by Arnold Zable
On the eve of her second May Day in the New World, mother can think only of Bialystok. She pictures the Bund locale on Ulitza Lipowe, where last-minute preparations are being made for the annual march. ‘How great would be my joy if I were there with you now.’
Many letters are missing. The last one from Wellington is dated May 15, 1934. Mother regrets the weakness she had shown in her previous letter. ‘I know you will not derive much joy from it’, she writes. ‘It was silly of me to have sent it.’ She has set her sights again on finding a way to bring Meier over. This is mother — the determined one, the stoic — as I would come to know her many years later, her life narrowed down to the single objective of raising her three children, the remnants of her once-large family. She did this with a quiet persistence, broken only from time to time by her abrupt scream emerging from a dream of villages on fire, or by a sudden rage with her hypnotic refrain echoing again and again: ‘I have a story to tell! No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!’
But increasingly I do, as I criss-cross the pages of her letters, and criss-cross Judenrein landscapes of her vanished past to uncover tombstones sinking into mud and dust. Each stone resonates with unfulfilled hopes; and each page of mother’s letters resonates with unobtainable dreams. I see her walking the streets of the New World, surrounded by strangers and locked doors. I see her confronted by her aloneness, her yearning for love and reunion. 1 see her search for a harmony, a sense of belonging and trust, while the years slowly erode her faith. Yet also I see mother acquiring, perhaps unwittingly and at great cost, a subtle wisdom which years later would be fully expressed only in silence.
On May 11, after three-and-a-half years of applications, rejections, appeals, delegations, threats of deportation, last-minute extensions and interventions, and a final plea at the eleventh hour from a friend of a friend, who knew the Minister for Immigration, father arrived in New Zealand. As he checked through customs he caught glimpses of Hoddes, among the circle of friends she had made during her two years in Wellington.
‘In that moment she seemed like a searing beam of light’, father tells me, ‘and as soon as I was able, I rushed towards her in a blur of excitement. But to tell you the truth’, he adds with a laugh, ‘I think her friends were somewhat disappointed with the greenhorn who emerged from the boat. They looked at me with great curiosity. Was this the Romeo they had heard so much about, the writer of such poetic letters, the object of Hoddes’s tireless passion, reunited at last with his Juliet?’ Father warms to the story. ‘On the same boat, there had in fact arrived two immigrant Jews’, he recalls. ‘Meier and Abrami. While I was small and wiry, Abrami was tall and handsome. He would have made a far more appropriate hero.’
Nevertheless, it was a time of great simche. From photos of that time I see a handsome couple at parties, on picnics with young friends, seated on beaches side by side: ‘A miracle for Bialystoker’, father claims. ‘We had come from a vast inland to a slender island, where the sea flowed from the skies and shades of blue permeated our lives.’ Mother strides confidently through Wellington streets, always smartly dressed. And father seems content. He exudes the heady lightness of freedom, unshackled by Old World obligations and fears.
Their goals appear simple and clear, to establish themselves with some capital. Father becomes an assistant in mother’s dressmaking business. They open a small shop, where he takes care of sales. ‘We had dreams of being able to send money to our families’, father tells me. ‘Particularly Hoddes — she was always talking about repaying Chane Esther for her many years of sacrifice. She planned to bring over her nephew Chaimke, her youngest brother Hershl, and her Aunt Rivke’s daughter Freidele. We fantasized that we would one day return to Bialystok on a visit, in style, radiating success, our suitcases laden with gifts, just like others we had seen who had made good in the New World. “Alrightniks”, they were called. We would be alrightniks on a triumphant return to the Old World.’
Again the soothing rhythm of trains. From the heights of Zakopane, the beginning of a return, one last visit to Bialystok. Day and night I move, through cities of an ancient dreaming, stopping for a day here, a few hours there, in renowned centres of Polish Jewry.
In Wroclaw it rains. The leaders of the kehilla escort me through their cemetery with a familiar lament: ‘We do not even have enough left for a minyan.’ In Lodz the burial ground is vast, overgrown, the stones hidden under long grasses that bend to the wind. Highrise flats loom on the edges, as if anxious to stake claims on occupied territory. Back through Warsaw at night, the train hurtles past a sprawl of solitary lights, and I glimpse figures stumbling under an avalanche of rain. By midmorning I am on a stone path which bears the name, ‘The Black Way’. It curves through a pine forest and opens out onto a clearing. In the centre stands a grey monolith, a mausoleum over ten metres in height, surrounded by a symbolic graveyard of jagged rocks. Each one represents a village, a town, a city, throughout Europe and remote outposts of the Reich, where victims were herded into wagons and railroaded here. Treblinka. A place of country solitude in a land of peasants. By night I am again on the move, southeast; and at dawn I am on the streets of Lublin, city of saints and talmudic scholars, centre of pilgrimage and rabbinical courts to which seekers once flocked from all corners of the realm. And just beyond the city limits I come upon it — a desolate field, surrounded by guard towers and barbed fences — a raw wound called Majdanek.
Towards evening I make my way back to the Old City quarters, a rambling neighbourhood of tenements with pastel-shaded facades. The winding alleys are deserted except for children who play by the wall which encircles the cemetery. Tufts of weeds poke out between cracks. The wall glows a mute crimson as it absorbs the sun’s rays. Never before have I felt so strongly the impact of this hour, when day gives way to night and when, for a moment, light and darkness meet in the luminosity of twilight. It seems impossible a Majdanek could have existed. Where have I been today?
The train circles north, towards the Bialystoku region. 1 doze fitfully through the night, occasionally jolted by the screech of brakes and flashes of light from stations rushing by. Months of travel coalesce in a trail of menacing dreams; and I envisage how it may have been, in the dying days of the Reich, as the Red Army moved in from the east, and the Allies from the west, liberating remnants from death camps, forest hideouts, attics and barns, a handful here, a few there. Like spectres they move, the survivors, across war-ravaged landscapes, in a trance, returning with the instincts of homing pigeons, urged on by faint hopes of finding someone alive: family, a former neighbour, a familiar face, within that vague, half-forgotten mirage they had once known as home.
In the streets of New Zealand delirious crowds are dancing. Yet my parents cannot recall a celebration, a sense of relief, or an ending, but merely a daze and an ominous blight, a ‘black stain’, father has called it. The search extended for years. They scoured Red Cross lists and personal notices in the columns of Yiddish newspapers, astounded that they could not locate even one distant relative, when thousands were emerging from the wreckage — this one from a refugee camp, that one from a Siberian prison, another from a remote town in Asia Minor, or any one of the many far-flung enclaves where temporary refuge may have been found while the storm was raging. In all parts of the globe lists were being scoured. And increasingly it was becoming obvious how immense, how complete, the Catastrophe had been.
In 1947, or thereabouts — I have never been able to find out exactly when — a notice appeared in a local paper, addressed to father, from a camp for displaced persons; and, in time, I would become aware of bitter quarrels, accusations, evasions, of matters enshrouded in obscure hints and denials, which seemed always, eventually, to hearken back to that message from yener velt, from the kingdom of night.
Many such notices were appearing at the time, signalling the unexpected reappearance of a friend, an acquaintance, a former comrade, as if returned from the dead. ‘I am looking for Meier Zabludowski’, s
he had written, more or less. ‘I am thinking of moving to Australia or New Zealand.’ The note was brief, a mere inquiry. Yet between the lines could be heard a barely concealed scream, a plea for help. Like so many others, she was seeking a means to flee the ruins of a past life in which they had marched together, through the streets of Bialystok, their arms linked, cushioned by each other’s warmth and an illusory sense of communal strength.
‘Send her money! Our savings! A permit! A guarantee! Send her everything she needs!’, father had replied on an impulse. At least these were the words that mother would mimic, at the height of her tirades. ‘Send her everything she needs!’ This was mother’s version, the way she imagined it, or accurately recalled it — I could never tell one way or another. And when I had begun to question father, he had, in those years, never replied. He would quietly retreat behind his bedroom door, to the works of his beloved Yiddish poets, to seek relief from the rage that had overtaken first his wife and then his children.
On one side, a silence; on the other, a tirade. My loyalties wavered, first one way then the other, goaded by father’s retreats, bewildered by mother’s furies: ‘I have a story to tell! No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!’
The year is 1947, or thereabouts. A baby is wailing. Mother is pregnant with the second child. ‘Send her money, guarantees, everything she needs!’ The spectre of Mrs Abrahams looms large. The fate of Sheindl remains fresh in her mind. Bialystok has been consumed by flames. Father is consumed by his helplessness and shame. Mother is consumed by a sense of having been betrayed. The shadow of Hitler extends from the grave. Father withdraws, a sullen retreat, limping with a loss of nerve and belief. Mother awakens with screams; and years later I would feel trapped in between, seeking desperately to distinguish reality from dreams.
Nearing the outskirts of Bialystok I see peasants gathering potatoes and turnips. They wear thick jackets, scarves, and knee-length boots. On the River Nerev a boatman poles past cottages sinking into the banks. In the yard of a farmhouse an old woman feeds her pigs. Villages whirl by. Crows swirl between church crosses and spires. A hare scampers from the tracks. Old men walk slowly along dusty paths. Wagons laden with the final harvest lurch over country roads. A midmorning sun hovers above fallow fields.
‘Those early years, after the Shoah, were a time of numbness, of suppressed grief, a stumbling through thick fog.’ This is how father has described it. And it is only now, since my journey has given us common ground, detailed maps that I have come to know like the veins which run blue rivulets through father’s worn hands, that I can fully accept his words. ‘We did not know it at the time’, he tells me. ‘How could we? We were like wounded horses, moving by instinct. We kept our sense of guilt at bay. We immersed ourselves in making a living, and in bearing children, three within four years. We moved back to Melbourne, following an urge to rejoin family and former Bialystoker, to find that they too were so immersed in their own efforts to rebuild their lives they did not have time to pause and look at themselves. We kept moving out of habit, driven by blind momentum, for we had little choice — either move forward, create a home, a refuge, or go mad.’ And, of course, some did. Like Bloomfield, forever tramping the streets, sleeping in parks and rooming houses, the tattooed arm his badge of sorrow, his engraved pain, his permanent Oswiecim.
Golden autumn, the Poles call it with pride. The landscape flows with a muted light which streaks into the city I am fast approaching. Bialystok appears tranquil, detached, beyond history, a survivor, intact. I see father in a leather jacket and open shirt, his trousers rolled up to the knees, wading across a stream on a trek through local forests: my favourite photo of him. His eyes are, as I have sometimes seen them, beyond doubt and confusion, denial and shame. They are blue. Clear as transparent skies. And mother’s are deep hazel, almost black, the colour of earth, of endurance.
I see them as they are now, in their old age. Father’s natural tendency has always been to fly, to soar on impulse and grand ideas. Yet for the fortieth year in succession he looks down upon the same patch of earth, as he composts, digs, plants, and moves towards an inner balance, an integrity. And mother, who has always cooked and cleaned and sewn and served, is softening, her gaze moving upwards, through distances, towards the heavens, towards surrender. And I see my reflection in them both. My eyes are green, in between; while within, I sense the first inklings of a harmony, the first intimations that a long journey is nearing its end.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A MIND CONSTANTLY ALERT, hands weaving as he talks, ideas bouncing erratically, curiosity expanding with age, body and soul channelled into single-minded attention on his rambling monologues — my father. A survivor. A philosopher.
Of all the seasons, he says, autumn is the philosopher. He had been born in winter: ethereal, snow-veiled, but forbidding and threatening. His basic pessimism had been tempered by spring’s naive and buoyant innocence. The summers had, he admits, been satisfying, at times even joyful. But the heat could also bloat the mind and dull the senses.
So it is autumn, after all, he has come to prefer. Autumn is the present stage in his life. A softer melody. A potential harmony. A song of fruition. A thanksgiving. Autumn is contemplative’, father stresses. ‘The season of afterthoughts, when leaves fall with a quiet language of their own.’ In the Old World it had been a season of colours, permeated with a copper glow, bronze and blessed.
And it is colour that greets me as I return to Bialystok after one month’s absence. The city parks are coated in ochres and lemons, auburns and pale emeralds. Buildings cast stark shadows to the movement of a sun low on the southern horizon. One day it rains incessantly, the next the sun re-emerges radiant and warm. Yet just as unexpectedly, temperatures plunge towards zero, frosts cover the countryside, and sharp winds bite into the skin.
Buklinski and Bunim are waiting as arranged. They sit in the gloom of Buklinski’s apartment, late afternoon, subdued, rugged up in gabardine overcoats. After a schnapps we descend the stairs into Zabia Square. An evening chill has settled upon the city. The two men clutch at their scarves and coats as if protecting themselves not only against the chill, but also against sinister forces they sense lurking around them. As we wait in line for a taxi they shuffle nervously. Out in the open, on the streets of Bialystok, my two companions are revealed as frail and vulnerable men on an alien landscape.
On July 27, 1944 the Red Army liberated Bialystok. In mid August Srolke Kott approached the outskirts of the city. He saw peasants in the fields gathering hay. Others stood chatting in front of their homes. A bizarre normality. An autumn harvest. As if nothing had happened. Srolke oscillated between fleeting moments of hope, and a brooding sense of dread and foreboding. Perhaps, yes, there would be some trace of home, a familiar face, a former neighbour.
I have never met Srolke Kott. For many years he has lived in Buenos Aires. Father knew his family as neighbours in Bialystok; but he remembers little of Srolke, since he was considerably younger than father. Mother had known his elder sister and had sung with her in choirs over sixty years ago. In a world of shadows, such connections can be as strong as blood ties. Soon after the war, Srolke wrote of his experiences as a partisan in the forests of White Russia. Father was particularly drawn to Srolke’s descriptions of his return to Bialystok. He absorbed them so fully, he could recount them as if they were his own. The ballad of Srolke Kott, the song of his homecoming, became the song of father’s imagined homecoming.
As Srolke drew nearer he hastened his steps. The first sight of the city confirmed his worst fears. The railway station was a burnt-out shell. The bridges were shattered. Whole streets had been reduced to rubble, and rows of houses to chimney stacks, a single wall, a skeleton.
Srolke approached the street in which he had grown up. Cobblestones which had once been smooth from the constant tread of footsteps were now overgrown with weeds. Holy books lay scattered about, their pages rotting. Wherever he looked there were broken chairs, doorle
ss wardrobes, fractured beds. Feathers from ripped pillows and quilts mingled with photographs of people who had once lived there — images of men with beards and sidelocks, women with fashionable hairstyles, a child in her mother’s arms, a boy seated on a horse, another wrapped in a prayer shawl on the day of his bar mitzvah — the album of a lost people.
All that remained of his family’s house were foundation stones and half a chimney. The rest was covered in sand and patches of grass. There were not even the remains of a wall on which he could find support. Srolke tried to visualise where his parents’ wedding photo had hung. For the children this photo had been the measure of their growing-up, while their mother would point to it as a reminder of how young she had once been.
Srolke was overcome by confusion. The legs that had supported him through many kilometres of forest and swamp gave way beneath him. The air he breathed seemed choked with the fumes of Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz. All his loved ones, all that had given meaning to his life, had vanished. One question echoed constantly within him: how could man commit such crimes upon his fellow man?
For a long time Srolke sat on the foundations, unable to remain still; yet at the same time, unable to flee. Nearby stood a fragment of barbed-wire fence, a remnant of the ghetto wall. In front of him Srolke noticed a hole in the earth, and recalled that this must have been the hideout he had built for his sister and parents. He bent over and stared at the opening. Inside it was dark, and he was seized by an urge to begin digging. Perhaps he would be confronted by corpses. It would be as if he had entered his own tomb. And in that moment Srolke was overwhelmed by that thought which was to haunt many survivors in years to come: why had he lived whilst his dear ones had been torn from life? How was he to deal with the fear of his own thoughts? How could he answer for himself? Is this what it meant to be liberated?