The paediatrician who assured her that there was nothing wrong with the baby suggested putting her on the bottle, while her friends urged her to continue breast-feeding. But no matter whose advice she took, Judy continued to scream. When she followed Dr Spock’s advice and let her cry, the baby became so overwrought that she developed hiccups and soon fell asleep, too exhausted to suck, until Bronia became distraught.
These days her condition would be diagnosed as post-natal depression, but in 1949 she thought she was an unnatural mother. ‘Luckily Heniek was a good father. He did everything for Judy: he wasn’t afraid to hold her and treated her like a human being, not like a piece of fragile porcelain,’ she says.
The man her family had thought so unsuitable that five minutes before the wedding ceremony her cousin whispered that she could still change her mind, has been by her side for fifty-four years. Bronia’s mother had hoped that her quiet, intellectual daughter would make a better match than this opinionated, uneducated man who dominated every conversation and would no doubt dominate her as well. But Bronia wasn’t swayed. With refreshing candour, she says, ‘He appealed to me sexually. I wanted to sleep with him. But I also felt that he was strong and resourceful and that we’d be all right together.’
Her instinct proved correct, although the contrast in their personalities is still noticeable. Heniek exudes a restless energy and expresses his opinions with absolute certainty, while she considers her words carefully and seems introspective and depressed. Although Heniek is close to eighty, in his French navy sweater and smartly co-ordinated check shirt, I detect the snappy dresser who made Bronia’s heart beat faster back in 1946.
Like most of the Polish-Jewish women of her generation, Bronia looks after her appearance and keeps her blonde hair well-groomed by regular visits to the hairdresser. When she has stopped bustling around preparing lunch and plying me with rye bread, cheese, cake and coffee, she hunches over in her chair and a preoccupied look appears on her face as she tells me about something that has made her feel guilty for over forty years.
‘Not long after we arrived in Melbourne, I got a letter from the German consulate,’ she begins. They had traced her because Captain Friedrich Fischer, who was the commandant of the Luftwaffe camp where she had been a forced labourer, had asked for references about his character and behaviour during the war.
Bronia heaves a deep sigh. ‘I’ve always felt guilty about him because he was an angel. Really and truly. One day, when some SS men arrived at the camp and accused him of fraternising with the prisoners, he came out with a whip, but under his breath he kept warning us, “Girls, I have to look as if I’m hitting someone, because they’re watching me, so get away from me!”
‘So when that letter came, I wanted to write and tell them how good he was, that he saved our lives, but,’ she gives Heniek a reproachful glance, ‘my dear husband stopped me.’
Heniek is waving his arms impatiently in the air. ‘All I said was, you can’t say he was a good man. All you could say was that he did this and this while you were there. Because I saw how they changed depending on circumstances.’ He leans forward, jabbing the air with his forefinger as he speaks. ‘At the end of the Death March, we got to a camp at Mildorf, near Dachau. We got a pillow for our head and a blanket. There were showers. And soap. Let me tell you, soap we didn’t see in years. Two plates of soup a day, bread, even a piece of cheese they gave us. No work. I couldn’t understand what was going on. The other inmates said that the commandant had changed because the Germans knew they’d lost the war and they wanted us to tell the Allies how good they were.’
Wound up now, he launches into another story. ‘In the next place they transported me to, I didn’t have a spoon, so I started eating with my hands like an animal. Suddenly’—he pronounces it ‘suddently’—‘the commandant appeared, a tall good-looking guy in a light suit, so I sprang to my feet—we all feared commandants like the devil—but in a kind voice he told me to sit down. Then he asked, “Why hasn’t this man got a spoon?” and ordered someone to bring me one. I thought I was dreaming. One of the inmates said that only a few months ago this same commandant would have beaten me to a pulp for no reason, but all of a sudden he was acting human to save his skin.’
Turning to his wife to make his point, Heniek adds, ‘So all you could say was that from this date to this date he was good to you, but what happened before or after, how could you know?’
Bronia sounds weary. ‘Heniek, Captain Fischer was good to me all the time I worked there. I wanted to write that in the letter to the consul but I was talked out of it. Later I heard that his wife divorced him, and I have that on my conscience.’
Heniek shrugs. ‘Out of all those war criminals, only a small percentage ever got punished, so if your guy did nothing wrong, believe me, nothing happened to him.’ But sins of omission weigh heavily on the heart, and no rationalisation that her husband offers can relieve Bronia’s sense of guilt.
In 1956, with the compensation they received from Germany for their losses and years of suffering in concentration and forced labour camps, they bought a milk bar like so many migrants looking for a lucrative business. They worked together and returned home late at night. Heniek sits forward, eyes alight with eagerness to tell a story.
‘One night we just came in when a neighbour came over with a tray of food—some soup, two big steaks, bread and a bottle of beer—and said, “You both work so hard and you’ve got two small children to look after, you have to eat properly!”’
Bronia is nodding her blonde head. ‘I fell in love with Australian people,’ she says. ‘When we moved into our first flat, one room needed painting. We’d never done any painting before but Heniek said we can do it ourselves, it can’t be such a big job. He bought pale green, my favourite colour, and worked on it all weekend, but he got paint on the window panes and it took us a whole day to scrape it off. Next day there was a knock on the door and a woman was standing there with a jar. “Sorry to come uninvited, but I can see you’ve been spending all your time on that window. Use this instead. ” She had brought us some paint remover!’
‘Wherever we lived, our neighbours were always good people, salt of the earth, and treated us like family,’ Bronia says.
Heniek is nodding. ‘Our neighbour on the other side was a panelbeater. One day when we were going away for a holiday, the car wouldn’t start. I asked our neighbour to have a look. “Henry, don’t worry about a thing, I’ll fix it, ” he said. A few minutes later he comes out with a car part, works on it for half an hour and says, “It’s fixed, you can go. ” When we got back I found out he took the part out of his own car without telling us, and wouldn’t even let me pay for it. “No worries, Henry! We’ll drink a beer together, ” he said.
‘Whenever we go on holidays, we always bring something back for our neighbours and they do the same for us. Our neighbour on one side is a scientist, but if he sees me climbing a ladder he shouts for me to get down and says he’ll do the job for me!’
Bronia is looking pensive. ‘I had another bout of depression when I put my mother in a nursing home when she was eighty-nine. She died three years later. Mother came out with us on the Derna. She helped me to look after Judy and helped us financially. I felt terrible, as if I was putting her away because she was useless. My conscience was eating me up.’
It’s a heartache I understand only too well. My mother died in 1993 and even now I can hardly bear to think about her last months in a nursing home, her independent spirit destroyed by Parkinson’s disease. I wonder whether one ever gets over the loss of a loving mother.
Bronia is continuing her story. ‘When I went to a psychiatrist he said, “Don’t think about these things any more. Try to forget them. ” Well, forget them I can’t, but I try not to talk about them. I’ve always reproached myself that I did the wrong thing with my mother. Just as I did the wrong thing with Captain Fischer.’
43
As I’m driving in the soft Sydney rain to meet Morris Shel
l, I remember that my father mentioned him once many years ago. I can still hear his admiring tone as he told me that Morris Skorupa, our ship-mate on the Derna, had cleverly anglicised his Polish surname simply by translating it into Shell. As for Morris’s wife Ruth, she had been friends with my Aunty Mania when they both worked at French Millinery in Bondi Junction, fashioning the veiled and flowered hats that were so popular in the late 1940s.
Morris is waiting for me in the foyer of the apartment block and his neatly trimmed white beard brushes softly against my face as he kisses my cheek. The young man who lost everything during the Holocaust has recently moved into a palatial apartment with marble floors the colour of whipped cream, a terrace the size of a theatre foyer and a harbour view that makes me catch my breath. When I say how happy he must be to have moved here, Morris shrugs. ‘I didn’t exactly live in a dump before. We moved here because Ruth has trouble with her knees and can’t walk up stairs.’
His grey eyebrows bristle like a thick upswept brush above piercing blue eyes that are unusually bright and clear for a man close to eighty. With his white hair and beard, he looks as though he has spent his days behind a lectern, discussing philosophy, but this is a man whose knowledge comes from life, not books. The young man with the round face and brushed-back light brown hair who sailed on the Derna has become more distinguished-looking with age, but age and affluence have not brought serenity. Beneath his affable manner runs a vein of sadness. This is the man who built railway junctions without machinery, levelled potato fields with his bare hands, and survived labour camps, death camps and death marches only to discover when it was all over that there was no one left to go home to.
‘We have everything but we have nothing,’ Ruth tells me, resting her concerned gaze on her husband. ‘Morris is obsessed with the past. We’ve just renovated our apartment but instead of enjoying it, he just looks around and says, “What’s the good of it when my family aren’t here to see it?” He still has nightmares and can’t stop going over the past.’
The three of us are sitting around the table in their gleaming kitchen and while Ruth bustles around making herbal tea in floral porcelain cups, Morris opens his photo album. ‘I was the youngest of nine children but not one of my brothers and sisters survived,’ he says. In one photograph, two beautiful young girls with raven tresses and radiant faces look so vibrant that I can almost hear their laughter. ‘They were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka,’ he says flatly. A shiver flickers down my spine as my imagination supplies the details he omits.
Turning the page, he points to a young man with a serious expression. ‘That’s my brother Abram. He had a chance of surviving but didn’t take it,’ he says. ‘At Auschwitz, Dr Mengele ordered him to go to the right because he looked strong enough to work, but told his fourteen-year-old son to go to the left. So instead of staying in the group that had a chance of surviving, Abram went with his son. He couldn’t let him go to the gas chamber alone.’
This album is all that remains of his large family, but as he continues to turn the pages to show me other relatives, the photos suddenly seem blurred. I can’t stop thinking about his lovely sisters, about his brother who chose to die with his son, and about the executioners who did these things and then went home to play with their own children. Perhaps we overestimate the power of the conscience and underestimate the callousness with which the morally fragile wield brutal power when given permission to do so.
Morris has been studying me across the table. ‘I remember you from the ship,’ he says. I look up expectantly but from his description it sounds as though he has confused me with someone else. It’s not surprising. A solitary child who sat knitting in a corner like a Mademoiselle Defarge is not likely to stay in anyone’s memory after fifty years.
Just the same, I feel disappointed. But Morris does remember the little French girl who was crowned Miss Derna when we crossed the equator, and shows me a photograph of her with a paper crown on her head.
He met Ruth in Germany after the war, through her brother who had been interned in some of the camps with him. ‘If Morris hadn’t shared his food with my brother, he wouldn’t have survived,’ Ruth says, but Morris waves an impatient hand in her direction.
‘Don’t turn me into a hero,’ he barks and changes the subject. When the war ended and he settled in a small Bavarian town, the locals couldn’t do enough for him and the Americans put him in charge of a store in the heart of town. But although he did well financially, he found the atmosphere poisonous. Dazed and angry after all he had gone through, he regarded every German he met as a murderer. When Ruth sent him a landing permit for Australia, he took the opportunity to join her and start afresh.
As soon as the train from Melbourne ground to a halt at Central station in November 1948, Ruth was already running towards him. But the joy of being together again didn’t diminish his shock when he saw the room she had rented for thirty-five shillings a week in a boarding house with an outside toilet. He couldn’t understand how such a young country could have such decrepit old houses. Corridors covered with torn lino led to small dark rooms where the smell of bacon and lamb fat soaked into mildewed wallpaper and lingered in the grimy corners where cockroaches scuttled.
Ruth tried to mollify him. The boarding house was only temporary, they would soon save up and move into a flat. There was a flat she liked in Bondi Junction, but the landlord had demanded too much key money. Morris listened intently and said with the fiercely determined look she came to know so well, ‘One day I’ll buy that whole block of flats for you.’
She laughed indulgently at the absurdity of it. It was typical of Morris to talk about buying property when he had just arrived and had no idea how he was even going to earn a living. As far as she was concerned, as long as they were together she could manage anywhere.
‘But I did buy it, about four years later,’ says Morris with a triumphant nod. ‘The whole block. It was the first property I bought in Australia.’
Their miserable living conditions added to his difficulty in adjusting to life in Australia. Compared to the warmth of the Jewish community in Perth, he found Sydney cold and unfriendly. He felt insulted by the insinuations they made and the questions they asked. Perhaps they were just expressing interest in his wartime experiences, but he sensed unspoken accusations behind their words.
‘When they asked me, “How did you survive?” what I heard was, “How come YOU survived when so many didn’t?”’ To the lone survivor of a large family, the question was loaded with innuendo and reproach.
When people questioned and assessed him, he felt belittled. In the bestial world he had been thrown into, there was no room for ambiguity. You belonged to the realm of the living or the dead, and clung to the slippery precipice of life by your fingernails. You lived only from moment to moment and considered it a miracle to be alive at the end of the day. More insulting than their lack of understanding was the pity he detected in their eyes. How dared they regard him as a victim when he had survived by pitting his will against a system aimed at destroying him? ‘Lagermenschen, camp people, some of them called us,’ he says, and his eyes flash with anger at the put-down.
But behind his abrasive manner, Morris was not as self-assured as he appeared. As so many young survivors discovered, the instincts that had enabled them to survive were now useless. People here were valued according to their level of education, but Morris had had no schooling to speak of. The camps had been his universities but graduation had not secured a degree. In a community where professional status counted, he didn’t even have a trade.
People appraised your background but his family were dead. He felt that he was being denigrated, and resented the fact that migrants who had arrived in Australia before the war regarded themselves as his superiors. One day he would show them that he was someone to be reckoned with. No matter how hard he had to work, he wouldn’t remain a nonentity. No one was ever going to look down on him again.
His first job, working at a l
oom in a textile factory at Annandale, didn’t offer much hope for the future. Travelling to work involved jumping onto one of those slow-moving trams that clanked from Bondi to Central railway and held up the traffic as they halted at every stop. From Central, he caught a train to the factory. The sun blazed down on the corrugated iron roof until the workroom felt like a sauna. While Morris worked with a wet towel around his neck to keep cool, he practised speaking English with his workmates. He had noticed that whenever he and Ruth spoke Polish while walking along the street or on the tram, Australians would glare or mutter, “Bloody reffos! Why don’t you bloody well learn to speak English?” The girls at work liked talking to this interesting foreign chap who managed to look neat and clean, even in the factory. When he got home, he pored over grammar books late into the night until he learned to speak fluent, grammatical English.
One year later, he went into business for himself. Having noticed that tailors were always sending out jackets and trousers to be pressed, he hit on the idea of providing an ironing service for the trade. He took a partner, bought four machines and a panel van, and operated from premises in Glebe Point Road where they paid their landlord, the Church of England, seventeen shillings and sixpence in rent. To transform the shop into a factory, they bought a big boiler for the steam, cut out the floorboards and concreted the machines into the ground so the floor didn’t vibrate when they were ironing.
‘The business was a gold mine from the minute I started,’ he recalls. ‘At a time when men were lucky to earn ten pounds a week, I was earning 150 pounds. We were so inundated with work that we couldn’t keep up and had to allocate pressing quotas.’ He would pick up the suits and coats in the morning and deliver them that evening, running up and down hundreds of stairs each day because, due to the coal strikes and frequent blackouts, the lifts often didn’t work.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 49
