The Fiftieth Gate

by Mark Raphael Baker

  Auschwitz–Birkenau

  My description of the initial encounter with Auschwitz is from Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York and London, 1961); the Auschwitz III camp known as Buna–Monowitz is discussed in J. Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben (New York and London, 1978); a detailed source on the day-to-day changes in the population of Auschwitz is D. Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (London, 1990); the description of the Central Sauna in Birkenau is taken from J. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (New York, 1989); Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum, eds (Bloomington, Indiana, 1994); the idea of alternative lives explored in the section on Buna–Monowitz is discussed by M. Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (California, 1994).

  Treblinka

  The account of Hinda Bekiermaszyn’s deportation to Treblinka on 27 October 1942 has been constructed from a range of testimonies and documents. These include Vassili Grossman, The Hell of Treblinka, trans. I. Ebert. The testimony was written by a Russian Jew born in the Ukraine (1905–64) who came as a war journalist to Treblinka with the Russian army. The testimony was first published serially in late 1944–1945 in Red Star, a Soviet newspaper; Rachel Auerbach (1903–76), ‘In the Fields of Treblinka’ and Abraham Krzepicki, ‘Eighteen Days in Treblinka’, in The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary, A. Donat, ed. (New York, 1979). Krzepicki’s testimony was given between December 1942 and January 1943, and the manuscript was buried in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto along with other documents from the Ringelblum archives; the first eye-witness report on Treblinka, written by an escaped prisoner, is Yankl Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka (New York, 1984). It was translated by the American Representation of General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland and distributed clandestinely in Poland in May 1944. It was published in English later that year; G. Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (New York, 1983); Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, Indiana, 1987).

  Survivor Registries & Displaced Persons Camps

  The following texts are located in the Yad Vashem Central Archives: Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria, Sharit Ha-Pletah: Bavaria (Munich, June 1945); Jewish Agency for Palestine, Search Bureau for Missing Relatives, Register of Jewish Survivors: List of Jews Rescued in Different European Countries 1 (Jerusalem, 1945); World Jewish Congress, Jews Registered in the Kielce District (based on a list submitted by the Central Jewish Committee in Poland); Union of Polish Migrants and the Central Committee to Aid Polish Jews, Reshimat ha-sridim shel yehudei polin (List of Remnants of Polish Jewry), Booklet A (Jerusalem, 1945); Death Books from Auschwitz (K. G. Saur, 1995).

  The ‘Traumatic Inventory’ of survivor symptoms is based on interviews with people in the Displaced Persons camps by an American psychologist, David Boder, in Topical Autobiographies of Displaced People (Los Angeles, 1956). See his essay, ‘The Displaced People of Europe’, Illinois Tech Engineer (1947) and his book, I Did Not Interview the Dead (Urbana, 1949).

  On the DPs, see K. S. Pinson, ‘Jewish Life in Liberated Germany’, Jewish Social Studies 9 (1947); Y. Bauer, Out of the Ashes (London, 1989); L. Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York, 1982); the quotation by US Military Chaplain Rabbi Herschel Schacter is from The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, From Holocaust to New Life (New York, 1985).

  On refugees to Australia, see W. D. Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History, vol. 2 (Melbourne, 1991); M. Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees 1933–1948 (Sydney, 1985).

  The Fiftieth Gate

  The epigraph for The Fiftieth Gate is drawn from numerous sources. The idea of gates is mentioned in the Bible in various contexts: the Gates of Heaven, the Gates of Sheol, the Gate of Death, the Gate of the Shadow of Death, the Gate of the Righteous. In the body of Jewish mystical literature known as Kabbalah, the metaphor of gates is further developed to include the Gates of Prayer, the Gates of Repentance, and the Gates of Light. See, for example, the thirteenth-century text by Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla, The Gates of Light (Sha’arei Orah), trans. A. Weinstein (New York, 1994). These ideas can be traced to much earlier writings about celestial spheres, known as the literature of hechalot (palaces) and merkavot (chariots). The fiftieth gate appears in a central text of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar (Book of Splendor), which refers to this gate as the highest knowledge of God. The best compilation of sources in English from the Zohar is The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, ed. I. Tishby, 3 vols (Oxford, 1991). In talmudic literature of the fifth century, Moses is said to have only reached the forty-ninth gate because of the sin of hitting the rock which prevented him from entering the Promised Land (‘Fifty gates of understanding were created in the world, and all but one were given to Moses’, Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 38a). The Jews during their exodus from slavery in Egypt are said to have descended to the forty-ninth gate of impurity; had they rejected the freedom of the desert and returned to Egypt, their punishment would have been the oblivion of the fiftieth gate. For this idea, see the Hasidic sermons on Passover of the current Slonimer authority, Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezhovsky, in Sefer Netivot Shalom, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1995). The fiftieth gate is also explored in the writings of the eighteenth-century Hasidic master, Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, from whom I also took my dream in Gate XXXVIII. See the story of ‘The Lost Princess’, The Thirteen Tales of Rabbi Nachman from Breslav (Jerusalem, 1978). The notion of God’s hidden light which allows us to see from one end of the world to the other is in numerous sources, including Babylonian Talmud, Chagiga 12a; Genesis Rabba 3:6.

  The title for this book was only developed at the end of its writing, when I came to understand the presence of gates in the narrative. Only weeks before publication of the book, after its completion, did I think to count the number of sections which make up my family’s collective memory. There were exactly fifty sections, the last one ending where it begins.

  A note to the reader

  Readers may find the pronunciation of place-names and personal family names difficult. I have attempted to preserve their original Polish or Yiddish spelling in order to retain authenticity, although inconsistencies frequently appear where there is a more common English usage.

  It may help to note the following:

  sz is pronounced as sh

  rz or ż makes a vibrating sound like zh

  w should be read as v

  j corresponds to the English y

  t sounds like an English w

  ó is pronounced oo

  c reads as ts

  Some common words:

  Bekiermaszyn = Beckermashin

  Bołszowce = Bolshovtse

  Bursztyn = Burshtin

  Cała = Tsawa

  Judenrat =Yoodenrat

  Leibush/Leib = Laybush/Layb

  Lwów = Lvoov

  Łódź = Woodzh

  Starachowice = Starahovitse

  Szydłowiec = Shidwoviets

  Wierzbnik = Vyezhbnik

  złoty = zwoti

  Żyd = Zhid

  Glossary

  aktion = raid

  barmitzvah = religious confirmation

  buba = grandmother

  cheder = room; Jewish elementary school

  cholnt = Sabbath stew

  chutzpah = insolence

  farshtinkene = stinking

  Hasid = pious; devotee of Jewish mystical philosophy

  hora = circle dance

  Jude = Jew

  Judenlager/Julag = Jewish labour camp

  Judenrat = Jewish Council (under Nazi occupation)

  kabbalah = Jewish mysticism

  Kaddish = mourner’s prayer

  kapo = head; prisoner leader

  kartofel = potato

  katzetnik = concentration camp inmate

  kommando = SS terminology for work squad

  kvetch = complain, sigh

  lager = camp

  lands
man = someone from the same town

  mameh = mother

  mamzer = bastard

  mezuzah = scroll fixed to the doorpost

  nebech = alas, pity, ‘poor thing’

  nu? = so? well?

  protektsia = connections

  Rosh Hashana = Jewish New Year

  rynek = market-square

  Shabbes = Sabbath

  shmock = penis, a dope

  shnozzle = nose

  shoah = holocaust

  shofar = ram’s horn

  shpritz = sprinkle

  shtetl = small town; Jewish community

  Shul = Synagogue

  shvitz = sweat

  Talmud = rabbinic lore and law

  tateh = father

  toches = backside

  Torah = Scroll of the Law; Bible

  yizkor = remembrance; prayer for the dead

  Yom Kippur = Day of Atonement

  yortseit = anniversary of someone’s death

  zeyde = grandfather

  Żyd(owski) = Jew(ish)

  Acknowledgments

  It begins where it ends, and ends where it begins: with my parents’ stories, and my stories of their stories, and now, their stories of my stories.

  This was the deal: I would give them my knowledge of history; they would give me their memory. An exchange of pasts.

  First I interviewed them, over a period of three months, in 1994. Twenty hours of voice on micro-cassette, endless hours of talking-head on video.

  Then we returned to their places of origin, Poland and the Ukraine; 1935 in 1995.

  ‘Don’t take me there,’ my parents plead, then surrender.

  ‘My house! It’s no longer there.’

  And then, the wrangling:

  ‘No more history.’

  ‘The wrong memory.’

  To my parents, for looking back with me, for returning to the places that are no longer, for giving me their memories, and their constant unmeasured love; to them, I give this book, with my unmeasured love.

  I want to thank my family for sharing this journey. Kerryn, my wife, who travelled with me through every gate, and made every step more considerate, more pleasurable, more loving, before her untimely death last year. Our children, Gabriel, Sarah and Rachel, who pull me back on the path beyond memory, and make me laugh along the way.

  Johnny, my brother, in name and deed, whose support gives me the confidence to write our parents’ stories. My extended family, too numerous to mention by name, who helped assemble the fragments.

  Krystyna Wyszogrodzki, whose scholarship and counsel made this book possible.

  Finally, I thank my initial publishers at HarperCollins, who enabled me to share my parents’ stories, and the wonderful team at Text Publishing, who showed confidence in The Fiftieth Gate by producing this twentieth-anniversary edition.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Mark Raphael Baker 1997

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Harper Collins Publishers, Australia in 1997.

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2017.

  Cover design by Text

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Baker, Mark Raphael, 1959– author.

  Title: The fiftieth gate: a journey through memory/by Mark Raphael Baker.

  ISBN: 9781925498615 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925410853 (ebook)

  Subjects: Baker family. Jews—Poland—Biography. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland. Jews, Polish—Australia—Biography. Holocaust survivors—Australia.