Innocence Revisited

by Cathy Kezelman

  My mother was born into a well-to-do family and she grew up with the best of everything, in an industrial Polish town called Lodz. She lived in an elegant apartment with Persian rugs scattered over parquet floors and priceless antiques in every room. Not only did my mother’s family have nannies, maids and tutors at their beck and call, but they were part of a rich, vibrant Jewish community. In childhood she had lots of friends and a large loving extended family. Her early life was one of abundance where my father’s was modest.

  As a child, I knew little of my mother’s background. I knew she came from Poland, and that Poland was in Europe, but she didn’t speak about her family or her childhood. It was as if she had no past. As a child I knew that my mother was different to the average Aussie Mum. She spoke with an accent and prepared strange dishes, like pickled herrings and cabbage soup. She didn’t bake cakes like my grandmother, nor did she make scones with lemon butter, or mince pies at Christmas.

  My mother kept to herself. She had a few friends; most were colleagues from school. Her best friend in Brisbane was Lily, who was Polish like my mother and spoke French as well as several other languages; just like Mum. Together they would criticise Australia, Aussies and most things Australian.

  When I was seven, my mother took us to Israel while Daddy stayed home. Before we went she spoke about her family there; I didn’t know that she had a family before that. I couldn’t work it out. When I looked for Israel on the map, I discovered that it wasn’t anywhere near Poland.

  My mother didn’t explain that she was Jewish and that Israel was the Jewish homeland. Going to Israel held no special significance for me. I could have been going anywhere. I didn’t want to go because Daddy wasn’t coming with us. I’d never been away from him for a single night let alone a whole six weeks. I missed him from the moment we walked through the gates of the airport and cried as I boarded the plane and even more as the plane took off. When the plane stopped in Darwin and Simey got lost in the toilets, I cried again. I felt a little better when we got off the plane in Bangkok and had a yummy breakfast with sweet juicy pineapple and pawpaw and went to see the floating markets, but I was sad again when we had to get on another plane.

  Israel was a long way away and we flew for hours and then more hours. By the time we arrived it was dark. The airport in Israel was busy and people were shouting. I didn’t know why they were shouting, because I couldn’t understand them but shouting made them sound angry. I didn’t want to stay in a place with angry people; I wanted to go home. I was scared.

  We caught a taxi to my mother’s uncle’s place - a different uncle to the one who had brought her to Australia. An old man and woman opened the door and they kissed my mother all over and hugged her. My mother was glowing. I’d never seen her so excited. The old man and woman grabbed me and kissed me and pinched my cheeks. I didn’t like them doing that because they were strangers and I didn’t want strangers kissing me. I just wanted to go back home to my Daddy in Australia where I could understand what people were saying; and where people didn’t shout.

  For the first few days I wouldn’t let my mother out of my sight in case I got lost, or someone said something which needed translating. After the first couple of weeks I got a bit more used to being there and I even liked being kissed by my mother’s uncle and aunt; especially because my Daddy wasn’t there to kiss me. I didn’t like being pinched on the cheek, or patted on the bottom, but I liked being spoilt. I’d never been spoilt before except by my Daddy; with stories. Simey and I were spoilt in Israel. We got treats every day. Another uncle of my mother’s owned a leather shop and next door to the leather shop was a cake shop. That uncle let us go to the cake shop every morning to choose a cake. I’d never had such yummy cakes as I had in Israel. There were lots to choose from but the chocolate one with all the cream was my favourite, so I chose that one lots.

  As the weeks went on I liked Israel more and towards the end of the six weeks I would let my mother go out for a couple of hours at a time without me. There were always lots of children to play with; cousins who lived close by. The best game was the one that we played from the roof of the block of flats my mother’s first uncle lived in. You could go right up on the roof of the flats in Israel and lie down on your stomach so no-one could see you and throw water bombs on the people walking on the street below. You didn’t need to speak the language to drop water bombs.

  Cakes and games were the highlights of my trip to Israel and family too. In Israel I had a family that gathered around me and made me feel special. I wished my Israel family would come back to Australia to meet my Daddy. I wished that they would come and live with us in Australia. I liked having a big family.

  I found some of the letters that my mother sent to my father from Israel when I was searching her place. It was weird reading what I’d written at the bottom of my mother’s aerogrammes.

  ‘We are having FUN. I hop you are two.’

  ‘Two day we went to a cake shop. Mine was yummy.’

  ‘I miss you Daddy.’

  And I also found some letters which my Daddy had written to my mother and was surprised to discover that he’d been keen to move to Israel; permanently. It seems that my mother didn’t want to. I still don’t understand why.

  After the six weeks we came back home and the instant family from Israel disappeared. My mother didn’t talk about them much, but whenever she did, she glowed. She always glowed when she talked about her family in Israel.

  My father’s family was less confusing because it fitted into the Aussie scene. It was only my father who didn’t. Many of my father’s rellies lived in and around Brisbane and the ones who didn’t still lived in Queensland. When I was four I was a flower girl at Paul’s wedding. I don’t remember being a flower girl but I must have been because my mother had the photos. I looked cute in my frilly dress with my black patent shoes and lacy socks. I even had ribbons in my hair. I don’t remember ever having ribbons in my hair.

  We didn’t see Paul or his family often, only a few times a year. My father and he had all but lost touch in their early adult lives and that gap had never been properly bridged. Paul did pop by regularly for a few weeks after my father died, but his visits soon waned. I hadn’t seen any of my Queensland relatives including Paul’s children for decades and wouldn’t recognise them if I bumped into them in the street.

  As for my grandmother, we saw her regularly when I was young, but when I was about six or seven we stopped and didn’t see her for years after that. As a child I could sense my parents’ resentment of her. I disliked her; she frightened me. She was cold and humourless and even when she tried to be nice, she wasn’t. My father didn’t like her either. Nor did he like the rest of his family from what I could tell. He had lots of aunts and uncles and cousins, but we rarely saw them. My father didn’t have many friends either; in fact I can’t remember a single one to name. My parents were isolated and as a result, so were we.

  My mother’s isolation had taken seed during the war. She was sixteen when the German army swept into Poland. Life for Jews had been steadily deteriorating for several years prior to the outbreak of war. Once it broke out and anti-Semitism raged, my mother’s once charmed existence was systematically eroded.

  Freedoms were cancelled and human rights undermined as Jews were persecuted simply because they were Jews. In 1942 her family was forced to leave their home and security and move into the Warsaw ghetto with thousands of other displaced persons. My mother was interned in that ghetto with her parents and her brother, Stefan, who was seven years’ younger and forbidden to leave. They were squeezed into cramped surroundings which they shared with other families and the few possessions that were permitted. Conditions inside the ghetto were dreadful. The allocated area was overcrowded and food was hard to find.

  My mother’s family was luckier than most as they could afford to buy food, at least initially, on the black market. But as time went on, food even for those with the means to purchase it, grew scarce. The little that
was available was of poor quality and little nutritional value. Disease spread readily in the unhygienic conditions. Typhus was rife. People died of starvation or disease or from the cold. Corpses piled up daily on the street waiting to be cleared and my mother, like other ghetto residents, was obliged to step over dead neighbours as she went about her business.

  The Nazi captors were cruel and their sadistic games of humiliation and dehumanisation gained further momentum. As cruelty became torture and torture became murder, Jewish survival often depended on twists of fate. Assassinations took place on a whim and supplemented those occurring on a mass scale by order of the SS, Hitler’s henchmen.

  My mother didn’t speak about the horrors of those years until she was in her sixties and self-published a book detailing her pre-war and war time existence. Her book highlights her dogged determination to survive. In stark contrast she also describes the magic of an indulged childhood and the richness of family and friends who loved her. She makes no mention of her mother’s temper, her coldness or the passing parade of nannies caring for her. She contrasts this with a picture of a warm and loving yet mainly absent father. She also writes about the envy she felt when her brother was born. His arrival after seven years in the spotlight undoubtedly shook her world. No doubt my mother’s early years were not as idyllic as they first appeared.

  Nothing that happened before the war broke out compared with the tragedy of life during the occupation. When selections for death camps became a daily reality, my mother’s parents devised a plan for her to escape. She had already gone on several escapades outside of the ghetto walls, seeking food and medicine for her family. She had proven that she could escape, but plans were needed to ensure that she could survive once she left the ghetto for good.

  Her parents used their few remaining resources to purchase false papers. She would adopt a new identity and live as a Catholic country girl on the Christian side of Warsaw. As my mother practised the persona of her adopted disguise, she prepared to leave her family and old life behind her for good.

  I have tried time and again to imagine how my mother must have felt as she left her parents and younger brother behind, knowing she would probably never see them again. How confused she must have been walking out of the ghetto all alone, with only the clothes on her back and her mother’s handbag with a few priceless mementoes - her mother’s powder puff and gold watch and her father’s gold chain. She strode through the gates of that ghetto without looking back; any show of emotion would have meant certain death.

  In August of 1942 my mother became an orphan of the world, displaced and dispossessed. And she left with her father’s final words to her ringing in her ears: ‘Always follow a straight path.’

  My mother adopted her new identity and lived in daily fear of being discovered. Any sign of her prior identity would have betrayed her. A few months after her escape, Stefan was smuggled out into her care. His escape unlike hers was ill-conceived and he arrived without the necessary papers. Within hours they were exposed and both of their lives threatened. My mother pleaded with her captors and was forced to hand over the valuables in her possession to ensure her own survival. Stefan could not be saved and was sent back to the ghetto. My mother never saw him again. Within months she learned of his murder. Her mother and father had also been exterminated.

  The news of her family’s annihilation marked the end of her prior existence. Yet she could not react; circumstances demanded her silence until the end of the war. She could not openly grieve; nor could she tell her story to a single soul, for she had no allies in her new life. She left Poland and lived out the rest of the war in Germany under cover. The extreme nature of the disconnection she employed would secure her safety, but would impact her life in a multitude of ways in the future.

  The story of how my mother survived the war is in her book. Suffice to say, she suffered unspeakable trauma for six years. The experience had desensitised her to the impact of any other traumatic events ever since. Like many holocaust survivors my mother never found any trauma to be as significant as that suffered during the war. After the war, she sought to start a new life and did so by marrying my father, denying her Jewish heritage and moving into an alien society. Once again she disconnected from all things familiar, including her own sense of ‘self ‘. My mother abandoned European society without ever embracing Australia and as a consequence still feels alienated here after more than half a century.

  Like many other Holocaust survivors my mother imbued her life after the war with special meaning. She denied the guilt she must have felt for surviving and glorified her survival thereafter. She believed there to be a reason she survived when so many others perished and that as a result, her life was sacred. She tried to live every day to the full and she expected her offspring to do the same. In marrying my father and settling in Redcliffe, she started afresh. Simon and I were born from the rubble of her previous existence. We were special and our lives had to be happy, even if they weren’t.

  By the time my parents’ ship docked in Dover, my parents were betrothed and they married within weeks. They settled in England, but life wasn’t easy for them there. My father struggled to find work and when he did it was in a rough school that he hated. His students were unruly and disinterested and my father soon became despondent. In poor and unheated accommodation, they shivered their way through the harsh English winter and even the news of my mother’s pregnancy did little to alleviate my father’s mood.

  My parents stayed in London until Simon was born, but when he was six weeks old they climbed aboard another ship and headed back to Australia. Neither of them was keen to return, but they had little choice. They couldn’t afford to stay away. It seems that my grandmother had made up her mind about my mother before meeting her. She didn’t like foreigners. Who was this Polish woman who had stolen her son? When they arrived, my grandmother snubbed my mother and barely greeted her son. Family folklore has it that on inspecting her grandson she exclaimed, ‘All in pink!’ My mother had committed the unpardonable Anglo Saxon sin, she’d dressed a baby boy in pink.

  The tenor of the relationship between my mother and grandmother was established on that day and little love was lost between them after that. To her dying day my grandmother had no idea that her daughter-in-law was Jewish, or that her grandchildren were for that matter either.

  chapter 11

  After eighteen months in therapy I was starting to feel better. The panic attacks had stopped and I rarely felt anxious. My increasing ability to trust, a skill that I was acquiring through therapy, was improving my other relationships. Because I was more in touch with my thoughts and feelings, I could connect better with friends and family. I still wasn’t gregarious; I didn’t feel comfortable in large groups and so my social circle had contracted, but the relationships I did have were becoming more meaningful.

  I was functioning better on a practical level too. I could shop, cook and clean and even manage some of the washing. And even though I still felt down at times, I barely gave The Gap a passing thought, let alone tempted fate by frequenting it. Understanding more about my parents and their background had also helped to ground me. All in all I was feeling more stable and more secure in my own skin.

  The photos I’d pulled together had been a godsend. I pored over them regularly, relishing the images they elicited and the memories I retrieved as a result. One day as I was looking through my album, the photo of the doctor I’d seen at my mother’s place popped back into my head. I felt immediately uncomfortable and, try as I might, I could not get his face out of my mind. After several restless days and nights I decided to go back and take another look at the original.

  Back at my mother’s place I flipped to the page in question. One look at him and I felt sick to my stomach. I slammed the album shut, and sat for a few minutes to settle my nerves.

  The doctor was short and stocky and his hair, glistening with Brylcream, was pasted hard onto his skull. His cold icy eyes penetrated me from the page, wit
h his nicotine-stained sneer, dominated by an ill-fitting gold incisor. In the photo, his arms encircled me like the tentacles of an octopus entrapping its prey. His fingers dug into my flesh. As an all too familiar cocktail of stale sweat, halitosis and nicotine assaulted me, I remembered the holiday my mother and I had taken in Sydney right after my father died.

  Simon hadn’t come with us; he had a holiday job picking tobacco in northern NSW. My mother and I had driven for two days and were exhausted when we arrived. My father had been dead only three months and I’d been sick for weeks. Nothing serious; listlessness mainly and a few aches and pains. My mother was sick of me being sick. She had no patience for illness of any kind; however, she was relieved that we would be staying with the doctor; not only was he a close friend, but he was, in her opinion, omniscient as well.

  I had met the doctor a few times before. He and his wife had come to Brisbane on a number of occasions to visit us. I’d never felt comfortable with the doctor, but that didn’t worry my mother. She adored him and that was all that mattered.

  *

  ‘Of course Lucy, my dear. Don’t worry! You’ve had enough, more than enough to handle. But you’ll have to wait a little I’m afraid. Not too long but I have a couple of patients to see. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  The doctor leads us down a hallway connecting his house to his surgery.

  ‘Just wait here, will you?’

  The doctor indicates a scatter of faded orange plastic chairs.

  ‘Shouldn’t be long. Now… er, Mr and Mrs Smythe, sorry to keep you waiting. Come on in, yes, that’s right. Through here.’

  An elderly couple gets up and follows the doctor into his consulting room.

  I sit on the plastic chair next to a coffee table on which a heap of National Geographics and Reader’s Digests fight for space. A dust-impregnated pot plant takes up the corner.