Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  Elie Wiesel was interviewed in 1978, the conversation appearing in a 1984 Paris Review.

  INTERVIEWER: For ten years you waited until you were ready to write about the Holocaust in your first book, Night.

  WIESEL: I didn’t want to use the wrong words. I was afraid that words might betray it. I waited. I’m still not sure that it was the wrong move, or the right move, that is, whether to choose language or silence.

  A minute or two later…

  INTERVIEWER: What do you mean you didn’t want to write those books?

  WIESEL: I didn’t want to write a book on the Holocaust… I had to. It wasn’t voluntary. None of us wanted to write. Therefore when you read a book on the Holocaust, written by a survivor, you always feel this ambivalence. On one hand, he feels he must. On the other hand, he feels … if only I didn’t have to.

  Vera via Robert in the memoir…

  ‘You’re a Jew, you survive the ghetto: you tell the story for the rest of your life. You have to believe that it matters. Poor Primo Levi, the tiled floor rushing up at him, facing what the Nazis could not achieve: his death. And why? Because what Robert wants to hear from me Levi had ceased to believe meant anything to listeners, to readers, to anyone… Someday someone will say to me, “The Holocaust? Is that a movie?”, and like Primo Levi I will see the floor speeding towards my face.’

  If life were different, if I could write books like normal people, I’d have had Vera all to myself.

  First my book comes out.

  After that, a respectful amount of time later, her memoir with Robert.

  The way writers do, I’d have slotted the parts into place for maximum impact hoping the readers might be taken by the life of another. I would have looked at Vera’s life, and thought—and said to myself, and out loud—what an amazing story. (Get a load of that!)

  This space I ended up in between the telling and the not-telling I would not have chosen in a million years.

  ‘Better a titmouse in the hand than a crane in the sky’—odd-sounding in English but in Russian it is one of those commonplace expressions featuring a commonplace Russian bird. You grow up with these birds and sayings flitting around you. Most cultures have a version of the saying. Sparrows and pigeons, hens and eagles, chicken, geese; in English it’s ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. A human life is often written about as if it is in the hand of whoever is doing the writing. It isn’t. It is always the two birds in the bush. Which is to say, it cannot be captured, that deceptively friendly English word for speaking of other people’s lives, and it cannot be fully grasped, another faux-friendly word for going deep into people’s worlds. Life of a child survivor? That’s more like four birds in the bush. Oh, come on, you know what I am saying: it’s only right that this one flew away.

  Scientists say childhood amnesia is a thing and it happens around seven. Children forget their early memories. As adults we may later remember those moments, whole honeycombs of them sometimes—most people say their earliest memory dates from when they were three, four—but we’ll remember them the way a not-yet-seven child remembers. As sensations. These memories tend to be physical, emotional, visceral, without narrative. ‘At seven,’ Paul Valent is telling me, ‘you start remembering like an adult, going back in your mind to a particular moment and remembering it in sort of an adult way.’ Seven marks the beginning of autobiographical memory: memory that organises, rather than obliquely underpinning, our sense of self. Except with trauma where none of it works like any of that.

  Psychologist Vicki Gordon tells me of a conversation with a man who as a child survived the Holocaust. The man, a bigshot doctor, remembers little from his early childhood. The traumatic episodes he can remember with clarity.

  On late-night radio is Dasia Black, who survived WWII in open hiding, living with a Polish Christian family as an Aryan child, praying to the right god, kneeling low, clutching so tightly her new identity that for a while she could not remember her real name. Her parents died early in the war. Eventually her real uncle and aunt adopted her, the three of them finishing up in Australia. Black doesn’t like the word ‘survivor’. It’s got ‘some tinge to it’, she explains to the radio host, ‘of strength, of something special, whereas it was simply circumstance. My parents were not survivors, does it make them any less?’

  Children of WWII were not seen as survivors until the 1980s. Parents of those children—parents who made it alive to the war’s end—they were the survivors and even that realisation took its sweet time taking root. Then in the ’70s the idea emerged of a second generation, children born after the war who were, as was often said, carrying the unhealable scars without sustaining the wounds. For them, wrote Eva Hoffman, a second-generationer herself, their family’s past was ‘a sort of supercondensed pellet of primal information … from which everything else grows, or explodes, or follows, and which it takes a lifetime to unpack and decode’.

  That was them and meantime child survivors—alive during the war—were afloat, largely. Afloat for four decades. It was believed they could not remember what happened. And believed they, burdened by neither memory nor knowledge of the nature or scale of what they’d lived through, couldn’t be possessed by the war in the same permanent way as the adults around them. Believed wrongly (obviously—that much has been worked out and owned up to).

  Dasia Black is being asked what a young child—she was three and a half when the war started—could actually understand. Grown-up Black’s a child psychologist. So the question is deliberately double barrelled.

  A child understands to be quiet, she replies, and to hide when a Gestapo raid is on, how to pretend to be someone else, do anything not to displease the family that’s taken her in, understands how to walk away from her parents and continue walking while every instinct, every molecule, every piece of gravity pushes her back to them. What Orpheus couldn’t do once he left the underworld—keep walking and looking ahead when his whole reason for being, his Eurydice, was behind him; a child could do that.

  ‘What could a child like this remember?’ Phillip Adams on the radio says to Dasia Black.

  ‘Most of it,’ she answers.

  ‘I had the childhood I had,’ Vera was saying to me one day, ‘and therefore I embarked on my life fearless. And therefore I have done whatever I have done with my life the way I really wanted to.’

  A society like ours that sees the protection of children as its first moral necessity might be well served recognising children’s vulnerability as originating in their capacity, not their incapacity, for knowledge and action. This capacity—extraordinary at times, especially in the face of a catastrophe, private or public—has limitations but these limitations are often not what we think they are.

  One day in 1942 two men in trenchcoats approached Paul Valent and his parents on a Budapest street. Not long before, in the night, Paul, his mother and his father crossed the border from Slovakia into Hungary. Four-year-old Paul was riding on his father’s shoulders. He could not see others in their group but he could hear whispers that would die down every time dogs barked in the distance. Paul didn’t know his father’s business had been confiscated and in their country Jews, which included most of his extended family, were being deported to concentration camps but he did know that their walk, as he wrote sixty years later in a memoir, In Two Minds, meant ‘life and death’. ‘I just knew I had to be totally quiet. I knew not to think or feel.’ And when in Budapest a new identity—Christian, Hungarian, stretching back generations—was drilled into him, together with admonitions not to ever let anyone see his penis, he knew to cling to that identity with everything he had. ‘I understood in my marrow that if I slipped up there would be unimaginable consequences. I was only four, and I did not slip up for three years.’

  Two trenchcoated men. A sunny day. Paul’s parents told him to wait. They were going with ‘these two gentlemen’ to ‘buy some ice-cream’ and would be back in ten minutes. They did not come back in ten minutes or ten days. As they
walked down the street they didn’t turn to glance, to give their son a sign, a look. (How many stories like this end well? Point one percent would you say? This one ended well—Paul’s mum and dad were arrested, sent back to Slovakia, put on a cattle train to Auschwitz, taken off the train at the last minute because a relative, still free, bribed the guards; they found Paul after a few months and survived the war together, passing as Aryans. Ending well doesn’t quite take into account the mother’s eyes—‘yearning, pitying, and distant’—after the three of them were reunited, or the father’s subsequent death in his prime from cancer, as well as adult Paul’s own wearying detachment, that emotional numbness psychiatrists like to write their books about. Still the Valents were ones who had ‘a good war’, in Hoffman’s haunting words, ‘hounded only by fear of discovery rather than by physical torments and indignities’.)

  In his memoir Valent tells of another moment: he’s in his fifties, a father of three, renowned psychiatrist, writer, founder of a child survivors of the Holocaust group in Melbourne. He is with his son in Hungary. Third trip back since the war—was here just the year before, in Slovakia too, with his daughter, they found the house that was their hiding place (still standing) and went to Auschwitz where most of their family was killed. This time Paul with his son returns to the hiding house and a different urge overwhelms him. He wants to find the street, the spot, where he watched the four figures disappear, knowing to let them go, knowing to not say a word. He doesn’t know the name of the street. All he has is an image of two men in hats and trenchcoats talking to his parents. By accident he sees a book in a shop window. Sees the book’s title—a name in it triggers something in him. His parents talked a lot about a street with this name. He checks. The street exists; it’s really close to where they must have lived.

  He hurries to the street. Reminds himself he was a child not an adult then. He crouches, lets himself go, allows his body to remember. He checks. A well-known ice-cream shop was at the end of the street.

  This is why his parents must have thought to say ice-cream.

  He goes to the spot, squats, remembers being left, remembers his mother not looking back, remembers thinking what have I done wrong? Then he knows—‘my mother could not have looked back, because whether she had smiled or cried, I would have run after her.’ The greatest betrayal of his life was an act of purest love. He understands then that the child who knew so much and didn’t slip up, not once, did not until half a century later know the most important thing.

  A child can know to be quiet, know a walk across a border into a country covered in darkness is life-or-death business, know never to let their real name squeak out or let anyone see them naked. A child simply cannot know perhaps that a mother walking away is the mother saving their life. Maybe only an adult can know this.

  And then the war ends. Your life’s no longer theirs. And then what. The challenge of the living, writes Robert Krell, another child-survivor-turned-psychiatrist, becomes ‘how to survive having survived’. Except what does it mean for a child exposed to evil to feel like a child again, if that’s what surviving one’s survival at least partly entails? If feeling like a child means not carrying, not yet, the full burden of protecting your borders as a sovereign being should we be wishing, with fervour, for traumatised children to feel like children again? If this feeling’s the one that makes children vulnerable should we fight for it, like it’s an unalienable good? Should we consider its denial (or impossibility) a deep failing by the world?

  ‘When we went into hiding,’ Vera says to me, ‘I stopped being a child. I understood I had to take responsibility for my own being, my own existence.’

  —Did you ever feel like a child after the war ended?

  —Nah.

  —It was gone completely?

  —I think so.

  Wisława Szymborska, the second Polish poet, Milosz was the other, to be awarded a Nobel Prize in the twentieth century had a poem called ‘Autotomy’. Autotomy—when animals amputate a part of themselves in self-defence like the holothurian does in the poem:

  In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.

  It abandons one self to a hungry world

  and with the other self it flees.

  One part is salvation, hope. The other is beyond salvation. One part is allowed to die so the other can reconstitute itself and grow into a living whole. A survivor is a holothurian. To say that is to say survival is not the opposite of death. It may in some sense be much closer to death than to life. Years after the war, Vera’s war I’m talking about, Mado—Charlotte Delbo’s friend and fellow survivor—would say to Delbo, ‘I died in Auschwitz, and no one knows it,’ and Delbo herself would write, ‘Can one come out of there alive? No. It wasn’t possible.’

  A survivor learns how to be alive and dead. A child survivor is a particular kind of survivor: an expert in doubleness. And a child who survived in hiding like Vera did is its own category.

  Vicki Gordon interviewed hidden child survivors—her parents were two—half a century later, noticing a certain ‘cutoffness’. A persistent matter-of-factness in many of her interviewees. A dryness, lack of ‘psychological depth’. At times, when the adult could look at herself as the child—compassionate adult seeing suffering child and feeling hard for that child who is them and not them—emotions broke through, but this was the adult not child feeling. Hidden children survive by remaining silent, invisible. Not asking for anything, not crying, never crying. Any emotion could deplete reserves of psychological strength. Expression of distress or fear in open hiding under a false identity could out you as a Jew. Inability to contain oneself could lead to discovery. Once, when the tape recorder was finally off, a child survivor said to Gordon, ‘I know what you want from me but you are not going to get it even if you sit here all day.’

  ‘I went to a palm reader in Byron Bay,’ Vera tells me on Skype, ‘and he said he hadn’t seen genes like that, such protection.’

  The reason Vera ended up in Byron Bay post-ABC was because her son lived there—her late son now, his death from a heart attack in a sauna came out of nowhere, he was fifty-something.

  ‘My son,’ Vera says, ‘was an extraordinary fellow who at the age of eighteen rejected us, saying I do not care about your refrigerator and your car and I’m going to go bush. Completely different fellow to us. I could understand him more when I started studying Buddhism after being retrenched from the ABC.’ Retrenchment: may sound trivial next to what else she had to live through.

  It was not. You start off your life feeling special. Such a precocious child your father will take you to the Sorbonne. Maybe not now, not while war’s on, but even now Soviet soldiers, occupying Lvov, listen to you play piano and want to send you to study music in Moscow. You’re that good, beautiful too, then you learn you’re nothing—the lesson couldn’t be clearer—until out of that obliteration of self you build yourself again and come to believe you’re special two times over, a phoenix. And then they tell you you don’t work here anymore. Which to your ears sounds like you’re nothing.

  ‘I am not someone who walks around saying please understand, I had a terrible life. I am not. Some lives go this way. Other lives go another way.’ Feeling down does hit Vera, time to time, and when it happens a Jewish friend of hers will say, ‘Vera, be happy no Nazis are at the front door.’ She thinks about it and feels happy. Wallowing, dwelling, moaning, sniffles—not for her. Moving forward, moving on, living, loving whatever can be loved in the life you live, devouring, delighting—her verbs.

  ‘I had that childhood. Didn’t have any close friendships. Was very direct. I didn’t have any patience for stupidity already then. I was never too conventional. When I was seventeen, eighteen, I began having an enormous success with men, with young men, because they saw I was so different and it would be worthwhile to make contact with me.’

  Having that childhood meant knowing: no guarantees possible: it could happen again. People, trained parrots, chanting Never again! Never! when
if you lived through what she lived through, you’d see the falseness of that, and then when the never-again happened again the chanters would be blindsided. Struck hapless. Too late to stop it by the time they catch up. The heavyweight Australian names Vera likes to drop—the ‘top people’, ‘elite’, just like in her Warsaw circle—aren’t merely symbolic of her rejection of Australia’s petty bourgeoisie, or proof of her not betraying the self she forged in postwar Warsaw. They have a practical purpose. If need be, they can protect her. At least some will be in a position to keep her safe. She still has a way of making people fuss around her. I don’t think she does anything in particular to encourage the fuss. It’s in the forcefield.

  ‘It is like the Jewish god gave Vera the supreme order to survive,’ Sophie says. ‘Everything else comes from it.’

  As Vera and I talk, as my book slides, drags, grows stalactites and slips further instead of gets closer, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse begins and gathers pace. Every day are reports detailing cases of children abused with brutality, impunity, elaborately over large tracts of time, as recent as a few years ago. On TV news you glimpse these child/adults—looking eaten away by the past, saying ‘pain builds up like rust in a metal waterpipe’. When I am walking the streets of my city I cannot stop myself imagining abused children hiding in adult bodies. I don’t want to check the statistics. I’m sure the stats are staggering. On a bad day, reading report after report and my mind goes to imagining my children violated then my jaw locks, all the talk about people’s reclaiming of safety, self, soul and family wrecked by abuse feels like pissing in the ocean. ‘Some call sexual abuse “soul murder”, it’s a real destruction of a person’s value and dignity,’ Paul Valent says to me. ‘Generationally too, it interferes with love.’

  Why in a child-centric world the violation of children should be so endemic, and what violation produces across a lifetime and beyond, are questions the legalistic language ‘gross breach of children’s rights’ and journalistic language ‘breaking of the human spirit’ and therapeutic language ‘damage to children’s psychosocial, sexual, spiritual development’ cannot get us close to. Innocence—talking about that as the thing defining of children, and which trauma rips out of them… I like how an Australian philosopher, Joanne Faulkner, deals with innocence. Three big problems she says: first it’s a self-serving adult fantasy; also it makes adults give up on children believed to be no longer in possession of their innocence; finally it stops children participating in an ethical and civic life.