I must have been already twelve or thirteen years, but I was a small girl. They chose me from the class, and placed me on a platform in front of the entire school. I sat on the chair and recited the whole poem in Hebrew. It was Hayim Nahman Bialik’s poem written to a bird: ‘El Hatsippor’. Another time they put me on the stage, and I had to welcome the guests that came to the school in Berlin. My word of honour, those friends from our town wrote letters to my father and told him:
‘You should have seen Genia standing up in front of so many people.’
‘The way she spoke …’
‘She wasn’t seen, but she was heard.’
My word of honour.
I myself what shall I tell you,
Lovely bird, what stories hope you
From my lips to know?
In this far, cold land, no singing,
Only sighs and lamentations,
Only groans and woes.
Yeah, that was me then. Nothing to look at now … nothing to see … ruins.
Shall I tell my tale of sorrows
Now well-known in all the places
Near and far alike?
Those innumerable sorrows
Of the present, or the others
That are yet to strike.
My mother had a sack of ice on her head and I was calling out ‘Mameh, Mameh, talk to me. How will I go on without you?’ And I kissed her feet and I kissed her hands and I talked to her but she never regained consciousness. It was a Wednesday when the news came, and her funeral was on a Sunday. And that’s something that I will never, never forget. I went through Hitler, but compared to when my mother died—I’ll never forget the funeral. I’m scared today like a child when I go to a funeral because I was calling out ‘Mameh, Mameh, I want you to open this, I want to see my mother, I want to see my mother, I can’t live without my mother.’ And my life was a great misery, ever since she died, till I was an adult. With her, everything in me died. Was never the same. I had nobody to turn to. That’s how my struggle kept on.
Have the blossoms that I planted
Not yet withered as I withered?
Old am I, and wan.
Fruitful days, I too remember
Like themselves, but now I’m faded,
Now my strength is gone.
‘Mameh, Mameh, talk to me.’
Her head is snuggled against her mother’s tombstone, protected from the icy Berlin air by a scarf which falls onto her shoulders. Grown older by half a century, she still looks like a mourner; the same frightened child who once peered into the depths of this grave. The tombstone is inscribed with faded Yiddish and German lettering:
This woman, Raisl (Rosa) Krochmal,
born in Bursztyn,
died on the second day of the Festival of Tabernacles,
13 October 1946,
in Berlin.
‘Maybe we should move her bones,’ she murmurs. ‘To a place of life … to Israel … anywhere but here.’
‘Here’ was where my mother and her parents had been sent after their liberation from the Ukrainian forests.
After some months in Stanisławów, her family moved to Bielawa, a town in Lower Silesia, known to Germans as Langenbielau. During the war it had been the site for a concentration camp linked to Gross-Rosen. For my mother, it was the site from which her journey into Germany would begin.
My most treasured photograph comes from this intermediary period in the summer of 1946: the family is gathered in a private garden set in thick foliage (it was a holiday because I remember putting on my best dress) and my mother, a girl of eleven, is smiling from the centre of the frame. On one side, stands her father, exactly as she likes to describe him: handsome, noble, proud. His hands rest on the shoulders of his wife Raisl, clad in an elegant short-sleeved dress which hugs her body, perhaps due to the additional weight she still carries from the child she bore only two months earlier. Sylvia, my mother’s new sister, is seated on Raisl’s lap, tranquil but distracted by something which causes her head to turn at the moment the camera’s shutter clicks. At the other end of the photograph, alongside another set of distant relatives, is my mother’s aunt and uncle, Wolf and Genia Haber, whose two children, Max and Alex, appear totally indifferent to the photographer’s gaze.
There are no scars or bloodied wounds. No one is whispering in darkness, nor hiding in corn-fields, nor fleeing the sound of marching boots. There is nothing in the faces of the assembled that reveals that these are survivors. The photograph transcends time. It could be any year—1926 or 1966; there is nothing to suggest it is 1946.
Doesn’t the photographer know that in two months my grandmother’s smile will be erased forever? Will the frozen figures realign themselves, situating my mother next to her new and unfamiliar guardians, Wolf and Genia Haber, who survived the war in the far reaches of Siberia? And poor Sylvia—what photograph will capture the plight of a motherless child, banished to an orphanage? The camera cannnot show my grandfather’s future wife, the German-Jewish nurse from his daughter’s orphanage who bore my mother two half-brothers after the war. And two decades later, of little Max, there is no signal warning us that he will die fighting for Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.
The Krochmal family briefly moved to Szczecin as a transit point on the way to Berlin. My mother was sent ahead with a relative (I arrived with a suitcase and two boxes of cigarettes which I sold to Russian soldiers), and eventually joined by her father who arrived by boat. In Berlin she was interned in the Düppel Centre in Zehlendorf, a transient Displaced Persons camp in the American zone of occupation. Established in October 1945 under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, it initially contained some 7000 survivors, the lucky ones who returned from concentration camps or resurfaced after hiding in the city. My mother was one of a small minority of non-German Jews who made their way to Berlin after the war.
It was thought best for Raisl and the new-born baby to join the family by safer transportation, which they did, crossing through the Russian zone of occupation into the English sphere by truck, where the drunken driver crashed his vehicle and killed seven passengers. My grandmother, who had jumped three times from trains heading to cities of slaughter, cushioned her infant child. She knocked her own head and haemorrhaged before she eventually died in a hospital in Berlin.
Other children didn’t have much but they had mothers. I had nothing.
Today, all we have is one of Raisl’s shoes, one of a pair worn in the family photograph, the single artefact retrieved from her life. Brown suede, a green tassel, almost childlike in size, like my mother’s feet.
‘It fits me.’
Nothing else remains; even her jewellery was snatched from her body by a passenger on board the convoy.
Sometimes I touch the shoe, wondering what it would have been like to have a grandmother to embrace me. My children call my mother Buba and she gives them her unconditional love. Love and whatever else they desire; a hug, a hot glass of chocolate milk, with heaps of sugar if they ask with a kiss, a stuffed toy, an extra hour to watch television. I hear them call her Buba, and envy the word which I have never uttered, at least not as something that belongs to me.
Perhaps I should give away the shoe, add it to the mountain of shoes in Auschwitz. No, my grandmother Raisl did not die a victim of the Holocaust, did she? She survived, but her death one year later was no less tragic than the possibility that she might have died countless other deaths fleeing from trains laden with human cargo, hiding in darkened cupboards and forest bunkers. In the end, she was spared these other deaths in order to breathe life into her two daughters. How infinitely cruel, these same daughters often reflect, to survive everything only to fall victim to a man’s drunkenness.
I used to stand in the queue and get these clothes which came from America. I would wash and iron them myself and I was always tidy. I wasn’t dressed up the way others were. I was envious of what other people had. Then I made up my mind that I had to fight to survive, to succeed and e
xcel. I was good at sport; I could dance beautifully. I used to write essays in Hebrew. I used to recite, to sing. At night I would take my school books and put them under my pillow, and tell myself a hundred times: ‘Genia, you are a survivor. Genia, you are a fighter.’
But inside I was probably the saddest child. I cried myself to sleep every night, saying how I wish my mother would come back and say: ‘Genia, I love you, you’ve done well, you’re a good child.’
Fly back to your hills and valleys,
Fly back to your forests, happy
That you’re leaving me;
For beside me if you linger,
You, too, singer, will be weeping
For my destiny.
I could have been a poet—anything—that’s what they all said when I stood up on the platform in school. My destiny; who could ever know how much there is to cry about?
XL
‘Now I remember,’ she tells me from her bed.
‘What do you remember?’ I ask.
‘The breakdown. It was because of you.’
Me? Was this some cruel joke she was inflicting on me for my constant interrogation of her past? ‘You’re giving me a nervous breakdown,’ she had shouted at me when I pressed her too hard for details. But that was now, thirty years after the real breakdown.
‘It was Hitler,’ I told her. ‘Your father and his genes. I’m your victim, not your oppressor.’
‘I remember now,’ she repeated insistently. ‘You asked me a while ago and now I remember. I never took tablets until you got sick.’
Until I got sick. This was the mythic story of our household, but I had never connected it with my mother’s erratic bouts of depression.
I was eleven months old at the time, her second child after a five-year respite.
Her first, Johnny, was named by American singer Mary Ford, or rather, by her hit-song of 1953, hummed by my mother while feeding milk to her infant child. ‘Johnny is the boy for me.’ As teenagers, my brother and I often teased her with renditions of the song which inspired his name, exaggerating her accent as it must have sounded after only one year in Australia: Jonny iz ze boy forrr mi. She sang along with us in good humour, always ending with her own improvised refrain: ‘Yeah, yeah. You should have seen me then. Not like now. Yeah, yeah,’ and she would return to the dirty dinner dishes, still crooning the same song.
Did my parents really believe they could conceal their foreignness by bestowing names on their children drawn from popular radio culture? We both fancied ourselves as Jesus’ apostles, my mother’s two little gospel boys, the Bakers of Galilee—John and Mark, waiting for brother Luke to be born. Maybe, I began to think after I discovered her secret facility with the Lord’s Prayer, maybe some of its magic stuck, resurfacing at the moment of our births when the pain invoked memories of her Christian education. But no, I knew there was something more deliberate in the names chosen for us, an attempt to obliterate not only my parents’ foreignness but the memories attached to it.
If it had been my choice, I would have been named after a forgotten relative, one of those nineteenth-century uncles: Shmuel-Gimpel, Isser-Idel, Israel-David. Or if I had been the daughter my mother desired, I would be Hinda, or Yentale, or Marta. In Yiddish I was informally named Mattis, but no one knows me as the little boy killed somewhere on the road between Bołszowce and Bełżec.
‘Why Baker?’ I ask my father, while showing him the family tree constructed from Polish archives extending all the way back to Tsirla, the eighteenth-century widow of an anonymous Bekiermaszyn. What right did my father have to lop the branches off the trees in our garden? Baker-Machine. What was a business without its machinery? Weren’t the black holes enough without adding to the deed? And all because he felt uncomfortable when his ship arrived at Station Pier in Melbourne.
He answers by telling me the joke about Berel, Merel and Shmerel, who changed their Yiddish names to Bok, Mok, and Shm … At this point he laughs, even before pronouncing the punch-line. ‘So Shmerel said, “I’m going back to Poland.” D’you get it, Shmerel! Shmock! How could he be a Shmock in Australia?’
How could I be a Bekiermaszyn in Australia?
He changed our name in 1958, after Johnny was born, but one year before my birth. On my birth certificate, registered when I was born on 7 October 1959, old habits persist. In his strained handwriting, he declared, ‘I Josek Baker …,’ and signed it, Josek Bekiermaszyn.
Exactly as he had signed his liberation forms in Buchenwald.
‘You can take the Baker out of Bekiermaszyn, but you can’t take the Bekiermaszyn out of the Baker,’ my mother laughs when she hears this story.
So I decided to put the past back into my name. I have chosen Raphael, the earliest ancestor I can find on our family tree. ‘Who’s he?’ my father asks, but all I can tell him is that he was born in Szydłowiec at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Raphael, the Angel of Healing. ‘Is something the matter?’ my father asks with concern. ‘You’re cuckoo!’ my mother dismisses the name I have placed within me.
My mother traces the origins of her breakdown to September 1960: eleven months after my birth. At least that’s what she remembers now.
It began with a cough, a call to the doctor, and that was that: ‘The doctor simply walked out the door, and left.’ The next cough saved my life, she recalls. The doctor heard it through the door, turned back, examined me again, looked at my mother, and announced, ‘Mrs Baker, we need to get this child to the hospital at once.’
She doesn’t remember much more, except that she fainted and awoke to the news that I had been taken urgently to hospital. They had given me an emergency tracheotomy, the scar from which still remains as an ugly wound on my throat.
‘These were the worst days of my life,’ she likes to tell me. In her days of despair, I lived in an oxygen tent, alongside another child whose vocal cords had been removed by the same procedure. ‘He whistled,’ she recalls, ‘and I prayed every day, “just give me back my child, even if he has to whistle for the rest of his life.” ’
‘A feifer,’ she would mutter in Yiddish, a whistler. Feif, feif, she remembers.
The doctors had told her it was hopeless, that my chances of survival were minuscule.
‘My word of honour,’ she continues her story relayed across three generations of listeners, ‘I threw myself at the doctor’s feet and begged him, “please, please, my child, save my child.” ’
And that’s when the tablets began. Not in the war, but in that hospital room where I lay oblivious in an oxygen chamber.
For my birthday, celebrated one day after my removal from the tent, they bought me a ‘horsie’, a fluffy toy which I have since passed on to my own son. He knows that one day he will pass it on to his children, along with the story.
He knows the story, but not the stories that foreshadow it.
At least that is my story: it wasn’t me. Couldn’t be. Not my fault. There’s too much before. Not just the child in the tent, helpless, drifting toward death. The mother facing deprivation, the loss of a son, her own Kinderyorn. The black hole. Mattis, my nameless name. The motherless daughter, the child throwing herself at the feet of a saviour, save me, save my child.
Only this time, the fighter died in her, so that her son could survive. Remnants only, ruins.
Her story doesn’t tell that I cannot whistle. Feif, feif, but no sound. They don’t sing from the ashes.
Sometimes she still sings, ‘Johnny is the boy for me. Always knew that he would be.’
XLI
The Search Bureau for Missing Relatives continues to function as a section of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. Its door can be found behind a long twisted corridor in the Agency building off King George Street, alongside other doors whose nameplates read: Immigration & Absorption; Rural & Urban Development; Education & Culture, to which has recently been added Unit for the Commonwealth of Independent States. These renamed departments, initially established during the period of British Mandatory rule
over Palestine, helped transform the Jewish settlement into a political entity which ultimately attained statehood in 1948.
The Search Bureau itself was founded in 1945, when it was assigned the task of locating, identifying and thereby rehabilitating stateless Jews whose exodus from Europe was directed by the Brichah organisation. At least 100,000 of these Jews found refuge in the emerging Jewish State.
It is a Thursday afternoon and I am standing by a public telephone booth at Yad Vashem. The small plastic shield which covers the row of telephones hardly offers shelter from the drenching rain. The phone rings at the Jerusalem office of the Bureau for Missing Relatives. A woman answers and informs me that the department is officially closed for the day. Ring back tomorrow, she says with an air of indifference. Tomorrow; what’s another day? Fifty years have already passed, but something about this moment propels me forward in a desperate bid for illumination.
‘Please,’ I beg, ‘I need to know.’
‘Is the person you are seeking a relative?’ she asks.
‘No’, I think, but I feel bonded to Benjamin Kogut as if he were the grandfather I never knew.
‘Yes,’ I answer.
The lie grows. ‘I am only in the country for one day. I need this number desperately, please, I am a survivor.’ I feel shame, but not enough to terminate the conversation.
She succumbs and I give her Kogut’s personal details. I know from his release documents that he intended to migrate to Palestine but, having learned of my own parents’ desire to emigrate to the United States, my hopes are tempered, however not enough to deter me. There is something in the handwriting of the American military officer, and in the story of Kogut’s survival, that assures me his will is the stuff of fulfilled dreams.
‘Ring back in ten minutes,’ she answers, which I do, eight minutes later. Within seconds I have the answer.
‘Benjamin Kogut, the son of Avraham (‘I know, I know,’ I whisper into the receiver) came to Palestine in 1946. He is married to Marta and lives in Tel Aviv. His daughter Chaya lives at a different address. If that doesn’t work, you can always try calling the brother.’
The Fiftieth Gate Page 18