by Ramona Koval
Like this woman’s, Max’s tattoo was in large digits on the top of his forearm rather than the smaller ones I’d seen, often on the inner arm. I wrote to Dr Stephen Feinstein at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, asking him about this discrepancy. He explained that there seemed to have been a general pattern of placing the tattoo so that it could be read when the inmate held the arm across the chest—to the eye of the bearer it was usually upside down. He said that size varied. One woman he met whose numbers were at least two inches high told him that she’d had an encounter with some skinhead types in an American mall who were impressed with it and ‘wanted to know where she had it done’.
In camp slang, Feinstein said, the tattoo was a ‘cremation number’—Auschwitz was part of the Third Reich and all deaths theoretically required a death certificate. But I knew that only those selected for work were tattooed. Those slated for immediate death did not have ink wasted on them.
Still, the ‘cremation number’ was new to me. Shame would turn to pride, surely, if you could look down at your arm and see that you had outwitted death.
Dad had turned eighty-two and we’d gathered at his place for lunch. My older daughter was at a ten-day silent retreat in the Blue Mountains. I could think of nothing worse. Even being here at this table was better than ten days without speaking.
My younger daughter had brought her new boyfriend, who was eagerly asking Dad about his life. I was impressed with his enthusiasm and politeness but my sister and I rolled our eyes when we heard Dad telling familiar anecdotes, punctuated with his theatrical sighs.
As we were leaving, Dad approached me with a copy of Time magazine in his hand. He gripped my forearm with his other hand and said, ‘You always wanted Utopia, but read this story on page fifty-six. It doesn’t exist!’ I said it was a shocking way to break the news to me and rushed to tell my sister.
Two months later we were angry with him again. He didn’t show up to the funeral of my sister’s father-in-law or to any of the minyans, the week of evening prayer gatherings after it, because, he said, he didn’t like funerals. I asked him: But who likes funerals? He didn’t like her father-in-law either, because he’d stopped Dad from bringing his second wife to my sister’s wedding. Okay—but we thought Dad could have made the effort for my sister’s sake.
We remembered how he avoided us after Mama’s death, and never asked how it was for us to have our mother die after we’d looked after her by ourselves, with no help from anyone. How could he really be our father when he never behaved like a father should do?
He did call us a few weeks after Mama’s funeral—to say that he’d put a caveat on her estate, so that we couldn’t sell it without the opportunity for him to claim an interest. They’d already divorced and split their finances fifty-fifty by then: more than fair, as my mother was too sick to work and my sister was still a student living at home.
His callousness was shocking to me, as was his disregard for the needs of my sister and for our distress so soon after our mother had died. We assumed that his new circumstances dictated his actions. It explained some of the exasperation I felt when dealing with Dad in the years afterwards, and my inability to cut him some slack.
When I returned from a dog-sledding trip to Canada with a deep-vein thrombosis in my leg, which meant I was relegated to the couch for rest, he called to say he was sending me smoked salmon in the post because it upset him to see sickness. He didn’t like dead people or funerals and now he didn’t like sick people either, even one who was supposed to be his daughter.
I had a restless night’s sleep thinking about what he’d said, then called him back to say that sending me smoked salmon in the mail was the most idiotic thing I’d ever heard of and that he shouldn’t do it. But I’ve organised my whole day around it, he said, disappointed.
It wasn’t a good week. A now elderly woman I’d paid to help me with child care after my mother died, my marriage ended and my sister left home called to warn me that she had met my first informant, my primary witness, Bern, at a church meeting, and that she seemed emotionally troubled. I was concerned to hear this and worried that I might be following a false lead in my search, until the church source herself proved to be confused and unstable. Was her report just a fantasy? Why did I have to question the reliability of my most important sources? Was it them or was it me? I was feeling a little crazy myself.
That year I was particularly sensitive to things that made me feel like an outsider. I had taken the idea of being a mamzer to heart. I felt passed over at Passover when I was not invited to my sister’s family Seder at her mother-in-law’s home. Instead, she invited me to the second night at her house, which has always been considered (by me, at least) to be the second-class Seder. The first night is full of enthusiastic singing and eating matzo-ball soup and the rest of the feasting and reading from the Haggadah the liberation story of the flight from Egyptian slavery. The second night is for the also-rans and for leftover food from the first night’s festivities.
I would have nowhere to go on the first night, as my children were spoken for at their father’s house, and I imagined a cold, lonely night of watching TV and feeling rejected. It was a bit ridiculous to be afraid of the cold. I had central heating, and an open fireplace and wood piled up at the back door.
Max’s younger nephew had invited me to their first-night Seder, an invitation I declined after a bit of toing and froing. It was kind of them, but some of those present would have known about our story and others wouldn’t, including the man who might well be my uncle. I was unhappy about coming to the table as a stranger and a cause of shame.
Deeply ambivalent about being in the second rank at my sister’s place, I nevertheless dutifully made a cake and the sweet charoset, a mixture of nuts and apple and honey to symbolise the mortar of the Egyptian pyramids built by Jewish slaves. I set off into the night to her house.
A few weeks later, at a performance of Julius Caesar, I met Max’s younger nephew in the foyer. I introduced him as my cousin to my friend, and she said she saw the family resemblance in his eyes. He said that it was good that I hadn’t come to Passover as his father, who was ninety-two, had collapsed and been taken to hospital in an ambulance. The night had been cut short.
The old man had later recovered. Still, I was relieved not to have been the cause of his collapse and imagined the scene if I had found it too hard not to pump him for stories, which might have seemed the reason for his turn. At least this wasn’t my fault.
By this stage I’d decided to end the psychoanalysis I’d been having for four and a half years. I thought that I had made some progress in understanding myself and perhaps even why my life had taken the turns it had. My analyst was Austrian, formal and clever; we had explored my quest for the truth about my father; and although I found the sessions intriguing and rewarding, if gruelling, I could no longer afford to spend time and money on the couch. I needed to pursue my enquiries outside that small room.
At the final appointment I shook my analyst’s hand and thanked him. He smiled and said it had been his pleasure. As I made my way down his staircase for the last time, I breathed a sigh of relief and accomplishment.
Ending analysis gave me back my time. No longer did I have to make sure I was available three mornings a week. I’d finally worked long enough to take long-service leave and had been awarded a travelling fellowship by the Goethe-Institut to spend two months in Berlin learning German, meeting arts and literary figures, and researching a film script that I wanted to write.
I rang Dad to say I would have to miss his eighty-third birthday that year, and to tell him the good news. He had good news, too. A letter had arrived explaining that the German government was paying him a few thousand dollars in compensation for being a slave labourer in Poland under the Third Reich. So now we both had German scholarships.
It was thirty years since I’d sat in a language class like this one in Berlin, waiting for the teacher to begin. We
were from all over the world—Japan, Korea, Sweden, Uzbekistan, Croatia, Israel and the USA—and I was from the most exotic place anyone could think of, Australia, at the bottom of the globe. Our lingua franca would be the German that none of us could yet speak.
The little Japanese woman had a porcelain face and a squeaky voice. The young man from Korea was formal and inscrutable. The woman from Uzbekistan was quiet, with warm eyes. The Croatian was serious, the Swedish boy was shy, the Israeli was casual and the American chewed gum.
By the end of the first class we could say our names, our homelands, our jobs. The Japanese girl was studying singing, the Korean had his own orchestra and played the double bass, and the Uzbekistani woman was a theatre director. The Croatian was into multimedia, the American was a painter, the Israeli a social worker with parents from Ukraine.
By the end of the first week we were relieved to be standing in the courtyard—in the break from the four- and-a-half-hour class—speaking snatches of English to those who could understand, and hearing Spanish, French, Greek, Russian and other languages. What a relief it was to be speaking a language you’d mastered—how excruciating to have lost the instrument of your self-presentation, which you were used to using with pride.
Back in the class Herr P. from Korea had shown just how versatile he was, having developed a sophisticated form of sign language in which he used his whole body to convey meaning. Fraulein O. from Japan hardly spoke, but I noticed that each day her homework was returned with hardly a correction, while mine was a mess of red lines. Herr M. from Croatia was a teacher himself, and had worked out interesting ways to remember things, trying out all the grammatical forms as soon as he had heard them.
Each day I understood a little more of what people were saying to each other on the U-Bahn. The advertising and information signs in the street began to make sense. It was like putting on a pair of corrective spectacles and having the blur come into focus.
We performed little plays—in the shop, at the doctor’s surgery, buying furniture—and Frau A. from Uzbekistan delighted us with her performances and those of her group, which she directed with glee. Herr P. from Korea was a joker, and began many of his interventions with the phrase ‘in Korea’: we learned to wait for the phrase and laugh with him. Somehow we talked Fraulein O. from Japan into singing for us and she astounded us all with her favourite German Lied: Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’, The Trout. From her slight frame emanated a wonderful voice, clear and strong.
My approach to learning languages was to cast off shore, regardless of the niceties of grammar. I said what I wanted to say in a mixture of ungrammatical German and the Yiddish of my family home, which was itself a sixteenth-century German dialect with snatches of Hebrew and Slavic words thrown into the mix. My teacher was no doubt intrigued (it must have been like hearing an Appalachian dialect at a New York party) but she gently corrected me at every turn.
We were asked to give a short talk in German about our countries. Fraulein O. told us of a mysterious lake which is usually covered with fog, and an ancient belief about young women who see the lake. Either they must see the lake in order to marry or else if they see the lake they will never marry. We were confused. Herrs USA (an especially hesitant speaker of German), Croatia and Korea took turns to draw pictures on the whiteboard—of a lake, a woman, a man—and perform actions. Fraulein O. shook her head at each bad German interpretation. At last the teacher clarified the problem, revealing that she not only spoke excellent English but perfect Japanese, too.
We began to meet outside the class. Herr P. from Korea was an expert at getting cheap opera and concert tickets, and we went together in the evenings. Frau A. from Uzbekistan gave us theatre tips, telling us what to see. When one of us travelled to give a concert or a lecture, or to a conference, the others were full of questions afterwards. We stayed in class during the break, or went together to buy cheese rolls and speak German in the street. We laughed at each other’s mistakes in pronunciation, they told me I asked too many questions because I was a journalist, and we exclaimed with delight when someone got a good mark on a test.
Near the end of eight weeks we were astounded when Herr USA gave a talk about a German techno group. He was fluent, and introduced us to many new words. We suspected he had found himself a German lover, but he insisted that he had just been doing his homework.
The subtleties and talents of each person, their character, history and experience, were revealed as the layers of unfamiliarity were stripped away. Our new shared language allowed us to marvel at the Korean habit of sleeping on the floor and bringing rice tea to anyone with a cold. We saw the Croatian’s wedding photographs: a serious young couple observing the Catholic rite. The Israeli gave us her passionate views about the Berlin Jewish Museum exhibition, and the Swedish boy offered insightful comments about his country’s welfare system.
In my talk about Australia I found myself describing a vast country with three time zones and many strange animals, just as a child might do. I told them about the Rainbow Serpent at Uluru, die Regenbogenschlange, and they seemed impressed—although I’m not sure they understood that it was a mythical beast. They thought I was very brave for surviving in Australia, with its snakes and sharks and hungry crocodiles, and this made me oddly proud.
We were sad to leave each other after our time together, and passed around addresses and promised to meet in Tashkent or Kyoto or on some far-flung border. Our language adventure had been a lesson in humility, in tolerance and in the joys of learning. We took ourselves off into the city, to see what lay ahead.
Each afternoon after class I’d made my way back to the flat where I was billeted, to do my homework. There I was supervised by the Polish cleaning lady, who tried to help me. I could smell alcohol on her breath, and I suspected that she didn’t know much more German than I did, especially when some of the red-lined corrections on my work were to the suggestions she had made forcefully over my shoulder.
I studied the German faces in the trains and one day sat opposite two men, brothers I assumed, who looked like elves. They were short; their eyes were close together; they had large ears that sat low on their heads, and long wispy hair. One wore a wedding ring. They were both in trousers that were too short for them. They sat very close together. My gaze kept returning to them, so much did they look like illustrations from a story by the Brothers Grimm. I thought I could see tufts of hair growing out of their ears, but it was difficult from my angled view to say for sure.
Later that day I searched for the old synagogue just off Kurfürstendamm, which is hard to spot. I was looking for a Star of David and by chance saw a notice for a Yiddish play in the window of a bookshop. A policeman showed me the entrance to what looked like an apartment building. When I went through the gates I was met by a couple of swarthy Israeli guards who said that the Orthodox synagogue wasn’t open for tourists. But I’m Jewish, I said, and I’m not a tourist. They asked me where I was from and searched my bag.
The synagogue was across the open courtyard. I found the women’s section at the back of a large domed cupola, its plaster curlicues painted in green and red and white. The congregation seemed very old, very Russian. None of the women spoke to me.
I became self-conscious and made my way back to the courtyard, where I took out my map of the U-Bahn to plan the next part of my day. A man in his sixties came over and asked in German how long I would be in Berlin. I told him, in my self-styled Yiddish-German way, where I was from and what I was doing here.
He asked if I wanted to see the ritual bath, the mikveh, and I said no, I didn’t need it. He didn’t need it either, he said. And that I was beautiful and his wife had died some years back and I should come home with him and he would give me food and something to drink.
It was hard to be gracious in a language you have almost no command over, but I said not today. They had another service later that night, he replied, and he would wait for me.
The man was like a character from an Isaac Bashevis
Singer story. He came very close to me and asked my name. When I told him he whispered it, stood on his tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek.
I think you are so beautiful, he said. Come home with me. I am from Uzbekistan and we have such hot blood there. Do you understand what I mean? It is good for a man to have hot blood.
I said I didn’t understand, that I was fluent only in English.
I could come to his house and teach him English, he said—he already spoke fifteen other languages. Uzbekistani, Ukrainian, Arabic, Polish, German, Hebrew…Another man interrupted then, and asked him to fetch something from the storage cupboard.
He was the caretaker of the synagogue, I realised, and as he crossed the courtyard towards the other man he said: Don’t forget, Ramona—I’ll be waiting for you tonight, Ramona, Ramona, Ramona.
That night I was joining a friend from the Goethe-Institut to hear a famous baritone perform at the Berlin Philharmoniker. The building is designed like a ship, with the orchestra deep in the hold and the audience surrounding the stage, looking down. We were high in the gods on the fifth level, first hearing Webern cantatas, then the singer we were waiting for. He came on for some Mahler Lieder. I knew nothing about him, so it was a surprise to see a man affected by Thalidomide, with flipper hands which emerged from his shoulders, and stunted legs.
As soon as they saw him the audience applauded wildly. He sang well, and they clapped and clapped; he shook hands with the conductor and the first violinist; and the audience would only let him leave the stage after six bows.
