Authors: Ramona Koval
Bloodhound (28 page)
How do I imagine Mama's story went?
She knew by the time they'd left Poland and spent four years in Paris, in that fourth-floor room with the treadle sewing machines and the piecework that they did late into the nights, that he was not the man for her. He cried too much. She had lost everyone, too, but she had learned not to cry. He was nearly ten years older than her, yet such a baby. She didn't want to leave the City of Light. She had nothing much thereâbut it was Paris, after all.
Her second cousin who'd survived with his parents in Siberia came to Paris and convinced her that if she made the boat trip across the world to Australia, where he had a distant relative from another branch of his family, he would help her to leave her miserable marriage.
That promise came to nothing once they were all in Melbourne. Another factory. Another slum. What was the point? What was a poor, uneducated survivor of barely twenty-three years of age to do on her own in this godforsaken faraway city? She could hardly speak English, much less get a job that might support a woman on her own. It was 1950. Women didn't do that.
And her husband blamed her for his misery. If only I had a child, he said, I would be a father and I would have something to live for. She had seen doctors in Paris and she began seeing another one, a woman, in the new city. They found nothing wrong with her. And him? They didn't broach that subject. It had been eight years and still she couldn't get pregnant. It was a monthly reason for an argument.
She read books. She had dreams. She watched films. In the block of flats where she and Dad lived, some neighbours had a son who was an actor, and they offered a hand of friendship. They felt sorry for her, a survivor from the ashes of Nazi Europe, and invited her to go to the theatre with them.
She worked in a series of factory jobs. Her friend Isabel told her of a position as a finisher in a factory where she worked. It was run by two brothers. The older one had come to Melbourne before the war and established himself. The younger one survived Auschwitz and came to Australia to join him. Mama went to the factory and started working there.
The younger brother was handsome and tall and strong. He was married; he had a young son. When he seemed to be interested in her, she went along with it. Why not? Who cared what happened to her? Nobody, least of all her. She went with him to the room with the low bed and the single bare light. It wasn't romantic, but it was urgent and passionate.
She returned to her chair in the machinists' section. She saw him walk to his office between the women bent low over their work, and she wondered if any others had been taken into the little room. She felt something like hope, like excitement. He was older even than her husband, old enough to protect her.
When she went for the appointment with her doctor she could hardly believe what she was hearing. At last! She didn't call her husband. She didn't call the boss. She went for a walk through the gardens between the doctor's office and the city, and later found herself in a movie theatre. The film was
Roman Holiday
, with Audrey Hepburn playing a visiting European princess who escapes her guardians to explore Rome for a day on her own. She meets Gregory Peck, an American reporter, older, who shelters her.
It's the story of a disguise, the princess pretending to be someone other than who she is. Just for a day. Mama was familiar with this kind of story, and she must have preferred the short and romantic one to the long and brutal one she had lived.
Maybe she told Max that she was carrying his child. Maybe, as Isabel said, she loved him. Maybe he loved her, too, and left his wife and son in the hope that they could be together. But he went back to his family. Maybe Max's wife found out he was having an affair and threw him out. Maybe it was just till she had cooled down. Maybe he never intended to come to Mama.
She never went back to work at the factory. Dad was pleased: his wife was pregnant and he was going to be a father at last. Mama was a practical woman. She might have thought that living with Dad was better than the life Max could have offered. If he offered anything at all.
Her life in disguise would go on.
She resisted having another child for years, until my pleading for a sister or brother got to her. She made her arrangements again. The children would never know: no one would ever know for sure. Her secret was hinted at in her occasional comments; perhaps she sometimes wanted to tell everything, or her unconscious mind allowed the comments to bubble to the surface, only for her to close the lid smartly, under the resolute gaze of her older daughter.
I was complicit, going along with her habit of silence and privacy. And finally her secret followed her to her grave, hinted at only by the persistent collection of small pebbles that I would find on the rare occasions I visited it, telling me that someone had been to her resting place, and set down on the cold grey slab the customary sign, a gift of stones.
Robert Antelme's
The Human Race
reveals how stories were life-saving for the men in the slave-labour campsâa way to maintain their humanity, and to see the humanity in others. Antelme describes a Christmas Eve when one work detail was holed up in a church, their small bread portions eaten, and nothing more to come:
They talked about their wives and their kids. They were proper women, the wives, and they had their whims. The stories moved around the stoveâ¦They understood what each other was talking about, and they could go on like that for a long time. Everything was described: the metro line, the street leading to the house, the job, all sorts of jobs. The story didn't wear out easily, there was always something left to tell. The hell of memory was operating at full blast⦠at that point each one had become a figure in a story⦠then the party died down, the story petered out, nothing of it was left. What remained was the warmth upon our face, the stove's warmth, that had brought the stories forth.
The most eager to talk, those who talked the most, fell stillâ¦Somebody in the centre of the church started singing. He was trying to make the guys keep on forgetting their stomachs, to make them think of something else for a while. Nobody joined him, but he continued to sing by himself. Where was the singer? How could you recognise which one it had been? They were all lying down, buried under their blankets. All you heard was a vague murmur coming from the pallets. In each head were wife and bread and the street, all mixed up with the rest, with hunger, cold and filth.
Each a tiny source of warmth, these stories reminded Antelme and his fellow prisoners that they were still men, still human in the face of the inhuman treatment of them by their guards; the stories were evidence of their difference from other animals, their ability as human beings to use the complex grammar of their language to create a scene for themselves and for the others that would stir the emotions and engage the mind.
And here, in the warm stove of connection that I had made for myself, were the stories of Max and Mama and Dad and Mr Lederman and Isabel and Alan and the mad Queen of Songs and the unfinished marriage certificate and Hanna Krall with the death-ray eyes and Wanda Bujalska and the performers of Warsaw making counterfeit documents and the wild Khazar women on horseback meeting Levantine traders on the Silk Road and Moshe Wilner climbing the clock tower in MÅawa holding the town's time in his hands and the last days of Ãtzi up in the icy reaches of the Austro-Italian border five thousand years ago: all these tales and so many others were now mine to tell. And the people I had doggedly followed had become characters in my story and I had become one in theirs, even though they would never know it.
I began my quest by asking: who am I? And I found the answer to a different question: what am I? I am made of stories.
We cherish our stories and, even if they have gaps, they continue to nourish us and to hold us secure as we make new ones, until we fade into the memories of others, mythic, dreamlike, forever silent. This is how it always is in the song-lines of our lives: in the ending of one song are the seeds of a new one, the chorus we sing together, our melodies, coalescing into the greater human symphony.
Mama & Ramona, 1955.
BOOKS & JOURNALS
Antelme, Robert.
The Human Race
, trans. Jeffrey Haight & Annie Mahler, Marlboro Press / Northwestern University Press, 1998. (Originally published as
L'Espèce humaine
, © Ãditions Gallimard, Paris, 1957.)
Casanova, Giacomo.
The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
, trans. Arthur Machen, 1894.
Goldstein, David B.
Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History
, Yale University Press, 2008.
Koestler, Arthur.
The Thirteenth Tribe
, Random House, 1976.
Krall, Hanna.
The Subtenant & To Outwit God
, trans. JarosÅaw Anders, Northwestern University Press, 1992.
Langbein, Hermann.
People in Auschwitz
, trans. Harry Zohn, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Levi, Primo.
The Drowned and the Saved
, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, Abacus, 1988.
Lichtenstein, Rachel, & Sinclair, Iain.
Rodinsky's Room
, Granta, 1999.
Meed, Vladka.
On Both Sides of the Wall: Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto
, trans. Steven Meed, Knopf Doubleday, 1979.
Oeggl, Klaus, et al. âThe reconstruction of the last itinerary of “Ãtzi”, the Neolithic Iceman, by pollen analyses from sequentially sampled gut extracts',
Quaternary Science Reviews
, 26: 7â8, 2007, pp. 853â61.
Ostrer, Harry.
Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People
, Oxford University Press, 2012.
Paulsson, Gunnar S.
Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940â1945
, Yale University Press, 2002.
Richie, Alexandra.
Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Sykes, Bryan.
The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science that Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry
, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Tec, Nechama.
Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood
, Oxford University Press, 1984.
Tec, Nechama.
Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust
, Yale University Press, 2004.
Turnbull, David. âOut of the glacier, into the freezer: Ãtzi the “Iceman”âdisruptive timings, spacings, and mobilities', in
Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World
, ed. Joanna Radin & Emma Kowal (forthcoming).
Wasserstrom, Dunia. âTestimony from the Auschwitz Trial, April 23, 1964', quoted in
Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics & Achievements
, ed. David Bankier & Dan Michman, Berghahn Books, 2008.
WEBSITES
Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota:
chgs.umn.edu
Genographic Project by National Geographic:
genographic.nationalgeographic.com
Dovid Hofsteyn's âWe spring from rocks':
mendele.commons.yale.edu/author/vbers/page/378
Cypora Jablon Zonszajn's Siedlce memoir:
deathcamps.org/occupation/siedlcememo.html
Nathaniel Kahn's
My Architect: A Son's Journey
:
vimeo.com/9418890
Jane Korman's ââ¦And now we dance: a celebration of life after Auschwitz':
youtube.com/watch?v=CuvgUZeUo8Y
MaÅgorzata Melchior's âThe Holocaust survivors who passed as non-Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and France':
fondationshoah.org/fms/docpdf/coinchercheurs/melchior.pdf
Pinkas Hakehillot Polin's MÅawa chapter,
Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland
:
jewishgen.org/yizkor/pinkas_poland/pol4_00280.html
This American Life
, âThe Ghost of Bobby Dunbar', 14 March 2008:
thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/352/the-ghost-of-bobby-dunbar
University of Southern California Shoah Foundation:
sfi.usc.edu
Dr Izhak Ze'ev Yunis's âThe Old Hometown':
zchor.org/mlayunis.htm
My sincere thanks to Leszek Borkowski, Krystyna Duszniak, Monika Dzierba, Lena Fiszman and the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre, Helen Garner, Kerrie Haines, Marcia Jacobs, Lloyd Jones, Walter Lederman, Faith Liddell, Miriam Mahemoff, Iola Mathews and the Writers Victoria Glenfern studios, Agnieszka Morawiñska, Yoni Prior, the late Jacob Rosenberg, David Sornig, Slowko Tomyn, David Turnbull, and MichaÅ WiÅniewski, all of whom helped in their own ways with my research for this book over many years.
As always, thanks to Text Publishingâespecially Michael Heyward, David Winter, Jane Novak, and W. H. Chong.
I am immensely grateful to Bernadette Waldron, whose phone call all those years ago pointed me in a new and compelling direction.
And for their help, which was a testament to the kindness of strangers, I am indebted to Robin Dunne, Helen Dunne, Ray Dunne, the late Joseph Dunne, and the late Alan Dunne.
