by Ramona Koval
Dr Yunis’s account of the town reminded me of the scenes described by the great Sholem Aleichem and seen in Fiddler on the Roof: a time before the pogroms started.
In the centre of the market, on a large and wide base of stones, stood a pure white building built in the sixteenth century. The building was covered with red shingles. Hugging the four walls like a black belt was a Latin inscription: ‘The same measure of justice applies to poor and rich, to citizens and new inhabitants, 1789.’
Above the roof a hexagonal grey turret with four round openings reached out to the skies, overlooking all four directions of the wind. The town clock was here.
Every quarter of an hour, its hoarse and familiar ring reverberated through the air. Children stood in the market place and looked at the clock’s black hands slowly revolving around its white face and waited for the clock to strike.
Quite often the hands of the clock stood still. No peal was heard. Time seemed to have been arrested. A silent sadness filled the heart. The whole town impatiently waited for Moshe Wilner to get up, climb the tower and reset the clock. The town’s time was in his hands.
I thought of the black-and-white silent films of the early twentieth century and imagined Charlie Chaplin as Moshe Wilner on a ladder, resetting the clock. Or maybe Harold Lloyd, hanging off the hands of the dial in the 1925 film Safety Last.
Dr Yunis spent his childhood exploring the nearby forests, watching the wooden water mills on the local rivers, smelling the flowers and enjoying the intrigues of bands of local children. Through his tale I learned of rabbis and tailors and ritual butchers and youth groups and markets and merchandise and crazy people. There were sages and politicians and theatre performances and characters who sounded like they were enacting old Jewish jokes—a man, his wife, the rabbi…Perhaps it was part memoir and part fiction, but reading it was strangely warming. It was a treat to imagine my connection to this working town, with its stories and documents and solid buildings.
Yunis said that by the 1930s people were leaving in droves for America and ‘even Australia’. This was the period when Max’s older brother Joseph left. Was Yunis thinking of him when he made that remark?
Of the almost five thousand Jews in Mława at the beginning of the war, only forty survived.
At the end of the Yunis text there are contributions from two other Mława residents that I hadn’t noticed when I scanned the document the first time. Both were survivors of concentration camps and write about giving evidence to a war-crimes trial. There, in an account by Moshe Peleg (formerly Moshe Poltusker), a passage leaped out at me:
Some of us who had been in the Mława ghetto were invited by the Germans to testify against the Nazi Policat. I will briefly describe this criminal. He was born on June 3, 1907, in Minserburg, East Prussia. He was commander of the gendarmes assigned to the Mława vicinity, who terrorized the Jews, among the rest, by ordering his dog to attack on command.
People were invited from the United States, Australia, Germany and Israel to testify against him. From Israel were invited Hendel Avraham, Pesach Sheiman, Zelig Avraham, and myself, and also Ben Zion Bogen of Strzegow. Yosef Haussman of Szrensk and Mordechai Purman of Rypin.
From the United States came Leibel Kozheni, Harry (Hersh) Forma and Reuven Soldanar of Szrensk; from Australia: Elimelech (Melech) Aduna. We were all survivors of the extermination camps.
This is why you need to read things carefully and not rely on name searches, I thought to myself, because Elimelech (Melech) Aduna is Max Dunne. The misspelling of his original surname leaves off the ‘j’.
I searched online for the trial details and found a record:
CASE NR. 755
CRIME CATEGORY: Other Mass Extermination Crimes
ACCUSED: Paulikat, Franz Ernst Walter Life Sentence
COURT: LG Arnsberg 710623
BGH 711203
COUNTRY WHERE THE CRIME WAS COMMITTED: Poland
CRIME LOCATION: Striegenau
CRIME DATE: 42
VICTIMS: Jews
NATIONALITY: Polish
AGENCY: Police Gendarmerie Mielau
SUBJECT OF THE PROCEEDING: Shooting of a young Jewess when she tried to switch from one row to another within a group of Jews awaiting transport
PUBLISHED IN JUSTIZ UND NS-VERBRECHEN VOL. XXXV
I saw that Moshe Peleg had misspelled Paulikat as Policat, and that the Police Gendarmerie was listed as being in Mielau which was, between 1939 and 1945, the German name for the Polish town of Mława. It was hard to know how I was ever going to get far with this story if the names and spellings changed depending on the teller of the tale and the writer of the document—but I felt extremely lucky to have a new direction to follow.
The case transfixed me. A young Jewess was shot ‘when she tried to switch from one row to another within a group of Jews awaiting transport’. Was she trying to join her family or her sweetheart? Was she hiding contraband, or electing to stand with those she thought had a better chance of being put to work instead of to death? I wanted to find out as much as I could about this girl. She was trying to change her destiny—that much was clear.
And at last I had a lead in my search for Max’s testimony. Not only might I find out more about what happened to him before he came to Australia: I might finally hear his voice in the pages of a transcript.
While I waited for a response to an email enquiry to the website where the trial details were listed, I read Moshe Peleg’s description of embarking on his trip to Germany in May 1971 to testify. He tells of being nervous, as I suppose most of them were, about making the journey to Arnsberg in Westphalia, where the accused, Walter Paulikat, had taken up residence after the war. Paulikat had even served there in his old profession—he was the chief of police until he was recognised by a German man called Brecht, who reported Paulikat’s whereabouts to those who dealt with war criminals in Germany.
All the former Mławan residents who were invited to testify in Arnsberg stayed together at the same hotel, so Max must have been there with them. I wondered if he was nervous. Alan said he seemed afraid of men in uniforms, but this time the man in question was under arrest and the uniformed guards were on Max’s side.
Moshe Peleg said he couldn’t sleep or eat in anticipation of seeing the man he called ‘the Nazi devil’. In the event, when he laid eyes on Paulikat the next day, Peleg collapsed and needed first-aid till he recovered, half an hour later. His testimony took two hours, and his fellow witnesses testified that same day and the next.
A month later, on 23 June 1971, Paulikat was sentenced to life imprisonment. Peleg writes that it made no difference to those who were killed, but those who travelled to Germany to testify could be satisfied that ‘at least we helped bring the criminal to his punishment.’
That sounded like Alan’s report of Max saying ‘We got him’ on his return from Germany. Now I felt as though I was finally getting somewhere with Max, even that I was closing in on him. I followed up my requests for information from the courthouse in Arnsberg, and waited to hear what discoveries my fresh luck would bring.
In the meantime, Dad was becoming demented, although no one used the term. In his late eighties, he was still going to the same coffee shop each morning, accompanied by his devoted but increasingly annoyed wife, to have the same thing for breakfast. Sometimes his cronies were there and they buzzed around his wife like elderly moths. They were still able to talk and joke with her, unlike poor Dad. He had become her child.
My older daughter and her husband had established a routine of taking my granddaughter to see Dad in the coffee shop each week or two, and when they did they invited me along. I took the opportunity to build up my points, as if I were in a cosmic filial-rewards scheme. I wasn’t sure what these points were going towards but I was happy to play with the baby, and I saw that Dad was captivated by her beauty and her sweetness. She was almost two and well practised in the art of coffee-house behaviour. She ate her frothy baby-chino with a spoon and held the glass in
her little hands to finish off the milk.
At last Dad and I had something in common: delight in my granddaughter. ‘Isn’t he just gorgeous?’ Dad said. Then, ‘Look, she is drinking’ and ‘He likes to drink’ and ‘She has curly hair’, and when he saw me he said, ‘I think we have met before’ and I told him, yes, I think we have met.
Mostly he spoke to me in Polish, a language he never taught me to speak. I tried to engage him in Yiddish, which I had taught myself with the aid of some lessons many years ago, but he no longer spoke back. And I realised that for the first time I was happy to meet him like this, with the baby on my knee and something else to think about besides our long and strange history together.
I liked him demented. It took the heat off me.
When I offered to help his wife, asking if I could do anything for them, and if she’d decided whether he needed more care than she was able to give, she told me, ‘No, no—I am not ready to give up on him.’ She said he followed her around the house and didn’t want to go out much, other than their Saturday nights dancing at the German Club. Now she danced with other men and Dad stood on the sidelines. I admired her goodness and her loyalty to him. I was spared the burden of having to look after him in a way that he had never looked after me.
I went to the movies to see The Counterfeiters, a German–Austrian co-production: the story of the men who were part of Operation Bernhard, the attempt by the Nazis to supply counterfeit Allied currency and to induce the economic collapse of their enemies. One hundred and forty-four Jewish prisoners of many nationalities worked at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin to produce such excellent counterfeit British pounds and American dollars that they were almost undetectable.
The film had great recreations of Weimar decadence and post-war recklessness, vividly depicting the mood of survivors. I could well imagine how I came to be born through desperation and rash judgement. The hard and distressed and partly demented group of survivors depicted in the film were like my parents’ social circle.
Counterfeit. It looks just like the real thing but it’s not authentic. That was me.
The men in The Counterfeiters had reminded me of Max and the hardness, the toughness, his son had described. Max was in Auschwitz for a long time because he had a ‘good job in the infirmary’.
I returned to what I knew about him. Born on 23 December 1914, early in the other world war, he was almost thirteen years older than Mama. I was sure she would’ve been attracted to older men. Having lost her father when she was two months old, she’d been entranced by the sad but romantic story of him swimming across a cold river to be there for her arrival.
Long after she died I found out, in an unpublished memoir given to me by an Israeli-based second cousin of hers and translated from the Hebrew, that he died after receiving a blow to the head in a fight with neighbours from the village. He was a strong man who, according to this cousin, had been able to lift up a small horse, and when challenged to a fight he’d boasted that he could beat his opponent with one hand tied behind him. The fatal blow formed a blood clot in his brain, and he died a few days later. Mama and her brother were brought up by their mother and extended family—cared for and disciplined by all of them—and Mama loved both her grandfathers fiercely.
It didn’t seem overly Freudian to think that she would look for a man who could father her and protect her, and with whom she might blossom. In Dad, she had a man who was damaged. He was the fourth and youngest child of a widow, doted on by his brother and sisters, and had great difficulty maturing into an adult. He was already twenty-one when the war started, and of course his experiences of it were traumatic and had changed his life’s trajectory, but he was never going to be the man she craved.
Another year was heading towards its end and soon Dad would be ninety. Looking at my notes, I couldn’t believe I’d been thinking about this story for ten years. I had little to do with Dad apart from the mornings in the coffee shop, and I ceded all responsibility for his health crises to my sister, who would work things out with his stepdaughter or wife.
I began to comb through the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation, a collection of long and often traumatic interviews with survivors of the Nazi era. These people had given their testimonies to strangers behind the camera, sometimes telling them things they’d never told their own families. They had survived the war in extermination camps, or as hidden children, or by living in Aryan zones under false identities.
The French writer Robert Antelme (the husband whose return from the camps Marguerite Duras writes of in her book The War) discusses in his remarkable memoir The Human Race the disconnect between knowledge and the capacity to speak of it:
[D]uring the first days after our return [from the camps], I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself, our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, and with us we brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was very much alive, and we felt a frantic desire to describe it such as it had been. As of those first days, however, we saw that it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up between the words at our disposal and our experience which, in the case of most of us, was still going forward within our bodies…no sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable.
There were thousands of interviews to watch in the Shoah Foundation’s archive, filed according to languages and war experiences and places of imprisonment, and it was overwhelming. For most of my life I’d avoided war stories or documentaries showing horrific scenes, and I’d learned never to ask Mama or Dad or their friends to tell me what had happened to them, for fear of stirring up memories and tears and anger. But this video resource gave me a chance to sit and hear, and to move between people and countries, and when I’d had too much I could press pause and go away without hurting the feelings of the teller.
I started by searching for names of family members. That there was somewhere, somehow, a survivor of my mother’s large family who she’d not been in contact with was a romantic fantasy, but I found a man with the same last name as her: Leon Kawer, pronounced Ka-ver, from the word for ‘coffee seller’ in Polish or Yiddish. He was from Poland and, along with his family, had ended up in Paris before the war. His testimony was sometimes dull—but when he spoke about how he made false documents for others to use, I was riveted.
He told of finding sympathetic priests, who would in turn point out sympathetic mayors, who would stamp the correct things on documents that showed other, real people’s identities alongside the photographs of Jews who were to assume and live under these identities. I had a rush of wanting him to be my father, because he was clever and brave. I looked up at his image on the screen and I felt six years old, vulnerable but protected. He might have been related to me, but equally his name might just mean that someone in his family imported coffee. How fickle of me to be so easily seduced into wanting this new, absent father! The feelings passed in moments.
I started looking in the archive for people who had been born in and around Mława, and who may have been with Max in the ghetto there, or made the journey with him to Auschwitz and beyond. I already had the names of some of his fellow witnesses in the trial of Walter Paulikat, and I found that two of them had been interviewed by the Visual History Archive. While I waited for their videos to be released to me, I sought out interviews with others who may have had the same kind of experiences as Max. I found Henry Coleman, born Henoch Kalma.
He was in the Mława ghetto in 1943 and was transported to Auschwitz, where he was tattooed with the number 76344. Max’s number was 76200, so I suspected that they were there at the same time. I knew they would have been tattooed in alphabetical order, A before K. I imagined Max being tattooed while Henry was waiting for the 143 people between them to file through. How strange to be thinking about the tattoo on the arm
of a man who had nothing to do with me because the number was close to the one on the arm of a man who also might also have nothing to do with me. I was painting by numbers. How pathological was this drive to connect—with a father figure, any father figure.
Henry Coleman said that when the Russians liberated them he shot a German SS man wearing civilian clothing whom he recognised, and soon after that he rode a bike because he loved bicycles. A shooting and a bike ride. I watched the rest of his testimony and waited for a mention of people he might have met.
After the war Henry went to America and made a new life there. ‘And this is my story,’ he said, towards the end of the video, and he cried, as he had now and then during the telling. I thought of the way Dad would cry when he remembered the war years and the things he had seen, but Henry was clearer and less self-absorbed. He told of his grandchildren asking him about the numbers on his arm and how they came to be there.
‘There were some bad men,’ he began, his head to one side, as if rehearsing how he might answer, ‘and they killed people. But how can you explain’—and now he looked through his tears directly at the camera—‘explain to a little child what happened? What happened to all the little Jewish children?’
I spent days with the different testimonies, compelled and horrified. As I watched, I censored the stories that I couldn’t listen to—I always encountered ones I wished I hadn’t heard—while looking for clues from survivors from Mława, in case they named the object of my interest. When the testimony became too hard to take, I left my desk to play with my grandchildren for an hour or so.
On one occasion I watched a man talking about an incident he witnessed in the Mława ghetto, when a German soldier offered a piece of chocolate to a starving baby in its mother’s arms. The survivor thought he was witnessing a rare example of kindness; he thought the soldier was an angel. I had to stop the video there. I was finding it hard to breathe. From the way the man was talking I knew that something awful was coming.
