Authors: Ramona Koval
He described himself as a manufacturer and designer. He was fifty-six years old and living in Melbourne, Australiaâhe was younger then than I was now, I realised. Max told the court:
I was born on 23 December 1914 in MÅawa. I went to the government school in MÅawa and later to a school for design in Warsaw. Afterwards I came back to MÅawa. Then the war broke out. I was not yet married. My brother went to Australia in 1937. I moved to the ghetto in MÅawa at the beginning of 1941 with my parents and was there till 16 November 1942 when we were deported to Auschwitz with the second transport.
Max testified that he was present at mass hangings and shootings on particular days in the ghetto. He described how people looked, estimating their heights and remembering details of what they were wearing and who else was there:
A lieutenant of the
Schutzpolizei
[security police] from MÅawa, I can't remember his name at the moment, but it may come to me. I remember him especially because his girlfriend Marysia Wrablowska went to school with me. He was good-looking, about thirty-eight years old⦠he was six feet tall, with middle-blond hair. There were also others there.
A man called Paulikat.
He had a light-green uniform on and was a member of the gendarmerie. He was as far as I know an under-officer. He was very good-looking, with a round face and about six feet tall. As I heard it he had lost his finger when he had taken part in the Spanish Civil War.
At the hanging there was also a member of the security police from MÅawa called Fost. He was very tall, more than six feet, maybe in his middle-thirties, he wore a dark-green uniform and a round SS insignia on his jacket.
There was also a
Schutzpolizei
called Blum who was thirty-five years old and five feet eight inches tall.
From his descriptions I imagined that Max had a designer's eye for detail and a tailor's sense of bodily proportions. I caught myself thinking that I may have inherited his eye for detail.
I remembered a joke Dad told about a tailor. Why was I thinking about the joke now? I was assuming that Max was a better tailor than Dad. I wanted him to be.
Dad's joke was about a man who went to his tailor to be fitted for a new suit. When he put on the coat he saw it was longer on one side. He complained, and the tailor said it was because the man was standing crooked and if he would just raise one shoulder the suit would fit fine. Same story with one of the pants legs. (You really need to see me when I tell this joke, as it has a physical punch line.)
When the man with the new suit was walking crookedly along the street with his shoulder and leg adjusted as the tailor required, he was spied by another man across the road who whispered to his wife, âI must find out who made that man's suit,' and the wife said, âWhy do you want to know?' and the husband said: âBecause if that tailor could make such a nice suit for a cripple like him, imagine what he could do for a normal man!'
When Dad occasionally made a coat for me when I was young he would say that the coat fitted well but that I was standing crookedly, so it didn't look quite right. The coat Dad made me was wrong because I was wrong.
And that is why I was combing a translated war-crimes testimony for things I might be proud of in the man who may or may not have been my father; who may or may not have been a damaged, difficult man; who may or may not have even cared if I was dead or alive. And part of me was stretching out the experience of hearing the transcript, as I could see it was only a page or two and this was almost certainly the first and last time I'd be able to read something that resembled a direct address by Max.
He was talking about what had happened in the past and, although he did not know it then, he was addressing himself to the future, to me (whoever I was to him), sitting with my friend in a coffee shop more than four decades later:
I knew all the murdered people, as they were from MÅawa. At the moment I can only remember a few names of the seventeenâSamuel Korzenik, Chaim Solarski.
In autumn 1942, it was two months before the deportation to Auschwitz, it was in September, when hundreds of young men, including myself, were arbitrarily singled out by the MÅawa security police.
We had to line up in the square of the ghetto. I remember distinctly that Fost was there. I believe that Paulikat was also there. When we were taken to a house in the ghetto I managed to run away. The remainder were held under arrest for a week. The guards had the house surrounded. Another person was probably arrested in my place.
Max managed to run away. He knew that this meant that another young man was arrested in his place. The moral code of the camps and the ghettos was beginning to take hold of him.
He also tells the court that someone else was probably killed because he'd taken the chance to escape. He didn't have to say it. But it was on his mind after everything he had experienced.
[F]our hundred young men were all shot. The entire ghetto population was ordered to be present at the shooting. I saw with my own eyes that Fost and Paulikat took part in the shooting. All the security police with reinforcement from nearby locations formed the firing squad. The shooting lasted several hours.
At the beginning of 1942 a woman named Pultuskier was shot by Fost on the street. I came a few minutes afterward to see the corpse of the woman lying in the street. I heard that Fost had shot the woman. The reason for the shooting I don't know, it was maybe because she had with her some bread or milk. He did it just for fun. He was a beast.
By then, Max must have known bestiality when he saw it. I respected his judgement.
In 1942, the exact date I can't remember, Mr Perlmutter from the ghetto elders committee was called to the guard police outside the ghetto and there he was shot by Fost. It was Fost that shot him. It was told to me by Wengelein's chauffeur who is now a taxi driver in MÅawa who I spoke with when I visited there in June 1967. I don't know why Perlmutter was shot. The name of the lieutenant which I have just remembered was Wengelein.
So Max had gone back to MÅawa in 1967. Although Alan had said Max had been back to Auschwitz, I hadn't known that he went back to his hometown, too. It was very early to be making the trip back, at a time when Poland was behind the Iron Curtain. I wondered if he was researching his testimony, collecting his wits, reliving his time there.
Maybe if he hadn't had to be a tailor or a manufacturer or a designer or whatever he thought of himself as, he would have been a thorough researcher. I was happy to see he'd remembered the name of the lieutenant that had earlier escaped him. I silently cheered him. I was becoming attached to Max, or at least to his account of himself.
Our transport to Auschwitz was under the command of the accused. We had to go three kilometres from the ghetto to the railway station. That was the longest journey of my life.
It was already very cold.
The accused was present on the march.
He supervised the transport from the ghetto to the station.
Ten people lay dead who couldn't manage this three-kilometre journey.
Those who couldn't continue were shot.
Who shot them, I couldn't today say.
I don't know any more today if Wengelein was there, but I am sure that the accused was.
The people were hopeless and dejected.
I don't know if the accused had a dog with him, I had to take care of my relatives.
That was the longest journey of his life, he said. He had to take care of his relatives.
He cared for his relatives, for everyone. Everyone, that is, but me.
How do I look? What do they think?
LET'S leave Max there, on the longest journey of his life, from the ghetto in MÅawa in that cold winter of 1942 to the train station. His life in a new kind of hell is about to beginâand you may well be thinking that I am being whiny and unreasonable in writing, âEveryone, that is, but me.'
I've tried to look at things from the point of view of an adult who is piecing together the story of her life from scraps, from whispers here and there, from veiled comments, from the unreliable recollections of people who might be ill or traumatised or have little direct experience or knowledge of the things that I wanted to tell. What can I say in my defence? (Why have I put myself on trial here?)
It was just a small cry from a little girl who was overlooked, ignored, passed over. What about me, Daddy?
I may not have the right to ask that question. But to whom should I be directing it?
Mama, what about me?
In my pursuit of Max, I had taken my eyes off another player in the drama. And while I was waiting for Max's testimony to arrive and searching through Holocaust stories, I came upon interviews with people who had survived using false identities, as Mama did in Warsaw.
What did I really know of her story? I knew what she had let slip, augmented by things I had learned since her death. She said she had fair hair and blue eyes, and she had been chosen by her mother as the one most likely to be able to pass for a Polish Catholic girl. Her fifteen-year-old brother had dark hair and brown eyes. According to a story Bern told me, on the night before the ghetto was to be âliquidated' and all the inmates sent to their deaths at Treblinka my grandmother gave her daughter a potato, the last of their food. She told Mama that where they were going they would have no need to eat.
When I visited the hamlet of WyrozÄby during my trip to Poland I learned that two of Mama's neighbours, brother and sister Joseph and Josepha Krzyzanowski, still lived across the road from her old house in a small wooden cottage in which a tap had just been connected after two hundred years of having to draw water from a well. They remembered Mama, were surprised that she had survived the war. âShe disappeared like camphor,' Joseph told me. They said that a woman named Wanda Bujalska, a member of a minor Polish aristocratic family who were local landowners in the region where Mama's family had a small farm holding, was most likely the one who had arranged Mama's false identity papers.
I found the Bujalska house high on a hill overlooking the valley; by then it had been turned into a school, but it was summer and the place was deserted. I sat in the garden in the shade of birch and poplars and fragrant Polish jasmine, imagining the secret visits here of underground couriers as the plans for Mama's false documents were hatched.
Recently I found a reference to Wanda Bujalska in a weekly paper published in SokoÅów Podlaski. It was an interview with her nephew about his recollection of wartime activities in the local district. After the death of her husband in 1927 in WyrozÄby, Wanda Bujalska rarely mixed with the locals. She was highly educated and had a circle of worldly artistsâactors, popular singers, opera stars; names which are still recognised in Poland: Nina Andrycz, Janusz PopÅawski, MieczysÅaw Fogg. Fogg was a member of the Polish underground.
Members of the underground visited Wanda Bujalska in her house, and it was there that she hid several Jews from Warsaw through the war. When it was all over, she lost control of the estate to another family member and a group of survivors organised for her to stay in a flat in Warsaw, to repay her. I see she died in the city in 1976, aged eighty-six.
Most likely Wanda Bujalska had given Mama contacts in Warsaw, and Mama slipped out of view to walk by herself, a fourteen-year-old girl, the nearly one hundred kilometres to Warsaw to find shelter with a Polish family. They had agreed to put her up; she paid someone for the false identity papers with a small blue-stoned ring that her mother had given her; and she lived in the basement of their home, looking after Rolf, their large German shepherd, and learning to be a Catholicâhow to pray properly and what was expected of her in church.
She was from a rural Orthodox Jewish family: her first language was Yiddish and she'd learned Polish at the village school. Suddenly she was living in a sophisticated metropolis, using her second language, and she was barely a teenager. Her papers said that she was seven years older than she was.
I knew that after Mama had spent about six months in the Warsaw basement, one of the family members, a brother-in-law or son-in-law who was a journalist, became rattled by the possibility that they would be discovered hiding a Jewish girl, and Mama had to leave. Where she went after that, how she disappeared as a young teenager into the Nazi-occupied city, is a mystery, but I knew that somehow she got a job as a waitress in a canteen for German soldiers.
Just as I had pursued Max by tracking the group of men who testified with him and who were tattooed in the same transport arrival from MÅawa, I searched for stories like Mama's.
I was trying to understand how it was possible for her to live her life in Australia in the 1950s, with children from two different fathers, and how she managed to keep her secrets till the day she died, despite having ample time to speak to me while I nursed her at home every day of her last six months. What was the hold on her heart and her mind that made her lock her story away so securely? As I cooked for her and talked with her, as my baby played at the foot of her bed, as I washed her and tended to her body, fed her, medicated her, didn't she ever want to say: Sit down here, my darling. I have something to tell you.
But then, there are ways and ways of telling.
Mama's favourite film actor was Ingrid Bergman. The mysterious Swedish beauty was a star of her generation, and Mama looked a bit like her. I imagine now that her lovers may have compared her to the enchanting lead in 1940s movies such as
Casablanca
,
Notorious
and
Joan of Arc
.
In the 1950s Bergman ruffled feathers when, already married, she not only had an affair with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini but had a son with him. She divorced her first husband (a Swedish dentist turned neurosurgeon who stalled the divorce, thereby making Bergman give birth to a bastard child); married Rossellini, had twin daughters, and in 1957 divorced him; then married the scion of a wealthy Swedish shipping family. All this made her persona non grata in Hollywood, but of great interest to Mama.