by Arnold Zable
Phillip closes his eyes and puts his hands to his forehead. ‘Actually we sat on boxes,’ he says, ‘and I doubt it was a real table. It was some kind of wooden box. The cellar was large: say, the size of about three rooms. It was dark, a place for hiding from the roundups. There was a hole in the wall that connected it to the next cellar. During the German raids, when they came to get us to take us to the forest to kill us, we were hiding in the cellars. Everything was uncertain. Anything could happen at any time. We were always on the lookout for danger.
‘Hirshke was a shy boy, but when he read his poems he changed. He did not raise his voice but you could feel his passion. When you were with him you could sense an inner life, that he was keeping something back. Do you get it? But when he read the two poems it was different. He was alive.
‘Hirshke wrote his poems in 1943, in late April, shortly after the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It has been said the uprising inspired him. I had no idea when he read the poems that one of them would become so important. But this is the strange thing: the conditions were so primitive, so dangerous, but you still had the capacity to express yourself, to write such poems. Even more so than usual.’
On the wall behind Phillip is a silkscreen painting of two geishas. It is large, two by two and a half metres. A fold divides it in the middle. The older geisha is showing the younger woman how to hold a fan. She observes the pupil with full attention. On her face there is a hint of gentle approval. The young geisha is focused on the fan, which she holds, delicately poised, in her fingers.
Everything is balanced and mannered. The figures embody an age-old ritual between teacher and pupil. Their relationship hints at a vast history, an enduring tradition. The figures are caught in a moment that suggests centuries.
The parallels between the painting and our conversations are uncanny. There is something of the teacher–student rapport between Phillip, the older man, handing over the story, and me, the listener, eager to receive it. The young geisha has taken hold of the fan and I have taken hold of the story, which like the fan is delicately poised. At this point it hangs in the balance.
‘I will tell you something even more interesting,’ says Phillip. ‘I know how Hirshke died. To my knowledge, no one knows exactly what happened. Some say he escaped from a work camp in Estonia and was killed fighting with the partisans. Others say he escaped in 1944 when the Russians were closing in and was probably executed by Germans. All that is known for certain is that he vanished. Then, unexpectedly, here in Melbourne, not so long ago, I discovered what happened.’
Phillip stops, puts his hand to his chin, and contemplates the story. Like Hirshke in composing his poems, he allows his words to take shape before he gives them to me. When he resumes he chooses them with great care, acutely aware of their gravity.
In the ensuing hours I come to understand his logic, the method in his detours and repetitions. It is not only the story, but the way it is told, that conveys the meaning. The detours are critical to knowing Hirshke, his dreamy nature, the process by which he composed his poems, and the means of his passing.
‘The story is like this. On the first of September 1943, early in the morning, German troops and their Estonian collaborators surrounded the Vilna Ghetto. Inside, we already knew that something was about to happen, a round-up, perhaps the final massacres in Ponary. The time had come. The resistance put out a call for the fighters to get ready for battle.
‘Most of the ghetto inmates went into hiding in the cellars and bunkers. There were two battalions of fighters. One went to the Jewish hospital and barricaded themselves inside with a few guns, a handful of homemade grenades and an array of improvised weapons.
‘I belonged to battalion number two. Our weapons were primitive and untested. We had made them in secret workshops. We had between one and two hundred electric globes. The pin of the globe was broken off, the bulb filled with battery acid and resealed with lead. Each of us took two globes. We gathered in a courtyard and waited for the Estonians to enter.
‘Imagine a big courtyard with two entrances, one at the front and the second at the back, and we are facing one entrance. Suddenly the Estonian soldiers appear in both entrances armed with machineguns, and force us to march to the front of the yard. It was autumn. I had the globes in my overcoat pocket. I decided that if I were going to die, I would die with dignity. So I put my hands in my pocket and walked slowly. But the Estonians just passed me and left me behind. Nothing happened.
‘I was at the rear of the group. I saw an open window and jumped through it. In the corner of the room there was a wardrobe and that was where I hid. I stayed until I heard the noise dying down. I could hear the footsteps of the Estonians on the cobblestones, the steps of one of them entering the room, searching, and I heard him saying, “Nobody here.”
‘I waited for twenty minutes and decided to go to the hospital where some of the fighters were assembled. I sneaked through the streets, knocked on the door, and the people inside said, “The door is barricaded. We are not going to open it.”
‘Not far from the front door, in the courtyard, there was a pile of wood for the hospital heating.’ Phillip draws a diagram in my notebook. He sketches the square courtyard, with apartment buildings on two sides, the hospital on the third, and a gate between buildings on the remaining side. He draws the wood stacked in front of the hospital.
‘The pile was approximately two metres high. I climbed up, hid myself on top of the wood, and waited. An Estonian soldier walked into the yard through the gate and he was heading in my direction. I found an axe, and I calculated that from where I was hiding, above the pile, I would be able to split the head of the soldier. I could easily lean over and hit him as he walked by. But I did not do it, because in reprisal they would kill a few hundred Jews. And you would not believe it. A little girl, nicely dressed, strangely enough, was walking towards the Estonian from a doorway on the opposite side of the square with an axe in her hand. The soldier grabbed the axe and threw it away. He gave the girl a gentle kick in the behind, and told her to go home. So you see, I had spared the life of someone who still had some human feelings.
‘A few minutes passed and I walked out to see what was happening. I saw a policeman walking in the street. I showed him my work pass, but he said, “Today it is not valid. I’m arresting you.” He took me to the gate of the ghetto where the Germans were waiting with trucks. They searched me and they found the light bulbs. They threw them onto the cobblestones and none of them even broke. They were useless.’ Phillip laughs, shrugs his shoulders, and gestures as if to say, we were hopeless fools, deluded in our hopes for our homemade weapons.
‘The Germans pushed me onto a truck, and the convoy moved in the direction of the train station. Because I had worked in the German Army car repair unit in the ghetto, I knew where the battery was lodged under the floor of the truck. There were about twenty people on board and I suggested that we should try to get to the battery and disable the truck. None of them agreed. They were afraid we would all get shot.
‘We came to the station and they put us in cattle wagons, eighty in each. They counted us loudly, from one to eighty, and they said: “If one of you escapes, all of you will be killed.” One of my schoolmates had run off to the forests some time ago to join the partisans. That day he had come back to recruit some people. He was discovered and shot on the spot, beside our wagon. I saw it.
‘They gave each of us a loaf of bread and some water, put a bucket in the corner for our basic needs, and at about four o’clock the train left in the direction of Ponary. We all expected to be shot, but we passed the forest and travelled further north. The people in the wagon, fearing reprisals, made sure no one tried to escape.
‘We travelled for three days and came to a transit camp in Estonia called Auvere. We were there for three or four hours. We eat some soup, and we are sent to another camp.’
Phillip has slipped into the present tense. He is unaware of the transition. From now on, he alte
rnates between present and past, between the reliving and the remembrance. He is both present and distant, both at the table and in the slave-labour camps of Estonia, and he is taking me with him. From time to time my eyes stray to the geishas. Somehow, they too seem far removed yet fully present.
‘There are no barracks, only tents,’ says Phillip, ‘with about thirty people to a tent, and, as it happens, in my tent they were all young people involved in the resistance. So we were all thinking about how to escape.
‘My job is to build the barracks, and my dream is that a truck would break down and I would be asked to fix it. And it happened. One day, two Germans came to our tent leader and asked for motor mechanics. The tent leader asked me if I could change a tyre and he sent me away with other fellows who would be working in the garage.
‘This saved my life because in the garage we are not exposed to the cold, and not exposed to so much animosity from the guards. Instead we received a degree of respect because of our skills. What does it mean a degree of respect? They would sometimes leave behind the crust of the bread, as extra food. Do you get it? This is all relative. We had been elevated to the status of half human, and we stayed alive.
‘And because of my work, I ran into Hirshke. Can you believe it? It was as if we were destined to meet again. This is the story. I was working in the mobile garage and I moved from one camp to another, all over Estonia, repairing trucks and cars for the German army. At night they would put me in the nearest hard-labour camp.’
Phillip stops, forever conscious of the need to extract the significance of the story. ‘Yes, being an automotive electrician saved my life. In the Vilna ghetto we understood this. Your life depended on how useful you were to the Germans. They issued certificates, which provided you with a degree of security. Back in 1942, a friend of my father’s worked in a ghetto garage repairing cars, and they required an automotive electrician. So my father decided I should become one. I had studied some physics at school. It was my only training. I knew little about cars. I told them I was an electrician.
‘My first job was to sweep the floor. The floor was earth, so I could sweep all day. When my foreman was at lunch, I experimented with the starter motors, generators and distributors, trying to see how they worked, how they were built. The other workers in the garage showed me how different electrical parts were working in a car.
‘This is interesting. In the ghetto there was a library that contained a lot of books about electric circuits in cars, electric motors. I learned from those books. I began collecting the old parts that were to be thrown out and, by tinkering, taught myself how to repair them. So I became very useful. And in Estonia, I made sure I would remain useful.
‘Estonia is very cold and the Germans had large diesel trucks. The engines were too big to turn over with a crank handle, so during the night they had to put a fire under the truck so that the engine would be warm enough for the starter motor to turn over in the morning.
‘I discovered the reason why the starter motor did not work well. Because of the cold weather, the magnetic force was too weak to close the gap between the two contacts in the relay that operated the starter motor. So I decreased the gap.
‘Again I proved to be useful. But I also knew that when it got hot the starter could burn out. So in the longer term, what I was doing was a form of sabotage. It was a kind of balance. I did what had to be done to survive, but I found a way to subvert it. After all, those I served were murdering my people.’
~
Phillip laughs. His pleasure in his subtle acts of subversion remains with him. He props his elbows on the table, draws in his shoulders, and touches his fingers together. Then, reminded of his purpose, he returns to the central thread, his meeting with Hirshke.
‘On one of my journeys we were staying two nights in a camp called Goldfilz. The inmates in the camp were returning from work. They were walking slowly, exhausted and hungry. Among them I see Hirsh Glik. I discovered that Hirshke’s fighting unit in the ghetto was captured, and he had been deported to Estonia not long after I was.
‘Why Estonia? The Germans had discovered shale rock from which you could extract oil. They were desperate for fuel and there was a labour shortage, so they used the Jews of Vilna to produce it. Thousands of able-bodied men from the Vilna Ghetto were spared the massacres in Ponary so that they could mine shale in Estonia.
‘The instant I saw Hirshke was a bright moment. Such things are relative. We lived with uncertainty. We did not know what would happen to us in the next hour. You are in a dark tunnel and the light is flickering far, far away, and you do not know for how long it will flicker, and you hope that you will eventually reach it. It is hard to describe.
‘I saw that Hirshke was the same person, still dreamy. Malnutrition creates a certain psychological state. You saw in a prisoner’s eyes that he was disturbed, but Hirshke had a steady look. He wasn’t defeated.
‘The first conversation between us was very short, but once you were in the camp at night you could move freely among the inmates. So when he finished eating I asked him, “Hirshke, how can I help you?”
‘Hirshke replied, “People respect me for the songs I write, and sometimes they allow me to have the better part of the soup from the bottom of the pot. But I have one problem. I do not have a spoon.”
‘Again you must understand what does it mean, “respect”. When people were in the queue for the soup, because they admired him, they would not push or hit Hirshke. They allowed him to retain his dignity. If you lost your dignity, you lost your will to live. Believe me, this is very important.
‘It was so easy to lose your dignity. In the camp there were certain jobs that made it more likely. The worst job was to carry the wooden troughs full of human waste. Little bits would spill over you and you stank. My word of honour, one of the worst nights I ever had was when I was ordered to do this job. The snow was slippery and I had to carry the troughs. I stank for days.
‘In the camps food was always on your mind. Hirshke did not ask for a bit of bread, he asked for a spoon. That was a good sign. He was not thinking like a starving person concerned only with immediate survival. Not only did I have a spoon, I had one with a sharpened edge so that it could be used as a knife. I would cut my daily ration of bread in half in the morning when I received it. I ate the second half in the evening with the soup we were getting when we were returning from work. I gave Hirshke the spoon.
‘For him it was a treasure. For me it wasn’t a big deal. I knew that in a few days I would organise another spoon. We were friends. Believe me, in conditions like that friendship was a matter of life and death.’
Phillip leans forward, and emphasises the point with his clenched fists. He allows the thought to settle before resuming. ‘After I gave him the spoon I asked him, “What else do you need?” “Something you can’t help me with,” he replied instantly. “I need freedom.”
‘He said this in a manner of a bird in a cage. As if it was the deepest innermost desire existing in that moment. He said it with the same feeling he expressed in the cellar when he read the two poems. His entire being, his deepest longing, was in that moment. It made such an impression on me. I thought: “This person needs freedom like one needs fresh air.”’
I look at the painting. It is filling out, beginning to convey a more expansive story. The two geishas are elaborately dressed. The blue-grey fan is the bond between them. A second fan lies fully opened on the floor in front of the older geisha. Her clothing is more ornate than her pupil’s; a shawl is draped over her shoulders.
The younger geisha is in the foreground. She wears a crimson kimono with a floral pattern. She occupies a little more space. She will have the greater responsibility since she is the student and will have to carry on the tradition. As yet, she remains innocent. The pressure appears mild. She is a geisha in training. There is serenity in the painting, and an exquisite stillness between the women.
I return my attention to Phillip. Between us too there is spa
ce born out of stillness, reinforced by the quiet of suburbia on a weekday morning. There is time for the story to quietly unfold, and for both the teller and listener to contemplate its meanings.
‘What did the camps teach us?’ Phillip asks, and in reply he says, ‘The basic difference between right and wrong. The good people became better and, unfortunately, the bad became worse. The strongest impulse in a person is to survive. Then it is important how you survive. And how you survive determines what sort of a person you are.
‘This is why for many years I assumed that Hirshke died by attempting to attain freedom, knowing he may lose his life in trying. And then, by chance, I found out what happened. In 1993 I interviewed a fellow in Melbourne called Samuel Drabkin. I was collecting testimonials for the Holocaust Centre. It became my new obsession, after my passion for collecting oriental and primitive artworks.
‘You see, a person must have a purpose to live a long life, and my purpose is to work in the Holocaust Centre. I am in charge of the testimonies department. When I tutor students, I direct them to the materials suitable to their studies.’
Again Phillip is weighing his words, aligning them with his speculations. ‘It is teaching young people that I love. I really believe in it. It is my real purpose. And in fulfilling it, along comes this fellow Drabkin.
‘He was also from Vilna and, at a certain point while he was giving his testimony, I realised that he and Hirshke were on the same transport to Estonia. They spent their first days in the transit camp Auvere, and were then sent to Goldfilz. This is life. Unpredictable. Something you never expected to find, and suddenly you discover what had happened to a friend.
‘I made another appointment with him, to record the exact details. The story he told is something like this. It was in 1944. Autumn. The prisoners were returning from the forests where they were cutting wood to be used in the mines. They were a group of about forty.
