by Arnold Zable
Arie was born in 1950 and Jochi in 1947. Sonia Boszkowska was their ‘Aunt Sonia’, he says, and Sami Feder, their ‘Uncle Sami’. Arie’s father, Rafael, was Sami’s best friend. The men met in Bergen-Belsen. They were brothers in displacement. When the Kazet Theatre embarked on its European tour, Sami handed over his role as director of the camp’s cultural department to Rafael.
‘Do you know,’ says Arie, ‘that the camp functioned as an autonomous state? A kind of republic. And that under the noses of the British military it became a self-governing system that looked after its people?’
I am taken by the idea: a republic of the stateless. With its elected leaders, political parties and governing officials. And a citizenry composed of the displaced—the broken in body and the wounded in spirit.
In the first year after liberation, there were more than a thousand marriages, a response to the re-awakening of sexual desire and an urgent need for companionship. It was the main event, with up to fifty weddings a week. The grooms wore suits, and the brides wedding dresses, some made from parachutes. Apartment blocks were decorated and rations transformed into fine dishes. In that first year, there were more than five hundred births registered at the Bergen-Belsen hospital, and by 1948, more than a thousand.
‘In this cynical world we live in, many people cannot understand what the camp provided,’ says Arie. ‘And the theatre played a big role in this. I am familiar with the reaction of the audience. It was a great deed that Sami performed at that time. He was the right person in the right place doing the right thing.
‘My parents told me about the theatre when I was a young boy. They told me that Aunt Sonia was the leading performer and that Sami was the director. They told me everything, the good and the bad. I could not understand it all, but what they said made a lasting impression.’
I want to keep Arie talking. Now that I have found someone who knew Sonia and Sami I cannot let go. I probe, rephrase questions and seek new angles, trying to rekindle memory. ‘My sister and I loved Uncle Sami and Aunt Sonia,’ says Arie. ‘And they loved us very much. We were the children they didn’t have. They were always smiling. When they visited our apartment, they lit up when they saw us.
‘In my child’s eye I saw Sonia as stronger than Sami, more worldly. She was glamourous. She wore haute couture dresses, make-up and perfume. This is what has stayed with me most, her perfume. It was a part of who she was: a woman from abroad, a woman of Paris. She was passionate and dramatic, and very attractive. A femme fatale. I am sure many men were drawn to her.
‘Something was not quite right between them. They were very unhappy in Paris. Sami was a dreamer. He lived for his art, and he lived in the past. He was frustrated in his efforts to make a living from theatre. I have letters Sami wrote to my father from Paris. Sami complains that he and Sonia are poor. He needs money.
‘They lived like dogs in Paris. There was talk of a small business, a shop they ran together. The business struggled. Sami was a schlimazl with money. They finally left and settled in Israel for a short while. Then one day Sonia disappeared from our life.
‘Sami spent much of his time writing his memoirs and histories of the theatre. He needed money to have them printed. He asked for help from people he once knew in Bergen-Belsen. He was always looking for a publisher and receiving rejections. He remarried. His second wife, Dwora, was a lovely woman, but they never had children.
‘Then a few years ago I heard that Sonia was living in Australia. I thought, this is fantastic. I wanted to hear from her again. I wanted to see her again, but it was too late. She died before I could get in touch. Sami died in 2000. They are all gone now: my father and mother, and the citizens of Bergen-Belsen. Your tribute has brought back many memories.
I phone Arie’s sister, Jochi. Her voice is strong and she is forthright in her views. Even over such a distance I can tell she is tough and grounded. ‘Listen, I can tell you something,’ she says. ‘As I speak I see Sonia in front of me. She had big eyes. She wore bright red lipstick. She was very particular in her make-up. She was a person who took care of herself. She was always perfectly dressed, and she was very kind. I would say, gentle. She never lost her temper, but she was in charge, and Sami was a shadow in her presence.
‘He adored her. His life revolved around her. He was nervous. Listen, I speak to you and I see him. He was jumpy, and his hands were always moving. He was a kind soul, but he was choking her with love. He worshipped her and was unsure of himself in her company. Sonia was self-contained. She had an aura about her. I am sure she knew what she was doing, and I am sure she initiated the separation. After they parted, I never saw her again.’
I am surprised by what Ari and Jochi have told me. I had always imagined Sami as the assertive one, and Sonia as living and performing beside a dominant man. I had deduced this, in part, from photos of Sonia and Sami separately and as a couple in the displaced persons camp and in post-war Paris.
In several photos, Sami wears a dark suit and tie and a white shirt. His features are sharp: deeply set eyes, receding black hair combed back from his forehead. His expression is thoughtful. He emanates authority and appears aware of the image he is projecting.
I had also assumed Sami was the dominant one in the partnership from what I observed in Sonia’s final years with Pinche. He was loving, but he often belittled her opinion and berated her for forgetfulness. When we visited the aged-care home, Sonia would get vodka from the fridge and bowls of almonds and fruit and slices of orange cake, and then say little. She appeared resigned, and compliant.
There were times when I saw her flinch at Pinche’s outbursts, and then become silent. She would shrug and close her eyes, and when she opened them her expression would be restored to neutral. Yet there was also the easy harmony of a couple familiar with each other’s ways, and a kind of love between them born of their common youth as children of the Bund and a mutual love of Lodz, their childhood city.
Pinche’s nostalgia for Lodz remained till the end. I visited him on the final night of his life, as he lay in his hospital bed. ‘Lodz was a dirty, polluted city,’ he said, in the pugnacious tone I knew so well. As always, his defiance was tempered by a sense of wonder. I had seen it many times over the years, his rapid switches from belligerence to wonder.
‘Yes, Lodz was a dirty polluted city,’ he repeated. ‘But it was my city, and it was my home, and it was the home of my mamushka and tatushka.’ These were the last words I heard Pinche say. He died hours later.
After Pinche’s death Sonia pared her life back to essentials. Among the few possessions she retained were the photo of proud Bono and one of her mother and father and her brother taken before the war in that dirty, polluted city. But she kept no trace of Sami or the Kazet Theatre. No photos of Paris or New York, or her walk-up apartment. Nothing from that long stretch of life between her childhood and youth in Poland and her present life, bar the painted portraits, the album cover, and the family photos taken in Lodz, her true home, despite it all.
I review the photos I have of Sonia and Sami. In one, taken in Paris in 1947, they are seated in the restaurant of the Sarah Bernhardt theatre. There’s a bottle of champagne on the table in front of them, a second bottle rests in a silver bucket. Perhaps the photo was taken after a performance of the Kazet Theatre on the last leg of its European tour. It may have been after the theatre’s final appearance.
In the light of my conversations with Arie and Jochi, I detect the beginnings of a shift in Sami’s appearance. He is showing signs of ageing. He was considerably older than Sonia. She is in her prime, glowing. He appears uncertain. Perhaps I am reading too much into it. ‘Who knows what goes on in a marriage?’ says Jochi. ‘We were children who did not have grandparents. Arie and I loved them both. We needed them as much as they needed us.
‘Listen, my mother lost everyone. She had a brother who was a prisoner in Auschwitz. He was a member of the Sonderkammando work units, one of the men who were forced to dispose of the bodies from the
gas chambers. What he saw no human being should have to see. Any dissent meant instant death.’
Jochi’s uncle took part in the revolt of the Sonderkammando on 7 October 1944. The plan was to destroy the gas chambers, inspire an uprising, and make a run for it. The men hoarded gunpowder smuggled in by women enslaved at a nearby munitions factory, and prepared grenades with which to blow up the crematoria. They attacked the SS and Kapos with hammers, two machine guns, stones, knives and axes, and they partly destroyed Crematorium 4. ‘My mother’s brother was killed for it,’ says Jochi.
‘My father had one brother left, a rabbi in Brooklyn. This was all we had, and he was far away. We didn’t see him often. The friends my parents made in Bergen-Belsen became our family. They went through the fire together, but each one was different.
‘You know, my father talked about the past, and he wrote about the past, but I don’t think he lived in the past. He felt obliged to remember and record it. And he did this so that what happened would be honoured, and what he had seen never forgotten.
‘But Sami lived in the past. That was the difference. Sami was obsessed. And yes, his hands were always moving, in a restless way. Listen, I talk to you and again I see him in front of me, his curly hair and his fading looks. I see him sitting next to Sonia, and I see how anxious he was.’
Of the day that British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen, Sami writes: ‘We were freed, but we were not free.’ Decades later he is still not free. He is weighed down by the memory. He remains an inmate of the republic of the stateless. Bergen-Belsen is now overgrown with grass, he laments. The mass graves are sinking beneath a newly planted forest.
Among the buried is his sister, Fela, who perished in the camp. Her photo appears in his memoirs. She wears a dark scarf and a checked shirt, and she looks directly at the camera. The image has a haunting aura, perhaps due to the viewer’s knowledge of her fate. Sami is driven to resurrect her, and document all that he witnessed. He cannot unsee it.
The literal translation of the Yiddish title of Sami’s camp memoir is: Through Twelve Fires of Hell. It is an apt title. The memoir burns with the horror of his experience, and his resolve. He does not flinch in the telling. He depicts the depths of human depravity in accounts that trace the descent of the victims into their private hells and the strategies they employed to survive and evade their captors’ attentions.
Sami’s forays into the fires of hell begin early. He has his first inklings in 1925, in Frankfurt Am Main. He is nineteen years old. Every night, on his way home from the acting school, he passes a shopfront displaying anti-Semitic books, woodcut caricatures and copies of the Nazi publication Der Sturmer. His people are depicted as an avaricious race of perverts and vermin. They are the root cause of Germany’s woes, parasites to be exterminated. Sami is enraged and drawn to political action.
In Berlin, he witnesses Hitler’s ascent to power: goosestepping thugs on the march, demonstrations, random beatings. After the burning, in February 1933, of the Reichstag, the Nazis round-up socialists, communists and stateless Jews, and deport them to the first concentration camps: Dachau and Oranienberg. As a journalist and theatre director, and a Jewish non-citizen active in progressive circles, Sami Feder is high on the blacklist.
One day, while he is at work typesetting the Encyclopaedia Judaica in German translation, he receives word from his landlady. His room had been ransacked by the criminal police and the SS. They had taken his typewriter, photos and camera, manuscripts and papers. They were waiting for him.
Sami makes his way to the home of a friend—a member of a socialist youth group, a printer and workmate. After a week in hiding, he steals back to his room and gathers a few possessions. There is a letter on his desk, left for him by the police, warning him that he has forty-eight hours to leave Germany or face dire consequences. The time limit has long expired.
Sami is smuggled out of Berlin to a nearby town, where he boards an express train heading southeast to the Polish border. He is arrested by the SS at Breslau Station, imprisoned and interrogated. They demand he tell them where and with whom he has spent the twelve days since he was ordered to leave Germany. Drawing on his acting skills, Sami insists he is a naïve young man who is anxious to return to Poland to reunite with his family. After paying a bribe in jewellery, he is handcuffed and taken to the station, locked in a compartment and deported to Poland.
On his arrival at Katowice Station, he is arrested for not possessing a Polish passport, and shunted back in a locked compartment to Germany. He steals back into Poland by merging with a group of German Catholics who cross the border to pray in a Polish church on Sunday mornings. Assuming guises is Sami’s profession, and a bag containing the bare necessities is his most trusted companion.
After a short stay in his mother’s house, Sami heads for the epicentre of Yiddish life, Warsaw. He goes to the artists’ union and to the Yiddish Writers Club, at the legendary address: Tlomackie 13. He climbs the well-worn stairs to the clubrooms and offices. He talks with authors and journalists and is inducted as a guest member, but his warnings of the perils posed by the ascent of Hitler fall on deaf ears. The establishment is complacent. This is nothing new, they say. You are over-anxious. Pogroms come and go. We know how to handle it. In Warsaw, we are free to go about our business.
Sami is in despair. He is Nietzsche’s madman, clutching a lantern on a summer morning, dashing through the marketplace among the self-assured and the unbelieving, proclaiming: ‘Wake up! Prepare! This is a danger of a different order!’ Sami is prepared. He is one of the first to have witnessed the Nazi party’s power, and among the first to understand what it portended.
When Sami and Sonia meet again in Bergen-Belsen they had both journeyed through those fires of hell. Sonia is a partner in Sami’s mission and active in creating the theatre within weeks of their liberation. At some point, they become a couple.
Perhaps it began during the time of their collaborations in Benzin before the war. Perhaps they were one of the many couples who would stroll through the forest in the displaced persons camp grounds, a favoured place for secret trysts and sexual encounters. Or perhaps they fell in love on tour in Brussels and Antwerp. There are photos of the couple at that time in which they appear radiant.
Fate is fragile. This story is fragile. Arie Olewski emails me a scanned copy of the two sides of a flimsy sheet of hotel stationery, dated 1960. The paper is razor thin. The sheet is headed: ‘The Sharon Hotel in Herzliya by the Sea’, evoking blue skies, ocean breezes and the waters of the Mediterranean. Glowing sands and crowded beaches, open-necked shirts and summer dresses. The sheet is filled with messages addressed to Sonia in Paris.
Both sides of the sheet are filled with greetings written in fountain pen. Every bit of space is taken. Some messages are scrawled vertically, others horizontally. Some are written on a diagonal, or squeezed into the corners. The messages were gathered at a reunion of the Bergen-Belsen Association, and written by ex-citizens of the republic of the stateless. Among them former members of the Kazet Theatre. They are more than citizens. They are comrades, brothers and sisters, but Sonia was not with them. I don’t know why she did not join them, but it is clear from the messages that her friends missed her.
Their sentiments are recorded in Yiddish, French, Russian and Polish. The republic was host to many languages. The ex-citizens have resettled, but the republic maintains its hold. They ache for Sonia’s presence.
‘Sonia, where are you?’ ‘My dear Sonitchka, all your friends are meeting. It’s such a pity that you are not with us! All our thoughts are with you.’ ‘Sonia, I hope you have remembered how we ate together in Paris.’ ‘Dear Sonia! Greetings to you. I regret that I have not seen you since the war. Remember me.’
‘Dear Sonia, I am sorry you are not among us. Greetings and kisses.’ ‘We would dearly love to see you.’ ‘We hope that you will shortly come to stay permanently.’ And the message which cuts deepest: ‘It is strange to see Sami without you.’
; Something is amiss. Sami writes: ‘Dear Sonitchka, I send you my most heartfelt greetings.’ Sami is present with former members of the theatre, but his partner is absent.
Sami is not able to fully return to civilian life. He was of one time and one place, a time that encompassed many places, way-stops in hell. He found his strength in hell, but once his ordeal was over, and he was in his promised land, he still felt stateless. Years later, Jochi articulates it. ‘He did not have roots in the present. He remarried, but he never got over Sonia. Listen. I can tell you something. Sonia and Sami’s great love was of a certain time and circumstance.’
Jochi is a daughter of Bergen-Belsen, conceived and born in the republic of the stateless. ‘Listen. I can tell you something,’ she repeats. ‘Sami and Sonia created something out of nothing. They came together, and they did amazing things. They climbed to a great height. For a moment, they stood at the summit, but there was nowhere higher to go. They could not adjust to a new reality. In Paris, Sami became a fallen hero, but a hero he remained.’
Jochi has led me to the irony. For years, Sami was ahead of history. He led the way, and he lit the way. He lifted spirits. He saved lives, and provided comfort. Then history overtook him. The price he paid was immense. He lost Sonia.
Yet, he attained something else. He took on the role of witness, the chronicler. There is a photo of Sami in later years, seated at a writing desk. He is surrounded by papers, books and documents, at work on his memoirs and histories. His writing is driven by a burning need to preserve all of it: the reviews, journal articles, newspaper reports, scripts, sheet music, eyewitness accounts and testimonies. Every scrap of information.
Sami writes with a sense of immediacy. He recalls both the horror and the moments of reprieve. He is fully present to the past, resuming yet another retelling of his life story. He is Dante’s Virgil, a guide in the Inferno. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, reads the infamous inscription, but Sami Feder is not dealing in allegory. He takes his readers into a literal hell. He descends again and again into the underworld.