by Arnold Zable
On Zakynthos, it seems, filoxenia endures. Perhaps it is embedded in the island’s history. There is a journal, written by an English sailor, Master Thomas Dallam, in which he records his welcome on Zakynthos in 1599. He and his two companions are wary of the villagers. But they are warmly greeted, and invited into homes where they are wined and fed.
As I put the final touches to this story, I come across a more recent episode of filoxenia on Zakynthos. In the first week of November 2001, a Turkish-flagged boat, the Brenier, carrying 714 Iraqi Kurds and Afghan refugees, broke down in the Ionian Sea. Abandoned by its crew, the ship was rescued by the Greek coast guard.
The Brenier was towed to Zakynthos Town. As the crowded boat moved towards the port, the townsfolk lined the waterfront and cheered. The local baker was waiting with 700 sandwiches. Others residents brought food, clothes and blankets. Pregnant women and babies were ferried to hospital, or housed in hotels.
Observers were stunned by this outpouring of empathy. It convinced wary Greek officials to treat the new arrivals humanely. A number of families who arrived on the Brenier have since been provided a home on the island.
When I heard of this incident I recalled my night journeys on the Ionian Sea. My lasting impression of Zakynthos is of a glow of lights approaching in the dark. I think of our treatment of strangers, here in Australia, in recent years. At the time the Brenier was being towed into Zakynthos, off the north-west coast of Australia, asylum seekers were being turned back out to sea.
Perhaps we need to venture out and become seafarers again. We need to see the ropes being untied and flung on board. We need to cast off and watch the gap grow between water and earth. To drift awhile, beyond sight of all land. And then return, and see the continent anew. To see that it is an island after all. We need to approach with nothing but the clothes on our back, and hope that awaiting us is not one-eyed Cyclops, ready to hurl us into the sea, but people of good heart. Perhaps then, we will recall that our own forebears were strangers who approached these alien shores by boat.
The Treasure
I first saw the village idiot on a winter’s night in 1958. I was eleven years old. ‘We are going to the Yiddish teater,’ father had announced in a tone of voice that suggested he was speaking of something extraordinary, something sacred.
We walked from home, via the back lane, to Fenwick Street. It was a ten-minute stroll from our house to the theatre. We turned right into Lygon Street, and approached a two-storey building called the Kadimah. Lights blazed from its arched windows, the upstairs balcony and through the foyer doors. Directly opposite, enclosed behind a fence of cast-iron palings, interspersed with cypress and pines, stood the Melbourne General Cemetery.
A flight of stone steps led to the portico. The foyer was crowded with perfumed women and men wrapped in gabardine overcoats. The air choked with the smell of cigar smoke. And they talked, everybody at once, so it seemed, in a loud, unabashed, fiery Yiddish that sprinkled the foyer with greetings and gossip. The women glittered with sequined bodices and rouged lips. Occasionally, an acquaintance stooped over to pat me on the head or pinch me on the cheeks. I spun about in a whirl of excited adults who had become like children adrift in a funfair.
The repeated ringing of the warning bell summoned us to our seats. The talking subsided gradually with the dimming of the lights. The hall lapsed into darkness. A spotlight descended upon four musicians seated in front of the stage, to the right, beneath a glowing red exit sign. Piano, clarinet, violin and drums: a medley of melodies enveloped the audience. They were taken up as a humming, a singing under the breath.
The melodies evoked another place, another time: of horse-drawn wagons trundling over mist-laden paths, of village weddings and paupers’ banquets, of cobbled lanes and tree-lined avenues that led to the comfort of a mother’s lullabies. I felt both entranced and safe, seated among my elders in a hall simmering with longing.
The curtain rose to reveal a transparent inner curtain, a veil behind which could be seen the dimly lit living room of a shtetl cottage. To the rear, a large window opened out onto a backdrop of crooked dwellings backed by fields within which stood a cemetery, a jumble of stones leaning askew at acute angles. A woman sat by a table dozing, her head resting upon her arms. The actor was Mrs Blusztein, my best friend’s mother. She lived five minutes away, in Fenwick Street. Whenever I visited, she would serve cups of tea and plates piled high with poppy-seed biscuits and honey cake.
While Mrs Blusztein dozed, a narrator’s voice intoned the prologue. Napoleon Bonaparte, it was rumoured, had buried a treasure near the old cemetery as he retreated from Moscow through the river valleys of White Russia. Napoleon himself, no less, could now be seen emerging upon the stage. Despite the emperor’s uniform, I recognised Meier Ceprow the tailor, the father of another friend.
Napoleon walked in front of the veil, hand tucked inside his jacket. He walked slowly, to the beat of a drum, followed by two aides carrying a casket. The trio disappeared into the wings. They reappeared moments later behind the window and slowly lowered the casket, between the stones, into the cemetery grounds.
The veil lifted. The living room of the gravedigger’s hovel erupted into life. Over the next two hours a succession of shtetl dwellers—wealthy merchants and paupers, philanthropists, beggars, big shots and small fry—beat a path to the door, all drawn by the rumour that the gravedigger’s son, the village idiot, knew the whereabouts of Napoleon’s treasure.
The townsfolk were obsessed. They vied for the attention of the village idiot. Their longing inflated into hysteria. Like souls possessed they filed about the dimming stage in a winding procession, led by the idiot grasping a lantern. They followed him outside the house, towards the graveyard, chanting: ‘Kumt alle, lomir zukhen. Kumt alle, lomir zukhen.’ ‘Come everyone, let us search. Come everyone, let us search.’ The townsfolk reemerged in the cemetery where they hunted among the tombstones in a frenzy of need and greed. And, in so doing, they desecrated the graves of the dead.
It was the cemetery that loomed into view as we emerged from the Kadimah. It was approaching midnight. The spirits of the dead, father whispered, were stirring, arising from their decaying tombs, making their way in white shrouds among the cypresses and vacated graves as they did every night. ‘They are possessed souls,’ he said, ‘trying to find a way back home.’
As we retreated from Lygon Street into Fenwick Street, I imagined the shrouded corpses bent over in silent prayer, led by a village idiot clasping a lantern. And all remained in darkness, except for a solitary flame in the hands of a fool.
The actors who portrayed the idiot and his sister were Moshe Potashinski and Mila Waislitz. At that time, I knew nothing of their past. All I recall is the intensity of their acting, their frenetic energy, their manic eyes. It is only in recent years that I have been able to resurrect their extraordinary tale.
Moshe Potashinski was born in the Polish town of Kionz Vielke in 1903. His love of theatre was nurtured in the city of Bendzin, where he first appeared on stage in 1919, in a concert of Hebrew songs. In 1921, he founded a Yiddish theatre club. He was overjoyed when he heard that a drama academy was about to open its doors, in Warsaw, with courses taught by renowned Yiddish theatre directors, Mikhl Weichert and David Herman.
Potashinski was admitted to the studio in 1924. He made his debut the following year in a Warsaw theatre ensemble. He toured Poland with fellow graduates of the drama studio. On his return to Warsaw, he joined the newly formed kleynkunst theatre, Azazel. Kleynkunst, which literally means ‘small art’, combined the work of actors, singers and writers in a tapestry of monologues and skits, satires and songs, and excerpts from the Yiddish classics, held together by a master of ceremonies with a gift for stand-up comedy and small talk.
Yiddish cabaret was to become Moshe’s specialty. In 1930, he acted with the kleynkunst company Ararat. Its leading light was the poet Moshe Broderson. A fast-talking wit who could produce rhyming couplets on the run, he became one o
f Potashinski’s mentors. He was the cabaret king. He had an entourage of hangers-on who sat with him in the cafes of Lodz and Warsaw, and doted on his every word.
In 1932, Moshe joined the Vilna Troupe and fell in love with an eighteen-year-old actor called Mila Waislitz. Mila was born into the Yiddish theatre. She spent a good deal of her childhood travelling with her actor parents, Yankev and Jochevet Waislitz, veteran members of the Vilna Troupe.
The troupe was formed in 1916 by an ensemble of amateurs in German-occupied Vilna. They first met in a dilapidated circus building. The unheated building was so cold that the actors applied their grease paint only after warming it by electric bulbs. So legend has it.
The Vilna Troupe was driven by a desire to produce finely crafted plays. The performers adopted the Stanislawski method and paid attention to every nuance of the written word. They drew on an audience that hungered after quality theatre. The ensemble toured the provinces and arrived in Warsaw in 1917, where they were hailed as the pioneers of a new era on the Yiddish stage. They embarked on tours of Polish towns where they were greeted by dignitaries, showered with flowers, followed by coteries of admirers.
In 1920 a dybbuk entered into the Vilna Troupe. A dybbuk is a lost soul in search of the body of a living being to possess. The play, The Dybbuk, was written by Sholem Anski, a poet, chain-smoker and revolutionary who sang the praises of peasant life. From 1912 to 1914, he led an ethnographic expedition through the Yiddish hamlets of the Ukraine. The team collected songs and melodies, proverbs, sacred objects, legends and tales. Anski was obsessed with preserving the folklore of a vanishing world. His play was based upon the motifs he retrieved as he journeyed from shtetl to shtetl.
Anski died in 1920 without ever seeing The Dybbuk produced. The Vilna Troupe worked feverishly to perform it at the author’s remembrance evening. The premiere took place, in accordance with tradition, at his sloishim, thirty days after he passed away.
The audience was mesmerised by the tale of Khonnon and Leah. The couple had been promised to each other by their fathers at birth. Khonnon’s father dies not long after his son is born. Leah’s father forgets the vow, and she is betrothed to another. Khonnon is devastated. He dabbles in the Kabbala, the arcane practices of Jewish mysticism. ‘Never practice Kabbala without a master!’ the rabbis have warned. When Khonnon realises his incantations and spells have not worked, he despairs. He surrenders to the powers of darkness and dies.
As the village prepares for the wedding, Leah wanders off in her bridal gown to the cemetery. She calls out to Khonnon’s soul, and he enters into her. ‘I have returned to my promised bride and will not leave her,’ his voice cries. Leah has been possessed by a dybbuk, the townsfolk realise.
The rabbis gather and enter into a battle with the dybbuk. The tale of the original vow is revealed. As punishment, Leah’s wealthy father is ordered to hand over half his wealth to the poor. But Khonnon still clings tenaciously to the bride. After much effort and prayer, Leah is exorcised. The wedding canopy is prepared again, but Leah’s family makes a fatal mistake. The bride is left alone for a moment just as she is to be led to the canopy.
Again she senses Khonnon’s presence. So strong is their longing for each other that Leah breaks through the spellbound circle that divides them, and joins her beloved in a blaze of light. She is doubly cursed. Even though she is reunited with her lover, they are fated never to bear children. Before she dies, Leah laments:
Hushabye my babies,
Without clothes, without a bed
Unborn children, never mine
Lost forever, lost in time.
The scenes of exorcism were both compelling and frightening. Perhaps they mirrored the intensity of the audience’s own lives. Within the past five years millions had died in the battlefields of Europe. And as soon as one war had ended, another had begun. White Army fought Red Army in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Poland reasserted its independence as the nations of Europe carved out new boundaries from the old; and again the roads were cluttered with the dispossessed.
With the performance of The Dybbuk the Vilna Troupe became one of the great art theatres of Europe. The ensemble toured the play throughout the continent. For a time Yankev and Jochevet, their daughter Mila and infant son David, were a theatrical family on the road. At the height of its fame the troupe travelled on a private train. The actors’ children played hide-and-seek among the costumes and props as the train hurtled from town to town.
The Vilna Troupe was an extended family complete with romances and rivalries. One week the actors would be welcomed as heroes and escorted over red carpets by community leaders in remote towns. A week later they would be on the verge of collapse as yet another impresario ran off with the take.
And they worked. They rehearsed one play in the morning, a second in the afternoon; and performed yet another the same night. In their ‘spare’ time the actors studied and memorised their lines. Even in their dreams there was little respite. The Waislitz children would often hear their father muttering lines in his sleep.
In 1932, at the age of eighteen, Mila made her debut with the troupe, and fell in love with Moshe Potashinski. The couple eloped and took to the road. They toured Poland, France, England, Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia. They performed skits and comedy sketches, cabaret and ‘word concerts’ that featured monologues from literary classics.
In 1939 the couple settled in Belgium where they founded a folk theatre. The Nazis invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940. Moshe and Mila joined the resistance as the Nazi net tightened. The couple went into hiding. And still they performed. They appeared in private homes where they produced concerts behind locked doors.
In March 1943, Moshe and Mila were betrayed and interned in the Malines transit camp in Belgium. And still they performed. They presented two concerts, the second on 15 April 1943, in barracks crowded with inmates. A third concert was planned, but it never took place. On the first night of Passover, 19 April 1943, Mila and Moshe, along with two thousand men, women, and children, were herded into cattle wagons at the Malines station. The transport arrived in Auschwitz on the third day of Passover.
Moshe was to recall the ferocity of that first assault in his memoirs. Blood. Chaos. Savage dogs released from the leash. At the gates of Auschwitz stood Dr Schmidt, elegantly attired, baton in hand, pointing left or right: death or slave labour. Couples were torn apart. Lovers from lovers, husbands from wives, parents from children, the strong from the weak. Suitcases, sheets, blankets, photo albums, the last belongings, were torn from their arms. ‘Where are you, Mila? Where are you?’ This was the thought that coursed through Moshe’s mind as he saw Mila being dragged away.
Mila was saved by her youth. Within hours, she was stripped, shorn, branded, and clothed in ill-fitting prison garb. As the group of women reassembled in the barracks for the first time, they were in shock. They had lost their loved ones. Some had been wrenched away from their children. They wept, or were overcome with hysteria. They gazed at each other and no longer recognised the faces they had known.
Then one of the inmates turned to Mila, hesitated, and asked, ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? On the stage, in Antwerp? In Brussels?’
‘Yes, I have seen you perform too,’ said another.
‘You must perform. Here. You must recite a poem, sing a Yiddish song,’ the inmates insisted.
‘Here? In Auschwitz? Are you mad?’ retorted Mila.
‘Yes, here,’ the inmates begged. ‘And why not here?’
The women covered Mila’s bare head with a scarf and she performed for the first time that night. Around her there gathered women from Jewish communities throughout Europe: Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium, Greece, Germany. Some of them did not understand a word of Yiddish.
Mila performed in the stillness of night. She moved from songs of longing to humorous sketches, from folk melodies to ballads. The mood shifted quickly from sorrow to laughter tinged with hysteria, so great was the need for release. An
d the stage lights were the flames of the crematoria, beyond the bunker windows.
It was the first of many secret concerts. Mila’s recitals were a form of communion. From them emanated the power of prayer and ritual. They provided moments of forgetfulness. They tied the inmates closer, into a bond that could never be untangled. Genia Tigel, who now lives in Melbourne, saw Mila perform twice. Tigel was a member of a women’s mandolin orchestra that would play in the pre-dawn hours as fellow inmates shuffled off to work. The prisoners were lined up at three in the morning for numbing head-counts, before being marched off in the darkness, with german shepherds at their heels, and the smell of death in the air.
As a rare privilege, Genia was given a ticket to an officially sanctioned concert. She recalls just one act: Mila Waislitz dressed in a vest, black trousers, black cylinder on her head, cane in hand, partnered by a Dutch actress. They danced and sang an excerpt from a popular Yiddish play.
As for Mila, the concerts sustained her and drove her on; even during the darkest days when she was an inmate of experimental block number 10, lorded over by Dr Mengele. Several times, when on the verge of being selected for death, she was hidden by fellow inmates so that she could survive and continue to perform.
Not so far away, unknown to Mila, laboured her Moshe. When he lost sight of Mila on the third night of Passover, he was herded into a truck and transported to Auschwitz III, also known as Buno-Monowitz, a slave labour camp run by the German company IG Farben.
Moshe would recall the raw earth of block number 6 on that first night. ‘Where are you, Mila? Where are you?’ His name had been reduced to tattoo number 117654. He had been wrenched from the warmth of a lover’s body, the comfort of an ordered universe. Moshe lay on the hard boards of a bunker, and in the still of the night he heard the stifled howl of a dog coming from his own throat.