Sunrise West

by Jacob G. Rosenberg

  SUBRISE WEST

  Jacob G. Rosenberg

  JACOB G. ROSENBERG was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest member of a working-class family. After the Germans occupied Poland he was confined, with his parents, his two sisters and their little girls, to the Lodz Ghetto, from which they were eventually transported to Auschwitz. Except for one sister (who committed suicide a few days later) all the members of his family were gassed on the day of their arrival. He remained in Auschwitz for about two months, then spent the rest of the war in other concentration camps. In 1948 he emigrated to Australia with his wife Esther; their only child, Marcia, was born in Melbourne. Rosenberg’s poems and stories have appeared both in Australia and overseas. Apart from three earlier volumes of prose and poetry in Yiddish, he has published three books of poetry in English, a collection of stories, and the award-winning East of Time, the first volume of his autobiographical memoir.

  ALSO BY JACOB G. ROSENBERG

  Poetry and prose in Yiddish

  Snow in Spring

  Wooden Clogs Shod with Snow

  Light – Shadow – Light

  Poetry in English

  My Father’s Silence

  Twilight Whisper

  Behind the Moon

  Elegy on Ghetto (video)

  Shylock (verse dialogue: video)

  Prose in English

  Lives and Embers

  East of Time

  Sunrise West

  Jacob G. Rosenberg

  BRANDL & SCHLESINGER

  © Jacob G. Rosenberg, 2007

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  First published by Brandl & Schlesinger Pty Ltd in 2007

  www.brandl.com.au

  Cover: The author and his wife in Marseilles, 1948, shortly before embarking for Australia.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Rosenberg, Jacob, 1922–.

  Sunrise west.

  1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-876040-84-0

  1. Rosenberg, Jacob, 1922–. 2. Jews – Poland – Lodz. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) – Poland – Personal narratives. 4. World War, 1939–1945 – Personal narratives, Polish. I. Title.

  940.5318092

  Typeset in 11pt Legacy

  Book design by András Berkes

  For Raymond

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I walked out of the flames with a song in my heart and a stutter on my lips. My everlasting thanks to my editor, Alex Skovron, under whose watchful eye the stutter disappeared and the song came to life.

  I wish also to express my warm thanks to Richard Freadman, Raimond Gaita, Louis Waller, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Helen Garner, for reading the manuscript and offering their invaluable comments and suggestions, and more than anything for their friendship.

  And finally to my life-partner Esther, for her unequivocal faith in me.

  Oh, cease to glorify man,

  Who has but a breath in his nostrils,

  For of what account is he?

  Isaiah 2:22

  Preface

  Sunrise West is a ‘sequel’ to East of Time, in the sense that it takes up my story where the earlier book left off. But the events related in this book, and the characters that people it, exist in a vastly different landscape.

  The present volume navigates between two worlds: my wartime and postwar experiences in Europe, and my subsequent new life in Australia. The hallmark of the first world is darkness and light; that of the second, hope and restoration — but a restoration forever coloured by the past, which cunningly refuses to give up its claim and permeates my days.

  As in East of Time, the individuals who live on in these pages are largely no more. To recall them is, for me, not just evidence that we exist only in relation to one another; perhaps more importantly, it is a way of paying homage to friends and strangers whose humanity in a time of darkness was the light that showed us the path to a better future.

  Like its predecessor, Sunrise West is imbued with pictures and visions of a bygone yet ever-living reality — it is a personal weave of autobiography, history and imagination. Some names have been changed, and I’ve reimagined certain incidents and encounters. But my words have been driven, as always, by the need for remembrance. Now, in the winter of my life, I am constantly revisited by a line written by the Yiddish poet H. Leivick: ‘I fell, stood up, and walk away once more.’ It seems to me that, somehow, this line marvellously epitomizes my tale.

  J.G.R.

  Arrival

  To the south of my city of the waterless river, in the valley of open secrets, where the very winds dread their own lament, behind a thin forest of sad all-knowing trees, lay the kingdom of death.

  We arrived at Birkenau in the middle of August 1944, a summery morning like any other, yet not like any other at all. I can still see the troupe of unreal men in striped rags, lingering in a nearby field like an ensemble of resigned clowns on a condemned stage, raking grass. In my heart’s innermost chamber, enveloped in tattered years, there still hang the pictures of my mother’s terrified eyes, my father’s bleak gesture of farewell, my sister Ida’s numb paralysis, and the horror of my two little nieces, six and four, standing like adults in the queue with their arms up, awaiting Selection. And I cannot erase from my memory the sight of my sister Pola three days later, stretched out on the wires of the electric fence, her head shaved, her hands in supplication, her mouth kissing death...

  Birkenau was the entry and selection point for the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, and an extermination camp in its own right. We were welcomed by a man dressed in black. His manner was efficient but casual, as his white-gloved finger nonchalantly showed most of my family the way to the gas. Pola and me he directed to his right, into that crowded other universe of soulless bodies.

  I was thin, but upright and passably fit. My hair, bleached by the sun, was combed back off my forehead. I was about two weeks short of my twenty-second birthday.

  Within the blink of an eye I became bestially free, a lone caged animal on the prowl. Was this a prerequisite for survival? I am not trying to explain, there is nothing to elucidate. The shadows of a life cunningly hide from light. There is an irresistible will in all of us: the will to live at any cost. Yet such a thing can exist only where life has a meaning, and this place, unstable as water, graveyard of human decency, had no meaning, no meaning at all.

  On a pitch-black night, by the piercing searchlight that kept camp morality in place, we, the chosen to live, marched five abreast past the pit of flames. I still recall the smell of burning flesh, and the escorting kapo’s matter-of-fact remark: ‘It’s good to burn the corpses in the open, the flames will chase away the mosquitoes. Watch the sky at daybreak, you dumb bastards, you may find a familiar face in the clouds.’

  Our contingent, several hundred men, was herded into Block 5. The barrack was soaked in a darkness one could almost touch. A solitary swinging bulb kept fathering sickly shadows.

  Then, like a nightmare out of the foreboding darkness, there appeared a faceless man. He wore a white Panama hat, tennis shoes, and silver-rimmed sunglasses. Hunching his neck and shoulders as if somehow deranged, weaving the air with his too-short arms, he spoke with a rasping voice, like that of a blunt saw, in Yiddish, Polish and German: ‘Men, take note. For your own good, I’ll give you five minutes to reveal what you have hidden in your stomachs. After that time I’ll bring in the X-ray m
achine. Death awaits anyone who is withholding his treasures.’

  Five volunteers were immediately taken to a separate room, and each given a strong laxative and a clean pot. Facing the wall, they relieved themselves of their burdens. After a few blows with cudgels, they were kicked back into the barrack.

  Everything happened as if in a trance, but when the faceless stranger took off his sunglasses I recognized at once Chaml, underworld hero, pimp of Bałuty, known for his hard dull gaze and his rapist’s smile.

  Settling In

  Our superior and block-eldest (Blockälteste), Romek, chosen by the camp authorities, was a plain-looking man of about twenty-three, with a pockmarked face, a sharply protruding nose and a missing right ear, apparently the target of a shooting contest between some Germans. On his left arm was tattooed the word Czuwaj, the greeting of the young socialist fraternity of which I had been a member. A day after arrival I plucked up some courage, approached him and pointed to his tattoo, hoping to awake in him a recognition of our common past. How foolish of me. There was no time here for any past. Here only the present reigned — the now of which we understood nothing — and, hovering between a yes and a no, the constant opportunity to lose one’s life. For my silly attempt I received a decent beating and no food for the rest of the day. As the kapo swallowed my last crust of bread, I recalled my father’s wisdom: If you encounter an impossible storm, just run for cover and wait unashamedly for the sun to come out again.

  In the small hours of the night, as I lay freezing on the concrete floor, I heard a whisper from the spot beside me, the voice of a man I would befriend. ‘Stay away from Romek. He is like the splintered reed of a staff, which pierces the palm of anyone who leans on it.’

  Raymond, fourteen years my senior, was a French Jew from Lyons who spoke excellent Yiddish. In the old days he had taught Bible and art in a private high school. He had received a profoundly religious upbringing, and like myself had once believed that mankind could create a new and better world. But the war, his country’s defeat, the hounding down of Jews, his own betrayal and arrest (he had been here since 1942), the gassing of his wife Suzanne and their four-year-old son Michel — all this had transformed a once trusting man into a bitter denier, a frightful scoffer. ‘I am a lucky nothing,’ he would cry, ‘chosen by the greatest Nothing of all!’

  Our day began at 4.30 a.m. with the hollow sound of a huge wooden spoon being beaten against the bottom of a large empty tin pot, accompanied by the kapo’s scream: ‘Aufstehen! Aufstehen!’ After a dish of lukewarm ‘coffee’, we would stand to attention like frightened stalks awaiting the sickle. We were counted, recounted; it seldom tallied. ‘Too many disobedient corpses,’ was how Raymond put it. ‘They refuse to obey the gong.’ Such unruly behaviour on the part of the missing provoked the kapos, and we would usually receive a thrashing.

  One evening he told me: ‘A Jew, alive or dead, must obey orders. Jews who die of their own volition, especially those who end their lives at night on the electric wires, are giving the Germans a great deal of trouble. How dare these damn Jews take matters into their own hands? Last year a man in Block 7 hanged himself with a rope made from his own striped uniform. The SS Blockführer was furious. How dare they make ropes out of German property! He promptly lined up about 150 prisoners, and scrutinized every face until he found two who looked to him like they were the kind who would encourage sabotage. After clubbing these two nearly to death, he ordered the kapo to throw them on a lorry of corpses bound for the crematorium.’

  Raymond shook his head. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I read somewhere that the builders of Babel were a godless, inhuman lot. If, in the course of construction, a worker fell to his death, no one paid any heed; but if a brick dropped and broke into grit, three days of mourning had to be observed.’

  Just before noon we had to queue up to receive our daily ‘soup’. We ate without spoons, four starving men to one plate, nervously watching each other’s lips, tearing the plate from each other’s hands, while the sons of the Master Race amused themselves by taking photographs.

  Block 8

  Prior to our life in camp we all had our idiosyncratic features, faces of our inner being, talismans of our childhood homes. But here, such characteristics quickly vanished, to be absorbed by the common depraved existence we were forced to endure. Yet I admired how my new friend Raymond, in some inexplicable way, though uncertain like most of us of another tomorrow, could retain a real measure of decency, of civility. I cannot remember him pushing or in any way abusing anyone; in moments of maltreatment by a fellow prisoner, he never resorted to curses or foul language, but rather to wit — a light sarcasm that often calmed down the offender.

  He also had a habit of paraphrasing the scriptures to fit the occasion. On our way to roll-call one morning in mid-September, it was Lamentations:

  Our enemies are now the masters,

  Our foes are at ease,

  Because the Lord has afflicted us.

  For what transgression?

  The SS Blockführer had ordered Romek to relocate half of Block 5 into Block 8. To our great relief, Raymond and I were both assigned to the new barrack. Was it Romek’s anti-Fascist tattoo which prompted him not to separate us? I can never know, of course, but I like to imagine that it was. There are times when we desperately need imagination to pierce the darkest dark with a sliver of light.

  I cannot remember the name of our new block-eldest, but I can vividly recall his physical features. Tall, perhaps a six-footer, with a round snow-white face and a well-trimmed ginger toothbrush moustache under his long, red, carrot-shaped nose. Although he spoke German, no one knew exactly where he came from. The rumour went that in 1930 he had been sentenced for rape and murder, and would probably have spent his life behind bars if history had not dealt him a lucky hand. For with the election of Schickl-gruber as Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazis’ dire need for a new army of educators, the godsend of Auschwitz threw open the gates of his prison.

  Inmates who had the misfortune to be invited to this Blockälteste’s candle-lit cubicle spoke with horror of his nocturnal urges, the blows and abuse they were forced to endure from this new educator, whose wall was painted sky-blue and adorned with the meaningful injunction: ACHTE DEM FORTGESETZTEN! Respect Your Superior!

  Rysiek, our Stubendienst (or room-orderly, appointed by the block-eldest), was a country boy from a village that lay close to my city of the waterless river. He had a strong, wiry physique, a head that was almost square, and no neck. Rysiek was our block-eldest’s favourite, not only because of his uncanny ability to foment hatred among us inmates, and not just because he had a pair of fists like steel and didn’t need to hit his victim twice, but also because he was something of a rhymester! All day long, he made us carry huge slabs of soil from A to B, and then from B to A, while he stood akimbo on a little mound and kept a stern eye on his choir. Woe to the man who had his mouth shut when ordered to sing Rysiek’s compositions:

  Morning coffee, evening coffee,

  This is our daily muck;

  From such grub our pricks go limp,

  Mother whore, what a fuck!

  Raymond said that Rysiek’s verses confirmed an old theory of the affinity between landscape and creativity, of the reciprocity between language and environment. As in Auschwitz at large, so in Rysiek’s every word the battle for human dignity died a daily death.

  Block 8 comprised 75 percent Hungarian and 25 percent Polish Jews. The Hungarians, most of whom had arrived here in 1944, did not experience the deprivations that had befallen the Polish Jews from the very first day of the war. They still looked relatively fit, and perhaps on that account were delegated the most coveted job in Block 8: dishing out the soup and dividing up the bread. Most Hungarians in this barrack hailed from small towns; they practically knew one another. This led to a blatant favouritism, especially when it came to the soup and bread. After a few heated arguments, we picked two of our more mature men to confront the one who had taken it
upon himself to be spokesman of the Hungarians in our block. He was known as Józsi Bácsi (Uncle Joseph), a small volatile man of unbounded energy who spent most of his time in the company of three young larrikins, Feri, Laci and Eli. Our delegates approached him and started to speak of our common calamity. Józsi responded with one sentence: ‘Baszd meg, te lengyel zsidó!’ (Get fucked, Polish Jew!)

  If not for the night, one would not see the stars.

  László Steiner was a respected doctor from Budapest, a quiet man of about forty who kept to himself. In all likelihood, his name would appear only on the pages of oblivion if not for his selfless deed. One day, as we lined up to receive our soup, with the Hungarians as usual at the head of the queue, Dr Steiner unexpectedly stepped out of the line. ‘Brothers,’ he declared, raising his right hand, ‘would it not be just, if only for once, to give priority to the Polish Jews?’

  A wink from the Blockälteste sent Rysiek’s fist into László’s abdomen. The doctor fell like an empty sack and the ladling went on undisturbed. After the evening roll-call Raymond and I carried László to his bunk. Miraculously he made it through the night, but as the first splinter of grey pierced the dusty barrack pane I heard his heavy breathing dwindle to a final, drawn-out sigh.

  Day of Atonement

  That year, 1944, Yom Kippur fell on a Wednesday in late September. I remember the oppressive sunset that preceded the Day of Atonement after we were herded into the barrack at 4 p.m., and the glimmer of the sickly lightbulb gazing suspiciously over the shadowy murmur of despairing hands.