We Are Here Read online

  I felt the impotence of being a survivor. They kicked us in the arse and we still came back begging. When I went home after the war, I felt that they were glad to have been rid of us, and they looked askance that we were coming, seeping back. Their attitude was sort of: what are you doing here? We were still powerless after the war. So I became a Zionist.

  Many refugees were coming back from Russia, people who had run away from Poland when the war was on and now they returned and they couldn’t establish themselves in Poland because there was open anti-Semitism. It was a hopeless situation. So our people convinced them the only solution for them is to go to Palestine.

  The British were against it. They didn’t want Jews leaving Europe, so it had to be done secretly. I participated in meetings when some of the future leaders of the labour movement in Israel discussed why Jewish survivors should not stay in Europe. And at the meeting one of them said, ‘You have to force them. If they don’t want to come, force them to come’ — in the belief that if immigration had existed during the war, a lot more people would have still been alive.

  This stream of people started to develop through Italy, more or less out of control. They were happy to be saved. They were usually youth, picked up as remnants from the camps and promised safety in Palestine. They were transported by the Jewish Brigade from Austria, from Germany to Italy with the hope that a ship would come and take them across the Mediterranean Sea.

  Yes, I was a people smuggler in today’s terms. I was comfortable doing it. I felt it was worthwhile, yes. Why did I become involved? That was part of my duty towards my people. I survived. I had to do something.

  I was an overgrown member of a youth movement, and in youth movements you talk, you dream. Now all of this — establishing a home for the Jewish people — became all of a sudden a reality. I was working with many like-minded survivors; when the first Israeli parliament was set up, a quarter of the members I knew personally.

  But Israel was also a country with a lot of difficulties. So we came to Australia. By the time we arrived, I was a father, married, and I had to provide for the family. I liked that Australia was far away. In Italy, I wasn’t allowed to work for an Italian, because I was a foreigner, a refugee. When I came to Australia, I had only one worry: to make a living, to progress. I went to work within a week. You had to get used to the fact that everything was upside down, much more casual.

  I didn’t feel at home, but I felt tolerated. I said to many Australians, ‘You don’t have to love me, but you will bloody tolerate me.’ That’s a feeling I didn’t have in Europe. I felt safe here.

  I spoke about the war as often as I met with people. When we had these afternoon teas or dinners, it always came down to ‘What happened to you in the war?’ No matter how you wriggled, by the time the food was over and you had a schmooze, it always came down to that subject.

  Today, some survivors are buying up old houses in the centre of Budapest and building hotels there. I think that’s wrong. Once they demonstrate that they don’t want you, what the hell are you going to push yourself back there for? Our people are still the minority.

  Last night, when I wasn’t sleeping, I counted 100 people from Balassagyarmat who survived.

  Lena Goldstein

  BORN: Chaja Midler

  31 January 1919

  Lublin, Poland

  There are no visual clues to the Holocaust’s legacy on Lena Goldstein’s long life. She bares no outward scars or wounds, and her arms, though spotted with age, are tattoo-free.

  She is a lively woman, sharp and witty, a natural conversationalist. But her words, often and invariably, flow back to World War II, whether she is voluntarily addressing a class of children about her survival tale, a decades-long labour for which she has been awarded an Order of Australia Medal, or chatting otherwise inconsequentially over a coffee. She talks for hours, evenly and in detail, and then laments that there is still so much more to be said. Just as calmly, she flicks through a book of graphic photographs of the Warsaw ghetto, her one-time enforced home, without flinching. ‘I am just checking that it was like that,’ she says as she turns through the same pages of dead body piles and dying children that have lined this tome, unchanged, for decades. ‘And it was like that.’

  Her burden is invisible and enduring. Six per cent of her life was consumed by war, a proportion that lessens the longer she lives. But her memory of those six years, and their personal toll, has become her life’s longest companion, a weighty presence that has outlasted every member of the tiny circle of loved ones who survived when she thought no one else had.

  The youngest of four siblings, she was born in Lublin, where her childhood comprised Polish and Jewish friendships and family gatherings with multiple aunts, uncles, cousins, and three of her grandparents.

  By her late teens, she was living in Warsaw and studying law, a field that hinted at a just and cerebrally satisfying life. After her first semester, however, Jewish students were suddenly ordered to sit to one side of the law auditorium at Warsaw University. They refused, and many were beaten up. When those same students were then banned from sitting exams, her legal future was over.

  Her early adulthood was a mix of missed opportunities and occasional miracles over which she had little to no control. Looking to study wherever she could, in 1939 she was accepted into dentistry at a university in Brussels. But Germany invaded Poland before she could leave to start the academic year, and one more possibility evaporated.

  In late 1940, when Jews were forced to move to a newly walled part of Warsaw, she and her parents were already living in the area consigned to become the ghetto. So they stayed where they were, with the dwindling assets they would later swap for food.

  For five years, she escaped death although it surrounded her constantly. She hid beneath a pile of clothes when her mother was seized from a ghetto laundry on Jewish New Year in 1942. Eight days later, when she tried to stop her father being forcibly marched away on the Day of Atonement, she was whipped into unconsciousness. Both her parents were killed. Soon her boyfriend would also be dead, and, she would learn later, almost everyone she had ever loved.

  Of the 400,000-plus Jews who had been forced into the Warsaw ghetto, by early 1943 she was one of just 35,000 who were still alive. In a life otherwise drained of hope, she had learned that some other Jews were planning an uprising, and, from the laundry where she had taken over the work of her dead parents, she was surreptitiously passing on German army uniforms and collecting light bulbs — to be used for Molotov cocktails — from forcibly vacated Jewish homes.

  But even the possibility of an uprising was not enough to quell her loneliness. Her sister and brother-in-law had been deported to Siberia and had not been heard from. Apart from her two brothers, who were living apart in the ghetto, unreachable and also soon to be killed, she was alone. In April 1943, she walked towards a ghetto wall, knowing she would be shot as she approached. It was preferable, she decided, to death in a concentration camp.

  Instead, two guards beckoned to her, and for reasons they never stated, gave her a reprieve: be at the main gate in a few days, with your hair bleached, and we will let you leave.

  She arrived at the wall later that week posing as a Polish woman heading for work. She wore high heels and a short-sleeved shirt, the finest of the few clothes she still had, and in her handbag she carried two identification documents in German and six family photographs. They remain her most cherished possessions.

  The same soldiers were there and silently they let her pass. It was 18 April 1943 when she exited. The following day, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at freedom that ended, weeks later, with the ghetto destroyed and its few remaining occupants killed.

  She spent the rest of the war in darkness and mostly silence, hiding for eighteen months with three strangers in a janitor’s bathroom inside an apartment block. And then for six months she e
xisted in an underground hole with eight others, a blackened bunker no more than two square metres, not high enough for standing, with one small candle and a daily ration of boiled grain among the few markers of the slow passage of time.

  In January 1945, she emerged to a desolate street in a liberated but empty Warsaw, where no one was waiting for her and with nowhere to go. Only then did she cry.

  Months later, working to find displaced people around Europe, she discovered that her sister, Fela, and her brother-in-law were alive in Siberia.

  In 1945, she met and married Olek Goldstein, a fellow survivor who had outlasted three concentration camps. They arrived in Sydney in January 1949.

  It was very dangerous in Poland for Jews after the war. But where could we go? Wherever we wanted to go, nobody wanted us. Then my sister and I remembered a cousin who had been sent to live in Australia before the war. We wrote to the Jewish Welfare Society in Sydney and very quickly we heard back; they found him in the army in New Guinea, and he was so happy to have any family left. Everyone else had died in Poland. He sent us permits immediately.

  I had two German documents and photographs of my family. That’s all I had. Olek had nothing because he came from a concentration camp. We had the passports that we came with.

  A few days after we arrived, someone we had just met told us, ‘You have to go on Sunday to Hyde Park, to the Domain, and then you will see a little bit of Australia.’ So we went to the Domain and there were those boxes and somebody standing on the box and speaking. Everybody was speaking against somebody. No one was pro anything. And here we see a policeman is promenading past, and smiling and talking to other people — and no intention to arrest anybody.

  At this moment, I fell in love with Australia. Because I went through German, Polish, and Russian so-called democracy where you were afraid to talk in front of your child because they might repeat what you said and you would be sent straightaway either to a concentration camp or to a Gulag.

  It’s a different way of life here, in a good way. You don’t know what it means when you come from a country where you are afraid to say a word even in front of your children. And you come here and you are not afraid to say the worst thing about anybody. You are free to say it. They might not like it, but you are responsible for what you do and what you say. It’s very liberating. And people that have lived all their lives in a free country, they can’t appreciate it. They think it’s natural.

  I want you to hear what I thought about freedom while I was in the bunker. This was written just for myself, a kind of a diary: ‘We dream of freedom. Freedom. This word has acquired a magical power and now it means much more than it ever did before … For us, freedom is a word which has become alive. It is our goal and our dream. It is the sky above us and the sun and the stars and the ground under our feet and the air for our lungs. It is a full stomach and a fearless look. It is the end of a hunted dog’s existence. Everything that we are missing and everything for which we strive, that is freedom. Because to us freedom means life.’

  That was written on November 16, 1944. Four years later, I am in the Domain. And nobody tells me ‘bloody Jew’. And I said to my husband, ‘You see, this is freedom.’

  When we came out of the bunker, Warsaw was completely destroyed. Because of all the bombings, there was no glass, but we managed to find an apartment and in one small room we replaced one window. A group of us started living there.

  Some of my housemates met Olek and invited him to come and stay with us. This is what he looked like: Instead of socks, he had newspaper on his feet. He had trousers made of brown paper bags. No shirt but a child’s jacket, so the sleeves were coming up to here. Instead of shoes, he had been wearing clogs, but he couldn’t walk far in them, so then he found a pair of football shoes, and he was wearing those. He had a sore tooth, so one side of his face was swollen, and the other side, because of starvation, was sunken. He looked like a caricature of a person. I couldn’t have fallen for him from first sight.

  I was lonely. I wanted to have somebody to talk to. Someone else wanted to marry me at the time, so I had to leave where I was living because I didn’t want to marry him, and it was uncomfortable; I didn’t survive to do something I didn’t believe in. Olek tried to help me find somewhere else to live.

  I could talk to Olek, but he was very inward, and he kept things to himself. So I was trying to ‘seduce’ him, and it was very hard. His heart was still elsewhere. He had a wife and her family, but they had been taken away. He told me, ‘Until I know what happened to Lily, I am not going to start any other relationship.’ He was going to Lublin, looking for his wife. I warned him, ‘There’s no sense going to Lublin.’ Because I knew that no one had survived there.

  He never talked about her, but he must have loved his first wife very much when he lost her because that was his first love and they married in a ghetto, young people, and I always suspected when he is closer to me that he has got a bad conscience.

  You couldn’t live in Poland as Goldstein; it was too dangerous. So he took on the surname of a dead friend, Okon — nobody had any documents anyway — and we were married at the police station in Warsaw in 1945 as Mr and Mrs Okon. I don’t remember the date; it was a few months after we were liberated. Later, when we were in a displaced-persons camp in Germany and it was safe, we took back the name of Goldstein.

  Building a life together was working hard, first of all to escape from Poland, and to start a normal life. And then we came here. First, we were working twelve or fourteen hours a day — I was a finisher at a clothing factory in Bondi Junction as soon I got to Australia — to save for key money. For sure it was not easy, but we didn’t feel it. We were satisfied that we were free. Every night, we were going to the pictures, with sandwiches Olek would make, for two or three sessions of the same film. It was like going to university because that was our lessons of the English language. That’s how we lived.

  We had our own factory later. Then Olek bought a shoe shop. I worked as a secretary at my brother-in-law’s factory, and then at another factory as a secretary. I don’t remember ever regretting that I didn’t go ahead with law. I would be happy if I finished any studies.

  For eleven years, I didn’t want to have children, because I was sure that if I loved my children I would have to lose them — as I lost everybody I ever loved. When I became a mother, I was afraid to show my love to my two children. I was trying to pretend that I didn’t love them; I was trying to cheat fate.

  I was doing everything that I should; they had music lessons, they did sport. But I didn’t show my feelings to them, because I was afraid. I was afraid to kiss them. When the other mothers were kissing their children, we called it ‘chuchela muchela’, and I was playing the part of a cold mother.

  I am not a compliment-maker. I never repeated to my sons if someone said something nice about them. I was afraid to tell them. Inwardly, I was very proud of them because I never heard anyone saying something unpleasant about them. I should be very proud of them. They are nice boys. But I don’t tell them.

  My grandchildren, I am the same with them. I can’t come and hug them and kiss them. I do feel great love and concern for them, but I can’t show it; I can’t be open about it. What’s the result of it? Let’s say they come here, a whole group of friends or family, my boys will kiss every woman hello, but they won’t kiss me. I know they probably missed out on the hugging and kissing, but I was afraid to do it.

  The most important thing in my life is my personal family. I can’t see anything that is more important. My father had three brothers and a sister, and each one of them had children. And my mother had two sisters, and they had children. Only my sister and I survived, and my father’s brother’s son who was already here.

  It’s a different world, and you get used to it, and it’s no use sitting and saying, ‘Look, I could have had here twenty-five people and only have five people.’ Some people don’t stop
talking about the family they lost. Nobody is interested in my little brother or big brother. They are interested in today.

  Maybe when I was younger, I believed in God, because my parents were traditional Jews. I am Jewish. It doesn’t mean that I am happy being Jewish, because it didn’t bring me happiness. But I am proud of being Jewish.

  I was already agnostic before the war started. But then I think of my father standing there naked at Treblinka, leading old men saying Kaddish (the Jewish memorial prayer) for the women and children that went to the gas chambers just before him. A man who escaped from Treblinka told me that the last thoughts of my father were about me.

  And the men standing there were crying ‘Shema Yisrael’ (praying ‘Hear O Israel’) — as their wives and children were being led to the gas chambers — and they were asking God to help them. And there was no answer. And then I read a Haggadah (Jewish text at Passover) when they say, every other sentence, ‘dayenu’; ‘if we would have done just that and that, that would be enough’. What was enough? That my two-day-old niece had seen so much that she deserved to be killed in a forest? And that’s God?

  Humiliation, it’s worse than physical pain. For the rest of my life, I’ve felt the anger. In the ghetto, the Germans would catch a young girl, take off her pants, and make her wash the pavement with her panties. It was such a funny spectacle for everyone around, all of our good neighbours. It wasn’t funny for us.

  When I was hiding in the bunker, I was thinking if I would ever come out, the first German I see on the street, whatever he does, I am going to kill him. But so far, I haven’t killed anybody. You are angry. But you can’t kill them all. When it comes to it, nobody is able to do it.