Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  By a strange coincidence, Marcel had a similar heartache with his daughter Edith France as his brother Jean had with Danielle. Marcel and Jako’s only child, who was two years old at the time we arrived in Paris, was living in the southern town of Rodez with her Catholic grandmother who also refused to give her up.

  In the modern living room of the country house he loves in Neuville, Uncle Marcel tells me that he arrived in Rodez during the war. ‘That was after I was discharged from the French Foreign Legion. Did you know that I was a Legionnaire?’ He chuckles and his amber eyes twinkle in his fleshy face. Now that I’m no longer frightened of my uncle’s explosive temper, I enjoy the easy way he tells a story, leaning forward and smiling into my face, creating a feeling of camaraderie that shuts out the rest of the world. Of all my uncles, he most reminds me of my father, and I love his generosity, warmth and vulnerability.

  Encouraged by my astonishment, my uncle backtracks to the beginning of the war. ‘As I was a foreigner, they didn’t let me join the regular army so they sent me to the Foreign Legion at the other end of the world! I had to learn to ride a horse. My horse and I made a pact: once I’d ride him, and the next time he’d ride me! But he didn’t keep to the arrangement, and always ended up on top of me!’ He’s laughing so heartily that his corpulent body is shaking while he shows me a photo of himself in Tunisia, a round-faced young man with a shy smile under the legionnaire’s cap.

  While we’re talking, in the kitchen Jako is scouring, dusting, mopping, sweeping. Uncle Marcel shakes his head in irritation and I can see that he takes her activity as a personal affront. ‘She never stops. I wanted us to enjoy this house together but she can never relax.’

  The French Foreign Legion evokes exotic images of adventure, but Uncle Marcel’s life in Tunisia was relatively uneventful. He only remembers one skirmish. The Italians in the Legion were always stirring up the Arab villagers to attack the Jews, and his regiment was sent to restore order. But instead of fighting the locals, my uncle, ever a gourmet, used to sneak out with another comrade and steal chickens from a farmyard. ‘It didn’t do me any good, though, because I was stupid,’ he chuckles. ‘When we divided up the chickens, I took the biggest one, not realising that it would be old and tough!’

  Not long after he arrived at the Legion, he was taken to a bunker along with some other soldiers. ‘It was just as well that Tunisia was never attacked,’ he says. ‘They left us there for a week with an ultra-modern cannon no-one knew how to use and they’d forgotten to provide us with ammunition!’

  After nine months with the Foreign Legion, Marcel obtained a work certificate from a friend in Rodez and was discharged. It so happened that a businesswoman in town needed a furrier, and she arranged work and accommodation for him. At first life was peaceful in this sunny southern town, but in 1941 the Gestapo arrived and rounded up the Jews. No-one turned him in but after that, he obtained false papers in the name of Marcel Faire, grew a luxuriant moustache, and dressed in sabots and a cloth cap to pass as a local farmer.

  As food was scarce and available only through ration cards, and as there were several Jews hiding in Rodez, his employer’s attractive daughter Jacqueline used to cycle fifty-two kilometres for meat, sugar and flour to a neighbouring village, and then cycle all the way back with her provisions, flashing the Germans a cheeky grin as she rode past. My uncle’s eyes light up when he recalls the spunky brunette who wasn’t afraid of anyone. Jako, as she was called, had inexhaustible energy and an effervescent personality that lifted his spirits like the finest champagne. She was always pealing with laughter, mimicking the Germans or the locals, or pulling faces. As soon as the war ended, one hundred guests toasted the newlyweds at their wedding breakfast.

  Marcel and Jako had already moved to Paris by the time their daughter Edith France was born, but soon after the birth, Jako was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had a hysterectomy. For several months she hovered between life and death, exhausted and emaciated. At the same time, Marcel was suffering agonies from kidney stones, so there was no-one to take care of the baby who cried so pitifully that they nicknamed her Poussy. They sent her to Jako’s mother in Rodez but when Jako finally recovered, her mother refused to return the child.

  Uncle Marcel shudders as he talks about his mother-in-law. ‘That woman had a Machiavellian streak. Oh là là! She could have taught the Borgias a few tricks! She’s a character straight out of a Balzac novel. She ruined us twice. We had a business together but when she sold the merchandise she never paid us.’

  My cousin Poussy, who has kept her childhood nickname, still remembers the terror of being kidnapped by her parents. She is tall, chic, mannequin-thin and typically Parisian, with a gamin haircut which accentuates her high cheekbones and huge opalescent eyes which survey the world with the haughty remoteness of the vulnerable. Heads turn when she walks along the street with the slow self-conscious saunter of a model on the catwalk.

  ‘I hated my father for taking me away from my grandmother, and I was scared of him because of the things she had said about him,’ she says. It wasn’t a good start, and set the pattern for their lifelong conflict. Poussy, who is a psychiatrist, has spent a great deal of time analysing their relationship. ‘It wasn’t just the initial trauma. My father never asked what I wanted. He just treated me like a doll, not a real person with ideas and feelings. I was told what to do and how to be. At thirteen I became anorexic as a reaction against my parents and their expectations, and I’ve had a horror of being fat ever since. I only studied medicine to prove my father wrong because he used to tell me I was stupid.’

  Family relationships are as fragile as egg-shells and as complex and unfathomable as the universe. As Poussy speaks, I recall Uncle Marcel’s face glowing with pride on so many occasions while he showed me her photographs and marvelled that a self-educated furrier from Krakow like him had managed to produce such a beautiful and accomplished daughter.

  In spite of her grandmother’s anti-Jewish views, her lifelong conflict with her father, and the absence of any Jewish education, my cousin feels Jewish. ‘That’s really odd, because my father wasn’t religious and never pushed me to become Jewish,’ she says while we pick at our antipasto in a cosy Italian restaurant near her apartment. ‘One day I just walked into a jewellery shop and bought myself a Star of David.’

  Poussy is striking, sexy and intelligent, but the men in her life have all been unsuitable, impossible or unavailable. ‘I won’t every marry,’ she says. ‘I’m content knowing that I’m developing my own potential. I never wanted to have children anyway.’

  My cousin Aline, however, has found happiness comparatively late in life in marriage and children. ‘I’m glad I started psychoanalysis when I was an adult, otherwise I would never have had kids,’ she says with a loving glance at her daughter Judith. While we sprawl on the floor of her rustic home beside the Marne, baby Charlotte on her lap, Aline’s expressive eyes light up when she talks about her romance with her husband Eli which resembles La Bohème with a happy ending. ‘We were living in adjoining garrets and got talking over the balcony. I was pregnant when we met, and our romance began when he came to visit me in hospital when I had Judith,’ she recalls.

  As we sift through the trunkful of family letters, photographs and memorabilia which her father kept all his life, she says: ‘My father rarely talked about the past. He kept in touch with his brothers and sisters but never spoke about those who had died. I think he felt guilty that he left Poland and survived, and they didn’t.’ Uncle Jean was witty and charming but Meniere’s Disease affected his hearing and as his deafness increased, he felt increasingly isolated and depressed. As Aline talks, I recall the letter that he wrote to me after my father died. ‘Hardly a day passes that I don’t think with sadness about my father and our family life in Krakow before the war.’

  Aline has become pensive. ‘Although I always knew that I was Jewish, I didn’t have any Jewish education whatsoever. My mother said it was because of what happened to Danie
lle. How could they bring me up to be Jewish when my sister had been baptised as a Catholic?’ she says in her deep, calm voice. Aline, who has kept the Baldinger surname along with her married name Achour, keeps a Jewish home, observes the traditional holidays and is a social worker with a Jewish community organisaton. She has recently written an informative handbook about Judaism, Christianity and Islam which will be published shortly. ‘To me, being Jewish means being part of the story of my people, and I am very proud of that,’ she says. Although there has been a rift between her and Danielle ever since their mother died, when Aline’s daughter Judith celebrated her Bat Mitzvah recently, Danielle and her family were invited to share the occasion. Shortly afterwards Aline invited them over for Seder night. The long rift was over.

  Before I leave Neuville, Jako takes me to the flower-filled little cemetery where Jean, Rolande and the Guyots lie buried. She bustles about, filling a watering can, sprinkling the flowers she has planted, and pulling out weeds. I’m fascinated to learn that although Jean had been totally disinterested in Judaism, at the end, when he lay dying, he asked for someone to say Kaddish for him.

  Today, Uncle Marcel is buried near the brother he loved, with whom he often fought and feuded. Unlike Jean, Marcel didn’t want anyone to say Kaddish. ‘My God died at Auschwitz,’ he told me one day. Daniel Baldinger’s youngest son derived more comfort from the Masons than from his father’s religion, and when he was dying of cancer, he asked for the Masonic emblem, a sprig of acacia, to be carved on his tombstone. ‘Just the same, if I’d been a man, I would have said Kaddish for him,’ Poussy said.

  After waiting in Paris for six months for a passage to Australia, we sailed from Marseilles on a scorching August day in 1948 with six hundred other refugees. On humid nights when the air in the cabin was like pea soup, we all slept on deck, on khaki canvas deckchairs. The women tied their hair in scarves, fanned themselves, hitched up their skirts, and sat with their legs wide apart to capture each tentative breeze. Around us hung the viscious smell of tar and sump oil, and the sharp smell of the sea as the ship rolled up and down on dark waves. Inside the ship, my nostrils recoiled at the mouldy, wood-rot odour of the slimy wooden slats of the communal washroom, the rank smell of too many bodies in one airless cabin, and the sour odour of the dining room where everything was cooked in tomato paste and served with salty pickled vegetables.

  The SS Derna was a rusting, clapped-out vessel whose Panamanian flag concealed a life history as tumultuous as that of many of its passengers. Built in 1915 for the German-owned East Africa Line to carry cargo and nine passengers, it was seized by the Allies after World War I and given to France in war reparations. After the fall of France, the United States Shipping Administration took it over as a transport ship. When Greek shipping magnate Livanos bought it in 1948, he had it registered in Panama, changed its name, and converted it to carry the maximum number of passengers in minimal comfort.

  The Derna was a perfect example of the sailors’ adage that changing a ship’s name brings bad luck. Only two days after leaving Marseilles, the chef dropped dead and we had to return to port. That was only the beginning of the misfortunes which dogged this vessel. We hadn’t long put out to sea when the refrigeration broke down, all the meat rotted, and we watched incredulously as the crew jettisoned putrid carcasses overboard. For most of the voyage we lived on tomato soup, macaroni and pickled vegetables.

  In the course of the voyage which lasted eleven weeks, boilers broke down, water became scarce, and to make matters worse, at Aden, the locals filled the tanks with brackish water. Then one of the engines caught fire. Although we were at sea, they couldn’t put out the flames because it turned out that the fire hoses had holes in them, so the fire raged unchecked. The captain’s pleas for assistance went unheeded by other boats, and for a time it looked as though we’d have to don life jackets and jump overboard, but eventually the fire burnt itself out. Finally, the navigation equipment failed, and we drifted off course, adding days to an already interminable journey. Many of the passengers muttered that they’d survived the war only to die on this acursed ship.

  My mother hated every moment of that voyage, and if she’d known that it was going to take almost three months, I doubt whether she would have walked up the gangplank on that August day. For anyone who loathed ships as much as she did, this overcrowded vessel was purgatory. My mother and I shared a stuffy cabin with a single porthole, with ten other women. The bathing facilities were primitive, most toilets had no doors, and the shortage of water made washing clothes difficult. From the moment my mother boarded the Derna’s scuffed decks, leaned over its scabrous rails and felt the rolling sensation of the ship, her stomach knotted itself into a tight fist. She felt seasick most of the time, couldn’t eat the food, and her creamy complexion sallowed in revolt.

  To add to her misery, she felt neglected. My father, who didn’t feel seasick and wasn’t bothered by the food, spent most of his days playing bridge or studying English grammar and didn’t seem concerned that she was unwell and unhappy. I suppose they were both reacting in their own way to what they’d been through. She needed care and attention while he was desperate for some respite from anxiety and responsibility. For him, this voyage provided a relaxing lull between the harrowing past and the uncertain future; for her it was a miserable existence, aggravated by what she perceived as his selfishness.

  The disasters of the Derna together with the tensions of the passengers created a combustible atmosphere. The ship was a floating microcosm of refugees from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Hungary, Estonia and France. The current Australian immigration policy, in response to anti-Semitic attitudes voiced by some politicians and journalists, restricted the percentage of Jewish immigrants on any one ship to twenty-five per cent, and the Derna carried an explosive ethnic mix of Jewish survivors who had lost their entire families, as well as some Nazi sympathisers. In these overcrowded, tense conditions, tempers flared and fights broke out. Some of the Baltic passengers accused some of the Jewish teenagers of spreading communism. One of the Ukrainians on board boasted that he’d killed Jews during the war. One moonless night, he vanished and was never seen again.

  In spite of all the turmoil, there were shipboard romances, illicit liaisons and bitter-sweet love affairs. Planted on their deck chairs, self-righteous matrons gossiped about the immoral single women who were seen emerging from the officers’ cabins. My mother spent most of her time chatting with other Polish refugees, mostly with Sophie Frant who, with her husband Dr Herman Frant, became my parents’ lifelong friends. The Frants had been appointed chaperones to the sixty-one Jewish orphans on board. They had survived by jumping out of the train taking them to Treblinka, while their daughter Christine owed her life to a courageous Catholic woman called Helcia who took her out of the Warsaw Ghetto and pretended to be her mother. For the next few years, Christine wore sunglasses whenever she went out, even to school, claiming that a rare eye condition made it necessary to protect them from the light. Their real purpose was to conceal her suspiciously dark eyes.

  Everyone on board had an epic story to tell. My mother admired a young woman called Topka, who looked after her brood of younger sisters like a mother hen. Before their parents had been killed by the Germans, Topka had promised their mother that she would always take care of the others. She kept her word, and even after she got married in Australia, she decided not to have children of her own so that she could devote her life to her sisters.

  Together with Mrs Frant, my mother helped a young couple look after their baby girl. Only teenagers themselves, Sam and Esther Fiszman had been orphaned during the Holocaust. At the age of twelve, Esther had been deported to Auschwitz where her mother was killed. If it hadn’t been for an older woman who had taken care of her, she wouldn’t have survived, but after liberation, they were separated and Esther despaired of ever seeing her guardian angel again. Out on deck one day she looked up and couldn’t believe her eyes. It was the woman who had saved her life. Esth
er’s hot-headed young husband Sam had smuggled arms into the Warsaw Ghetto and had crawled out through the sewers just before it was burnt to the ground. Esther was so violently seasick that she spent most of the voyage in sick bay, and my mother and Mrs Frant helped Sam find food for little Maria.

  As for me, there was little to relieve the monotony of the voyage. I spent most of my time on board reading, knitting clothes for my doll or playing with the other children. One night my mother woke me up and took me out on deck where all the passengers were craning over the rails, staring at something burning in the distance. Lifting me up so that I’d have a better view, my father said: ‘This is something you only get to see once in a lifetime.’ Mt Etna was erupting and the terrifying red-hot lava flowed down its slopes like a river of blood.

  In eleven weeks, there were only three ports of call. At Port Said, the Jewish passengers weren’t allowed to disembark because the Arabs had declared war on the newly created state of Israel, and all Jews were regarded as enemies. At Aden we were beseiged by a flotilla of bobbing wooden boats whose vendors loaded up hands of bananas and dozens of coconuts into buckets which were pulled up on board. It was the first time any of us had visited the Orient or seen such a profusion of tropical fruit or exotic palm trees which grew on the shore. My father called me over to see men with white turbans and mahogany skin climbing up the ropes, and pointed to their sinewy thighs, no wider than his arm. It distressed him that human beings had to work so hard for so little. Although the crew instructed the passengers not to give them anything to eat, my father, along with many others, surreptitiously dropped food into their baskets.