The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  Wayne Rosenthal had never heard Border ask questions like this in the middle of an interview and he became convinced that Border must have known this Rosa Rabinowicz before the war. Was she a friend perhaps, or a relative?

  He was running late for Evie Harmon’s party. He was not going to have time to get changed beforehand and so he went directly to the Borders’ home from where the three of them were to be driving. The Borders’ housekeeper, Callie, and her son Russell, who had been engaged for the evening by the Harmons to help out, were also coming. It was on the way uptown to their place in Sheridan Road that he thought about the fact that the only wire recording to be uncategorised in Border’s office was this one, the only one where the interviewee had been abusive to Dr Border, the only one where he had interrupted to ascertain the precise identity of someone in the interviewee’s story. Wayne Rosenthal was standing at the Borders’ front door when he heard Elly Border call out, ‘It’s okay, Callie. I’ll get it. It’s probably Wayne.’

  He gave her a peck on the cheek to which, a little put out by the fact that he was running late and had not deemed the event worth changing for, she didn’t respond but returned to the kitchen to collect Callie and Russell. This allowed Wayne Rosenthal just a minute or two to ask her father about this one uncategorised wire recording. When they all crammed into the Borders’ car, Henry Border was already agitated. At the Harmons’ party, after the various introductions, offers of drinks and social niceties had been exchanged, Dr Border took Wayne Rosenthal aside and, with uncharacteristic brusqueness, told him, ‘That spool is not for you. Do you understand?’

  But Border’s anxiety and his tone had only succeeded in adding weight to what Wayne Rosenthal had already begun to suspect. Rosa Rabinowicz was not only familiar to Border, she had also been involved with him in some way. She could have been a girlfriend or maybe even his wife, Elly’s mother. Could it be that Border, who wanted more than anything to tell the world what had happened to the Jews of Europe, had chanced upon the incredible story of his wife’s fate and yet was not telling her daughter? But why wouldn’t he want Elly to know? For all his respect for Dr Border, Wayne Rosenthal could not pretend that he didn’t suspect what he now suspected.

  *

  When Adam Zignelik was a child growing up in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Elwood, his maternal grandfather liked to point out which of the bridges in Melbourne, the old man’s adopted home town, were designed by Australia’s most celebrated World War I general, Sir John Monash, who was in civilian life a distinguished engineer. He liked to tell Adam how Monash had overcome the obstacles of his German Jewish heritage to become a national hero in a predominantly Anglo-Celtic country. The little boy grew up asking his mother, his grandparents and sometimes his grandparents’ closest friends, Mr and Mrs Leibowitz, ‘Is this a Monash bridge?’ whenever they went out for a drive. The answer was ‘yes’ more often than it was accurate.

  What put him in mind of this now? He was sitting in the back of a Melbourne taxi going over the Elster Creek on his way from his hotel in St Kilda to a Jewish aged care facility to meet a woman there, a Holocaust survivor, who had been interviewed in a DP camp by Henry Border in 1946 and who had agreed to talk to him. Back in Melbourne after so many years he had directed the cab driver to take him on a tour of his old neighbourhood first.

  The cab went over the bridge over the Elwood Canal and Adam smiled when he passed his old secondary school, Elwood High School, as it had then been called. He closed his eyes at the thought of his late mother. She had never remarried after Jake Zignelik. Nor had she ever complained when Adam returned to the US to go to college. Adam was going to be a big man in the history game. He never got to tell her. She had died far too young. When his cab got caught behind a crawling Number 64 tram on Hawthorn Road, he closed his eyes again for a moment in the back seat and hugged his day pack to his chest.

  ‘Bloody trams!’ the subcontinental cab driver, now a confirmed Melburnian, muttered under his breath.

  His grandparents had predeceased his mother and there was nobody left, no family at all, none that he knew of. He could have started a family with Diana. She had begged him to but he hadn’t shared her confidence in his ability to provide for one. There was nothing to stop a professor of history from being a fool. He saw that now but the realisation had come too late.

  Looking to see where they were, Adam noticed the small Carlton Football Club logo on the windscreen of the cab.

  ‘I used to be a Carlton supporter when I lived here a long time ago. How are they doing these days?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ the cab driver grumbled. And continuing the grumble, ‘They should get rid of the bloody “W” class trams.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Adam asked.

  ‘The bloody “W” class trams, too slow. Get rid of them, I say.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Adam. ‘Out with the old,’ he added as they pulled up outside the Emmy Monash Jewish Aged Care facility in Dandenong Road.

  A woman there, a manager of some sort, met him at reception. She wasn’t the person Adam had spoken to the previous day, but she knew who he was and told him that she had been expecting him. She insisted on showing him around the facility as though it was the institution that was of professional interest to him, not one of its residents. But he was polite and just as Henry Border had thought it prudent to agree to being shown around any DP camp he was visiting before beginning his interviews, so would the man studying his work more than sixty years later take a short time to examine the surroundings that his work had led him to.

  The administrator took him along several corridors to show him the residents’ living quarters, at least from the outside. Occasionally someone had left their door ajar and Adam would catch a glimpse of an old person in his or her room. In one, a tiny man was peeling an orange. Outside each of the residents’ rooms was a rectangular glass case, which each resident had filled with various mementos. There were small ceremonial silver Kiddush cups and menorahs, but mostly photographs of people of various ages, children, grandchildren. Some of the photos were of the resident many years earlier, smiling and seated beside a spouse, who, because each room was a single room, was likely no longer alive. The administrator noticed Adam’s interest in the contents of the glass cases.

  ‘These are our memory boxes. Many of our guests get lost after activities and aren’t always sure which room is theirs. It can be embarrassing for them. They don’t like to ask. The memory boxes allow them to manifest their pride in their families. That’s the way we put it to them. But of course, their real purpose is to remind people which room is theirs. A lot of the residents on this floor are just at that stage where their memories about quite basic things are starting to go. The memory boxes give them tremendous comfort in a number of ways.’

  The memory boxes of some of the residents contained black-and-white photos that they had recovered from their pre-war homes after the war. Unlike most old people, the tiny man peeling his orange had lost everyone in his one photo within a year of its being taken. Who knew that? Who but he ever looked inside his memory box and thought of that? Adam watched the little man slowly peeling his orange.

  ‘You talked of residents on this floor. Is there a difference between this floor and other floors?’ Adam asked the administrator.

  ‘The floor below us, the basement, is where … It’s for the residents who are no longer able to care for themselves at all. They’ve lost their memories maybe almost entirely. They can’t wash or toilet themselves. They have trouble distinguishing between the present, the recent past and the distant past. If you look after they’ve had their lunch you’ll find that they’ve put half of it in a bag.’

  ‘In a bag?’

  ‘They’re saving it. They think they’re still in the concentration camp they were in. You’re not meant to go there without a pass or unaccompanied by one of the nursing staff but I could arrange it if you –’

  ‘Thanks, but I should really begin the intervi
ew. Perhaps you could show me –’

  Just then the administrator was approached by a dapper old man, a resident dressed in pleated trousers, shirt and tie, who interrupted them to greet her warmly. She knew the old man by name and it was only when she said the man’s name that Adam, who was impatient to begin the interview, stopped silently cursing the timing of this exchange of pleasantries. With his notepad and recording equipment under one arm he looked quizzically at the old man who stood there stooped in his fawn cardigan and black trousers. So quizzically did he look at the old man that the smiling man looked back at him.

  ‘Mr Leibowitz? I’m Adam.’

  ‘Yes, Adam,’ the old man said. The name meant nothing to him.

  ‘I’m Adam Zignelik.’ The man’s eyes widened and he straightened as much as he could.

  ‘Oh my God! Oh … my God! Little Adam!’ The old man moved forward and, reaching the height of Adam’s chest, he embraced Adam.

  ‘You know Mr Leibowitz?’ the administrator asked.

  ‘Know him?’ Mr Leibowitz interjected. ‘I knew his grandfather and his grandmother from when they lived in Carlton. I knew his mother when she was just a little girl. Look at you, Adam. Little Adam!’

  ‘Not so little any more,’ the administrator said.

  ‘We thought you lived in America,’ Mr Leibowitz said. The old man was still using ‘we’ though his wife had died some years earlier. The administrator gave her version of the reason Adam was there.

  ‘You want to interview me?’ the old man asked hopefully.

  ‘I certainly want to talk to you. When I’ve finished the interview with the woman I will come to see you so we can catch up. I’ll come looking for you.’

  ‘You won’t forget?’

  ‘Of course not! See you soon. Okay?’

  ‘Yes. Okay, Little Adam!’ the old man called as the administrator took Adam in the opposite direction. ‘Adam, say hello to your mother for me.’

  Adam set up his equipment. Out of his day pack he took a notepad, a couple of pens, headphones, which he attached to a digital audio recorder, and two tiny microphones, one to attach to his clothing and one to the dress of the woman he was about to interview.

  ‘Yes, Dr Zignelik, I remember him very well.’

  ‘Very well?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Can I ask you, why after everything you had been through, after all your war-time experiences, why should this man, Henry Border, stand out to you?’

  ‘Well, because we argued.’

  ‘You argued?’

  ‘Yes. We didn’t like each other. Well, I didn’t like him.’

  ‘Why not? Actually, before you answer that, can you tell me how you came to meet him?’

  ‘How did I come to meet him? Well, I was at that time in Zeilsheim, the DP camp in Zeilsheim.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, this is how I remember him so well. It was the day that the camp had a special visitor. We were all very excited to see her. Mrs Roosevelt was coming to visit the camp, the President’s wife. He wasn’t the President any more. It was Truman by then. Roosevelt had already died, but for us her visit to Zeilsheim was a very special thing and we … I mean everyone in the camp was looking forward to it very much. We wanted to meet her. I was hoping I would be able to talk to her.’

  ‘Why did you want to talk to her?’

  ‘Not only because she was famous. That wasn’t really it. I wanted to tell her exactly what had happened to us. What an opportunity! You see we didn’t know what people knew. We couldn’t imagine that the Americans knew what had gone on. In the camp we believed, everybody did, that the Allies must be completely unaware of what was going on there every day, so loud was the silence. It was the only explanation for why nobody did anything … ever.

  ‘Well, this funny-looking man, an older man … remember, I was still a teenager then, this man comes into the hall where we ate the food they gave us. And he has this wire recording device with which he could record what people said. He wanted people to tell him what they had gone through so he can record it and take it back to America. That’s what he said, and people wanted to tell their stories. I did too; I wanted to tell what had happened to us. That’s why I agreed to be interviewed. But he had this special way he wanted to do it.’

  ‘What do you mean “he had this special way”? What was that way?’

  ‘He wanted me to sit with my back to him … so that I couldn’t see his face. What for? I didn’t want to do it like this but he insisted. I insisted back. Then he insisted back. He had that strict manner, you know, like a teacher. Not like a teacher these days but the way they were in Europe, you know, before the war … He was very stern, very strict in the way he talked. This didn’t help him, not with me. I didn’t care what he wanted. What I wanted was to tell him the story of my sister …’

  ‘And did you tell him?’ Adam Zignelik asked the woman.

  ‘Sure. I made a deal with him.’

  ‘A deal?’

  ‘If I would answer his questions … If I would do the interview his way, you know, in the order he wanted … well, then, he promised he would let me tell him what I wanted to tell him.’

  ‘And did you tell him everything?’

  ‘What do you think?’ asked the woman, who had been the fifteen-year-old Hannah Weiss, the sister of the Estusia Weiss who was hanged for her role in the Sonderkommando uprising.

  It was then that she told Adam Zignelik the entire story of the women in the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory, of their role in smuggling the gun powder meant for munitions to the Sonderkommando resistance.

  ‘I told him, I made him listen to everything.’

  ‘About Estusia?’

  ‘I told him about Estusia and also about the others. I told him about Rosa Rabinowicz and how she had approached us in our block. I told him about Ala and Regina, about the smuggling of the gunpowder from the Pulverraum. I told him how none of them ever betrayed me or a single other person from the resistance. I told him about –’

  ‘Wait a minute. Did you say Rosa Rabinowicz?’

  Recording every word just as Border had some sixty years earlier, Adam Zignelik sat in the temporarily empty dining room of the Emmy Monash Aged Care facility on the corner of Hawthorn and Dandenong roads in Melbourne and listened.

  ‘You told him about a woman called Rosa Rabinowicz?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Do you remember how you identified her?’

  ‘What do you mean “identified”?’

  ‘How did you let him know who she was?’

  ‘I used their names and, where I knew it, I also told him where they were from. I wanted to … I wanted the world to know how brave these girls were. Has there ever been anyone braver?’ Now, for the first time since the interview had started, the old lady had tears in her eyes.

  ‘Did you remember where Rosa Rabinowicz was from?’

  ‘Yes, I remembered then and I remember now.’

  ‘Where was she from?’

  ‘Rosa? She was from Ciechanow, but she’d spent some time in Warsaw before the war. We knew this.’

  ‘And you definitely told Border?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How can you be so sure … all these years later?’

  ‘Because that was the whole point of talking to him. I wanted to tell him, to tell the whole world what Estusia and Rosa and the other girls had done. I wasn’t going to talk to him, not one word after he had made me miss out on seeing Mrs Roosevelt, but it was because I wanted to tell Estusia’s story and also the story of Rosa and Ala and the others who had got the gunpowder to the Sonderkommando that I agreed to put up with his nonsense.’

  ‘After this second interview, after you’d told him the story … about Rosa Rabinowicz and Estusia and the others … Do you remember how he reacted, what he said?’

  ‘I don’t know. Who remembers? It was what I wanted to tell hi
m about. Why would I care what he thought?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Anyway, isn’t it all on the recording?’ she asked him.

  ‘It probably is. I haven’t got to your recording yet but I wondered if he said anything else … if you remembered anything that wasn’t recorded for whatever reason.’

  ‘I don’t know. How could I know what was recorded? Maybe he thanked me. I couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted Estusia’s story to … to go out to the world. This is what I thought he was good for. I was saving the memory of my sister … and the other girls.’

  ‘You wrote to me …’ Adam pulled a letter from a file out of his day pack and began to read it. ‘You wrote … He paid “particular attention to Rosa’s story”.’

  ‘Okay, I believe you. If that’s what I wrote then that’s what I remembered.’

  ‘Do you remember it now?’

  ‘Look, I have to be honest, this Dr Border … he’s not so important to me. He’s just a man who interviewed me in the DP camp. Estusia was important to me … and Ala.’

  ‘And Rosa?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t know Rosa so well. She was in Kanada. I wanted their story to become known. Why is it important to you? Why does it matter if he showed more interest in Rosa’s story?’

  ‘Because I think she might have been his wife.’

  Adam Zignelik pictured the one photo he had seen of Henry Border and tried to imagine the man, the face on the inside sleeve of the barely read I Did Not Interview the Dead, when he quite unexpectedly learned what had happened to his young wife Rosa, the woman he had abandoned, the mother of his child. What Border had heard from Hannah Weiss all those years ago must have undammed a flood of feelings and thoughts and images, all of them heart-rendingly painful, and eclipsing all of them, unbearable guilt. It was there in his voice at the end of his very last interview when he asks the listener, ‘Who is going to sit in judgement over all this? And who is going to judge … me?’

  Who could ever begin to know how he had felt? Whenever Border had thought about it, and he must have often, other than learning she had survived, he must have hoped never to learn what had happened to the young woman Rosa Rabinowicz, the girl formerly of Ciechanow he had promised to protect, the woman he had married and had a daughter with, the daughter he had stolen from her when he abandoned her.