The Fig Tree (19 page)

Anski died in 1920 without ever seeing
The Dybbuk
produced. The Vilna Troupe worked feverishly to perform it at the author's remembrance evening. The premiere took place, in accordance with tradition, at his
sloishim
, thirty days after he passed away.

The audience was mesmerised by the tale of Khonnon and Leah. The couple had been promised to each other by their fathers at birth. Khonnon's father dies not long after his son is born. Leah's father forgets the vow, and she is betrothed to another. Khonnon is devastated. He dabbles in the Kabbala, the arcane practices of Jewish mysticism. ‘Never practice Kabbala without a master!' the rabbis have warned. When Khonnon realises his incantations and spells have not worked, he despairs. He surrenders to the powers of darkness and dies.

As the village prepares for the wedding, Leah wanders off in her bridal gown to the cemetery. She calls out to Khonnon's soul, and he enters into her. ‘I have returned to my promised bride and will not leave her,' his voice cries. Leah has been possessed by a
dybbuk
, the townsfolk realise.

The rabbis gather and enter into a battle with the
dybbuk.
The tale of the original vow is revealed. As punishment, Leah's wealthy father is ordered to hand over half his wealth to the poor. But Khonnon still clings tenaciously to the bride. After much effort and prayer, Leah is exorcised. The wedding canopy is prepared again, but Leah's family makes a fatal mistake. The bride is left alone for a moment just as she is to be led to the canopy.

Again she senses Khonnon's presence. So strong is their longing for each other that Leah breaks through the spellbound circle that divides them, and joins her beloved in a blaze of light. She is doubly cursed. Even though she is reunited with her lover, they are fated never to bear children. Before she dies, Leah laments:

Hushabye my babies,

Without clothes, without a bed

Unborn children, never mine

Lost forever, lost in time.

The scenes of exorcism were both compelling and frightening. Perhaps they mirrored the intensity of the audience's own lives. Within the past five years millions had died in the battlefields of Europe. And as soon as one war had ended, another had begun. White Army fought Red Army in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Poland reasserted its independence as the nations of Europe carved out new boundaries from the old; and again the roads were cluttered with the dispossessed.

With the performance of
The Dybbuk
the Vilna Troupe became one of the great art theatres of Europe. The ensemble toured the play throughout the continent. For a time Yankev and Jochevet, their daughter Mila and infant son David, were a theatrical family on the road. At the height of its fame the troupe travelled on a private train. The actors' children played hide-and-seek among the costumes and props as the train hurtled from town to town.

The Vilna Troupe was an extended family complete with romances and rivalries. One week the actors would be welcomed as heroes and escorted over red carpets by community leaders in remote towns. A week later they would be on the verge of collapse as yet another impresario ran off with the take.

And they worked. They rehearsed one play in the morning, a second in the afternoon; and performed yet another the same night. In their ‘spare' time the actors studied and memorised their lines. Even in their dreams there was little respite. The Waislitz children would often hear their father muttering lines in his sleep.

In 1932, at the age of eighteen, Mila made her debut with the troupe, and fell in love with Moshe Potashinski. The couple eloped and took to the road. They toured Poland, France, England, Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia. They performed skits and comedy sketches, cabaret and ‘word concerts' that featured monologues from literary classics.

In 1939 the couple settled in Belgium where they founded a folk theatre. The Nazis invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940. Moshe and Mila joined the resistance as the Nazi net tightened. The couple went into hiding. And still they performed. They appeared in private homes where they produced concerts behind locked doors.

In March 1943, Moshe and Mila were betrayed and interned in the Malines transit camp in Belgium. And still they performed. They presented two concerts, the second on 15 April 1943, in barracks crowded with inmates. A third concert was planned, but it never took place. On the first night of Passover, 19 April 1943, Mila and Moshe, along with two thousand men, women, and children, were herded into cattle wagons at the Malines station. The transport arrived in Auschwitz on the third day of Passover.

Moshe was to recall the ferocity of that first assault in his memoirs. Blood. Chaos. Savage dogs released from the leash. At the gates of Auschwitz stood Dr Schmidt, elegantly attired, baton in hand, pointing left or right: death or slave labour. Couples were torn apart. Lovers from lovers, husbands from wives, parents from children, the strong from the weak. Suitcases, sheets, blankets, photo albums, the last belongings, were torn from their arms. ‘Where are you, Mila? Where are you?' This was the thought that coursed through Moshe's mind as he saw Mila being dragged away.

Mila was saved by her youth. Within hours, she was stripped, shorn, branded, and clothed in ill-fitting prison garb. As the group of women reassembled in the barracks for the first time, they were in shock. They had lost their loved ones. Some had been wrenched away from their children. They wept, or were overcome with hysteria. They gazed at each other and no longer recognised the faces they had known.

Then one of the inmates turned to Mila, hesitated, and asked, ‘Haven't I seen you somewhere before? On the stage, in Antwerp? In Brussels?'

‘Yes, I have seen you perform too,' said another.

‘You must perform. Here. You must recite a poem, sing a Yiddish song,' the inmates insisted.

‘Here? In Auschwitz? Are you mad?' retorted Mila.

‘Yes, here,' the inmates begged. ‘And why not here?'

The women covered Mila's bare head with a scarf and she performed for the first time that night. Around her there gathered women from Jewish communities throughout Europe: Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium, Greece, Germany. Some of them did not understand a word of Yiddish.

Mila performed in the stillness of night. She moved from songs of longing to humorous sketches, from folk melodies to ballads. The mood shifted quickly from sorrow to laughter tinged with hysteria, so great was the need for release. And the stage lights were the flames of the crematoria, beyond the bunker windows.

It was the first of many secret concerts. Mila's recitals were a form of communion. From them emanated the power of prayer and ritual. They provided moments of forgetfulness. They tied the inmates closer, into a bond that could never be untangled. Genia Tigel, who now lives in Melbourne, saw Mila perform twice. Tigel was a member of a women's mandolin orchestra that would play in the pre-dawn hours as fellow inmates shuffled off to work. The prisoners were lined up at three in the morning for numbing head-counts, before being marched off in the darkness, with german shepherds at their heels, and the smell of death in the air.

As a rare privilege, Genia was given a ticket to an officially sanctioned concert. She recalls just one act: Mila Waislitz dressed in a vest, black trousers, black cylinder on her head, cane in hand, partnered by a Dutch actress. They danced and sang an excerpt from a popular Yiddish play.

As for Mila, the concerts sustained her and drove her on; even during the darkest days when she was an inmate of experimental block number 10, lorded over by Dr Mengele. Several times, when on the verge of being selected for death, she was hidden by fellow inmates so that she could survive and continue to perform.

Not so far away, unknown to Mila, laboured her Moshe. When he lost sight of Mila on the third night of Passover, he was herded into a truck and transported to Auschwitz III, also known as Buno-Monowitz, a slave labour camp run by the German company IG Farben.

Moshe would recall the raw earth of block number 6 on that first night. ‘Where are you, Mila? Where are you?' His name had been reduced to tattoo number 117654. He had been wrenched from the warmth of a lover's body, the comfort of an ordered universe. Moshe lay on the hard boards of a bunker, and in the still of the night he heard the stifled howl of a dog coming from his own throat.

It was the first of 630 days and nights that Moshe was to remain an inmate in Auschwitz. Each day survived was a miracle—a day spared from selection, from typhus, or a bullet for faltering at work. At night Moshe would grit his teeth and whisper, ‘Live! Live! Live!'

One afternoon, as Moshe descended a flight of stairs with a slave-mate, under a load of bricks, they began to hum in unison, beneath their breath, the first lines of
The Dybbuk
.

Why has the soul fallen

from the highest heights to the lowest depths?

Is it because it carries within it

the hope of redemption?

In that moment, this chant attained a meaning that would have been unimaginable when Moshe first performed the play with the Vilna Troupe in prewar Europe. Moshe joined the camp resistance. He moved from block to block at night, delivered lectures, staged concerts, lifted morale. Through the barracks windows could be glimpsed guard-towers in which stood SS men, machine-guns in hand.

Moshe moved through a world of mud, barbed wire and perpetual electric light. The light cast the countryside in a grotesque glow so that prisoners attempting to escape could be easily caught. Moshe moved as if in a dream. He performed as if in a dream, from memory of a time that lay on the other side of life, a time that meant freedom and celebration, children and community, opening nights and blessed Sabbaths. Now it lay beyond reach, except within a dream. And in that dream his fellow prisoners sang with him:

With joy, with joy, plays Reb Aliya

With joy, with joy, plays the band, the
kapalia

The tears in your eyes should be stemmed

So your enemies will not see

How your heart is being consumed.

Moshe also performed for Jewish doctors and their assistants in the ‘sick bay', the camp hospital from which few emerged alive. He introduced each item with explanations. He spoke of the significance of Yiddish theatre in prewar Poland, so that those doctors from France, Hungary and Germany who had little knowledge of the tradition could understand the meaning of the works.

The prisoners would cram into the barracks. Moshe stood on a bunk. He dredged up from memory fragments of his expansive cabaret repertoire. He sensed the constrained excitement of the audience. And, in a stillness imbued with despair, he began to recite and sing. Again, he was overwhelmed by the healing power of his ancient craft. As one concert drew to an end, a prisoner shouted, ‘If we have lived to sing in camp, we will live to see the Messiah!'

January 1945: the United States and its allies were closing in from the west, the Red Army from the east. Thousands of women were ordered out of Auschwitz by their guards. Among them walked Mila Waislitz. They were marched across snow-clad landscapes. Winter winds bit into the flesh. The prisoners wore rags for clothes and newspapers to shield their feet. They used anything they could find to protect themselves from the cold.

Those who weakened were shot by the roadside. Some women gathered nettles as they moved. When they halted, they collected leaves and twigs, lit small fires, and roasted the nettles to give them an illusion of nourishment. They moved on foot or in open freight cars, lay at night in filth and mud. The Third Reich was unravelling. Yet still they were not saved.

And from among the living corpses arose the figure of Mila Waislitz. She stood up at night and sang
Shloime, vest lachen
, ‘Shloime, You Will Laugh'. Songs performed at a time of agony? It was grotesque, yet sublime. How can such things be understood?

One day, as they trudged towards a German village, on the banks of the river Elbe, the women came upon bands of villagers in retreat. The prisoners took shelter in an abandoned hut. They awoke, the next morning, in a deserted village. Red Army tanks and armoured vehicles rumbled into the village streets.

The tanks came to a halt. The hatches opened. ‘Children, you are free,' the liberators cried out. The women feasted on sausages and sugar, chocolates and tinned food. They wept and rejoiced and ate until they were sick.

Mila and Moshe were reunited in Brussels months later. Many of their prewar colleagues had not been so fortunate. All they had known had been destroyed. The couple returned to the stage. They appeared in the Theatre Patria, in Brussels. The hall was packed to capacity. The couple performed pieces they had written in the camps. They recounted tales of endurance and struggle. Their acting was now permeated with something extra, an aura of suffering tempered by grace.

The actors took to the road. Their train hurtled across a war-ravaged continent. They performed in Antwerp, Liege, Amsterdam, London, in Paris and the provinces. They had become the wandering graduates of Auschwitz.

Yet Moshe and Mila longed to reunite with the few loved ones that had survived. In February 1947, the couple arrived at Circular Quay, in Sydney, on board the SS
Monkay
. They were greeted by Mila's parents, Yankev and Jochevet. They had not seen each other for a decade.

It had been Yankev Waislitz's great fortune to be on tour in Australia when the war broke out. He had not wasted his time. In 1938 he united the various ensembles of Yiddish actors performing in Melbourne into one strong company. He named the new theatre after his mentor, David Herman, one of the founders of the Vilna Troupe. It was Herman who had first initiated him into the actor's craft. Yankev had been a student in Herman's drama academy in Warsaw in 1913. And it was David Herman who had directed the very first performance of
The
Dybbuk
at Sholem Anski's memorial night in 1920.

Within a fortnight of their arrival, Mila and Moshe were feted at a welcoming banquet in the Kadimah. They were reunited with actors they had worked with during their prewar tours, and were greeted by friends who had seen them perform in ‘the time before'.