The Fiftieth Gate

by Mark Raphael Baker

  Tattooing

  Travelling with my family in Mexico, we were asked by the hotel doorkeeper to show our number. I dangled the key from my pocket, as my father instinctively raised his left arm. We laughed.

  Uncle (see Relatives)

  The phone rang at 4.30 in the morning.

  ‘Baruch just died,’ the voice on the other end of the line said.

  I hung up. It was 30 December 1981 and together with my brother Johnny, I prepared to break the news to our father.

  It was still dark when we entered our father’s room where he lay alongside our mother, peacefully asleep.

  We had visited our Uncle Baruch only the day before, and, my father, too frightened to confront the sight before him, mustered only the courage to poke his head behind the door for a few silent moments. He turned away, unable to face the image of his brother: this gentle and saintly man, shrunken back into the hollow body of his erased youth.

  The same body whose lifeless arm still carried almost the identical blue etching as his bereaved brother; consecutive numbers, A18751 and A18752. Twice, the void between ‘left’ and ‘right’ had divided them, until my father instinctively pulled his older brother into the queue headed for life.

  This time my father was powerless to redirect his brother’s fate.

  When we told him, he buried his face in his pillow and wept like a baby.

  Wife (see Relatives)

  ‘She told you I chased her? Look, I told you why, no? She was the nicest looking girl in Melbourne. Everybody used to say so. Now she’s sixty years old, how can you compare? Sometimes she looks seventy and sometimes she looks forty. When she works like crazy, cleaning the house, she looks like an old woman. Yesterday she looked nice, the way she dressed, no?’

  What did you expect?

  ‘I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: therefore choose life’ (see Deuteronomy, 30:19).

  XLVII

  In the end, the beginning.

  My mother’s half-brother sent me another package: scraps of paper, in Yiddish, in Polish, in Ukrainian. He found them in his father’s personal files, stuffed away with musty German books and photographs; a copy of Reb Nahman Krochmal’s Guide for the Perplexed of the Time.

  I look at the first letter, admiring the neat Yiddish handwriting of my grandfather. ‘A pedant’, my mother describes her father when she lights a candle for his death. It is evident in a photograph thrown in among the pile. Leo Krochmal is standing at attention in a Berlin street, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit with a kerchief neatly arranged in his jacket pocket. ‘Look at his hat,’ my mother says, ‘dressed like a lord.’

  The letter is addressed to his brother in Argentina, who migrated there shortly after the war. It is dated 2 June 1946.

  June 1946. The family photograph. Leo, Raisl, my mother Genia, and baby Sylvia, in Bielawa, en route to Berlin:

  I find myself with my wife in Poland in the city of Bielawa.

  For his wife, only four months remain.

  I came from Stanisławów where I recently lived. During the time when the Nazis occupied Poland I was in Bołszowce. Till today we do not have a place of rest, persecuted and hunted we are. A wild hatred exists against a nation that no longer exists. What we have lived through I do not want to describe. My family today consists of the following persons.

  1. Krochmal, Leo – b 1901

  2. Krochmal, Rosa – b 1907

  3. Krochmal, Genia – b 1934

  4. Krochmal, Sylvia – b 1946

  (the youngest child)

  My Mattis is no longer.

  He itemises his family, one to four: his sole possessions, remnants from his past, himself, Number One. Minus one, another left behind.

  ‘What did you expect?’ my mother asks. ‘A full confession?’

  I can trace his journey from other fragments in the package. There is a train ticket purchased on 13 August 1946; 360 złoty for the family, a discount for the baby. It transports him from Bielawa to Szczecin, the route to Berlin. Szczecin, the same place I returned to fifty years later in search of his Polish protectors.

  Two months remain for Raisl my grandmother. My Buba.

  Sometimes I think that if I were granted the time before I die, I would burn all my private papers. I would prefer to leave the idea of me, rather than bits and pieces. What would my descendants make of all those scribbles and doodles?

  I had already seen how my grandfather reinvented his own life.

  The next letter is written in Ukrainian script, stamped with an official seal.

  ‘We,’ it declares in florid lettering, ‘the Head and Secretary of the Village of Bołszowce’ (it says town, then a thick line changes the entry to village) ‘confirm that Citizen Krochmal Rosa resettled in Poland and left the following assets in Bołszowce.’

  Not her shoes, bought for the Jewish New Year, but: a plot of land, real estate in the market-place, twenty-two metres long and fifteen metres wide, an additional five-and-a-half hectares of general property.

  It does not mention the studnia, the well, the landmark my mother remembers, finds.

  ‘See!’ my mother shouts. ‘See!’

  She grabs the document from my hand and holds it against her heart. ‘Do you know what it means to own real estate in the market-place?’

  There is more.

  ‘I, the undersigned, public notary of Bołszowce, confirm that citizen Krochmal Leo Shimonovich was a citizen of Bołszowce but nowadays lives in Stanisławów.’

  My mother is reading for me: ‘… a landowner, bought a village, Kinashev, a stable, barn, thatched roof of straw, orchards, two hectares … Wheeeee.’

  Pola Krochmala.

  Krochmal Fields.

  The Rothschild of Bołszowce.

  She is breathless: ‘Tell the Baba Yaga,’ the lady with one tooth.

  ‘And eight hectares of ordinary land.’

  The original contract, the document says, has been lost, but it was registered in the presence of a witness from Bołszowce. Signed, August 1945.

  ‘Mine, mine.’

  My grandfather, who erased Bołszowce from his false autobiography, preserved the things from the place that was no longer: his pride, his past, his property.

  Arriving in Melbourne from Germany more than a decade after his eldest daughter, he was virtually penniless, initially dependent on her support. He always seemed miserable, even when he pushed me in my stroller through the streets of Elwood; not the kind of grandfather who would spoil me with gifts and affection.

  ‘I confirm,’ the next document says, ‘that citizen Krochmal was the cantor of the Jewish synagogue in Bołszowce.’

  A forgotten element of his life.

  ‘Yes, and he sang in Berlin too.’

  After, when he remarried.

  And for the little girl: a gift. Found on the bottom of the pile, a piece of paper I hand over to my mother.

  It is 21 April 1945. After liberation, the beginning in the end, in Bołszowce, her farewell. She is ten years old. I had always ignored the part of her story when we went back after liberation to Bołszowce. I went to school there for a short time, but we were forced to leave when the Banderowce came.

  The episode is recorded by her teacher in a handwritten report card. Genia Krochmal, Yevgenia in Russian, daughter of Leo, it says, received straight A’s.

  Language—5

  Arithmetic—5

  Calligraphy—4 (‘what do you expect? no practice in the dark’)

  Drawing—5

  Singing—5

  Gymnastics—5

  Behaviour—5

  ‘Anything, I could have been anything.’

  Anything.

  Kinderyorn. Like a dream, all has passed, no more.

  Wheeeee.

  XLVIII

  My mother opens a drawer in a cupboard in her bedroom. She emerges with a possession, a small plastic container, the sort used for facial cream. The lid is cracked.

  She hands me the c
ontainer.

  ‘This is you,’ she says.

  Inside I find a lock of golden hair.

  ‘Why now?’ I ask.

  ‘I never thought to show it to you before.’

  The fragment of hair is familiar, the same colouring as my own three children. Goldene lokshn, my parents call these grandchildren. Gold noodles. Goldilocks.

  I want to tell her that I have found my first memory; before the swing, beyond the bed positioned against the wall in our first apartment.

  My mother is combing my hair. I am sucking my thumb, lying in bed, while she passes her hand through my hair. Goldene lokshn, she is saying. Golden head. I remember it as a lullaby.

  ‘It’s all I have,’ she says. ‘Memories. Just memories. Nothing more.’

  ‘Give them to me,’ I plead. ‘Let me take them.’

  She shakes her head and turns away.

  ‘The hair you can have. The rest is mine.’

  XLIX

  As she twirls under her husband’s arms there is no knowing how old she really is: twenty? forty? sixty?

  ‘Nu, can your mother dance?’ she calls out from the centre of the floor. ‘Anything—rock’n’roll, rhumba, tangos …’ but she is whisked away before she has time to boast of the additional dance modes included in her repertory.

  ‘Spring chickens,’ one of their friends whispers in my ear, slapping my shoulder.

  ‘Young lovers,’ another says, ‘nothing has changed since Maison de Luxe.’

  ‘Sundays,’ I answer, and he nods his head in agreement.

  Sunday was Maison de Luxe … Monday was Leggetts Prahran, you know, where the coffee lounge is now … Tuesday was, I think, was Ziegfield, used to be over there, jitterbug … Wednesday we went, I think it was Heidelberg Town Hall … Thursday, mmm … Friday was Trocadero, in the city … Saturday the Palm Grove, but sometimes in St Kilda Shul, in the Samuel Meyers Hall …

  Did he wipe the sweat off his brow as he does now?

  … so I told her, ‘You want to go dancing Sunday in Maison de Luxe?’ and she said: ‘Why not, Joe?’

  He waves at his grandchildren from the centre of the floor around which the crowd has gathered to watch the spontaneous performance.

  ‘Rock Around the Clock’, my mother calls out to the bandmaster, a Russian immigrant who is accompanied on the piano by his daughter.

  ‘Pretty, no?’ a man says to me in Yiddish while munching on a piece of chocolate. He returns to his table where friends from his town are still arguing about the number of survivors.

  ‘Maybe fifty,’ one says.

  ‘Don’t speak rubbish,’ his wife scoffs at him, ‘not so many.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ a survivor who has travelled from Chicago ponders, ‘there are seven of us here.’

  Seven Jews: less than a quorum of landsman from four corners of the world gathered in Israel half a century later to celebrate their survival.

  ‘Not celebrate,’ my mother corrects me, ‘commemorate.’

  They commemorate by celebrating, every night in this Tel Aviv hotel located on the beachfront where they gather to listen to music and dance till the early hours of the morning.

  On the next table there are eleven Jews trading memories and poker cards while eating peanuts and tapping their feet to the music.

  They have come from Australia, America, Canada, England, France, South America, but they are bound together by a different geography whose borders are marked out on faded maps—Częstochowa, Łódź, Tarnów, Radom, Płock. Tiny shtetls relived around small tables filled with pint-size glasses of scotch and bowls overflowing with sunflower seeds.

  ‘Vun, tu, sree o’clock, four o’clock rrrock …’ they murmur while applauding my parents’ majestic display.

  ‘Oy, I’m shvitzing,’ my father calls out while peeling his wet collar off the back of his neck, but his wife’s energy has not yet flagged. She must keep dancing, perhaps driven by the painful awareness that she has no table of her own to join, except as a visitor intruding on other people’s towns.

  Listen, I tell you what happened. There wasn’t many Jewish girls, maybe twenty or thirty boys to a Jewish girl. We danced all night, but some boys couldn’t get girls. Me, I had girls because I was a good dancer but some boys, it was very hard for them.

  My father left the port of Marseille for Australia on 14 September 1948 aboard the Napoli, the same liner which transported my mother from Munich four years later.

  She remembers:

  From Germany, we went by train to Genoa and boarded the Napoli. It took us over four weeks; the food was rotten and I got sick so I spent a lot of time sitting out on the deck. But I had fun, I was young and there was dancing and music. One Spaniard, I remember, fell in love with me. He wasn’t Jewish and so marriage wasn’t even a question for me. I remember arriving at the port in Melbourne. It was the eve of Yom Kippur: September 1952.

  The anniversary of Bołszowce’s Aktion: Yom Kippur in Melbourne. After a period of restricted immigration before the war, Australia provided shelter for 180,000 Displaced Persons, seventeen per cent of the total amount in Europe; about 18,000 were Jews.

  The immigration documents list my parents separately: a new number, a new life.

  For my father, his new life was accompanied by a new name. Yossl Bekiermaszyn was reborn as Joe Baker, although to his friends he always remained Yossl—Yossl the Buchenwald Boy. No longer the Wierzbniker, not the prisoner at Majówka, nor Number A18751 at Auschwitz. His deaths were left behind in the Old Home, relived in hidden places he travelled to in sleep. Life began in Buchenwald, first on the afternoon this seventeen year old boy was discovered by American tanks, and again in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell where he was given shelter with fellow inmates from the same row of barracks.

  Buchenwald in Melbourne was a sprawling cottage owned by the Jewish Welfare and Relief Society whose leaders sponsored the migration to Australia of a group of displaced adolescents. For one year in this welfare house the orphans wove dreams together about the future. After a few days we started to look for a job; ‘Joe,’ he told me, ‘this country needs tailors. You buy a machine and you’re already a boss.’ Within weeks Joe was sewing his dreams on the factory floors of Flinders Lane, lining sleeves for three pounds a week; then dresses for seven pounds ten, jackets for eighteen pounds. Six months work, six months no work, I had at least twenty jobs, until he could afford his first machine. By 1951 he was a boss, in a clothing company whose name—Swiss Models—would forever remind him of the moment his time began.

  My mother’s dreams were spun in Elwood, where she lived with her relatives, Ciociu and Wujciu, who assisted her migration to Australia. I was underpaid because I was young and had no experience. I didn’t even know how to start the machine. I sewed labels, but later on I used to model samples for the buyers. Until she met her husband-to-be: I went to a dance and he saw me there … and on 6 December 1953 … we were married.

  On their honeymoon she got sick. He cried, ‘Genia, Genia.’

  And what do I remember?

  Holidays to Surfers Paradise and sunburned bodies.

  Passover feasts and Sabbath dinners with smoking candles.

  Barmitzvah celebrations and Red Aces around the kitchen table.

  My mother singing in the kitchen; my father lying on a green couch, asleep.

  ‘Genia, Genia.’

  Both of them laughing, crying, shouting; showering my brother and me with love and adoration, dreaming through us their burnt desires.

  An Australian Jewish childhood.

  And my parents dressed in their proudest clothes for the annual Buchenwald Ball.

  And dancing.

  Dancing at Buchenwald, not there, but in spite of there, in defiance of then, in celebration of now in memory of them.

  O Buchenwald, we do lament and wail,

  whatever our fate may be.

  But we want to say yes to life,

  for someday the time will come when we are free!


  Freedom is not a happy ending. It is a flame that dances in remembrance, inside the blackness.

  We come from crematoria flames and that’s exactly where your father came from. We come from bunkers and from the woods and that’s exactly where I come from. So always remember it, and your children will remember it. They will survive, they will sing and they will dance.

  ‘Nu? Can your mother dance?’

  ‘Oy, I’m not so young any more.’

  ‘Two old people.’

  ‘But can you imagine how we danced when we were young?’

  ‘Quick, quick, they’re playing again.’

  It’s not all of it, only a bit of my life story; there is a lot I don’t remember. I can tell you only one thing, that I hope we will all live to dance, there is still a lot of dancing we have to do. And one day when we’re not here, listen to this story with your children and say to them, ‘You had a grandmother, you had a grandfather, who …

  L

  … it always begins in blackness, until the first light illuminates a hidden fragment of memory …

  Notes and Sources

  I began writing this book after recording my parents’ stories toward the end of 1994. At the time I had a vague notion of reconstructing their pasts based on historical documentation. I was planning a sabbatical in Jerusalem and intended to use my time away from university scouring the library at Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to Holocaust memory. I never expected to uncover documents so intimately bound to my parents’ stories; the book I imagined was written in two distinct voices, that of my parents, embedded in my historical commentary.

  I commenced with the card catalogues: W for Wierzbnik; B for Bołszowce. I was rewarded with an indispensable volume of memories compiled by survivors of my father’s town. In contrast, nothing appeared under the entry for my mother’s birthplace, a pattern which repeated itself throughout my investigations.

  I then moved on to the microfilm records of the International Tracing Service, an organisation established by the Allied High Commission in the aftermath of war. Centred in Arolsen, a small town in West Germany, the collection has been released to Yad Vashem as one of many post-war deals involving reparations of money and memory. It came as a shock when I first encountered a familiar person on a frame of microfilm: the image of my paternal grandfather’s name inscribed in records from the Buchenwald camp haunted me and forced a reassessment of my entire project. My father’s ‘prison’ records were also drawn from the same archival collection, allowing me to reconstruct aspects of his internment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.