She was no longer the little girl left behind in the Ukraine. In Landsberg she discovered herself as a woman.
Who was my first boyfriend? she asks herself.
There was one, Romek, he became a solicitor, or was it a doctor? And another, Yitzchak, a dentist, they all went on to America. They wrote letters to me saying they would wait till I was ready, till I got my emigration papers. But in the meantime, I was going out with a boy, Mila, for one and a half years. He was studying dentistry, he was very, very handsome. I would say that we were both in love. He used to live in Munich and came to visit me in Landsberg, and then … then I left. He waited for papers to emigrate with me, but all along I suspected he would be a womaniser. Although he loved me, I knew that it would wear off and he would go with other women. I never joined him because I realised, with emotion more than with reason, that if on top of everything I would get a bad husband then I’d hang myself. I found out later in life that he married a widow, had two children and had a heart attack and died when he was very young, maybe forty-two or forty-three years. See how lucky I was not to have married him? I would have been a young widow myself. Or maybe if he married me he wouldn’t have had a heart attack.
Maybe if …
But in the meantime, she is standing with her husband in Jerusalem’s ‘Valley of Destroyed Communities’ at a point midway between his town and hers. It is only a few steps in either direction to the single memorial they each have of Bołszowce and Wierzbnik, at a location thousands of miles away from their shared home in Melbourne, Australia.
XLV
‘Did your parents meet in Poland or Australia?’ Avraham asks.
‘In Australia,’ I answer.
There is nothing that connects their lives in Poland except that they were both victims of the same hatred.
This bearded man, I was soon to discover, also drew a thin and miraculous thread between my parents’ lives.
I had been warned by his brother, who heads the Wierzbnik Survivors’ Association, that Avraham is an eccentric, but nothing prepared me for my encounter with this penitent in his one-room house in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood of Jerusalem. His wife, her hair covered by a wig in deference to traditional notions of religious modesty, prepares a bowl of cut fruit for us to eat. I turn on my tape-recorder and interview her husband.
‘Tell me what you remember about Jewish life in Wierzbnik?’
‘I was so assimilated before the war,’ he proceeds to explain, ‘I didn’t know what it meant to be a Jew.’
I suspect at this point that this man, so consumed by his refashioned identity as a born-again Jew, will not yield much information. So I decide to abandon my questions and treat the interview as an exotic foray into the curious world of ultra-Orthodoxy in Jerusalem.
‘In Wierzbnik I was a Zionist,’ he expands in Hebrew. ‘I came to Israel after the war as a commander on the Altalena.’
I know of this episode in Israel’s history; the story of the armed Jewish militants on board the Altalena who were fired on by Jewish defence forces in 1948 as the refugee ship approached the shores of Tel Aviv.
‘Jew fighting Jew,’ he says, ‘that is the crime of this generation for which we have been punished. Why else would God allow a Holocaust to happen to us?’
This is beyond eccentricity, I say to myself. What theological perversion could lead this survivor to think that the Holocaust was due to Jewish factionalism? I’ve heard it all before from unrepentant Christians, the bit about Nazis as divine rods of punishment for the Jews’ errant ways. It all amounted to the same intolerable point of view.
‘Avraham,’ I ask him desperately, borrowing from my readings on theology, ‘would you be capable of repeating those words in the presence of a child being thrown into the fires of Treblinka?’
‘For our sins!’ he repeats. ‘It makes me cry, and I am certain God is weeping too, but it is written in the Torah. We were punished because people like me didn’t obey God’s commandments. Here, read this.’
It is not a Bible that he thrusts before my eyes, but a newspaper.
‘I publish this myself,’ he explains, pointing to a dusty computer in the corner of his book-lined room which somehow functions as a kitchen, bedroom, study and publishing-house.
His eight-page Hebrew newspaper is entitled The Covenant for Total Redemption. It is illustrated with poorly reproduced photographs of ageing rabbis with flowing white beards encircled by words on the theme of repentance and salvation. ‘This newspaper quotes from words of Torah,’ a boxed item warns, ‘maintain its holiness by burying it in the synagogue or near your home.’ I read the paragraph he vigorously thumbs, searching for signs of sacredness. Instead, I find the language of spiritual racism, a debasement of prophetic ethics into an aggressive onslaught on modernism and secular culture. Assimilation, it argues, is the cardinal sin, responsible for ‘every destruction and holocaust visited on the Jewish people’.
‘Who wrote this?’ I inquire.
He points to himself, assuming that his thoughts are my thoughts, while entering into a second bout of theological speculation. ‘Any tragedy that befalls us should prompt each and everyone of us to ask: What have I done?—or what haven’t I done?—that led to this terrible thing to happen. This is the way God made the world.’
I contain the volcano erupting inside me, and try to steer the conversation back to the original intent of my visit: a fact-finding mission, a further attempt to confirm my version of history through a witness to the events in my father’s town. It is a perspective I value, having experienced its total absence from my mother’s part of the story; for her there are no witnesses to interview, no Bołszowce Survivor Society, no means of validation. How easy it is to get things wrong, to forget this school or that confectionery shop, to size up a personality in the wrong way, to miss a communal conflict, to set your narrative in a tissue of unintended lies, to forget to read between the lines. And worse—to reduce survivors to supporting actors in their own tragedy.
I invite him to retell the story to me—chronologically and systematically, pinning him down on minute details about personalities I have only encountered on microfilm and fading slips of paper. Mincberg, I learn, possessed a razor-sharp mind and was unfairly judged by some of his townsmen after the war; Shloymele Szkop was a loving cheder teacher who never flogged his pupils with the customary cat o’ nine tails; Shmuel Isser was not as hostile to Zionism as I imagined him to be. There were more Hasidic dynasties in Wierzbnik than I had accounted for, more schools, more women’s organisations, and altogether more vibrancy. ‘It was a shtetl like no other,’ he concludes.
For a moment I imagine Avraham as he had once been: behind the beard and saintly smile I recognise the playful child, the young Zionist ideologue, the accomplished boxer, and the adolescent who sabotaged German ammunition in the slave compounds of Starachowice. He does not recall the younger Bekiermaszyn, even though his stories are constructed from the same nightmarish material woven from a shared period in Majówka. His memory is more precise than my father’s, and for the first time I am able to gain a clear picture of the network of labour camps from a map he scribbles on one of his newspapers.
Yet as chronicler of Wierzbnik there is a hiatus in Avraham’s understanding of the early years of war. ‘I can’t answer that,’ he tells me when I fire questions at him about the Judenrat in 1940, or about the early period of compulsory labour in the days leading up to the town’s liquidation. ‘I can’t answer that,’ he repeats, ‘I wasn’t there at the time.’
He explains his omissions. He was one of the only Jews from his town to flee the Nazi assault, winding his way across Eastern Poland into the Ukraine. ‘I knew I had to escape; through forests and cities, on foot or by train, anywhere but away from Nazi occupation.’ His movements, he says, carried him to a small town in the heart of the Ukraine, far from Wierzbnik where his family remained. A village, he calls it, a kfar.
‘Oh, where?’ I inquire.
‘I fl
ed to Stanisławów first, and after the first Aktion I succeeded in escaping to a kfar called Bołszowce.’
He notices the tears clouding my eyes, and leans forward to touch my hand.
‘It wasn’t a village,’ I protest on my mother’s behalf. ‘It was larger than a kfar; it was a shtetl, a beautiful one—didn’t you see the Count’s palace?’
During four months of hiding, Avraham saw only the interior of a shed where he slept with other refugees.
‘Krochmal? No, Krochmal I don’t remember.’
He remembers marching every day under Nazi guard to a hill on the edges of Bołszowce where he helped lay the foundations for a railway line.
He remembers standing above the town and watching the Jews perform their daily tasks like ants burdened with miseries and fear.
And he remembers, toward the end of 1942, deciding that it was safer to return to Wierzbnik than to wait for the final liquidation of this single Ukrainian shtetl.
‘Finished. I could see that there was no hope here, their fate was sealed. It was only a matter of time till the last Jew would be murdered.’
‘The last bar one,’ I tell him.
So he left my mother’s town to return to Wierzbnik where he was enslaved in the same camp as my father.
‘It was then that I first discovered how to pray,’ he continues his story. ‘As I passed through the villages and townlets of Galicia, finding my way back home, I recited the Adon Olam day and night, praying that God would intervene.’
‘There were many others whose prayers were unanswered,’ I comment.
‘Not unanswered. Every prayer, every prayer opens another gate. Six million prayers. Imagine how many gates are open to you.’
We debate the question through the night, the same one posed by rabbis centuries ago: would it have been preferable for God not to have created humanity?
We add our knowledge of this century to the scales of justice weighed by our ancestors. We consider every act of genocide, and measure each against the advances of our age, piling the deeds of human goodness against the evils of the past and present: Auschwitz, Armenia, Kampuchea, Rwanda, Bosnia.
‘No,’ I say, ‘not numbers, it’s people.’
The scales waver: a child fleeing from pursuers on a village road; a child hidden in a monastery. A mother raped and shot; a mother shielded by a foreign soldier. A man tortured in captivity; a man set free.
Feathers on the scales.
The darkness and the light.
In the end, we cannot produce a wiser answer than the one recorded in our ancient texts:
‘It would have been better if God had not created humanity, but now that the deed is done, let us examine our own deeds and repent.’
I know it is time to leave. To let go of my pain so I can reclaim it for someone else; to look beyond the fire so I can walk, again, through the field, where bushes burn without a trace of ash.
‘For our sins,’ Avraham repeats.
Towards the fiftieth gate where light hovers inside the darkness. Inside the broken heart.
XLVI
After the Register of Survivors came the lists of the dead.
And after the lists of the dead came the analysis: the classification of trauma, the psychology of victims, the inventory of symptoms.
The alphabetic roster of items covered by the Traumatic Inventory is planned as a tool to assist the trained content analyst in finding the appropriate themes in the inventory.
Here too, in the first ‘survivor syndrome’ index compiled in 1949, I searched for my parents, hoping to find them somewhere between A and Z.
Beliefs, religious and political, disparagement of
Standing at the gates of Auschwitz fifty years later, a young Israeli student approaches my father and asks him: ‘Do you still believe in God?’ He smiles and throws the question back at her.
She does not even move her head.
‘We’re alive, aren’t we?’ he shrugs his shoulders.
Confinement, in dungeons
My mother is frightened of elevators; she prefers to shop using escalators. My mother despises houses without windows. She slides the curtains open before consuming her morning coffee. At night, my parents leave a small light on outside their bedroom.
Funerals, rites and prayers
‘You don’t understand. Ever since my mother died I cannot go to a cemetery. If you make me go it will bring everything back; I will cry for my mother, like a little girl. How can you ever understand such a thing?’
Gloating
‘Your mother can do anything: I dance, I sing, I recite poetry, I speak six languages, I make friends, I cook, I swim, I decorate, and how I look? Ask your father how I look.’
Husband (see Relatives)
‘Oh, there were plenty. First of all, we always went out with a few couples to a place called Eden. Dad was a very good dancer, he loved dancing, he was fun to be with and that’s how it all started. Then we were going out for a while and I could see he loved me. He was a moral support to me in every way. And me too, I loved him. Very much. I admired him for the qualities that he had and somehow together we seemed to be the right match. I was maybe more temperamental, more aggressive, in my young years especially. I was spoilt by him, and he again was the calming waters on me. He used to tell me after I arrived in Australia, “you are not right Genia, you should do it,” or “you shouldn’t do it,” and I encouraged him in other ways. So we were a good combination. He was chasing after me a long time, telling me how much he loved me. It was the first time in my life I felt lucky.’
Illness, protracted
An unsettling memory:
We are at Hayman Island, my father, my brother, and myself. My father is at the centre of the hall, balancing a bed of raw vegetables on his head, his hairy legs seductively poking out from beneath a flowing red dress, for which he is receiving a prize for the best fancy-dress: a bottle of champagne. He holds the trophy high alongside the bananas and lemons. I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, clapping for my father, Carmen Miranda. I applaud with the others, flicking the tassel which hangs from my oriental head-dress. Now my father is dancing. I am dragged into the circle by a honeymoon couple. One of my parents’ oldest friends has seized the microphone on stage and is singing a Russian melody, a love song.
The thought comes to me again:
Where is my mother? Why have we left her behind in Melbourne to rest with her girlfriend?
Why is she not dancing with my father and her children?
Insanity
My only surviving grandfather, Leo Krochmal, lost his mind before he died. He frequently wandered from home in the middle of the night, until he was hospitalised under constraint, where only his mind was free to wander. Visitors and nursing staff would be greeted with a torrent of abuse: ‘Nazi whores.’
Marital taboos between ethnic groups
Taboos do not require conscious articulation; they are innate and unquestioning, absorbed from childhood in unspoken communications.
My parents are survivors: they did not have to ask me to marry a Jewish girl.
I am not a survivor: will my children have to ask me?
Personal appearance
‘I had a very close friend in Germany after the war, and she had a rich auntie, who bought her beautiful clothes. All her clothes were initialled, each piece embroidered with the letters P.D. She used to lend me her clothes. That’s why to this day I like initials. Even on towels. Later when I came to Australia I had a dressmaker, and she used to make me beautiful dresses. Ask your father. I had all my dresses initialled, G.B. And the children used to say, “Go look at Genia.” Yeah, look at Genia. What’s left of me? G.B. That’s all—the remains of Genia Baker.’
Pollution of Air
‘We voz at a picnic,’ my father relates.
A picnic for orphans, soon after he arrived in Australia.
An Australian asks: ‘So where were you during the war?’
‘Buchenwald,’ my father
answers.
‘Where’s that? In the mountains? How was the air?’
Production quotas
‘So I said to him, “Morry, I’m going to start a new business …” ’
Relatives (‘Gravity Score’ for Children)
‘At sixty, when I sit and talk, I say I’m a very lucky woman. I always think to myself, if my mother would only be alive, if my mother could see what became of her poor child, she would smile and say: “My poor child is a rich child, not in money, but in what she has achieved and contributed in her life.” Look what I’ve achieved together with Dad. Two sons, and we’re very proud and lucky with the girls you’ve both married. And what makes us happiest is the interest on our investment, the grandchildren, who we enjoy and love deeply. So from all this misery I feel a very successful woman. My success is my naches, the fulfilment I get from my family. I’m getting older but I can still say, Lechaim, Lechaim, lechaim! To Life, To Life, To Life! Am Yisrael Chai! The People of Israel Live!’
Sanitation
‘What are you doing today?’ I ask my mother.
‘Shpritzing the flowers.’
She begins watering the back garden, singing to each flower in Yiddish.
‘Oh I know that I owe what I am today,
to that dear little lady so old and frail.
To that wonderful Yiddishe Mameh,
Oh, Mameh mine.’
When the hose reaches her front gate she picks up its slack so she can continue her song on the pavement. I can hear her voice all the way down the street, singing while she shpritzes the concrete footpath with water.
Screaming
‘Yossl! You hear how he talks to his mother? He’s killing me. What Hitler didn’t do, he’ll do to me.’
Sex drive
Once I came home late at night and interrupted them. I fled from the house before they heard me and returned home forty minutes later. My mother and father were sitting up in bed watching ‘Dynasty’.
The Fiftieth Gate Page 21