Sunrise West

by Jacob G. Rosenberg

  ‘They feel good,’ I said, seeing no reason to try another pair.

  ‘And they look marvellous on you,’ Esther chipped in.

  ‘You’d better have a little walk,’ said the saleslady. ‘Make sure they’re comfortable.’

  Suddenly everything around me seemed to go dark. I tried to stand up but some unknown force pushed me back into the chair. I was shivering and felt a cold sweat travel through my body.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Esther cried, frightened. ‘Someone please help, my husband is fainting.’

  ‘I’m not — don’t call for help. I just need a glass of water.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said the saleslady. ‘Let me show you the way to the cafeteria.’

  The cafeteria was enveloped in a respectful muteness. The few customers dotted about the room were conversing under their breath, but as we walked in they all turned curiously towards us. A girl in a black dress and white apron showed us to a table.

  Esther could hardly wait. ‘What happened to you back there?’ she asked the moment we sat down. ‘You have to tell me.’

  I sighed. ‘In 1944, in Auschwitz, I met a former neighbour of ours, a cobbler named Yankel. The first thing he asked me was what had become of my boots. I asked him why he wanted to know. “Because,” he answered, “your mother paid for them with her weekly ration of sugar — one teaspoon!”’

  ‘All right,’ said Esther, ‘but that was then. I still don’t understand.’

  ‘It was something my mother said to me after she gave me the boots. It came back to me after all these years, like a thunderbolt.’

  ‘Something your mother said? What?’

  ‘She said, You’d better have a little walk — make sure they’re comfortable.’

  Fever

  Perhaps it was my perforated old shoes, or the rainy season, or my refusal to wear the outlandish ankle-length coat I had brought from Italy. Whatever the cause, I was laid up in bed with the flu. After midday my temperature jumped to an unbelievable high, the mercury threatening to burst through the thermometer. Esther quickly called our doctor, Herbert Silver, a serious man who peered with his liquid brown eyes into the depths of my throat, made me say aaah, fingered my pulse, murmured something to my frightened wife, and left. By twilight my condition had worsened. As had happened in the past whenever I ran a temperature, the vision I had experienced as a four-year-old with scarlet fever returned...

  I am back in the room of my birth. No one is at home but my silent father, who sits at the table with his head in his hands, perturbed, his eyes riveted on an empty glass. There is a knock on our white door. In comes father’s old German friend, the tall bald-headed Arbeiter, who lives in our street. I don’t know why this usually jovial fellow is wearing a sinister smile, why his enormous shapeless shadow is bouncing up and down like a marionette, why he is disappearing and then reappearing from our wall, which is painted green with silver acacia leaves.

  Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he raises a fist over my father’s head. I fear the worst, I scream out, but no one can hear me. Father sweeps me up out of the bed and darts outside. Arbeiter gives chase but slips on the stone staircase. He pleads for help but father will not stop. All at once we’re in a forest. With one hand my father presses his little boy to his chest, with the other defends himself against the blazing trees that jump at him from all sides...

  I spent the night in a pool of sweat. Early next morning, a Friday, Dr Silver was back. He checked my forehead, measured my temperature, let his cold stethoscope journey over my hot chest, and after a minute of tense silence said to Esther: ‘His temperature might rise again, but the danger seems to be over.’

  ‘So can I go back to work?’ I asked eagerly.

  The doctor gave me a disapproving look. ‘Don’t you dare!’ he shot back. ‘You’ll have to stay indoors for at least a week. To go out now would be a grave mistake.’

  Worn out from the fever and my sweat-soaked night, I fell back onto the pillow. At least a week! If I couldn’t return to work everything would fall apart. We had rent to pay, furniture to pay off, I could even lose my position at the factory! What a cruel comedy life could be. My mind started to wander. After every destruction we think of restoration; after every broken promise we crave to believe again; after every death we wish each other long life. Only yesterday, a devil in the disguise of a doctor threw my sick, ephemeral body out of the barrack into a freezing winter morning. And today, in the warmth and safety of my own home, I was resenting the advice of the truest, most benevolent of doctors.

  Evening fell asleep on our windowpane. In the stillness I listened to the black footsteps of night approaching, while Esther resolutely lit the Sabbath candles. I looked at the twin flames. How marvellously they had outlived the bonfires of the inquisitors. Or had they?

  And just as the doctor had predicted, my temperature once again got the better of me. Now Arbeiter is back. Shoving the thermometer into my burning mouth, he squints at the mercury. How much? I ask.

  Five past midnight, he answers, smiling gravely. Have no fear, young fellow. The day of fools has been reinstated.

  Democracy at Work

  Around October 1949, when the Labor government under Ben Chifley was still in office, we had attended a preelection meeting, organized by the Bund, at the Bialystoker Centre in Robe Street, St Kilda. The speaker was a certain Harry Brown, a strongly-built man with a hefty face and full red smacking lips that bespoke a ferocious appetite. He offered the audience a grim picture of the future.

  ‘If that Fascist, Menzies, ousts the Labor Party,’ he had thundered, ‘I am convinced that he will rewrite the Constitution of this country, curtail civil liberties, build more prisons... Robert Gordon Menzies,’ shouted Brown, ‘visited Nazi Germany in the thirties. He has no stomach for the free spirit of the Eureka Stockade.’ (This to me was a mysterious allusion at the time.) ‘From behind his bushy brows, Menzies keeps eyeing Germany’s law and order of a decade ago, its resoluteness, its industrial might. That is the kind of society in which he dreams of involving us all.’

  Esther had turned white as a ghost, a soundless howl distorting her features. As for me, I recalled the expression on my mother’s face when the motorcycles of the German vanguard rumbled through our street. Though I had been told that Brown was a political Cassandra, a master of the histrionic art and a purveyor of mad fantasies, I had not reckoned on the effect he would produce. His dark prophecies had jolted Esther back to the Warsaw ghetto, Majdanek, Belsen and Dachau, and had transported me back, also, to those foggy daybreaks when I stood in deep snow, envying the safe tomorrow of the concrete lamp-post that bore daily witness to my Jewish guilt.

  I may not have understood everything Chifley was saying, but I had loved his warm heartfelt voice. The fact that my prime minister was the son of an engine-driver augmented his charisma in my eyes. I would never forget the photos of his drawn, disenchanted face which appeared in the daily press after his election defeat in December 1949. As for the victor, I looked upon his pompous smiling visage as a personal affront.

  Not long afterwards our newly-elected leader made his first attempt to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia. He intended to confiscate its property, prohibit party members from employment by the Commonwealth, and prosecute groups and individuals deemed to be Communist. I couldn’t help thinking of the anti-Communist paranoia that was sweeping America, and I began to fear that Harry Brown’s predictions would come true. However, the High Court declared the prime minister’s ambitions unconstitutional.

  I came from an anti-Communist home. All his life my father had been a staunch supporter of the philosophy of the Labour Party in Britain: as a Fabian socialist, he believed not in revolution but in social and political evolution, an evolution that one day would lead our ever-bleeding world to a state of peace and human dignity. So when Menzies attempted to ban the Communists, I felt compelled — despite a certain unease — to support our newly-elected PM’s intentions. Yet discussing the issue
with Esther over dinner one evening, I remembered the story of the German pastor, Martin Niemöller, and his immortal statement:

  First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out —

  because I was not a communist;

  Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out —

  because I was not a socialist;

  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —

  because I was not a trade unionist;

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —

  because I was not a Jew;

  Then they came for me —

  and there was no one left to speak out for me.

  As a socialist, a member of a trade union and an incurable Jew, I was guilty on three counts!

  I thought also of what Ben Chifley had said in one of his speeches: ‘Never is liberty more easily lost than when we think we are defending it.’

  Menzies, his plan frustrated by the High Court, decided to take his plea directly to the Australian people. A referen-dum to amend the Constitution so as to give the government special new powers was held in September 1951. It was defeated.

  A few weeks later, on my way home from work, I was drawn towards a crowd of people gathered in front of the Town Hall. The speaker, a member of the clothing union, delivered a flaming, abusive speech against the elected government and its leader. The police stood by calmly to keep the peace. No one was intimidated, no one was arrested, no one was dragged off to a prison or a camp. As soon as the demonstration was over, the nearby pubs came to life with laughter and good cheer.

  Sage

  It was at The Windjammer, a café I frequented in Swanston Street, that I first met Ivon. He was tallish, with a face furrowed like a Greek Stoic’s, but his eyes radiated warmth and wisdom. He approached me with an outstretched hand one day. ‘My name is Ivon Sage,’ he said. ‘We have crossed paths almost every day. Would you care to join me for lunch?’ And overnight a friendship was born which would last until the day of Ivon’s death.

  That friendship might perhaps seem unlikely. He and I had very different histories; we came from different planets, as it were. Ivon was fourteen years my senior, an eloquently spoken, well-read man, a captain in the Australian army, and a Past Master of his Masonic Lodge. I was the stuttering camp survivor, a refugee immigrant with a scant education. What attracted me to him was that, from the first, I never had to explain myself. No clarifications were needed — he and I knew intuitively that despite our vastly dissimilar pasts we were united by a mysterious understanding.

  Ivon Sage was not overly religious, but profoundly pious. It was not the candle but its flame that he worshipped. As we became closer he encouraged me to read (not that I needed any encouragement), yet whenever he was giving advice he always included himself: ‘We should read,’ he would say, mindful that a single unnecessary word might offend. Reading, he argued, was a university of its own. ‘As it is written, Not to increase one’s knowledge is to decrease it.’

  Ivon was a fortress of reason, and a fount of wonderful sayings. On one occasion he observed, ‘The heart of a wise question is the question within the question,’ and proceeded to explain this with an anecdote, about a man who was determined to discover what lay at the core of an onion. He peeled away one layer, and then another, and another after that, and then one more, and the next, and the next again, but when he finally reached what he thought must be the very essence of the onion, he found that its core was nothing else than — the smallest and last layer.’

  Another time, Ivon the idiosyncratic rationalist — who believed that only the inexplicable is capable of defeating our empty rationalism — told me the following story. ‘The Japanese stood on our doorstep. I was stationed in the outback, where the heat can ignite the soil, where the very gum-trees pant for air. A couple of days before Yom Kippur I asked my commanding officer to grant me twenty-four hours’ leave. I explained the holiness of the forthcoming day; he understood and said yes. In passing I asked if there were any other Jews in our outfit. Yes, there was one, but he was gravely ill; according to the medic he had just a couple of days to live. “In that case, sir,” I said, “he has more reason to pray than anyone else.”

  ‘Four soldiers helped to place my co-religionist on the cushioned floor of a truck and off we went. I drove down to a nearby river, where, amid the stillness of the sunburnt bush, we set up camp. Once evening had fallen we began to send our prayers up to heaven. The next day we continued praying. By the time we arrived back at the base it was pitch-black. When they came with a stretcher to carry my compatriot back to his quarters, I said goodbye and wished him well. And guess what: I met the man only a week ago — with a young, beautiful, laughing wife hanging on his arm! So you see,’ Ivon finished with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, ‘the prayer obviously must have helped.’

  Another thing I recall about Ivon from those years is his reaction when I confessed to writing poetry, at that time only in my mother tongue, of course. ‘I don’t understand Yiddish,’ he replied. ‘But there is always music in poetry, and that I can certainly grasp, so please, read me some of your poetry and then try to translate it. I’m sure you can do that.’ I hesitated, but tempted by the need to show off I began with a stanza from a poem titled ‘The Violin’:

  Play, my violin,

  My everlasting dread,

  That blazing summer’s

  Death.

  Although I translated as best I could, I doubted if Ivon had grasped my meaning in these lines, which lamented the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto. But after a tense silence, when he remarked, ‘There are sorrows that can outlive all our days,’ I knew that my friend was with me.

  ‘I am quite aware,’ he went on, ‘that people who have lived through days defiled by hatred and brutality must dwell in two realms at once. There is a constant revisiting of the past, if only to reaffirm one’s own being.’ He leaned back and sighed. ‘I know that each survivor carries his own private hell on his back. But I can see that you need to talk about it. I would encourage you to write in English as well. Not only will English give you a chance to reach a much wider world. Perhaps more importantly, it will enable you to keep singing, in the language of your adopted land, your people’s interrupted song.’

  Norman’s Secret

  Among the characters I met at the Kadimah during the early 1950s was Nahum Kafewicz, known during his Melbourne years as Norman. I used to read his social-political articles and commentaries in the Jewish News. It was only much later that I learnt Norman’s remarkable story from his daughter.

  One of seven children, he was born in 1909 in Stok, a pinhead township on the map of prewar Poland. His father, a profoundly religious man, was a tailor and so too were Nahum’s three uncles, his father’s brothers. Nahum quickly picked up the trade and at fourteen arrived in Warsaw, where he joined a workshop catering to the military. In no time he became their most sought-after sartorial specialist, a star tailor to the Polish army’s elite.

  Like many other Jews in prewar Poland — who were not permitted to enter state high schools, universities or the public service, even at the lowest level — Nahum was seduced into the arms of Communism. He had no problem reconciling the Talmud with twentieth-century socialist revelation, and soon began to ruminate over Marx’s teachings in the tones of his own homely chassidic chant. He was proud of this synthesis of an ancient heritage with his new political horizons, for he knew that while it was possible to change one’s ideology and one’s language, the music one inherited from home would never cease to resonate in the soul.

  But this is not the essence of the story. What is truly extraordinary about Nahum Kafewicz is that he became Hitler’s private tailor!

  A Jewish Communist as the Führer’s clothier? It sounds bizarre, I know. Well, that in effect was what he became. Because even if this occurred by proxy, and anonymously, the basic reality is the same. Nahum became the third point of a sartorial triangle, the other
two being a German tailor (let us call him Klaus) and the latter’s clientele. Klaus took the measurements and did the fittings, and Nahum carried out the tailoring and completion of the garments. Klaus — a canny, balding, anaemic, morose-looking chap with short swift-moving arms and fleshy boiled-sausage fingers — had discovered Nahum by accident, but he quickly became aware that, by comparison with Nahum’s skills, he himself was not even an apprentice.

  A workshop was established outside the ghetto. Nahum’s customers, whom he never saw, belonged to the highest and cruellest echelons of the Nazi hierarchy. In the wake of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, all the uniforms and other garments torn or damaged in that explosion fell into Nahum’s hands. The thugs praised Klaus for his excellent work.

  But it appears that even before that, in January 1944, Hitler’s most trusted lieutenant, Martin Bormann, had spotted a new uniform worn by Eva Braun’s brother-in-law during a gathering at Berchtesgaden. He summoned Klaus promptly to his headquarters. The tailor feared the worst, but to his enormous relief Bormann instead entrusted him with a length of coffee-coloured gabardine and directed him to take the Führer’s measurements. Klaus was elated. Back at the workshop he handed over the material to Nahum — reverently, as if handling a holy talisman — and then whispered in his ear: ‘Follow the instructions, then destroy them.’

  When I heard this story, I found a vicious satisfaction in giving free rein to my fantasy by ‘imagining’ Nahum’s secret brief. Jacket: three shoulder-pads on left shoulder, one only on right. Extra-stiff canvas to build up sunken chest, double calico between lining and sleeve fabric to hide the flab. Trousers not to be cut too baggy; omit the usual 5 mm for private parts... Then, I fancied, Klaus might well have added: Make him look like a Caesar. In other words, transform a sardine into a leviathan.