The Watermill

by Arnold Zable

  The Kazet Theatre expanded its program. Feder added another two shows to its repertoire: the comedy, ‘Zvei Hundert Toisent, der Groiser Gevins’, Two Hundred Thousand, the Big Win, written by the most-loved of Yiddish writers Sholem Aleichem, and ‘Der Farkishefter Schneider’, The Bewitched Tailor, adapted by Feder from a Sholem Aleichem story.

  The two plays were interwoven with popular pre-war songs and folk melodies. The scripts and sets appealed to audiences yearning for familiarity. Whereas the cabarets confronted the reality, the plays restored, for a moment, a sense of what once was. There is a Chagall-like magic in the backdrops of shtetl cottages, and a touch of modernity in the expressionist sets and costumes.

  The troupe widened its reach, playing to patients in the camp hospital and at community events, including the opening of the Bergen-Belsen folk university. In the summer of 1947, they toured displaced persons camps in the British zone: BadHarzberg, Braunschweig and Hanover.

  They were a band of troubadours on the road. Wherever they appeared, they were greeted by survivors who had recently emerged from their harrowing experiences. Whenever a scene was enacted, a tremor passed through the audience. This was a theatre of the unmasked. The performers’ faces were naked in their expressions of grief, and enraged when depicting their tormentors.

  In June 1947, the ensemble embarked on a tour of Belgium and France. The tour ended in Paris. Plans to tour London, New York, Buenos Aires and Palestine were never realised. The members of the troupe could not sustain the intensity. They wanted to move on and regain a sense of normalcy. In August 1947, the Kazet Theatre was disbanded, despite Sami Feder’s efforts to keep it going.

  Sonia and Sami settled in Paris. Sonia remained absorbed in theatre. She performed with the Parisian Yiddish Art Theatre. She studied humanities at the Sorbonne and moved in progressive circles. In later years, she spoke of her friendships with Edith Piaf and Jean-Paul Sartre. It was one of her recurring stories, a rare display of pride and self-assertion. Beyond these brief mentions, concerning her life in Paris she said little.

  In 1948, Sonia Boszkowska and composer-musician Henekh Kon toured a concert of Yiddish songs in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany. Henekh was a force in pre-war Yiddish cabaret and had worked with Sonia’s mentor, Moshe Broderson. Henekh had fled his native Lodz and spent the war years in New York.

  He met Sonia, in rehearsal, when he was commissioned to compose music for the Paris Yiddish Art Theatre. He was taken by her performance skills. He described her voice as a beautiful mezzo-soprano. He praised her instinctive sense of rhythm and the clarity of her tone. He composed songs for Sonia and accompanied her in acclaimed recitals in Paris.

  Their first concert in Germany was in Bergen-Belsen. The last of the inmates were still waiting for visas elsewhere. Sonia was reunited with friends with whom she had shared the journey from terror to liberation. They embraced and wept and rejoiced in each other’s presence. She was greeted with standing ovations and was mobbed by the audience.

  While in Munich, Sonia and Henekh were invited to perform in displaced persons camps throughout Germany. After a concert for patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium, the audience poured out of the hall chanting: ‘Bravo, Sonia! Bravo, Sonia!’ People surrounded her car and pelted it with flowers.

  As the car made its way from the sanatorium, Sonia sat lost in thought. The road to Munich wound through a valley, and the car was dwarfed by soaring peaks; the sun sank behind the mountains. The performance was over, replaced by a resonant silence.

  In 1962 Sami and Sonia emigrated to Israel. The couple were farewelled in Paris at a banquet in Sami’s honour. Journalists, performers and writers sang his praises. Their sojourn in Israel did not last long. The couple separated. Sami stayed in Israel. Sonia moved to New York. The move was abrupt, and final. Sonia never spoke of the reasons for the separation. She deflected my questions about Sami: ‘He was once my husband. We worked in the Kazet Theatre. We performed together.’ And again, weeks before she died, the blunt facts: ‘Yes, I knew him. He was my husband.’ That was all.

  Her deflections were polite and detached. A dismissive wave of the hand, a sideways glance. And that gesture, the knuckles swiped over her closed eyes. It was Sonia’s version of the art of the closed fist, but for an entirely different purpose: to defuse memory.

  I listen to Sonia’s album, In Joy and Sorrow, as I drive around the city: Sonia’s Melbourne, the route she took on theatre outings with friends, from Joyce Street, left into St Kilda Street, past Ormond Park, and right into Glen Huntly Road. I stop at the traffic lights by the corner pub where, a decade earlier, I joined Sonia and Pinche for dinner on the eve of their move into aged care. There was no hint of regret that night. They could no longer live independently. That’s the way it is. Let’s get on with it.

  I turn left and head towards the city on Brighton Road. Darkness is falling. Sonia and her friends are buoyant in anticipation of a new play unfolding. Listening to the album, recorded in Tel Aviv in 1966, I am taken by the range of Sonia’s voice and the drama she brings to her performance. Backed by an orchestra, she sings folksongs, love songs and ballads of longing.

  There is one song that I play several times over as I approach the city’s arts precinct—the concert halls and galleries that Sonia was drawn to. The riverbank cafes and restaurants bustle with life and movement. Crowds walk across Princes Bridge, to and from Flinders Street Station. The scene is at odds with the song: ‘Einzam’. Solitary, written by troubadour Itzik Manger, a balladeer of the people but also a loner. The lyrics express the deepest of human cravings: to be understood. ‘No one knows what I say/ No one knows what I want…/ I put on my capulusz, and go on my way/ Where does one go late at night, in solitude, alone?’

  Einzam. Solitary. Perhaps this is what Sonia became after the loss of her loved ones. Certainly, this is what she is when she arrives in New York. She is forty years old, a single woman starting anew. She changes her name to Sonia Lizaron, combining the names of her mother and father, Liza and Aron, and will never again be Sonia Boszkowska.

  Sonia cannot survive on singing alone. She puts on her hat and walks the avenues of New York clothed in a new identity, putting the past behind her, each step a testament to how far she has come from the day of her liberation. She learns a new trade and becomes a programmer at a time when computers are the size of a room. She lives in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment. She descends the stairs each morning, and sets out for work. In the evenings, she performs concerts or goes out with friends.

  She is invited to sing in US cities and in Montreal and Toronto, and she embarks on tours: South America, Europe, Australia. Sonia is going solo, finding her own way. She becomes known in New York theatre circles and befriends writers and artists, including the author Isaac Bashevis Singer.

  She once told me that she had observed Singer writing in his Manhattan apartment. He would randomly draw out cards from a filing system—on each card was the outline of a character—and he would bring them together in the one short story. Sonia’s memories surfaced unexpectedly as passing comments, rearing up from and settling back to silence.

  Who is Sonia in her silence? On stage, she embodied her people’s suffering. But offstage she remains a mystery. Despite her efforts to forget the past, she is struggling with traumatic memories. She seeks ways to deal with the terror. This is something she was willing to speak of years later in the house in Joyce Street.

  Her search had begun in Paris when, for a time, she became a follower of the teachings of Georges Gurdjieff. She was drawn to his ‘system’: an interweaving of music and movement as a means of releasing past trauma. She continued her practice in New York.

  She travels to India and spends months in an ashram. She wakes pre-dawn and makes her way to the meditation hall. There are hundreds up at this hour, a community of seekers absorbed in their own thoughts, becalmed by the stillness of the hour. Sonia immerses herself in the daily routines. She is drawn to the scent of incense and
the rhythms of the chants. She works in the ashram gardens, takes walks to the nearby village. She cherishes her solitude.

  Meditation helps to temper the burden. She does not dwell on the past, and she no longer recounts her story, bar the odd reference and the recurring tales of Rossner, the man who saved her life, and of the bicycle trip through the camp to gather performers for the ensemble.

  A curtain is being drawn, the horror confined to remembrance evenings. The stage is the one space where Sonia allows herself to revisit the past, but once the concert is over, that is the end of it. Shut out by that gesture—her knuckles brushed over her closed eyes, putting an end to painful memory.

  Sometime in the 1980s, Sonia rekindled her friendship with Pinche Wiener. Sonia had first met the Wiener brothers, Pinche and Bono, in the Bund primary school she attended in Lodz. The brothers were daredevils back then. The tenement courtyards were their playgrounds. They made their way home from school over the rooftops to their third-floor apartment at 28 Szkolna Street. Their mother watched them anxiously as they clambered over the tiles towards the kitchen window.

  The Wiener brothers were children of the Bund, and their parents, Moishe and Royze, like Sonia’s, were party activists. The apartment was cluttered with books and pamphlets, and the nights were filled with friends engaged in fierce debate fuelled by vodka and whisky: a template many years later for gatherings at the Wiener brothers’ house in Joyce Street.

  Bono was born in Lodz in 1920. He changed his birthday to 5 May, the date of his liberation from Mauthausen slave labour camp in 1945. He was barely out of his teens when he became a leader of the Lodz ghetto resistance. He survived and became a builder of institutions and a co-founder of Melbourne’s Holocaust Centre. He strode through life and the streets of the city, tall and proud. He looked at everyone he met with a disarming directness.

  At community meetings and on memorial evenings he delivered fiery speeches. He founded a travel company so that he could visit his many pre-war friends in New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Montreal—the many corners of the globe where they had settled.

  In the Lodz ghetto, Bono was one of the keepers of a secret radio that was divided in two parts and hidden in two aluminium billies. Abram Goldberg took care of the other part. When the coast was clear, the parts were reconnected in the factory where both Abram and Bono worked. A foreman at the factory, Abram covered for Bono while he tuned in daily to the BBC and the Polish radio station Swit. Bono kept in contact with the Polish underground and government-in-exile, informing the inmates of the progress of the war, while lifting their morale with news of Allied victories.

  The pair risked torture and execution; seventeen radio operators were arrested and shot at various times in the Lodz ghetto. Bono carried a cyanide tablet in his jacket should he be tortured for the names of resistance fighters.

  Bono’s parents died in the Lodz ghetto: Royze from illness, Moishe from starvation. As a locksmith, Bono could have remained in Lodz after the ghetto was liquidated, but he chose to accompany his aunt Clara to Auschwitz. Clara perished there, and Bono resumed his resistance work, organising clandestine meetings in his barrack. When he received fifteen lashes for disobeying camp rules, he did not moan, but counted out each blow aloud, gaining the grudging admiration of the guard who whipped him.

  He once told me he survived Auschwitz because, no matter what the circumstances, even on freezing winter nights after a day of slave labour, he washed himself; he traded a portion of his meagre rations for a piece of soap to preserve his dignity.

  At his funeral, the mourners at his graveside farewelled him with ‘An Oak Has Fallen’, a song reserved for Bund heroes: An oak has fallen, a fully grown oak, with a head higher than the oaks around it. His portrait took pride of place on the dressing table in Sonia’s room in the basement of the aged-care home.

  Pinche was a different character. Restless. Nervous. Given to sudden outbursts of temper. After Poland was invaded, he served as a conscript in the Polish army. He endured the war years in the Soviet Union, partly as a slave labourer in the Arctic Circle, after a year spent in the city of Lvov as a captive of the Red Army, where he was locked in a cell with more than a hundred prisoners.

  A small barred window, high on the wall, provided a glimpse of the sky. A drum served as a toilet. He was taken late at night to be interrogated. Always the same questions, night after night, under a single light globe and the sound of a tap dripping. His interrogators looked bored, sometimes threatening. They wanted him to confess to being a spy.

  In later years, Pinche prided himself on his experiences: ‘I may be an ignoramus in many things,’ he said, ‘but in two things I am a professor: in mud and hunger. And you can add lice—on this subject alone I have a doctorate.’

  After the war, Pinche could not abide the sound of taps dripping. At the slightest hint, he changed the washers. He stocked many bars of soap and washed often, and he ate his meals with a feral vitality. He emerged from his ordeal embittered. ‘Aron,’ he would say to me. ‘We thought we would save the world, and we proved to be idiots.’

  The brothers were reunited in Lodz at war’s end. They vowed never to separate. They fled Poland in 1948 through the Tatras Mountains to Czechoslovakia, made their way to Paris, and emigrated to Australia in 1950. After a stint as railway labourers in Perth and Adelaide, they settled in Melbourne.

  Sonia began spending periods living with Pinche in the house on Joyce Street in the 1980s. She kept her apartment, dividing her time between Melbourne and New York, where she lived for six months each year. She climbed and descended the four flights of her New York walk-up until it was no longer physically possible. As always her decisions were calculated. She wound up her affairs in New York and moved in permanently with Pinche in Melbourne.

  It was in the Wiener brothers’ home that my friendship with Sonia flourished. After my son, Alexander, was born in 1993, Sonia and Pinche became his surrogate grandparents. Alexander was drawn to Sonia’s kindness and Pinche’s mocking way: ‘Your father is a no-good bastard,’ he would say. Then, turning to me, ‘Has he called you an idiot yet? Has he woken up to who you really are?’

  Sonia and Pinche marked Alexander’s height with a pencil on the kitchen door. It was a routine that concluded each visit. When Alexander developed a passion for Klezmer music and the clarinet, Sonia insisted on buying him a high-quality instrument. She came to the music store to choose it. She rang often, and when we did not answer, she left the same message: ‘Well, let’s hear some news.’

  In her final years, Sonia’s physical world narrowed, but she continued to move between Joyce Street and the Yiddish cultural centre, the Kadimah. She performed concerts for the elderly in the upstairs hall and on Wednesday mornings repaired and catalogued Yiddish books with volunteers in the ground-floor library. The books were dropped off by the sons and daughters of a passing generation. In this understated way, Sonia continued her commitment to cultural retrieval.

  After she shifted into the aged-care home, she maintained the same steady pace. At first with Pinche, to and from the dining hall for meals and concerts. And then, after his death, to and from her room by the basement courtyard. Whenever I visited her, I walked the windowless corridor to the locked door and typed the code to be admitted.

  ‘It should not be this way,’ I think, when confronted by scenes of the infirm and demented living out their years in confined spaces. Over time I see the deterioration in some of the residents. I come to know those who wait in vain for visitors and those who pace the floors dishevelled, their dignity abandoned.

  None of this seemed to concern Sonia. She kept her own counsel and protected her private space fiercely. When disoriented residents strayed into her room, she ordered them out. These were among the rare times I saw her flare up in anger. Her sharp command stopped them in their tracks; they did not dare come any further.

  In the ghettos and camps, the boundaries between the private and public were non-existent: filth a
nd wounds on display, indignities out in the open. There was nowhere to retreat to. In the displaced persons camps the lack of boundaries persisted; the inmates lived in close quarters. Only as they began to disperse were the boundaries re-established, as, one by one, alone or in couples, they peeled off and began new lives elsewhere.

  In her final years, Sonia was forced to return to communal living. The boundaries were again being erased, but she knew how to handle them. She ate her meals seated with residents in the common dining room, kept to herself, and was done with it. Only when friends visited did her space expand. She wore make-up and was elegantly dressed, sitting bedside, or reclining on a sofa. Comfortable in her solitude. Einzam.

  ‘How are you?’ I ask, as I walk into the room.

  ‘Hanging in there.’

  How do we do justice to a life? The dead cannot speak for themselves. Long after Sonia’s death, it is a thought that haunts me. There are many gaps in Sonia’s story, missing pieces. Who was she in the prime of her life? And in her partnership with Sami? How were they as a couple? What drove them apart? How did they appear to others who knew them?

  In January 2017, I received an email from Arie Olewski. We had never met or been in contact. He lives in Herzliya, a coastal city north of Tel Aviv. He had read a tribute I had written to Sonia and he wished to publish it in a journal dedicated to the memory of Bergen-Belsen survivors. Arie and his sister Jochi knew Sonia and Sami as a couple, and knew them well.

  ‘I grew up on their knees,’ says Arie. ‘They spent a lot of time in our home during their trips from Paris. But then Sonia vanished. I was about ten years old. I never saw her again.’