We Are Here Page 13

  ‘I want to show you something,’ she says, and carefully places the frame on the table. In it sits an old black-and-white photograph — not the original, which belonged to her late aunt, but a copy or perhaps a copy of a copy — of a family gathering from the late 1920s.

  There are dozens of people in the picture: bearded old men and demur young women, a little girl looking sidewards, a man in a shirt and tie, another tilting his head up to be seen from the far end of the back row. At the front, a few children are on the ground, the girls with their feet politely to one side, while behind them the gathering expands, some adults seated, others standing in a haphazard arrangement of people assembled in another place at another time.

  This was Hella Wilk’s world and the people who filled it when she was growing up: her great-grandfather, her grandparents and parents, multiple aunts, uncles and cousins, and Hella herself in the summer of 1929 when a moment at her annual family gathering at a Polish holiday town was captured for posterity. More than thirty people are in the picture. She is one of only three who was still living after World War II.

  ‘This one finished off in Stutthof from what I hear,’ she says now as she begins an itemised account of her family’s fate, pointing out one of her many aunts who died not of old age but prematurely in a concentration camp.

  ‘That’s my uncle,’ she continues, indicating a man in one of the rear rows; he was offered a chance to escape the Łódź ghetto during World War II but refused to leave his sister. ‘He could have survived,’ she says, still dismayed all these years later. ‘It was his choice.’

  In her tenth decade, she is a woman of specific emotions. She speaks frankly and is not overly demonstrative. Yet her eyes well and her voice chokes frequently as she sits in this light-filled space on the other side of the world and remembers the last time she saw her parents and her sister. More than seventy years have passed since they were separated at Auschwitz and only she emerged alive, but the trauma of that separation remains sharper than almost any memory in her long life.

  The Holocaust is her life’s great marker, years of Nazi tyranny effectively severing the first part of her life from the many years that followed. In that opening chapter, she was the eldest of two daughters. With her sister, Dziunia, a voracious reader but deaf and mute, she belonged to a vast family that not only holidayed together but also sometimes lived in the same apartment complexes.

  She grew up in Łódź, where her father was a wholesaler of horn buttons, but considered herself Jewish, never Polish, a sentiment reinforced as far back as she could remember by the anti-Semitic names thrown at her by neighbourhood children.

  She was fourteen when World War II began. Germans troops arrived in Łódź within days, soon rendering her town a place where Jewish men were dragged from their homes and Jewish women had jewellery ripped off them in the street.

  By December, she, her parents, and her sister were among the first families to move into the Łódź ghetto, squeezed into a two-room apartment that would soon house fourteen people, with no heating or electricity, a kitchen but no bathroom, and some clothes among the few items that were still hers.

  The degradations amassed. Her education was stopped, restarting for a few months in the ghetto before being ended for good, and she began working in a leather-goods factory as winter’s death toll mounted around her.

  When the ghetto was liquidated, her father was working in its main office, and his position gave his family a temporary reprieve. They were among the last to leave there in August 1944, and were then forced onto a train that later brought them, her aunt and uncle, and two cousins, to Auschwitz.

  She was nineteen when she arrived at the concentration camp, afraid and bewildered, and soon separated from her immediate family. She had seen her parents and sister for the last time.

  With her cousins, she spent two days at Auschwitz, relieved not only of her possessions, but also of her clothes and her identifiable red hair. After two nights on a concrete floor, she was taken to a town in Saxony, where she spent much of the rest of the war working twelve-hour shifts at a metal press that was almost too tall for her to manage. Under the supervision of a sadistic SS official who favoured a whip and holding back on already meagre rations, she spent her days creating metal components for German anti-aircraft guns.

  After eight months, in April 1945 she was taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she was reunited with a third cousin, and where, in early May, she was liberated.

  In the weeks that followed, she learned that the Jewish Brigade of the British army was smuggling survivors to Palestine via southern Italy. She began the journey to Italy via Austria, but when she arrived in Salzburg she was told that the displaced-persons camp there was full and that the clandestine passage to Italy and onwards to Palestine had been suspended.

  So she headed to a camp near Munich and stayed there for eighteen months. Then she waited in Paris for a ship to take her to Australia, where, sponsored by an aunt who had been living in Melbourne since 1913, she and her two surviving cousins arrived in early 1947.

  With dreams of becoming a doctor, she worked instead in a factory sewing clothes. She married a fellow survivor from Lodz, who had spent the war in Russia, their union spanning more than fifty years, and they had one child. Decades after her own education was halted, her son graduated from medical school.

  After the war, I put on a lot of weight. I didn’t know about food. How could I? In the ghetto, we couldn’t cook; if we got some potato peelings, that was something.

  Later, I loved many foods, but they didn’t agree with me. I loved sausages, I loved fancy food, and I loved fried food. I was renting a room in a boarding house in Melbourne, and I wasn’t supposed to cook there, so I went to restaurants for more than a year. I had too much fried food because I liked it, but I wasn’t used to it, I didn’t know what it would do to me, and, by the time I realised, it was a bit late. At the age of twenty, I had an ulcer.

  In Theresienstadt, when the war was over, we had enough food — they gave us a big bowl of soup and some barley — but we were always wondering if we did. After being hungry for so long, we overate; we didn’t know how much was enough.

  The Russians had walked into Theresienstadt one evening in May 1945 and said, ‘Oh, you are free, we are liberating you.’ And the next day was the end of the war. Yes, I was sort of happy. But then I got a list of survivors, and my father’s name wasn’t there, and it dawned on me that he was gone. I was sure that out of all of my family he would have survived. I don’t know why — because I wanted him to. When it started dawning on me that he hadn’t, I really got depressed. I have never been one for crying so much; I am not demonstrative. But if I do cry, it’s about the Holocaust.

  When we arrived in Auschwitz, we didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know anything about this place. My sister was eleven, but she looked eight, and they said, ‘Who is the mother of that child?’ And my mother, who was sometimes absent-minded, quick as anything she said, ‘I am.’ So they pushed her to one side with my sister and pushed me to the other. I was trying to explain to my sister what was happening. She looked at me …

  I was taken away, and my hair was shaved. Hair is very important. It’s personality. To have your hair shaved, it was very demeaning. It robbed you of your identity and your humanity. We were unrecognisable. We looked inhuman.

  When our hair was growing back, when they had already moved us to the factory, at least we looked human after a few months. We used to work twelve-hour days, and we walked a good half-hour there, and most of it was during winter. I remember I looked up once as we were walking, there were houses, and I saw a light in a window. It was a lamp, amber coloured, and it gave a warm, homey-glow. And suddenly, that brought up nostalgia in me. It was a reminder of some other time.

  There was no point in me going back to Łódź after the war. I didn’t want their reception and I didn’t
want Polish citizenship. I don’t want to live in Poland. I don’t give a damn.

  I had wanted to leave Poland before the war. I didn’t feel Polish at all because I was called names: ‘sore-infested Jewess’. I remember I was three years old on holidays and a little girl said to me, ‘I can’t play with you; the Jews killed Jesus Christ.’ Where would she have heard this at three? All I ever heard was ‘the Jews killed Jesus Christ’, which of course they didn’t. I never even knew Jesus was a Jew until the first day at high school when we had history and I opened the page of a book and they mentioned that.

  I hated the anti-Semitism in Poland, and I hated the fact that I was a second-class citizen and I couldn’t go to university. Soon enough, my aunt sent papers to come to Australia. We went from the DP camp to Paris, but the French Indochina war had started and the boat was requisitioned, so we had three months in Paris. That’s when I really had the feeling of freedom.

  Walking those wide boulevards and being on the street, looking at normal life — it still wasn’t quite normal then, even in Paris — that really symbolised freedom.

  On the way to Theresienstadt, they had made us walk through a town, and it was the first glimpse in so long of what we used to have: a normal street with beautiful shops full of beautiful clothes, burnished shiny shoes with beautiful polish. Every shop window had a portrait of Hitler, and there were huge banners outside everywhere with swastikas. They were flaunting their Nazism, the thing that degraded us and wanted to destroy us.

  And here we were, bedraggled, tired after ten days, hungry, unwanted. We looked unkempt, and we felt it. And this huge hate welled up in me. It really made me realise what we missed, what normal life was: shops, streets you could walk on. We hadn’t had a normal life for years and years. This was a shock.

  I do get angry about injustice. Forgiveness? I am quite happy sometimes if people get their comeuppance. After liberation, I saw that the town had been ransacked — broken windows, everything boarded up, no signs of life. I felt some sort of relief; they deserved it.

  It was hard getting used to life in Australia. There was another set of rules. I had to go to work. I was lonely although I met friends right away; all the newcomers gathered together. Other people, they didn’t really ask too much about what had happened. They didn’t really have an interest in understanding what it was to go through the war.

  My aunt knew and didn’t want to know. When her younger daughter came back from Queensland to do her Bachelor of Arts exams, of course I was quite jealous. There I was working at a factory, doing sewing at the machine — it was not quite the thing that I looked forward to. I hadn’t finished high school, so I couldn’t go and study. I was a bit bitter about that.

  My aunt lived in a house with thirty-six steps to go up, a mansion. She really took care of the three of us. We had to go to the city to buy some clothes, because our skirts were too short, probably because of a shortage of material in Europe, and we stood out. On the way there, my aunt said to us not to talk in Polish. But what else could we speak, for goodness sake? I knew no English.

  She sent us to a teacher who was very good in English grammar, but she didn’t know how to teach foreigners. After two lessons, we said to aunty, ‘This is hopeless.’ So I read newspapers. And when I went to the doctor or the dentist for a check-up, the Women’s Weekly and the Woman’s Day were a wonderful way to learn English.

  It took a while to get back to the way we had lived before the war, to the standards that I had grown up with. My husband and I started off in a boarding house, in one room, and that’s why I didn’t have a child for a long time. Coming from a middle-class family in Poland, I had a one-bedroom flat in Melbourne, and I didn’t want to get stuck there all my life. So we waited to have a family. In the end, I didn’t wait long enough, because our son was born while we still lived in the flat, and I became quite depressed.

  The first compensation money from Germany helped me to get a house. My cousin wouldn’t take it — not money from Germany — but I couldn’t afford not to take it. It wasn’t a matter of pride; it was a matter of need.

  The Holocaust made me much more cynical. You can tell me something, and I will be always doubtful. I don’t take anybody’s word unless I have got evidence. All my life afterwards I am the one who stayed in the back.

  Who remembers me from back then? My aunt died in 1984, and she hardly remembered me as a child. My two cousins have died. All my best friends are gone. The ones that are left, I cut my ties with them a few years ago. I don’t see many.

  The family is missing. You notice it everywhere. You see somebody has a sister and an aunt, a normal family, and you haven’t got a sister, nobody close to you. All right, at my age not everybody could have an aunt or anybody still living. But even in younger times, I didn’t have much family left.

  I still have my son. He has a family. He knows about my past. He knows I lost my family. He knows I was in Auschwitz, and he did see the film Schindler’s List. But I didn’t talk to him about it as a child. I didn’t want to remember it.

  I never wanted to remember it. I was in Israel forty years ago, and I didn’t go to Yad Vashem (the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre), and I am ashamed. Now I would go. But I was frightened; I thought if I went there, I would just live the nightmare.

  I didn’t want to live with it. But it keeps encroaching. You see old films; every now and then, there is a film with Germans and wartime and I watch it. Why do I watch it? I don’t know. I shouldn’t watch it. I don’t watch the Hitler ones. I don’t want to see Hitler. I can’t look at a swastika. For a while, I couldn’t even listen to German. I didn’t want to see their uniforms. I saw an American film six months ago, and there were still too many German uniforms and swastikas for me. I switched it off.

  It was only six years of my life, but it keeps coming back somehow. I don’t want to remember. But I just can’t seem to forget.

  Phillip Maisel

  BORN: Falk Majzel

  15 August 1922

  Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania)

  He knows 1,000 stories of survival: the elderly woman whose long life after the Holocaust was tinged with the guilt of having inadvertently sent her young niece to her death; the inmate temporarily released from Auschwitz so he could sell stolen diamonds for his Nazi captors; the Jewish woman who fell in love with her SS guard.

  Phillip Maisel has heard more first-hand accounts of the Holocaust than almost anyone. Since 1992, he has been recording testimonies at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre as an ageing and willing witness to the horrors that stalk so many of his contemporaries.

  In a quiet room with a big black screen and a professional set of lights, he chronicles the intimate details of other peoples’ losses, mastering the intricacies of filming more skilfully than he has shielded himself from the legacy of listening to so much tragedy.

  For decades, he has devoted four days a week of his long retirement to the painstaking recording of testimonies from those who, like him, outlived Hitler’s plans. Largely self-taught, his dedication — he has been involved with 1,000 of the centre’s 1,600 testimonies — has consumed more than a quarter of his long life, and has been recognised with an Order of Australia Medal.

  But there is one story that will always stay with him. Shadowing his years of detailed documentation is his own tale of tragedy and survival, and the loss of most of his extended family, a history as harrowing as all the others, and one that belies the smile he wears today.

  He was born in 1922 in Vilna, now the capital of Lithuania but then a Polish city with more than 100 synagogues and 200,000 residents, 55,000 of them Jewish. By the time he was twenty-three and the war was over, he would be among the tiny percentage of Jews from his hometown still alive.

  He was one of three children, born within minutes of his twin sister, Bella, and six years after his brother, Joseph. Both his parents — his father, who was a
flax wholesaler, and his mother, who died when he was ten — were from Russia. He was raised in a Russian-speaking kosher home, attended a Polish school, and was well versed in the laws of Judaism and in his city’s changeable history.

  Throughout his life, Vilna had known many masters. Once the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it had come under Polish control in the early 1920s, was occupied by Soviet forces in September 1939, and by October that year had been transferred to Lithuania.

  Under Soviet occupation, his life changed markedly. His family’s assets were seized, and, having recently completed school, he went to work not at his father’s business, which had been taken over, but at a paper shop, later becoming technical secretary of the local branch of the Soviet paper workers’ union.

  Life was different and difficult but still tolerable, and then the pace of World War II changed his hometown’s fortunes again. By June 1941, the city was controlled by German forces, who quickly issued the first of many anti-Jewish decrees. Suddenly, Jews could not walk on the pavement of their own city. They had to wear a yellow star on their clothes to identify them. They were subject to a curfew and could only buy minimum quantities of food. Within weeks, they were being forcibly removed from their homes.

  On 7 September 1941, his once unspectacular life was abruptly curtailed when he and his family were given twenty minutes to grab what they could before leaving their home forever and moving into the city’s newly formed ghetto.

  Here, in the poorest part of town, where perhaps 50,000 were crammed into an area constructed for 5,000, he would spend the next two years, labouring at first, then training in six months to become an auto electrician.

  He became friendly with a group of young people who had started a resistance group within the ghetto, and collected light bulbs that might be converted into bombs. He also resumed his friendship with a former paper workers’ unionist, the poet Hirsh Glik, who would become best known for writing ‘Zog nit keynmol’ (‘Never Say’), today known as the ‘Partisan Song’ and the unofficial anthem of Holocaust survivors.