Sunrise West

SUBRISE WEST

Jacob G. Rosenberg

JACOB G. ROSENBERG was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest member of a working-class family. After the Germans occupied Poland he was confined, with his parents, his two sisters and their little girls, to the Lodz Ghetto, from which they were eventually transported to Auschwitz. Except for one sister (who committed suicide a few days later) all the members of his family were gassed on the day of their arrival. He remained in Auschwitz for about two months, then spent the rest of the war in other concentration camps. In 1948 he emigrated to Australia with his wife Esther; their only child, Marcia, was born in Melbourne. Rosenberg's poems and stories have appeared both in Australia and overseas. Apart from three earlier volumes of prose and poetry in Yiddish, he has published three books of poetry in English, a collection of stories, and the award-winning
East of Time
, the first volume of his autobiographical memoir.

ALSO BY JACOB G. ROSENBERG

Poetry and prose in Yiddish

Snow in Spring

Wooden Clogs Shod with Snow

Light – Shadow – Light

Poetry in English

My Father's Silence

Twilight Whisper

Behind the Moon

Elegy on Ghetto
(video)

Shylock
(verse dialogue: video)

Prose in English

Lives and Embers

East of Time

Sunrise West

Jacob G. Rosenberg

B
RANDL
& S
CHLESINGER

© Jacob G. Rosenberg, 2007

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 Pty Ltd in 2007

www.brandl.com.au

Cover:
The author and his wife in Marseilles, 1948, shortly before embarking for Australia.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Rosenberg, Jacob, 1922–.

Sunrise west.

1st ed.

ISBN 978-1-876040-84-0

1. Rosenberg, Jacob, 1922–. 2. Jews – Poland – Lodz. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) – Poland – Personal narratives. 4. World War, 1939–1945 – Personal narratives, Polish. I. Title.

940.5318092

Typeset in 11pt Legacy

Book design by András Berkes

For Raymond

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I walked out of the flames with a song in my heart and a stutter on my lips. My everlasting thanks to my editor, Alex Skovron, under whose watchful eye the stutter disappeared and the song came to life.

I wish also to express my warm thanks to Richard Freadman, Raimond Gaita, Louis Waller, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Helen Garner, for reading the manuscript and offering their invaluable comments and suggestions, and more than anything for their friendship.

And finally to my life-partner Esther, for her unequivocal faith in me.

Oh, cease to glorify man,

Who has but a breath in his nostrils,
For of what account is he?

Isaiah 2:22

 
Preface
 

Sunrise West
is a ‘sequel' to
East of Time
, in the sense that it takes up my story where the earlier book left off. But the events related in this book, and the characters that people it, exist in a vastly different landscape.

The present volume navigates between two worlds: my wartime and postwar experiences in Europe, and my subsequent new life in Australia. The hallmark of the first world is darkness and light; that of the second, hope and restoration — but a restoration forever coloured by the past, which cunningly refuses to give up its claim and permeates my days.

As in
East of Time
, the individuals who live on in these pages are largely no more. To recall them is, for me, not just evidence that we exist only in relation to one another; perhaps more importantly, it is a way of paying homage to friends and strangers whose humanity in a time of darkness was the light that showed us the path to a better future.

Like its predecessor,
Sunrise West
is imbued with pictures and visions of a bygone yet ever-living reality — it is a personal weave of autobiography, history and imagination. Some names have
been changed, and I've reimagined certain incidents and encounters. But my words have been driven, as always, by the need for remembrance. Now, in the winter of my life, I am constantly revisited by a line written by the Yiddish poet H. Leivick: ‘I fell, stood up, and walk away once more.' It seems to me that, somehow, this line marvellously epitomizes my tale.

J.G.R.

 
Arrival
 

To the south of my city of the waterless river, in the valley of open secrets, where the very winds dread their own lament, behind a thin forest of sad all-knowing trees, lay the kingdom of death.

We arrived at Birkenau in the middle of August 1944, a summery morning like any other, yet not like any other at all. I can still see the troupe of unreal men in striped rags, lingering in a nearby field like an ensemble of resigned clowns on a condemned stage, raking grass. In my heart's innermost chamber, enveloped in tattered years, there still hang the pictures of my mother's terrified eyes, my father's bleak gesture of farewell, my sister Ida's numb paralysis, and the horror of my two little nieces, six and four, standing like adults in the queue with their arms up, awaiting Selection. And I cannot erase from my memory the sight of my sister Pola three days later, stretched out on the wires of the electric fence, her head shaved, her hands in supplication, her mouth kissing death...

Birkenau was the entry and selection point for the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, and an extermination camp in its own right. We were welcomed by a man dressed in black. His manner was efficient but casual, as his white-gloved finger nonchalantly showed most of my family the way to the gas. Pola and me he directed to his right, into that crowded other universe of soulless bodies.