Bloodhound (23 page)

As soon as I got in, the driver asked me if I knew what year the Japanese submarines entered Sydney Harbour. I can't remember, I said. I'm from Melbourne. This was an odd answer. But it was the one I gave to the Polish consulate as well. I wondered if I seemed illegitimate to the taxi driver, too.

He'd trained as an electronic engineer, but when he got to Australia in 1989 his English wasn't good enough for him to work; and then, when it was better, electronic engineering had moved on. He spoke and read Chinese and Japanese. He wanted to write his life story but thought it was too late. He worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. He had no friends. He was lonely. But he read.

When I arrived at the airport I had a headache. Too many stories of displacement, too many languages for one day.

16

The longest journey

THERE was no way to avoid it, no matter how hard I tried. I had to piece together what might have happened to Max in Auschwitz, and what brought him to the moment when he may or may not have become my biological father. At first I'd had an interest in who he was and what parts of him might have been transmitted to me, but after following his story for years I'd become interested in filling in all the gaps that I could, not just for personal reasons but for the sake of the story itself. I had become immersed in its meanderings and sharp corners, and found myself swept up in it. I was intrigued by the tributaries of Max's story, too, the way the stories of others overlapped with it.

Alongside my quest for the right Polish documents, I was studying the Auschwitz video testimonies and reading Holocaust literature. I'd do this during the day and then take sleeping tablets each night to knock me out. If I didn't take the pills, the phrases and terrible scenes would play in my mind when my head hit the pillow and I wouldn't find the sweet place where sleep was possible.

I knew I was no historian, but it seemed logical to me that these men with whom Max had entered the camp and with whom he had been tattooed, with whom he survived and with whom he joined to travel to Germany to testify against Paulikat, would have shared with him some other critical experiences. Their stories must have intersected in some way. I might learn from their analyses what made one man live and the man next to him die—apart from luck, which wasn't something you could influence.

From the testimonies I'd watched I knew that those who were strong to begin with, or used to the cold, or used to hard regimes, or able to ‘organise' better food or a better position in the bunks away from the reach of bashing Kapos and not too high near the roof so as to choke from lack of air, or had tradeable goods or skills, or had a knowledge of how things worked and who to bribe and who to trust—such attributes gave prisoners an advantage and made it possible to still be breathing, albeit in a skeletal and diseased shell of a body, when the war was finally over.

I read through books on my shelves till I came to one bought years before: Hermann Langbein's
People in Auschwitz
, an account of life in the camp written by an Austrian political prisoner. He'd been arrested for being a Communist activist. His positions in the camp, as an office worker in the infirmary and a member of the underground resistance, gave him a point of view that I found fresh and compelling.

I'd avoided reading his book because the title and cover seemed to promise great distress, but by the time I opened its covers I thought I might have become inured to nightmare visions through reading the works of Eli Wiesel and Primo Levi (who, like Max, had also worked in the Auschwitz infirmary) and, more recently, Robert Antelme. Though Langbein's outlook and language were calm and penetrating, still the night terrors came.

After spending three days reading the book I was relieved to have completed it. I had a palpitating heart and couldn't catch my breath. This was anxiety, my old friend, yet here I was in my home, at my desk, no crematoria in sight but in my mind's eye.

And now I wanted Hermann Langbein to be my father. He was born in Vienna in 1912, two years before Max, to a middle-class family. His mother was Catholic and his father a Protestant convert from Judaism. He trained and worked as an actor before being an organiser for the Communist Party. After the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938 he fled first to Switzerland, then to France and finally to Spain, where he joined the International Brigade to fight against Franco in the Civil War. When it ended he was interned with other members of the brigade in various French camps. Following the German conquest, the Vichy regime handed them to the Germans and Langbein was transferred to Dachau, then in 1942 to Auschwitz, where he remained for two years.

As an Austrian interned for his activism he was given a privileged job as clerk to the chief SS physician in the infirmary, and from his position in that circle of hell he could both witness and document events. His number was 60355, so he had arrived before Max, but not long before.

When he was liberated, Langbein became general secretary of the Comité International des Camps and set about not only analysing what he had seen but reading all the other available survivor and witness testimonies. He started campaigning to bring some of the perpetrators to justice—such as it was in post-war Germany. He filed accusations against Carl Clauberg, who had conducted sterilisation experiments in Auschwitz; he filed accusations against Josef Mengele, who fled to Argentina before he could be extradited; he filed accusations against Wilhelm Boger, which led to the first big Auschwitz trial, in Frankfurt in 1963. He attended most court sessions and published a documentary account of the trial shortly after the verdicts came down.

As was the case with Robert Antelme, being a political prisoner gave Langbein a more protected life in the camp. More than that, his sober understanding of the human condition, perhaps because he was already mature when he was interned, made him a contemporary Virgil for me.

From Langbein I learned that Max was well placed to be given a work detail on his arrival in Auschwitz, being twenty-eight in 1942, tall, strong and a tailor, one of the trades needed for factory work in the camp. Langbein quotes Primo Levi, from
Survival in Auschwitz
:

And in
The Drowned and the Saved
, Levi elaborates:

Tailors made uniforms for the Wehrmacht and the SS, including specialist riding breeches, as well as civilian clothes. The factory offered an opportunity to mix with Polish workers from outside the camp, and this meant a chance to trade. Langbein details the underground economy, the possibility that if you had a connection in ‘Canada' there might be a chance of obtaining a watch or a piece of jewellery which could be bartered for food on the outside.

A few eggs or butter that had been exchanged for a diamond would not be consumed by the ravenous black marketeer but rather be traded with people who worked in the bakery for loaves of bread. The bread would be divided among all who'd taken part in the process. Every step, every transaction came with the risk of death, and many unlucky traders were executed.

I knew from Alan that Max had said he'd managed to get a better job in the infirmary. But what was a tailor doing there? I discovered that SS medics who assisted in the infirmary didn't have to be trained, and in Aleksander Lasik's account in
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
they were often cobblers, tailors and farmers.

My Virgil, Hermann Langbein, wrote that the infirmary was a desirable posting, despite the possibility of contracting contagious diseases, as it provided a roof over your head, you were excused from violent roll calls, and there was more to eat, because

Max worked first as a tailor and then in the infirmary, a step up. His younger nephew told me some years after we first met that Max's brother-in-law had been a Kapo in the camp. I thought this connection might have been how Max got a better job, and been the source of rumours about him. No wonder he was proud of his number, a signal to himself and others that here was a strong man, a clever man, a cunning man, a lucky man, and perhaps a man not to be trifled with.

An email arrived from an academic I'd written to in the law faculty at the University of Amsterdam who had an interest in war-crimes trials.

I did as he suggested and, in the halting German I'd learned in the two months at the Goethe-Institut in Berlin, I wrote to the Staatsanwaltschaft in Arnsberg for a copy of Max's testimony.

While I waited I read
Rodinsky's Room
, by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, about the search for a man who disappeared from his room above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Spitalfields, London in 1969 and was never heard of again. David Rodinsky's room was opened up a decade after his disappearance, and since then people had been going through the mess and books and his notes, trying to work out who he was and what might have happened to him.

Like my project, it too was a quest, and I could see the romantic projections that Lichtenstein made as she travelled all over the world following up clues in the cabbalistic notes of her quarry. I had to examine myself for signs of romanticism. There didn't seem to be, on the surface at least, much romance in finding the truth of Max's story and the way it might have intersected with mine. Max Dunne sounded like an angry, damaged man, even if it was clear to me why he might have become like that.

I combed through Auschwitz literature to find out more about the jobs that were regarded as ‘good' in the camp. What went on in the infirmary? How romantic could I be with this material that I had to work with?

Rachel Lichtenstein had far more to go on than I did. She had photographs and documents and other people's memories. And she could make contact with people and ask them anything she liked without feeling as if she was going to open old wounds or embarrass them or shock them with her very existence.

Then an envelope from Germany arrived in the post. I was renting a shared writing room in an old mansion near my house and my writer roommate, a German speaker, happily agreed to help me with the translation. We headed to our local coffee shop. I was excited, as I expected to ‘hear' the voice of my father for the first time. Though not the voice of a father reading a little girl bedtime stories or praising her school results or warning her tenderly about the ways of the world.

It would be the voice of a former Auschwitz inmate who had been damaged by terrible experiences, who had lost most of his family and who was probably under great stress, standing in a German courthouse twenty-five years after his liberation, giving evidence in a war-crimes trial. It was not a transcript of every one of the words he spoke, but a deposition of his evidence. It had been given in his recently acquired English (did he speak with a strong accent, did he hesitate?) and translated into German at the time. And I was attempting a translation back to English, more than forty years later. What voice could I really expect to hear?

The date of the testimony was 21 October 1970. I was finishing Year Eleven at that time.

First, Max confirmed his identity through his Australian passport: G262151.