We Are Here Read online

  She arrived at the death camp in January 1944, and became known by the number tattooed to her arm, 74260. A year later, with Russian forces approaching, she was taken on a death march through snow-covered streets to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany and then to nearby Malchow. She was on another death march when she escaped near Hamburg, hiding in a barn with two other girls for three days until she heard people shouting, ‘die Russen sind da’ (‘the Russians are here’), and then she was free.

  She fell to her knees when she met her liberator, a Russian soldier on horseback who took her into the farmhouse so she could wash and eat, and who signed an old Christmas card that she had found in the house: ‘To the girl from Poland, Mala Rekant, from your liberator.’ It was all she had from Germany.

  She returned to Poland shortly after, but when she reached Łódź she learned that her family was dead. So she left the country for the last time and turned back to Germany, to a displaced-persons camp, and months later, after hearing of an opening for refugees, she travelled to Sweden. There, in April 1946, she married Isi Sonnabend, a survivor who had been married to her cousin. He, too, had lost a spouse and child to the war.

  Seven months after their marriage, they sailed into Melbourne, and were reunited with Mala’s sister and her husband — her closest remaining relatives.

  When I was liberated, I didn’t have anything. Many people who were freed in Germany could go into a house and take anything: cutlery, fur coats. I took a card from the house where I was liberated. This is all. I had no change of clothes, no change of underwear, nothing. I couldn’t take anything; I was glad that I was alive, and I didn’t bother about material things.

  Sweden really helped me learn to become human again. For five years, I’d lived from day to day. I didn’t know whether I would get killed in the morning, or lunchtime, or evening. And then we came to Sweden and we saw a table covered with a white tablecloth and plenty of food. I couldn’t believe it.

  I had to learn to trust people. In Sweden, it was all under snow, and I went to a shop and I saw people had left their parcels outside, and no one took them. You learned how to deal with people. You learned to sit down, to use a knife and fork. You were living for so many years just using your fingers, using a mug for everything. Sweden was the birthplace that showed you a little bit of culture.

  And Australia was wonderful. It was very, very difficult at first: I learned to speak English only thanks to the radio and the paper; I slept two hours a night. When everything was done, my husband was studying medicine to requalify in Australia, the dishes were done, I took in some work with Hestia, the bra company, and I was making at home button loops and I was getting peanuts for it, but anyway I was getting something.

  For three years, we had nothing. Government benefits did not exist. I used to buy bones from the butcher, put in all the vegetables I could buy for a few pennies that were not fresh anymore, and make some soup for the whole week. How did we survive the three years? I don’t know. But we were very happy. We didn’t have to put bread under our pillow anymore.

  We were some of the first people who came here after the war. I remember when I first started telling my story, my sister didn’t believe me. She came to me and very gently said, ‘Do you know what, we’ll go to a doctor tomorrow. I’ll make an appointment and we’ll try to help you.’

  She thought I was crazy. And she wasn’t the only one. Everybody that I talked to was looking at me and thinking that I was just telling stories. So I stopped talking.

  I lost a whole family through the war. I didn’t want to be reminded of what happened and what I lost. Even now I don’t like to talk about it. I spoke only once publicly. I was getting old and I thought there are some things people should know.

  I still have nightmares. That’s why I don’t want to talk, because I just can’t. What I’m telling you, what I tell people, is not the same as living through it. I saw terrible things. Of course, you can’t forget it, but you don’t want to introduce it into your new life.

  I became pregnant on the way to Australia. And I had the baby here. I was happiest when my son was born, and later my daughter. Because I never thought I would have a family again, that I would have children again.

  The upbringing of the children was probably the best part of my life. I put all my abilities and all my life into it. When I came here, I wanted to go and study pharmacy, and my husband said, ‘Why do you want to do this? You’re raising the children.’ I had a very good, interesting life, a useful life, in bringing up the children, in helping them in the early years when they needed help, to stand by them, to share their lives with them. The best times of my life were when the children were growing up and I always knew what was going on and somehow there was a very good understanding between us. I loved them; I loved the fact that I had a family again. And now I have two children, six grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. And I can’t believe it.

  The children found out slowly about our past, the stories in connection with the family, when they were taken away, what we were eating in the camps. We did it in steps. It was not something I would like to hide from them.

  We tried to normalise our life, not to live all the time in the shadow of the war and the camps. We didn’t talk to them in a derogatory way. We talked about the war, but when they didn’t want to eat, we didn’t say, ‘You have to eat because we starved,’ things like that which happened a lot. It turned out to be the right way.

  I was thinking if we wanted to create a new life, we couldn’t create it on hatred. Isi felt the same way; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to do it. There was a good understanding between us. We supported each other. We talked a bit, but we didn’t have to talk much. We knew a lot of things that happened to each other. When we were in the ghetto in Białystok, we were put in the same building, and he would come and talk every day about what happened, and this brought us closer. We knew each other’s families. There wasn’t anything that we had to find out. We knew without talking. I don’t think we would have survived afterwards if we didn’t understand each other.

  I consciously didn’t want the children to be brought up with a negative approach to life. We both had more or less the same idea. I didn’t want them to think that people lost all their humanity. There were many people thanks to whom many survivors are here. I thought it’s important when you bring up children to think of good things, that there are good people in the world, not only bad ones.

  I think people are good, definitely, because I experienced it; I experienced the good and I experienced the bad, amongst Polish people and amongst German people.

  When we were hiding in the house in Sokoły, they just took everything from us in the night. In the morning, they said we could leave because there were no Germans. And as soon as we walked out, Germans started popping up from behind the wall and started shooting and so we started to run. My husband was carrying the baby. They got killed. And I was running, and when I looked around I saw what was happening.

  I must have fallen asleep later because at one stage somebody touched me on the arm and I opened my eyes and I saw a German soldier in front of me. He said, ‘Get up, and I will take you to where the other Jews are gathered.’ And I started to run then, I said, ‘You can shoot me instead.’ I was running and I heard a shot — and it didn’t hit me. I was still alive. And I saw the German walk away. He was shooting in the air and not shooting me. He walked away. It’s incredible. Some Germans really behaved properly. Even in camp, there were people who were nice to you and people who were not.

  Kindness is very important, and thinking of others, and being grateful. When I came home from school on a Friday afternoon, my mother always prepared three little baskets of food for three families who didn’t have much. And I always remember those people who hid me for a month in Poland. I couldn’t even go back to thank them when I was liberated, because they still weren’t safe from their own
people for saving a Jew. I can’t forget these acts of kindness.

  Tolerance is a big factor in your life. I talked to one lady the other day and she told me she was in the war, and I said, ‘How can you criticise food then?’ In the war, we got a slice of bread, sometimes it was mouldy, but you survived, and you were grateful if you got an extra slice of cold sausage.

  I am generally a positive person. I don’t want to think of bad things. When I judge a person, I won’t think that you’ve got bad shoes, I’ll think you’ve got good hair.

  It has been a good life. A lot depends on how you make it, what you expect. Everything was built around my family, and I expected them to be good people. When I look at my children, I see they have grown up beautiful kids. All of the grandchildren are very nice. I would like them to follow in the footsteps of their parents, and they all do — choose the right company; the value of work and not to depend on other peoples’ earnings; be honest to each other. I can’t complain about my grandchildren or children.

  I consider myself lucky, absolutely. Despite everything that happened, the fact is that I could bring up a new family. I sometimes think, why am I the only one left? Every time I get together with my family I look at them and I think, well there must have been a reason I survived. There is a reason: to create a new family, not to let the family die altogether.

  When I sit at the table on a Friday night and I see my whole family there — embracing Jewish tradition, and the little great-grandchildren doing gymnastics, and the five-year-old saying Kiddush (Friday night prayers) — I think about one thing. How come I am the creator of all those things? Do they realise? Because I can hardly realise myself.

  Shmulik Moses

  BORN: Ernő Mozes

  11 September 1923

  Balassagyarmat, Hungary

  Shmulik Moses’s war was short — so brief, comparatively, that for a long time he felt he had not suffered enough to be considered a survivor. Yet its legacy endures, not in any physical manifestation, but with the lingering sense of displacement that flooded his soul midway through his war and never disappeared.

  He was a young printer when the Holocaust arrived belatedly in Hungary. The eldest of three brothers, he had grown up in Balassagyarmat, a northern town with a centuries-old Jewish community. By the mid-1800s, every third local was Jewish — a statistic that would seem even more startling by 1945, when just a handful of those people and their descendants were still alive.

  For as long as he could remember, he had lived with anti-Semitism. As a Jew, he could serve in the army but not be an officer, and nor could he work in the public service or as a police officer. Instead, when he finished high school and there was no chance of attending university because of his religion, he began learning his trade.

  In 1942, as war became increasingly personal to Jews in other parts of Europe, his printing apprenticeship concluded and he moved for work to Budapest, and then to a small town on the Danube. By then he had become increasingly involved with a Zionist youth group, Bnei Akiva, which advocated for the creation of a Jewish state on socialist and religious terms, and he had started learning Hebrew.

  Within two years, Nazism was rapidly permeating Hungarian life, and he faced even greater and more sinister restrictions. He had to wear a Star of David on his clothes. A five p.m. curfew was imposed. Before long, local gendarmes arrived at his workplace and ordered him to return to his hometown immediately.

  He arrived in April 1944, and within a week was ordered to move again, this time into the town’s ghetto with most of his family. Within a month, Jewish men aged fifteen and over were being summoned to the local synagogue, where an official from a local military unit announced that they were to be deployed as army labour: either for Germany, or, to save their lives, with Hungary.

  In May 1944, he was mobilised into a Hungarian army labour unit. Of his immediate family, only his mother now remained in Balassagyarmat. Within a fortnight, he was taken to Poland, where, armed with a pick and shovel, his life was reduced to a harsh regimen of tough physical work, with little to eat and often no shelter. As a forced labourer, he had some food but never a full stomach, he was regularly reliant on the goodness of strangers for sustenance, and he was often left to sleep in paddocks with cows.

  Even his identity was unprotected from the degradations that were ravaging Jewish life around him. With a Nazi-supporting government having been installed in Hungary, he was no longer referred to by name but by his unit number, and his company was sent west. Sometimes working, but mostly marching, he was forced to trek endlessly across the width of Hungary, and on one unforgettable day he was led though his hometown where a once flourishing Jewish population had all but vanished.

  After marching for two months, he arrived at the Austrian border at the end of 1944, confined to a brick factory when not ordered to clean frozen snow from roads, and as 1945 began he was transferred to Austrian authorities, where SS officers now guarded this weakened and bedraggled group of Jewish men.

  Only when he saw one of those officers shoot an inmate in the head as he was digging an army tank ditch did he accept that his life had lost its value; if he, too, was murdered, no one, he realised, would be held accountable.

  The toll of forced labour and minimal food increased, and members of his unit became increasingly sick with typhus, to be taken out to a field and shot. He was one of perhaps twenty men still alive when he, too, became seriously ill. As the able-bodied members of his company were moved on, he was driven away by truck, and he resigned himself to death.

  Instead, he was taken with others to another Austrian town and dumped at an empty school with few to no guards present. After three days, a Russian soldier arrived, and he was, figuratively, free.

  He spent two weeks walking back to Budapest, was arrested several times en route by Russians who suspected him of being a German spy, and learned that his father and two brothers were still alive. He returned home, and with the rest of his family awaited his mother’s arrival.

  In the post-war years, he began working with other young Jewish people surreptitiously trying to establish contact between surviving European Jewry and the Jewish Brigade of the British army, which was quietly trying to help survivors illegally make their way to Palestine, then under British control, ahead of the establishment of Israel.

  He lived in Italy until 1954 when he emigrated to Australia with his wife, Rachel, and the first of their two children. They later ran a ladieswear shop in Sydney.

  When I came back from the war, I never felt that I qualified as a survivor. I remember, years later, telling my story to someone from Poland, and she said to me, ‘You were in a scout camp.’ When I heard about what had happened in Auschwitz and in all those camps, I thought, well, I am not a first-grade sufferer.

  It was a short part of my life, and what I went through was still awful. When I got home to Balassagyarmat, we still believed that Mother was coming back; she was taken to Auschwitz a week after I left. Slowly, girls started to return from the camps, and they told stories of what had happened. I couldn’t find anybody who remembered Mother from the train or from her arrival at Auschwitz — up till today. I saw her last time when I was marched out of the ghetto; I looked back and I thought, well, now Mum is alone. She had nobody in town anymore. And I still feel guilty that I left her.

  Later, my justification was that if I had stayed, we would have both gone to Auschwitz. It pacifies me that I didn’t have that choice. But I still have that guilt occasionally when it comes to Yizkor (memorial prayers recited four times a year).

  And, of course, it has had a significant impact on the rest of my life. There’s a Hebrew term, shechikah (erosion); it’s like a cake of soap and you rub it here and there and in the end you finish off with barely nothing. What happened then made me what I am today.

  Before the war, we were living in a self-imposed ghetto. We didn’t want to, but we felt easier
that way. You were with people with whom you felt comfortable. If you ask me how many people we knew in Balassagyarmat who were non-Jews, I would count it on my hand.

  We had been part of this war all along in a non-acute way. As a Jew, I couldn’t study at university. I couldn’t be a public servant. We always dreamed that being in Hungary, we might slip through somehow. We watched the map, how the Germans retreated, and we thought we may be safe.

  But we only knew so much. I look today at how Adolf Eichmann took 440,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in mid-1944, a whole year after the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and we still didn’t know about it. We didn’t know there was a Warsaw ghetto uprising. We didn’t know Auschwitz existed. That’s why we went like sheep.

  I haven’t got enough reasons why we didn’t try to escape. Our wagons with the military, when they transferred me to Poland, were open. We could have jumped out. But where could we go?

  Later, when I was being marched through my hometown, I figured out that to escape wasn’t a big deal. You could lie down in the gutter, and the rest of them went, and you stayed. But I couldn’t figure out to whom in Balassagyarmat I could go.

  It was November, it had started to get cold, and I speculated, okay, I will escape and I could go to my house. But what do I do if the lady now living there says, ‘No, I don’t want you’? I realised then that I don’t belong here. Nobody wants me.

  That sense of isolation I felt from the moment I passed through my town encapsulates my whole life story. It gave me the picture that I am a stranger here. I never felt at home again.

  I realised that I didn’t have more than two people to try to ask for help. I didn’t know anybody. Somehow through the process I became more Jewish than before. Before, Jewishness meant that I put on the tefillin (phylacteries) and I went to the synagogue. Later, it meant I was a minority that lives in a strange country.

  For thousands of years, we didn’t realise that we were guests, tolerated guests in these countries. And we kept on climbing slowly up. They looked upon us as though the Jews have got everything, the Jews are the rich ones. They were waiting to get into our flats. Later on, I saw a suit of mine on a local chap. I asked him when he bought it. He said it was from the local flea market in Budapest: my suit, tailored to my measure, that he had already torn. And I turned to my brothers and said: ‘What should I do, start an argument when nobody will support me?’