by Fiona Harari
In his early twenties, he was again forced to recalibrate his expectations of life in order to survive, with minimal food, cramped living quarters, and long days working at a garage. Then, after two years, the ghetto was liquidated, and in September 1943 he was sent to Estonia. He endured six hard-labour camps over the following year, before being shipped to the Stutthof concentration camp and then to Dautmergen, where prisoners were dying at an alarming rate.
By then, his life had been reduced to surviving in increments: first living through the harrowing rollcall that started early each morning and could last for hours; once enduring a merciless beating for having hidden some dried onions; marching for kilometres each day through residential areas to work long hours as a mechanic for the German war effort; marching back to the camp at night; and hopefully still being alive the following morning.
In April 1945, he was taken on a death march through Germany, led by ageing guards who fled as Allied forces neared. He was liberated within weeks in a nondescript village, with no possessions, no home, and no clear idea of how to live as a free man. After so much misery, freedom arrived with little fanfare, and the double-edged realisation that he was among the few European Jews who had survived Nazism.
Within two months, he was working as an auto electrician for French troops occupying parts of Germany, and he learned that the majority of his relatives, including his father, had died — but his two siblings had not. His brother, Joseph, who had been studying in France, returned there after the war and died in the 1960s. His sister, Bella, joined him on a ship to Australia, where they arrived in 1949.
Now widowed, he has two children and three grandchildren, and speaks to his sister every day.
I was liberated on 27 April 1945 in Ostrach in Germany. The war is finished, and you find yourself abandoned in a little village. Because I didn’t know what to do, I returned to Balingen, location of my concentration camp. And I went back to work a few kilometres away in the same garage in Frommern, with the same tools I had been forced to use for the Germans — but now as a free man for the French.
We were a group of twelve mechanics, all Jewish, and all liberated. We didn’t have any papers. We were still dressed in our striped uniforms. It took about three days to walk to Balingen. I had to go ahead of the others because I kept walking in a zigzag. For so long, I had had to march in a straight line. Now I had the freedom of crossing from one side of the street to the other, so I did.
I stayed in Germany for another three-and-a-half years, living in this little town where I was now one of the privileged people because I wore a French military uniform. And the Germans were suddenly very friendly. They said they never knew the Nazis had been so cruel. Every morning, we had been walking on the main street, from the concentration camp to the same garage, for about eight months. My landlady’s room, where I lived after the war, looked directly onto the street. And she claims she never saw anything. The hypocrisy!
I didn’t feel fortunate after the war, just the opposite. Here I am alive. What happened to my family? What happened to my friends? What happened to the world that Hitler destroyed? It was exuberance at first, but then came the reflection, and that was extremely sad.
I didn’t think about whether I should feel comfortable staying on in Germany. I only thought about how I could settle down, find the family, and re-establish my life.
When I found my sister, we spent a few days looking for my father. We didn’t know that he had passed away. And then we met a fellow who had seen my father burned to death; for me, that is the most gruesome thing. He told us in great detail what had happened. Then he said, ‘Look, I had two children, and I lost them. You lost your father. Could I adopt you?’ We thanked him very much, but then we departed. Nobody could substitute for a father.
The moment I found my brother and sister, there was a certain aim in my life. That’s where the start of the happiness was. When did I feel fortunate? After arriving in Australia, not straightaway, after settling down.
My uncle had come to Melbourne in 1924. He sent me a photo of himself, a gentleman in a beautiful suit with a bow tie, two daughters in white dresses, in front of what looked like a palace. I thought he must have been very prominent in Australia. He wasn’t — the photograph was of the wedding of my cousin, and the beautiful building was a synagogue — but they all had very good hearts. With them, for the first time in a long time, I felt the warmth of a family.
But I still felt a stranger for a very, very long time in Australia. When I spoke Polish with my friends on the bus or the tram, people looked at me, sometimes with some disgust. It was only when I married that I felt, yes, here I will start my life and build my future.
I was very conscious of propagating the Jewish nation, of not letting Hitler win the war. A baby for me was something sacred. Even the crying of a baby was a pleasure because it was my baby, and subconsciously because I had lost so many people. This was the nicest period in my life, when my wife brought our two children home.
There is a Jewish custom to name your children after people who have died. We didn’t follow it. My parents died in tragic circumstances, and I didn’t want to evoke the memory of a cruel past.
When the children were older, I talked to them about the war. But I talked to my wife, Miriam, very, very little about it. Her mother had lost most of her family during the Holocaust, and as a child in Melbourne she had been introduced to this fear of the trauma of it. When I met her, I felt that I shouldn’t inflict on her the pain of my memories.
As much as I was involved with filming all the testimonies, Miriam couldn’t stand the Holocaust. And she didn’t understand it. She would leave the room when the television was showing a film about it. She hated hearing about it. It was such a traumatic experience, she wanted to avoid even listening to it. I understood and tried never to hurt her.
Between ourselves, survivors talked, but not with others. When I came to Australia and I started to talk to my uncle about what had happened to me, and I tried to make it not too traumatic, he said I was exaggerating. He just couldn’t comprehend that something like this could happen. Most of my friends were survivors, and some things I knew were so traumatic I could only tell them. It was quite important that we talked to each other because other people didn’t understand.
The Holocaust is incomprehensible. But after the war, I still thought it would be a new world, a just world. One of the biggest disappointments for me was that there was not only not enough justice, but that justice was perverted.
One day, soon after liberation, a Pole living in Balingen came to us and said he knew where our Lagerführer — the cruellest man I had ever met — was living with his girlfriend. During winter, when it had been very cold and people were very slowly going to work, he had had a fellow stand at the gate and pour a bucket of cold water on another prisoner, someone who could hardly walk. The fellow died on the spot. This was a camp with 2,000 prisoners and sixty people dying on average every day because of the conditions — and he’s supervising this.
Now he was living twenty minutes walking distance away from us. So I went over there with my friends, we arrested him, and we brought him to the French commander, who said to us, ‘I am quite sure you want to have a talk to him,’ and left us in a room with him. All my friends started to kick him — we had picked up some boots along the way with nails in the soles so you wouldn’t fall on the ice — and they kicked him until he was bleeding. I couldn’t kick him. I felt this is not the right way to punish him. I just stood by and let them do it. I didn’t say not to do it. Everybody has his own way to express his anger.
There is no punishment sufficient for what happened — this man died a national hero — and in practical terms, it can’t be imposed. The only compensation is that I can try to teach about the Holocaust and try to make the new generation of people decent people.
I work in the Holocaust centre, where I support the Jewish trad
ition of remembering. I record memories. There are memories you have seen. There are memories you hear from other people. There are memories that you create yourself to fill in the gaps. History is about people and how they respond to events. We know that the events of the Holocaust happened. But you have to see about thirty testimonies to get the real picture.
The testimonies are gruesome, and when I interview I try to get detached. I went through similar things; it was part of the life in the concentration camp. But I pity the person who is suffering.
I hear so many things that, like everybody else, I select what I should remember. I try to protect myself quite consciously. When I am listening, I am a machine, recording. If somebody cries, I check how much of this crying I have to record, two seconds, three seconds, or five seconds. A few hours later, I suffer a little bit.
If you would know how much I have learned listening to other people: about attitudes to life, about justice, about ethics, about humanity. My conclusion is that in this world there are a lot of good people who are never rewarded for what they have done. And I think every good deed should be rewarded in some way.
In all those testimonies, I have seen more optimism than pessimism. Did it surprise me? Actually, it didn’t. I believe in humanity. I am alive today because of the humanity of many people.
I am hiding, a Lithuanian soldier discovers me and he calls out, ‘Nobody is here.’ He saves my life. When I escape from the ghetto, a Polish person, a complete stranger, hides me and when I leave puts some food in my pocket.
I am in a concentration camp in Estonia, during a storm I escape and I go to an Estonian woman who feeds me and tells me, ‘You can come anytime to my house and I will feed you.’ I go back to the camp. The SS guard, instead of punishing me for escaping, hears about the Estonian woman and he allows me, every Thursday when he is on duty between eight and ten, to go out, and she feeds me.
Humanity is very important — the most important thing for me. I want to be a good human being, and I educate people that everybody is equal. Every so often, I do something for strangers, because strangers helped me.
When I saw the world after the Holocaust, it wasn’t the way I expected it to be. It doesn’t mean that I lost trust in humanity. I didn’t. It was still underlying the way I judge the world. I met a lot of decent people. I am here because of the kindness of complete strangers.
Now you know why I smile. It has been a very good life, despite all the suffering. I have seen good and bad in humanity, but I still believe that people are good. I survived the Holocaust, and with my decency intact. Yes, I feel very fortunate.
Afterword
‘Good morning. My name is Agnieszka. I will be your guide through the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. If you have a mobile phone, please put it onto flight mode. You can take photographs here, but you cannot make phone calls.’
It is a quiet Sunday morning in April 2017, close to a lifetime since those imprisoned at Nazi concentration camps were freed, and, as it does every day except for Christmas, New Year, and Easter Sunday, Auschwitz is welcoming visitors. The first tourists have driven into one of the paid car parks, and, at the four-star hotel opposite the main entrance, breakfast is being served.
Time does not change for genocide. Blossoms continue to bud each spring on the trees lining the road to the former concentration camp, imbuing this place with a gentle perfume that belies its history. At the train station, a billboard welcomes visitors to ‘Auschwitz, city of peace’, a valiant effort to recalibrate the popular image of a name now synonymous with terror.
Auschwitz, the twenty-first century’s byword for genocide, has become a museum. A leading tourist destination, it has a website and an automated booking system. There are still people in its brick barracks and even in a gas chamber — two million visited in 2016 — but now they are tourists who come to peer inside and out, to see where so many ghosts linger.
Most days, they file past the piles of old canisters of the poisonous gas Zyklon B, past the display of seized Jewish prayer shawls and the shoe polish tins brought by those who were hopeful they might indeed be sent to work here. They use the public toilets that have been installed in some of the brick barracks where civilians-turned-prisoners, within living memory, were confined. And when their inspection is over, they are free to leave.
Many join tours like this one, led by a genial Polish woman highly educated in the horrors that occurred at almost every step, with a detailed knowledge of Hebrew and of Jewish history, and a keen understanding of the delicacy required to guide visitors through Europe’s biggest cemetery.
On another day of the year, a date not marked in its official opening hours, Auschwitz is again closed to the public. On this spring day, when the promise of new life clings to the surrounding foliage, and clusters of yellow flowers appear on the once grassless earth, Auschwitz assumes a different air.
Since 1988, on a date originally intended to coincide with the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, thousands of people have marched the three kilometres from Auschwitz to Birkenau in tribute to Holocaust victims. On this day, in this normally quiet place of reflection, the mood wavers between triumph and sorrow as upwards of 10,000 people from dozens of countries — Jewish students from Morocco and Panama; Christians from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria — gather in the disused space between the old barracks. Where emaciated prisoners were forced to line up for hours for rollcall, there is, on this day, an air of informality. The grey order of wartime is supplanted by the bright blue jackets of haphazardly gathered marchers chatting over kosher sandwiches. Young girls in of-the-minute sunglasses giggle incredulously when they encounter Jewish students from the furthest recesses of the globe. (‘There are Jews in Australia? Cool.’) Then a ram’s horn is blasted over a loudspeaker, the same ceremonial sounding that has marked Jewish life for millennia, and the walk begins.
Twenty-nine Australian high school students join the march in 2017, mostly sixteen-year-olds from Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and regional New South Wales, each wearing a wristband remembering a child who was killed in the Holocaust. Ida and Gita, Wolf, Babi — these old names from another world are attached to the young wrists of a new generation, twenty-first-century youth walking in silent procession, arms linked as they exit Auschwitz beneath its famous sign proclaiming that work would free those forced to be here.
Slowly, they make their way along residential streets, past a smattering of local onlookers, past a little boy staring out from his lounge-room window, his face in his hands. For almost three kilometres, they are quiet as they head, within this bright sea of marchers, around a corner and up and over a small bridge. Only when they glimpse the train track that ends inside Birkenau do they finally unlink arms, and then, wordlessly and unconsciously, wrap them around one another’s shoulders.
On this journey, most delegations are accompanied by survivors from their own countries, ageing members of an ever-dwindling pool of eyewitnesses reluctantly returning to this place so that a younger generation might remember their histories. But distance has become keener with time, and this year, for the second successive year, there are no Australian survivors to provide a personal soundtrack to the journey of these young Australians. Instead, they travel through Poland with students from Florida, and the testimonies they hear are from those who have made a home in North America.
The voices of survivors are dimming. But their stories remain intensely personal on the grounds of orderly Auschwitz, which is unexpectedly diminutive, and all the way to Birkenau, eight times larger and now mostly a collection of preserved rubble and the shells of old buildings. More than one million people were murdered here. Many of their names are lost forever. But each of them was someone’s child. They were Marianne Van Der Poorten’s mother, Hella Wilk’s little sister, Marianne Schwarz’s father, and many of the people Rina Schuldiener ever loved.
History has inextricably linked Poland to the sto
ries of so many survivors. It is the location of multiple death camps, and as a nation it witnessed enormous losses. Almost five million Poles died during World War II. Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, three million — ninety per cent of a once thriving community — were from here. Half the people in this book were born elsewhere in Europe. But add those who were forcibly taken away or whose families were, and only one of the eighteen who survived had no personal connection to this land.
‘They say it’s not the best idea for a county to lie between Russia and Germany,’ begins the recorded commentary on a hop-on, hop-off bus ride around the national capital, a phoenix-like metropolis whose recent past hovers only just below its extensively reconstructed exterior.
Warsaw was once a place of markets and squares and nineteenth-century townhouses. But after the general uprising in 1944, the occupying Germans systematically razed the city. More than eighty-five per cent of the historic centre was destroyed, leaving behind, for those few residents who had avoided being exiled, a lunar-like landscape of almost utter devastation.
A coded map recounting that time shows a grid that is mostly grey, signifying the vast swathes of once gracious buildings, often centuries old, that no longer existed at the end of 1945. Sprinkled across the gloom are tiny patches of orange. In a city that would take years to reconstruct, these are the few buildings that were left standing at war’s end.
One of them was Lena Goldstein’s family home. An above-ground unit with a view to an internal courtyard, it outlasted the city’s tumultuous past, as it continues to do, although it is no longer the comfortable place of her memories. An abandoned space within an old apartment block, it is locked up and weed-strewn, and cut off from its former neighbourhood by a newish major road.
Across town, the stranger’s bathroom in which she cowered for eighteen months has also survived, an anonymous apartment block with its silent history as an unlikely haven. And the square beneath which she existed for half a year in a foetid space of air and dirt has been cleared of rubble, and, like so much of the capital’s UNESCO-recognised historic centre, has been beautifully restored, with a shiny Starbucks outlet competing for attention with alternating neon signs for expensive watches. The modernist American and gracious Swiss embassies lie just metres away from this place that was once cut off from the world. Now the world gathers here to eat and shop and take in a city’s unique history.