by Fiona Harari
He was fifteen when German planes flew over Warsaw in 1939, the announcement of war curtailing his childhood almost immediately. When his apartment building was destroyed in an early bombing, he and his family moved to Zielonka, a nearby town where they had spent many holidays. But the familiar air of leisure that he had always associated with the area was quickly replaced with fear and uncertainty, as he was among a group of young students abruptly loaded onto trucks one day, destined for German factories.
He managed to run before his truck started moving, the first of multiple escapes he staged as life grew steadily worse, and, with his mother mostly bedridden with a bad heart, his father was forced to sell the family’s belongings for food.
As the war progressed, he was issued with a new identity card. While his parents and brother were listed as Polish, his place of birth had since been annexed and was noted as Germany. What seemed a humorous administrative anomaly became deadly serious in the first year of the war when he was called to a government employment office and told that as a result of his place of birth, he was an ethnic German, and he would need to join the army or work for the war effort outside Poland.
Insisting that he was Polish, he was dragged away by German guards and sent to a temporary jail, and then piled with other prisoners into a goods wagon, before staging another escape as the concentration-camp-bound train rounded a bend and he jumped onto the tracks.
He made his way back to Zielonka, but feared for his safety if he returned home following his escape. Instead, he moved into a small unit at a local pit mine, arranged by members of the local Resistance who asked him, in exchange, to help smuggle two people across the border.
On his return, however, he was caught by German authorities. Over the next few years, he was moved through multiple camps, loading coal one day, digging graves another, and escaping from a work gang to end up in a forest where he met up again with members of the Polish Resistance. He fought in the Warsaw uprising, was caught by German soldiers once more, and was sent by train with his father and brother to the Dachau concentration camp. He was twenty. By then, his mother had died of heart failure.
After several weeks in Dachau, he was moved with others to the Katzbach concentration camp, at the former Adler industrial factory near Frankfurt, where his brother was beaten to death. Soon after, his father was fatally shot.
With his family dead, and his health waning, he was moved to the Vaihingen camp in early 1945, and then, after a death march that many did not survive, he was put on another train. Of the 100-odd people in his wagon, he remembers only two emerging alive on his return to Dachau.
When he was liberated there weeks later by American troops, he had tuberculosis and fluid in his lungs. In the final days of the war, he had been speared in the groin by a guard who had mistaken him for a corpse, and the resulting wound now caused his lower body to swell so badly that his trousers had to be cut off him, and he was unable to stand up.
His first six weeks of freedom were spent in the concentration camp’s hospital. The following two years passed in recuperation at a French hospital in Germany, before he moved to a displaced-persons camp.
He was one of 50,000 Polish-born people to arrive in Australia between 1947 and 1954, working initially as a fitter and turner, and later as a toolmaker. In retirement, he has taught plant propagation and chess. Married for many years, he has been separated since he was eighty-six.
Before the war, before this, I was a different character. I was happy-go-lucky, always. I was the life of the party. When there was a dance or something, I made everybody happy, and I was liked.
I was a hyperactive kid and hard to manage, a real troublemaker. I had to do something, and usually by venturing into something not very good: jumping on trams and trains without a ticket, running all over the place. I was streetwise. My brother was the reverse. He was a gentleman right from the start, clean, well dressed, always reading books.
It helped me a lot being an untamed spirit because I knew how to get out of situations and how to avoid things. I started very early having trouble with the Germans. I was arrested a few times, and I was confident always that I would somehow get out. If I was caught, I was already thinking how I could escape. I was so confident that I thought if the Germans shoot, maybe they would kill everybody else, but not me.
Another person came out of the concentration camp. My character after was broken completely, not only from the loss of my father and brother but how they died. I know how they suffered. It is a tremendous weight on my mind even now that I couldn’t do anything about it.
When I survived, I was one of the walking skeletons. In Dachau, they made a lot of pictures of me because I could walk but I couldn’t stand up. On my hips, there was bare bone, no skin. I spent two years in hospital — I went through puberty a second time when I was twenty-one — and I wanted to recover as fast as possible. Everybody was lying in bed, but I wouldn’t. I was painting. I was making jewellery boxes. I even created a small theatre group.
Sometimes, I read in the paper about Australian soldiers coming back from Vietnam and how they need counselling and all these sorts of things. Whatever they went through, they got through it with a gun in their hands. I was there hopeless, helpless in a concentration camp and I didn’t have any support after I came out. Physically they repaired me, but mentally I had to repair myself. I saved my sanity by painting.
And I started to save my brain from the torture of my memories. I created a barrier to not remember the concentration camps. The barrier was so strong that later, when I tried one night to remember what my mother had looked like, I couldn’t, and I was really upset.
I was angry and unsocial. My brother and my father suffered and died in that concentration camp. And the anger was that I couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t trust anybody. If someone wanted to be friends, I wondered what he wanted. I didn’t have friends for a long time. Except for Janus; he was like a brother. We went to primary school together. We were in the Resistance — to defend our freedom and get the Germans out of Poland — but not in the same unit. He ended up in one of the same camps as I was.
We were the only survivors from about fifteen or more friends. He knew what I went through and I knew what he went through. We didn’t talk about where we were. Somehow, both of us avoided this. No good reminding each other about what it was. We could almost talk telepathically. This was the only person who could understand me, how I felt. I would say he was the best friend that I had. He is buried in an army cemetery in Warsaw.
There were others I knew from Poland, also from concentration camps. We didn’t talk much about it after. We knew from the pain in each other’s faces. They have all died now.
I was not violent before the war. Then somebody said something and I didn’t like it, so I would punch him. I lost my temper with a Polish man at the DP (displaced-persons) camp in Germany. He swore at me. We were standing on a staircase and I punched him on the nose and he took a step backwards and fell down the stairs. He was knocked about, but he didn’t suffer too much. He reported it to the camp police, and they threatened me that I wouldn’t go to Australia.
Even here it happened. When we were going to the migration centre at Bonegilla, other people were looking at the burnt grass and dead trees, and some were crying. Where are we going? Into a desert? When I arrived, I took a lot of air into my lungs, looked around — unlimited space, I can go wherever I want — and thought, that’s freedom. I felt safe.
The first job they gave me was in the bush, cutting down trees. Two of us were stacking logs. We had been working hard — I was so surprised that I could do it, that I had strength again — and we took a break. All of a sudden, one of the bosses came and opened his mouth at us. He shouted: why were we sitting? And all I could see in him was a German SS man with his attitude and his shouting. So I punched him. I was taken from there and put in a timber mill, miles away, and harder work.
But I didn’t mind. I was away from him.
Australia gave me a chance for a new life. I didn’t aim for too much. I just wanted to have what I was missing. I wanted to belong to a family. So I got married and I had children. That’s the only thing I could do.
Once I was married, I started to have motivation. I plunged into work. I wanted to improve and improve and create something for my children. I was full of energy. I was tireless. I was working full-time, coming home, and I was working at home doing everything. I never called anybody to fix anything. I was electrician, plumber, builder, bricklayer, everything, because I wanted to make a future for my family.
The barrier still worked.
In the morning when I was going to work, I was always kissing my wife, but it was more ritual. I became sort of rigid. When I look at some films today, I see modern families that did not go through the tragedy of the last war. I see fathers cuddling their sons or daughters happily, and smiling and laughing. I couldn’t do it. And I realise this and I am missing this.
I am unable to show emotion. I feel it, but I can’t show it. I can’t express myself easily — sadness or happiness. I think it has had a great impact on my family.
One time, when my three daughters were all little, I put one on my knee and pretended I was a horse, and I was singing a song in Polish. My daughters remember this very well, because it didn’t happen often. It only happened once that I threw away these chains that were gripping me and I became myself.
That’s why my wife left me eventually, because I never completely recovered from the concentration camp. Still it’s in me. Anything reminds me. I hear German music: the German waltz played in the Dachau concentration camp every time there was a row of prisoners hung. My mother died on 2 May — that was my name day. And I was arrested on 5 September, on my birthday.
I had so much hate towards the Germans. My father told me once during the war, ‘I think you have a chance to survive.’ And he asked me to retaliate when I survived, to do something to the Germans. But I couldn’t do it. Not on innocent people, I couldn’t. I was looking for those that were in the concentration camp. I was going all over Germany after the war looking for the guards. I heard about them here and there, and I couldn’t find them anywhere.
I had great hate. I hated all of them. I even hated those that were born just now. That hate was killing me. I realised this later when I went to Germany. Three times I have been there. They wanted me to lecture at university, at technical colleges about what I suffered in the concentration camp in Frankfurt.
I just went there to tell them what happened. And I met so many Germans; it started to change me. After I finished one talk, a university student wrapped herself around me. She had tears in her eyes, and said, ‘I am sorry for what our fathers and grandfathers have done to you, your family, and your country.’ Then I started to get emails from students saying that my survival was not wasted and that to hear from somebody who was there, as an inmate in their country, was a different story. That’s how I got rid of the hate. I didn’t expect that.
I have changed a lot. I can’t get rid of the hate altogether — I still have this resentment of anything that’s German — but it’s much less than I had, and it doesn’t kill me anymore.
But in one way, things are worse. Loneliness brought back more memories. Because the older I am, I have more time to think, the more that memories come back and interfere with my sleep, more and more now, in details, and so vivid.
One memory comes into my head and it escalates. I try to think about flowers, gardens, something pleasant, but nothing can replace this. I sometimes get up at night because I know it won’t stop. It’s bothered me for so long, I’ve sometimes wondered why I have lived that long. I should have caved under all this, but I haven’t.
I killed German soldiers during the Warsaw uprising. I thought about one of the men, that he probably didn’t want war either, he’s probably got children and a wife at home, and I killed him. I was really sorry. It was nagging at me. But it was kill or survive, and if I didn’t kill he would kill me. But it’s still on my conscience; according to the Catholic religion, you don’t kill.
Do I believe in God? I go to church to sing in a choir, but I don’t go to pray. Why should I pray to a God that hasn’t done very well at all and created that much suffering on this earth? That’s really added to my terror. If he is really for the people, why did he create something like that — the murder of masses of people?
Yes, I was in that holocaust. But the Holocaust seems to be entirely and only what happened to Jews. Millions of Poles died also in various concentration camps, but it was all hushed up later by the communists. Russia didn’t allow Poland to talk about what the Germans had done, because we had East Germany as neighbours. All the world has heard the Jewish part of what happened but not from Poland. I think the Holocaust was for us as well. It’s the only word for it.
The pain of what happened, I will always have it. I can’t enjoy in full anything; how can you when something is bothering you and you have constant pain?
On two occasions, I heard on television Jewish people telling about their experiences during the war. One man was saying that people don’t like to hear morbid stories now and when they talk about you later on they say, ‘He talks about such awful things.’ And he said, ‘It helps me but people don’t like it.’ I know how it was. I always felt that if I was talking to someone that wants to hear it, it took some of the pain from me. That’s what the man said on the television. I feel the same way.
My life was not like an average person’s. Of course, I know that. I am aware that I have gone through hell. But I don’t class myself as anything special. Because I know there were others just like me.
Mala Sonnabend
BORN: Malka Izrael
21 March 1918
Ostrołęka, Poland
The past is an eternal shadow that Mala Sonnabend has kept mostly private. The first and only time she spoke publicly about her war losses, she was 96, a diminutive woman with a small voice who stood alone on a stage, a box of tissues by her side, and related to so many strangers how she had come to lose almost everything she had loved.
Two hundred people crowded into a too-small auditorium in inner Sydney to listen on that grey, autumn afternoon in 2014 as she spoke quietly about her personal war toll: the devastation of her Polish home near the German border, her years of internment and deprivation in four concentration camps, how she had survived a death march but lost almost every member of her family, including her husband and their infant daughter. She spoke evenly, mostly dispassionately, and when she had finished she received a standing ovation.
Since then, unlike some of her contemporaries, she has mostly declined requests to retell her story. Memories still sear. But the war years also loiter. And in the small room of the retirement village that is now her home, and where the items she amassed in Australia during the second part of her life have been whittled down to the essentials, the few papers she has from those war times, and the stacks of photo albums bulging with images of her Australian family, are always at hand.
She does not like talking about the past, yet she lapses into it repeatedly, mostly with stories of kindness: the German man who advised her to hide in anticipation of the next round-up of Jews; the jail warden who would roll onions to her and others when they were locked in cells; the Nazi soldier who shot into the air, rather than at her, so that she could escape deportation; the other soldier who was expected to turn her in for attempting to smuggle a curtain out of a ghetto, but who instead handed her a safety pin from his lapel so that she could continue to hide it under her clothes.
Her story is one of resilience and luck. The youngest of four daughters, she was raised in a Polish town of 25,000, where one in every three residents was Jewish. She attended a selective co-educational public high school and hoped to become a pharmacist.
When Germ
any invaded Poland, most of her family — bar one sister and brother-in-law who were living in Melbourne — moved closer to the Russian border for safety. In March 1940, she married her boyfriend, Gedale Rekant, and moved to Sokoły, where he was the local pharmacist and she worked as his assistant. Their daughter Miriam was born in January 1941.
Life under German occupation became increasingly restrictive, and, in September 1942, word spread of an impending round-up of Jews. A local priest who was a school friend of Gedale’s offered refuge to the young family. But Mala worried that a crying baby would endanger the priest, so instead they accepted the offer of assistance from another man, who lived further out of town with his wife and six children.
That evening, the couple and their baby arrived at the home, carrying and wearing whatever they could. As the night progressed, the man continually asked them to hand over whatever they had brought until they were left with just a set of clothes each.
The next morning, the host declared it was safe for the young family to leave. But as the trio emerged to daylight, German soldiers appeared from behind a nearby cemetery wall and began shooting. Mala was struck in the arm and kept running. Her husband and baby were killed.
Endless doors were closed on her that terrible day as she begged other families to take her in until eventually one did. But the risk of being discovered forced her out after a month, and she fled to the ghetto in Białystok. While working in a felt factory there, she was rounded up by Nazis and taken to jail in Grodno, near the Lithuanian border, then to Łomża, where she was inadvertently labelled a political prisoner and packed onto a train for a frightening trip to the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdańsk, before finally being sent to Birkenau.