We Are Here Page 9

  Some survivors coped better than me. I would look at them. They were happy. They were dancing. Maybe in their hearts they were feeling it, but they were not showing sadness.

  I seem happy? Maybe I am a good actress. When I would go to the Jewish museum here in Sydney, my throat would get tight. I would have liked to have been a guide, but I was too emotional.

  What happened to me was bad. I was humiliated, I was beaten up, and I can’t get rid of it. We were seventy girls from one city, we had to make two rows, and the Germans were walking and we had to pull up our skirts, we had to show them our bums. Whoever had enough fat went to work. Whoever was a skeleton went to Auschwitz.

  I have been carrying this heavy weight with me my whole life, and the older I am it’s getting worse. It was a colossal loss of family and of your young years. Teenage years never come back. I survived because I was young and the German men had to fight in the war and they had to have slaves to work in their factories. I live with that. And nothing can change it.

  After seventeen, my life turned upside down. So how can you live and be happy? There’s a saying, ‘As you grow older, you get colder.’ I will be healed when the earth covers me.

  Eddie and

  Flore Jaku

  BORN: Abraham Jakubowicz

  14 April 1920

  Leipzig, Germany

  BORN: Flore Molho

  28 September 1923

  Thessalonica, Greece

  After decades of conscious and careful avoidance, the past has become Eddie Jaku’s present. He talks about it regularly, to school children and military officers, to diplomats, tourists, and German-speaking students, to never-ending roomfuls of strangers whose interest in his personal history seems to strengthen as he ages.

  Thousands have listened to his story of survival, which he details multiple times a week at the Sydney Jewish Museum, something he has been doing through much of his long retirement. He has spoken, too, to a multitude of community groups around the country and sixteen times to military officers and cadets in Canberra, a decades-long endeavour that contributed to his Order of Australia Medal.

  At an age where the voices of his contemporaries have softened, he has become a masterful raconteur. His delivery is warm and easy as he stands steadily before his audience, his voice skilfully building to a crescendo as he recounts his unlikely tale, which began in 1933 when he was thirteen and thrown out of his German school for being Jewish.

  In need of an education, he was whisked away by his father to a boarding school, and spent the remainder of his childhood assuming the identity of a non-Jewish student, Walter Schleif, who had less to fear from Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor than a Jewish boy from Leipzig.

  Although he was busy learning the finer points of precision engineering, he was lonely being away from his parents, his younger sister, Johanna, and his extended family. So in November 1938, five-and-a-half years after becoming exiled in his own country, he boarded a train home for the first time to surprise his parents on their twentieth wedding anniversary. In the sheltered environment of the boarding school, where he was assumed to be an orphan, he had learned little about the increasing hatred being shown towards Jews in Germany, and when he finally arrived home he was surprised to find no one there.

  History would remember this night as Kristallnacht, the infamous and frightening ‘night of broken glass’, and, in anticipation of the mooted pogroms that would devastate Jewish communities in Germany, Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia that night and the following, his parents and sister had gone into hiding. But he had no inkling of this as he went to bed, alone in the apartment, to be awoken at five a.m. by the frightening din of the family’s front door being broken down by German police.

  He was taken from his room and beaten, saw his family dog being killed, and was then sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He languished there for months until an old boarding-school friend, now working as a camp guard, arranged for him to be released briefly into his father’s care before he was to be taken to work, in exchange, as a factory toolmaker.

  Instead, his father drove him to the border, where a smuggler took them both to Belgium. His few weeks of safety there ended with his arrest by Belgian police for being German. In the ensuing months, he was interned multiple times, for being German or not, depending on the progress of the war and his location. Eventually, he made his way back to Brussels, hid in an attic, was denounced, and by November 1942 had been transported to Auschwitz.

  He spent more than two years there, forever on the precipice of death. He faced the daily risk of being hanged if the air-pressure units he was servicing at a Bayer medicine factory failed. He saw his father being trucked away to the gas chamber. And he lived with the constant fear of being gassed, too, in his barracks if an outbreak of lice was detected.

  His brutal time in Auschwitz concluded just as brutally in January 1945, with a three-day death march and then a harrowing train ride back to Buchenwald. There, he broke his self-imposed rule to never volunteer, and put his hand up to be a toolmaker at a German factory. In return, he was chained to a machine from six p.m. to six a.m. every night for the first bitter months of 1945.

  In the final stages of the war, the factory was closed down, its forced labourers left to sleep in a forest with no food and under dwindling supervision. After several nights, he escaped by hiding in a pipe, and later in a cave, existing on slugs and snails for weeks until June 1945 when, desperately ill and weighing twenty-eight kilograms, he finally encountered US troops. His war was over — one month after the end of World War II in Europe.

  His story is long and distressing, and he waited until the 1970s to relate it publicly. Since then, he has told it regularly, week after week, verbatim and voluntarily. But beyond his smooth delivery, there is a personal sense of urgency. As much as he is among the last survivors, he knows that his audience is the last generation of listeners, and more than anything this compels him, in his late nineties, to keep speaking.

  Not so his wife, Flore, who knows his story well. Over a long marriage, she has come to understand her husband’s tale of survival, with all its intricacies, as intimately as her own story. She is also a survivor. But where her husband has opted for oratory, her choice has mostly been silence.

  Born to a Jewish family in Greece, she spoke French and Ladino, the now mostly dormant language from Spanish Jewry. When she was seven, her family moved to Brussels, where her father ran a laundry agency and her mother was a dressmaker.

  When Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, she was working at a local council, and, while bans were soon imposed on everything from the playing of American music to the freedom to walk the streets at night, in some ways her life continued as ever. She still went to work and lived at home until 1942, when she was ordered to appear at the local Gestapo headquarters, informed that she had been denounced by a colleague, and told she could no longer work at the council. Soon after, she was presented with a long list of items — fork and knife, blanket — to assemble, and told to appear with them on 4 August 1942 at a former military barracks in Malines, between Antwerp and Brussels, before being deported.

  In the intervening days, her council boss learned of her intended fate and instead arranged through the Belgian Resistance for her to be taken to France where she would assume a false identity.

  For the next two years, she lived in Paris, known to everyone but her brother and sister-in-law, with whom she shared an apartment, as Christiane Delacroix (Christine of the Cross), the most non-Jewish name she could contrive. For all that time, she abandoned her own religion, attending church instead, and with a French identity card she obtained rations and avoided starving.

  When Paris was liberated in August 1944, she joined the enormous crowd cheering General Charles de Gaulle at the victory parade along the Champs-Élysées. Within weeks, she was back in Brussels, living in her old home, and, soon afte
r, working in her old job.

  Within months, she met her future husband, but their paths to marriage were markedly different. Both Jewish and based in Brussels, they had endured very different wars. His had been spent largely in concentration camps, his identity reduced to a number, and he had emerged emaciated, gravely ill, and having lost all of his family, bar his sister. She had assumed the identity of a Frenchwoman, had lived in an apartment in another country, and no one in her immediate family had been killed. By her own admission, she had done nothing to survive and he had done everything.

  They married in Brussels on 20 April 1946 — Hitler’s birthday, as they both point out — and, with the first of their two children, they arrived in Australia in July 1950. Their union would be unlikely but enduring, spanning two continents and more than seventy years.

  Eddie

  I don’t think I had so much joy at liberation. Once you know nearly all your family is dead, you realise that life is miserable. Liberation is freedom, but freedom for what? To be alone? To have to say Kaddish for other people? That’s no life. I know many people who took their own life in Germany when we were liberated.

  Many times, I was very sad. But I had to learn to live again. And the most important thing was to be nice to your friends. Kurt Hirschfeld and I had been in a camp in southern France with 4,000 Germans. We became very good friends. Before I was deported, he came to my home in Brussels many times. He didn’t have any family then. His parents had already been killed in Berlin.

  Until I got married, he was the most important person in my life. Brothers wouldn’t be as close as us; he understood everything. We were together in Belgium when we were in hiding and we met again in Auschwitz.

  Kurt was in block 38 and I was in block 14. I had to walk twenty-five minutes in the rain and snow to get to him. He kept me going. When I was in hospital with jaundice, he risked his life to bring me soup. When we were on the death march, he couldn’t walk any longer and I hid him in an attic.

  I knew if he had survived, he would go back to Belgium. I found him in a little Jewish canteen for soldiers in Brussels. They thought we would never let go of one another. I think we stayed there for ten or fifteen minutes, both crying, looking into each other’s eyes. It was something fantastic. Kurt found a girlfriend before me. He married in February 1946 and later moved to Israel, and I married in April.

  Did I need a wife? No. I needed a mum. I was very lonely. I missed my mum and my life, even today, and Flore replaced her. Kurt showed me the letters I wrote to him after we got married. And I said many times I had found a new family. Her mum, she accepted me with all her heart. So I got a wife and a mum.

  I was a very difficult person when I married. I didn’t want to go dancing, I didn’t want to go to the cinema, I didn’t want to go anywhere where there were a lot of people. You had to avoid crowds because that’s where you would be detected; somebody could recognise you. I had been programmed to look out for danger. My wife didn’t know anything about this. People didn’t realise how bad it was and how easily you can lose life.

  When I was back living in Belgium, one day I got a message that the Germans had returned some of our photos and documents. It was a big box of things: my German passport; different identity cards; a book where my father had started paying insurance for me; a work book from when I graduated as Walter Schleif; an identity card from my mum, from my dad, everything.

  It was very, very emotional. I cried. My sister, she wouldn’t even look at it, she was too upset. In your subconscious, you close something; you can’t bring them back. You realise your parents and your valuables and everything you loved has gone. And suddenly it comes in front of you. It’s a shock. For a long time, I put it away and didn’t want to look at it. It was a long time after I was married that I took it out of the drawer.

  The good things that happened were so few that you couldn’t compare with the bad things that happened to you. People generally are good, but I remember cruelty more.

  I haven’t got trust in people like I had before. I tell you how unfair life can be. We had been a group of four men in Auschwitz, with a lot of Hungarians there, many were elderly people, and it was bitterly cold. They were standing near a fire, and our kapo (prisoner in charge of other inmates), a Jew from Austria who had sent his own uncle to the gas chamber because he had done something wrong, came and took down all their numbers because they had stopped working to warm themselves up. Just to put their names on the list was a death sentence; they would get seven lashes on their backs. I had had seven lashes. I had survived, but I knew they wouldn’t survive. And I said to him, ‘Put my name down instead.’ He said, ‘All the time you want to be a volunteer. I have to bring names.’ They all got seven lashes. I never saw them again.

  In 1945, four of the survivors, we saw that kapo in Belgium. We wanted to do something, make an affidavit, put him in jail. We went to the police and we wanted to get him arrested. But it was just after the war, and he had influence: he had a girlfriend, a minister’s daughter, and he was going around with two German Shepherds. The police warned us if we didn’t stop, they would deport us back to Germany.

  I am still outraged by this. There is a man who had killed people indirectly. Let him be judged in a court of law. And we couldn’t do anything against him. You don’t have to do that; you volunteer to be a kapo. If you denounce someone, you must be punished. I am not saying you must be killed, but this man had to go to jail. It makes me feel that there is no justice. I think that very strongly.

  In Belgium, I didn’t feel comfortable, because they denounced me to the Germans. They are the enemies — and they denounced me, the refugee. That really hurt. Eventually, I felt all right there, but I never felt safe. After the war, I felt there were people who said Hitler didn’t do a good enough job. When I started working in factories there, it felt like they were uncomfortable I was there, that I had taken a job from a Belgian. I felt comfortable in Australia. Many times, I heard people saying ‘reffo’, but I didn’t take any notice.

  At first, I spoke very little about the war. People asked me; I have a number on my arm, so I can’t forget. But voluntarily for thirty years, I didn’t want to speak about it, because it contradicted my feelings about creating a family as normal as possible.

  I speak now so that people are aware of what’s happening, how people can be so cruel. Talking, it lifts the burden, but it’s hard because you get emotional. Sometimes, I have to stop and have a drink of water.

  I call the audience ‘my new young friends’, even the officers at the Defence Force Academy. I speak to thousands of people. These are thousands of people who say, ‘I will help you, that this will never happen again.’ Maybe they won’t do it straightaway, but when they get older maybe their children will follow up what I said.

  I believe that I make a great impact. We were at a dinner, there were about 150 people. Two women came up to me and said, ‘Are you Eddie Jaku? You spoke at our daughters’ school ten years ago.’ So there it is, children who heard me speak years ago are still talking about it.

  I hope my story will stay in their hearts. And it stays. They remember that moment. Like yesterday: I had a school from the Blue Mountains, sixty people, and thirty-two women tourists from all over, and they came into the museum and listened. I said, ‘I cannot forgive or forget.’ But in the same sentence I say, I don’t hate the Germans, because I believe hate is a disease. And one woman said, ‘What would you like them to do so that you don’t despise them anymore?’ I said, ‘They can’t do anything.’

  Before I leave, I am concerned that I leave a message, because Germany was the most educated country. My grandmother lost a husband and two sons fighting for Germany in World War I. They were my people. That was my country. And suddenly people of that calibre became murderers.

  Even in Buchenwald, thousands of Jewish German men in this tent, we got our bread, and suddenly I felt sick, I had to run to t
he toilet. I left my bread there, I swear to you, twenty minutes later my bread was still there. This was German upbringing.

  I believed in Germany as a beautiful country. I don’t hate them, but I don’t like them. They can send me anything and give me as much money as they want, but I will never forget or forgive.

  I was invited a few years ago to be on a TV show about forgiveness. I am glad I didn’t go because they would have asked me for forgiveness. And who are the other people on this panel? Some people whose child was run over, or someone’s husband has a girlfriend and she finds out and she forgives him. How can you compare this to what happened to us, to the murders that they have done?

  Do you know that I am invited every two years to go to Germany to visit my proper home? Every time, I answer very politely: ‘For personal reasons, I cannot go.’ When I was in hospital for three months after the war, I kept asking about my chances. I found out through a nurse that the doctor gave me a thirty-five per cent chance of living. So I made a vow; I said to my God, ‘If you help me to come out alive from this hospital, I promise you I will never set foot again on German soil.’ And I never did.

  My God? I was brought up religious, but I am not religious. I don’t believe in God anymore. If there is a God, it would be a God for everyone and this would never have happened. If there was such a power, he would instruct his wise men to make everybody the same. Because it says in the Bible if you do good you get rewarded and if you do bad you get punished. I didn’t see any punishment for the people who have done so bad.

  Flore

  Before the war, my only contact with Jews was my family. Everybody else I knew was non-Jewish. I was completely assimilated. After the war, I felt intensely Jewish. I went from one extreme to the other.

  After liberation, I could shout that I was a Jewess. It really brought me close to my people. I only was mixing with Jewish young people then. I hated all the others who had done that to us.