We Are Here Read online

  You can’t put people into one box. Can you say Poles are like that and Jews are like that? There were Jews that were working with the Germans and there were Poles that risked their lives to save people that they didn’t even know.

  We hoped after the war that people would have learned their lesson and that the world would become a better place. And instead in so many cases it’s even worse. People are afraid to go here or there. There were never so many cases of murders. Especially in America, people are going around with guns and shooting innocent people. It was never like that before the war.

  People ask me, ‘Did you go back?’ I don’t even know where my whole family was killed. I didn’t even have ashes to go to.

  I was twenty years old when the war broke out. I had a lot of friends. In all that time, I only once went to a funeral. Everybody was alive. Death was not as constant as it is now. In the last ten days, I went to two funerals and nearly to another one. So many people are dying young.

  I don’t know whether it’s been a good life, but I think in a way I was lucky because I had a good husband and I have got two nice boys, and I have got six nice grandsons, and I have got a nice family. I don’t have to live in a chateau. This house is good enough for me.

  I live every day as it comes. When I ring my friends up, I am afraid to say, ‘How are you?’ because they might tell me how they are and that’s not what I want to hear. ‘I wish I didn’t wake up,’ that’s their usual answer. I don’t even think about death.

  In the ghetto, we were so used to death that we were passing by dead bodies on the street, it didn’t make you stop. This was our life then, people starving to death. I never saw anybody dying; they were taken away from me and then I never saw them again.

  When my sister died of breast cancer, I saw her suffering. Then her husband followed her, and then Olek died. Now there is no one in the whole world that I can ask, ‘Do you remember?’

  Josef Hellen

  BORN: 8 February 1926

  Hodonín, Czechoslovakia

  In a long life marked by extremes, Josef Hellen has been a member of a large Czech family and one of its few post-war survivors. As a young inmate of Birkenau, he was surrounded by death, his own always an imminent possibility, and he became intimately acquainted with poverty. As a resident of Melbourne, he has reached his tenth decade with a private fortune so vast he is one of the most significant Australian property investors in the US.

  Working in one continent and living in another, with a love of fast cars and good whisky, his life, in a material sense, is infinitely larger than most. And yet, all this time after World War II, he seems to have never stopped surviving.

  He is, by his own assessment, a natural fighter, although there were few obvious signs of that as he grew up in an industrial Czech town, the second-eldest of four children. With a passion for knife throwing, a hobby that he practised endlessly against the door of his family’s outside toilet, he was an average student and had little knowledge of the religion into which he had been born. Hodonín, where his father was a butcher, had comparatively few Jews and there was such little emphasis on religion at home that he cannot remember having had a bar mitzvah.

  Until he was fifteen, he paid little attention to the encroaching war. Then he was suddenly ordered to wear a Star of David on his clothes, by virtue of the religion that he barely understood. He obeyed the decree mostly, but not on a day in early 1942 when he was one of six boys and a teacher randomly rounded up at school and taken to the local police station, as part of widespread retribution for the assassination of Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, a chief architect of the so-called Final Solution.

  He was sent to one prison, then another, and then to the concentration camp Auschwitz, where he was tattooed and his head was shaved, and he was ordered to begin work on the foundations of a camp crematorium.

  He worked later in the kitchen at Birkenau, where he was able to supplement his meagre diet, and eventually at the clearing area, known as Canada, where he sorted through other inmates’ seized property.

  Named in honour of the land of plenty, Canada was a vast storage warehouse, and working there afforded him considerable privilege compared to other inmates. Through the enormous stores of seized goods, he had access to food and clothes, jewellery, and cutlery.

  His time in Birkenau was as improbable as his survival. Where others were starving, his access to food meant he was not. From seized cutlery, he was able to alter a set of knives so that he could teach a guard, who had shown an interest in his hobby, to throw them. Several times, he was even rounded up to play soccer beside the crematorium in a team of inmates versus guards, a life-beside-death scenario so absurd he was reluctant to discuss it for a long time.

  After working in Canada for almost two years, his life’s trajectory changed again in January 1945 when Russian troops were approaching the camp and he and other inmates were forced on a death march. On the first night of the brutal trek, he escaped.

  Needing a place to hide, he randomly knocked on the door of a house belonging to an old Polish couple. They allowed him to stay in their hayloft until Russians troops arrived, liberating him and sparing the pair who had harboured him.

  The life and death extremes that had marked his survival of World War II continued as he was released back into the free world, a young man who no longer had a family. He took a bicycle and rode back briefly to Birkenau, and with the help of a Russian Jewish captain travelled by truck to Slovakia. From utter poverty at liberation, he was soon working the black market in Eastern Europe, based in Hungary, where he had gone to find a girlfriend from Birkenau. When his lack of Judaic knowledge failed to impress her orthodox family, however, he turned his attentions to a neighbour, and they were soon engaged.

  His wife, Judith, was also a survivor. In 1950, they left for Australia — because it was far from Europe, and because it had fewer Jews than the US, and the comparative lack of competition, he figured, was bound to boost his business prospects.

  He started working almost immediately for General Motors, bought a milk bar later in a working-class part of Melbourne, and began to amass a sizeable real-estate portfolio, which eventually extended to the US.

  In the mid-1960s, his daughter Evelyn, who had been born at sea two days before his ship docked in Melbourne, became ill with leukaemia. She died in 1968, aged seventeen. He and his wife later had two other children. Now a grandfather, he works six days a week, and, apart from regular tennis games, business consumes much of his life.

  I never thought I was a Jew to start with. I didn’t know anything about being Jewish, nothing, till Hitler came along and said, ‘You’re Jewish.’

  Did I resent that? When you lose your parents and your brother and sisters and your relations, everybody, what do you think? I would do anything not to lose them.

  The war completely changed me from a boy who didn’t know anything about the world. The longest I had been was ten kilometres from Hodonín. I didn’t have a clue about business, big business, small business.

  I didn’t have a young life. I never got to be a young boy, because I went to a concentration camp. It was more than a university. It was life education. Everything I learned the hard way, meaning in Auschwitz. It was a very tough school.

  I learned to be cunning, to trust nobody — I didn’t trust my finger; everything had to be checked and double-checked — and to take calculated risks. I didn’t care about anything or anyone. It was me, me, me, me. I wanted to survive.

  In Birkenau, I was lucky to get into a commando called Canada. I had a top position, cleaning boots. Everything came to Canada: salami, sardines; the Greeks bought figs. I got more food than at home. Half a dozen sardines bought you luck; I went direct to the Polish inmate who was working in the crematorium. There they got gold, diamonds, you name it, but not food. So it was an easy trade through the wire; no pleasure, just business.

  It w
asn’t stealing. Stealing was when you took bread from someone who was really hungry, skin and bones, and you took their last portion of bread. When you steal from Germans, that’s organising. They stole. I organised.

  When you organise, you have to be very, very patient and have good nerves. I learned everything in the concentration camp: what a diamond is, what gold is, what twenty dollars is worth, and so on. I wanted to have a diamond because it was easy and small. In the end, I got plenty. How many? I wouldn’t have a clue. I had a lot of gold and so on buried in the timber where I slept. When I went back to find it, after liberation, it was all burned; dead bodies were still lying around.

  The guards treated me better than others. Possibly my face was pretty good, honest. Who knows? For me, everybody was SS. The nicest they would have been, or if they gave me gold, I still was suspicious. Only one guard, Blöde (Stupid) Heine, was after me. He found me when I was organising — I took some food — and he started with a stick to get me, hitting me anywhere he could. He broke my nose, gave me this big scar on my face. He would have killed me. And another guard came past and said, ‘Leave him alone.’ Then he stopped.

  I started looking for Blöde Heine thirty years ago when I had money and I was travelling. I was looking for a long time. My God, I wanted to find him. I would have killed him, easy. I offered money, but nobody would give me information. I went in Berlin to Jews everywhere, and I asked where and how could I get him? ‘Do you know his name?’ I didn’t, not his real name. How could I go to the police when I didn’t know his name? He just disappeared.

  I made a mistake. I should have known his name and memorised it.

  I kept in touch with one of the SS guards, the one who had stopped the beating. He was pretty good; he used to talk to me in Canada about his girlfriend and everything. I was young and he knew if he told me something nobody would know. I was not the man who would share something. I never, ever pointed the finger to anyone. I wouldn’t even dream about it. After the war, I met him once or twice. We shook hands. He wanted to meet me, and in my opinion he was entitled to. He saved my life. How can I say no?

  He wasn’t much older than me, possibly four or five years. I never saw him do anything bad. When he came to Canada, one guard said to me, ‘He’s different. He’s a gentleman.’ He was a gentleman in one way. But still he was SS in my way. Even though he saved my life, my family was gone. That’s not his fault. But he was SS.

  I escaped the first night of the death march. I was walking like everybody else, with lots of clothes on and six knives. I could have taken thousands of pullovers from Canada, thousands of everything. I took what was the best, and warm.

  There were trees, and every twenty metres was a guard with dogs and a gun. I calculated I would try and jump between the trees. If they sent the dogs, I had no problem, because I had the knives and I could easily use them.

  I took the chance. I ran through the trees. I saw a pile of straw for cows, and I hid myself in there. Then I went through some villages. I was on the edge of one village, and two young Polish men came after me. I threw the knives, took them out and cleaned them, and then went on my way. I didn’t ask questions. And if they were alive or not, who cares? After millions of people were killed, two more doesn’t make any difference.

  After the war, I was a different man. I couldn’t go home. Where was my home? I had a girlfriend in Canada, so I went to Hungary to wait on her. She was Jewish, very religious. I knew nothing about being a Jew, and her family said no, no marriage. What did I do? I married a neighbour two doors away.

  I didn’t talk about the war much with my wife. When she came back home, I had already been working for five months on the black market in Hungary. I went to Romania for matches and salt. I went to the Slovak Republic with a lot of cigarettes. And I was changing roubles to dollars. That was my life.

  I didn’t see any kindness from anybody, especially when I came here. I asked for a 200-pound loan; they said, ‘You have to have five guarantors.’ How can I get five guarantors when I didn’t know anybody? I didn’t get the money. I started with fifty pounds, and then my wife went to work at a chemist shop, and that’s where we started.

  There were all Australian working class people in Broadmeadows, and I was one of them, working fifteen-hour days. Sometimes, I was so tired I forgot to lock the milk bar. No problem; nobody robbed it. The Australian workingman knows if you are working hard. I belong to Australia now — not at first; after a few years.

  I went possibly twenty times back to Hodonín. My house was still there. I felt nothing. I saw — let’s call them school friends. Every year, we went to one of their vineyards, and there we talked about the girlfriends we had when we were fifteen or sixteen. They asked me about the war; I didn’t tell them too much. They wouldn’t believe me anyway. I know only them from before the war, nobody else.

  I didn’t have friends in the war. I still don’t really have very close friends. I have got a few reasonable friends who are business friends in Los Angeles, but really close friends, no. My closest friend was my wife.

  It has been already eight years that she has been sick. Sometimes she recognises me, sometimes not. Today, if she wasn’t at home with the two nurses twenty-four hours, within a week she would be gone. I promised her father more than sixty years ago that I would look after her and if she wished she could have a kosher house, the children would go to a Jewish school. I promised. I delivered.

  Really, for eight years now, I have been on my own. I have my business, sometimes tennis. Sometimes, I go on the treadmill for half an hour.

  The happiest time in my life was when I had enjoyment with my daughter Evelyn and she was going to kindergarten. My daughter was numero uno. We had a hard time the first two or three years. I was young. We gave the little girl to an Australian family to look after her full-time for a year, because my wife was working and I was working. My wife was not so healthy then, and this was the decision that I had to make. She was well cared for. Then we got her back and we were really very happy.

  When my daughter died, I just couldn’t take it. I never cried. Everything is inside. If I could get it out, it would be much, much better. Every day, I was in the cemetery. I made a mistake not having half a dozen children. I could afford to. I just was too greedy, with time and to make money.

  I think about my parents and my sister and brother in the night; I dream. When I was younger, I didn’t. In September, I say a memorial prayer for them in English. I took that date years ago; I wouldn’t have a clue when they died.

  Survivor’s guilt? Are you kidding me? I never knew what is guilt. I just was lucky to survive. I would kill to survive. That’s my nature, to fight.

  I am happy with what I achieved in one way: business-wise I didn’t dream I would achieve one tenth of what I got. Work is very, very important. It’s in my blood. I am still young at heart. I enjoy fast cars. I have all the whisky I need. I’ve got everything except one thing. I have got nobody to take over my business.

  I still don’t know too much about being Jewish. I was born a Jew, and I stick to it. If I would have been born Christian, I would be Christian, I wouldn’t change. The religious Jews who survived and who saw people going to the crematorium, they never came back to be religious again. I didn’t know anything about being Jewish — and now I am more Jewish than before.

  I saw Jews go to the crematorium, 100,000 of them, and I said to myself, I am here two-and-a-half years, and I survived. My family was completely wiped out because they were born Jewish. What the hell, I am the last Mohican.

  I am a Jew.

  Marianne Schwarz

  BORN: Marie Gross

  8 August 1922

  Vienna, Austria

  In a long and cruel war that removed almost every semblance of normalcy from her once civilised world, Marianne Schwarz only lost hope once. She was in her early twenties and an inmate of Germany’s Bergen-Belsen conc
entration camp, the latest in an endless chain of camps in which she had been imprisoned for her entire adulthood simply because of her religion.

  Judaism had played a moderate role in her early years in Vienna, where she attended a local school and had had mostly Jewish friends. Her father had been a banker and had then run a haberdashery shop. Yet the religion into which she was born had become the defining element of her existence as Hitler’s power increased.

  Her mother had wanted to move to Palestine, but her father, nineteen years older, had worried about surviving in another country, with a different language. So they had remained in Vienna, where she watched tearfully, in March 1939, as her only brother, Heinz, seven years her junior, was put on a train to France — and though the childhood he knew was halted, his life was saved.

  Banned from attending school because of her religion, in her late teens she tried to find a job with the local Jewish community’s retraining program, and spent a few months attending mothercraft and kindergarten courses. She also worked as a nursing aide in a Viennese Jewish hospital.

  Yet any outlet she sought soon had limited options as the restrictions on almost every area of her life tightened. As a Jew, she could not be treated by a non-Jewish dentist. She could not use public transport. She could only live in a defined area.

  By September 1942, with Jews being deported almost daily, tension among those remaining in Vienna was acute as they awaited news of the next steps of lives that were no longer under their own control. When she and her parents were finally packed onto a train and sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto near Prague, just a week after her grandparents were deported, the relief she felt at the end of so much uncertainty was short-lived.