by Ramona Koval
My translator explained, after speaking to the woman in charge, that Mama and Dad had been in a hurry: ‘So there was this rabbi here and they said “I do”, but there was no time to make a proper certificate. They signed here and didn’t pick it up later for completion.’
Dad had told me that after hiding in the cellar he was liberated at the end of 1944, when the Russians came to town. He said he met the girl who would be his wife on the streets of the town a few months later, and married her ‘not for love but for pity and loneliness’.
Mama and Dad were in such a rush because they had to register their religious wedding to ensure that in the future there would be no trouble getting passports to travel together. A new birth certificate was made for Mama: they lied about her date of birth because she was underage. They didn’t stay to pick up the document as it was the day after the Kielce pogrom, when forty-six Jewish concentration-camp survivors returning to their homes were murdered by their neighbours. Instead they escaped to Berlin by Russian army transport for the price of a bottle of vodka.
After I saw the abandoned marriage certificate in the Palace of Records, I drove several kilometres out of town in the direction of the arrow on Dad’s map. There was no sign that this or that house or barn was the one I was looking for. When I got back to the hotel, I recorded my call:
Hi Dad, guess who it is…Good…And guess where I’m ringing from? I’m in Siedlce. It’s incredible. I’m good. Listen, we went to see Szkoła Ulica but there’s no house there. No. So I found the Jewish cemetery. Yes. All the headstones are broken. No, it’s all right, Dad, listen… Listen…Okay, Dad, I’m healthy…No, wait a minute, just calm down. I want to ask you a question. To find that place where you hid, we took…Hang on a second… Yes, okay, but there’s a branch in the road. One road is called Terespolska and one street, Siedlecka, goes to the border of Belarus. So which one?
Oh. You were taken in the night. So do you know if it was on the left fork or the right fork? Do you remember, on that crossroads there’s a Madonna in the middle of the street—you’re supposed to kiss it…But I’m just interested, so if you could remember anything about that…I’ve come this far—it would be great to be able to know if it was the left street or the right street.
So, Dad…Yes, I’m coming back, but I’m here now. Dad, it’s all right—listen…Okay, you can’t tell me whether it’s the left street or the right street of the highway?
He hung up on me! God, he bloody hung up on me! Unbelievable. ‘Thank you for ringing from Poland,’ he said, and hung up. Jesus!
After my return from Poland I did what I should have done before I went there: find out more about the places on my itinerary. Miriam Weiner’s classic book Jewish Roots in Poland had just been published and the entry on Siedlce had a photo of the Jewish cemetery at the end of Dad’s street. I learned that it had been established in 1807. In 1939 there were thirty-five thousand inhabitants of the town, nearly half of them Jewish. The town itself was founded in the mid-fifteenth century and Jews settled there a hundred years later, first as innkeepers and later as craftsmen and merchants. The town burned down at the end of the seventeenth century but it regained its position as an important commercial and cultural centre by the early eighteenth century. It fell under Austrian and then under Russian rule. A Jewish high school opened during World War I, and after the war several Jewish newspapers were active, as well as a Jewish hospital. Dad had drawn the Jewish hospital on his odd little map.
The Germans occupied the town on 11 September 1939. They burned down the synagogue on Christmas Eve that year; the ghetto was formed in August the next year, and in October it was sealed off. In August 1942 ten thousand Jews were deported to Treblinka. This must have been when Dad jumped on one of the departing trains to look for his family. Several thousand more Jews were shot in the forced-labour camp established in Siedlce. This was the camp that Dad had been working in when his brother came to take him to Bimbrowski’s place.
I’d known nothing about this.
Occasionally Dad would tell me about his mother crying because she couldn’t afford for him to go to high school, and he once showed me a school report that proved he had been an excellent student. He must have taken it with him to the cellar. He was apprenticed to a tailor at age thirteen and described being sent to the blacksmith’s forge for coals to place in their irons for pressing clothes. Dad’s stories sounded like they’d been written by the Brothers Grimm.
By the time I arrived, Siedlce was yet another shabby town in eastern Poland, in a state of neglect since the war and through the years of Soviet rule. The buildings’ cast-iron balconies, which you see in old photos and which the Nazis took for making armaments during the war, had not been replaced.
Dad had never spoken about Siedlce’s history: it was as if he’d arrived in a puff of smoke. When I offered to show him photographs I’d taken of his town, he was reluctant. I had to force him to look at them, and I gave up after a few minutes. He did not feel the least bit sentimental about my having gone across the world to stand in the street where he played as a child.
Searching online, I found a reference to a memoir of survival in Siedlce by Shimon Goldman, written in Hebrew. There is an English translation, but it’s in the New York Public Library and you can only look at it there. I imagined flying across the planet to read it. If this were one of the Goldman brothers with whom Dad had shared the cellar, it would be a great find. Or maybe it was another Goldman altogether?
Instead I read about what happened when the Germans took over Siedlce, organising the labour camp and death squads. The Reckmann camp was established in the town’s fire station in January 1941, with barracks by the railway tracks. The labourers built and repaired the tracks, and carted coal. In March 1943 the camp was liquidated, as they say (my parents used the term, too); but before that Dad had made the journey to Treblinka and back, then gone into hiding in Bimbrowski’s cellar with the Goldmans. I found accounts of other people escaping from Treblinka in the same way, saved by hiding in the piles of clothing and waiting there till the train left the station, carrying the stowaways.
One was from the Siedlce ghetto memoir of Cypora Jablon Zonszajn, who wrote her notes in an exercise book before she managed to place her eleven-month-old daughter, Rachela, with some brave and honourable Polish people, who hid her and looked after her till the war was over. Cypora took things into her own hands before she was shipped out with the others: she killed herself with poison. Her journal, reproduced online, is harrowing reading.
The wagons are going to Treblinka. I have news from there from Maks Bigelman of Warsaw, who worked there for fifteen days (from August 27th to September 9th) sorting out belongings of those brought in, and escaped. This man is at present lodged with me and relates many things…The wagons arrive at the station of Treblinka. Here the wagons are emptied of people and belongings. The people go through the gate to the square on which are two barracks. Women and children go to the left, men to the right. The women stand before one of the barracks, the men at the other. The women take off their shoes before the entrance then go inside to undress completely. From this barrack the women go along a corridor by a garden path to the ‘baths’. These ‘baths’ are situated in the next securely and tightly sealed barrack. Four hundred people go inside and it is locked with a horizontal bar from outside. In front of the barrack are four machine guns which ‘help’ them to go in. When the barrack is closed, gas is introduced…
Young people are taken from among those who stand in the first courtyard. They work at sorting out all the clothes. These clothes taken from those who have gone to ‘bathe’ are put into parcels, put on the wagons and sent straight back again. Thanks to these wagons a few hundred people saved themselves. It is from these that we know about everything.
After two weeks Maks had got into a wagon with items which were being sent back and in this way he made his escape.
I was taken aback by this confirmation of Dad’s own escape story, wh
ich didn’t need to be confirmed at all. I spent a miserable time looking at survivor testimonies, with my heart in my mouth.
And yet it was the wrong father and the wrong town, and my trip there—finding the paranoid anti-Semitic singer and suspicious neighbours—left me with no feeling of connection at all. All I’d discovered was that my parents had failed to fill out their marriage certificate. It seemed symptomatic of their life together, which was also empty of the correct information, of the flowering of love and of any remnants of empathy.
But if I’d spent that time in Mława, Max Dunne’s birthplace, about 125 kilometres north-west of Warsaw, would my reception have been any different?
4
Who are you again?
I WAS haunted by the words of the older of Max’s two nephews. What did he mean by Max having been made into a ‘beast’ by his experiences in Auschwitz? In Mama and Dad’s circle of survivors, those parents who’d been in Auschwitz seemed to inhabit a special category for us kids, as though outlasting that particular circle of hell dealt you a perverse trump card. My parents had been ‘in labour camps’, ‘in hiding’ and ‘with false papers’ on the Aryan side. Which seemed to me to be less horrible than the experiences of those in the concentration camps. How had I worked that out? Sometimes one of my parents’ friends would say or do something angry or aggressive, or break down in tears at an afternoon-tea gathering, and Mama would whisper to me ‘She was in Auschwitz’ as a way of explaining things.
There was also a line in the sand between Holocaust survivors and Holocaust refugees—those who had come after the war and those who had arrived in Australia before it was no longer possible to get out. Even those who came alone as refugee children and subsequently lost their families were considered the lucky ones. So, while they had both been adults before the war, there must have been a chasm between Joseph Dunne and his brother Max, five years younger, one here before the war and the other who came at the end of 1948.
I found journal articles about these hierarchies of suffering that look at populations of survivors across the globe. Again, child survivors were considered to be low in the pecking order. Was the thinking that they must have had someone looking after them, or that they couldn’t remember horrible things like adults could? Or that they couldn’t interpret what they were seeing, that shocking things might not be so shocking to those who didn’t understand how far they fell short of a measure of humanity and civilisation?
Mama and Dad had no visible tattoos. The only evidence of their traumas was the private horror show inside their minds. They had friends with the tattooed black or navy or green numbers on their left arms, and when we asked about them we were told that it was only a way for them to remember their phone numbers. Why couldn’t they remember them, I thought—I knew mine. Recently I met the father of an old Sunday school friend who told me he used to say to kids of my generation that the tattoo was his phone number, but now he tells his great-grandchildren that it’s his PIN.
The adults in my parents’ circle were mostly remote: they ignored us, and wanted us to play outside all the time; and they ignored their own kids, unless they were smacking them for being annoying. That was my impression, although I never stayed overnight with any of their families, which is the only way you can see what families are truly like. But I could see that you didn’t want to cross them. How much tougher could Max the beast really be?
I was in a frenzy of activity. I telephoned the daughter of Max’s best friends and arranged a meeting. Once again I parked my car in a stranger’s street. I approached the house with a mixture of bravado and embarrassment. In her kitchen I told my ridiculous story. I was getting adept at explaining to strangers the odd theory I had developed about my parentage. It felt like one of those dreams where you are in your nightie while everyone else is dressed. I would have been more ashamed if it were not such an intriguing tale to tell.
The daughter of Max’s friends was a glamorous woman, a few years older than me. Her father had been a heroic fighter in both the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising and the 1944 Polish Resistance uprising in Warsaw. Would such a man befriend the Beast of Auschwitz?
Perhaps slightly shocked, she was nevertheless helpful. She told me what she could remember about Max, and that he was not so much a beast as a man who could sometimes be difficult. He had been close to her parents.
She remembered his son Alan, a handsome curly blond and blue-eyed boy, a troublemaker. She’d had a crush on him. She found a photograph of Joseph’s younger son, a general practitioner now in his mid-fifties, a very good friend of hers. I looked at his face and saw echoes of my own. I was beginning to worry that I’d lost perspective, that I would see echoes of my face in any photograph, if I willed it.
She promised to ask her mother if there was any possibility of a dark secret that Max may have shared with his friends. Her mother still saw Max’s widow. Perhaps the woman had talked about this scandal in the past. So many afternoon teas and dinners and parties. So many chances for whispers and raised eyebrows. If Max was difficult, his wife must have fought with him. Perhaps she confided in her friends about how hard it was to live with him. His affairs, his illegitimate child. Now I was running purely on imagination. I had to resist that and stick to what I knew.
Before I left, she said she’d try to get me in touch with Max’s younger nephew and his family, who were expecting a new granddaughter. True to her word, she soon sent a message saying he was keen to meet me. I made the call. He was lovely on the phone and asked me to dinner.
The next week I was sitting at my sister’s table, Dad and his wife at the head, and I felt like I was the one having an illicit affair. I looked across at him, thinking that he had nothing to do with me. I saw him merely as an instrument of my quest. It felt urgent and dangerous to ask him for clues that might help me, to breezily put questions to him without explaining why I was interested. I had taken on Mama’s persona. She was the one having the affair, after all—she was the one disguising herself as a wife when she was also a mistress.
We were drinking coffee and eating cakes. ‘Nothing for me,’ Dad said. ‘My wife says I’m on a diet.’ When we pressed him, he relented. He was always happiest when he was eating, and like all survivors he ate quickly. We ate quickly, too, emulating their anxiety about the plate being taken away. We had to learn how to eat like free people much later. His wife said nothing but shook her head. Her plate was spotless: no cake for her. But she could never be found without a cigarette dangling from her lips.
I asked Dad if he worked in the same factory as Mama did before I was born. I imagined it might have been hard to carry on a clandestine relationship with the boss if your husband was there every day.
‘No,’ he said, ‘she worked there because her friend Isabel told her about the job, but she got pregnant a few months after taking it and stopped working. If you want to know something, ask Isabel. But she’s in a nursing home after having five strokes.’
He didn’t ask why I was interested in their 1950s factory experiences when I had never asked about them before. I was elated to get away with the probing and to have a new clue to follow. I imagined Mama getting pregnant only a few months after starting the new job. Nine years of infertile marriage to Dad, with visits to gynaecologists in Paris and in Melbourne—then she fell pregnant. Was her husband surprised? I know he was pleased, because I’d been told that he’d been disappointed for years that he hadn’t become a father like the other men in their circle. In those days men assumed it was the woman whose works were at fault. Why should he be suspicious? What did he know of the mysteries of the female body? He was going to be a father.
We’d hardly said goodbye to the old couple at the door when I called the nursing home from my sister’s kitchen to ask if Isabel was well enough to receive visitors. The nurse took the phone to her.
‘It’s Ramona here, Sabina’s daughter,’ I said. ‘Do you remember me? Can I visit you?’ Yes, she said, and asked me when. ‘How about twenty mi
nutes?’
I was anxious and in a rush when I stopped on the way to buy a big bunch of flowers: Christmas lilies. I had not seen Isabel or heard from her in twenty-five years.
In the car I tried to remember what I knew about her. She’d been an attractive woman with no children. She would buy us new dresses when Mama was out of money. There was a dramatic portrait of her hanging in her Carlton flat. It reminded me of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s ‘Green Lady’, a popular interior-design feature at the time. When I found a shot of the Tretchikoff painting online, I realised that Isabel certainly didn’t look Chinese. But she was sultry, like the Green Lady, and maybe that’s what I remembered. She had short hair and red lips and wore a dress with layers of petticoats. Maybe she only wore the dress once, but that’s the one I remember. She might as well have only ever worn that dress.
She was married to a brutal and unpleasant husband, Marek. He was an engineer, or at least that was what he did before the war. Afterwards, in Australia, he invented a new design for a steel coat hanger that could hold several suits suspended from one main vertical hook.
It didn’t take off, probably because the horizontal hangers slid from the vertical one and the clothes landed on the floor of the wardrobe. I know this because my parents had a few of the prototypes he’d put aside when he started manufacturing another creation, a kind of mocha cream covered with chocolate and sitting on a thin biscuit base. This was my idea of a great invention.
Marek used to try to touch me when he visited our house. He’d ask me to kiss him hello, as if he was offended that I hadn’t already, and it seemed impolite not to. He’d leave sloppy wet smooches on my cheeks. As I got older, he would stand in doorways so that I’d have to squeeze past him to leave the room. Now I can see he was some kind of paedophile but back then I only knew it was a good idea to avoid him.
