It is 16 June 1944.
A vast platform appears before the deported, lit up by reflectors. They are ordered to climb down with any personal belongings which are to be deposited alongside the train. The platform is swarming with shadows but no one dares break the silence. Then the selection begins: a dozen SS men stand around with an indifferent air, pointing in two directions.
‘Left, right, left, right.’
Two brothers pass before a sea of hands. A single finger waves Yossl and Baruch to the right. They join a group assembled near the railway platform from where they are prodded by whips along a path. Two days later, and four years since he was seized from his home, the father is embracing his two sons: a reunion of the three male members of the Bekiermaszyn family in Auschwitz III.
When I was transported from Auschwitz to Buchenwald I was on the same transport as this Kogut. For him it was a return trip. He had been in Buchenwald before, for two years, and helped us again because he understood the rules. He knew people there, from before, and he helped me get into a better block. They wanted to put me in the Kinderblock, for children, but he told me to lie about my age. So I went with him, to Block 52, and again, he saved me. I don’t know anything what happened to him after. We were together in the same room in Buchenwald. In Buna–Monowitz too. Like a father. Maybe he’s still alive? Could be, you know. Could be. Sometimes I think that if my own father would have survived with Kogut, then I would have been united with him in Auschwitz. We would have even shared the same barracks in Buchenwald.
Can you imagine that? Imagine what could have been?
Imagine: the same story, different endings.
For every alternative there is an alternative to the alternative.
It is 16 June 1944.
A vast platform appears before the deported, lit up by reflectors. They are ordered to climb down with any personal belongings which are to be deposited alongside the train. The platform is swarming with shadows but no one dares break the silence. Then the selection begins: a dozen SS men stand around with an indifferent air, pointing in two directions.
‘Left, right, left, right.’
‘Please,’ one man begs, ‘I was a builder in my town.’ He is waved to the right—condemned to live.
Two brothers pass before a sea of hands. A single finger waves Yossl and Baruch to the left. They join a group assembled near the railway platform, the children huddling together.
Leib Bekiermaszyn lies awake in the darkness of his wooden bunk in Auschwitz III; imagining what might have been while whispering the mourner’s prayer for his children.
Maybe he’s still alive. Could be, you know. Could be. Anything can happen. After the war I met people I thought were dead. Have you ever heard such a thing?
XXXIV
‘Ohhh my papa, to me he was so wonderful …’
My mother does not always sing when she is washing the dishes, but on the occasions that she does they are most often melancholy melodies.
At first, as a child, I could not distinguish between the languages in which her tunes were intoned, but I learned to differentiate the sounds from the rhythms and tempo of the songs. I had the least difficulty recognising the English pieces. These swinging numbers and rock’n’roll bebops transformed the dish-washing routine into an exhilarating performance, perhaps because they were borrowed from a phase of her life when her beauty flowered on the dance-floors of Melbourne’s immigrant clubs. Without warning, the ecstasy would be banished by expressionistic songs of desire, sung in poetic Russian lyrics whose tunes conjured images of unrequited love ended by dramatic suicide pacts, or in Polish hisses which added war and bloodshed to the burning romance. Sometimes the songs were a potpourri of languages, like Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera Sera’, or the Andrews Sisters’ version of ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Sheyn’. Most of all, I was touched by the Yiddish melodies, lullabies whose narrative I captured in fragments of recognition, through words which spoke of mother’s tears and father’s departure, of babies sleeping and Temples burning, of birds in trees while down below the shtetl is being razed to the ground. My mother’s hand would caress the dishes while she hummed these laments, and her eyes would gaze blankly through the kitchen window in which she was reflected.
But today, while she washes the red lipstick from the edge of a stained coffee cup, she is chanting a new melody snatched from a forgotten moment of her life.
Ohhh my papa, to me he was so wonderful,
Ohhh my papa, to me he was so good,
Gone are the days, when he would take me on his knee …
Minutes before, she had bared her pain before me.
There are certain things that hurt me very much and I can’t talk about it. It’s enough to say that he wasn’t nice to me; he mistreated … he didn’t … he never cared about me … never cared. And in later years when he came here and was more dependent on me, he became different and probably mellowed with age, but otherwise I don’t even want to talk about it.
Should I?
The strongest protest against truth comes from the pleas of an elderly relative in Israel:
‘This book will be for dor dorot, for generations to come. My children will read it, my grandchildren will read it. Please, I beg you, be careful what you say. It’s forever. It’s our family. I don’t want you to write about what happened with your grandfather. He was my nephew. Please. What will they say?’
Miriam, or Mitsi as she is known to those who remember her from her Polish days, is one of my last remaining links with the world of my mother’s family. Ever since she migrated to Israel (Palestine then) in 1935, she has lived in the same neighbourhood of Haifa with her husband Chaim, a veteran of the 1948 War of Independence. A picture of a youthful soldier hangs from a wall in the corner of her compact apartment. In another corner of the room stand two framed photographs.
‘This is your great-grandfather, Shimon Krochmal,’ Mitsi reveals. ‘He was your grandfather Leo’s father.’
I have never seen a photograph of my great-grandfather Shimon but the resemblance to his son is striking. It is apparent from his sharply focused eyes, which I imagine to be blue, and from his thick prominent lips.
‘Shimon the egg-seller,’ she reminds me, the man who died prematurely of cancer (‘what did doctors know then?’) and whose death bed was the site for my grandparents’ wedding canopy, hastily performed in his presence.
‘I was younger than your grandfather,’ Mitsi explains, ‘but he was my step-nephew.’
This was one branch I had not found on my mother’s family tree.
She elaborates: ‘Shimon and I had the same father. We were born from different mothers though, which makes Shimon my half-brother. Shimon was much older than me, and by the time I was born he was already married with children.’
How many other branches had I neglected in my research? Dor dorot, she was telling me, for generations to come; but what of the generations before which appeared as a thick forest of branches in whose leaves might be hidden more Krochmals or Bekiermaszyns, the old and the young ones, men and women, grandparents to grandchildren, aunties and uncles to nieces and nephews, mothers and fathers to children who beget their own children, each with a story which gives birth to a new story whose beginnings and ends I had erased forever?
‘Your grandmother Raisl,’ Mitsi’s story begins, ‘was my best friend.’
I had never heard my grandmother described as a friend, only as a mother. On certain points, the stories overlap with those I have heard from my mother: how she loved to dress, draped in the finest cloth from the big town of Stanisławów; or how she was a devoted mother and baleboste—a housewife who enjoyed cooking and fussing over her children, Genia and Mattis. Of her dancing skills, however, I’ve heard nothing, and as Mitsi describes Raisl waltzing with her husband Leo, I visualise my own mother whirling to rock’n’roll melodies at a barmitzvah or wedding. There was more; while she was not as intelligent as her husband Leo, she loved to talk, to tell stories, to enjoy life, to
walk in the Ukrainian forests; and she was an astute business woman.
‘After the war …’
After the war, I think, only months before her tragic death. Stories about how she travelled to Berlin following her husband, how she sold contraband goods to Soviet soldiers in Stanisławów—gold watches, sugar, flour, anything; how she secured a life for her surviving daughter.
‘She did all this alone,’ says Mitsi.
‘Did they love each other?’ I ask.
A lot of things hurt me as a child, like not caring for me, like neglecting me, and I was hurt enough as it was. When we were living underground he was still nice to me; it was after—when I was on my own, but I don’t want to talk about it. Look, he’s dead … it’s forgotten … but I never, never … it was his loss because I never loved him. Later, as he got older, he expected me to love him. I tried my utmost to be nice to him but I never had this really deep feeling for him. I did it more as a responsibility and not a love, and it’s a big difference between responsibility and love. I love my mother deeply till today. After she died, I was beaten in every way, emotionally, physically, and I was a very, very poor child and I had the poorest childhood I can imagine a child to have. Not only during the war but after liberation. But, as you know me by now, because I’m sure that children study their parents as much as their parents want to teach them, you know by now that I have a strong willpower, a determination, a drive and that’s why I would call myself a real survivor; in every way I was a survivor. But now he’s dead, and may he rest in peace. I … I can’t even talk about it.
‘Of course they loved each other,’ Mitsi answers unhesitatingly. ‘I remember him as a caring husband, a loving father. Handsome, too.’
‘But there’s one more story,’ I probe.
‘There are so many stories.’
Her teeth glare beneath an involuntary smile.
‘Al tagid klum. Don’t say. I beg you. It’s forever what you write. He was such an intelligent man. The most handsome. They loved each other. Dor dorot, for generations.’
‘But it was different then. I’m not judging. It was a war. A matter of survival.’
‘Please,’ she begs.
Isn’t the baby part of our family tree too? Should I also bury her amongst the forgotten branches of our past?
There were two babies.
After the war my grandmother had sown the seeds for a future life. It was as if she had resolved to turn her back against her past, to answer murder with life, to respond to cremation with creation; to avenge the death of Mattis.
It was as if she knew that her own days were numbered.
Sylvia was born on 3 March 1946 in Stanisławów. She is my mother’s younger sister, born as a phoenix on the ashes.
I had never heard of the other baby before the first hints: the visits to the peasant woman in Stanisławów after the war. And two throw-away comments: the first, about how she had risked her life by sheltering Jews because she must have loved him. The second, about how Raisl suffered when she saw where it all led.
‘Do you think she looks like Sylvia?’ I once asked my mother, who was reluctant to listen to my inquiries into the matter.
‘It was the war,’ she cut me off. ‘We were the only survivors in the whole town. Maybe that was the price he had to pay to keep his family alive.’
‘Maybe they swapped us,’ Sylvia once confided her fears to me, laughing at the same time. ‘Maybe I am the Polish baby and she is me.’
It must have been toward the end of the war, because I remember the baby was a year or two older than Sylvia. They went to Stanisławów after the village burned and I used to go there and play. I remember my mother and father talking. No, there were no other men at the farm; it was only my father. What does it matter now? Everyone wanted to save their lives and people did many unusual things that today would not be accepted. As I said before, people were so obligated to certain people that after the war they even married them. Many. We gave them some flour, whatever we had we gave them. Later, we lost touch. They never wrote to us. I wish I would know … I mean, by now they are probably dead. The name of the village? I can’t remember, I was so young at the time. Yes, blue eyes, blonde, and the face, very much like Sylvia was as a baby.
‘Stay for cake,’ Mitsi is saying. ‘Have you ever watched “Neighbours”? It’s from Australia. They’re going to divorce today. Such stories, like you would never believe. Like in Bołszowce. Just like Bołszowce. But don’t say. It’s forever what you write. Generations to come. Come, I’ll bring you some cake and let me turn on the television for you.’
And with a smile, he changed my tears to laughter,
Ohhh my papa, to me he was nisht so wonderful …
XXXV
This is what my mother’s rescuers remember today:
‘She was so scared and timid; a small Jewish girl, with dark hair and large black eyes.’
‘We wanted to adopt her; I was always hoping that after the war she could be my daughter.’
‘Sometimes in the cellar, under the floorboards; usually on a bench we built for her next to the oven; other times in an attic where her father slept; and not often, but I think in the barn.’
‘Once the Ukrainians came into our house, and we quickly threw a blanket over her and hid her in the space behind the oven.’
‘And under the bed; she would crawl there on her own, always thinking someone was going to find her. So scared she was, all the time, but no one knew she was hiding with us.’
‘People used to say I loved him because I brought him food; but of course it wasn’t true.’
‘Yes, sometimes we fed her pierogi with cheese or cabbage or mushrooms.’
Elżbieta is offering me the same dish, more than fifty years after she had made these dumplings for my mother; soft and doughy, filled with sweet cheese and bitter memories.
For her, it is the search for a child whose fate for more than half a century was kept hidden from her.
‘I always prayed that she would live. If only you could bring her to me, we could pray together now.’
As she tells me this she looks down at an old photograph I have passed into her time-worn hands, nodding her head as she hugs the image of my youthful mother to her chest and mutters: ‘My heart, my heart, this is my heart.’
For me, it is a search that had begun one year earlier. No, not a search, an obsession, a raid on my mother’s memory, a son’s theft of her past.
‘Enough already,’ my mother shouts, ‘you don’t think it still hurts to be reminded of those days? I’ve told you everything, the same story for the thousandth time.’
Everything but the name of the village.
I knew it was a house on a hill, separate from, but nonetheless connected to, the village which was situated near her town. I imagined it as a magical hut inhabited by kind witches and talking farm animals who shared secrets of charmed passageways leading to forests blanketed in dew. I measured the dimensions by pacing the distances on my living-room floor. The front door opened on to a corridor, and on each side hung two doors …
‘Wooden doors?’ I press my mother.
‘Of course, everything then was made of wood, not like today.’
The corner of one room was dominated by an oven, whose heat provided warmth and cooking facilities for the peasant family. There was a bed and two windows: one which overlooked the hills leading down to the village, and the other which looked on to a cherry tree whose fruits were picked by women dressed in black, protected from icy winds by shawls and head-scarves. The cellar could be entered from the corner of the room …
‘Which corner? Next to the oven or on the other side?’
‘How should I know, I was so little then? But it was when you came in the door, there in the corner, under the floorboards. So little, such a square hole that we had to squeeze through to go inside. And on top was an attic, maybe a ladder.’
Of the village itself, I was armed with only three clues: it was somewhere
in the vicinity of Bołszowce; it was inhabited totally by Poles in a region primarily populated by Ukrainians, and toward the end of the war it was scorched by the Banderowce, the Ukrainian nationalist militia.
And of course, there was the unspoken clue, the secret of a child whose birth nurtured my obsession with the trivial details of this inaccessible phase of my mother’s history. I never imagined this peasant child as an adult; it was always the tiny baby with blue eyes, peering out from its tight swaddle into the burning fires which consumed the wooden shelter shared by my mother, her half-sister. Everything about the baby’s identity was divided into halves—she was half-Catholic, half-Jewish; half-peasant, half-gentry; half-spared, half-condemned.
‘You don’t remember how far it was from Rohatyn when you escaped? Did you go east, west, north, south? Did you pass through any towns on the way? You must remember something, how else will we find them?’
‘How else will you find them! Enough already, you’re driving me cuckoo with the questions; enough!’
So when I exhausted memory I turned to history.
I compiled lists of villages, visited on faded maps lettered in Cyrillic, tiny dots choking towns in the Stanisławów and Tarnopol districts.
Then came the expensive phone calls from Jerusalem to Melbourne, resembling a kabbalistic incantation:
‘Demeszkowce. Konkolniki. Niemszyn. Hanowce. Słobódka. Popławniki. Byszów. Jabłonów.’
‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.’
Until the next week when I breathed another mantra into the telephone receiver:
‘Szeroka. Ruzdwiany. Ludwikówka. Wyniówka. Kuropatniki. Demianów. Jezierzany. Korostowiec.’
‘No, no, no, no, no. Maybe, but no, no, no.’
So I sought to shorten the lists, acting on the clues provided by my mother, discarding villages whose records attested to a Ukrainian presence, however negligible, or whose wooden structures were left untouched by the fires of the local militia.
The Fiftieth Gate Page 15