by Fiona Harari
Her grandfather died at Theresienstadt, and then her father and her grandmother were gassed at Birkenau, where she, too, was sent in May 1944. There she had a number crudely tattooed on her arm, and with other women she was forced to parade naked in front of the camp’s infamous physician Dr Josef Mengele.
Apart from her mother, Grete, who was to be with her throughout the war, from Theresienstadt to Birkenau and on to multiple labour camps in Germany, the constant presences in her life were misery and uncertainty. And yet she remembers this time not just for its tragedy, but also for it humanity: reciting poems with other women; the humour that sustained them; and even the New Year’s Eve concert for inmates and guards at a German labour camp in which she participated in the last hours of 1944.
In all that time, her faith in people, and in her own survival, was strong, even as her family was slowly eliminated and she was once beaten so savagely by a guard — for having asked if her mother could remain with her while being transported between camps — that she thought her head would be split open.
It was only in Bergen-Belsen, the last of the many camps in which she was imprisoned, that her optimism failed and she was overcome by apathy. Stricken with lice, exhausted and starving, she developed typhus. Gravely ill and weighing thirty-one kilograms, she lost her will to live.
It was mid-spring of 1945, and in her debilitated state she had little awareness of the arrival of the British troops who liberated the camp on 15 April, shocked to discover that most of its 60,000 survivors were barely alive.
In the days that followed, she remembers being stretchered away, her fever dangerously high, and crying out to her emaciated mother who watched on silently but was not allowed to accompany her to a makeshift hospital.
When she had recovered slightly, but was still weak, she headed back out into the camp, days later, hoping for a reunion that never happened. To her continuing regret, her mother survived the war only to die days after she was free.
With her own health still precarious, she was sent to Sweden, with the help of the Red Cross, and once she had recovered she started working there as a nursing aide. Within six months, she had gained twenty-five kilograms. Within another six months, she was preparing to sail to Melbourne, where an uncle and aunt had taken refuge in 1939.
She arrived in Australia in November 1946 and moved in with the couple, sharing a room with their newborn baby. She spent the next two-and-a-half years working as a nanny before returning to Austria in 1949 to marry Joschy Schwarz, whom she had known in Vienna before the war. They settled permanently in Melbourne in 1952.
Hoping to fall pregnant, she stayed at home for many years and raised her only niece while her husband, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law went to work. She had six miscarriages and gave birth to a son, prematurely, in the late 1960s, but he lived for only five days.
After training as a welfare officer, she worked at the Children’s Court in Melbourne, and spent many years caring for her husband before his death in 1995.
Now retired, she plays bridge and table tennis multiple times a week and calls bingo monthly.
When the liberation came, I had typhus. I was so sick, I didn’t even know we were free. I came to a few days later in a makeshift hospital, and the girls in the room said, ‘Don’t open your eyes so much.’ I was so skinny, you could see only eyes in my face.
When I was a bit better, I went from barrack to barrack with a blanket around me looking for my mother. Whatever happened to me does not compare to that loss of my mother after liberation. I still feel guilty that I couldn’t do anything to save her, that she had to suffer all through the war, and then die.
Many people were very kind. One of the English liberators asked me to come with him to the pictures. Maybe he felt pity for me; the way I looked, he couldn’t have seen me as a desirable object. A soldier from Belgium gave me a book, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. I still have a copy of it. It was a wonderful thing because I used to love reading as a child. That was the first book after the war that I read.
Though I lost my mother, I felt fantastic. I felt I was given back to life, or that life was being given back to me. When I came to Sweden, they asked me if I would like to work in a sanatorium for tuberculosis. I had a friend who worked there, too, and I remember one day we went through the corridors with a comb and a piece of paper and we made music. I felt like I was coming back into existence. It was a wonderful feeling. The losses were always with me, but life goes on. And I was young. I wanted to live.
One day, I went swimming in a beautiful lake in Sweden with my friend. She still had her mother then, and after a few strokes she said, ‘I can’t swim anymore.’ She suddenly panicked in the deep water, she was hanging on to me, and she pushed me under. Luckily, in the end, she made a few strokes and we were back on land. And we never talked about that with anybody, because it was such a terrible thing; if she had drowned after the war, how would I have told her mother?
My experience in concentration camps taught me a lot of things: resilience, to take people the way they are; and my attitude to life and death is completely different. I am a fatalist. I hate it when people say to me, ‘I didn’t deserve that.’ Who gets what they deserve? Things happen to people, and it’s just your attitude and what you do when you are given misfortune that counts.
Nobody wants to lose their life, unless they are really depressed and down. Our greatest urge is to live. I didn’t allow myself to be so down that I didn’t want to live anymore.
The people that really dropped their bundle, they went because they gave up. Once you gave up, you were gone. In the labour camps in Germany, we were pushing heavy loads of sand, we shipped bricks, everything. We did really hard work. And while we did, we laughed and we told each other jokes. We wanted to show the Germans that they couldn’t humiliate us to such an extent that we would lose our dignity. We wanted to show them that they couldn’t squash us.
Humour is very important. It keeps you going. When I had my number tattooed on my arm, of course it was traumatic. When it was on, I don’t know how long after, I remember saying, ‘That will go nicely with an evening gown when I come out one day.’ Deep down, I felt they were not able to take away my identity. I still was the same person.
I really had close friends during the war. It was very important, to share my feelings. We were on the rollcall in Auschwitz in the morning, four o’clock; I stood with a Czech girl and I recited German poetry to her, and she recited Czech poetry to me. My mother was standing also at rollcall — we were really starving — and exchanging recipes with women of her age.
When I came to Australia, it was not so fantastic at first. In Sweden, they have the most wonderful forests, and when I came here I was missing it terribly. Everything was different. But I wanted to like it, and I made myself like it.
I had an urge to talk straightaway. At first, I could only speak to people who shared the same experiences with me because I thought they understood. I talked a lot, but privately. And I think it has made me a good survivor. Because I shared my experiences with people who went through the same things as I did, it seems that I was not touched so badly psychologically.
I met many who were very badly affected. I had a friend, he wrote a book about his past, and he was obsessed with what happened until he died. He had nightmares. He was one who became very bitter.
I didn’t become bitter. I tried never to lose my faith in people. I believe in people — although it’s not easy. And you know I still bare no deep resentment against the German people today. I refused to believe that everybody was terrible — and they were not.
In 1949, I went back to Vienna to get married. I had had a boyfriend in Theresienstadt, and while I was in Sweden I found out that he had died in a concentration camp, and I really was grieving. No way was I going back to Vienna. I wanted to start a new life.
Then Joschy started writing to me when he heard that I wa
s alive. Everybody said I was crazy to go to Vienna, and to a man with whom I had never had a real relationship. I was very apprehensive going because of my memories. I lost my parents, and nobody was there anymore. But as you see, I am an optimist. And it worked. We were very happily married for forty-six years. And we had not a bad life there.
Before the war, my mother had left some of my clothes with some people who ran a delicatessen in Vienna. The woman, when I came back for the suitcase, said she didn’t have them anymore. And then I saw her daughter wearing something made of the material of one of my dresses; apparently, she made a blouse for her out of it, and I resented that very much.
But thinking back, I don’t blame her anymore. They were probably not that fantastically well off, so she made her daughter a blouse out of my clothes. It was years later. She thought I would never come back and I wouldn’t need it anymore. I don’t know how happy she was to see me. She was embarrassed.
I learned to live with what happened to me. It never left me until today. You know I am still reading books about the Holocaust, maybe even more than before. I wouldn’t call it an obsession, because I read other things, too. But I am still trying to understand how people like Germans, with culture and music, were capable of doing such a thing. Do I have an answer? No.
I always thought people were good. But the problem is that the majority of people are bystanders; they are a little bit indifferent. You should see what is right and wrong. But it’s not easy to stand up, believe me. If I would have been in that same situation and it would have endangered my life, would I have been able to stand up? I don’t know. And that’s why I hesitate to blame everybody because I don’t know how I would have reacted.
I don’t believe in God anymore. How can a God permit things like that, for goodness sake? Nobody can be so bad to deserve it. Religion causes an enormous lot of damage all over the world. It stresses the differences between people and it makes everything a lot worse. Similar things are happening today that happened then. I am shocked still today what people are capable of doing to other people. People don’t learn from their mistakes, not really.
I dream occasionally. I have sometimes nightmares that my niece is drowning. But in my nightmares, the people I love survive. Nobody dies in my dreams. I don’t let them.
There’s one more thing I want to tell you. When I was in the labour camp in Germany, I went to the latrine in the middle of the night. It was the most beautiful starry sky. And it consoled me in a way, that the war was going on and the moon and the stars were still around and during the day the sun was shining. There was madness all around, but I looked up and the sky had not changed. Life goes on.
I am satisfied with what I have achieved. I don’t think that under my circumstances I could have done anything different. I am alive. I have to laugh.
Life, I find, is still a wonderful thing.
Michael Matz
BORN: Moishe Matz
12 January 1923
Wilno, Poland (also known as Vilna; now Vilnius, Lithuania)
Michael Matz obscured his past so well and for so long that for many years it seemed his life had begun in Newcastle, Australia, in 1952. In fact, he had been born thirty years earlier on the other side of the world, to a large Jewish family and an old culture whose legacy would linger through his long life.
But the war so devastated his past that the best way to counter its aftermath, he figured, was with silence. He spent three decades working at BHP’s Newcastle steelworks, with few opportunities to converse in his native Yiddish and even fewer to exchange stories with survivors, had he so desired. By the time he retired, he had belatedly anglicised his birth name, Moishe, the distinctly Yiddish name that was one of the last outward pointers to his past, and he was looking forward to an easier future.
Time and age, however, wore down the defences he had spent his post-war life constructing, and history began to escape his self-imposed containment lines, seeping into his dreams and his consciousness.
When he speaks of his former life now, which he does willingly but not happily, it is in a long and continuous flow. His gaze is slightly askew, and his expression is mostly sad as he sits in his favourite chair surrounded by dozens of bits of paper on which he has scrawled in his shaky handwriting as many Yiddish words as he can remember. Then he rises slowly from his favourite chair, rustles through a dresser drawer of CDs, selects one, and the sound of old Yiddish songs fills his small lounge room.
In a language that no one around him can understand, he sings of love that can burn and never end, of a heart that can yearn and cry without tears. He sings loudly and with gusto, oblivious to the volume and the noise that is spilling out onto the inner-city street, and only then, as his eyes well and an enormous smile spreads across his face, does he exhibit joy.
He is a child of Wilno, now Vilnius and the capital of Lithuania, but when he was born there in 1923 it was a Polish city whose tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants ensured that Yiddish was widely spoken. His father was a printer, his mother fairly observant, and he had two brothers and two sisters.
He began working as an apprentice locksmith at fourteen. He was still in his teens when Germany occupied his town, and he saw the first of many roundups of Jewish families, dragged from their homes and sent to nearby Ponary, where more than 75,000 people would be massacred between 1941 and 1944.
Somehow, his house was missed in that first round-up, but before long he and his family were forced into the city’s ghetto, where they moved into his grandmother’s empty house; she had already been taken to Ponary and was presumed dead.
His job in the ghetto, offloading 100-kilogram bags of potatoes and flour for the German army, was considered vital, and protected him temporarily from being deported. But as life for Jews steadily worsened, a neighbour arranged for him to travel by truck to another town, Lida; in their last conversation, his mother told him she thought he would be safer there.
A massacre in 1942, however, quickly changed that notion. Of the 7,000 Jews thought to have been in Lida, he was among 1,500 to have survived. Lida’s ghetto was liquidated in September 1943. He spent a week traipsing through forests, and arrived back in Wilno to learn that his parents were gone, and much of his family.
He was later rounded up again and sent to Estonia to work in brown-coal mines, and then taken by ship to Germany, arriving in August 1944 at the concentration camp Buchenwald, where he was eventually liberated by US troops.
After the war, he planned to return to Wilno. But when he heard that there were no more Jews there, he headed instead for Łódź, and then a displaced-persons camp near Munich, with plans to move to Israel. Instead, in 1946, he met a local woman. They married in 1951, and arrived in Australia in 1952 with their young daughter.
The only other surviving member of his family, his brother Eliezer, died in Israel in 2015.
I had a hard time after the war, a very hard time, very lonely. I had no family; I feel guilty even now about being the last one alive. I can remember a little bit about what my family looked like; I don’t have any photographs. My mother was a thin woman. My father was not fat. The older sister was like a mother. She married a teacher from school. Sometimes, I see people who look like my younger sister.
Afterwards, I didn’t think much about the things that happened. I didn’t dwell on the past. I wanted to make a new life, to make up for what I had missed when I was young. I had to catch up on girls, on food — in the beginning, we were mad about eating — dancing, having a few drinks.
I moved to Bad Tölz, in Germany, and stayed for five years. A friend of mine, a Holocaust survivor, was doing some business there, and I rented a room; it was more like back-to-normal life than being in the DP camp. We had a little Jewish community there of survivors, a synagogue; I worked in a Jewish socks factory. We had a group, Jewish boys playing up a bit, having a drink and going to the dances. We had everything we wan
ted.
I never thought about getting married. I just thought about having some company, having some sex. But I couldn’t get a Jewish girl. I had had a girlfriend in the camp, and after the war she found me. We spent about a week together, then she went back home and wrote me a letter: she had a bloke, much older, and he had come looking for her. She didn’t want me, because the Jewish girls were looking for a rich Jewish man — some were more successful than others on the black market. But I didn’t have much luck; I wasn’t rich. And the next girl — Otti — didn’t worry if I was rich or not.
I had seen her walking on the street. She lived in the same town, and one night we met near my place, it was nearly midnight. Of course, I liked her. I was thinking about going to Israel when she asked me to marry her.
I said, ‘I can’t marry you. You’re German.’ Then we both started to cry. She said, ‘Why not?’ I thought how could I marry a German girl after they’d done all the things to us? But she had nothing to do with it — and I liked her; she was the real thing.
Did her family accept me? Yes and no. Her brother didn’t trust me at first. But later, it was okay. Both her parents had died, and her sisters were pretty good. They never mentioned the Holocaust. We didn’t want to upset the relationship by talking about it.
It was not an easy time for us after the war, because some people were against our relationship. ‘How can you marry a German girl?’ They didn’t actually say it, but I could see it in their reaction.
When we came to Australia I met a nice Jewish lady. She said, ‘You will have difficulties.’ We did have difficulties. We had an Australian neighbour who used to call Otti ‘the bloody SS wife’. Once we were at a party for a Jewish boy, his mother was there and she asked my wife, ‘Where do you come from?’ And my wife said, ‘I come from Germany,’ and the woman’s face dropped and that was the end of the conversation.
It was harder for her than me after the war. I was tougher. She wanted to come to the synagogue with me, but she wouldn’t go, because people looked down on her. We both had bad things said to us, but we got over it. It was hurting, but later on we said we won’t react, we won’t lose any sleep over it. As long as we’re together, that’s the main thing.