by Ramona Koval
The lawyer agreed that the original marriage certificate may well have been in the divorce application. He applied to the Family Court archives and they released the official ksuba, a statement handwritten in Aramaic on a thin and yellowed sheet of paper. It had been drawn up in Siedlce by one of the other survivors, and it had served as the official Jewish marriage certificate when Dad made himself a wedding suit and a dress out of pink paper for Mama.
The application for our family’s Polish passports became a kind of hobby for me. I had to write to the Repki local government office near my mother’s birthplace, Wyrozęby, for a copy of her birth certificate. I had been there myself in 1996 and had discovered that much of the archive was destroyed in the war. They gave me a new certificate based on information she’d given them when she returned from her undercover time in Warsaw. She was trying to marry Dad so they could leave Poland, but at seventeen she was legally underage. Technically, she needed permission from a guardian, but all of her guardians were dead. I imagine this might have resulted in a protracted legal story, and I knew they were in a hurry to flee. I was given a copy of a birth certificate that listed her birth date as being four years earlier than it really was. I knew it was wrong. But it was official, and what was more wrong—the unofficial truth or an official lie?
I signed the letter that my historian accomplice wrote to the Siedlce civil office. The records of Dad’s birth and his parents’ marriage did not exist anymore. She asked them about my report of the incomplete marriage certificate with my parents’ signatures on it. They wouldn’t tell her anything over the phone. I didn’t blame them—it sounded crazy to me, too, and I’d seen the certificate being dug out of the ‘unfiled documents’ folder with my own eyes.
We sent all our Australian passports to the Polish consulate in Sydney. They sent them back in our self-addressed envelopes. We had the sense that finally progress was being made.
I had to apply for a change of details to my Australian birth certificate, as it had a misspelled version of my mother’s place of birth and Dad’s name, and had not mentioned the town where he was born. Up till then, I hadn’t noticed. But the Polish authorities were on to even the most minor mistake, and these were rather major. And they didn’t like staples and they didn’t like blue ink.
By the beginning of the following year, many months later, we all had our Polish citizenship documents. I looked at the papers that had been sent to my house, and among the mostly incomprehensible Polish phrases there were our names and dates of birth and official numbers and an official stamp.
For the children, the next step was to register their Australian birth and marriage certificates in Poland, and then to apply for a special number—a PESEL—and for passports. For me, the road ahead was potholed and circuitous.
I’d been divorced and had changed my married name by deed poll, taking the Polish ‘w’ out of it and putting in a streamlined ‘v’. This made it easier for people to pronounce: as I worked in radio, there were a lot of pronunciations each day that could go wrong. I thought this was a good idea at the time, but it now proved costly.
In the past I’d been summoned to the Family Court. My ex-husband had got annoyed when people—dentists, school administrators, parents of my children’s friends—occasionally made the mistake of spelling our children’s last name with a ‘v’ rather than a ‘w’. He wrongly assumed that this was done on purpose—engineered by me—to usurp him. And he engaged a barrister to take me to court.
The judge was confused. He pointed out that I could not be held responsible for the spelling mistakes of the rest of the world, and dismissed the claim. My ex had spent a lot of money on legal advice and was furious. The case of the Vs and the Ws was a funny story I told for years afterwards… and then it came back to haunt me.
Unlike the relative ease of registering my Australian birth and marriage certificates in Poland, I needed to have my Australian divorce recognised by a Polish court. I suspected this might be because post-Soviet Poland was reverting to a Catholic approach, and divorce was in a special legal category again. The bureaucracy, though, retained a distinctly Soviet flavour.
I needed to find a lawyer in Warsaw, and neither my contacts nor the Polish consulate could help me. I visited yet another office to get a copy of my divorce decree and took it to the Department of Foreign Affairs for an apostille. I was getting very good at this.
I wrote to lawyers whose names came up on a Google search, and judged them by their English responses and whether they got back to me at all. Once I settled on one I began explaining my situation. All I wanted was for my divorce to be confirmed and the documents to be registered in the name I’d used for thirty years. A name that I’d changed by deed poll. A name that had caused me some aggravation with my ex-husband.
The divorce document could be registered in time, came the reply. But I would have to get my ex-husband’s agreement that I could use my name spelt with a ‘v’, and he had to confirm that he was aware that we were indeed divorced. I’d not asked him for anything in three decades, and now this—the Vs and the Ws again raising their ugly heads. I was gutted.
I waited for his consent letter to arrive by post, but it seemed he’d asked a friend who spoke Polish to check that what he was signing was correct. I wondered why he couldn’t use Google Translate—that was what I’d been using for months—but I resisted the urge to hurry him up.
Soon I was to travel overseas for work. I desperately wanted to post the document before I left. The night before we were due to go I covered the kitchen table with attempts at copying his signature. Some I imagined were rather good, but I then thought better of it. I left the country without the signature.
When I got back, there in the letterbox was the envelope with my ex-husband’s familiar writing on it. It must have come the day I had left and before the post was due to be held at the post office. To my dismay, snails had eaten their way around the envelope. When I opened it, I saw with relief that the signature was intact. But the page looked like an attempt by a school child to reproduce a ye-olde-worlde treasure map.
Still, here it was, and I was not going to ask for another. I sent it to Warsaw.
I learned some months later that the judge thought the document was a forgery. So I needed to ask for another original and to get it signed by a notary as a witness, and get a red wax seal on it, too. By now I was used to this. Rather than give up, I did as I was instructed.
By the end of the year my divorce document had arrived. I was now officially divorced in Poland, more than thirty years after I achieved that status in Australia. My ex-husband kindly didn’t mention the case of the Vs and the Ws. Until his signed document had been accepted by another bureaucrat in a Warsaw office, my Polish passport in the correct name remained out of reach. I was getting worried that by the time I could apply there would be a language test, and maybe a test in astronomy too, as a nod to Copernicus. I had to ask myself why I was pursuing this task with such vigour. Seeking a Polish passport seemed like yet another attempt to claim authenticity, to get the right papers, to restore something that was lost.
I’d thought I was doing it for the grandchildren—but they were Polish now and had the passports to prove it, with their identities and options in the hands of their parents. Whereas I was trapped in a web of legal intrigue to get my passport, and I didn’t even know why it mattered so much to me. Or even if it mattered at all, and had instead become a kind of game, or a kind of tic.
A passport was evidence of legitimacy as a citizen. But I had an Australian passport and Australian citizenship. I was a legitimate citizen of this country. The Polish passport might be speaking to something deeper, a confirmation of where my parents came from and that I had a stake in the place. My 1997 radio documentary made after the Polish trip was partly about looking for a hole in the ground where Dad had hidden. It was like looking for an empty grave, a man-shaped hole in the ground. The search for my father had brought me to a question mark, a space that conta
ined nothing.
Three years after I began this particular quest for an identity, I received the document from the Polish Consulate that officially changed my name from Kowal to Koval and opened the way for me to get a Polish passport. The next step was to go to Sydney with all my documents and apply. And then the passport would come, and then I would think about what it meant and why it had been such a drawn-out affair.
Waiting for the plane to Sydney I was anxious: about missing the flight, or finding the consulate closed when I got there, even though I’d called the week before to check that it would be open. I was anxious about discovering that I needed yet another document, or that my photographs were no longer the right size, or that I didn’t have enough cash. Or that I needed to speak fluent Polish to apply. Or that all of the rules had changed. It was like an anxiety dream, a Kafka story.
It always felt dangerous interacting with the consulate, dealing with a vast bureaucracy and suspecting that there were secret reasons for its reticence to accept me. I’d recently seen a news report about a move to outlaw ritual slaughter in Poland—the last time that a law like this was proposed was the mid-1930s, something about banning the production of kosher food.
It was upsetting. Not that I was dependent on kosher food, but I was alarmed at the idea that there were people who might want to ban it. But then I reasoned that if all the idiotic ideas of Australia’s fringe politicians were publicised overseas it would reflect poorly on this country, even if they weren’t representative of our collective thinking.
There were more troubling questions. Why did I want legitimacy from the government of a country that my parents fled? They were so damaged by their experiences there that they didn’t teach me Polish. But it was a language that I heard each day in the house. Maybe I wanted to restore certain memories or gain information about what they might have been talking or fighting about.
And there was my anxiety about needing the correct papers. About Mama’s forged papers being the secret to her survival. I couldn’t avoid seeing the connection.
I wanted the Polish passport, but was torn between using it and not using it. I was unsure about what would happen if I got into difficulties somewhere in the world and needed diplomatic support. If I couldn’t speak the language, what would happen—though what could I possibly do that would require the diplomatic support of the Polish government?
Kafka’s Josef K. didn’t know what he had done in The Trial, but he was still in trouble. As a young reader I had identified with him. I must have thought there was something about me that was different, questionable, illegitimate, without being sure what it was.
I thought about my husband’s attempts before the trip to calm me down. He quizzed me about Poland, in case they asked me questions when I was there. What’s the epic poem of Polish culture? Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. I knew that. He asked what it’s about and I didn’t know, so we googled late into the night. Mistaken identity, lost Polish pride, lost loves, complex misunderstandings, a girl called Zosia. Right.
And who’s the prime minister of Poland? Donald Tusk. What kind of a name is Donald for a Pole? Tusk is from the Kashubian minority, which in the car to the airport I could only remember as Kardashian. It’s pronounced Toosk, according to Wikipedia. The title of Poland’s national anthem translates as ‘Poland is not yet lost’. Would they test me?
At the consulate in Sydney a woman who I thought might be the consul—dark-haired, forty-five, neat-figured—greeted me. She seemed to be temporarily staffing the desk.
I said, ‘I have to apply for my Polish passport.’
She said, ‘You have to?’
I said, ‘I wish to—I’m here to.’
I smiled. She didn’t.
She asked if I had my documents, yes; my photograph, yes; my Australian passport for identification, yes. She checked them. I held my breath. They are all in order, she said, and handed me two forms to fill in. She pointed out where to sign, here and here, and to start with questions one to twenty. They were all in Polish. She offered no help, even though I had conducted the whole conversation in English, apart from my hello. She motioned to a table for me to sit down with the forms and asked the next person in line to step up.
I fired up my Google Translate app, and when others who spoke Polish sat down at the table I asked discreetly for confirmation that this or that line was correct. One woman obliged but I felt she was unwilling. Another woman who learned Polish as a child but who couldn’t read very well was more co-operative.
After an hour the consul asked me how I was going. I brought the forms to her, a child handing in homework to the teacher. She used white-out to obliterate some of my answers. She told me that in response to the question about the colour of my eyes I must not write ‘blue’, but the Polish word for it. Fair enough.
I returned to the desk feeling like I was in the remedial class at school. I was never in any remedial class. The word for ‘blue’ is niebieskie.
In the nationality box I wrote ‘Polski’ over the whited-out ‘Australian and Polish’. When I returned to the desk the consul pronounced the forms correct, except for a missing ‘e’.
‘Ah, Polskie,’ I said, ‘because I am a woman.’
She neither confirmed nor denied this.
I began to feel relieved as she took copies of my documents. The computer system was down, she said, but she could do it by hand. If there were any problems with my papers, they would contact me. I told her I was from Melbourne and it would be hard for me to return. She was unmoved.
The consul took fingerprints of my index fingers, and I handed her $152 in cash. She apologised that the process had taken me an hour and a half. (Years, I thought, not hours.) But I could have closed the consulate, as the computers are down, she repeated. I agreed that it was better that she hadn’t. I farewelled her in Polish, went outside and looked for a cab.
As soon as I got in, the driver asked me if I knew what year the Japanese submarines entered Sydney Harbour. I can’t remember, I said. I’m from Melbourne. This was an odd answer. But it was the one I gave to the Polish consulate as well. I wondered if I seemed illegitimate to the taxi driver, too.
He’d trained as an electronic engineer, but when he got to Australia in 1989 his English wasn’t good enough for him to work; and then, when it was better, electronic engineering had moved on. He spoke and read Chinese and Japanese. He wanted to write his life story but thought it was too late. He worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. He had no friends. He was lonely. But he read.
When I arrived at the airport I had a headache. Too many stories of displacement, too many languages for one day.
16
The longest journey
THERE was no way to avoid it, no matter how hard I tried. I had to piece together what might have happened to Max in Auschwitz, and what brought him to the moment when he may or may not have become my biological father. At first I’d had an interest in who he was and what parts of him might have been transmitted to me, but after following his story for years I’d become interested in filling in all the gaps that I could, not just for personal reasons but for the sake of the story itself. I had become immersed in its meanderings and sharp corners, and found myself swept up in it. I was intrigued by the tributaries of Max’s story, too, the way the stories of others overlapped with it.
Alongside my quest for the right Polish documents, I was studying the Auschwitz video testimonies and reading Holocaust literature. I’d do this during the day and then take sleeping tablets each night to knock me out. If I didn’t take the pills, the phrases and terrible scenes would play in my mind when my head hit the pillow and I wouldn’t find the sweet place where sleep was possible.
I knew I was no historian, but it seemed logical to me that these men with whom Max had entered the camp and with whom he had been tattooed, with whom he survived and with whom he joined to travel to Germany to testify against Paulikat, would have shared with him some other critical experiences. Their stor
ies must have intersected in some way. I might learn from their analyses what made one man live and the man next to him die—apart from luck, which wasn’t something you could influence.
From the testimonies I’d watched I knew that those who were strong to begin with, or used to the cold, or used to hard regimes, or able to ‘organise’ better food or a better position in the bunks away from the reach of bashing Kapos and not too high near the roof so as to choke from lack of air, or had tradeable goods or skills, or had a knowledge of how things worked and who to bribe and who to trust—such attributes gave prisoners an advantage and made it possible to still be breathing, albeit in a skeletal and diseased shell of a body, when the war was finally over.
I read through books on my shelves till I came to one bought years before: Hermann Langbein’s People in Auschwitz, an account of life in the camp written by an Austrian political prisoner. He’d been arrested for being a Communist activist. His positions in the camp, as an office worker in the infirmary and a member of the underground resistance, gave him a point of view that I found fresh and compelling.
I’d avoided reading his book because the title and cover seemed to promise great distress, but by the time I opened its covers I thought I might have become inured to nightmare visions through reading the works of Eli Wiesel and Primo Levi (who, like Max, had also worked in the Auschwitz infirmary) and, more recently, Robert Antelme. Though Langbein’s outlook and language were calm and penetrating, still the night terrors came.
After spending three days reading the book I was relieved to have completed it. I had a palpitating heart and couldn’t catch my breath. This was anxiety, my old friend, yet here I was in my home, at my desk, no crematoria in sight but in my mind’s eye.
And now I wanted Hermann Langbein to be my father. He was born in Vienna in 1912, two years before Max, to a middle-class family. His mother was Catholic and his father a Protestant convert from Judaism. He trained and worked as an actor before being an organiser for the Communist Party. After the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938 he fled first to Switzerland, then to France and finally to Spain, where he joined the International Brigade to fight against Franco in the Civil War. When it ended he was interned with other members of the brigade in various French camps. Following the German conquest, the Vichy regime handed them to the Germans and Langbein was transferred to Dachau, then in 1942 to Auschwitz, where he remained for two years.
