Sunrise West (21 page)

And autumn came

With sombre trees,

Leaden skies

And rain, and rain,

And windy sighs.

Mendl Blicblau and I sat by a kerosene stove staring at the windowpane, engrossed in our thoughts. At last my companion spoke up.

‘I worked in the coalmines,' he began, ‘thanks to my five-foot height. Only small men were chosen — it enabled the engineers to accommodate more drills, such was the diabolical thinking that governed Germany's economy. The work was hard and there was no food. The death rate was enormous, but the corpses were quickly replaced.'

He told of how the death march had finally landed him in Dora, where the V-2 had been produced. They were housed in a disused theatre. The stage was occupied by an antisemitic hierarchy, slavishly obeying every whim of a man in a black cassock with a huge silver cross on his chest. He spoke an excellent, educated Polish. It may have been something about Mendl's appearance (he was tiny and emaciated), or maybe his ability to sew, but the man with the silver cross on his chest invited him to join the group up on the stage, much to the displeasure of the hierarchy. He was to enjoy many privileges from this man, and although the others kept muttering against Mendl's presence, they did not dare to challenge their spiritual mentor.

‘However,' Mendl went on, ‘the moment the war came to a close, this feared man with the silver cross freed himself from his cassock and, to my delight, and to the shocked dismay of his disciples, revealed — just like in a theatrical melodrama — that he was Jewish! They all screamed at him, and plotted revenge, and sang
Judas! Judas!
into his face.'

‘Ah,' I cut in. ‘How the noblest intentions of men can be misconceived.' And I told Mendl about my friendship with Raymond, the French Jew and biblical scholar who had once explained with such gusto about Judas. ‘According to Raymond, Judas was the greatest Christian ever.'

‘How did he figure that?'

‘Judas believed in his rabbi with every fibre of his tormented being — so much so that nothing could deter him from his resolve to bring about a confrontation between the Son of God and evil Rome. You see, this was what his so-called betrayal was intended to achieve. Judas was in no doubt that Jesus could destroy Rome with a wave of his hand.'

‘I wonder if Christians will ever see Judas in that light...'

‘Maybe one day. And when they do, perhaps we'll stop being locked up in concentration camps, and murdered, and turned into soap. Only then will Raymond's vision become reality.'

Mendl's black eyes glistened; he didn't reply. It was not that Raymond's philosophy was outside his domain. I could tell that at this moment Mendl the Melburnian was suddenly back in the coalmines, where day after day a flickering lamp had lit his descent into a world of mist and darkness; where life dangled from a cobweb suspended over a fathomless abyss.

To bring him back to a happier landscape, I remarked: ‘You know, friend, I can recall to the smallest detail your home on Lagiewnicka 13: the unlit corridor leading to your one-room flat, the little botanic garden your father planted on a windowsill with so much love, your walls adorned with musical instruments...'

Mendl's face cleared up like a freshly washed sky after a storm. He smiled his wistful smile and picked up the thread I had offered him. ‘Before the war,' he said, ‘I studied the art of tailoring. My mentor was a fine man called Fingerhut — an appropriate name for a tailor, don't you think?' (The word meant
thimble
.) ‘He used to say that all Jews should pack up and leave Babylon for Palestine before it was too late. And here we are, a Diaspora people once again.'

‘I discussed this with Raymond as well. After Auschwitz I was of the same opinion as your Fingerhut. But Raymond, although he believed Jews are entitled to their own country, argued that we should never dwell in one spot, not until the whole wide world becomes one great Jerusalem.'

Raymond's position appealed to us both. Nevertheless, Mendl's camp experience — not just his own sufferings but the murder of his parents, siblings and friends, and the betrayal by the land of his birth — would not release my companion from his bondage. Not that he wanted to be released.

‘What became of Raymond?' he asked me.

‘He did away with himself.'

I had learnt years earlier that my dear friend, who had watched over my sanity in camp, had died by his own hand. He lived through the war, but could not become again the person he had once been.

We stared into the windowpane.

‘It hasn't stopped raining,' Mendl sighed. ‘Our past walks ahead of us.'

 

 
Immigrants
 

With hope on their lips and doubt in their hearts, they came, came to restore the irrestorable, to repair the irreparable, to mend, to patch up their torn-up lives with bleeding yarn. Without language, money, profession, they walked about in their long woollen coats, with their leather satchels and funny hats, to an ambiguous welcome from the general populace, and from their own co-religionists as well.

It was a tragedy of biblical proportions for a seasoned newcomer who had arrived in 1938, and already knew how to say ‘good on you!' and ‘you'll be right!', to see his highschool-educated sweet Bettina wed a rough-edged Yosl, or for mummy's Aussie little Monty to marry a Raisl from God knew where. And indeed this outlandish, volatile generation, hardened in Germany's concentration camps, had scant time for niceties, etiquette or the formalities of acceptance. But driven by a collective want, they who had spent time in the shadows of the gas chambers, and had slept for years in the same bed as death, knew the meaning of their new-found freedom and quickly set about rebuilding their ruined lives.

The Australian immigration ministers' encouragements to populate or perish enthused millions of displaced people in Europe who were seeking a peaceful new life. Shiploads of men, women and children kept arriving week after week.
Poles, Hungarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and others — among them numerous Jews — found shelter in this fortunate land.

It is true that many among these immigrants came with little or no formal schooling: most of them had been just fifteen or sixteen at the outbreak of war. Yet the majority were multilingual and brought with them a legacy of two or three cultural traditions. It didn't take them long to draw level with, or even surpass, their older-established counterparts, not only in economic terms but more significantly — impelled by the age-old dictum that knowledge is strength — in having their children university-educated.

Thanks in large part to their language skills, the Jewish newcomers assumed a pivotal place in the emerging multi-cultural mosaic, notably the restless Yiddish-speaking entrepreneurial individuals among them, who in all their lives had never experienced such freedom as Australia offered them. They breathed fresh meaning into the existing Jewish communities, a new purpose of achievement. Although in 1948 there were only some 14,000 Jews in Melbourne, a Jewish cultural life had already existed. There were two small Yiddish schools, two Yiddish newspapers, and a thriving theatre. In 1950 the Kadimah community centre and library in Carlton boasted about a thousand members. It was within this expanding cultural hive that the Holocaust survivors established their Republic of Memory.

At our various regular gatherings, some of my friends dreamt of transplanting our Eastern European way of life into Australia. To the Yiddish-speaking community these dreams were like a protective shield against the brutality of
history, and they brought about a rich crop of Yiddish poetry, prose and art.

I recall one commemorative evening at the Kadimah, its stage draped in black and someone reading poetry. He finishes, and another man walks quietly towards the lectern, wipes his glasses clean, clears his throat, and begins his speech with a passage from Isaiah:

Come, my people, enter your houses,

and shut your doors behind you;

hide yourselves for a little while

until the indignation passes.

For behold, the Lord is coming forth out of His place

to punish the dwellers of the earth for their iniquity,

and the earth shall disclose the blood shed upon her,

and shall cover her slain no longer.

What a dignified and proper introduction, I reflect; this is a man worth listening to. But to my great disappointment the speaker goes on to say something banal and offensive. ‘Yes,' he shouts passionately, ‘the slain, the slain! — our people walked like sheep to the slaughter!' And all at once everything around me goes black. The speaker has been transformed into a uniformed Nazi waving his fleshy hand:
Left, right! Left, right!
I want to scream out:
Bastard, how dare you!
But Raymond, my Auschwitz friend, has appeared beside me and places his hand on my mouth.
Don't say a word!
he whispers.
Our only hope is to get out of here before it's too late. There is to be a selection at daybreak!...

I stand up cautiously, as I did one time in Auschwitz — when I risked my life to carry a blanket from one barrack to another — and to Esther's consternation I leave the building. As luck would have it, the April night is dark and foggy and there are no searchlights. I wait a minute or two, hesitating. Am I to betray my wife as I once betrayed my parents? But then there she is, standing right next to me.

‘Why did you rush out like that?' Esther asks, upset.

‘Let's walk,' I reply. ‘We'll talk later.'

 

 
Morning of the Swastika
 

It was spring of 1949. I had left for work earlier than usual and Brunswick Road was still wrapped in slumber. As I turned the corner at Lygon Street my steps froze. There, screaming at me from a wall like a malignant spider, a huge black swastika. And all at once I was back there, my head shaven, standing to attention in front of Block 5. A well-dressed passing stranger looked at me blankly, asked me something, I didn't know what.