We Are Here Read online

  Before long, they, too, went into hiding, taking refuge on the outskirts of Amsterdam in the home of a woman David had known for much of his life. Before his marriage, she had been the caretaker of his apartment building. For several weeks, they hid in one of her bedrooms and were later joined by Marianne’s parents, who had been hiding elsewhere in Amsterdam but who, at the woman’s insistence, had also moved into her home.

  Her hospitality, however, was not selfless. Through visiting friends, Marianne and her husband learned that the woman had been speaking openly about harbouring Jews. Realising that she was jeopardising their lives, they made plans through the Resistance to move elsewhere. As a courtesy, David told the woman that they were preparing to leave. But before they could, she tipped off German authorities, who were then paying informants for details on those attempting to evade capture.

  Interrogated by the Gestapo, the couple were imprisoned for two nights and then taken by train to a camp at Westerbork, where they arrived on 18 April 1944. It was their fifth wedding anniversary. Within a month, Marianne’s parents had been taken to Auschwitz, where they died, and, by September, Marianne and her husband were interned at Theresienstadt, where he worked as a doctor and at night she volunteered to tend to other people’s children.

  In June 1945, months after liberation, she was finally reunited with her daughter and son. Six years later, having given birth to a third child, she came to Australia with her family.

  In the years since, she has been widowed and divorced, and her two eldest children have died.

  When the war ended, my husband was very ill. Lots of people came to Theresienstadt from Auschwitz, and they brought with them typhus, and he caught it. He spent six weeks in hospital.

  The children were still with their foster parents then. I was lucky because my late daughter was hidden by my neighbour’s sister. They wanted to have a child, so I knew she would be safe there. And my son went to friends of my neighbours.

  It was too dangerous for them to be together. What could I do? They were not safe with me, so I had to hope that my children would be all right with other people, and I was nearly sure they were.

  I was always thinking about them. In the meantime, I looked after other children in Theresienstadt. I helped at night to feed them and take them to bed. One of them came to Theresienstadt as ‘Alfred Van Der Poorten’, which was my son’s name, with a question mark against his name on the list. My husband was sure it was our son, Alfred, who was only a baby the last time we had seen him. It wasn’t him. But I said to my husband, ‘It doesn’t matter; we will still look after him.’ And then I saw a girl who looked like my daughter, and after the war we took her back to Amsterdam, too. I didn’t have a home then, but I found people who didn’t have children who would love to have that boy. And the girl went back to the people who had hidden her. So for that I didn’t have any worries.

  I hadn’t seen my own children for three years. They didn’t remember me when I went to get them. My son was a baby, and my daughter was only three when she went to her foster mother, Nan. She was very fond of her. My daughter didn’t want to come back to me. Whenever I combed her hair later, for a long time she said, ‘Nan never did that.’

  It was very difficult for her to come back and see that I was her mother. And it was difficult for us. We were always compared to the foster parents, for quite some time. It was a little bit troubling. I just tried to be as good a parent as possible.

  Our other daughter was born in 1947. I wanted to have one child born after the war because I had missed all those years with my children, so I wanted one child from the beginning.

  I loved Holland. I wanted to stay. It was the place where I was born; I grew up there, and went to school. But my husband was afraid that the Russians would come to the West. He wanted to go as far away as possible.

  It was quite hard leaving. But anyway, we came here, and it was quite nice. And I had here an aunt and uncle and a few friends, and we were very lucky that we had a large house that belonged to a doctor, so after my husband studied again he could have his practice there. In the meantime, to earn some money, I had a boarding house.

  I tried, especially because of the children, to live a normal life. First of all — never cry when they are there. There were times I was crying in the war when my friends disappeared. After my parents were taken away, I didn’t cry anymore.

  And never bother them with our experience, because even now my daughter knows people whose parents had been in concentration camps, and they pester their children with it, and we never did that.

  I didn’t like to talk about the war. I wanted to forget. Lots of children were always reminded that their parents had been in a camp or went through terrible things. And we never told them anything. We thought, why should we bother them? Why should they have a bad life? It was already terrible that I had to remember. So why should they? I think it was the right thing, yes.

  I always thought it was important to enjoy things. I have always celebrated birthdays. I go out on Sundays with my daughter-in-law for lunch. I have a strawberry daiquiri or a Campari with orange. We go away to Terrigal every school holidays — four generations: me and my daughter, three granddaughters, and seven great-grandchildren. I love it.

  I have survived and I have lived — both. I sometimes thought about revenge. The Germans were top of the list. Three years after the war, I was driving and I saw on a bike the lady who had betrayed us. Later, they gave her twenty years in prison, but they freed her already after three years. Of course, I hated her. I told my husband, ‘There she goes.’ I wanted to drive over her. If my husband hadn’t been there, I would have done it.

  There’s a lot of people who are not too good. My experience was that. We were hidden with people, and they betrayed us. There are good people and bad people, and maybe, unfortunately, there are more bad people than good people.

  Sam Gelber

  BORN: Shloma Gelber

  1 May 1925

  Düsseldorf, Germany

  Details can be a changing commodity in Sam Gelber’s inimitable life. Some vary because of history: his date of birth, the liberal transliterations of his given name (Shloma/Szloma/Schloma). Others, he recites meticulously: the arrival of German troops in his town, the death of his father, shot by a policemen as he tried to reach his only son inside a Polish ghetto.

  There is a proud, defiant tone of success to his story but also an air of survival that endures so long after the war officially ended. Born in Düsseldorf, he left Germany with his parents and younger sister when he was six or seven, as the ascent of Hitler portended a difficult life for Jews, and his grandparents urged the young family to join them in the comparative safety of Poland.

  They arrived in Częstochowa in the early 1930s. He attended a Jewish primary school and then a trade school. His father was a fruit wholesaler. He spoke Polish and Yiddish at home.

  At fourteen, before he had even had time to contemplate a livelihood, his life was upended. Almost as soon as the war had started, German soldiers were in his town, an arrival that his father initially welcomed; he took his only son to the train station to meet the troops, and, after conversing with them in German and being plied with chocolates and cigarettes, he returned home reassured that the invasion was not a bad thing.

  That sense of comfort, however, was shattered within hours. The next day, Jews were forced from their homes, told to run, and then shot at. Some of those who survived were taken through the city to an army camp. Within weeks, his mother and sister had been sent to Treblinka.

  The only family life he had known was over, and, with Jewish students banned from attending school, so was his formal education. He and his father were forced into a ghetto, and when that was liquidated, they were among 900 people, mostly men, transferred to a nearby plant producing ammunition, arms, and wood-distilled gas generators. From there, his father was loaded onto another truck, a
nd he never saw him alive again. By 1941, aged sixteen, he was alone. He has been responsible for himself ever since.

  For the rest of the war, he was part of an ever-dwindling demographic, avoiding multiple atrocities when so many others did not. From the main ghetto, he was moved into a smaller ghetto, before it, too, was liquidated in 1943, and some of the few remaining inhabitants were taken to the local Jewish cemetery and shot.

  He was among just 4,000 survivors now, and like many he was sent to a nearby forced-labour camp, surrounded by electrified wire. There, his life depended on reconditioning ammunition for the very war effort that had already murdered his family.

  His war was long but never far. Working in a kitchen at one time, sometimes making bullets, burying people at another time, he was whipped and kicked on multiple occasions and forced to live on meagre quantities of food. In six years of misery, however, he was never more than a few kilometres from home.

  Then, in January 1945, he heard shooting and a gate crashing. Russian soldiers had arrived at the labour camp and so had liberation. He walked back into Częstochowa, and returned to freedom without his family, with no clear idea of how to live an adult life.

  But even his homecoming was short-lived. Within months, he was conscripted to the Polish army. Later, he moved to a displaced-persons camp in Austria, smuggling goods across the border to Czechoslovakia and illegally changing money, whatever he could do to generate an income before arriving in Australia, stateless, in 1951.

  When he talks about those years now, he is animated and shows neither sadness nor tears. But mostly his history has been carefully guarded. He has spoken little of his past, sometimes talking to his late wife and his children but rarely in great detail. One of the few times he varied from that pattern was in 1995, when he spent almost three hours recording his war experiences with Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. Even then, he was reluctant to talk, and only did so at the urging of his late wife.

  I have two birthdays. I think I was born in Düsseldorf in 1925, but when I went into a camp I was only fourteen, and I made myself four years older. They would have killed me otherwise; I was a child and not useful.

  My second birthday is 5 August 1921 — in my passport, everything. And I couldn’t reverse it. I went to a big solicitor here and we couldn’t change it for any money. You have to get a birth certificate, which I haven’t got.

  My father was a translator in Treblinka. He ran away from there and came back to Częstochowa to find me. He tried to get into the ghetto, and a Polish policeman shot him. Nobody came to me when he died; everybody looked after himself, for his own life. I was still a child; I didn’t know what to do. I did nothing. I lived in the ghetto and went to work every day. I don’t know what happened to him after. I suppose they buried him somewhere.

  No one survived, except one cousin. She is in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

  It was hard when we were liberated. I had to make a living by myself. I had to get a pair of socks, a shirt, anything. I had no feelings. In the evening, I saw some vodka, so I went and took two cases and traded it with the Russians. Was it stealing? I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t mind at all. Everybody was taking everything for free. People went into the shop — it was empty — and took things.

  I lived day by day. No rules at all. It wasn’t easy, but I made it. I don’t remember being lonely; I always had a lot of friends. I am more lonely now than I was then.

  In the Polish army, I made a lot of money. In the beginning, they gave me a rifle and I thought I would have to stay on duty and train. But I didn’t do anything. I never had to fire a shot. I never went on duty. I was sitting in coffee houses and restaurants. I had bags of German Marks because I sold army supplies. I had that much money I didn’t know what to do with it. Even though I had lost my parents, I felt for the first time happy. It was the best time in my life.

  One day, there was a pup, and this Russian railway man said, ‘Would you like to buy a dog?’ And I liked the dog so much, the look of it. The head was crooked; it hit me straightaway, it was a lovely dog. You couldn’t touch me. If I walked with him in the street and you touched me, he jumped. Such a beautiful dog.

  I didn’t like Europe; I wanted to get out. I applied everywhere: Argentina, Canada, America. And my first papers came in from the Australian consulate to go for an interview.

  I came to Melbourne first. You couldn’t see a car. You couldn’t see a person. I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ Then I came to Sydney. I couldn’t get a job — and I went to the consulate to go back to Austria. I didn’t like Australia. There was nothing here. You couldn’t get a piece of salami. You couldn’t get a piece of cheese. Devon was the salami and Coon cheese was the cheese. There was nothing here, not a coffee lounge — you want a coffee, you went to the milk bar: ‘You want white or black?’ No restaurants. Six o’clock, the pubs closed. It was very cheap everything, but I couldn’t get a job.

  I was lucky I didn’t go back. They wanted a guarantee that I wouldn’t be on the government’s expense in Austria. And I said, ‘I haven’t got anybody,’ and they said, ‘I am sorry; there is nothing we can do for you.’ After, I was working three jobs in Sydney — and then I felt better. I got money and I saved. Then I had key money for a unit. Later on, I worked for twenty-eight years in real estate.

  It was a fantastic decision to come here — not good. It’s a very quiet, nice life. So long as you have nothing to do with the police, you can live like a king.

  I do believe in God. I shouldn’t — because I was a child in a camp, and he didn’t help me at all; not only me, everybody. But I do believe in God. I am not religious. I believe somebody must be in heaven.

  When I cry, I cry very softly. Sometimes, if it hits me, I cry about my wife. I don’t remember if I ever cried about the war; maybe I did, but I don’t remember.

  What’s to cry? It’s done, finished. I really don’t want to think back. But I had to tell my grandchildren, my children. I just spoke to the family. And I did an interview for Spielberg. My three granddaughters, after they saw it, they were crying all the time: ‘Papa how did you get through this?’ I had tears in my eyes. The most treasured thing in my life is my grandchildren. I don’t want them to worry about it. So I said, ‘Everything is over — no more problems.’

  I used to be a guide at the Jewish museum. Then I heard a friend of mine talking to some children about his story, and I couldn’t stand it. And the manager told me, ‘I can see on your face it’s very hard for you to do.’ It was too much for me.

  I wouldn’t go and look at a film from a concentration camp; you remind yourself, oh, they did it to me, too. I don’t like movies, number one. Since my wife passed away, I never went to a picture show, I never went to a theatre, I never went to dancing or these kinds of things. I didn’t feel like doing it.

  I had some very bad dreams. Somebody is running after me and shooting. I remember very well all the stories that happened. Sunday, they came in; and Monday, they threw everybody out of their houses, and the SS were lying on the road with machine guns, puk, puk, puk. We made it — me, my mother, my father and sister — we all made it at first, but then they separated us. It was very scary.

  I don’t talk about my parents now, but I see them in my dreams a lot. My sister would be in her nineties now. What a beautiful girl, a good ice-skater.

  It’s possible I didn’t show love to my children. I didn’t have anybody after I was sixteen; you think about yourself. I was much better with my grandchildren. I love them to death. I do love my children, but it’s different with them. In my heart, I feel the grandchildren better than the children. That’s how it is.

  What sort of a father and husband? Maybe not so good. I was out all the time, always busy. Somebody rings me up Sunday morning, ‘I want to see this and this’, so I went; business before pleasure. I was a terrific salesman. When I retired, they begged me, ‘Come over for two days a week and tea
ch the new salesmen how to sell properties.’

  I never went back to Poland. I wouldn’t even look at it. I hate that country. They used to stand in front of the Jewish shops, the anti-Semites, and they used to sing, ‘Our best advice is don’t go into a Jewish shop, because they will rob you.’

  I don’t feel anything bad about Germans. A lot of people do. I don’t want to speak German, but I don’t hate the Germans. I hate the Germans from the war. I remind myself of all the things they did. Not the soldiers; I am talking about the police and the SS and the Gestapo. These people I hate. I hate the Poles, not the Germans, because a Polish policeman killed my father.

  I am afraid of nobody. Nobody and nothing. What should I be afraid of? I didn’t do harm to anybody.

  Before I came to Australia, four of us went to the park. We were in Liegnitz, in Poland, on the grass, joking and drinking, and an old gypsy came to us. ‘Would you like me to tell you your future?’ I said no; I never believed in it. One said, ‘Okay, tell me.’ So then I said, ‘Tell me my future, too.’ Whatever she told came true, 100 per cent: I am going far away, I will be well off, I will get married and have children, my wife would go before me, I would have a long life. And she was right.

  I didn’t have a transition from childhood. I didn’t have anything, no life at all. But after, I was never hungry. Never.

  Hella Wilk

  BORN: Chaja Rivka Weingott

  21 August 1925

  Łódź, Poland

  Hella Wilk is sitting at her kitchen table, talking about the past with a mix of nostalgia and disapproval, when she rises mid-sentence. She is a small, forthright woman — 1.47 metres before age erased a few more centimetres — and she exits wordlessly, returning with a sturdy picture frame that seems oversized under her slight arm.