1.
My aunt landed on the British shores as a war refugee in 1946.
She’d lost everything and everyone.
Except – as she stepped off the train on a wet, cold morning at Victoria Station – she held
the hand of a little boy.
Since 1939, the avoidance of being denounced as a Jew (or, as “a cute little Jewess” as
the likely denouncer would say) came at various costs. One of the costs was the boy,
born to a 16-year-old mother (“a cute little Jewess”) in a labour camp in Austria.
Once off the train on a wet, cold morning at Victoria Station, she decided to become an
“invisible Jew”. She changed her surname. She avoided her fellow Jewish refugees. She
spent two years in the Displaced Persons’ Camp playing the piano for the Polish theatre
set up in one of the barracks.
The theatre was run by seven Polish Jews and a Ukrainian diva. All of them performing
under Polish-sounding stage names.
“Do you even realise what it meant for an ugly Jewish girl with an illegitimate child after
the war to be courted by a handsome Polish lieutenant of the Allied Forces?”.
My aunt wasn’t ugly. She had the most beautiful hands I’d ever known and the way she
used them on the piano keyboard made her svelte body ever more attractive.
The lieutenant, by then her husband, won a prestigious scholarship at the London
School of Economics; my aunt got accepted into the prestigious conservatoire in
London too!
But there were no scholarships for refugee women with illegitimate children.
So – she spent her life performing for the Polish theatre in London instead. She
cherished her invisibility as a Jew during the day.
Nightmares. She would regularly fall out of bed; in her dreams she was running away
from someone. I would often help her get up from the floor at 3am after another
nocturnal “escape”.
She raised thousands of pounds at charity concerts for the Catholic care homes in the
UK. Or the victims of floorings, draughts, landslides, Martial Laws, Solidarity prisoners
and whatnot in Communist Poland.
One of those care homes was named after the most enthusiastic pre-war Catholic Jew-
hating friar with a penchant for mass media popularity. Despite having spread racial
hatred to all and sundry with the ardour of today’s compulsive Twitterer, among the
Catholics, he is considered a martyr due to his sacrificial death at Auschwitz. And “The
Patron Saint of Our Difficult Century”, by the decree of the Vatican.
On one fine day, following a charitable concert in London, a benign silver-haired lady in
the care home named after the said Saint, whispered to my aunt: “The war was horrible,
naturally, but at least Hitler resolved the Jewish problem for us”.
The martyr friar would probably have agreed.
My aunt turned her incredulous gaze away from the benign silver-haired lady. Her eyes
filled with tears. Blood rose to her cheeks, a self-conscious mélange of anger, shame,
anxiety and the compulsion to disappear at once. As if she were to fall out of bed at 3am
in the morning.
Yet she couldn’t. She was an invisible Jew after all.
At home, I often heard that she’d spent the war fearing the Poles more than she feared
the Germans. Of course, she never said it when she was being fêted at the Polish
Embassy or awarded medals for her contribution to the Polish cultural life “in Exile”.
She was an invisible Jew.
“Tell them the truth”, I demanded for years, “Or else, they’ll say I’m making this up once
you’re gone”; in order to besmirch, to distort, to overdramatise. “Tell them the truth!”.
She never did. She had made it through the Einsatzgruppen but she didn’t make it
through Co-19.
My mind has became her voice recorder. It is now my duty to tell.
2.
Nice. Promenade des Anglais. Or was it the Croisette?
Wherever it was, the seawater was heart-achingly azure, the palm trees swung lazily in
the breeze, the blood pleasantly invigorated by the first round of the kirs royals before
supper. My mum and aunt, looking dandy and still acting embarrassingly droll after
singing the Neapolitan songs with their hairdresser in San Remo that morning, parade
along the Baie des Anges (or was it the Baie de Cannes?) as the sunset starts gleaming
in its strikingly rusty-red colours over the Estérel hills.
Inebriated by this folly of colours and sensations, our tatste buds teased by the crispy
sweetness of the crushed-olive tapenade tartines accompanying the kirs, we might as
well have been in heaven. Or, at least, in the place one notch down from heaven in
which one chooses to take one’s holiday with two eccentric ladies of a certain age who –
so far – had not mentioned the H-word all day. A novelty in my life.
The ladies once flew in to Dublin to see something I directed in Ireland. I picked them
up from the airport. Hugs and kisses and toi toi toi’s. We get into the car. I mention first-
night nerves, or something like that. Two sentences later, there we go again:
new discoveries concerning the Polish complicity in the Shoah. Authors, sources,
unfamiliar town names, atrocities that dare-not-speak-their name.
I stop the car and say not without slight despair: “Have you ever been to
Ireland?”; “No”. “Do you know what’s coming up tonight? For me, at least?”. “Well, of
course, your premiere!”. So could we please save the Holocaust stories till the breakfast
room tomorrow morning and just focus on why you are here and why I am here
tonight?”.
The ladies, non plussed, shrug their shoulders in perfect synch and look somewhat
disinterestingly at the rows of working-class houses along the road that takes us
to central Dublin.
Yes, but that was Dublin. Now we’re in Nice. (Or Cannes?). We’re on the Riviera. And
even the Chagalls at the Fondations Maeght have not brought up the H-word that day.
My aunt’s sandal strap becomes undone. My mum kneels down to help her do it up. My
aunt snaps at her, with venom which seems totally out of character: “Get up! Get up
right now”! She hobbles along to the nearest blue bench (so it must have been Nice
after all!) and buckles up her sandal herself. Like a little girl whose pride has been
snatched away. Mum and I look at one another, bemused. Or confused. Or both.
The rest of the evening continues on a strangely morose note; the enthusiasm to
converse over supper comes and goes. The food is excellent, the wine is superb yet
there is something heavy – weirdly heavy – hanging in the air all evening.
“The weather must be changing” says mum rather unconvincingly.
Back in London, I ask my aunt to meet me for a coffee.
“What was that sandal drama in Nice about?”
I think I may have said “Cannes” instead. But we both knew what I had meant.
Silence. A long, studied silence.
“You know when I lost respect for my mother?” says my aunt “We left Cracow for
the countryside when they started putting us into the ghettoes. Anyone we accosted
could have guessed we were fugitives, helpless, hapless, homeless, hungry and so
desperately, desperately Jewish. As another night approached, we walked into a church
which we saw in a village. Christian mercy and all that. My mother pleaded with the
priest to let us have a roof over our heads overnight. “Just one night only please!’ He
said “no”, sheepishly.
Then I witnessed my mother going down on her knees to beg him to give us shelter for
the night.
He refused.
She rose.
We left.
You never want to see your mother humiliated like this. And I never want to
see your mother get on her knees in front of anyone.
Anyone.
Ever.”
3.
My grandad in Lemberg.
As a child I wondered how anyone’s hair can turn white in an instance:
“My grandad’s hair did!”.
I was fascinated by this mysterious hirsute transformation.
“I lost everyone overnight”. Followed by a non-debatable full stop; that was the refrain I
heard all childhood.
“I lost everyone overnight”…
Ok, thought I, grandad had lost everyone overnight and thus his hair turned white.
“Everyone” seemed abstract.
What does it even mean “everyone”?
How does your hair turn white in an instance?
And grandad was in his mid-thirties when it happened!
I’m 47; I’ve got my grandad’s hair. I don’t have a single white hair on my head.
I later found out what he meant: “everyone” had been transferred to the death camp in
Belzec in one cattle carriage.
Or was it two carriages? Three? The family forcefully dispersed by the ghetto
gendermes? Or by pure happenstance?
Belzec is a place that does not really exist.
A concept. A bubble. A void.
The death camp was operational for the duration of the… should I say it?…“the purge” –
only to be duly closed down as soon as the last Lemberg Jew’s corpse was turned into
ash.
Everything wrapped up. Folded. Swept over.
Ok, there is a monument in the middle of a forest.
But there is no one there to look for.
Nothing to look for.
No chance of finding your great uncle’s spectacles in the exhibition pile.
Or looking at the name tags on the suitcases stacked up within an airtight glass-cage.
Just a forest.
And a monument.
In the middle of the forest.
Everything wrapped up. Folded. Swept over.
Then, wondering about what “everyone” actually meant, I found a piece of this testimony
from a Nazi official overseeing the killing process in Belzec:
(reading)
Unterscharführer Hackenholt was making great efforts to get the engine running. But it
doesn’t go. Captain Wirth comes up. I can see he is afraid because I am present at a
disaster. Yes, I see it all and I wait. My stopwatch showed it all, 50 minutes, 70 minutes,
and the diesel did not start. The people wait inside the gas chambers. In vain. They can
be heard weeping ‘like in the synagogue’, says Professor Pfannenstiel, his eyes glued to a
window in the wooden door. Furious, Captain Wirth lashes the Ukrainian assisting
Hackenholt twelve, thirteen times, in the face. After 2 hours and 49 minutes—the
stopwatch recorded it all—the diesel started. Up to that moment, the people locked in
those four crowded chambers were still alive, four times 750 persons in four times 45
cubic meters.
Another 25 minutes elapsed. Many were already dead, that could be seen through the
small window because an electric lamp inside lit up the chamber for a few moments.
After 28 minutes, only a few were still alive.
Finally, after 32 minutes, all were dead …
I’m 47; I’ve got my grandad’s hair. I don’t have a single white hair on my head.
4.
Does “everyone” actually mean “everyone? Or “everyone except”?
Does “overnight” really mean “during the course of the night”? Or “suddenly”,
“unexpectedly”?
Were there two “overnights”? Did “everyone” get replaced by “someone else” between
1942 and 1944?
No surviving cousins in the first and second line, according to my DNA.
There’s no one to ask.
Nor is there anyone willing to tell.
Or is my family history an apocryphon followed by an apocryphon, its sharpness
indecipheredly blurred year by year as in a daguerrotype found on the floor of the attic?
You don’t find daguerrotypes at the attics of the houses in Warsaw; the city was flattened
down in 1944, daguerrotypes and all.
Any daguerreotypes left behind in Lemberg? But how do you search for the lost photos
under an apocryphal address? In a non-existent attic of an apocryphal house?
So here is take two: grandad in Warsaw, 1943 towards the end of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising.
He lived under an assumed name in the centre of Warsaw; he was a lodger in a flat
where his assumed identity of an Austro-Hungarian nobleman would not be
questioned.
The concierge was a particularly vicious Jew denunciator. In grandad’s apocryphally
elegant Viennese, he often misdirected the German and Polish police while the hunt for
ghetto escapees was being conducted, most likely due to the snaring zeal of the said
concierge.
Grandad used to bring provisions for a woman and a child hiding in the attic.
Away from the inquisitive eye of the concierge.
One day the woman with the child threw herself off the roof.
The woman and the child landed on the cobblestoned courtyard of the seven-story-tall
apartment building.
Spattered? Crushed? Squashed? Or just with their spinal cords broken?
When I was 44 I found out they were my grandad’s first wife and child.
5.
What is it about euphemisms?
“What’s in a name”, right?
Why does it seem that both the oppressors and the victims resort to tip-toeing
euphemisms when referring to the greatest crime committed on the European soil
under the watch of the whole Western world?
“Ver-nicht-ung”,” End-lösung”, “annihilation”, “destruction”, “annulment”, the (dreaded)
“Final Solution” (which should not be acceptable in use without big fat quotation
marks!), “purge”, “extermination’. “Nihil”, “Nichts”, “terminare”, “nullus’, “nil”. Nothing.
Nothing. Nothing.
Sounds almost elegant. Latinate. Cold. Rational. Studied.
How about the verbs then?
“Sent to the camps”, “perished”, “lost“,”ausgeschaltet”(“switched off”,”out-hulled”,
apparently!), “e-limin-ated” (the Latin etymology suggests: “turned out of doors”, some
secret “limen”, “threshold” that the Jews are not allowed to cross. Or may have
accidentally overstepped.).
Should one just say “killed”?
But “ killed” sounds so normal. Too normal, in fact.
You get ‘killed” in a car accident. You do not get “killed” along with 6 million other
people with whom you share some of your DNA.
For no other reason but that DNA.
“Eugenics” one should say, not “DNA”. That is: “well-growing”.
Sounds scientific.
Like cultivating a perfect garden with a botanist’s poise while carefully pruning out the
weeds. (My family being the weeds, of course; most of you being the pretty flowers).
But, still, it sounds elegant, cold, rational, studied. Greek rather than Latinate this time.
“Eugenics”, though, hits you with some sort of pseudoscientific superiority. Which makes
it even harder to stomach.
“Murdered”? I always thought that Jack the Ripper “murdered” his victims. Or Sweeney
Todd. Or Charles Manson.
“Murdered” sounds like something done to a person down a dark alley in Victorian
London.
Can you “murder” six million people?
As a child I remember the furtive whispers about “the ovens”. As if it were some sort of a
gory Hansel und Grettel variation.
But then, whether we say “burnt”, “cremated”, “incinerated”, or “turned into ashen”, it
still does not reflect dying. Only the disposal of the corpse.
And it still sounds wrong. Poetic. Literary. Dignified.
Well, you cannot ignore the indignity of being “gassed”. “Gassed to death” (as opposed
to “gassed to life”)…
“Gassed” is probably the worst of all the available terms.
Who wants their grandparents “gassed”?
“Burnt on a pyre”? As, indeed, were the bodies when the crematoria reached their
“operating capacity” (doesnt “operating capacity” fill you with linguistic abhorrence!?).
“Pyre” – sounds as if it belonged to some ancient religious ceremony
.
“Consumed by the flames” – another sort of a religious rite. Pagan. Obsolete. But
meaningful.
Meaningful of what exactly, in our case?
An “offering” then? “Burnt offering”? “Holo-caust” – “a burnt offering on an altar”.
Were the ovens of Auschwitz “an altar”?
What was being “offered”?
By whom?
And what for?
I’m lost for words.
My vocabulary is exhausted.
There is nothing but emptiness out there.
“Nihil”, “Nichts”, “nullus’, “nil”. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Infinite sadness.
And silence.