‘Keszczówka. Firlejów. Podwinie. Putiatyńce. Załuże. Kutce. Wierzbołowce. Załipie.’
‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.’
Then memory visited her as a stranger from another world.
‘I remember your grandfather,’ the old man revealed to my mother in synagogue on the Day of Atonement—the anniversary of her town’s Aktion, half a century later. ‘After the war we exchanged stories, and found that we had both hidden in the same village. He told me he was sheltered in P. with his daughter.’
P. did not even appear on my scrawled lists.
I found it as a dot on a German map of Poland’s eastern territories, on the road connecting Bursztyn with Podhajce, only twenty kilometres from my mother’s town, Bołszowce. It is not listed on contemporary maps of the Ukraine, its fate eradicated in August 1944 by the country’s war heroes whose actions are recalled by survivors of the region:
Suddenly the shocking scream of a woman could be heard: ‘Ukrainians! Ukrainians!’
A few houses beyond us were already burning. The shouts of the woman fell silent. Evening fell. Screams, cries and laments could be heard. Then it really began. Someone must have noticed my husband. They battered him to death in the gutter. They didn’t notice the child, who sat beside his murdered father until the morning. The mother and her child were attacked by a friend with whom she had attended the same village school. He hit her on the head with a rod. As she fell, she covered her child. She saw that her attacker wanted to prod her in the stomach with a bayonet. Instinctively, she rolled on to her stomach and was hit on the buttock, arms and back. She lost consciousness. The cool morning woke her. Pain and blood everywhere. She took the child and walked toward her house. It was empty. Her instinct told her to hide. The bodies of those who had been murdered were being transported along the road, to be buried in a common grave.
So too does my mother recall the shots, the hiding, the moaning, the terror.
We ran and ran when the village burned. I couldn’t walk, I was a child, I couldn’t walk so far. I remember my father not having any boots, not having shoes. He wrapped his feet in rags, and slipped his trousers into them, carrying me all the way, on his back, and I was thirsty. I said to him, ‘I’m thirsty,’ and I remember passing a place with cows standing in a puddle of their own pish, and I asked: ‘Daddy, will you give me this to drink? I’m hungry. I’m thirsty.’ And he tried really hard for me. He carried me most of the way. We were barefoot. His feet were bundled in rags, tied up with string like a bandage, and he carried me from our shelter on top of the hill through the forests while behind us the village was burning.
I returned to Poland—this time on my own—to seek out survivors of this village, formerly numbering 102 Polish houses and a single Russian residence; in addition to a sole house on a hill hidden in a thick forest of fruit trees only four kilometres from the village centre.
I found Elżbieta and her two sons in a village near Szczecin. They arrived there after the war when the eastern provinces were sovietised, sharing the fate of millions of Polish families transported on cattle-trucks to Western Poland. The village road is dominated by a Gothic-style church whose approach is lined with oak trees.
Elżbieta immediately reminds me of my great-aunt, my mother’s Ciociu, who informally adopted the motherless child in Berlin before taking her to Australia. Or perhaps it is the familiar smells from childhood Passover feasts at Ciociu’s apartment in the beach suburb of Elwood; the odour of unaired rooms mixed with steaming pots of chicken soup and boiled fish cutlets. Like my own Ciociu, this peasant woman instinctively embraces me as if I were her great-nephew.
As if; everything here is ‘as if’.
As if it were still then, as if nothing had changed, as if the uncertainties and ambiguities did not challenge my convictions.
These are the certainties:
Elżbieta lived in a house on the hills overlooking the village of P. where for a lengthy period she sheltered a Jewish child. The wooden house was divided into two main rooms by a corridor, each of which was lit by two windows and heated by an oven.
‘The little girl used to look through the windows at the cherry trees, but at the sound of a visitor she would jump under a bed and hide for hours.’
The little girl had no name, but Elżbieta clearly recalls the Żydówka affectionately calling her Ciociu—the Polish word for aunt.
‘ “Ciociu, Ciociu,” she would say, “are they going to come and take me? Will they kill me if they find me?” She was always so frightened.’
Here her older son interrupts to add more detail to the story.
‘We used to play all sorts of games, and I would bring her cherries from outside. I taught her to pray so that if she was caught people would think she was a Catholic. She learned it with ease, she was quick and extremely clever. I can still hear her reciting it.’
Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie,
Swieć się Imię Twoje
Przydź Królestwo Twoje
Bądz Wola Twoja
‘And her father?’ I ask.
‘There was a man,’ Elżbieta answers. ‘We hid him in the attic, and in the daytime he would go to the bunkers in the forest because it was too dangerous to keep him at home. The little girl stayed with us, she became part of our family. She was brought to us by a woman; maybe it was her mother.’
My mother had not told me the story in this way. She was in the cellar, with her father, not in the forest, and later with her mother in the barn. Doesn’t Elżbieta remember?
‘The little girl lived with us on a wooden bench we built for her in the space behind the oven.’
‘Yes, we had a cellar in the room.’
‘No. Well, sometimes she went down there but I can’t remember if she ever slept below with her father.’
‘A barn? Yes, we had stables outside, but I don’t know if they ever hid there. Maybe, it’s so long ago, I don’t know, she was living with us like a daughter.’
It was so long ago but she could remember precisely how many kilometres separated her from the villages and towns which radiated outward from her centre in P.; how she would visit the Bołszowce market-place and purchase food from Jewish traders; and how she would produce butter in a wooden barrel by churning creamed milk with a rod.
I recognise this process from my mother’s descriptions of the way her protectors prepared buttermilk. She always told it while licking her lips as if she were still the same hungry child grabbing the leftover droplets from the barrel she labelled masielniczka.
‘Masielniczka,’ Elżbieta confirms.
But they do not remember the blackness.
They recall a little girl staring endlessly out of a window.
My mother recalls a little girl hiding in a dark cellar.
‘It’s the wrong people,’ my mother tells me afterwards when I reveal I have secretly returned to Poland. ‘It can’t be them. There was a mother, a husband and a son, but I hid in the other room with a widow, her mother and her daughter. I remember like today: she had black whiskers, like a moustache, short hair, and she was the one, you know, the one who, my father and her …’
I know some of these details, and ask Elżbieta about the configuration of families in the two rooms. In one room, I am told, she lived with her husband and son, the same man sitting alongside us on an old couch who periodically interrupts our conversation to elaborate on it.
‘My godmother had a little moustache,’ he smiles.
His godmother is one of the many characters who walk in and out of Elżbieta’s story. There is the godmother’s daughter, and her husband’s sister, and an old lady who frequently visited the house from the village, and a cousin who played with the Jewish girl until she gave her friend away to the Ukrainian militia.
About this the older son sadly nods his head and comments: ‘Some people have this kind of heart, other people have that kind of heart.’
Elżbieta’s heart is clearly ‘this’ kind of heart, but I ha
ve no way of verifying if it had extended its compassion to my mother.
The main element of the story has been tucked away, waiting until the right opportunity. It never presents itself to me so I simply ask:
‘Your younger sister Maria refused to speak with me. But other villagers from P. told me that she gave birth to a baby girl in 1944.’
Elżbieta offers me more cake, before responding with a firmness I have not seen in her before.
‘No, there is no truth to this. Anyway, she did not live with us but in the village.’
Elżbieta has already told me how she herself gave birth to a second son in August 1944 on the day the Banderowce burned her village. He is the younger man sitting on the other side of the room next to a black and white television set relaying a game of international soccer.
‘I bore him in Maria’s house,’ his elderly mother says, ‘in the cellar before the fires reached her home.’
The older sister is prepared to admit that Maria is much younger, and has two daughters who were born after the war. I press her again.
‘I know this is difficult for you,’ I plead, ‘but I need to know. Everyone remembers that your sister had an illegitimate child around the time your son was born. I can understand that Maria won’t talk to me herself. It’s been so long. She wants to protect her daughters. But I have to know. All I want is the truth and then I’ll never mention it to your family again.’
‘No,’ she repeats again. She hesitates.
‘Please, it’s because of this baby that I am here today.’
The grown boy who had once played with the Jewish girl is the one to break the long silence.
‘Tell him, Mama, we all know the truth. You can tell him. He’s said he won’t tell Maria.’
‘Who remembers things from so long ago?’ she answers. ‘But it wasn’t with the man we hid in the attic. It was a Polish fiancé, but he was killed by the Banderowce. The baby died too. I don’t remember anything more, it wasn’t really important. Not then, and not now.’
‘Don’t steal my memory,’ my mother later erupted. ‘You think because I was so young I don’t remember. It’s clear now, like a photograph. It can’t be them. They were in the other room. The woman who looked after me had an old mother and a daughter; she wore black, and tied her hair back with a scarf. She was the one who took my father in. And we lived all the time in a cellar, me and my father, and when my mother came we moved to the barn. I never slept on a bench; it was always dark, dark, black. No, I don’t remember calling her Ciociu. It’s not them, you’ve found the wrong person.’
The wrong person is feeding me pastries and crying that she has finally found her daughter.
And I am crying that I have finally found another Ciociu.
And wondering, at the same time, what happened to the Żydówka, the little Jewish girl with dark hair, who slept somewhere in darkness inside a wooden house on a hill overlooking the cherry trees of P.
XXXVI
April 1995. Buchenwald.
My father searches for Block 29 at precisely 3.15 p.m., exactly fifty years after American tanks rolled into the wire enclosure. We have driven from Berlin to Weimar, from where we follow the road signs to the Buchenwald Museum. My father passes through the gates knowing that this site housed two generations of Bekiermaszyns. We begin the search for his father Leib, for the barracks he lived in during the autumn of 1940. My father counts the absent spaces, pointing to invisible objects that still frighten him.
‘Twenty-nine is here,’ he assures us.
There is nothing there, except my father who looks out of place with his layered clothing, woollen hat and Sfida wind-jacket. It is a landscape of emptiness; even the sounds dissipate into birch trees inclining toward the Ettersburg ranges.
‘Here is his barrack,’ my father repeats, ‘and mine is further down on the edge of the camp.’
What camp? I wonder. Remnant wires cornered by a single watch-tower give the impression of a Hollywood stage set. The hands of the clock, frozen at 3.15, welcome visitors to this memory park. Once inside, it is an expansive landscape of pebbled mud brightened at select spots by wreaths bound in colourful ribbons.
My father came here from Auschwitz on 26 January 1945, one of 3987 prisoners on the same transport whose trek began on a march through Bierun to Gleiwitz, a temporary concentration point for thousands more prisoners evacuated from Monowitz. Before the march continued a selection was conducted, during which the sick and lame were shot behind the Gleiwitz barracks. After another three days and nights of marching under SS escort, the column of prisoners arrived in Blechhammer auxiliary camp, pausing for brief rests in barns found along the way. Eventually they were transported in freight cars to numerous destinations: Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald.
We didn’t know where we were going but we knew we had to walk. Walk, walk, walk, wearing wooden shoes, and anyone who couldn’t walk fast was shot. It was winter, very cold, snow, and we just kept on walking because we knew if we stopped, it would be the end.
Until the trains arrived: ‘On to the trains,’ they shouted, and we ran on, but some didn’t make it and were left in the snow or shot by the German guards. There was no roof and we were frozen. I remember passing a station and people threw potatoes at us. I tried to grab one, but a German hit me on the head with a gun. More shooting, and my head was spinning. I didn’t know where I was. The Germans threw bread into our wagons and people jumped on it like hungry animals, one on top of the other. People killed each other for a bit of food. The man on the bottom of the pile sometimes suffocated. We survived for one reason only. It was winter, and as the snow fell, we ate the tiny flakes. People couldn’t even stand in the carriage; we were packed in like herrings. The stronger ones threw the weaker ones out. They wanted to choke my brother, but I bit them on the foot, I was young but I was strong then; not like today. I’m much weaker now.
After a few days, we came to a gate.
‘To Each His Due.’
His due, after Majówka and Auschwitz, was the death marches which claimed the lives of a quarter of a million prisoners. As Nazi rule disintegrated under threat of Allied bombardment, entire camps in central Poland were evacuated. The healthy were sent on railway lines to destinations within Germany, where slave labour could be utilised to replenish the German arms industry. The order to eliminate the Auschwitz network of camps was given on 17 January 1945; by that date the crematoria and documents attesting to the mass extermination programme had been destroyed. Even the barracks containing the stolen possessions of the deported were burned.
My father, grown older by half a century, speaks in the present tense as if time has not passed.
‘Here is the kitchen,’ he tells us, ‘and this is where we cut the wires to allow the American tanks to pass through.’
At 10.30 a.m. on 11 April 1945 an SS officer proclaimed that the Buchenwald camp would be surrendered. The battle was drawing nearer as American planes bombarded the area. All SS officers, it was announced through a loudspeaker, were to report to their offices outside the wire enclosure. They run in every direction. Tower-guards abandoned their posts, retreating into the woods. A Russian prisoner takes a pair of pliers and, snip, he cuts the electric wires. We run through to greet the American tanks. At 3.15 p.m. the first tank of the American Third Army entered the camp. A great noise. Hurrah. Hurrah. We are free. We throw our hats in the air. Hurrah. We are free. Prisoners ran to the towers and hoisted a white flag. Thus the first armoured units found the Buchenwald camp, liberated by its own inmates.
I found my father in a photograph which spilled out of an old tin box hidden behind my brother’s stamp collection. He was wearing striped pyjamas and a matching camp cap, his body gaunt and lifeless. A child at the time, I rummaged deeper into the box and found a pile of images which yielded clues to his secret life: burnt bodies heaped into a mountain of limbs, souvenirs from his past.
My father still speaks of his past with
out consciousness of its pastness. He knows he has grown older, lived a thousand lives since his feet trod this soil; he has even forgotten the location of the Personal Property Room and the name of the Kapo from his block.
Our different time-frames collide in front of an invisible row of barracks.
‘Fifty-one was here,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve studied the maps of the camp.’
‘I’m here,’ he insists, dragging his family across a dirt path. ‘I was in 52, not 51. I came with the Boys to 52.’
It’s always the Boys. The Boys frozen beneath the hands of the clock. He’s one of the Buchenwald Boys, he tells me at a friend’s celebration, pointing to a bald man with bent shoulders dressed in crumpled pants pulled above his belly-button.
‘Kleine menshlech’, my mother affectionately calls them, ‘little people’.
‘That’s because they’re boys,’ my father corrects her.
Once I was invited to address a Buchenwald reunion in Melbourne. The chairs were filled with old Boys and their wives, gesturing wildly and chattering in Yiddish. A piano urged them to join in singing favourite folktunes, melodies which pined for burned shtetls left behind. The Boys swayed in their chairs while chanting Kinderyorn, a song about childhood years:
The sweet years of my childhood
Remain forever imprinted in my memory,
How rapidly have the years passed by
And I have so quickly aged.
They looked like mischievous children performing in a kindergarten choir. Occasionally, they exchanged furtive glances, but turned away for fear of acknowledging what they had seen—hair sprouting from an ear, his twisted finger, her varicose legs, a shrivelled neck. Singing with them, he is not Joe Baker but Yossl Bekiermaszyn, the impish coach-driver from Barrack fifty-something.
My mother sat by my father’s side and wept as she sang the same melody. She is more consumed by the past; there are no girls to grow old with. She has always been a lone survivor, an ageing woman longing for a childhood buried in a distant sepulchre. Sometimes she looks at her youth as if it is a lost object, a physical thing of delicate beauty which, if retrieved, could somehow cast its magical spell on time. Only then would her wrinkles smooth out to unmask the face of an innocent, a replica of the pretty child photographed in verdant fields alongside her mother.
The Fiftieth Gate Page 16