by Arnold Zable
But the performers’ backers are deserting them. The relief workers are overworked and indifferent. Theatre and the arts are low on their list of priorities. Impresarios in the US are in search of light entertainment, wary of the confronting tales enacted by the ensemble. They are not prepared to finance a troupe of thirty on a national tour: the costs of wages, accommodation, theatre hire and travel expenses are too high.
Tours to London, New York and Buenos Aires are cancelled. Sami has no choice but to disband the troupe and allow its members to go their own ways. It could not last. In their gathering lay their future dissolution, in their unity lay the seeds of their dispersal, and in their performances they had paved a way from the past to the future. It was time to move on.
Some stay on in Paris in the homes of friends and relatives. Others receive visas from sponsors in the Americas, or seek passage to Palestine. Some have no option but to return to Bergen-Belsen. Among them are Sami and Sonia. Again, a train journey, backtracking over borders they had so recently crossed. Again, rails leading to guarded portals. Returned, as they had left, to the republic of the stateless.
Sami and Sonia eventually return to Paris. They marry in 1950. Time hangs in the balance. The authority that Sami had forged in Frankfurt and Berlin appears to be slipping; his focus is shifting. As the need to document what he has witnessed takes hold of him, Sonia wants to move on. She wants to step out into the world. She wants to live and make a living. She is looking forward. Sami is condemned to look back.
Responding to a small item in a Yiddish journal, on 27 August 1951, Sami writes:
Somewhere in a small corner, on page three, hidden behind a barrage of news, there is a report: ‘The last displaced persons camp in Germany, the British Zone, has been liquidated.’ A chapter of history closed. Shush. Silence. As if nothing had happened. Bergen-Belsen where thousands of martyrs were buried in the weeks following liberation, forgotten. Bergen-Belsen is not even named, and the dead are not mentioned. The displaced persons camps in the British zone have been closed, and not a tear shed for the memory of those who are buried there—souls who could never come with us.
How does the word ‘liquidate’ sound to those who survived and spent years of their lives there? Bergen-Belsen cannot be liquidated. It exists. Thirty thousand corpses lie there, and tens of thousands more lie in unmarked graves, murdered on the brink of liberation. For us Bergen-Belsen will exist forever. Yiskor. Always remembered.
After Sami settles in Israel in 1962 he will not return to live theatre. He will not direct or perform again. He will spend his remaining years retracing his journey, crisscrossing that span of time from 1925 till 1947 recounting the same stories in many versions. He will write: ‘Forgive me, I am slow on the typewriter. I do not have money for editors, and no resources for technical help. I do not have time to correct my work. Forgive me if I repeat myself.’
Yet no matter how much he writes, he will say there is much more to write, and that he is too ill and tired, and time is running out, and that even with his best will and strenuous efforts, he can never depict all he had seen and experienced. ‘But I will try,’ he says. ‘I will draw on every ounce of strength I have left to fulfil my sacred mission.’
He will live in the promised land, but Bergen-Belsen will remain his Jerusalem. He will forever sing the praises of the Kazet Theatre and the republic of the stateless. He will name its triumphs: the kindergartens, schools, trade workshops, folk university, the houses of learning and yeshivas, its own court and police force, library and adult education courses, the music school, dance school, newspapers and journals. The miracle.
And he will sit by the water of the Mediterranean and vow: ‘If I forget thee, O Bergen-Belsen, let my right hand forget its skill. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set Bergen-Belsen above my highest joy.’
I now suspect that Sami’s highest joy was his love for Sonia, but it is a joy he did not record. He documents Sonia’s seminal role in the Kazet Theatre; but he does not hint at what he felt for her.
I look for clues elsewhere. I recall the first time I saw Sonia perform, circa 1980, as a guest overseas artist, on the Kadimah stage, in Elsternwick, a seven-minute drive from the city’s beaches, and an easy walk from the Joyce Street house that years later she would share with Pinche; and a ten-minute drive from the aged-care home where she would spend her final decade.
The stage is modest, a raised platform. There are no curtains; the back wall is wood panelled and flanked by vertical stained-glass windows. The hall seats upwards of two hundred. On the walls are black-and-white photos of writers and actors and community leaders posing with dignified expressions. Sonia stands at the mic. Her hair is dyed blonde. She wears a pale blue dress that hugs her slim figure.
There are survivors in the audience. They do not see themselves as victims, and they do not live as victims. They have moved on with their lives and are happy to see each other. They are here to be entertained and to hear songs they have known since childhood. Sonia is at one with them. She performs pre-war songs of hope and promise: ‘We are young, the world is open’. Yiddish cabaret: ‘Why do you loiter outside my window?’
She switches to French and Russian: Edith Piaf and ‘Play Balalaika’. She sings nonsense songs: ‘Listen to this story children, listen with nose and eye, over grandma babushka’s roof, a cow I saw did fly’. And songs of nostalgia: ‘Where is that village, where is that street? Where is that laneway where we would meet?’
She does not perform ghetto songs in concert. They are reserved for memorial evenings. There is one exception: Springtime, written in the Vilna ghetto by her friend, Shmerke Kaczerginski, songwriter, poet, frontline artist and, like Sami, by trade a printer.
Shmerke was born in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1908; he was a year younger than Sami. His mother and father died when he was six and, like Sami, he was raised by his grandfather. Shmerke was a leading light in the movement of experimental Yiddish poets in Vilna known as the ‘Young Ones’. When the Germans occupied Vilna in June 1941, he posed as a deaf mute to evade capture. He was caught in early 1942 and incarcerated in the Vilna Ghetto.
Now Shmerke wrote songs reflecting his people’s struggles: ballads of partisans and ghetto fighters, songs of mourning and bleak lullabies, ‘Quiet, quiet, let’s be silent, corpses are growing here’. His works were performed in ghetto cabarets, theatre evenings and cultural gatherings.
After the Vilna Ghetto uprising in September 1943, Shmerke escaped to the forests and served as a partisan in the borderlands of Lithuania and Byelorussia. He re-entered Vilna with the Soviet Army on 13 July 1944, on the day of the city’s liberation. After the war Shmerke lived for a time in Lodz, then settled in Paris in 1946 and toured displaced persons camps in Germany, where he met Sonia and Sami.
Like Sami, Shmerke became a collector of songs and folklore, an archivist and a historian. In 1948, he published his crowning achievement, the landmark 435-page Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps. Shmerke moved to Buenos Aires in 1950 and embarked on speaking tours and concerts in Europe and throughout North and South America.
He died in 1954 in a plane crash in the Andes foothills. He was returning home from a public engagement in the provincial town of Mendoza.
Shmerke wrote Springtime in the Vilna Ghetto, after the death of his first wife, Barbara Kaufman. Barbara was captured and taken prisoner in Krakow for her role in the Resistance. She was deported to the Vilna Ghetto where she met Shmerke. The couple were married in 1942 and were active in the ghetto underground. Barbara was executed in 1943. It was springtime:
I wander the ghetto, from alley to alley, but nowhere can I find peace. Where is my lover? How can I recover? People, say something, a word to console me. My house is lit up now, by skies blue and glowing. But what good does it do me? I stand like a beggar, by each doorway, and beg for the sunlight.
I go to my workplace, and pass by our cottage, in sorrow the door is locked tight. The da
y fierce with sunrays, the flowers are wilting. They weep, for them it is night. Each evening, returning, my sadness is burning. Right here you’d be waiting. Right here in the shadows, your footsteps familiar, you embraced and kissed me.
This year, the springtime has arrived early. My longing for you in full bloom. I see you approaching, laden with flowers. With joy, you are coming to me. The sun has watered the garden with sunrays. The earth is coated in green. My dear one, my lover. Where have you vanished? I can’t get you out of my mind.
Springtime, please take my sorrow, and return my lover, my dear one to me. Springtime, upon your wings of blue, take my heart with you, and return my joy to me.
Sonia stands on the Kadimah stage and sways to Springtime’s tango rhythm. I knew little about her then. I did not know that hers was the final voice heard by some of the inmates she sang to in Bergen-Belsen in the months before liberation. Sonia in rags, surrounded by death and terror, singing.
I can never know what songs she sang back then. Perhaps a song of resistance, a children’s song. A lullaby: Sleep my child, my life, my treasure. Ai-le-lu-le-lu. Sleep my child, my prayer, my future. Ai-le-lu-le-lu. Fortunate is she who has a mother. And a cradle too. Ai-le-lu-le-lu.
It is in song that I find Sonia. A song is finite, a framed moment of intensity. It has time limits, set boundaries. In song, Sonia felt at home and protected. And it is in Springtime and her performance of it, that I picture them, Sonia and Sami, in the time of their highest joy and their deepest sadness.
The song returns me to Sami, on a winter night—10 February 1945. Bunzlau slave labour camp. The inmates cannot sleep. They hear the pounding of heavy artillery. The following morning, they are not ordered out for work. Instead, they are assembled and told that the camp is to be closed, and the able-bodied transferred to another labour camp. The sick and the weak will follow later.
Late into the night, the men pace the barracks, calculating. Some are on their feet, praying. Some sit by the table, engaged in whispered conversation. Others lie on their bunks, fully dressed, awaiting the next move, dozing. The Soviet front is closing in from the east, and the Allied armies are approaching from the west.
There are rumours that the SS are planning to raze the camp and poison the sick prisoners. The debate rages: should the sick inmates try to disguise their ailments? Should the able-bodied feign illness, and stay put in the hope of being liberated by the Russians, or should they leave with their overseers?
At 1.30 am, there’s an uneasy stillness. Suddenly the screams of SS guards: ‘Achtung! Achtung! All able-bodied men out to the assembly ground. Ready to march. Schnell. You have ten minutes. Do you understand?’ ‘Jawohl,’ the men reply from the barracks, in one thunderous chorus.
They hastily dress, gather their meagre belongings and rush from the barracks, hearts pounding. The snow crunches underfoot; the moon peeps in and out of black clouds. They line up, eight to a row, and stand to attention. Their overseers pace the lines, guns at the ready.
There is no headcount, no selection, and no search for those who have opted to remain hidden. The wagons have been loaded with ammunition and provisions. Some of the inmates are harnessed to the wagons. The camp commandant orders the march to begin. The convoy of slaves and their masters files out in the darkness. Some of the wagons are bogged in the snow. The guards beat the men, screaming: ‘You useless pigs. Do you want to pull, or do you want to die?’ The men are soaked in sweat. Palls of frost rise with their breath.
The convoy moves on. Blows rain down on the men when their pace slackens. Many collapse, exhausted. Some beg permission to load their fallen comrades onto wagons. Others heave them onto their shoulders, and haul them over the snow, willing their feet on beyond the limits of endurance.
At night, the men sleep in barns, in camp barracks and in the fields, cuddling in the snow for warmth. The days become weeks and still the march continues: past burning homes, bombed-out villages and gutted factories littered with debris and metal. Searchlights sweep the landscape. The air trembles with the roar of planes, and the earth shudders with the thud of bombs and anti-aircraft fire.
Sami Feder will record the details of the march in his memoirs: the fate of his comrades, their names and the manner of their deaths recorded. He will write of the beatings, and of marchers murdered on a whim by guards enraged by the advance of the liberating armies. And of the SS men, machine guns in hand, marching at the rear of the column, shooting those who fell behind, and leaving them for dead by the wayside.
He will write of crossing a river and of the bridge exploding moments later. The men are flung off their feet, and they fall covered in dirt, blood and mortar. He will write of prisoners breaking free and making a run for it, then betrayed and smoked out of their hideouts and executed by SS men and civilian militias; and of being ordered to bury dead comrades, and reciting the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, over their corpses.
He will write of men being lined up to be shot, then reprieved by the counter-orders of a ‘decent’ commander; of nights sleeping in abandoned camp huts, and of the floorboards being set alight to flush out prisoners who had secreted themselves beneath them. And of life reduced to footsteps on snow, the crunch of one foot and then the other, each step edging closer to death or—dare the prisoners hope—freedom.
After six weeks on the march, the convoy arrives at the Mittelbrau-Dora slave labour complex. The dwindling band of sick and exhausted men is marched to the sub-camp, Ellrich, which produces V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets. Of all the camps that Sami has endured in the past four years, Ellrich will prove to be the worst.
It is crowded with prisoners from many nations, housed in barracks and hangars. The men are marched to and from the quarries in round-the-clock shifts, seven days a week, each completing a work day of up to sixteen hours. When a prisoner falls ill, his forehead is marked by a number, and he is consigned to a barrack stacked with corpses squeezed between layers of timber, where he too will await cremation.
Sami will write of the anti-Semitic attacks by fellow inmates, and the brutal hierarchies among the prisoners. And of the saving graces: his Kapo, the barracks leader, a gypsy called Peter who, believing they share the same name, grants Feder favours; and a slave-labour mate from white Russia, who shares a mutual love of literature and theatre—their whispered conversations help them pass the long days loading clay and gravel onto wagons.
One morning, the prisoners make their way to the assembly ground for the daily headcount and trek to work. They are told that the camp is to be evacuated. The front is closing in; the sound of machine gun and artillery is growing louder. The men are marched from the camp, loaded into cattle wagons and taken north, to the city of Hamburg.
The British have bombed the tracks. The train is left stranded at the Hamburg station. After his liberation, Sami learns that the prisoners were to be shipped onto the Elbe River, and drowned. Instead, they are transported to Bergen-Belsen. They arrive in the last days of March.
After years on the move, yet another camp is his destination; again, the sight of barbed wire, sentry huts and watchtowers, and beyond the wire, wooden huts and the ghostly movement of grey masses. Camp 1, the main camp, is overcrowded with the sick and the dying. The newcomers are incarcerated in Camp 2, in the military barracks of the Panzer Training School, sections of which, in the months before liberation, housed prisoners of war: Sami’s final portal.
Sunday, 15 April 1945. Sami and his comrades lie in the barracks. They are too weak to move. The sun mocks them through the windows. They are dreaming of their daily bowl of soup. They crave water, but do not possess the energy to fetch it. Suddenly, the sound of gunfire. The barracks are shaking. The firing grows louder; the men cling to their bunks. A deafening roar, and the windows are shattered. The barracks are being strafed by low-flying German aeroplanes. Some of the men are dead, others lie wounded in pools of blood.
Then the thunder of cannon fire, and soon after, the rumbling of jeeps and tanks. S
everal prisoners shuffle to the window. ‘Comrades,’ one of them shouts. ‘The English!’ The men cannot believe it. Minutes later, a voice can be heard through a loudhailer. ‘Prisoners of all nations…the British military has taken the camp. You are free.’
The inmates are free, but not free. It is a line that Sami will repeat many times in his memoirs. They are free, but the dead lie side-by-side with the sick and the dying. The spirit is momentarily lighter, but the body is not. Ah, sweet liberation, yet for many a new battle is about to begin. They are free of the spectre of death, but do not know what it means to walk among the living.
And there are dangers: the inmates of the Horror Camp are quarantined for fear of the spread of typhus. During the first two days, Hungarian SS guards—who have been retained by the conditions of a truce to help maintain order—patrol the barracks. Some of them shoot newly liberated inmates for attempting to leave the camp in search of food or for raiding a potato patch, or ‘stealing’ supplies from the camp food stores: a final pretext for murder.
The first Sabbath after liberation, several hundred survivors gather in the camp grounds. Many are still weak and exhausted. They huddle together for warmth. A voice rises from the stillness humming a nigun, a melody. From the humming there arises a song, and from the song, a collective singing.
The first stars appear. A bonfire is lit. Sami Feder stands by the fire and recites his newly written poems of umkum un oifkum, death and resurrection. Rabbi Zwi Helfgott, a former Yugoslav prisoner of war, presides over the gathering. He raises his fists and proclaims: ‘Death to the fascists. Long live freedom.’
He lifts a burning log from the fire and recites Havdalah, the prayer marking the end of the Sabbath, and leads the survivors in song. They rock back and forth as they sing. Some struggle to their feet, and dance by the fire. It is a scene that will remain forever engraved in Sami’s soul.