6 Helping to Find a Narrative of Hope, or Honoring the Narrative

“My mother/father/grandmother/grandfather won’t talk to me, won’t tell me about their time during the Holocaust. How can I make them?”

Countless times this statement has been said to me. Countless. My response is simple: you can’t. I asked a friend of mine, a leading psychiatrist in Melbourne, whether I was doing harm to Lale in letting him talk to me at such an emotional level, given he was also grieving the loss of Gita. I was talking to him not as a professional but as a friend, in a social setting. This man already knew a great deal about my relationship with Lale. He assured me I wasn’t, that Lale would never tell me something he didn’t want to talk about. This was so reassuring to hear. And, as I have already written, I know Lale took a lot of his story to his grave. My psychiatrist friend told me he was more concerned about me looking after myself than he was about Lale. He could see I was invested in our friendship and was at pains to point out that I needed to take care of myself.

“Do what you know is the right thing for the both of you,” he told me. “You can’t go wrong if you follow your instincts, protect yourself first and by default, you will protect Lale.”

How right he was.

Knowing this, or because of this, I took my responsibility very seriously. I knew I must be sure to tell Lale’s story true to his memory—I have included nothing he didn’t tell me. Although I made sure that I verified everything he told me, because I was aware of the extreme sensitivities around this subject. I only included details that I could verify from another source. But when his stories didn’t always match up with researched facts, I also knew I was not telling THE story of the Holocaust, I was telling A Holocaust story—Lale’s story.

My initial thoughts were to write a memoir; I even went to a Memoir Writing Workshop—for a day—it was a five-day workshop. I knew after one day the style and rules of a memoir did not suit the way Lale wanted his story told. I saw Lale’s story played out on a screen. Big or small, it didn’t matter. Having attended many screenwriting classes, seminars, and workshops, and being familiar with the disciplines of writing a screenplay, I decided that was the way I would work. It was only after several years trying to have the script developed, that I made the decision to adapt the screenplay into a novel. I am not a historian, and so many brilliant minds have written and recorded the story of the Holocaust, and so I chose to use the medium of fiction to re-create all that Lale told me in our three years of friendship.

Lale only chose to talk to me because Gita had died. That was it, the only reason he would now speak at length about his experience of the Holocaust. His reason for not speaking to someone sooner came down to his honoring a vow to her that they, individually or together, would not publicly talk about their past. He told me this on the first day we met. He was very calm, even matter-of-fact about it: he could now tell his story because Gita had died, but I had to hurry up and write because he wanted to be with her. Over the next three years, we talked about Gita’s insistence they did not talk about their past and he would lean in to me and whisper, “Only to ourselves, in our bedroom, did we remember.” He loved telling me that and always had a twinkle in his eye when he did.

A memory of evil and horror, remembered in the most private and intimate surroundings for six decades. How poignant is that?

Lale explained how Gita wanted to put their past behind them, asking him always, how could she have a good and happy life if she kept talking about Birkenau, about losing most of her family? Both Lale and his son, Gary, told me many times how little Gita had ever said in front of Gary; Lale had been more open and up-front with his son about his time as the Tattooist. Yes, both he and Gita had made videos for the USC Shoah Foundation, but their understanding when they agreed to be interviewed was that these tapes would not be readily available to the public. Other than this interview, Gita had spoken very little of her experience. The friends I met with Lale also confirmed that she did not join in conversations about surviving the Holocaust. They said she listened, just didn’t take part or share. Lale admitted to me that he and his male friends spoke about it together, safe in the knowledge they had all shared the same experience and could talk freely among themselves, that no one would judge, that there was no need for shame or guilt within this group. Shabbat dinners after the women had gone to the kitchen to clean up (his words!) became a time to speak of their shared tragedy.

Lale’s subsequent desperation to find someone to talk to so soon after Gita’s death is testament to how badly he needed to tell the world of the girl whose arm he held, dressed in rags, her head shaven and unbathed, who stole his heart. He also felt if he spoke up and people heard what he had to say, the Holocaust would never happen again. I think he always felt the hand of history on his shoulder, recognized that his role in the Holocaust was unique and worth recording. He was highly intelligent and understood that there was a growing willingness on the part of the remaining generation of survivors to speak out, as they reached the ends of their lives, and a growing need for people to hear and learn from these stories. It was almost as if he felt it was his duty to tell his story before he went to “be with Gita.”

I am convinced Lale never intended to reveal the deeply emotional and traumatizing impact of the events he had witnessed and experienced. I think at first he intended to keep that bottled up inside and simply to let me have the facts as he remembered them. Only after he really came to trust me did he allow himself to open up in front of me. Then he would, right up to the end of his life, let slip little bits of stories hidden, buried so deep within that I think he almost surprised himself by speaking them out loud. As I have mentioned before, this was the way I first got to hear about Cilka Klein.

One day we had been out for a coffee (yay!), met several of his friends, and sat with them. They knew by now I was writing Lale’s story and with great humor and ribbing were telling me stories of their own and asking him, “Did you tell her [me] that? Bet you never told her about…”—generally some mischief the men had gotten up to, resulting in the women present wanting more details. During these informal coffee meetings, I was hearing mostly about Lale and Gita’s life in Melbourne, the lifestyle they enjoyed, the parties these friends had been to. When we got back to Lale’s apartment, and I had declined a further cup of coffee before he skipped to the kitchen and produced it without asking, I noticed he was in a reflective mood. The giggles and lightness had left him. As we sat down, he turned to me and said, “Did I tell you about Cilka?”

“No, who was she?” I replied.

“She was the bravest person,” and wagging his finger at me, he added, “not the bravest girl, the bravest person I ever knew.”

When I pushed him to tell me more, he shook his head, turned away from me, head bowed. I could see the trembling lips. I let it go, moved on to a subject less painful—but I could also see that it was a story he wanted, needed, me to hear. Gradually over the coming months, he told me about her, always ending his conversation with: “When you have told my story, you must tell Cilka’s, I want the world to know about Cilka.”

Lale struggled to find the words to describe Cilka’s survival in Birkenau. He couldn’t or wouldn’t use the word “rape.” Instead he would say, “He made her do it.” When I asked, “Do what?,” he squirmed and looked away and muttered, “Sleep with him, you know.” Holding his hand above his head, he would say, “He was up here,” dropping it down, “She was down here. How could she fight him?” Shaking his head, he would mutter over and over, “There was nothing we could do to help her, save her, from that bastard in Birkenau or what happened to her after.” He would then say, “If Gita was here, she could tell you, she would tell you. She visited Cilka in Slovakia after she got out of Siberia, the girls talked about it.”

Lale never got to read his story as a novel, but he did get to read it in its original format, a screenplay. After a year, I had a first draft written, and on his birthday, as I sat with him drinking his coffee and eating a small piece of cake he had bought from a local café, I handed him my gift. He ripped the paper off, revealing my bound first draft script of The Tattooist of Auschwitz. The cake was pushed aside (he wasn’t a big eater anyway) as he flicked through the pages. But he wasn’t reading it, he was running his fingers over his and Gita’s names on each page. He beamed and giggled—I’ll never forget that laugh. It was a wonderful moment for both of us. When I left him that evening, he was still hugging the manuscript close to his chest. It was as if I had given him back a little piece of Gita, written in words—the words he had given to me.

I was lucky to have a local film production company option the script from me. Over the next year, Lale was involved with these people in contributing and developing my original script. All the changes and rewrites were given to him. He offered advice here and there, but he was delighted by the way I had captured his story, in particular by the way I had written about Gita. He had stopped saying, “I need to be with Gita,” every time we met. Now he wanted to live for as long as it would take to see their story told to the world.

Sadly, this didn’t happen. He died on October 31, 2006—three days after his ninetieth birthday, three years after we first met.

It would not be true to say that through the process of sharing his story Lale lost his pain, trauma, and guilt—he carried so much with him to the end. But I do believe that speaking with me, knowing his story would be told, helped in some way to lighten the burden he’d carried his entire life. I saw firsthand, repeatedly, how talking freely and feeling safe, knowing I would honor his story, helped him reclaim his zest for life.

There were five words Lale would say to me all the time that would have me roll my eyes, and just look at him.

“Did I tell you about…?”

From this opening statement, something I had never heard before might follow. Not helpful when I thought I had a full account of his story and my current draft of his screenplay was being read by others.

He was in a particularly playful mood the day he said, “Did I tell you I was a playboy?”

My initial reaction of mock disapproval had him quickly qualifying how he was referring to his life before Gita. Listening to him tell me about his life as a “playboy” in Bratislava prior to his deportation, with his fine tailored suits, polished shoes, coiffured hair, a physique he was proud of, was a truly joyous experience. He’d had so many girlfriends, he told me. A good job gave him the money to spend on food and wine, entertainment, the designer clothes he craved. As he paced around his living room, he left me, went back to that time and place, describing his life in detail. And what a life! A young man grasping every moment, every opportunity that came his way, he was full of hope for his future. It pleased me to give him the space and safety to talk about his life pre-Auschwitz, a time lost to him. He could never go back to the dream of that bright future; the Holocaust had obliterated those happy times.

I listened in awe to his descriptions of beautiful women and enviable lifestyle, switching my gaze from this excited eighty-eight-year-old man to the photo of Gita on his sideboard. It seemed incongruous that he subsequently fell in love where he did and under the circumstances in which he did. He often told me that he had total belief he would survive Auschwitz-Birkenau and resume his life back in Bratislava. Surely it would be with one of the beautiful women he knew there, whom he hoped to return to? He admitted to me that he didn’t necessarily date Jewish girls, that many of his “girlfriends” were not Jewish. Instead he had held the hand of that young girl dressed in rags, and he said, “I knew in that second I could never love another.” What was it about Gita that spellbound our playboy? He told me it was her eyes: they were black, they were alive, they bored into him and he couldn’t look away. In that terrible place of death, he saw in those eyes a defiance and will to survive.

As Lale opened up more, although I often witnessed his distress, I was also increasingly aware of the effect that telling his story was having in helping him heal. It was a physical and emotional healing for him. To laugh again, connect with his community, go out to movies and cafés with me, shop and cook meals for us both, spend time with my family. And then there was dancing with Tootsie. Him holding that poor dog’s front paws in his hands while he swirled around, Tootsie stumbling with him, was, as I told him often, potentially hazardous for a man his age.

He also had this little skip. Whenever he stood up, he would take two steps, skip in the air and click his ankles together. It was six months into our friendship that I first saw “The Skip”—it continued for the rest of his life. I think he allowed me to see the man he was before the Holocaust, perhaps a man he could never quite be with Gita, because of all they had experienced and witnessed together. Perhaps in some way, I helped him become that man again.

As I go forward writing other stories of hope, courage, love, and survival, I will be totally focused once again on caring for the person who is telling me their story, caring for myself, and striving to relate these stories, always honoring those involved and their narrative. It is such a privilege to sit in the homes of ordinary people who have lived through an extraordinary time and be present with them as they take me on a journey through their experiences. In getting to know them and their families, as well as sharing my own story with them, I have made lifelong friendships and my life has been hugely enriched.

Recently, I made a second journey back to Israel, to spend time with the family whose story I tell next. This time I had shekels on me: I was a little wiser about the rules in Israel this time. Meeting this amazing family has been one of the great joys of my life.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Livia’s apartment was the jigsaw puzzle on her dining table. It didn’t take long for me to gravitate toward it and tell Livia and her family how much I enjoyed doing puzzles. I use them to shut down from writing. Nothing totally absorbs me like leaning over a thousand tiny pieces of cardboard begging me to put them together, to make something whole out of chaos. Reading a book, watching a movie does not shut my brain down the same way as a jigsaw does. Order out of chaos? Fitting tiny moving pieces into a whole story? I’ll leave it to you to figure out what that means.

When I mentioned this to Livia, she immediately agreed. Involuntarily, I picked up a piece and started looking for where it might fit in before realizing what I was doing. “Go ahead,” she said. Every member of her family who visits her daily greets her, then they too work on whatever puzzle she has laid out, placing a piece or two before they leave.

A week later, my last few hours with this woman were spent with the two of us sitting opposite each other, trying to outdo one another in placing bits in the puzzle. We talked about our families and how our lives were just like the puzzle in front of us: complicated, but ultimately rewarding. Through this one connection, jigsaw junkies, I got to know this woman on an entirely different level to the person who had survived evil and horror. I saw the calm, steady mind that studied a small piece of a puzzle, held it over the box depicting the scene she was creating, either placed it where it should be or gently put it to one side to be considered again at a later time. Our conversation was about the hope that she has carried for decades of a good life for her children, now extended to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She is proud to tell her story, she told me, in the hope that it will make a difference to others. I will be proud to tell her story of hope and resilience. I have said it many times, my books are not my stories: they are Lale’s, Cilka’s, and these three amazing sisters’.

One thing every survivor has said to me is, “I was lucky.” This might sound strange—how is being persecuted for religious faith during the Holocaust lucky?

In April 2018, I was at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living. Together with thousands of men and women, girls and boys, we marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Sitting on the grass on a beautiful spring day, dignitaries and politicians would speak of the need to Never Forget. Never Again.

When the opening music of the formal event ended, the first person to speak was an elderly man. He was dressed in the blue-and-white-striped uniform of this place. The program told me he had been a Polish prisoner here, where I sat, and now lived in the United States. He was helped to the microphone, a granddaughter beside him to support, both emotionally and physically (twice he started to collapse only to be held back up as he insisted on continuing to speak).

I was sitting on the grass examining every blade around me. Did Gita and the other girls sit here, searching for four-leaf clovers? I searched until the words of the old man made me stop and look up at the stage in front of me.

I don’t know what I was expecting him to say, probably something about his time here, nearly seventy-five years ago, but he didn’t. His opening words were to give thanks and heap praise on the American producer/director Steven Spielberg. He was acknowledging the role Mr. Spielberg had played in keeping the story of the Holocaust alive with his movie Schindler’s List (1993). On and on he went, urging all of us to give thanks to him—he must have said Mr. Spielberg’s name ten times or more.

There is no doubt that that film, among many, continues to keep the Holocaust story alive. I have had the privilege of meeting and sharing a stage with Thomas Keneally, the man who wrote Schindler’s Ark, the book on which the film is based—in my opinion an Australian hero. However, it is not only this movie that I think of when I think of Mr. Spielberg. It is what he did after making the movie that I believe is Spielberg’s greatest achievement in keeping the narrative of the Holocaust alive: the creation of the USC Shoah Foundation.

In sending videographers to far-flung countries to record the individual stories of survivors, he gave voice to them and to their resilience and bravery, giving them an opportunity to tell their story. As many survivors have said to me, there are not two people who would tell the same story. Everyone witnessed and experienced the Holocaust differently. Their own personal backgrounds made them interpret what was happening in a uniquely individual way. No one story is better or more profound than another. Of course, there is an inevitable and terrible similarity in many of the experiences, particularly when it came to witnessing atrocities, but it is the personal suffering that must be acknowledged and told, not just the collective.

Two of the three sisters whose story I tell next went through the same appalling experiences, yet one describes how she was in a “zombie”-like state for most of the time she was in Birkenau. A psychiatrist would describe this as “dissociation,” the mind freeing itself from feelings and emotions in order to cope with severe stress or trauma. The other sister—well, she had her eyes wide open. She remembers the small details and is able to describe how she reacted, how she dragged her little sister along with her, looking out for her, caring for her.

I return to the many children and grandchildren who have told me how they want, need, their Holocaust survivor family member to speak out, tell their story, and yet how rare it is for those close to Holocaust survivors to feel able to ask about it, or how often their questions are rebuffed.

I am a mother, a grandmother. I do not believe there is any way I could look into the eyes of my children or grandchildren and tell them of horrors I had lived through. Indeed, I struggled to tell my children of the horrors I heard from Lale Sokolov—I wanted to protect them from secondhand trauma.

Meeting the families of three sisters, Holocaust survivors, in Israel was so uplifting. For the first time, I spent time with first- and second-generation descendants who had grown up hearing every detail of these three brave girls’ stories. They told me when they attended survivor children support groups, they were envied because these women had chosen to speak about their experiences. The love which exuded from every family member toward each other was palpable. I believe their love for each other and family was due to the honesty and openness their parents had demonstrated with them, telling them their stories at age-appropriate times and in age-appropriate language.

It was obvious to me this family had healed from the trauma their parents had experienced. Their painful past was never to be forgotten, it was to be talked about often and shared. Now, that’s courage.

It must always be the individual’s choice what to talk about and what they choose to take to their grave. Thankfully, Steven Spielberg has ensured that thousands of survivor testimonies now exist, and the individual stories of the Holocaust need never be forgotten. These videos offer hope to those who made them, and to us, that through the darkest times in history, people clung to each other and hoped by their survival to tell generations of the hope they carried. Hope is the last thing to die. In fact, as that terminally ill young woman told her mother in hospital: “It takes only moments to die, the rest of the time we are living.”

With every breath we take, we are living.

When I chose to fictionalize Lale’s story, I wanted to tell it the way he told it to me. I was telling his story, not my version of it, and so I stayed true to his storytelling, honoring his narrative in re-creating his experiences. The only thing I couldn’t re-create was his charming Eastern European accent and how he would get words back to front or jumbled up in a way that would have us both laughing. He was very ready to laugh at himself. Not having a deadline meant there was no pressure for either of us, no time limit on his telling and my listening.

Taking time to really listen to someone and hear their story requires patience and perseverance. Several years ago, I read an article about the upcoming Olympic Games. The article was about the cost of security to protect the athletes and officials. The last paragraph mentioned the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne and the small security team back then. The head of security had been only twenty-three years old at the time. Fascinated by this story, and wanting to learn more, I did a quick calculation and guessed the man might still be alive. After calling every man with that name in Melbourne, I finally struck gold. I asked the elderly gentleman on the other end of the phone if I could come and talk to him about his time at the Games in 1956. I was told he had no intention of talking about that time, Official Secrets Act and all that, but I kept him talking long enough to wangle a coffee out of him.

Lale had died and I now had my Sundays free. For nearly a year, I had coffee two to three times a month with this man, who had been the head of security at the 1956 Olympic Games. We enjoyed each other’s company, the coffee was much better than Lale’s, but he was teasing me and giving me very little.

One day, out of the blue he called to say his health was failing and he wanted to tell me all. I arranged with the curator of the venue where the Games were held to have access, and with my children acting as a film crew, we spent several hours recording his story. They were known as the “Friendly Games,” but they were held at the height of the Cold War, around the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Suez Canal crisis. Lies, spies, murder, and abductions were the reality. This one man was front and center of it all. He saw the abductions, sat with the politicians who scrambled to cover up what was going on in our town. A screenplay exists of this story; it sits in the bottom drawer of my desk. Maybe one day, it will see the light of day.

Like Lale, this man experienced a form of therapeutic release in telling his story. I got to spend many more wonderful moments with him before he died. I also got to hear his story of life after the Games, and like Lale, it was his love for his wife and their family he especially wanted to tell me about. As I got to spend time with his wife every time I visited—truth to tell, it was she who made the great coffee—I understood his initial reluctance to talk to me. He had lived the most amazing life with the people he loved surrounding him, with no need to look back, but as is so often the case, he chose to speak out toward the end. I chose to listen, and I am the richer for knowing him and hearing his story.

The world is a big place; your community and neighborhood are small in comparison. Stories like the ones I have told are around us all the time, among the people we live with. If you are that way inclined, if you feel your life might be enriched by meeting people outside your circle, spending time with them, listening to their stories, you might find it changes your life—just look around you.