From there he arrives at a section of wall from which a series of black cylinders protrude. Each is covered with a hinged circular door, one of which lies wide open, providing a tunnel into which my father thrusts his head.
‘Crematoria-a-a,’ his voice echoes, before he pulls his head out, realising his mistake.
‘Nah. Couldn’t be. Must’ve been where they cleaned the clothes. A boiler.’
It is a boiler, technically known as a disinfection autoclave, one of three instruments built into a wall with doors on either side. Once the action of the steam was completed, an operator on the clean side opened the door and removed the sterilised clothing—underclothes, shirts, prison uniforms, and blankets. He is still playing with the inert machinery as if he is stroking a Singer sewing-machine from his factory.
‘We were naked,’ he says matter-of-factly. The door swings on its hinge and bang, it locks. ‘But there were no women, only men.’
This is added as if to alert us to his modesty. Whenever he shaves before the bathroom mirror, or does his morning exercises, he always wears his underpants. In the bathroom he wraps the lower part of his body in a generous towel, and only occasionally can one catch him unawares, streaking across the house to give a final checkover to the alarm system or to fetch water for a pill prescribed for him by his doctor.
‘Bastards,’ he suddenly thunders. ‘See what they did to people? One man. One mamzer.’
My father very rarely swears, and his armoury of English expletives is limited to ‘bloody this’, or ‘bloody that’ although I once heard him say ‘fuckink’ when a neo-Nazi debated the existence of gas chambers on television. In anger, he mumbles indistinguishable sounds which he involuntarily emits. On the occasions when he battles my mother at home, he is no match against her mastery of curses which she can articulate in three different languages, of which Polish provides the most lethal refrain. ‘Cholera psia krew,’ she screams, which I at first thought was a Slavic version of super-cali-fragi-listic until I learned it was a kind of witch’s brew of cholera and dog’s blood.
‘Bastards,’ he repeats. ‘They took us into the shower-room. I thought we were finished.’
His eyes dart around the surrounding walls. He bends down as he moves back under the archway.
‘Here, you can still see the holes in the wall where the pipes came out.’
There were fifty shower-heads in the Birkenau Sauna room.
We came into the showers, I think there were at least thirty of them. And we thought gas. We saw the smoke before we came in across the field, we saw the chimneys on the roof of this block, and we think gas. Everybody thinks gas. People were crying, screaming. ‘Geshtorbn,’ they called out. Dead. We were naked, nusink. No hair. No clothes. Pushed in. And we heard a strange noise. Wshhh. Wshhh. We look up. Water. They were washing us. No gas, water. Wshhh. Wshhh.
His clothes are still wet from the rain, and a single drop falls from the peak of his hat to the floor. He does not notice the puddle he has left behind as he moves us back through the archways into another concrete room. Its back wall is lined with portrait-shaped windows which frame a series of views over barren land.
‘I told you. I told you,’ he says excitedly. ‘We couldn’t see where they put the people. We came in one way, and the people came out this way. We thought they were finished. But they were waiting here. I was one of the last to come.’
He looks out the windows. ‘That was the worst. Being the last. I suffered so much. I should’ve gone first.’
He explains how while they waited in this antechamber they were served some food (‘soup, I think it was’) and then gathered outside in a field where they were eventually marched to a distant barrack. The proceedings took almost the entire day, and it was night by the time they were left to sleep.
For my father, the tour has concluded. He is agitated and has begun to retrace his steps back through the jumble of rooms, into the showers, past the delousing instruments, and toward the room where he had been stripped of his clothes and hair. He steps out through the double doors.
‘The crematoria. You can’t see them now, but they were over there. We could smell it. We saw the smoke. Finished.’
I remember how many years ago I was sitting with him in a high-rise apartment in Surfers Paradise, a resort to which his circle of friends flocked every year. My father was seated on a couch, dressed in bathers with his feet curled under his bottom so that his belly looked more spherical than normal. We were discussing his experiences during the war, and I asked him how far the crematoria had been from where he stood when he arrived at Auschwitz.
He scrunched up his eyes and his hand was stroking his belly until five seconds later he came up with a response.
‘Oh,’ he said pointing through the window at the bustling shopping-mall, ‘about from here to Cavill Avenue.’
He was right. It was about from there to Cavill Avenue, a pleasant stroll. One hundred metres, to be precise.
It is raining heavily again when we move toward the car. We pile in, but not my father. He is pointing at something, a tall narrow box which lies at the edge of the field where his transport gathered before entering the shower-block.
‘Could be,’ he is mumbling. ‘Could be,’ and now he is running toward the barbed wire fence with its overhanging searchlights and electric currents. A sentry box stands at the boundary but his feet carry him toward an adjacent wooden box which looks so frail and decrepit it might choose this very moment to fall over on its side.
‘Phooy,’ we hear him say. He pokes his head through a tiny door which hangs loosely off the shabby cubicle. It is the same toilet from which he had witnessed his friends being led into the shower-block.
‘Shtinkt du, vey iz mir. Drek. The same shit.’
A minute later he emerges, mumbling ‘phooy, phooy’, over and over again, as he triumphantly kicks one leg sideways, and blindly leads his fingers to the zipper of his trousers.
XXIX
Our sages remember:
Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion was studying the Torah and holding a Scroll of the Law to his chest. Our enemies took hold of him, wrapped him in the Scroll, placed bundles of branches around him and set them on fire.
His disciples called out, ‘Rabbi, what do you see?’
He answered them, ‘The parchment is burning, but the letters are soaring high above me.’
My parents remember:
the fire
the parchment burning
the bodies buried
letters soaring high,
turned to ashen dust.
XXX
The librarian at the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem has warned me more than once. ‘Don’t make yourself feel at home.’
She is probably right. I am gathering volumes of boxed files as if they are bricks for constructing a grand house.
‘Only two at a time,’ she threatens me, ‘and no ordering after four o’clock.’
Yad Vashem is much more than a monument or an institution. It is a theme-park of memory, a landscape that expresses Israel’s troubled relationship with the Holocaust out of which the Jewish state emerged. Perched atop a mountain named after Israel’s founding father, Yad Vashem looks down upon the city of Jerusalem.
It is the third time I have lived in Jerusalem, a city where I feel strangely at home among a cast of Jews drawn together from every moment and place of Jewish history: the bearded and hatted Hasidim, the secular coffee-drinkers and soccer fans, the Moroccan youth on Ben-Yehuda mall, and the small colony of English-speaking migrants who have abandoned their privileged lifestyles in the United States, England and Australia to fulfil their pioneer dreams. I, too, feel compelled to return to this city, on a journey that bears toward my beginnings.
My parents prefer Tel Aviv, free of the mountains and stony walls that hem its inhabitants into history. There the coastal waters of the Mediterranean lean outward toward infinity, like the vast desert expanses of Central Australia. It is a city peopled by the
irreverent spirit of secular Israel, a mixture of the Levant and Europe, amongst whom can be found Israelis speaking Hebrew inflected in Yiddish accents: my parents’ folk, the survivors.
‘Better than Surfers Paradise,’ my father reports as he walks along the boardwalk leading toward Jaffa.
They have come to visit us in our Jerusalem suburb, where I have been living with my wife and children for the past year. There are landmarks all around me: in one direction the President’s House, a heavily fortified structure, and in another, I pass the Prime Minister’s residence. It is one week since its occupant has been assassinated by a gunman. The atmosphere in the streets is still eerily silent; people gather outside Rabin’s residence to light memorial candles, singing prayers of peace. I take my children there and teach them to light their first match. My youngest daughter is still too little to understand what she is witnessing. She thinks it is a birthday. My other children, aged six and eight, put the flame to the candle. My wife and I teach them to sing the ‘Song of Peace’, Rabin’s last words. It is their first act of public memory.
My parents say it is oppressive in Jerusalem: ‘sad’, my mother complains, ‘sad, like the stones’. I love these stones, I tell her, excavated from the limestone hills which elevate this ancient city. They look like the inside of a broken heart.
I often wonder if it is fair to break my children’s hearts and tell them about their grandparents’ lives. My father tells them that the tattoo on his arm is a telephone number, but they already know. ‘Why?’ they each ask in their own time, and I am never sure how to answer them. But I know they must be told. Only a broken heart yearns to heal the world.
‘You’re too serious about the Holocaust,’ my mother tells me.
‘Do you want me to laugh?’ I ask her.
It hurt when she comforted me. It was meant to be the other way: I was searching for her history in order to vindicate her stories. My father takes a different view of the matter. He will open each telephone conversation with the same question: ‘Nu, did you find anything about us?’ He laughs each time he asks, as if my probing of his past is a frivolous diversion.
‘Maybe Bołszowce doesn’t exist,’ my mother says.
I tell them of the latest discovery: the sole entry for her town in the Yad Vashem oral history archives.
‘Nu?’ my mother asks.
‘It doesn’t mention you,’ I answer.
It is written by a man who landed near Bołszowce after jumping from a train headed toward Bełżec.
He is not one of the dead.
He is not even a native of my mother’s birthplace.
He encountered the town’s Jewish Council, maybe even my grandfather. ‘A helpful Judenrat,’ I assuage my mother’s troubled conscience.
He did not see the Aktion my mother experienced, but he heard the screams and gun shots from his place of hiding:
The houses of the ghetto are not far apart from each other. I hear what is going on in the surrounding houses. Doors are pulled open hurriedly and slammed shut again quickly. I hear someone shouting:
‘Let me in.’
‘Open the window!’
‘Close the door!’
Shots again. Cries for help, crying, and sobbing. Doors are rammed in, window-panes are shattered. I don’t need long to know what that is.
‘Yes, yes, exactly how it was.’
I can’t go away to hide myself. I can’t even climb down the ladder. I can’t even pull it up. I’m lost.
I have enough strength to climb out from under the bedspread and to crawl into a corner. There I hide myself under a small pile of straw.
They come. One of them pulls the ladder up. Through the straw I can see him.
‘Come, come, come!’
That has the effect of magic. He must also have seen me. But I can’t get up, I don’t have the strength to do so, I remain lying down.
‘Come, come, come!’
I know from other Aktions that whoever can’t go to the gathering place is shot immediately. Why should I climb down the ladder then? I don’t have the energy to do so anyway. I prefer to stay lying down where I’ll be shot on the spot.
‘Come, come, come.’
‘They’re going to kill him,’ my mother says, forgetting for a moment that he survived to write his memoirs.
Why don’t I answer? Why don’t I obey the magic word? Perhaps just because of lack of strength.
He lifts up the bedspread:
‘The bed is still warm. The fellow must still be here.’
He stands on the uppermost rung of the ladder and beats the straw with the butt of his rifle. He doesn’t reach as far as the corner. He goes away.
Four or five times the SS man returns and rifles through the attic, and doesn’t find me. From the street, the cries of the Jews reach me and the shouts of the SS:
‘You’ve lazed about for long enough! Into the camp with you! To work!’
And shots.
In the evening I hear the trumpets: the raid has ended in the name of the Führer. Bołszowce has been declared judenrein, a town free of Jews.
‘What happened then?’ she asks.
‘You tell me.’
She says nothing, so I show her a list of the dead in Bołszowce.
‘So, am I on the list?’ my mother asks.
‘Not you and not your parents, but there are enough Jews to keep you lighting memorial candles for the rest of your life.’
Names and names and names, compiled and alphabetised like entries for a telephone directory.
Amongst them can be found three Krochmals who must have fled Bursztyn to seek shelter with Leo, by then an influential communal leader in Bołszowce.
‘So maybe you want to ring them now,’ she asks. ‘Will you start with the A’s?’
No, but I know I need to keep searching in the archives for a voice from amongst the dead. Someone who watched or heard them die. Someone, besides my mother, who can lead me to their homes so I can inhabit their place and time for just a single moment. Only then can I leave.
It is four o’clock now. The librarian has closed the archives for the day.
She is right; this is not a place to feel at home.
XXXI
The Ukrainians are marching past the market-square in Bołszowce and my father is swearing in Yiddish.
Not at them, but at me. ‘Get in the car,’ he hisses in my ear. He is waving his arms frantically, gesturing us to enter the vehicle so we can escape his approaching nightmare.
‘It was good enough to spend the day in your town,’ my mother retorts in frustration, ‘but in my town you want to run away before I’ve had time to look inside the Count’s house.’
He swears at us profusely, mustering every curse to entice us into the car. He grabs me by the arm. It is a violent gesture, propelled by desperation.
‘They’re coming,’ he screams. ‘Can’t you see they think we’ve returned to take back your house?’
‘What house?’ my mother answers angrily. ‘They can have the farshtinkene piece of land where my house once stood, they can have their town with all its chickens and greyness. Look what’s left of my beautiful shtetl!’
They are coming in formation, parading down the street toward us. At the head of the procession the priest, garbed in sacerdotal splendour, bears a large wooden cross which he waves in our direction.
My father is now seated in the car, still beckoning his family to join him. He is no longer a survivor; he has reverted to a different time-frame: perhaps that day when he was separated from his mother, and forced by Ukrainian police to march up the hill away from the town square.
We enter the car, fearful of further exciting him only six months after his heart operation.
For a moment, we can hear the funeral procession chanting Ukrainian hymns. The crowd brushes past our car till all that remains in sight is the tip of the cross guiding the entire town toward the local burial ground.
‘Another dead Bołszowcer,’ my mother m
utters, observing the spectacle from a safe distance.
My father again explodes at us: ‘They could have killed us; you don’t understand, you weren’t there. I want to go back to Warsaw now.’
His head is buried in his hands as my mother points, for the last time, at the church with its shattered windows and simply notes the valley ‘where the Jews were gathered like lambs’ as if she were a tour guide displaying a scenic landmark.
Twice during the war my mother had left this town, carried along the same route that we are now traversing.
I don’t remember how the transport happened—was it by trucks or … this, I really don’t remember.
Most of the town had already been transported to Bełżec. Her father managed to escape to a nearby village. Her mother and brother were in a railway-car on their way to a place of death. My mother was alone.
‘When was it?’ she asks, as our car speeds along the pot-holed road toward the adjacent town of Rohatyn. ‘How old was I? Five? Six? Seven?’
She pauses before sharing her thoughts with her family.
‘It doesn’t really matter. I was never a child. I had the instincts of a child, wanting things that I could never have. But I was talked to like an adult and I had to respond like one. When a little girl is transported alone to a strange place, without a mother and a father, what is she? An adult or a child? What does it matter what the year is.’
She is right, but for the record it was November 1942—the week of her eighth birthday.
I came to Rohatyn with my mother’s younger sister, Sheva, who had escaped from the train. We lived in a room with ten, maybe fifteen people. I remember how scared I was, but she looked after me, washed me, dressed me, and whatever she could buy on the black market she bought. We had a hiding-place, a false wall with a bed standing next to it, and a panel came out so we could hide inside a narrow passage. One thing I will never forget: soon after I arrived in Rohatyn there was an Aktion, and we survived by hiding in the secret wall. After it was over I went to see some family in the ghetto, distant cousins. I remember we walked into a room and their heads were chopped off and lying on the floor, and my cousin—she was a little girl like me who I played with—her head was on the floor.
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