaszyn is bending low, pulled down by the weight of the potato and turnip peels which he balances on a large tray from the Kartoffelkeller, the Potato-Peelers’ cellar managed by Commander Schobert. He is in a room near the back entrance to the kitchen working on a twelve-hour shift whose beginning and end is signalled by the sound of a bell activated by a piece of string. Once the peels are piled in a high mound, they will be taken to the pigsty to plump the livestock for the benefit of SS officers. The potatoes will be given to the inmates as the basis for their daily rations.
This autumn day in 1940 began at 5.00 a.m. with a shrill whistle, warning that all inmates had exactly thirty minutes to wash, dress, straighten their beds and to consume a breakfast consisting of a morsel of bread and a mug of coffee. Leib then assembled in the parade ground for the morning roll-call, where the camp population was arranged in formations of eight. It was a familiar ritual for Leib, who by now had learned to respond to his number faster than to his own name. Similarly, Leib knew exactly how to manoeuvre through the chaotic scene spurred by the next command: ‘Work gangs fall in!’
The work detachments, or Kommandos as they were more familiarly called, were the central feature of camp life; the key to either life or death. On his first day at Buchenwald, Leib had been handed a slip of paper from the Labour Statistics Office informing him of his work detail. The possibilities were manifold: the worst Kommandos in the camp were those involving heavy manual labour, either digging quarries or ditches, building railway lines or sewerage systems, while the best units were generally considered to be located in the hospital, in the Personal Property Room, or working as a tailor or servant. Many of the prisoners were sent to work detachments outside the camp where industrial concerns vied with each other for the slave labour potential carried within the German concentration camp system.
Otherwise why keep the inmates alive? Buchenwald was the modern equivalent of the medieval dungeon, transformed to suit the needs of an industrial age. Leave the prisoners to rot in their dank barracks, feed them minimally, but ensure that the maximum hours are extracted, thereby adding to military might and efficiency. More than one tenth of all new arrivals at Buchenwald died, but they were replaced, swiftly and exponentially, to sustain the imperatives of war. Without the new transports, the camp-site would be a heap of bones. For it is not the fact of death that unleashes terror but its ever-present possibility: war profit is maximised if prisoners are made to endure torture, to eke out an existence measured by tin spoons of savourless broth, to live from one shift to the next, all under the gaze of the gallows and watch-tower.
Camp life also produced its own liturgy. The common creed, the ‘Buchenwald Song’, expressed a desire for freedom which would be fulfilled at the end of time. For Jews, there was a separate confessional prayer, recited at the behest of the Camp Commandant who was particularly keen to impress visiting SS members or tour groups conducted for the Hitler Youth:
For centuries we’ve cheated the people,
No swindle was for us too big or strong,
We have but tricked and lied and cheated
With either dollars or with German marks.
We crooked Jew noses are wailing,
For naught hate and dissension have been spread.
It’s over now the stealing, easy life and loafing,
It is too late, for ever it’s too late.
There was no redemption for Jews, reflected in their placement at the bottom of the colour-coded hierarchy. The Greens and Reds—non-Jewish criminals and politicals—vied for control of the camp, and were entrusted with positions of power on behalf of SS overseers: as Block Elders, Kapo agents, commanders of work detachments. Jews were only fit to die; they were exterminated, fed minimum rations and frequently assigned to the most hellish work battalions or exclusively summoned for night work. The yellow triangle was a sign of ageless sin leading to the ultimate sacrifice of death. Like the medieval ghetto, the concentration camp provided visible testimony of the Jews’ damnation:
For finally the German has unmasked us
And put us behind a barbed wire fence.
And what we swindlers were afraid so long of,
It has now come to pass just overnight.
Leib’s expiation begins in the Potato-Peelers’ Kommando where he offers his dues for one month. On 17 September 1940 the roll-call officer Strippel issues an order which rotates his unit with workers from the SS-Unterkunft, the SS housing and construction division. There Leib spends his days burdened by heavy loads of mud, stones or cement, building barracks for 6000 Waffen SS troops. It was the kind of work detail to which Jews were often attached before succumbing to illness, ended by a few days in the Krankenbau, the hospital bay where most prisoners never regained their health. Leib was one of thirty-five Jews in his unit, the others having been employed in the garage, the quarries or as gardeners, all in the service of the privileged class of the camp who resided in stylish luxury villas outside the barbed wire enclosure on the southern side of the Ettersburg mountain range. There, the lucky prisoners worked in the best Kommandos designed to attend to every whim of the SS officers, assisting in the preparation of evening parties where opulent dinners and fine liqueurs were served; creating interior decorations for their lodgings and assisting in workshops which produced sculptures, pottery, family photo-albums, and elegantly bound books; working in the hunting lodge built in an old Germanic style with a fireplace and lavish furniture, behind which there was a deer park, a zoo with monkeys, bears and a rhinoceros, a falconry and cages containing wild cats. ‘To Each His Due’ was the camp motto, and Leib was forced to help the SS receive the salvation which their rank and merit guaranteed them.
At night, when the work was done, he would pass by the gates, the watch-towers and electrified fences toward Block 29, in time for the final roll-call on the muddied square where the prisoners’ daily ode rang out on the Buchenwald air. The sweet promise of freedom lay beyond the forests, over the mountain ranges, somewhere in the distance.
XVIII
I remember whe
n the Action happened in Bołszowce, I would have been about five, six years old; the underground where we were hiding, how they took us out, where we were all accumulated in a valley near the church, and how my mother told me to run to the Judenrat. The shooting started, and we ran, to our neighbour, where we had built a hole in the wall unit, down into the ground. It was a dark little bedroom. A cupboard stood against the wall. We had food prepared there, blankets and cushions. And as soon as we went down, the Germans came and found the place. I remember exactly where it was, I can feel it, how it happened. ‘Genia,’ I still hear it, ‘Genia you’re not allowed, you’re not allowed to say anything.’ There was one man and he was running to our cupboard when the shooting started. He didn’t know how to get in, and something broke; yes, something broke so when the Germans came with torches they noticed the hole where we were hiding.
It was dark in there, it was stuffy, crowded, frightening; even today I’m still scared of darkness, I feel claustrophobic when I’m by myself. Nightfall is to me sadness and darkness and I just can’t disconnect my past, you know, I can’t forget these moments for as long as I live. I wasn’t alone down there, we were all there, my mother, my father, my brother and me. We must have … we were soon discovered as soon as they came … they broke into … I don’t know … maybe a few hours … and they were screaming, ‘Juden raus! Jews get out!’ There were a few of them and you could hear those boots, boots, boots, and suddenly my whole head was spinning and I could only hear those noises.
The Fiftieth Gate Page 8