by Ramona Koval
After his son engineered it, the old man started to show me the family photo album, starting with shots of his grandchildren and his wife. All the while I was dying for him to get to those of his brother and his brother’s son, my possible half-brother.
‘And who’s this?’ I asked eventually.
‘That’s my brother Majlech, in our tailor’s shop in the town of Mława in Poland before the war.’ The same face that I had seen in that first photograph, smiling now, and here again with a family group. His eyes. They almost told you they had seen many things, even as you knew they were yet to see many more. Uninterested in Joseph’s wife’s side of the family, I was cavalier, desperate to get to my quarry. I was a bloodhound and the trail was hot. I drank black coffee and asked for another cup, stretching out the time I could have with the album, and eventually came across a photograph of his brother’s son, who also looked like me.
And all of this only one week after I’d started my search. I was excited, and then I felt pathetic again, like a child trying to ingratiate herself into a family to whom she is really a stranger. Is that my father? Are they my uncles? Is this my grandmother? Was this man, this butcher named Adunaj in a provincial northern Polish town, my grandfather?
I thought of P. D. Eastman’s story for children Are You My Mother? A chick hatches when his mother is away looking for food, and he starts searching for her in all the wrong places. He asks ‘Are you my mother?’ of a kitten, a hen, a dog and a cow, and then he turns to inanimate objects: a boat, a plane and finally a great power shovel on a building site. The story has a happy ending, when the shovel places the bird back in the nest as his mother returns with dinner. Would I find the power shovel of my dreams? Not that I was expecting dinner, as all the personnel were long dead.
I felt a pang of envy seeing all these photographs from Poland before the war. Joseph had emigrated in 1937 (under the names Izrael Yosck Adunaj and Israel Josek Adunaj, according to documents I later found in the National Archives), and must have brought many photos with him, or perhaps his family sent them in the ensuing couple of years.
Growing up, my sister and I had no set of photographs. There was one of Mama’s grandfather, an old man with a black cap, a long coat and a long beard. She said the beard was red, like my sister’s hair. There was a group photograph that included Mama’s mother, who wore a large sun hat and whose face we couldn’t really see. These must have been sent by distant cousins in Israel, and I knew they were a source of pain for her. To my shame I can’t even find them now—I fear they were hidden at the back of a piece of furniture that I donated to charity when she died. I was never privy to her hiding places.
I might have envied these people their family album, but at least I discovered that Adunaj was a Polish name meaning ‘from the Danube’. From the Danube to Adunaj to Dunne. I was relieved again not to have to think of myself as English.
The old man was getting tired. He became puzzled and asked me to explain again why I was there. It was time for me to go.
His son gave me the name of the daughter of Max and his wife’s best friends. He thought she might be able to give me more information about what kind of person Max had been. He didn’t know exactly what had happened to Max in Auschwitz or even how long he’d been there.
If Max had had some close friends for many years, it was possible he wasn’t so terrible. He must have had some social skills. I was happy to doubt the Beast of Auschwitz story.
And the half-brother, Max’s son: his name was Alan, he lived in Queensland and he was close to his mother. Contacting him now might upset Max’s widow, and could lead back to Dad. I’d decided that surviving the Holocaust was one thing for Dad, but surviving a challenge to his fatherhood was quite another. I didn’t want to risk it.
It was still over forty degrees outside, with a cloudless sky. The kind of day you remember from school years, trudging home, when the sun made you squint so you couldn’t see the road ahead and you could hardly breathe.
3
Something to find, something to see
BEFORE Dad’s eightieth birthday and the call to Bern, before I sat with the two men at their kitchen table poring over their family album, I was invited to attend a writers’ workshop in Prague and conduct interviews there. When I’d looked at a map of the world to work out my route, I’d realised that Poland was just north of the Czech Republic. I’d never looked closely at this part of the globe before. My parents had never pulled out a map to show me where they grew up. The idea came to me that, if I was going as far as Prague, I may as well go to Warsaw, too. And if I was going to Warsaw, I may as well visit the towns where Mama and Dad were born. I had no idea of where these towns were in relation to one another and to the capital.
I took my recording equipment with me and made a radio documentary that I called The Cellar, the Hinges and the Copper Samovar. I liked the title. It reminded me of folk tales, which often list things in threes. And I liked the absurdity of the premise. It was about the search for three things that seemed impossible to find: the cellar, the ‘hole in the ground’ where Dad hid with the two Goldman brothers; some iron hinges—the work of my children’s paternal great-great-grandfather, a blacksmith who, like other boys, had his thumbs removed to avoid the draft for Tsar Nicholas II’s Russian army, as you couldn’t fire a musket without thumbs—which were on the windows and doors of a house in a small village beside the Bug River; and the house where my maternal great-grandfather, a baker, had sat by his window drinking forty cups of tea a day from the copper samovar.
Looking for the cellar where Dad had hidden, I was armed with only his hand-drawn map of Siedlce, which lies around ninety kilometres east of Warsaw. When I’d invited him to accompany me, in an effort to improve the connection between us, he had declined.
On the recording I made at the time, he says:
It’s very hard for me to discourage you, because you are a young person. And I don’t want to be the one to discourage you from something, because the human nature is always…it wants something to find, it wants something to see; you think you’ll see something, you’ll learn something. That, I don’t want to say. But me as a person, I don’t see the reason for it, to go to Poland.
For me to come back, that is the worst thing what can happen to me. There is not a cemetery there…Like I said, I don’t think even the grave of my brother is still there, I don’t believe in that; I believe it’s all demolished, it’s all broken down. After fifty years nobody’s there, not a soul.
If I go in the street where it was the ghetto then I’ll see the street, I’ll remember the blood was flowing there. How can I go, how can I look at that? But you are young, you are looking for opportunities, you are looking for wisdom, you think maybe…If you want to go, I can’t tell you not to go—I leave it to your judgements. But I, you will never persuade me to go. To me, Poland is a Jewish huge cemetery.
On my first night in Warsaw, while I was eating at a table outside the Hotel Europejski opposite the Saxon Gardens, the strains of familiar music wafted from the dining room. I could hardly believe I was hearing ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ from Fiddler on the Roof, the kitsch American adaptation of ‘Tevye the Milkman’ and other short stories of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. The trio played each phrase enthusiastically, the violin making virtuoso features of the klezmer lilts. Here, in a country almost without Jews, the diners hummed along with Jewish melodies.
This was my first experience of being a living Polish folk memory. Most Jews had been killed during the war or had left soon afterwards when pogroms began to eliminate the few survivors. Poland had been a home for Jews for hundreds of years, and now some Poles seemed quite sentimental about the culture that had thrived here. In several towns I found tours that offered experiences of the Jewish past. I felt disoriented: authentic and yet out of place.
I’d engaged a guide and translator, a university mathematician who could make more money taking people around Poland investigating their roots. His fathe
r had been Jewish and his mother not, and he’d made a study of the history of Polish Jewry. From Warsaw we drove east in his battered blue Skoda to the town where Dad was born, to Siedlce—Si-ed-letz-e in Polish and Shedletz in Yiddish.
Dad had hidden in the cellar of a cottage outside town that was owned by a Polish family with a small farmstead. He’d reached this haven after making a narrow escape from the Treblinka death camp.
According to Dad, people were told that the Siedlce ghetto was overcrowded and that those in charge were worried about typhoid spreading, and hence they were being sent to a ‘better camp’. Dad’s mother and sisters and their families were sent to Treblinka. The people in the ghetto knew nothing, but they were suspicious. After three days Dad could not stand being without his family any longer, so he joined the old and infirm on the trains leaving for Treblinka, to look for his mother. As they arrived, he saw columns of naked people standing, waiting to go into ‘barracks’ for showers and leaving bundles of clothing on the ground.
As he was moving with the others, a man also in his mid-twenties came up to him. ‘Don’t go with that line,’ he whispered. ‘Tell me, what are you doing here?’ Dad said he’d come to look for his mother and family, who’d arrived three days before. ‘Don’t look for them—they have gone to the gas chambers. Their bodies are already up the crematorium chimney. If you want to save yourself, come and help me.’
Dad helped him pick up all the clothing on the ground. They carried the bundles to the empty, dirty cattle wagons and stacked them high. The man told Dad to hide with him beneath a stack. They watched and waited, and eventually the door was closed and they heard a whistle outside the carriage. The train moved slowly out of Treblinka.
More than fifty years later, as the car pulled in to Siedlce, I saw some graffiti on a wall. It was a drawing of a Star of David in a hangman’s noose. My translator told me the writing next to it said: A good Jew is a dead Jew. I was alarmed and amazed, but he was at pains to explain: ‘Quite often, you know, the children are writing this and they really don’t understand what they are writing. Probably they didn’t see a Jew in their life.’
We were there to find an empty hole in the ground at an unknown address some distance out of town. At least I knew roughly the direction. It was a romantic and impossible task. The translator was happy enough to indulge me, and I was amusing myself with the mission.
Before I left for Poland I’d studied the map that Dad had drawn. I’d asked him to indicate the location of his hiding place, but the only thing on the page was a smudged pencilled arrow at the left edge, pointing off the page. It was absurd. It was perfect for my absurd quest.
He was terribly nervy that day, having drawn me the map but not wanting me to use it. On the recording he says:
Here is Warsaw, it was two hours’ drive to Warsaw, but I went out of Siedlce, but it could be maybe one kilometre or maybe one and a half kilometres. And I’ll write you down here, a map, look what I write you down here…This is the station, the railway station, you come down the main street, I’ve forgotten the name of this street…the street from the station to town.
When I arrived in Siedlce the map was all but useless, of course. I had another one I’d picked up in the foyer of the cheap hotel where I was staying. Dad had told me he lived in Szkoła Ulica—School Street—at number 13. He’d remembered there was an electricity substation on the corner of the street and, at the end of it, the Jewish cemetery. It wasn’t the best part of town. At first he told me that if he knew the cemetery still existed he might join me, as his brother was buried there, but then he demurred, saying he was sure nothing existed there anymore.
In fact, the cemetery did still exist, but by the time I saw it the graves were overgrown with weeds and many of the headstones were smashed beyond recognition. It was used as a shortcut across the paddocks. Dad’s street was rundown, its wooden houses weather-greyed, paint peeling off window frames and fences leaning, and there were some vacant lots where houses had once stood. My translator talked with a few locals and reported their suspicions that I wanted to claim back land from them. Dad’s family had been renters, so there was no chance of that. Yet I didn’t feel like reassuring them.
A woman of advanced years, her red-dyed hair wild and her eyes painted black with kohl, stopped us. She was breathless, speaking at a great pace. The translator said:
She is a ‘queen of songs’ and she would like to go to perform in Warsaw but unfortunately her whole correspondence is stolen, so no letters are arriving for her address because of the son of this older guy, we were talking to him before, this is the worst guy in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless she will go to Warsaw and will try to make a comeback. Many buildings in the street were in her possession, but also were stolen from her by Jewish people. The radio stations, the television stations and the Jewish mafia is governing here, and all the power is derived from her songs.
I wanted him to ask her how the Jews were running everything when there were no Jews here, but I saw that he’d rather not. He didn’t want to prolong the conversation, he said, because she was crazy, a sick person. I asked if he thought she was talking like that because she thought I was Jewish. Probably not, he replied. It was just the kind of conversation she might have any day, with anyone. ‘Thirty per cent of the people we’ve met today,’ he said with a mathematician’s precision, ‘have been either drunk or mad.’
Number 13 turned out to be a vacant block. As I stared at it, I tried to visualise a house there, and in the house Dad, the youngest of four children, and his widowed mother, a sharecropper who cultivated and sold a portion of the apples from an attached orchard—but the image didn’t come to me. I didn’t feel connected to this block on this street, with its suspicious neighbours and madwoman’s accusations. Though I didn’t know it then, I had nothing to do with this place save for a few stories.
Dad had spoken of his adored older brother, Herschel:
My brother came to the place I was working [as a labourer in a work camp] and he had some papers from his office at the petrol station allowing him to walk the streets freely, day or night. He came to the gate and showed the papers and they called me forward and let me go with my brother. I was still covered in black soot and he had arranged a shower for me, and he told me he had a place for me to hide. It was at a Polish man’s house called Władek, together with another two brothers called Goldman. That same evening he went with me to the hiding place. It was two or three miles out of town in a cellar under the barn, with a trapdoor from the kitchen. He stayed with me one night, and the next day he went back, telling me he would return. He never did.
In the cellar by candlelight on all sorts of pieces of paper I started to write a diary of events from the first day of the war. I missed my family terribly, my mother, brother and sisters and their families. I cried day and night, and the pieces of paper were wet with my tears.
How they dig this hole, my brother, these two brothers—I wasn’t there and I don’t know how they digged it. What they did was a little house just with one room, a little bit back from the highway. In that room was two beds standing with the table, and a cooking oven which went on wood. So what they do—look, this is the oven [he scribbled a plan of the room in the hut]—and what they did, they dig the hole in front of the oven, just to jump down, and from the hole they dig a big place that you can lie down there with some wooden planks. So to go down to this hole we had to jump down and then we went there, hiding like rats, sitting on these things. Then the wood trapdoor went down, they put a mat on it, so when you walked in you wouldn’t find nothing…As soon as somebody went out, they knocked, so we went out from the cellar, we opened the trapdoor and we came out in the house. You see, this is the hut which I survived. This, I must give it to you. How can you recognise a hut like this?
Dad was showing me a photograph that I had never seen before, taken in 1945 according to the pencil writing on the back. It was of an older man sitting outside a house with his wife and, standing be
hind them, their daughter. You could see a line of the roof and a trellis. There was a name on the back, too. ‘Now I see his name was Władek Bimbrowski,’ Dad said. ‘The writing says here: “He called me son.”’
I asked Dad if he remembered anything about what stood around the house, a marker, a shop, a fork in the road.
No, nothing. When you travel on the highway, the south side of the town, you’ve got houses like this going on all…Maybe one is a wood one, one has a few bricks, the other one is made from timber, you see. But like I said, every few hundred metres is a house, is a little house. You wouldn’t see a huge space empty because there’s houses one after another.
I wanted to find this Bimbrowski and thank him, or thank whoever was left of his family, for sheltering Dad and thereby ensuring my own safe passage into the world. But at the Siedlce Registry Office, which my guide called the Palace of Records, there was no trace of him. No luck either in the Palace of Maps. I searched for birth and death certificates that might have survived the war, hoping to spot traces of my roots in this community. I did find a man with the same surname as Dad, who died in 1908 at the grand old age of one hundred. He was called Gedalia and his profession was listed as ‘beggar’. He must have been a brilliant one to live so long.
I asked to see my parents’ wedding certificate. For two hours the archivists searched, without success. The last thing they did was look through a book titled ‘Unfiled documents, those incomplete or without dates’. By this stage it felt like another of my hopeless quests. I felt like the queen of hopeless quests.
Then my translator called out. He couldn’t believe it: they had found something. There was Mama and Dad’s wedding certificate, with their signatures at the bottom of the page, the handwriting I would recognise anywhere—but no other parts of the certificate were filled in.
