The Penance Room

by Carol Coffey

  “There were hundreds of prisoners at the hospital there so it was easy to blend in and go unnoticed but the shame of not owning up to who I really was remained with me. When they asked, I gave my name as Wilfred Richter which was my uncle’s name and when I was well enough I returned to Berlin.”

  “You are not Wilfred Richter?” my father asks, amazed.

  “No,” Wilfred responds.

  “You are not even Wilfred?”

  “No,” he answers, looking at the ground. “I am sorry to have lied to you.”

  He takes a deep breath and resumes his story.

  “When I returned to my street, even in the distance I could see that my house had been bombed. There was no roof on one side and upstairs the wall facing out onto the street was just rubble. I remember standing looking at it from a distance and wondering what exactly I had expected to find. Berlin had been heavily bombed and everywhere there were houses without roofs or walls. And yet with all this chaos there were children playing on the streets, tiny children for whom this sight would now be normal. I walked slowly towards my house which was about halfway down the curved street. Our red front door lay on its side and water was pouring from a drain onto the street. I stepped over the water and called out but there was no answer.

  “In the hallway, Uncle Wilfred’s wheelchair lay on its side but he was not there. I remember my heart beating faster. Wilfred could not walk at all so he could not leave without this chair but I willed my mind to ignore this and to believe that perhaps he was injured and at a hospital. Yes, I thought, an ambulance took him away and he is injured simply and I will go and collect him there. I went to my father’s study and plans for new buildings were thrown around the floor, all burned or damaged by smoke, my father’s precious work, now useless. I walked to the kitchen hoping someone would be there, waiting for me. My mother’s kitchen table was still set with plates so I realised that they left in a hurry. I moved towards the stairs and stupidly called out even though there was hardly any roof left above the bedrooms so who could be up there? I walked around the debris on the floors and called out again, expecting them to be hiding. I sat for a while amongst the rubble and reasoned that they had fled when a bomb hit the house and that they were in a safe place. As I sat there with my head in my hands, I tried to think of all the places they might go until I heard a voice above me.

  “‘Carl?’

  “I looked up to find Mr Esaias, my father’s solicitor who was Jewish, standing over me. He looked older and his beard was now white. He put his hand out to help me up and I reached for it but in that moment, I pulled back and curled my arms about me. I could not take his hand. I . . . couldn’t. I had an urge to cry but I bit inside my cheek and only when it hurt could I speak.

  “‘You’re alive?’ I said.

  “‘Yes, because of your father,’ he replied.

  “I remember opening my eyes wide and focusing on him. He offered his hand again and I took it. For a brief while I was vulnerable. I had nowhere else to go. He led me down the street towards his house but I stopped at the door and refused to enter. I thought to myself, please have some respect and don’t accept his kindness. Even if my father had saved his life, I didn’t deserve any repayment. He understood and gave me a look that said he knew where I had been, that he knew what I was but yet he was offering his hand to me.

  “He said, ‘For your father, please take shelter in my home,’ and I began to cry – right there on the street. I just cried.

  “He brought me in and led me to a chair. An old woman and a young boy sat in the room and watched me.

  “‘Homeless also with no family left,’ Mr Esaias said sadly to explain who they were.

  “A cup of hot soup and hard bread was put in front of me. As I drank and ate quickly I looked around the sparse room that had once been well furnished. I noticed Mr Esaias’s clothes were worn and tattered.

  “‘I lost everything I owned in the war,” he said quietly “but nothing more valuable than my family.’

  “The shame I felt sitting at their table and eating the little they had was much worse than the shame I felt as a soldier. It is difficult to explain. You cannot perhaps understand. When I finished eating, Mr Esaias told me that my father had hidden him and some of his family in our house and at his office and that because of that, six of his family survived. I asked about his son Ely who I remembered playing with when we were young and our fathers were discussing business. Mr Esaias shook his head and the grief in his face cut into me. Although I felt ashamed, I asked him about my family. Mr Esaias said my father had died two years previously trying to save people who were injured in the street, even though his own house was on fire. He said that he and his son Abram buried him in the darkness. Then he told me that on the day the house was bombed, my father sent my mother and sister to stay with relatives in the country. Mr Esaias never saw them again.

  “I remember swallowing some more hot soup quickly. ‘They could be safe,’ I said but he shook his head. He said he didn’t think they could ever have got out of Berlin.

  “When I asked about Uncle Wilfred, he said that he was in the house when the bomb hit and that he was taken to hospital. My father was dead so a friend went to the hospital to enquire about him but they said he was not there. Mr Esaias knew what they were doing to disabled people and in normal circumstances he would have made enquiries as my father’s legal counsel but, as a Jew, he could not be seen. He arranged for another lawyer to go to the hospital but they insisted that they had never heard of Wilfred Richter.

  “‘I think we can also guess what became of your uncle,’ Mr Esaias said.

  “I remember standing up and walking towards the door. He stood in my way and asked where I was going.

  “‘To the hospital,’ I said but he stopped me.

  “‘You’ll be taken. It is not safe,’ he said to me and sat me gently down.

  I asked him if he knew where I had been. He nodded and looked away from me. I could see an awful expression on his face and knew that helping me was a struggle for him. He asked me to stay with them. He . . .”

  Wilfred’s chin trembles as he quickly wipes unwelcome tears from his eyes.

  “He offered me shelter. In his home. Even though he knew what I was and what I had stood for, he offered me shelter. I begged him to leave me alone. I told him that there was nothing for me now. I left and Mr Esaias followed me onto the street. ‘Come back, Carl!’ he shouted but I kept walking back to my house. For nine days I slept at my house among the debris. I found Uncle Wilfred’s camera and slept on the floor of my father’s study with it in my hands. Each day food would be left just inside the door. For the first couple of days, Mr Esaias would call out to me but I would not answer. Seeing what I had seen, I could not now bear kindness from a Jew and later I found it hard to accept kindness from anyone. When I was sure he was gone I would make my way to the front of the house and eat the food quickly.

  “Over the next few days I ventured outside and took photos of war, photos of burnt-out crumbling buildings and old people lifting heavy bags that their dead children should have been carrying for them. I found some clothes in a wardrobe at the back of the house belonging to Uncle Wilfred. My own clothes were in rags so I started to wear his. One day while in my father’s study, I remembered his safe. He kept it under the floorboards beneath his desk. I found the key and when I opened it I saw all of my mother’s jewellery inside. There was also some money that my father kept hidden for emergencies, advice I remembered Mr Esaias giving him one evening when I was younger. Under the cash was my father and Uncle Wilfred’s passports. I remember that they only used them once when they travelled by train to Prague to see a musician friend of my father’s in concert. They didn’t need passports I am sure but my mother was worried and insisted they take proper identification. They were only gone for three nights and my mother fretted the whole time. Uncle Wilfred talked about that trip for years. I think it was the first time he had seen a live orchestra. The wh
eelchair held him back from so many opportunities.

  “It was when I was looking at his passport that the idea came to me. I was standing over my mother’s sideboard which had a large mirror on top of it. A bird flew past the window and I looked up quickly, nervous of the sudden movement. I saw my reflection in the mirror, with Uncle’s shirt on and I looked just like him. I know it will seem silly but I felt Uncle Wilfred had sent that bird past at that exact moment to show me what to do. In the days I had been in that house I never heard a single bird so I was convinced he was telling me to be his wings, to be his legs and to find my mother and sister. I knew I could not travel as myself. It would be too risky to do so but I could travel as Wilfred Richter and it didn’t feel shameful to do this even though I knew it should. That night I left half of my mother’s jewellery and some of the cash at Mr Esaias’s door. I knocked gently and was halfway up his street by the time he cautiously opened his door. He stood on the street and I turned. I remember that in the light from his hall I could see him nodding at me. He knew that he would never see me again and that the money and gold was a peace offering, a way of trying to ease my conscience, a way of saying this might help us both to start new lives. The only things I took with me were Uncle’s violin, his camera and some of the beautiful photographs that he had taken.

  “My father was from Berlin but my mother was born in the countryside of Vogelsberg where she still had cousins. They were the only relatives I could think of so I began to walk the entire journey to their farm. I had only been there once as a boy and I remembered my father joking that my mother had to travel such a long way to Berlin for true love. Most nights I walked and bought my food quickly in markets along the way. Sometimes I ate only what I could find on the land and sometimes strangers would offer me a lift or shelter and food until I was rested and able to move on and all the time I took photos of my surroundings, photos of beautiful countryside and kind faces and beautiful flowers, the photos that Uncle Wilfred could have taken if he’d had use of his legs, if he’d lived. Often I wondered if that day when he asked me not to forget him, he knew this was all coming and if he was asking me to look for beauty when all you can see is despair. A few asked me who I was and where I was going and I was relieved on those occasions about how good a liar I had become and how easily the name Wilfred Richter rolled off my snake tongue.

  “I lost count of the days but I think I travelled for over three weeks until I found Ida’s home. She was living alone with her three teenage daughters, waiting for her husband Otto to return from the war. At first she thought I was there to give her bad news but she soon realised that I had expected to find my mother and sister there. Ida had not seen or heard from my mother and didn’t even know that she had left Berlin for Vogelsberg more than two years before. So now I knew for sure that they never made it but still I believed that they were safe somewhere. I just had to keep going until I found them. When I was at Ida’s home I began to dream that I would never sleep properly again until I found out where they were and brought them to safety – and this came true.

  “In some ways it was nice to be with Ida. She looked a lot like my mother and I found some peace there but at night when her daughters slept she would talk about the Jews as if she was a party member and I could not stand her naïvety, just as my father could not stand it when I was a fool. Ida said that if her husband never came home she would blame all Jews for all eternity. I tried to tell her that the Jews had nothing to do with the war but that it was started by us by invading Poland but she didn’t believe this of course. She believed the story that Poland attacked first. Like me, she had her brain made to believe these things from propaganda. Ida said that if there were no Jews there would be no war and her husband would not be missing in Poland. After two weeks the atmosphere between us was not good so I left. Ida said that mother and she had another cousin in Argentina and that she heard many Germans were going there to avoid Soviet persecution.”

  Wilfred falls silent.

  “So you went to South America?” my father prompts.

  Wilfred nods.

  “When I arrived in Genoa in Italy, I wrote to this cousin. From Genoa, it was easy to travel to Argentina from the port of La Spezia. On my ship, there were members of the Nazi party, people of importance that were avoiding trial. I kept to myself and with my limp people took me for a wounded soldier looking for a new life. It didn’t take people long to know that I didn’t want to answer questions and soon no one tried to sit at my table for meals. I didn’t want to lie any more than I had to. When I arrived in Buenos Aires, my mother’s cousin Alvin came to meet me even though he lived a long way away so I found out that it was a wasted journey the same day that I got off that ship. My mother had not arrived there and he had never had any contact with her. Alvin had lived in South America since before my parents were married and he had not seen my mother since she was a little girl. He was not at all racist and was married to a beautiful Argentinian woman named Estella. She was an artist as was her father. Each day I went out and took more photographs and she brought me to a friend to learn how to develop them. I remember sitting in my room looking at photos of my ruined house, of the countryside of Vogelsberg and of my cousin’s daughters and it seemed clear to me that my photos represented each stage of my search for my family. Estella encouraged me to take photographs and when I began to run out of money, she organised an exhibition although I stayed far behind the scenes as she and her father sold my photographs.

  After a couple of months there I had enough money to move on. Alvin knew someone who could get me a new passport so I could get to New York but I declined. I had become used to the name Wilfred and didn’t want to change it. Deep down I knew Alvin didn’t agree with my membership of the Nazi party but he never once asked me about the war, which I was grateful for. While Nazis were welcome and protected in South America, this was not the case in the US. I spent four years in New York and kept to myself. I sold my photographs directly to newspapers and magazines. Many of them paid me by cheque in the mail so never even met me. For those that did ask about my past, I told them that I was against Hitler’s regime and had been imprisoned until freed by the Soviets in 1945, some of which was true. Once, an editor wanted to print a story, to say that I was a hero. The day he telephoned me I left my apartment, closed my bank account and took a bus to Ontario. Even with a new name, I felt someone would recognise my face, that somewhere out there were survivors from Sachsenhausen. It was not imprisonment I feared or even death, but that if I was captured I would never find my mother and sister, that I would never be able to put things right for my family.”

  He pauses again.

  “Why did you leave Canada for Australia?” my father asks.

  “It was a chance meeting on a street corner in Toronto. I was coming out of a supermarket near where I lived and I heard a voice shout ‘Carl! Carl Erlichmann!’ I froze on the spot. The accent was German and I thought this is it. I am found. I turned and almost put my hands in the air – then I saw Bert Fleischer, a man I grew up with and whom I had fought alongside in Poland standing on the street corner. I could smell drink off of him even though it was only lunch-time. He looked a little dirty and I found out that he was living only two blocks from my apartment. I asked how he managed to get free and he said “Ssh! This is a secret. I could ask the same of you but I won’t!” so I never found out how he escaped. Bert brought me to his apartment. He was a night worker in a meat factory and was not married so he had little else to do during the day except have some beers. We talked for a few hours and I was actually pleased to see him. It was nice to have someone to speak in Deutsch to. I remembered that he didn’t want to fight in the war. When I was about three hours at his place he said that he heard that my family had escaped to Australia. I dropped my drink – I was so happy! I asked him ‘Where? Where are they?’ Bert told me that he had contact with his mother who was still alive in Berlin and she said Mrs Erlichmann had made it to relatives in Perth with her daughter.
I told him we had no relatives in Perth but he said, yes, yes, he was sure of it.”

  “So you came to Australia?”

  “Yes, fourteen years ago now and they were not here. I found four families in Perth by the name Richter which was of course my mother’s maiden name and none of them were any relation to my mother. More cautiously I looked for Erlichmanns but again, I didn’t find anyone related to my family. I worked again selling my photographs and when I could I searched telephone books and local records but I never found them. In this country, I sometimes won prizes for my work from people who had no idea who I was. Each place I came to work, I looked again for Richters or Erlichmanns and then of course, I moved on to take more photos for the magazine. Then, I came to Sydney and I became ill. My . . . I had a nervous complaint.”