‘Can you see how I look like my mother?’ she says.
One cannot fail to notice the resemblance—the same crescent smile, the dark eyes, the drawn-out face—except today the daughter in the photograph is at least thirty years older than the mother pictured alongside her.
The years have vanished never to return,
My home, my mother—nought has remained.
Age and gloom have replaced those happy days,
Only memories are left.
For her it is not only time lost, but time that never was. ‘I never had a childhood,’ she says. ‘I was always an adult—a poor, little adult hiding in a black hole.’ Photographs are useless when she confronts her absent years; they have nothing to show, except for ghosts who fly into her creased skin, whispering with unrelenting cruelty: Kinderyorn.
I can think back to my own childhood, and remember the times when I would leap into my parents’ bed and find a comfortable spot between my mother and father. ‘Markinu,’ they called me, and sometimes Mochka, a word they invented for the sound of thumb sucking. Mochk, mochk, mochk, as if my childhood identity was bound up in the action of sucking, which apparently I did with such gusto and frequency that a permanent blister appeared on the joint of my thumb. I lay there in the warmth of their presence, and together we watched television variety shows like ‘Sunny Side Up’, as my mother combed my blonde curls with her hands, waiting for the moment I would fall asleep so that my father could carry me back to my own bed. The whole process even had a name: pyeshchi we called it, cuddletime.
Most of all, I enjoyed the pyeshchis when sickness prevented me from attending school. My mother would tiptoe into my room in her slippers, a bottle of Eau de Cologne at hand which she sprinkled around my body like a magical potion designed to protect me from the evil eye. I would fall asleep in the comfort of the perfume, buried beneath my quilt which she whipped into a storm over my head to ward away unwelcome germs, until I awakened to a different smell. The cheese blintzes, she said as she paraded them into my bedroom, would ensure a speedy recovery. The strawberries and apple sauce were added, I presume, for my enjoyment, and her satisfaction.
Today I am still Markinu to my parents, but I no longer have blonde curls, nor a thumb blister. I now give the pyeshchis to my own three children. Each of them has blonde hair; they even suck their respective thumbs, with a blanket or a toy horse or their mother’s hair curled between their tiny fingers.
Three Mochkas.
Oy, how quickly I have aged,
Like a dream, all has passed, no more.
Childhood years, a song celebrated and mourned with its own rhythm.
A different melody from the one played at Buchenwald fifty years earlier; before the past even had a chance to escape its own tail.
It is April 1945.
‘Achtung’, proclaims the sign in hand-painted letters. It is plastered to a wall somewhere in liberated Buchenwald, its bold red lettering reinforced by two thickly drawn triangles reminiscent of the shapes sewn on to prisoner uniforms.
Achtung! Attention! All former inmates of Buchenwald and of the Concentration Camp surroundings are urged to present themselves immediately to the Historical Commission, Block 29 Room 4.
The proclamation serves as the Boys’ first lesson in history. They still wear their striped uniforms as they approach the barrack where they are greeted with an official sheet of paper.
‘What is the name of your birthplace?’ it asks them.
‘How many Jews lived there before the war?’
‘What institutions, associations, schools, hospitals etc. existed in your town?’
‘Was a ghetto established in your town? Who served on the Judenrat? List names of all members.’
And on and on.
My father—yesterday’s tattooed prisoner, commissioned to remember by agencies of history.
By November 1945 the Central Historical Commission had settled in offices in Munich, had established a charter, and had begun the task of tabulating memory. Munich was the nerve centre of recollection. Under its aegis, it established four new commissions, in Bamberg, Frankfurt, Regensburg, and Stuttgart. Thirty-three departments and countless more cells extended its reach to hundreds of settlements and camps in Poland, Lithuania, Rumania and Russia.
Each fragment of memory was placed in an archive and catalogued; files and boxes containing testimonies, photographs, Nazi documents, museum artefacts, antisemitic writings and questionnaires.
But no psalms of Kinderyorn.
‘Don’t turn me into a memory,’ my mother screams. ‘There’ll be plenty time yet to write on my grave.’
‘It’s my way of honouring you.’
‘Better you should honour someone else’s parents.’
A teacher at school once asked me: ‘Do you sit in your Daddy’s chair?’ We were discussing the biblical text about honouring parents.
‘Yes.’
I felt ashamed.
I feel ashamed.
Digging and digging, before time, to a time beyond, like the iron claws of the kopachke, Treblinka’s robotic gravedigger.
XXXVII
My father is on pages forty-two and 109 of a Register of Jewish Survivors published by the Jewish Agency of Palestine in 1945.
Among the lists of remnant Jews from the concentration camps of Bergen–Belsen, Dachau, and Theresianstadt; from East European shtetls and West European cities, rests the Buchenwald inventory in which his name can be found. My father’s name appears twice: first on a list submitted by the World Jewish Congress in May 1945, and again the next month. His details variously appear as Josek Bekerwaszyn, Josek Beckermazzyn, from Starachowice, from Wierzbnik, while his brother Baruch assumes the form, Bekerwaszyier. All in all, 60,000 names appear, but the warning against despair is emphatically repeated: ‘These lists are incomplete. Hence the reader who does not find a certain name in a given list should not give up hope on that account.’
My father, the survivor.
No longer the victim, the Lager Jew, the Auschwitz Katzetnik, but a survivor, a dry bone whose body breathes life; signs of life.
What do they mean by ‘a reader’, as if the lists were a Tolstoyan romance to be read at night by the light of a bedroom lamp? Who at the time cared to ‘read’ my father’s name? Not his father, nor his mother, his sisters all gone, no grandparents. No Jews left in Wierzbnik either, except the handful who might have returned to seek out their homes, only to find they were lived in by amnesiac owners. Or bulldozed like my father’s home during his family’s total ‘absence’ in 1943.
Maybe my father was the only one who drew nourishment from the inclusion of his name on the list.
Me, the survivor. Ich leyb, I am alive.
With the realisation of life grows the knowledge of death, the asking of postponed questions and the confirmation of doubts.
There are the survivor registries: Volume 2 soon appears, containing 70,000 more names. Two Bekiermaszyns, both from Szydłowiec, resurface in a list of Jews from the Kielce District. The Starachowice list, sixty-one names in all, contains familiar personalities—Simcha Mincberg, the Judenrat leader, two Brodbekier brothers, the Bread Bakers, but no Baker Machines. The radio broadcasts and special bulletins continue, uniting anxious listeners lerachok velekarov, ‘Far and Near’, who are urged to search the rubble in the event that a brother, a mother, a distant cousin, escaped the furnace. The Committee to Aid Polish Jews offers its advice to relatives in search of one another: Patience, the body-counters counsel, ‘… the tyrants destroyed our world in six years and as much as we would like to, we cannot repair it in the space of six weeks’. Patience and systematic cooperation, facilitated by numerous forms to be forwarded to various agencies in moments of discovery, in cases of absence:
I … (family name)
residing at … (address)
am interested in … (family name)
whose name appears in the registry on page …
It is my wish to receive
more information/be in
contact with/send help …
Or:
I hereby inform you, that according to information in my hand the following is to be included amongst the Jews of Poland who survived …
To be concluded by a hand-written signature.
The date is 8 May 1945. The scrawl is childlike, not unlike his signature today except for the elongated Bekiermaszyn, which in later years surrendered to its circumcised form, Baker. Gezeichnet: Signed. Every question on the form is itemised bilingually, first in German, then English. Most of the details are familiar: Josek Bekiermaszyn, Prisoner A18751 and 120527 is male, Polish, Mosaic (that is, a Jew), officially arrested by the SS on 28 October 1942, after which he was imprisoned in three locations squashed on one line—‘Starachowice, Auschwitz, Buchenwald.’ Most of the document is blank. He has no information to supply when asked ‘reason for arrest’, ‘court trying case’ and ‘names of judges’ and leaves a space when queried: ‘Have you ever belonged to the Nazi Party or any of its affiliated or subordinate organisations?’ When asked his profession, he no longer declares kutscher, a coach-driver, but reverts to his pre-war identity: schoolpupil.
‘If released where do you intend to go?’
‘To U.S.A.’
‘Give names and addresses, if known, of three reliable persons living in the locality where you intend to go, who can vouch for you.’
‘Blank’; but what he meant to say was, ‘Who can possibly vouch for me? You cannot begin to understand what it means to survive the death of your entire world.’
Four days later the decision of the presiding military board is handed to him:
‘Release.’
A single word which conceals a life whose span is measured by minutes, to which a series of labels have already been attached: Jewish Survivor; Sheirit Peletah, one of the remnant few; Stateless Pole.
He is one of three hundred and eighty thousand Jewish survivors from Poland, most of whom held on to life by escaping into the Soviet Union at the outbreak of war.
One, left over from three million Polish Jewish victims.
For my mother, there are no release forms, nor personal signatures. The announcement arrived with Russian tanks whose wheels tore through the bunkers concealing the huddled few. Only later, in 1951, do her case documents officially release her. The statement by her father, Leo Krochmal, informs Miss E. Starner, the Child Care Officer for the International Refugee Organisation in Augsburg, that his daughter, Genia, does not require any international tracing. Her whereabouts are known, care of Mr and Mrs Wolf Haber in Landsberg. He, on the other hand, resides in Westphalen with his new wife, Ruth Krochmal, their half-daughter, Sylvia, and their infant son, Michael. Genia’s mother, the form indicates, is dead.
The last piece of information is supplied before the case can be closed on 11 June 1951: ‘Genia released by father for emigration to USA.’
A single word: released by father; not with. A new birth; her release.
One of seven thousand Jews released from Eastern Poland; one life left over from a community of half a million dead souls.
And what of his release?
The only clue came after my second return to Poland when I received a package from my mother’s half-brother, Michael. Minka, his mother called him, a name she pronounced in a strong German accent. Her other son was Gary, but he was known to us as Gershon Krupp, until one day he announced his new name, Frodo the Magic Table Leg. My mother refused to call him by this Tolkien title, and so he never answered her, but they didn’t have much to say to each other anyway. When I was young he taught me all the Beatles’ lyrics, and another song called ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. We would sing it together, banging on a rubbish bin lid while we danced the chorus until his mother, my Mama Ruth, called me in for my favourite treat—chocky egg, a yummy concoction made of chocolate, heaps of sugar, and a raw egg yolk. While we ate and sipped a glass of milk from a straw, she would talk in German to her bird: ‘Hänschen! Hänschen!’ she would address him, ‘Du kannst schlafen gehen, aber wir haben liebe Gäste. You can sleep now, but we must entertain our dear guests.’
I had not seen Michael for many months, and thus welcomed the package. It contained an undated note, typed in German on a piece of cardboard by my grandfather. Michael had also inserted a message, begging me to leave the ghosts at peace:
Leo Krochmal, son of Simon and Sara nee Mehrberg, born 5/1/1901 in Kassel. In the year 1905, moved to Bursztyn, where I lived until 1914. Moved to Vienna 1914–1918, attended commercial school there. Returned to Bursztyn, worked there until 1928 as commercial employee and married Rosa (Raisl) Haber in 1928. Moved to Langenbielau in 1928, where I resided in 1936. Left there in 1936 and moved to Kattowice, where I lived until September 1939, when I was displaced to Bochnia. In July 1941 saw myself forced to go into hiding with my wife in Sanok, but was betrayed on 24 October 1942. In Gestapo jail between 25 October and 6 December 1942. Put on to Belsen train on 6 December 1942, jumped from train and lived in Ghetto Rohatyn until June 1943. Then lived in forest until September 1944.
‘I don’t understand,’ said my mother when I read it to her over the phone from Jerusalem. ‘This is not him, this is not me. Where is my life?’
Her life—his life—in Bołszowce had been extinguished from this autobiographical entry. I recognised snippets of truth from my grandfather’s narrative—Bursztyn, his wife Rosa or Raisl, the forests. But this effort to Germanise his life—Kassel? Vienna? Langenbielau?—this was not his life, at least not as my history and my mother’s memory had reconstructed it.
‘Maybe there are no survivors from Bołszowce,’ she commented after a moment of silent reflection. ‘Maybe I never existed there, maybe, just maybe, everything is a horrible nightmare I have been living ever since the first Aktion? Maybe I am someone else?’
Maybe, I wondered, the little girl with dark hair was captured from a false cupboard near the Judenrat headquarters, or maybe she reached the final destination point on the Yom Kippur train, or maybe she was consumed by the fires that pursued her from a black shelter in a village in the Ukraine. And this woman—this woman who gave me life, who is she? Perhaps she is from a different story, and I have been writing the history of another life, of the last victim of the liquidation of the Bołszowce ghetto.
Maybe, I tell my mother, your father reconstructed his life because he could not live with his real one; maybe that is what it means to survive—to obliterate the guilt that comes from living amidst total death by narrating a new story, one without the Judenrat, without the fear of persecution by Soviet liberators, without the blue-eyed daughter and peasant widow; one that is observed but not experienced because the real one is too painful to endure once the Aktions have ceased.
‘How tragic,’ his daughter reflects about her father, ‘to survive and yet bury your life in someone else’s ashes. Maybe all those years I was too harsh on him.’
How many alternative lives can a person occupy? How many memories can a survivor bury and how many destinations can one life reach?
Nowhere on their liberation documents do either of my parents mention Australia.
Nowhere on my grandfather’s document does he mention how he greeted the news of his wife’s death by slitting his own wrists.
XXXVIII
Neither my mother nor father ever met their persecutors.
Only in sleep, they tell me. ‘But not in the streets.’
I once heard my father scream at night.
‘Sshh,’ my mother told me the next morning. ‘He was just dreaming.’
‘What do you dream about?’ I asked her.
‘It’s always the same. I’m always a child. Never an adult. Even when I’m awake and thinking about it, I’m always a child.’
I want to share my dreams with her.
I tell her that in my dream I am sent on a journey, by a king who is weeping for his daughter.
I come to a palace, pass through a gate, then another until I find a
room. I sit in a corner, reading till the king’s daughter enters.
She says, ‘What are you reading?’
‘The Vale of Tears.’
‘If you want me to come home, go away and search elsewhere.’
I leave and enter a field. After many years I find a kerchief. The daughter’s tears are written on it.
‘I know this dream,’ my mother interrupts. ‘I used to read it to you.’
‘It’s my dream,’ I tell her.
‘In bed,’ she insists.
I return to the palace and find the daughter.
‘What are you reading?’ she asks.
‘Your tears.’
‘Go away,’ she says.
I enter a field with a river of wine. I drink from it, and dream. I dream that the wine has turned to blood.
I have nowhere to hide. I stand in the field, alone, and find a kerchief. My tears are written on it. They say the daughter is captive in a palace surrounded by fire.
I return to the palace.
The gate-keeper says, ‘I do not have the key.’
I pray and enter the palace.
‘It’s my story,’ my mother says. ‘He finds the daughter and brings her home.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s a different dream.’
XXXIX
Do they know and could they picture
How the many rise against me,
How their hatred swells?
Singing, singing, O my birdling,
Sing the wonders of the land where
Spring forever dwells.
The Fiftieth Gate Page 17