The Fiftieth Gate

by Mark Raphael Baker

  He always arms himself with a broad knowledge of tomorrow’s weather forecast. ‘What should I wear today?’ he asks. ‘The girl said it will be cloudy, mainly sunshine, but I don’t know, it looks colder to me.’ He defies the predictions, and tucks his head into a heavy knitted sweater, which by day’s end he has removed. ‘Oy,’ he complains, ‘it’s so hot, I’m shvitzing. Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

  Perhaps he was just being defiant in remembering winter when it was autumn. And anyway, why should I expect a coherent narrative from him? No, time did not unfold for my father but leaped at him, like a jack-in-the-box: the next terrifying chapter. When was it? 1941, or was it ’42? Auschwitz. I remember it was day. No hot, it was night, no winter.

  It goes something like this, his life: Wierzbnik, a child. Stop. The war. Stop. No father. Stop. No mother, sisters. Camp. Starachowice. Stop. Auschwitz. Stop. Buchenwald. Stop. Start.

  What has time left behind?

  A man, sixty-something years old, born on 1 June 1929, he tells us.

  Dare I tell him his age? Who am I, his son, to measure time for him? The world, the Torah teaches, is five thousand and something years old. Not millions. Which is truth? God’s time, or history’s, the sacred or the profane?

  It’s only a matter of two lost years, left behind like a lost sock. My brother and I consider the thought: had he danced at his sixtieth birthday party, or was he really sixty-two? Is he closer to sixty, or to seventy?

  Two lost years, unlived but made possible at the moment of birth, recorded on a certificate registered by his father, and further witnessed by two friends:

  Leibush Bekiermaszyn, 27 years old (window-fitter),

  came forth on 8.06.27

  witnesses: Jonas Rozenberg, 56 years old

  Shloyme Morgenstern, 44 years old

  Declared that Josek had been born at 12 p.m.

  on 1 June 1927,

  Mother: Hinda, 26 years old.

  Perhaps a mistake, but no, even his schoolteacher lives by the same measurement of time; in 1938, he is a pupil, born in 1927, eleven years old.

  ‘Born in 1929,’ he tells the doctor at Auschwitz, who puts his youthful body in the line headed for life.

  ‘Born in 1926,’ he tells the guard at Buchenwald, who pulls him out of the Kinderblock, the children’s section of the camp.

  ‘Born in 1928,’ he tells the American military-officer, who hands him his release papers.

  ‘Born in 1929,’ he tells the International Refugee Organisation, which grants him a child’s visa to Switzerland.

  He laughs when we tell him his revised birthdate. ‘No more birthday cakes with candles,’ he announces, and we immediately regret our arrogance, the presumption that we could play with time.

  ‘Two alte kakes,’ my mother says of their ageing bodies. ‘Maybe I am older too.’

  ‘Think of it like daylight saving,’ I tell them. ‘Let’s pretend that you’re still two years younger.’

  Yet secretly I knew that he knew there was no escaping the onset of the wintry months: two years had vanished, and I feared that they might choose this belated moment to pursue him with a vengeance. One morning he would awaken to find that his hair, already turned grey but salvaged by youthful strands of black, would be utterly white; or worse, that a baffling disease had eaten into his bones.

  For I had already caught a glimpse of time doing its charmed dance around his body. The doctor had told him that without heart surgery his life was a gamble. It could happen to him in sleep, playing tennis, or dancing with my mother. His symptoms told their story quietly. His heart never warned him with cramps and hesitant pauses, but the doctor knew, and confirmed his suspicions with a battery of tests. On the day of the operation he refused to see his family, and the nurse later told us that he had spent the day weeping. Plumbing, he called the surgical procedure, but taps and shower-heads did not mind being refitted. I reminded him how he once said that as a child he could never cry.

  ‘That’s not the only thing that has changed,’ he responded.

  When he finally awoke he was not really awake, but appeared to us as a golem kept afloat by knotted wires and colour-coded tubes. We stood at his feet, like mourners at a funeral. Again he was labelled with a scrawled number, a precaution against the possibility of these moveable beds being exchanged around the ward; in case anyone crept in at night and shuffled the comatose patients like a deck of cards.

  We could only see the external signs of his suffering: the way he meditated on a piece of bread before forcing it into his mouth; the struggle to find a comfortable resting position against a mountain of pillows, which he would remove one at a time, and then pile up again, as if it was some purposeless task to which he had been condemned. He might have died, I panicked on the sixth day, as I watched his wounded chest rise up and down. ‘Tuy, tuy,’ my mother would say if she could read my thoughts, but even if medicinal spells and any other home-brewed amulets might ward away the fact of death, it cannot evict the thoughts that settle in a frightened mind. What was it I feared most: the loss of his childlike smile? The comfort that even an adult child feels in the presence of a father? Him, just him? Or the obliteration of his memory?

  He remembers, therefore I am.

  That’s how it was turning out. After he convalesced at home, I asked him if he would record his story.

  What, you can see me through there? Hear me too? If I pick my nose will the video know?

  It still hurt him when he laughed, but not as much as it hurt when he spoke about his own parents. I knew I was opening another wound in him, before the other had time to heal, but I was gripped by a sense of his inexorable mortality.

  ‘Soon the Wierzbnikers will all be gone,’ he interrupted his own story to tell me.

  He repeated the same words some months later, at a ceremony in Israel in memory of a recently deceased fellow from his town. My father cast his eyes over the Hebrew lettering engraved on the tombstone: the name of the person, his place and date of birth.

  ‘Who was he?’ my father whispered to me during the recitation of prayers.

  It didn’t matter who he was; my father had come because he had been a Wierzbniker—another dead Wierzbniker—mourned by survivors of the same town who were huddling around the grave.

  ‘Tell them who I am,’ he said to me. ‘Do you think they remember me?’

  Only one remembered.

  It didn’t matter. If they couldn’t remember him, they remembered his stories—the ones about his cheder teacher, about the Aktion, about the food in the labour camp.

  And his father they remembered.

  ‘Ahhh, Leibele.’

  ‘You’re Leibush’s son?’

  ‘We didn’t call him Bekiermaszyn. He was Leibush Wożniak. That was his nickname—Leibush the Teamster.’

  ‘I remember when he died, how the whole town came to his funeral.’

  And then they remembered my father through his grandmother: ‘Buba Laya?’

  ‘He’s Buba Laya’s einikl, her grandson?’

  ‘Every day we’d go into her corner shop on the way to school and buy ice cream.’

  ‘But you were so young. You must have been a little boy.’

  Standing in the cemetery around the dead man’s grave he was a little boy: the boy from Wierzbnik, the grandson, not yet barmitzvahed, a lifetime removed from the heart surgeon’s knife and the fears of creeping baldness.

  And I was his memory.

  ‘Tell them,’ he’d nudge me. ‘Tell them about Wierzbnik. Tell them what happened.’

  Instead, I asked them to tell me their stories, while privately I mourned the things I had stolen from my father—first, two years of his life, and now his memory.

  You sure you can see me? I told you already the story about the boot.

  XXIII

  In a German report published in 1943 about the situation in the area of conquered Poland known as the General-Government, it is written on page xxxiv, in the section entitled, ‘Man an
d Economy’:

  The General-Government possesses an area of approximately 142,000 square kilometres, that is 37% of the area of the present Polish state, with approximately 18 million inhabitants of which 72% are Poles, 17% are Ukrainians and 0.7% are Germans.

  Where have the millions of Jews gone?

  XXIV

  ‘Hallo.’

  I could tell she was still asleep. In Jerusalem it had just turned midnight, making it 9.00 a.m. in Australia. I knew I would awaken her. Every morning at 7.30 a.m., without the discourteous services of an alarm clock, her husband would roll out of the left side of bed, tip-toe into the bathroom, shake his hands in the air for precisely thirty seconds and touch the tips of his toes five times with his knees bent at a forty-five degree angle, all the while breathing in and out at a quickening rate, shower, lather his face in shaving cream, and then dress, the entire procedure executed in silence. This way, my mother’s sleep could continue undisturbed, except for a momentary interruption between showering and shaving produced by my father’s compulsive need to clear the accumulated contents of his nose. ‘Trompeiter,’ my mother would call out from her sleep, but there was nothing she could do to silence his shnozzle.

  ‘Mum, can you hear me?’

  Silence, broken by the faint sound of a groan transported by electronic impulse.

  ‘Mum, I found something at last. Do you remember you told me you were the only child to survive Bołszowce? Well, it’s true. I mean, I believed you, but it’s really true.’

  For months I had been searching for a sign of her former existence in Bołszowce. Not that either of us needed confirmation. For my part, I did not doubt for a moment that she had once lived in this town, nor that she had experienced the events relayed in bits and pieces over the years. It was not the facts that were held under suspicion, but her credibility as a survivor. Unlike my father, she could never show her children the scars on her arm; hers were invisible, numbered in the days and years of her stolen childhood. ‘I don’t understand,’ I once told her when she responded to my casual greeting ‘Are you well?’ that no, she was depressed, unhappy, unwell. ‘I don’t understand,’ I repeated in frustration, which I truly didn’t. I could not hear beyond her kvetch, the one which emanated from her home in her room in her bed. What did she survive, when her suffering appeared to be rooted in the present, not yesterday, but today? Was she ever in a concentration camp or in a death camp? There was no label for her torment, no institution to which she could pin her identity, saying, ‘See, I am a survivor, too.’ No one I had ever met or heard of shared memories of the places which she had once inhabited; Bursztyn, Bołszowce, Rohatyn. These were an unconnected trio waiting for a story to connect them. The faraway Ukraine. Galicia. They were not like my father’s sites of memory, which rolled off my tongue as smoothly as the first words I absorbed as a child.

  Auschwitz.

  Treblinka.

  Buchenwald.

  My father never told me about these places, until I began to ask after I already knew. They were just there in the air, breathed in from birth as a palpable presence. Tiny clues led me to my intimacy with these words, a vocabulary I would hug against my body like a fuzzy toy one takes to bed. Ow-switch. Oshwish. Aaaarshvitz. And later were added: Arse-witch, Oświęcim, sounds which would lull me to sleep as I counted the syllables jumping into the fence.

  And beyond the words and images, an absence, which connected my father’s story to my mother’s without giving either an appellation. I had a name for this feeling of emptiness: Andy Pandy, after my favourite teddy bear hero. It gnawed away at my stomach, creating a cave which I did not understand but felt, burrowing deeper and deeper, evoked by certain things like my father asleep in front of the evening news; or my mother lying against her pillow, a white telephone pressed against her hair net, hissing animated sounds in Polish, her secret language; the wax from the twenty-four hour death candles spread out on the kitchen bench; my great-aunt’s gefilte fish and tiger-skinned dressing gown; and most of all, the sharp pain in my stomach which made me matron’s most regular school visitor, and which would never go away unless I rolled over in bed on my side, knees pressed against my chin.

  Of my mother’s world I knew next to nothing. There were no words I could sound out, only tiny fragments hurled at my brother and me: ‘You don’t know how much I suffered,’ she would warn us if we resisted her disciplinary measures. Or at school, before a test, during an assignment when she would sleep on the floor in our room watching us work: ‘I never had the chance,’ she lamented once or twice during the night, and then she would wrap the blanket over her head and from beneath we could hear her whisper, ‘If only I could have studied, imagine what I would be.’ She would feed us with spoons which she flew into our mouths accompanied by a whizzing aeroplane noise and a story she never finished about a German boy called Struwwel Peter, adding all the way along: ‘When I was your age,’ and then we would capture part of her story in a sigh, in an elegiac ‘yes, yes’, in a silence we thought we understood but could never flesh out.

  She begins to show signs of life.

  ‘Nu, so what did you find?’

  She wanted to hear, just as she had wanted to tell, despite the pretence that she had no time, that there was shopping to be done, cooking to be completed, the garden to be hosed and a friend waiting on the other telephone-line. I did not allow the times when she shooed me away to deter me from persisting. ‘Not now,’ always meant come back after I’ve had more coffee and cigarettes, which I did, and then she was always prepared to talk, to speak to the camera for hours at length, until my father came home from work and poked his head around the door, saying:

  ‘Vot? You still talking? Is she good like me?’

  She was good like him. Even better? How can one measure these things, I told myself, but my mother always knew how to tell a story. This time, her story. She was much younger, only six years old at the time, not like him, she kept reminding me. ‘What do you think?’ she complained when I harangued her for details. ‘Do you think your little children will remember where they used to live before they were five?’

  She did, and each detail was embellished by the use of her hands which she waved about, forming different shapes that you could almost pick out of the air: how she pumped the water from her well, how she crouched in the cupboard when the ghetto was surrounded, how her mother squeezed lice from her hair after she was liberated in the forests. Sometimes she would sing a song, or recite a poem, in German, in Polish, in Yiddish, in Hebrew, and although I never applauded her performance out loud she knew that tomorrow I would come back for more.

  Perhaps she sensed that she alone held the key to those stories. My father’s fate was not possessed of the same urgency as hers. His was a past written on a page of history shared by other survivors. My mother could not point to anyone, except those she had befriended in the years spent in Germany after the war. ‘He was in Auschwitz with me,’ my father often told me, ‘in the same barracks’; or, ‘He’s one of the Buchenwald boys.’ He told his stories in a matter-of-fact tone, with good humour but never with an enlarged sense of his own role as the chief protagonist of the events he was relating. Perhaps he had just heard his story too often, either from himself, or from his friends, on commemoration evenings or over a game of Red Aces, or on television dramas which he would eagerly watch, covering his eyes with one hand at the parts when the Jews were led to the gas chambers. He would observe these made-up characters in Auschwitz or in their ghettos eating soup from a tin bowl worn with a chain around the neck, or hiding in the sewers and communicating in John Wayne accents, as if they, and not his own life, endowed his past with authenticity.

  ‘Where is your Memorial Book?’ I asked her from Jerusalem.

  I had just finished reading my father’s Yizkor book, named from the biblical word for remembrance. It is bound in red casing, 532 pages in all, containing stories and testimonies from survivors of his town, from friends scattered across all parts of
the globe, in Tel Aviv, Montreal, Buenos Aires, New York, Melbourne, everywhere, but not in Poland; not in Starachowice–Wierzbnik.

  But who will remember for my mother? There are 896 Memorial Books in the Yad Vashem library. There are thick books for the ‘Jewish mother cities’ of Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Lwów, Vilna; tomes for the centres of Torah in Bełz and Ponevizh, albums for the hundreds of hamlets and towns in the Ukraine, in Belorussia and in Lithuania. There are even collections on the entire region of Galicia, but none of them recognise my mother’s town as a place which was also transformed into a city of slaughter—a space where the memories which dance in her head once took place on the foot of the hill leading down from the monastery which faces the town square a few steps away from her own house. Here and there, a single paragraph (‘an Aktion took place in October 1942’; ‘Bołszowce was a town near Rohatyn with 1800 Jews’), mere snippets, hardly amounting to a dignified remembrance.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ she repeated into the phone, ‘I was the only young survivor from Bołszowce. I and my parents, and maybe one or two others who hid in the forests with us. So who is going to write such a book? Who is going to read it?’

  I knew what she meant, and what I had discovered in the archives pointed the finger even more sharply at her fate. It was not only the quest for a scribe and a reader, but for an audience of believers. Who is going to believe her story?

  I hesitate before telling her, pausing at the madness of my phone call and the motives which led to it. Am I usurping her memory, I, a mere rummager in paper chambers? ‘Luftmenshn,’ she likes to characterise those in my profession, idlers living off air. Perhaps she is right. What are these papers anyway except echoes of the past, dark shadows without screams, without smells, without fear. Why do I crave the contents of this single lone sentence I discovered on a reel of microfilm, when all it says is what she has repeated throughout her life? Why believe the Soviet apparatchik more than my mother? It’s his word and her word; it does not add a single jot to the stories she told us while washing dishes, or lying in hospital with an ailment which angered me. Does history remember more than memory? Why am I calling her? Won’t she recognise the shameful truth, that I doubted her, that I never believed her, that I only recognise suffering in numbers and lists and not in the laments and pleas of a human being, of a mother, screaming for acknowledgment?