PERHAPS IT WAS BLOOMFIELD who gave me the first inkling. He would tramp the streets of our neighbourhood in a worn suit, verging on neatness in a navy-blue tie and white shirt. But the heels of his shoes were non-existent from constant walking, and his clothes were frayed. He would pause only for a quick chat, a few cryptic remarks. Forever restless, he was anxious to resume his rapid strides which headed purposefully nowhere except within a well-defined territory of local streets and parks. It was said he slept in rooming-houses for paupers and single men. In winter a large coat weighed him down, while in summer he would discard the jacket of his suit and walk with his shirt sleeves rolled up. It was then that I would see, clearly exposed, the primitive scrawl of blue figures, his ‘passport number’ as he called it with a nervous laugh. And for as long as I can recall, I associated him with whispered conversations among my parents and their friends: something about him having been a human guinea pig in experiments conducted by a Doctor Mengele, the white-gloved arbiter of life and death in a place they called by its Polish name, Oswiecim. The word would evoke in me a chill, a sense of terror, a feeling of dread.
Or perhaps I first heard it in the annual commemorations which took place, late April, throughout the 1950s, in the Melbourne Town Hall. It would be packed to the last seat, with several thousand East European Jews, most of them recent arrivals from ‘yener velt’, the other world, or simply ‘over there’, as they often called it.
As the lights dimmed, six candles would be lit by six children, the sons and daughters of survivors. We all knew very well what the candles represented. But the figure was too vast, incalculable. I would lie awake some nights trying to penetrate the mystery. Six million dead? Or was it six million spirits? If one travelled out into space, what would be the end of it? Could there be an end? Was six million the end-point of all journeys?
In the candle light, standing on a rostrum, alone on stage against a stark black backdrop, a cantor would recite the Prayer for the Dead, a plea to the Master of the Universe to look after the souls of the departed. His amplified tenor would soar in the cavernous hall, mounting in intensity as it flowed into a recital of names, each one pronounced in a voice that seemed to weep, drawing with it a chorus which ascended from the audience, at first softly, slowly gathering force, discarding all restraint, until it seemed as though the whole of humanity was weeping. Oswiecim was always the first name: Oswiecim, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec, Buchenwald, Dachau — ghettoes, extermination camps, sites of execution. As I listened, the names were instilled within me as places on a mythical landscape, in a remote Kingdom of Darkness, in which ancestral ghosts stalked unredeemed, eternally condemned to a netherworld of shadows.
Then the lights were on, the chandeliers ablaze, the community swarming out onto the streets, the children even daring to play. We hurtled up and down flights of stairs while our parents talked on the footpaths. The faces of the town clock beamed at us as we crowded onto trams together, since many of us were returning to the same neighbourhood where Bloomfield, the human guinea pig, could be seen even at this late hour, maintaining his restless patrol, his eyes perpetually fixed on a distant and inaccessible goal.
And there was a golden era, which I vaguely recall as weaving in and out of a darkness. Father would sit on the living-room sofa, stand me on his feet, and lift. His feet contained a magical power. ‘Oompah! Oompah!’, he would say with every lift. ‘Oompah! Oompah!’, and I was flying, arms outstretched, while his face whirled below me in a ball of laughter. Mother too displayed magical powers, especially when I contracted the various childhood ailments which swept through kindergarten and primary school. I recall them as one extended fever from which I would sometimes open my eyes to see mother always seated by the bed, her face emanating a softness, a gentle strength, a constancy. Sunday mornings were the best of times. We were allowed, all three brothers, to jump into the warm double bed which mother and father had just vacated. We bounced on the mattress, crawled under the fat eiderdown beneath which they slept on winter nights, and revelled in the after-scent of their bodies.
Yet there was always something else. I do not recall a first time, but there were to be many times. Mother would be standing in front of me, rocking to and fro, her eyes shifting out of focus, as if everyone around her, myself included, no longer existed. She was somewhere else, perhaps ‘over there’, in that distant world she had left behind. I did not see it as such at the time. All I could register was the estrangement, her non-recognition; and I wanted to shake her, to bring her back, to awaken her from the dream — or perhaps enter into it, so long as we were together.
But even this seemed preferable — her silent retreat, the passive withdrawal — to the rage that could erupt at any time, accompanied by a refrain repeated incessantly as a plea, a demand, an accusation. ‘I’ve got a story to tell’, she would exclaim. ‘No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!’ It was never clear nor logical, this outcry, but rather a succession of garbled clues, an erratic monologue strung together between familiar phrases and catchwords: something about permits, passports, disloyalties and locked doors; broken promises, broken hearts, betrayals and unjust laws. Her words were hurled at father, Hitler, the community, the world at large; and they careered back, over and again, to the refrain, ‘I’ve got a story to tell. No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!’ Bialystok, Wellington, Melbourne, Oswiecim, this world and yener velt were all intertwined. Over there was over here, and here was over there; and I would take to the streets, or retreat to my bedroom, to seek relief from the storm. And father too would slip away, as if somehow implicated, unwilling to answer the questions I had begun to ask with increasing persistence and mounting anger as I sought to fathom the source of the constant tension which simmered in the house.
There was another possibility: the dining-room cupboard, full of journals and letters, ageing books and mysteries. Spiders had found undisturbed corners in which to spin their webs. Cockroaches scurried by. The letters were neatly tied in bundles, the envelopes coated in dust. I would prise open the doors, retrieve the bundles, and take them to my bedroom. I carefully unfolded the fragile writing-sheets, which were yellowed and riddled with holes. Others were a little thicker, pale blue, more durable. A vague scent of forgotten days hovered about them. The dates seemed ancient, concentrated between 1933 and mid 1936: they were addressed from mother to Meier Zabludowski, Bialystok, Kupietzka 38; and from father to Hoddes Zabludowski, care of her sister Feigl in Melbourne, and care of a Mr and Mrs Morris in Wellington, New Zealand.
It was difficult to decipher the scrawling Yiddish script — written in haste, it seemed, with an urgency I was too young to comprehend. Only gradually did I come to detect the agitation and longing, especially in mother’s letters; and also a strength, always expanding in order to contain her growing sense of isolation, bewilderment, and unfulfilled love.
Her early letters, however, were permeated with optimism and high expectations. On the night of February 3, 1933, the passengers on the Wild Mama held a farewell party. A chocolate cake was baked for the occasion, and the French cook was shown how to ice the message, in Yiddish: ‘We wish you happiness in your new life.’ The passengers sang, made lofty speeches, and danced. Two black stewards, who had served them throughout the journey, joined in the festivities. ‘They were fine dancers’, writes mother. ‘One of them stood on the table and sang the Marseillaise.’ And at dawn they had all gathered on deck while the Wild Mama steamed through the gap between the two peninsulas which enclose Port Phillip Bay.
As the port came into view they could see many people awaiting their arrival. A boat from Europe was quite an event, and the infant Polish-Jewish community of Melbourne would treat it as a public holiday, a rare day off work. Among the passengers, Mrs Abrahams and her three young children were the most excited. Somewhere in the crowd, waving from the docks, stood her husband. Five years of separation were coming to an end.
Mother was greeted by her sister Feigl, her brother-in-law Moishke, their baby daughter Freidele, and many former Bialystoker, eager to obtain news from home, a message from a loved one. As for Mrs Abrahams, her husband was nowhere to be seen. Long after the customs formalities had been completed she remained on the wharf with her three children, their trunks and suitcases in a pile beside them. Nine weeks later, Mrs Abrahams was dead of a stroke. Or was it suicide? The children were in a home for the abandoned, and her husband was still living with the woman who had been his mistress for several years. Meanwhile, the gates of the Old World were slowly closing and, in the New, mother had begun the long battle to bring over her husband.
She writes once a fortnight, late at night, or early mornings, before work, in order to post her letters in time for the next mail-run to Europe. For the most part she concentrates on everyday details, her practical vision of reality. Within two weeks of arrival she has a job as a machinist in a textile factory in Flinders Lane, the garment district in the heart of the city. She gets up at seven, walks to the tram stop at 7.30, and enters the factory punctually at eight. There is a ten-minute break for morning tea, half-an-hour for lunch at one, and an afternoon session until five thirty. At night she works at home, in her sister’s dressmaking business. She receives a weekly wage of two pounds and five shillings, pays fifteen shillings for food and lodging and, apart from various little expenses, the balance goes into paying back the loan for her ticket to Australia. She looks forward to the day when she can put aside money for her husband’s fare and for her impoverished family in Bialystok.
‘Work conditions are in general satisfactory’, she writes in the tone of the former committee member of the Bialystok Seamstresses’ Union. She is grateful for the regular wage, and enthuses about holiday pay and the overtime bonus. She recalls the interminable hours of unrewarded work in the sweatshops at home. The memory tempers her attacks of nostalgia. She is determined to start a new life regardless, under the strange, somehow transparent light of these southern skies.
Nevertheless, Melbourne’s isolated Polish Jews learn to bend and mould time and space to soothe their moments of longing. They recreate the Old World in the New. Mother asks Meierke to send pictures of her Bundist heroes, Vladimir Medem and Beinish Michelevitz, and of her beloved Yiddish writer, I. L. Peretz. When they arrive she hangs them on the walls of her room alongside pictures of the Polish countryside. On Sundays she visits Bundist families in the neighbourhood. As soon as she enters their homes she feels enveloped by the warmth of familiarity. There are regular latke evenings, where fiery discussions of politics burn until the early hours of the morning; and when she walks home, she feels lighter, uplifted, as if she were moving through the streets of Bialystok.
And she calculates distances, time-spans. It takes five weeks for a letter to cross the oceans to her Meierke. ‘Here it is midnight. I am sitting at a table, in a room in Melbourne, and over there, my dear one, it is early afternoon. Here it is late summer, and for you it is still winter. Be careful you do not catch cold.’ Weeks later, when she tastes the freshness of autumn evenings on the way home from work, she muses: ‘If only, on such perfect nights, you were the one who greeted me as I left the factory, rather than the strangers who crowd the streets at this hour.’ On Mondays, when letters from Europe arrive, she sits at work impatiently, ‘as though on pins’. Her head ‘spins from thinking about it’, and at five thirty she grabs her coat and beret and hastens to the tram. Within twenty minutes she is close to home, running, her heart beating strongly, plagued by the thought, ‘What if no letter arrives today? How will I get through the next week?’
There are times when she can barely contain the longing. Especially on anniversaries and celebrations. Take, for instance, May Day, 1933. Mother writes in March, so that the letter will arrive at the appropriate time. She is upset that this year she will not be able to participate, for the first time since 1922. In ten years she had not missed a single May Day march, ‘like a pious Jew does not miss his three daily prayers’, she remarks. She recalls the arrest, just one year before, of Rivke Hartman. ‘I can picture the scene clearly, the police running with batons and upraised bayonets. Meierke, I trust you will describe everything that takes place during this year’s march. Send my best wishes to my friends in the Bund, and take good care of yourself during the demonstration. I will be with you, in spirit.’
As winter approaches, the community huddles together. It subscribes to Polish-Yiddish dailies, worries about the rise of Hitler in Germany, establishes news-sheets, a choir, a Yiddish theatre. Mother sings at concerts and at a grand banquet to celebrate the arrival of an eminent Yiddish writer on a lecture-tour of Australia. Funds are raised for Yiddish schools in Poland; and plans are made to establish one in Melbourne, which I will attend decades later, on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. As a result I will learn the ‘aleph beis’, the Yiddish alphabet, an esoteric knowledge which will enable me to decipher mother’s letters and to discover the ebb and flow of her moods, the slow erosion of her faith, and her increasing desperation as she fought to remain in the New World.
Lives hang in the balance in ill-lit offices where, in between cups of tea and biscuits, with a cigarette dangling from the lips — or so I like to imagine it — a bureaucrat sits down, adjusts his glasses, focusses on the papers in front of him, and deduces that she, my mother, had migrated as a Probutski, on a permit made out to a single woman, sponsored by a sister, and the application he is scanning is for a husband with the name Zabludowski. This is a transgression of the law. Besides, there is an economic crisis in the land, jobs are hard to come by, and there are many citizens calling for an end to migration. A letter is sent to Hoddes Probutski, official, polite, to the point: you have one month in which to leave the country.
Mother fights tenaciously to stay in Australia. Accompanied by her brother-in-law Moishke, she approaches rabbis, communal leaders, lawyers, and lodges appeals. She is interviewed by an immigration officer. He is angry at the ‘trick’ she had played on the government. She had signed her papers falsely. Mother argues she had been single at the time. ‘But you arrived as a married person’, the officer admonishes. He turns his attention to Meier. ‘Can your husband speak English? Does he have skills which are scarce in Australia? Perhaps he has money. With five hundred pounds he could enter without a permit.’ Only towards the end of the interrogation, when mother hands him a photo of Meier, does he soften. ‘Not bad looking, your old man’, he remarks. ‘But I’m afraid the decision is not up to me. Your papers will be sent to Canberra. The boys up there will look into it. Trouble is, there are too many people in this country. Even our prime minister, good Catholic that he is, has eleven children.’
‘I have become very nervous’, writes mother. ‘I am running out of patience.’ She waits six weeks for a reply. On October 19 it arrives. Her permit has been revoked. She must leave the country. Mother’s despair can be felt in every sentence as she writes to Meier of her sense of humiliation on receiving the reply. ‘It was like a clap of thunder’, she tells him. She has barely paid off her debt for the ticket out: now she must find money for the return journey. The Christmas season is coming. She works overtime in the factory and well past midnight in Feigl’s business. ‘At least work helps me forget’, she writes, ‘and as I work 1 think of you. Your name is always on my lips, your face embedded in my fantasies.’
A delegation is sent to the Minister responsible for immigration. He promises to think it over. Mother’s hopes leap. ‘It is good to dream’, she writes, ‘but woe unto the dreamer.’ At the same time, she never allows herself to stray too far from the practical. She rebukes Meier for sending letters express: ‘An unnecessary expense. Every groshen is valuable. Write on thinner paper. But your letters are a great encouragement’, she adds, ‘and I await them anxiously, every Monday, my “sacred” day of the week.’
The Minister rejects the appeal, but allows her four months in which to earn the fare home. A new possibility emerges. Rabbi Brody of Melbourne writes to rabbi Katz in New Zealand. Rabbi Katz approaches immigration officials on mother’s behalf. She requires sponsors, they reply, and only then can she apply for a permit. A young Bialystoker in Melbourne has relatives in Wellington, a Mr and Mrs Morris. He asks them to act as guarantors. They agree, and an application is lodged. If this attempt fails, mother reasons, she will return to Paris rather than Poland. She can see what is coming. Any alternative, anywhere on this globe, would be preferable to her former homeland.
Yet with each rejection Bialystok seems more alluring. ‘Come home’, writes Chane Esther. ‘There will be a great simche when you arrive.’ ‘Life is not so bad here’, writes Meier, ‘Your many friends would love to see you again.’
Their entreaties are tempting; a day of waiting is an eternity. Each night takes its own time before giving way to the dawn. Mother wakes at 3 a.m. in a fever. She stares at photos of Meier. The ticking of the clock is a creeping insanity. Each minute is fraught with panic; each successive tick resounds louder. Letters float across oceans, bearing images of loved ones. Mother gazes at photos of her sister Sheindl, her cousin Freidele, her nephew Chaimke. ‘He looks so alive, as if he were actually here’, she writes. ‘And Freidele is growing up to be pretty. But my sister Sheindl’s sad smile gives me no joy. She seems very upset. Chilek no longer writes to her from Palestine. I feel insulted by it.’ This is always the possibility which skitters beneath the surface, the spectre of abandonment, the fate of Mrs Abrahams.
Mother lodges one last appeal with the logic of desperation. Or is there a touch of irony, uncharacteristic of her? ‘The centenary of Victoria’s settlement is to take place next October’, writes Moishke on her behalf. ‘The newspapers say that over fifty thousand guests are coming from England alone. So why not allow me to stay on? At least until then? What difference will one person make?’
March 4, 1934: the final rebuff from the Minister. Melbourne has just emerged from a heat wave, over forty degrees for nine days in succession. Factory work is almost intolerable. ‘The papers say it was the hottest spell in many years’, writes mother. ‘It had to be now, of course, just for me. It seems as though I am a true shlemiel. Well, let it be the last trial.’
Mother’s moods fluctuate with increasing rapidity. She receives a visa for New Zealand, but only for six months. Her Yiddish script takes on greater urgency. The characters are more elongated, stretched taut almost beyond recognition. ‘I have become a mere straw tossed around on wild seas, from earth to the skies, from the skies back to earth.’ And she hastens to add: ‘This is not just pretty prose, but the way it is. Which way do I go? Wellington? Paris? Bialystok? Buenos Aires?’ She changes her mind from one letter to the next. ‘Why spend my hard-earned money on a fare to New Zealand, where my future is uncertain, where I am without family or community?’ Bialystok appears frequently in her dreams as an enticing mirage. She sees herself sitting in the city gardens on summer evenings, strolling in Sienkiewicza Avenue on Sunday afternoons. ‘It will be exciting to see everyone again’, she writes. Mother appears to have made up her mind. ‘There is much to talk about, Meierke’, she concludes, ‘but it can now wait for when we are reunited in our beloved Bialystok.’
April 11, 1934: mother’s last letter from Melbourne. ‘It is early afternoon. At four o’clock I will be going to the station. At 5.30 the train leaves for Sydney. From there I will catch the ferry for New Zealand. My situation you can well imagine. I try to reassure myself, but I have fantasies of arriving in a strange and desolate land. I’d be much happier returning to Bialystok. But I know, within me, I must seize this last chance, so that in years to come I will be certain I exhausted every possibility. Otherwise it will always weigh on my conscience.’
On the train to Sydney mother chats with the woman sitting next to her. She is of German descent. When she learns of mother’s predicament she offers to look after her in Sydney until the ferry departs. ‘Only seven million people in such a vast continent?’, the woman muses. ‘Surely there is room for just one more!’
The Wanganui steams into Wellington Harbour through heavy rain. When the ferry docks customs police check documents. Mother and a group of Chinese are detained. ‘We were treated like criminals’ she writes. After lengthy questioning, Mr and Mrs Morris are allowed on board. They identify Hoddes as the woman they have been expecting, and assure the police they are her guarantors.
On April 30 mother writes her first letter from New Zealand. She is at her lowest ebb. During the first week she had walked the factory district looking for a job. Within a week she had found work. ‘Mr and Mrs Morris are fine people’, she observes. ‘I sleep on a sofa in their dining room. They treat me as a welcome guest.’ Yet this cannot lift her spirits. ‘To tell the truth’, she confides, ‘I would rather be back in Bialystok eating bread and salt, than here, with all the riches in the world. I cannot see either of us fitting into this way of life. You have to look with a lamp to find just one Bialystoker. As soon as I have earned the money for the fare, I’ll take my pack on my shoulders and journey home. This single thought sustains me.’
On the eve of her second May Day in the New World, mother can think only of Bialystok. She pictures the Bund locale on Ulitza Lipowe, where last-minute preparations are being made for the annual march. ‘How great would be my joy if I were there with you now.’
Many letters are missing. The last one from Wellington is dated May 15, 1934. Mother regrets the weakness she had shown in her previous letter. ‘I know you will not derive much joy from it’, she writes. ‘It was silly of me to have sent it.’ She has set her sights again on finding a way to bring Meier over. This is mother — the determined one, the stoic — as I would come to know her many years later, her life narrowed down to the single objective of raising her three children, the remnants of her once-large family. She did this with a quiet persistence, broken only from time to time by her abrupt scream emerging from a dream of villages on fire, or by a sudden rage with her hypnotic refrain echoing again and again: ‘I have a story to tell! No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!’
But increasingly I do, as I criss-cross the pages of her letters, and criss-cross Judenrein landscapes of her vanished past to uncover tombstones sinking into mud and dust. Each stone resonates with unfulfilled hopes; and each page of mother’s letters resonates with unobtainable dreams. I see her walking the streets of the New World, surrounded by strangers and locked doors. I see her confronted by her aloneness, her yearning for love and reunion. 1 see her search for a harmony, a sense of belonging and trust, while the years slowly erode her faith. Yet also I see mother acquiring, perhaps unwittingly and at great cost, a subtle wisdom which years later would be fully expressed only in silence.
On May 11, after three-and-a-half years of applications, rejections, appeals, delegations, threats of deportation, last-minute extensions and interventions, and a final plea at the eleventh hour from a friend of a friend, who knew the Minister for Immigration, father arrived in New Zealand. As he checked through customs he caught glimpses of Hoddes, among the circle of friends she had made during her two years in Wellington.
‘In that moment she seemed like a searing beam of light’, father tells me, ‘and as soon as I was able, I rushed towards her in a blur of excitement. But to tell you the truth’, he adds with a laugh, ‘I think her friends were somewhat disappointed with the greenhorn who emerged from the boat. They looked at me with great curiosity. Was this the Romeo they had heard so much about, the writer of such poetic letters, the object of Hoddes’s tireless passion, reunited at last with his Juliet?’ Father warms to the story. ‘On the same boat, there had in fact arrived two immigrant Jews’, he recalls. ‘Meier and Abrami. While I was small and wiry, Abrami was tall and handsome. He would have made a far more appropriate hero.’
Nevertheless, it was a time of great simche. From photos of that time I see a handsome couple at parties, on picnics with young friends, seated on beaches side by side: ‘A miracle for Bialystoker’, father claims. ‘We had come from a vast inland to a slender island, where the sea flowed from the skies and shades of blue permeated our lives.’ Mother strides confidently through Wellington streets, always smartly dressed. And father seems content. He exudes the heady lightness of freedom, unshackled by Old World obligations and fears.
Their goals appear simple and clear, to establish themselves with some capital. Father becomes an assistant in mother’s dressmaking business. They open a small shop, where he takes care of sales. ‘We had dreams of being able to send money to our families’, father tells me. ‘Particularly Hoddes — she was always talking about repaying Chane Esther for her many years of sacrifice. She planned to bring over her nephew Chaimke, her youngest brother Hershl, and her Aunt Rivke’s daughter Freidele. We fantasized that we would one day return to Bialystok on a visit, in style, radiating success, our suitcases laden with gifts, just like others we had seen who had made good in the New World. “Alrightniks”, they were called. We would be alrightniks on a triumphant return to the Old World.’
Again the soothing rhythm of trains. From the heights of Zakopane, the beginning of a return, one last visit to Bialystok. Day and night I move, through cities of an ancient dreaming, stopping for a day here, a few hours there, in renowned centres of Polish Jewry.
In Wroclaw it rains. The leaders of the kehilla escort me through their cemetery with a familiar lament: ‘We do not even have enough left for a minyan.’ In Lodz the burial ground is vast, overgrown, the stones hidden under long grasses that bend to the wind. Highrise flats loom on the edges, as if anxious to stake claims on occupied territory. Back through Warsaw at night, the train hurtles past a sprawl of solitary lights, and I glimpse figures stumbling under an avalanche of rain. By midmorning I am on a stone path which bears the name, ‘The Black Way’. It curves through a pine forest and opens out onto a clearing. In the centre stands a grey monolith, a mausoleum over ten metres in height, surrounded by a symbolic graveyard of jagged rocks. Each one represents a village, a town, a city, throughout Europe and remote outposts of the Reich, where victims were herded into wagons and railroaded here. Treblinka. A place of country solitude in a land of peasants. By night I am again on the move, southeast; and at dawn I am on the streets of Lublin, city of saints and talmudic scholars, centre of pilgrimage and rabbinical courts to which seekers once flocked from all corners of the realm. And just beyond the city limits I come upon it — a desolate field, surrounded by guard towers and barbed fences — a raw wound called Majdanek.
Towards evening I make my way back to the Old City quarters, a rambling neighbourhood of tenements with pastel-shaded facades. The winding alleys are deserted except for children who play by the wall which encircles the cemetery. Tufts of weeds poke out between cracks. The wall glows a mute crimson as it absorbs the sun’s rays. Never before have I felt so strongly the impact of this hour, when day gives way to night and when, for a moment, light and darkness meet in the luminosity of twilight. It seems impossible a Majdanek could have existed. Where have I been today?
The train circles north, towards the Bialystoku region. 1 doze fitfully through the night, occasionally jolted by the screech of brakes and flashes of light from stations rushing by. Months of travel coalesce in a trail of menacing dreams; and I envisage how it may have been, in the dying days of the Reich, as the Red Army moved in from the east, and the Allies from the west, liberating remnants from death camps, forest hideouts, attics and barns, a handful here, a few there. Like spectres they move, the survivors, across war-ravaged landscapes, in a trance, returning with the instincts of homing pigeons, urged on by faint hopes of finding someone alive: family, a former neighbour, a familiar face, within that vague, half-forgotten mirage they had once known as home.
In the streets of New Zealand delirious crowds are dancing. Yet my parents cannot recall a celebration, a sense of relief, or an ending, but merely a daze and an ominous blight, a ‘black stain’, father has called it. The search extended for years. They scoured Red Cross lists and personal notices in the columns of Yiddish newspapers, astounded that they could not locate even one distant relative, when thousands were emerging from the wreckage — this one from a refugee camp, that one from a Siberian prison, another from a remote town in Asia Minor, or any one of the many far-flung enclaves where temporary refuge may have been found while the storm was raging. In all parts of the globe lists were being scoured. And increasingly it was becoming obvious how immense, how complete, the Catastrophe had been.
In 1947, or thereabouts — I have never been able to find out exactly when — a notice appeared in a local paper, addressed to father, from a camp for displaced persons; and, in time, I would become aware of bitter quarrels, accusations, evasions, of matters enshrouded in obscure hints and denials, which seemed always, eventually, to hearken back to that message from yener velt, from the kingdom of night.
Many such notices were appearing at the time, signalling the unexpected reappearance of a friend, an acquaintance, a former comrade, as if returned from the dead. ‘I am looking for Meier Zabludowski’, she had written, more or less. ‘I am thinking of moving to Australia or New Zealand.’ The note was brief, a mere inquiry. Yet between the lines could be heard a barely concealed scream, a plea for help. Like so many others, she was seeking a means to flee the ruins of a past life in which they had marched together, through the streets of Bialystok, their arms linked, cushioned by each other’s warmth and an illusory sense of communal strength.
‘Send her money! Our savings! A permit! A guarantee! Send her everything she needs!’, father had replied on an impulse. At least these were the words that mother would mimic, at the height of her tirades. ‘Send her everything she needs!’ This was mother’s version, the way she imagined it, or accurately recalled it — I could never tell one way or another. And when I had begun to question father, he had, in those years, never replied. He would quietly retreat behind his bedroom door, to the works of his beloved Yiddish poets, to seek relief from the rage that had overtaken first his wife and then his children.
On one side, a silence; on the other, a tirade. My loyalties wavered, first one way then the other, goaded by father’s retreats, bewildered by mother’s furies: ‘I have a story to tell! No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!’
The year is 1947, or thereabouts. A baby is wailing. Mother is pregnant with the second child. ‘Send her money, guarantees, everything she needs!’ The spectre of Mrs Abrahams looms large. The fate of Sheindl remains fresh in her mind. Bialystok has been consumed by flames. Father is consumed by his helplessness and shame. Mother is consumed by a sense of having been betrayed. The shadow of Hitler extends from the grave. Father withdraws, a sullen retreat, limping with a loss of nerve and belief. Mother awakens with screams; and years later I would feel trapped in between, seeking desperately to distinguish reality from dreams.
Nearing the outskirts of Bialystok I see peasants gathering potatoes and turnips. They wear thick jackets, scarves, and knee-length boots. On the River Nerev a boatman poles past cottages sinking into the banks. In the yard of a farmhouse an old woman feeds her pigs. Villages whirl by. Crows swirl between church crosses and spires. A hare scampers from the tracks. Old men walk slowly along dusty paths. Wagons laden with the final harvest lurch over country roads. A midmorning sun hovers above fallow fields.
‘Those early years, after the Shoah, were a time of numbness, of suppressed grief, a stumbling through thick fog.’ This is how father has described it. And it is only now, since my journey has given us common ground, detailed maps that I have come to know like the veins which run blue rivulets through father’s worn hands, that I can fully accept his words. ‘We did not know it at the time’, he tells me. ‘How could we? We were like wounded horses, moving by instinct. We kept our sense of guilt at bay. We immersed ourselves in making a living, and in bearing children, three within four years. We moved back to Melbourne, following an urge to rejoin family and former Bialystoker, to find that they too were so immersed in their own efforts to rebuild their lives they did not have time to pause and look at themselves. We kept moving out of habit, driven by blind momentum, for we had little choice — either move forward, create a home, a refuge, or go mad.’ And, of course, some did. Like Bloomfield, forever tramping the streets, sleeping in parks and rooming houses, the tattooed arm his badge of sorrow, his engraved pain, his permanent Oswiecim.
Golden autumn, the Poles call it with pride. The landscape flows with a muted light which streaks into the city I am fast approaching. Bialystok appears tranquil, detached, beyond history, a survivor, intact. I see father in a leather jacket and open shirt, his trousers rolled up to the knees, wading across a stream on a trek through local forests: my favourite photo of him. His eyes are, as I have sometimes seen them, beyond doubt and confusion, denial and shame. They are blue. Clear as transparent skies. And mother’s are deep hazel, almost black, the colour of earth, of endurance.
I see them as they are now, in their old age. Father’s natural tendency has always been to fly, to soar on impulse and grand ideas. Yet for the fortieth year in succession he looks down upon the same patch of earth, as he composts, digs, plants, and moves towards an inner balance, an integrity. And mother, who has always cooked and cleaned and sewn and served, is softening, her gaze moving upwards, through distances, towards the heavens, towards surrender. And I see my reflection in them both. My eyes are green, in between; while within, I sense the first inklings of a harmony, the first intimations that a long journey is nearing its end.