Letter from my Father

Letter from my Father

Dasia Black

Dr Dasia Black
(whose given name is Ester Hadasa) was born in Poland in 1938, survived the Nazi occupation of her country and at the end of the War escaped with her family to West Germany. At the age of twelve she arrived in Sydney, where she completed her schooling and university studies. She has lectured on Child and Adolescent Psychology, Intercultural Education and the Psychology of Racism at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney for most of her professional life. She considers her seven-year involvement in a teacher education program for indigenous students in remote communities a most rewarding part of her professional life. She is now a psychologist in private practice.

Letter from my Father

Dasia Black

Brandl & Schlesinger

Copyright © Dasia Black, 2012

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

First published by Brandl & Schlesinger in 2012

www.brandl.com.au

Book design by Andras Berkes-Brandl

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Author: Black, Dasia.

Title: Letter from my father / Dasia Black.

Edition: 1st ed.

ISBN: 9781921556197 (pbk).

Subjects: Black, Dasia. Immigrants – Australia – Biography. Polish people – Australia – Biography. Mental health personnel – Australia – Biography.

Dewey Number: 305.906912092.

In memory of my parents Szulem and Chana Kahane and for my grandchildren

What surrounded me was totally unfit for my inherent nature, yet I survived. I survived through some mysterious, encoded talent in my being, through some unshakeable ancestral commitment to hang on and keep going.

Magda Denes:
Castles Burning

This book is a personal and subjective memoir of real people and events, but names have been changed to protect the privacy of those who appear in Ester's life story.

Acknowledgements

Writing
Letter from my Father
over a number of years has been a challenging and all-consuming task. I was fortunate in having generous friends who contributed to the completion of the book, each offering a special viewpoint and talent. To each I am grateful. I would like particularly to thank Yola Center, Diana Encel, Rina Huber and Clara Stein for their meticulous reading of the manuscript in its early stages and for giving me thoughtful and practical advice. The late Sol Encel gave me heart by simply saying:
This is a story worth telling
. I am grateful to Diane Armstrong for her gentle but persistent questioning about when I was going to start writing and later whether I was giving my writing adequate time.
Letter from my Father
would not have been written without my editor Diana Giese. She has been consistent in asking for more and better, in maintaining my courage when it flagged, in suggesting structural changes and showing remarkable sensitivity to what I wanted to say and what I needed to omit. My thanks also go to Veronica Sumegi of Brandl & Schlesinger for her insightful guidance and wisdom on the purpose and shape of the book. My devoted and patient husband, children and grandchildren were consistent in giving me the space and moral support in what was at times a painful journey.

Dasia Black

Sydney 2012

PROLOGUE

The Broken Vase

A
woman is sitting on the floor in a dimly-lit room, trying to glue together the shards of a broken clay vase. She does it over and over again, but the shards will not stick to one another.

The woman is me.

The Broken Vase Protocol was a workshop for psychologists I attended in April 2003 in Melbourne. It was offered by Erik De Soir from Belgium, who has worked with traumatised people involved in large-scale disasters. De Soir's basic premise is that once a trauma has occurred, a person's life structure and core beliefs change irrevocably. They cannot be ‘fixed' or ‘repaired'. We need to create a new structure based on a new reality.

The workshop aimed at helping traumatised clients integrate their experiences into their post-trauma lives. We divided up into groups of three. Each group was handed a red clay flower vase, and asked to go outside the building and smash it. We were told:
Come back and, using the strong adhesive provided, make what you can of it.
We could make a collage or another shape, since restoring the vase to its original shape was clearly impossible. That was the fundamental fact De Soir wanted us to experience.

While other groups threw their vase to the ground outside and soon returned with several broken shards, we were not satisfied with our first breakage. Since we agreed that it was
not broken enough
, I stood on a bench and dropped it again from a greater height. It shattered into many more pieces, some just small particles of clay. We returned to our window-less room, sat down on the floor and each of us started putting different bits together. We responded as if we could rebuild from scratch. Sue worked on the sides of the vase, Jane on the upper part and I focused on the base and a major connecting side. I spread a plentiful amount of epoxy adhesive on the edges, held them together for more than the required time and set down what I had made. Immediately the shards fell apart. I did it again more carefully, aware that the edges were rough due to their having crumbled after it had been dropped. Again it fell apart. Our group kept on working, unsuccessfully trying to fit together the shards. We were not getting anywhere.

Halfway through the workshop it was time for lunch. By that time, a number of the groups had created quite attractive arrangements of their shards. We went up to the dining room for the buffet lunch, where we found most people enjoying the break, relaxing on the terrace in the sunshine. Not I. I hurriedly ate my lunch, returned to the empty room and continued my task of restoring at least the base of the vase. I carefully spread the glue on the edges, held them together and set the base down. Again it fell apart. I repeated the same action over and over again.

Eventually Erik and the others returned. I told them what I had been doing, and the other two in my group suggested that since it was so important to me, I should take the broken pieces home to work on later.

My husband, who had accompanied me to the conference, was surprised to find a plastic bag with shards of the broken vase in our room that evening. He was even more surprised that I intended to take them home to Sydney. Later that night, I woke and decided that I was carrying things too far. I got out of bed, found the bag and tossed it into the garbage bin.

The next morning I took it out again, not sure of its future. In the lobby I met Erik who thought that I should take a few of the pieces home and see what I could do with them. This book is the result.

I

With my Mother and Father

T
he whole world was white. The snow was like a huge, high fence around the house which was also white. Father had to dig a path for us to go in and out. Some big girls took me on a sleigh down a steep hill that sloped towards our door. I had my legs spread one on each side of the sleigh, and had to hang on tightly to the girl in front. I loved the thrill of going down really fast with the sun shining on the snow. My mother Chana was standing outside the house, hand shading her eyes, looking up towards me and calling out. She had on a dark blue jacket. She was pretty.

The Seret River had frogs in it. Beside it was a meadow where in summer I picked yellow and white daisies. In our house my mother and father and I lived with my Grandma Sara and Grandpa Israel. They owned a flour mill. I had been told that there was a Baba Jaga in town, a sort of witch, an old woman I imagined with beady eyes and a long nose that stuck out.
She took naughty children away
, they said. When I saw any old woman with a bent back I thought it was her and grasped Mother's hand tightly. Baba Jaga was often on my mind since I didn't like being good all the time.

Then I was sick. The doctor told me to lie on my tummy so he could cover my back with hot little suction cups, small glasses heated and placed upside down. This was a good way of making a sick person's fever go away, they said. I didn't like it but did not complain. I was savouring the lollies that my Grandpa Mendel from Zbaraz had brought for me. I also loved the doll that my mother's sister had given me.

One very cold day, I was standing by our living room window which faced the street, looking at the beautiful patterns on the glass shimmering in the winter sun. Why had they put sand between the window panes? Outside, children were making a snowman. My father Szulem called me. I went and sat close to him on the sofa, while he taught me the Hebrew alphabet, the Aleph Bet. I was happy all over.

It was April now and the days were getting warmer. The Jewish people of the town were busy preparing for the Passover festival. It was exciting to go with Mother and Father to a house where people were standing at rows of wooden tables in a large room, kneading dough, rolling it out and cutting it into squares, then pricking little holes with a special fork. They laid out the squares on large flat trays which went into the oven to bake. Matzos, the unleavened bread we Jewish people eat right through Passover smelled good as they cooked. Everyone seemed to be busy doing something, talking all the time.

Then suddenly everything changed. It was summer, July 1941. I was three-and-a-half years old. We heard the news that the German army was advancing. They were expected to pass through our town, Mikulince, in the next twenty-four hours. I didn't know what
German army advancing
meant but I could feel that the grown-ups were nervous. We went to the forest to hide and wait. We had to be very quiet. Though it was night, we saw and heard the German soldiers march and drive along the road in big cars called
tanks
. I was scared, terribly frightened of the dogs barking and of the roar, the terrifying roar of the Germans' motorcycles. Finally they were gone. I didn't understand what was happening but now I knew danger.

We returned to our house but we didn't stay there for long. My father decided to leave Mikulince and join his family in Zbaraz, the small town where he was born. It was not far away. One evening we set out for this new place. I was
not put to bed but allowed to lie on the sofa, fully dressed and clutching my doll. A horse-drawn cart arrived and we packed our belongings on to it. It was so quiet. No one seemed to want to talk. We drove through the night. I was alert to new sounds and sights around me: the driver whipping the horses, the bright stars, my parents whispering. My father held me wrapped tightly in his arms. I sensed that scary things happened in the world, but knew that when I was in my father's arms, nothing bad could happen to me.

We arrived in Zbaraz. I heard people whispering about something called
the Jewish Problem
. A very bad man called Katzmann, head of something called the
SS
and the police district of Galicia, had ordered a
vigorous evacuation
of Jewish people from the area. I really didn't understand what all these new words meant, but I did understand that SS were people who terrified everybody, like a large crowd of Baba Jagas. Katzmann ordered all of us to live inside the Zbaraz ghetto, an area near the marketplace with many people already crowded into it.