Bloodhound (16 page)

Dad was now eighty-six. Would he ever die? We decided against the big lunch and instead gathered for afternoon tea at my sister's house. Dad came with his wife and her daughter and son-in-law. He sat at the end of the table and, as usual, took the presents we had given him and put them on the floor next to his chair, feigning a lack of interest. I insisted that he open them.

He told the same stories. My sister showed him a Moses action-man doll complete with detachable Ten Commandments that she'd bought in Hong Kong. Dad and his wife seemed engrossed at their end of the table, playing like children with the doll. Dad was especially enamoured of the commandments and Moses' staff, which was also detachable.

My oldest nephew and I talked about editing the commandments down to six, as the modern world was too fast for ten. I suggested removing the one about adultery. I couldn't remember if you were supposed not to covet your neighbour's ass or his wife or his wife's ass.

On New Year's Day my older daughter was passing through Melbourne on her way from Darwin, where she was now living, to New Zealand for a trekking holiday, so we called Dad to see if we could drop by for a cup of tea. She wanted to see him because she was worried that he might die soon. He told us he was having lunch and couldn't see us. We'd already eaten, we said, and would just have a cup of tea. He resisted, said he'd see her next time. Next time? He must have thought he would live forever, and I wondered if he might outlast me.

I'd heard that Max's wife was very sick. I thought that I'd be closer to being able to write my story if she were nearing death. I was like a vulture waiting for a body to fall. It was unedifying, I knew, but there it was.

I turned my mind to the war-crimes trial that Alan had mentioned his father—our father?—attending in Germany. After which, Alan had recounted, Max came back saying, ‘We got him.' Who the ‘him' was, I had no idea, but I searched the internet for mentions of Max's name as a witness. I looked for Max Dunne and Majlech Adunaj in reports of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which lasted from the end of 1963 to the middle of 1965, and found no clues.

Maybe it was a false trail? Maybe Max was trying to have a few weeks away from his wife and ended up on the Riviera for a holiday? It wouldn't be the first time a married man contrived a story to allow himself a spell away with a mistress. And it wasn't as if Max didn't have form.

One summer afternoon I sat on my veranda, looking across at my garden and the quiet street, and up at the blue, almost cloudless sky. I thought of how lucky I was to be here in this place and at this time, when it would have been so different had I been born somewhere else, twenty years earlier. I thought that this story might end prematurely, with the recognition that waiting for old people to die so that I might complete my investigations was unworthy.

I wondered how much anyone could know in this situation, and how important it really was to find a conclusion. It might be time to look to the future, instead of being obsessed with the past.

My son-in-law had survivor relatives who gave talks at the local Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre. I'd asked them if there was a community response to the call to give evidence at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and mentioned this in passing to my younger daughter.

She asked if I'd told them my story and I said no, that I'd just said I was researching for something I was writing. She asked if I was writing a book and I said of course I was, that she knew this. She told me she hadn't realised that I wanted to publish it. I shrugged her off, saying I'd wait till everyone was dead, and she replied, ‘Including me?'

Dad was eighty-seven. Again we met at my sister's house for lunch. My older daughter was in Darwin; she and her husband were expecting their first child.

I'd bought a concrete duck for Dad at a garden-furniture place. I was running out of ideas. I'd looked for something suitable every year, yet his reaction to the last few presents had rattled me. He didn't read much anymore: he was in his own world. He had more or less constant lapses in understanding; he was deaf, and just repeated his stories. Why a duck? I thought of the old Marx Brothers routine. Why not a duck? A concrete duck was as good as anything.

His wife was short with him now. She corrected him loudly and complained about him, but still she looked after him. Good on her, I thought. I couldn't do it.

That week, for my radio show I interviewed the poet and writer Jacob Rosenberg, whose memoir had just won the National Biography Award. He had worked with Mama in a Melbourne clothing factory before she went to work for the Dunne brothers. I'd seen him the week before, at a book launch, and we had talked about her. He said that she was like a nineteenth-century woman.

‘Madame Bovary?' I asked.

Perhaps, he said. And he added that she was a bohemian at heart and had been trapped in a middle-class life.

I invited him to have coffee with me after our interview, and he sat with me at a little table in the busy open space of the atrium in the ABC headquarters. He remembered having lunch with Mama four or five times a week at the factory where they worked.

‘She used to bring her lunch to my sewing machine and we talked. She was hungry for culture. And we would discuss books and I would recite for her my poems. And she would give me a kiss for a poem. She had thin lips but warm.'

They would sit close and talk—he described her as audacious and uninhibited, and I wondered how this manifested itself. I told him of my quest, as I knew I could trust him. He seemed a wise and thoughtful man, and I felt he would not disappoint me like the other elderly men I had been pursuing for my story. His friendship with her was platonic, he explained, and I asked why, thinking of the thin-lipped kisses, and he said it was perhaps because he was too immature at the time.

He asked why I wanted to know all this: wasn't it better to let sleeping dogs lie? I was interested in truth, I said, and he answered with a disquisition on truth. In response I quoted him something from his book: ‘sometimes even the cruellest truth is preferable to the gentlest lie.'

He argued softly with me, back and forth. ‘What does it profit us to know who made the world, was it God or was it the Big Bang?'

‘In the scheme of things it's not important, but for me it's nice to know,' I replied. I ventured that it might be hard for him to understand, as he knew who his parents were. And anyway, I said, it was also about learning to trust your own intuition. I'd thought something was amiss for my whole life, and piecing together a story helped me begin to trust my own sense of reality.

Jacob's next book would be about his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, when he became in his words ‘a free animal', no longer having any family member to worry about, only himself. Thinking of this I became self-conscious: I was telling an Auschwitz survivor that he couldn't understand my little difficulty, in the face of everything he did understand.

He suggested I write all this down to relieve myself of it. Otherwise, he said, it would eat me up and make me unhappy. He told me to write a fictional account and not mention any names, and that it should be a detective novel.

I told him the interesting thing for me was that it was a search for the truth; it was about evidence and identity—why should it hide behind a cloak of fiction?

He became philosophical again about the meaning of truth. Before long his taxi arrived and he kissed me goodbye, heading off into the bright day.

A month later he sent me a card with a photo of a red rose on the cover. ‘Darling Ramona,' he wrote, ‘the enclosed picture is actually the cause of my belated thanks for your generosity and friendship. Love, Jacob.'

He had made a copy of a photo of Mama and him sitting together in a park, their faces framed by trees and lawn. They are both young, clear-eyed and smooth-skinned, with similar low-key smiles playing on their lips. Mama wears a light blouse with a Peter Pan collar under a darker tunic, and her hair is combed to one side. Jacob's tie needs straightening and he wears a knitted vest over a white shirt. Just a few years before, they had both faced certain death.

It is hard to read Mama's expression. Although she looks directly into the camera, the light seems to glance off the surface of her eyes; their depths are impossible to fathom.

12

What we had to tell

I WAS at an impasse. There was no one else I could call upon for more details of Max's life. I wrote to a handful of academics, trying to locate any testimony he'd given to war-crimes tribunals, and waited for a response. I could find nothing by perusing digital collections and suspected that what I wanted was probably filed under a misspelling in German in a dusty archive somewhere, in an ancient manila folder tied with red ribbon. I imagined these were the documents that would give me access to the voice of my father, or the voice of a man who was nothing to me.

Faced with silence, and a burning need to know more about Max, I decided I might be able to fill in some gaps using the testimonies of those who were likely to have been in the same place at the same time: people from Mława, who might have been with him in the Mława ghetto and transported with him to Auschwitz. I would shadow Max until I could find something more solid.

I went back to the memoir of the town written in Hebrew in 1949 by Dr Izhak Ze'ev Yunis and translated into English. When I had first found it I was only looking for a mention of Max's family name, but this time I read it properly. It is a charming account of Mława, which existed officially from 1429 on the long-range cattle-trade route between Russia and what eventually became Austria. From its early days the town had brewers, blacksmiths, potters, tailors, carpenters and butchers. Its fortunes declined in the seventeenth century and the Swedes invaded. Two fires ravaged the town in the eighteenth century, and it wasn't till the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that things looked up. Mława was only seven kilometres from the border with Prussia: the establishment of a railway brought new prospects for business. Factories making leather goods, soap and oil, and then a big brewery, sprang up. With them came the smuggling of horses, gold watches, diamonds, silk and even people.

Jews were present in the town from the beginning, remaining part of its social fabric through good times and bad for over five hundred years. By the time Dr Yunis was growing up there were steam mills, a cement works, a cigarette-box manufacturer, an ink factory and a hub for wheat trading. Jews of all persuasions lived there: Orthodox, Zionist, secular, politically left and right; they formed a drama club and established a theatre, and there were newspapers catering for all shades of opinion.

Dr Yunis's account of the town reminded me of the scenes described by the great Sholem Aleichem and seen in
Fiddler on the Roof
: a time before the pogroms started.

I thought of the black-and-white silent films of the early twentieth century and imagined Charlie Chaplin as Moshe Wilner on a ladder, resetting the clock. Or maybe Harold Lloyd, hanging off the hands of the dial in the 1925 film
Safety Last
.

Dr Yunis spent his childhood exploring the nearby forests, watching the wooden water mills on the local rivers, smelling the flowers and enjoying the intrigues of bands of local children. Through his tale I learned of rabbis and tailors and ritual butchers and youth groups and markets and merchandise and crazy people. There were sages and politicians and theatre performances and characters who sounded like they were enacting old Jewish jokes—a man, his wife, the rabbi…Perhaps it was part memoir and part fiction, but reading it was strangely warming. It was a treat to imagine my connection to this working town, with its stories and documents and solid buildings.

Yunis said that by the 1930s people were leaving in droves for America and ‘even Australia'. This was the period when Max's older brother Joseph left. Was Yunis thinking of him when he made that remark?

Of the almost five thousand Jews in Mława at the beginning of the war, only forty survived.

At the end of the Yunis text there are contributions from two other Mława residents that I hadn't noticed when I scanned the document the first time. Both were survivors of concentration camps and write about giving evidence to a war-crimes trial. There, in an account by Moshe Peleg (formerly Moshe Poltusker), a passage leaped out at me: