‘So it will take me five minutes longer to become a millionaire, but now I’m going to enjoy myself,’ he would reply.
But beneath the calm exterior, Fred was not as tranquil as he appeared. Although he never talked about the past, it festered in the depths of his mind. At night, often his own screams would wake him. Covered in sweat, he would tremble, shaking off the invisible hands that held him down while white-coated Nazi doctors sliced open his flesh.
Things came to a head in 1959 when he had surgery on his leg. ‘As I was coming out of the anaesthetic I became hysterical,’ he recalls. ‘I thought I was in the gas chamber and they were trying to kill me. I screamed for my mother and grappled with the doctors and nurses until I fell out of bed and crashed to the floor. They thought I’d gone berserk, they had no idea what was wrong with me.’
So when he needed another operation several years later, he alerted the surgeon beforehand. ‘Be prepared in case I put on a floorshow,’ he said, explaining what had happened the previous time. The doctor told him not to worry. He had arranged for a nurse to stay with him until he regained consciousness in case he had a similar episode. ‘I had never come across such kind people before,’ he says.
Through all the years, Fred had never abandoned his dream of becoming a chef. While working as a cabinet-maker by day, he attended catering classes at night and worked as a head waiter in various restaurants. One of them was a nightclub called Hey Diddle Griddle, then managed by Harry Miller who later became an entrepreneur and celebrity agent in Australia. In 1962 Fred fulfilled his lifelong dream. The terrified fourteen year old who had prepared doughnuts at a New Year’s Eve party for the Nazi elite at Gross Am Wannsee twenty years before, gained his catering diploma, bought a restaurant they called Barbecue in Dominion Road, Mt Eden, and finally became a chef. By then Fred was married and his wife Billie did front of house while he was in his element in the kitchen, frying schnitzel, braising beef and preparing apple strudl. Fred’s Wiener schnitzel, friendly service and reasonable prices attracted a devoted clientele. Although the restaurant was always full, they closed down in 1985, after the government introduced the GST. ‘I preferred to close down than have to explain to the customers why we had to increase our prices,’ he says.
From the concerned look on Billie’s face while he talks, I can see how supportive and caring she is in her understated way. Billie isn’t Jewish, nor are their daughters. ‘That doesn’t matter to me at all,’ he says. ‘It’s not important. I am what I am, she is what she is, and we respect each other’s differences.’
While Fred and I continue to talk, Billie calls out to say that she’s leaving to visit their older daughter Dallas, who is about to have a biopsy for a tumour. ‘Medical experiments!’ Fred comments with a wry expression. In view of his past experiences, it’s a chilling phrase, but he is trying to make light of it. I’m amazed that at such a stressful time, he is willing to spend all day talking to me about the past, but perhaps it distracts him from his anxiety. Looking at me with that stoic expression of his, he says, ‘It will be all right, she’ll be okay,’ as if to reassure me, and probably himself as well. That’s what his parents in Berlin used to say to reassure him when life was falling apart all around them.
Returning to the story of their restaurant, he tells me that it became a great success, even though he wasn’t a good businessman. ‘When the bank manager told me I needed an overdraft, I didn’t want to take it. Finally I agreed to take it for six months but I repaid it as soon as I could and refused to take another one. I hated the idea of borrowing. It was like taking something that didn’t belong to me.’
Apart from his abhorrence of debt, Fred didn’t want to owe money because he didn’t expect to live very long. In 1945, when he was emaciated, injured and sick with typhus at the hospital in Nordhausen, the doctor had warned that his life expectancy was short, that he wouldn’t last beyond forty. Like an Aboriginal tribesman having the bone pointed at him, he was so convinced the prediction would come true that he didn’t bother taking out life insurance. ‘I was very surprised to find that I was still here after I turned forty,’ he chuckles. ‘It wasn’t until my fiftieth birthday that I finally realised that I was going to live! But I never dreamed I would celebrate my seventieth with my wife, sister, children and five grandchildren around me!’
Fred and his sister Hansi are much closer now than they were when he arrived, but it took almost forty years for them to start talking about the past. On New Year’s Day in 1994, when he dropped in to wish her Happy New Year, she told him for the first time what had happened to her after she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then forced on the Death March to Bergen-Belsen, where she was interned at the same time as Anne Frank. Finally she answered the question that had bothered him ever since he discovered that she had survived. Why had she not returned to Berlin after the war? She explained that she could not bear to go back after their parents had been taken away. By then the rift was healed and the reason no longer mattered.
The following year Fred was invited to Germany for the opening of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. It was his first time back since 1948 and the four days he spent there were agonising. ‘I couldn’t cope with the formalities and ceremonies while graffiti on the walls in Frankfurt said “Jews Out”. Plainclothes policemen accompanied us around town, to protect us, they said. That made me freeze. I wasn’t ready for the polite speeches or profuse apologies. The visit stirred up such vivid memories that the nightmares came back. After that visit I decided to forgive the Germans. Hatred only begets more hatred. But forget? Never!’
The visit to Germany had an unexpected result: it launched him into a new role. Until then, Fred had avoided talking about the Holocaust. As he speaks, my eye falls on the faded number below the short sleeve of his blue and white check shirt: 106792.
‘Whenever people asked me about the tattoo on my forearm, I would say it was my telephone number. I didn’t want to talk about it and I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me,’ he says. But when he returned to Auckland in 1995, he was interviewed on the Tonight television program and soon afterwards he was invited to talk about his experiences to schoolchildren.
‘I was petrified. I’d never done any public speaking before. I didn’t know how to talk to children about such things or how to describe such personal experiences.’
The first time he stood on the dais of a school hall with a hundred curious young faces turned towards him, he trembled so much he wondered whether he’d be able to stay on his feet long enough to tell his story. What if they were bored or made fun of what he was saying? How would he find the words to tell these young people about the things that had happened to him when he was their age? What if they didn’t believe him?
There are times when one has a sense of being involved in something so important that it seems as though one was born to do it, and no matter how difficult it is, the significance of the task transcends personal discomfort. We who survived feel that we have been spared and owe it to those who were not to bear witness about the past. It’s a sacred duty to tell what we saw and experienced because we alone can speak for the millions whose voices were silenced forever. On these stressful occasions Fred suffered anguish by day and recurring nightmares by night, but he overcame his anxiety to tell his story.
Since then, he has often spoken to schoolchildren and students, but each time his hands shake and his stomach churns. The Holocaust denial industry has found a strong foothold in New Zealand and sometimes their adherents attend his talks to try and discredit him, arguing that what he lived through did not exist. Every time this happens, he is paralysed with anger and terrified of losing his composure.
‘I get choked up when they try to bait me but I have to control it,’ he says. ‘Each time before I start, I remind myself why I’m doing this. My message is really about understanding and tolerance. I tell them that you don’t have to love people but you have to respect them so we can all live together without discrimination.
But that terror of being challenged, of not being believed, never leaves me.’
Whenever he speaks at schools, universities, churches and charity gatherings, he always begins by saying, ‘I only speak for myself. I don’t talk about politics or religion, or say one faith is better than another, I only tell my story. And please, don’t look at me as if I’m a hero. I’m not a hero. I made it, that’s all, but why, I have no idea. I wasn’t clever or resourceful or prepared for anything that happened to me. I just lived from day to day. I didn’t even believe in God then, but I do now.’
The man who reconnected with his faith in New Zealand became vice president of the synagogue and president of the Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish burial society. ‘I feel guilty about resigning after sixteen years but I’ve had enough of burials, coping with grieving families and sitting up with the bereaved all night.’ He still works part-time for an Auckland firm, Fletcher Challenge, purchasing stationery, organising personal cards for the executives and co-ordinating their monthly board meetings.
On the walls of his study hang plaques, certificates and awards. The chef’s certificate he shows me with pride; the others I discover on my own. He is proud of the community service award from the City of Auckland for voluntary work counselling people at a citizens’ advice bureau. ‘I’m happy to put something back into the community that welcomed me so warmly fifty years ago when I arrived,’ he says.
31
The woman who answered the phone sounded pleasantly detached but as soon as I explained my reason for calling, she became quite excited.
‘The Derna ?’ she exclaimed. ‘Was that the name of the ship I arrived on? I never knew. I was one year old at the time and I could never get my mother to talk about it.’
Like Fred Silberstein, Eva arrived in Auckland in 1948, with her mother Irene Abrahamsohn and grandmother Gretchen. I knew that Irene was the German doctor who had organised food for the babies on board, but finding this family proved difficult as they were not listed in the Auckland telephone directory.
Just as I was about to give up, one listing caught my eye. The name was slightly different but I decided to try it just in case they had anglicised the spelling. The man who answered the phone had a clipped New Zealand accent and a laconic manner. After a long pause, he said, ‘Gretchen Abrahamsohn. That would have been my grandmother, but she died a long time ago. Her daughter would be my Aunty Irene, I suppose.’ With a little prodding, he added, ‘Irene is still alive but she’s in a nursing home.’ While I was visualising dementia, Alzheimers and the whole catastrophe, he elaborated, ‘Irene’s daughter Eva lives in Auckland but I’m not in touch with either of them.’ After mentioning a family feud, he suggested I call his brother for Eva’s phone number.
Although Eva is eager to help me, she is dubious about her mother’s reaction.
‘Mother is very sharp mentally but she’s eighty-seven and has a very difficult personality. I never know from one day to the next what kind of mood she’ll be in,’ she says in her resonant youthful voice. ‘Still, some days she’s better than others. I’ll tell her you’d like to meet her but how helpful she’ll be, I don’t know. She doesn’t like talking about the past.’
On our way to the Onsdorp Retirement Village in Glendene the following afternoon, Eva confides that her mother is not enthusiastic about this meeting.
‘So I don’t know whether you’ll be there for ten minutes, one hour, or whether Mother will talk to you at all. When I told her about you, her reaction was, “Why should I tell her my story? I want to write my own book about my life!” So I told her she wouldn’t need to tell you anything if she didn’t want to, because you’d tell her stories about the other passengers.’ I can see that Eva has become skilful at dealing with her mother’s moods.
A trained nurse who works part-time in a medical practice these days, Eva looks as young as she sounds. She is small and energetic with brown hair cropped into a fashionably wispy style, a snub nose and large eyes behind shiny glasses. As we walk into the retirement home she turns to me with another warning. ‘You need to know that my mother is a bit of an intellectual snob.’
The sign on the door says ‘Irene Valentine’ so I assume she must have married in New Zealand. The woman who opens the door has cloud-white hair that curls around her face, alert dark eyes and a beautifully shaped tip-tilted nose, unusual in an old person. The walls are covered in paintings and sketches, photographs are stacked against the wall, the shelves display knick-knacks and memorabilia, and the books are by writers such as Goethe, Balzac and Elie Wiesel. As we exchange pleasantries, the sharp scrutiny in Irene’s gaze softens when Beatrice, her handsome tabby, pads in from the sunny courtyard and swishes her tail against our legs.
A moment later Irene swoops on a large black and white framed drawing and holds it up to show me. With a smile that reveals protruding front teeth, she asks, ‘Do you know who drew this?’ Across the table, Eva’s amused expression denotes ‘I told you so’. I feel like Calaf when confronted by the last riddle of Turandot. Having come this far, however, I’m anxious not to fail the final test. As I scan the drawing, eliminating artists one by one, at last the distinctive interlocking initials in the right-hand corner stir my memory. ‘Albrecht Durer!’ Irene Valentine is nodding restrained approval.
‘So, do I pass?’ I ask. We both know it’s not a question.
Irene migrated to New Zealand in 1948 with one-year-old Eva and her mother Gretchen because her brother had settled here nine years earlier. He was a builder at a time when tradesmen were being recruited by the government and met their strict criteria for non-British immigrants, which enabled him to get out of Germany just in time. The family had lost touch with him during the war and Gretchen was convinced that her son had died, a perception that she wasn’t able to dislodge from her mind even after he contacted them and sent them permits and money for their fares.
By then Gretchen Abrahamsohn had lived through fifteen years of persecution and hardship in Germany. Because she had married a Jew, she had to deal with the loss of their home, business and income throughout the Nazi era. They lived on starvation rations and if it hadn’t been for the occasional secret charity of their neighbours, they would not have survived. Humiliated and depressed, her husband died of a heart attack in 1943, while Irene was barred from practising medicine. Mother and daughter lived through the terrifying bombing of Berlin when buildings shook and collapsed all around them. They had to scrounge among the ruins of the starving city for food and water during the occupation by Russian soldiers who looted and raped indiscriminately.
After the ten-week ordeal on the Derna , during which she had broken her leg, Gretchen finally limped onto the tarmac in New Zealand to discover that her son, whom she hadn’t seen for nine terrible years, had not come to the airport to meet them. To exacerbate her feeling of abandonment, she didn’t have the money for their cab fare and had to ask her son to come out and pay the driver when they pulled up outside his home. Much later, Irene discovered that her brother had felt so overwhelmed by the responsibilities that this reunion entailed, that he had been unable to face them. He and his wife had three small children and were expecting their fourth, and he felt crushed by the prospect of having three more people under his crowded roof. But Gretchen never got over her anguish at being rejected by her son after travelling across the world to join him.
They hadn’t been in New Zealand very long when Irene met her ship-mate Herta Birnbaum in Auckland, which they both considered provincial despite its pretty harbour setting. ‘Let’s drink a toast to our new life,’ Irene suggested.
As they entered a pub, a row of men slouching at the bar swivelled around to stare. Nice girls wouldn’t be seen dead in public bars, Irene was later told. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this strange place where bars closed at 6 pm and having a social drink was solely a male prerogative.
Life in New Zealand proved much tougher than Irene had imagined. It was obvious that they couldn’t continue to sta
y at her brother’s place, where they felt unwelcome. She had to earn a living as soon as possible, but to practise as a doctor she would have to study again. With no money, an increasingly distraught mother and a small daughter to support, she felt the problems were insurmountable. A hundred times a day she cursed the moment she had decided to leave Berlin.
‘I was emotionally drained, physically exhausted and thoroughly miserable,’ she says, stroking the tabby that has curled up in her lap. ‘If I’d had the money for our fares, I would have gone straight back.’ In her distress, the harsh conditions of post-war Berlin seemed preferable to the hardship she faced in New Zealand.
The medical faculty at the University of Otago in Dunedin accepted Irene as a student in 1949, but repeating her studies proved to be a relentless struggle. When she had studied in Germany during the 1930s, she was shunned by her fellow students because she was half-Jewish, but in Dunedin she was regarded with mistrust because she was German. In 1939, in line with public opinion in New Zealand which had been against enrolling refugees, the University of Otago had opposed admitting foreign doctors. Although they later repealed this decision, this conservative Scottish enclave in New Zealand’s South Island was parochial and insular and its residents were not used to foreigners. Although Irene spoke English, most people regarded her as a German, unable to distinguish between the Germans who had supported the Nazi regime and those like her who had been victimised by it. For four long years, she felt like a sparrow trying to survive among a flock of ravens.
Eva sits forward while her mother speaks, straining to hear every word. Although Irene has forbidden me to use my tape recorder, occasionally I hear a muffled click from Eva’s handbag and realise that she is recording stories that she has never heard before and may never hear again.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 38