The Watermill

by Arnold Zable

  Over the ensuing weeks, the inmates of Camp 1 are moved to Camp 2 and housed in the former living quarters of German officers. Bergen-Belsen, now a displaced persons camp, is a vast sanatorium. Some of the able-bodied men are taken on military trucks to a displaced persons camp in the town of Celle, twenty kilometres away, among them Sami. Within weeks, he decides to return to Bergen-Belsen. In his mind, his project to retrieve the works written and sung in the camps and ghettos is forming.

  I imagine Sami’s return. The winter is long over. There are scenes of serenity: forests of birch and conifers, creeks fringed with willows. Groves of linden and ash. Heathland and juniper. Village streets lined with picket fences and timber cottages. Here and there, a shattered house, blown up culverts and bridges—warped steel and shattered concrete partly submerged in water. The roads are crawling with military convoys, cut off by checkpoints.

  The truck approaches Bergen-Belsen. Uniformed soldiers guard the gate. Sami feels a tightening in the chest, a moment of panic, but the guards appear benign and his papers are in order. There are no demands barked by enraged officers, and no killer dogs straining on their leashes. He is waved through.

  The camp grounds are vast. There are jeeps driven by military personnel and motor vehicles idling. Uniformed nurses climb the steps to the camp hospital. A truck filled with sacks of potatoes is being unloaded. Women peg washing to cords strung between makeshift poles made from stripped branches. Men and women walk the pathways, some shuffling like phantoms.

  Sami sees her from a distance. She is thin. He is not sure at first. It is four years since he last saw her. Perhaps he is dreaming. He catches the glint of sun on the red-tiled roof. As she draws closer, Sami grows more certain. Then she lights up in recognition. She stops. She sways on her feet, closes her eyes, clenches her fists, and presses her knuckles to her eyelids.

  Sami does not dare move closer. The sounds around him have faded to silence. She opens her eyes, and they are clear; her face is transparent. She quickens her steps. Sami is thirty-nine, Sonia twenty-five, but time has lost meaning; all is reduced to this moment, two people embracing.

  Sami and Sonia’s fists are unclenched, and their hands are open. Beneath the palms, the rise and fall of breath, the heartbeat of the living. The armour that has sustained them is falling away. There is no frontline, no need for resistance. There is only Sami and Sonia. Love lost. Love regained. Springtime in the republic of the stateless.

  Maybe this is how it was. Maybe. But of his return from Celle to Bergen-Belsen and this meeting with Sonia, Sami writes only in passing. ‘There I met my khaverte, my comrade, Sonia Boszkowska, who had performed theatre under my direction in the Benzin Muse ensemble in Poland. We decided to create a theatre studio.’ And, later, another reference: ‘Immediately after the liberation, as hundreds were expiring every day from typhus, exhaustion and hunger, it was then, among the dying, that I met my khaverte, Sonia Boszkowska.’ That is all.

  There are images captured by British war photographers and eyewitness accounts by the British troops. ‘We had seen the dead and the wounded on battlefields, but we had never seen anything like this.’ ‘The things I saw completely defy description.’ ‘It was so different to, well to anything.’ ‘I can’t explain it…We’d seen distressed people about, people walking from town to town, but nothing like this.’ ‘No words can describe the horror of this place.’ The phrase most used: ‘There are no words for this.’

  And there are the sounds most remembered—an eerie stillness, the impression of a city of the dead peopled by phantoms. Many of those who remain alive wandered about, staring at their liberators with incredulous eyes, as if to say, are we dreaming? There is apathy and rage and a thirst for summary justice. Crowds of inmates assemble each day by the pits to scream at their former tormentors as they transport the corpses for mass burial. Sonia is somewhere in all of this.

  The sun shone in those days, but the light it shed was dulled by an oppressive haze, hanging over tracts of barren heathland littered with bodies. And up close, in the huts, the feverish inmates: heads shaven; skin ravaged by bedsores, scabies and ulcers; bodies reduced to stick-like limbs, exposed ribs, jutting chins and shrunken faces.

  That first embrace between Sonia and Sami—if there was one—would have been between two near skeletons. Sonia may have been too weak to stand up, too exhausted to embrace. She had barely made it to the day of her liberation, and Sami had barely made it to the final camp. They had survived. That is all.

  There was a cleansing station that came to be called the ‘human laundry’. The inmates were stripped of their rags, wrapped in blankets, stretchered from the huts in Camp 1 to an ambulance and driven to the station, which was housed in a converted stable in Camp 2. They were attended by German nurses now acting under British military orders.

  At first, the nurses were hostile, but when the emaciated inmates were stretchered in, they were horrified by what they saw, and they worked, week after week from eight in the morning till six at night, until they were sick and exhausted. Several died after contracting typhus.

  There were two rows of ten stalls either side of a passageway. Each one with a table, a bucket of water, towels and soap and scrubbing brushes. A mobile bath unit supplied hot water. The inmates were scrubbed and shaved, and dusted with DDT as disinfectant. Then they were dressed in fresh clothes, wrapped in clean blankets and transferred to improvised hospital wards in converted compounds or to outdoor beds and straw pallets. Fourteen thousand inmates underwent this process. Sonia could well have been one of them.

  There is one memory that he did share with me of her final weeks in Bergen-Belsen before liberation. She is lying ill with typhus. She is close to death. Her will is ebbing. A fellow inmate is tugging at her arms. Imploring. ‘Sonia. Stand up.’ She is dragging Sonia to her feet. ‘If you want to live, you must stand up.’

  Sami too was ill. He was designated ‘fit’ by the relativities of triage; but this meant only that he could stand up unaided. He wrote in his memoirs that, one month after liberation, his flesh and bones remained eaten by hunger. His lungs were scarred, and he would spend time in a TB sanatorium and undergo surgeries in Paris and Berlin. He struggled with insomnia, heart problems and periods of depression. The doctors warned him to avoid the physical and mental demands of theatre.

  Sami revisits one incident in several memoirs. It takes place in the early months of 1946. The Kazet Theatre is well established, and the premier performance is long over. Sami is preoccupied with the many demands of the theatre and camp politics. He is walking in the camp grounds. A military truck veers onto the pavement. The driver, a British soldier, had been drinking.

  Sami is catapulted head first to the pavement. He is rushed to the camp hospital with his skull fractured in two places. He undergoes a life-saving operation and spends six weeks in hospital recuperating. Sonia sits at his bedside. She reads to him, transcribes scripts and helps him plan future performances. Perhaps this extended period of convalescence brought Sami and Sonia closer. But the injuries Sami sustained also had a more lasting impact: he would suffer migraines for the rest of his life.

  Sonia spoke to me only once of the death marches. She recounted a tale of a dream: The women have halted for the night. It is snowing. They lie in squalor, freezing and exhausted. Sonia drifts into an uneasy sleep. She is falling, then she is rising from the earth. She is taking flight. Her comrades, in their misery, are fading far below her. She soars over field and forest, towns and cities. She is at ease and buoyant. The air is light and the skies are transparent. If only, she thinks—if only I could keep flying forever.

  Sonia would not speak of the horrors. But within months of liberation she was re-enacting them—and this is what her audiences, the ‘surviving remnants’, wanted. It was a plea British soldiers reported hearing in their early encounters with the inmates: ‘Tell the world! Tell the world! Did you know what was happening? Tell the world! They must know what happened to us!’

&nb
sp; Yes, there are tales that are meant to be told, and not to tell them would be a betrayal. Sami and Sonia, I hope I have done your tales justice. That I have not betrayed you. The thought is unbearable.

  Been not enough listening. Not enough sitting. Sitting on the earth, sitting on the veranda. Sitting in the shade beneath the house. The land, as far as the eye can see, clad in ochres and reds. The sky so blue it hurts. The air so dry it sucks in the breath. Yet it is cool enough in the shade to converse, and there’s time enough to take in the silence, to notice that far-distant cloud. ‘It’s going to rain,’ the old man says. ‘Give it six hours, but believe me it’s going to rain. Best place to be is here, sitting in the shade beneath the house.’

  This is a tale of maps: some of country where the people have lived for sixty thousand years. Perhaps many more. Could be the Kimberley, the red centre, or somewhere up north. Could be a remote settlement, a parched riverbed, or the dusty streets of an outback town. The place will remain unnamed. I am a guest. Learning to see what I have never seen, hearing stories I have never heard. I am here to listen, and to exchange tales. In search of that place where we meet.

  The kitchen is where my parents sat late at night. Hadassah and Meier. In a single-fronted terrace, built against the light, enclosed in stucco and brick. Cool enough to preserve ugly patches of damp. When they moved in, the roof slates were slipping, the walls were cracked and the rooms infested with rats. There was a housing shortage back then and the landlord could do what he liked.

  My parents got rid of the rats, repaired the roof, plastered the cracks and got on with their lives. And late at night they sat in the kitchen with their old-world friends. I strained to hear them as I lay in bed. Their voices, as in a lullaby, sang the names of places on a distant map. Bransk, Bialystok, Grodek, Orly, Bielsk. Border country, where the armies of rival kingdoms were forever on the march.

  It ended badly. The lucky ones got out. Some sailed for a new world and settled in Melbourne, a city at the ends of the earth. Yet, no matter how far they’d sailed, they could not escape the longing for the place of their birth and the horror at what had happened to those they left behind. I lived in a house of absences and ghosts, and one photo album of my parents’ pre-war past.

  ‘Who are these people?’ I asked of one photo.

  ‘Three of my six sisters, one of my three brothers, your uncle Joshua, your grandmother, Khane-Esther. Your cousins Khaimke and Freda, eleven and six years old.’

  ‘Where are they, now?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Hadassah would say. And that was that. Of nine siblings, her parents and extended family, only three survived. On my father’s side, it appeared, there was no one left.

  In 1986, I made the journey, travelling alone, rucksack on my back, on the Trans-Siberian from Beijing across the length of the Soviet empire to Moscow and beyond. I entered the Polish borderlands by train from the east; walked the streets of towns, villages and cities whose names I had heard as I drifted asleep on the other side of the world: Bransk, Bialystok, Grodek, Orly, Bielsk. Places that they now called the old world, der alter velt.

  When I returned, I sat with Hadassah in the kitchen of that single-fronted house. I now had the means to invoke the ghosts. ‘Saw birch trees the length of the empire,’ I tell her, ‘ghostly white. Standing alone, standing in packs.’

  ‘The beryosé,’ she says, as if in a trance, and she sings, in Yiddish, the mother tongue: O come quiet evening, and rock the fields to sleep/ We sing you a song of praise, oh quiet evening glow/ How still it has become, the night has come to stay/The white beryosé, remains standing in the forest alone. Mother tells stories through song. It is too painful to tell them in prose.

  With Meier, I sit on a bench in Curtain Square, the neighbourhood park, beneath an archway of Moreton Bay figs, six abreast on either side of a gravel path. Here is where we meet in the months after my return. The square is home territory; the kindergarten I attended is across the road, and the primary school a two-minute walk. The square is where we drift, father and son, between our words. The silences are broken by a gust of breeze, the bark of a dog, and tales sparked by the names of distant streets I have now walked.

  ‘Sienkievitza Avenue,’ I say.

  ‘Ah, that’s where Kondruchik the White Russian sold ice-cream, and where we played billiards and chess, and where, in the Macedonian quarter, we ate Turkish delight, and where horse-drawn carriages dashed by on their way to the dance halls on Saturday nights.’ Meier’s stories flow quickly now that I know the maps.

  There is another map: an item I first saw in a museum exhibition in Melbourne in 1994. I knew instantly where I had seen such a map before. Eight years earlier, on that journey to Poland, in a pavilion in a forest of birch and pine—on the outskirts of the site where Treblinka death camp once stood. That map detailed places of massacre in an area that extended east to the Soviet border and beyond, and hundreds of kilometres to the west.

  On the Treblinka site is an assembly of stones, seventeen thousand in all. Each one is said to represent a town, city or hamlet from which the eight hundred thousand men, women and children who died here were transported one generation ago.

  I searched among the stones for the names I’d first heard from the kitchen while I lay in bed as a child. Bransk, Grodek, Orly, Bielsk. I could not find them. I lit a candle in front of the stone marked Bialystok, the eastern Polish city where my father was born and where my mother’s family moved when she was a child—the city where Hadassah and Meier lived the first three decades of their lives, and which they left. Just in time.

  Now I am standing in front of that museum exhibit: a map of Victoria, my home state. Titled the Massacre Map, it shows sixty-eight sites of known killings of Indigenous people between 1836 and 1853. A caption adds: ‘Many thousands more died beyond prying eyes.’

  And I am contemplating a mystery: Why have I never heard of these sites? And why is it that in all my years living in the city where my family settled a year after I was born had I not once heard of the words Wurundjeri, Woiwurrung, Kulin?

  I played on the banks of the Yarra River as a boy, sifted for yabbies with nets, launched myself on ropes into its muddy waters and swam in its brown depths. Why did I not know the ancient name: Birrarung, river of mists? Why did I not know of the clans who fished it, swam it and gathered on its banks? And why was it that after so many journeys to the beaches of the bay, I did not know of the Boonwurrung, the people of the coast? Why did I not know of the ancient maps?

  ‘Where can I find out more?’ I ask the exhibition curator, Jim Berg. Gundidjmara man. ‘Go see Aunty Joy,’ he says.

  Weeks later I drive sixty kilometres northeast. I pull up in Healesville, in the driveway of a weatherboard house. There’s a grandeur here at the feet of the mountains of the Great Divide, a clarity that comes after days of rain. Clouds drift from the upper slopes. Magpies and kookaburras hover by the veranda in anticipation of their daily feed.

  Wurundjeri elder Joy Murphy Wandin opens the door and invites me into a house that contains millennia of history. She puts the kettle on the stove. On the living-room wall is a black- and-white photo taken in the early years of the twentieth century. Like the photo of my mother’s family, there are nine people in two rows.

  In the centre, at the back, stands Joy’s grandfather, Robert Wandin—also known as Wandoon. White-haired, wearing a waistcoat and suit, he stands beside his wife, Jemima. She is dressed in a high-necked white blouse and a dark ankle-length skirt. Robert and Jemima are surrounded by six of their ten children and a family friend. The youngest child, an infant, is Joy’s father, James Wandin. The photo radiates dignity and pride.

  Robert was the nephew of William Barak, Ngurungaeta, the leader of a Wurundjeri clan, says Aunty Joy. That is the term to use, she says. Ngurungaeta. It is a word unto itself. No translation can do it justice, she says. Aunty Joy offers her knowledge like a gift.

  In June 1835, as a young boy, William Barak, it is
said, was present when John Batman signed the so-called treaty with elders of the Kulin. Treaty or no treaty, within decades the lands were taken, and the Woiwurrung language driven underground. The Indigenous population radically reduced through massacre and imported disease. The invasion was all but complete.

  Aunty Joy knows her ancient maps well. In 1987, as a project officer for Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Joy set out with anthropologist Alistair Brooks on a twenty-month journey to retrace the Aboriginal boundaries in the state. The pair consulted elders, and examined maps drawn by previous anthropologists, who had gathered the information from Indigenous peoples when their dispossession had just begun.

  The Wurundjeri is a clan of the Woiwurrung language group, Aunty Joy tells me. The two names have in recent times become almost synonymous. Theirs is a territory ranging from the mountains of the Great Divide east to Mt Baw Baw, west to the Werribee River, and south towards the Boonwurrung lands by the coast. The Woiwurrung and the Boonwurrung are two of the five peoples who make up a confederation known as the Kulin.

  As Aunty Joy speaks, the map takes shape. The foundations I have known since infancy are shifting beneath my feet. She is speaking of ancient times, yet for me she is charting new ground: the lands she speaks of had been hidden, the maps erased.

  Yet the stories were passed on, knowledge exchanged, and fragments of language retained, in living rooms and at kitchen tables, on verandas and around fires, in distant exile or on Kulin land. There were always those who knew who they were and those who were hungry to know more; and always children who heard the ancestral names.

  In the 1980s, the Wandin family commissioned anthropologist Diane Barwick to work with them to compile a family tree. Joy spreads the documents on the living room table, tracing the Wandin family five generations back.