AFTER nearly 25 years of psychological and psychiatric examinations and treatment at the hands of the guesswork gurus of medical science, as well being on and off various medications, my old and dear friend Dave the Jew has recently been told that he has been incorrectly treated for a schizophrenic condition that he never suffered from in the first place. According to the latest scientific breakthrough he has simply suffered from a paranoid psychosis brought about from the horror death-camp stories he was told as a child by his various relatives.
In other words, he suffers from a psychopathic personality. Christ, I told him this when he was 16 years old.
We would go to Dave’s place for Sunday afternoon tea with his mum and dad and assorted ‘uncles and aunties’, who were not really related to him but were close friends of the family who had also survived the death camps in Europe.
Dave’s ‘uncle’ Aaron, who survived Belsen with Dave’s dad, would roll up his sleeve and show his tattoo on his left forearm and launch into yet another horror story.
On one occasion Dave said to Uncle Aaron, ‘tell Mark about the time the SS Officer shot your mother’. The room was full of crying people and Dave was almost out of his mind with hate and rage.
Dave the Jew’s dad walked into the lounge room and said to Aaron, ‘he charges $75 per hour’. Aaron looked up and asked who charged $75 per hour and Dave’s dad said, ‘the psychiatrist we send young David to three times a week. Can’t you cheer up for five minutes. You are sending the boy mad.’
But Aaron argued he must be told, that he must know the truth. Dave’s dad got angry. ‘We already took care of that. He has been dreaming about Belsen since he was nine years old. Now all he talks about is killing people or revenge and hate.’
It was true. I had heard about 100 different death camp stories from the people I would meet at afternoon tea at Dave’s place and I found myself having dreams about the camps, as if I had been there myself.
It had a deep effect on my mental and emotional wellbeing, and if that was happening to me in the space of approximately one year, I dread to think what it was doing to poor Dave’s mind. Instead of a bedtime story as a child he would get a death camp story, and dream of Adolf Hitler.
The mothers and fathers who survived the death camps passed on a death-camp psychosis to their children, even if they were born a long time after the war. I listened to those stories for about a year until I could hear no more and found myself dreaming that I was riding the train to one of the death camps. If I was not a well unit when I started going to these tea parties I was positively feral after a year of it, and I wasn’t even Jewish. But as one old Jew pointed out, ‘Mark, your father is a Freemason. Do you know how many Freemasons the Nazis put to death? Thousands and thousands – and their families.’
In the end I stopped going to Dave’s place for Sunday afternoon teas and when I told Dave about the dreams and my reasons for not visiting his home any more his mother came to see me with Dave in tears, and said sorry, and we all ended up in tears together.
She took a small gold star of David and gold chain from around her neck and hung it around my neck and kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘Mark, you are my second son.’
Dave’s mum was a beautiful lady and I loved her dearly, but if a year of death-camp stories still hang with me today imagine what a whole childhood of horror stories would do to the human mind. The ‘death-camp psychosis’ suffered by the children of the holocaust survivors is a very real thing.
It spun me out. No wonder Dave took a turn for the worse in later life. His childhood left mental scars which will never heal. Any only child listening to that stuff was always going to be in trouble. They said he had to hear it, that he had to be told, but his dad was right: ‘for God’s sake let’s cheer up a bit’. No wonder there are so many Jewish comedians. It’s either laugh or cry. Bloody hell. It still spins me out, just remembering it.
Poor Dave was an intelligent teenager who ended up being probably the best secret hitman in Australia – and a man who liked to ‘experiment’ on his victims in a way which made even me shiver. He was convinced he was the reincarnation of the American Jewish gangster Bugsy Siegel. Now in times of high unemployment this is not a good thing to put on one’s CV. Imagine it. Name: Bugsy Siegel. Occupation: 1930s US Gangster. References: Al Capone, Eliot Ness and Meyer Lansky.
Dave was, and is, a great friend and remains staunch at all times. He was prepared to hop over to Tassie and help a few Crown witnesses in my trial reconsider their points of view, but I asked him to leave well enough alone. Then again, he’s on the outside and I’m on the inside. So who’s the crazy one?
SPEAKING of Dave the Jew, he was recently talked out of some madcap plan to return to Israel by an old and dear friend of his family in Tel Aviv who spent some months making phone calls to Melbourne trying to explain to Dave that he can’t just piss off from the Israeli army the way he did and return years later and expect all to be forgiven. If he goes back and isn’t shot he most certainly will finish up in an Israeli military prison.
Dave’s idea about returning to Israel was a bit of a worry for me, as I knew it would be the finish of him. But next it seems he wants to get his passport and travel to France and try to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. He was greatly offended when I sent him a message that even the French Foreign Legion would insist on a psychiatric examination. And, besides, he hates the French. Now he wants to come and live with me and Mary-Ann when I get out of jail. Ha ha. I can just see that … Mary-Ann would go out the back door one day and end up vanishing like a German backpacker.
Poor Dave, I love him. I often think back and see in my mind’s eye myself and the Jew sitting beside Squizzy Taylor’s grave (born June 29, 1888; died October 26, 1927) talking of the future. The trouble was that we were so hell bent on trying to control our destinies that we both forgot we had no control over our fate.
When all hope is long forgotten and the world has turned rotten,
And you find yourself alone, with no one left to trust,
And all your love of life has just fallen in the dust,
And you stand and watch your friends as they sit down to dine,
And you hear their laughter ringing, as they sip their wine,
And you find yourself alone, as you walk the streets and weep,
And you go down to the river to ponder your final sleep,
Your death might stop the hurting but it won’t win you the war,
Your death gives them the victory, I can tell you that for sure,
Cheer up, my bonny Cabalero, it’s no time to whinge and wail,
Even though the winds of life are blowing you a gale,
So mount your pale pony, and together we will ride,
And just remember, brother, I am always on your side.