We Are Here

by Fiona Harari

  We started to build our lives here in Newcastle. We would have had the option to go somewhere else, but we were lost — we couldn’t speak the language — so we just stayed.

  There was nobody to welcome us; they just put us in a camp in Nelson Bay, gave us a job, and we started from there, everybody for himself. I had to get up at four a.m. to get all the way to work. We didn’t have enough money to buy a chocolate at first; we couldn’t afford to buy fruit. But I had a job, what a beauty, and wages and money. Then we started to live.

  The steel works had about 12,000 people. There was one Jewish steel worker that I knew of — me. All my friends at work were Ukrainian, Polish, Russian. I had no Jewish mates at all.

  They all knew I was Jewish. There was a Polish bloke I worked with who said, ‘God punished the Jews in the war for their sins.’ I got really angry with him. I didn’t hit him; you would get the sack for hitting him. I just said to him, ‘Don’t you talk to me anymore.’

  I secretly wondered about some of the people I worked with, what they’d been up to during the war. There was a Russian; we used to knock around together. I said to him one day, ‘Another bloke told me you were really a German, and that’s why you came to Australia.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t working for the Germans. I was only wearing their uniform coat. It was wintertime, cold, and I got a coat from the Germans; it was nice and warm.’

  I didn’t believe him. If you eat onions, you smell; if you did nothing wrong, why didn’t you go back home? But what could I do? We worked together day by day. I couldn’t find out the truth.

  It would’ve been nice if there were more people to talk to, more survivors. There’s only me left now. Not long after I came here, I was in Hunter Street and I saw a jewellery shop, the name was Solomon, so I went in and the owner was an old man who came from Wilno and he could speak Yiddish. It opened up my life. He could tell me how to get a bus, where to go.

  Yiddish is such a sweet language. It melts my heart. There were never many people in Newcastle I could speak to. They could say some words — ‘chutzpah’ — but everyone was speaking English. Now there’s only two people I can still talk to, both at the synagogue.

  I wrote my story in Yiddish a few years ago and then translated it into English. I printed a few copies and gave them to everybody. One lady bought five copies. She paid me for them, but I didn’t want the money. Somebody had to put it down in writing, to shut up the deniers.

  In the beginning, I didn’t talk at all. But later on, it all comes out. Bad things I remember more than good things. I didn’t do an interview with Spielberg, because I was very sick; I used to get a lot of chest pains from the smallest thing.

  I don’t believe in God anymore, not really. After the war, the American army came to Buchenwald, and the army rabbi came and made a prayer service. They gave us each a little book, and I said, ‘I will go reluctantly because God didn’t help us.’ We just prayed. They said, ‘We will pray to God because we are still alive,’ and I said, ‘Yes, but many are not alive.’

  Till now, I go to the synagogue every week, not because I’m religious but for company, to meet people, get out of the house, find out the news.

  I never regretted coming here. It’s the best country ever. The only thing is, I wish I were younger. Now I’ve got everything I want. Money is no object now. My wife gets a pension from Germany. I get a pension from Poland. I got the first payment last month, after seventy years. I can’t enjoy it though; what can I spend it on now? I’ve got a car. I’ve got money in the bank. I just fixed my teeth up; I put in a denture for the first time. I just painted the house. I put in a roller door.

  My life out of ten? Now you talk like a doctor. I am quite happy. I would give it ten. I enjoy what I do. I enjoy my food. I enjoy my little jobs. I potter around in the garden, water the lawn — that’s about all.

  I think about the fact that now I can have whatever my heart wants, good things like herrings. But I still can’t eat more than my stomach will take. When we go shopping and people buy and buy, I say to my daughter, ‘Look at this country; you can get whatever you want.’ I had nothing and now I can have anything. I can’t get over it.

  I’ve got no hatred of anybody. All the things the bastards did to us, I don’t dwell on it, otherwise you would go crazy. But I remember the war every night. The dreams are terrible. I dream I go in the forest and I try to hide under a bush and I can’t go there, there’s somebody else there. I wake up, walk around, and go back to sleep.

  Talking has a reaction on me. Last night, after we spoke, I couldn’t fall asleep, I had to take some medicine at ten o’clock. I will think for a little while after I finish this interview, but then I’ll try to forget. I will have to forget. You can’t think about it all the time. It’s no good for you. What can you do? The people are dead. They don’t feel anything.

  Nobody can understand what I have gone through. Nobody will ever understand. But I try not to think about it. You’ve got to get on with life. You can’t change it. You’ve lost everybody, and that’s it.

  Rina Schuldiener

  BORN: Rivka Perl

  28 April 1922

  Sucha, Poland

  Rina Schuldiener did not stop mourning. Not when she was shoved away from her Auschwitz-bound parents as they were being expelled from their Polish hometown in July 1942, and her life was spared because of her youth. Not when Russian troops crashed through the double row of barbed wire that encircled the last of three forced-labour and concentration camps into which she had been enslaved, and the freedom she had lost in her teens was returned to her as a young woman. And not even as she became a mother, and added a new generation to a once vast extended clan that had been otherwise extinguished.

  She mourned even amid the joy of birth, as those first post-war lives were joined by a second generation and then a third. War had stolen her youth, curtailed her education, and claimed the lives of fourteen members of her immediate family. And even though the Holocaust was over, there was little about her cumulative losses that would be reversed as life continued.

  Survival did not bring her happiness. On the contrary, it filled her with a sense of sorrow that has never dissipated, lingering longer than any of those she loved first ever lived.

  In her post-war life, she has had many long associations. She was married for fifty-two years. She has been a mother since 1947. Sadness, however, has been her longest companion. It has accompanied her across continents, to her final home in Australia, through a brief stay in Israel that filled her with a sense of place she has never quite replicated, and all the way back to the Polish town where she had only ever lived until others took control of her destiny.

  Sucha was an industrious place with a population of 6,200, almost ten per cent Jewish, an important railway junction near Kraków. She grew up there in an orthodox home, the seventh of eight children. Her father prayed at the synagogue twice daily, and her mother covered her hair with a wig in accordance with Jewish modesty requirements. From the multi-storeyed building in which they lived and worked, her parents ran a building-materials business, which at one stage boasted the town’s only telephone.

  Anti-Semitism had been a fact of life for a long time as it had been in much of Poland, but, after Germany invaded in September 1939, the impediments facing Jewish families became increasingly sinister. Among a series of measures, businesses were overtaken and Jewish residents were required to report to police daily.

  To avoid the crackdown, Rina, her parents, and her four brothers who were still at home grabbed a few belongings and fled to a distant town where one of her married sisters was living. When that part of Poland was also overrun by Germans, they went home within weeks, only to be ambushed on the return trip by German soldiers who threw away the family’s few remaining pieces of property and taunted Rina’s orthodox, bearded father.

  Back in Sucha, the family’s home and business had been
ransacked, and the contents stolen. They survived that freezing winter on carrots and potatoes stored in their cellar, and remained there, with an ever-increasing number of exiled Jewish families from surrounding areas, until 1942, when they were all evicted.

  The family moved next to an isolated shack with a mud floor and slept on straw-filled sacks through endless cold nights until July 1942. Then they were rounded up in a local square with other Jews from the region; Rina’s parents were among the older adults, along with children under fourteen, sent to Auschwitz. With other young people from the area, Rina was instead sent to a local brewery, which had been converted into a labour camp inside the Jewish ghetto, and from where she was forced with little food to dig ditches, carry rocks, and clean toilets with her bare hands. Her long slide into humiliation was underway.

  It continued as she and a group of seventy young Jewish women were taken by train to a flax factory in Freiberg, Germany, where they were made to lift soaked linen from an acid solution with forks, and later shifted with them to another camp in Egelsdorf, where they lived and worked in a locked factory under constant guard.

  As 1945 dawned, they were moved again, this time on a days-long march in harsh weather and with no food, escorted by dogs and armed German guards, to the Kratzau concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The conditions there were foetid, with open bowls of human excrement lining parts of the camp in the absence of almost any latrines. In three months, not once she was able to wash herself.

  By the time Russian troops crashed through the camp’s perimeter on 9 May 1945, she was covered in lice, she had been severely beaten by a guard for having worn a skirt under her thin dress for warmth, and she was seriously ill with bronchitis. Years of hunger had also taken a massive toll. With her coat on, she weighed thirty-four kilograms.

  When her health improved, she headed home to Sucha with six other local young women, hoping to find a single relative alive there. She did not. Instead, she visited the local photographer’s studio and scoured countless old proofs for any images of her family. She located a single frame of her mother, date unknown. It remains among her most precious possessions.

  Although the war had ended, there was still no peace to be had for the seven Jewish women from Sucha. Tipped off about an imminent anti-Jewish pogrom, they fled again, this time to Germany, where one of Rina’s brothers had survived. She later learned that a second brother was also alive, having spent the war in Russia. In a family that had boasted innumerable aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, only they three were still living.

  In the months after liberation, she met Sam Schuldiener, a Polish survivor who had lost his entire family. They married in January 1946. The following year, their twins were born.

  The young family remained in Poland for twelve years, unable to leave because of the new rules of communism. In 1957, they emigrated to Sydney to be with one of Rina’s brothers. She worked for several years on the assembly line of a cosmetics factory, beside a concert pianist and an architect, and later for a bank.

  Her extended family now spans four generations and includes several noted academics.

  I used to be a happy girl. But my life finished when the war broke out. I was always miserable after. I never recovered.

  I can’t laugh. I remember myself laughing before the war as a girl. But then came the Germans, and they put up a billboard: ‘Jew, the laughing will vanish for you.’ And it did. They succeeded.

  Before the war, I didn’t have to look after myself, absolutely not. I was the only girl at home and four brothers. Maybe I had too good a life before the war. I was spoiled. All I was doing was reading books. The girls in my family were brought up to make challah (plaited bread) and have a husband. I should be more educated. Absolutely, it still bothers me. I missed out.

  Everybody always knew we were Jewish, not Polish. I couldn’t forget that, because I was called a bloody Jew. I was called a Bedouin. And we were always being told to leave. Even if I went for a swim in the river, I would have little stones thrown at me by Polish boys. We were not welcome in our own town.

  Of course, I didn’t feel at home. We could have gone anywhere before the war, to Australia, to America, because we had enough money to buy a permit. But nobody was thinking of leaving.

  It’s God’s fault. He said go forth and multiply. And then they multiplied, and there became three million Jewish people in Poland, and the anti-Semitism grew, and there were pogroms before the war. And the slogan went, ‘Beat the Jews Up.’ And they did.

  Have I ever regretted being born Jewish? Not once — always. I still regret it. My friend, her father went to a shop, bought her a cross, put it on her neck, and said to her, ‘Go.’ He kicked her out. She went to Kraków. She survived and her family didn’t, all because she was wearing a cross. Doesn’t that make you think?

  I am angry at God. If he let 1.5 million innocent children be killed, how can you believe? When Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) comes, I am devastated, I break down, because that day was sacred. I was brought up in a five-room apartment, and in the corner was my father standing in his kittel (prayer robe), and one by one on Yom Kippur he would give us a blessing. That’s how I remember my father.

  I was brought up in a Jewish family with all the traditions. No, I couldn’t take up another religion. It’s built-in. But that has nothing to do with believing. My mother brainwashed us that God is up there, so we imagined that there is a big armchair and God sits there. Now they are thinking of going to Mars, and they still can’t find God on that chair.

  I stopped believing because I have that image; I can’t get rid of it: my father was dying in the gas chamber. I have the image that he said ‘Shema Yisrael’ (praying ‘Hear O Israel’) and that haunts me. It kills me. God was death. He was not listening.

  I didn’t think I was lucky to survive. The loss was too colossal. It was meaningless to be free. Nothing could make me happy, because I went to hell. I had no interest whatsoever in anything.

  I was glad when I met my husband that I found someone. I didn’t want to be alone. He was very good-looking, and I was a poor orphan. But we were not a good couple. He was a fantastic, good man, never said a rude word. I could never find a connection with my husband, yet he was working very hard as a tailor. We had nothing in common.

  I couldn’t talk about things with my husband. He was worse. He went to such shocking places, seven camps. He told me some things. He wouldn’t do even a testimony for Spielberg; it was too terrible.

  And I didn’t talk to the children about the Holocaust. They found out themselves, because I didn’t want to put the burden on them. But they are still saying that they are second-generation Holocaust survivors, and that makes me very sad. They are suffering. They have no relatives, no uncles; at the holidays, there was no grandfather.

  When my twins were born, it was a shocking time for me. I had no one left in Poland, no sister, no aunty, no cousin. My husband had to work. He left at eight o’clock in the morning and worked twelve hours. I knew nothing about children. I just thought I will keep them clean and give them food and then I will send them to school.

  I was so unsure of myself. I could have crossed into Germany illegally at night. But how could I go with two little kids? So we stayed, and the communists took over Poland, confiscated our passports. My life was five years or six under Hitler, and then under Stalin. It wasn’t a good picture.

  I was a good mother physically. I couldn’t give them knowledge, but I gave them a roof over their heads and food on their plates. Emotionally? There was not much hugging. And I feel guilty — a lot. Maybe I was withdrawn. I loved the kids, and they are very good. Maybe I didn’t do so badly, because they are absolutely good to me, and caring.

  Being in Poland after the war was terrible. People were being arrested, and my husband liked to talk politics, and I was always scared that they would come to get him.

  On the w
ay to Australia, we stayed in Israel for two months. There, I had my loving brother, my loving family, and my friends from school and from camps. They were all nice to me. We came by plane from Warsaw, and in Budapest at the airport two Russians with rifles took away our papers. I started to panic. I said, ‘Oh, not again; they are back.’ But they gave us back our papers.

  When we were flying from there over Israel, suddenly we saw the plane was full of Jews who took out their tallits (prayer shawls) and started to pray. I will never forget that. I said, ‘Is that possible? Jews praying like that? Free?’ I hadn’t seen a tallit in years.

  And then we landed in Israel and I saw a policeman — a Jewish policeman in a Jewish country. I couldn’t believe it. My brother picked us up in Tel Aviv, and he said he had a place for us. And I told him we were going to Australia. He was crying.

  I was homesick later for Israel. Why? Every Friday night, my father would raise the wine cup and say, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ And then came the day when they said, ‘You don’t need to say that, you can go to Jerusalem any time you want.’

  So many times I felt guilty that I should have stayed there. I didn’t want to at the time because Israel was a very hard life and my brother in Sydney said there were plenty of jobs here. But I was dreadfully lonely in Australia. I didn’t speak English. I didn’t know what’s what.

  I went to the movies and meetings and holidays. But I was always sad. I just kept going, but the past was always there, day and night. I live with it. I sleep with it. I wake up with it. There is no escape.

  I see everything: how my family and hundreds of other Jews were packed into cattle wagons — it was standing room only. How long the journey took, I don’t know. And you see them pushed out; they have to get out in Auschwitz.