Bloodhound (3 page)

After the Germans invaded Poland, the family was transported to the ghetto in Sokołów Podlaski, a town a short distance from Wyrozęby. By the summer of 1942 there were rumours about deportations of Jews from the nearby Siedlce ghetto and from Warsaw—they would be killed at Treblinka. Jews from Sokołów Podlaski had been sent to an unknown destination from which nobody had returned.

Mama was the only one of the family in the Sokołów Podlaski ghetto who was fair and blue-eyed (she took after her father's people rather than her mother's, with their darker and more Semitic looks), so she was chosen as the one most likely to escape using false Aryan identity papers. Aged fourteen, she said goodbye to her mother and brother and other relatives, walked the ninety-odd kilometres to Warsaw, and disappeared into the city.

She became Alina Kołakowska: Catholic, Warsaw-born, twenty-one. She plaited her hair to straighten its natural waves and pinned the plaits to the top of her head, a traditional Polish hairstyle. Mama was Alina for two and half years, revealing her true identity to no one. This little I gleaned of her life during the war.

And Dad? Here in Melbourne, he was a cutter in a factory which, by the time I was aware of such things, was mass producing cheap T-shirts and shorts and skivvies for Target. It was many steps down from making men's suits and women's ‘costumes', which he was trained to do before the war, and which he continued to do after it in Paris, then in Melbourne after their arrival in 1949.

Dad liked his bosses and the people in the factory who responded to his jokes and stories. He wasn't deep. Not like her. It was hard to imagine them together.

Each year their survivor friends would gather for a fancy-dress party to dance and celebrate their lives. One of the circle made home movies and from one party there's a fleeting, trembling sequence showing the guests walking up a stairwell towards the camera. Mama arrives in a white kaftan with bell sleeves which she'd made that day from an old bed sheet. It had a matching trim on the collar, sleeves and the headband. She is wearing a faux-copper peace sign she borrowed from me, so it must be 1970. Her hair is shoulder-length and oddly honey-coloured, and she disconcerts by folding her arms in front as if she were a Native American woman. She smiles faintly and her eyes give nothing away.

Dad ascends the stairs at least twenty seconds after her arrival, possibly more, as I'm not sure how much time was removed in the editing. He looks like a cross between a Mafiosi hoodlum and a plump Roy Orbison, in an open-necked black-and-white checked shirt, with dark glasses, a silver chain hanging over his belly and his straight dark hair brushed forwards. He holds a cigarette between his fingers and scowls. Maybe he was looking for her, or just needed a drink. They couldn't even arrive together.

He liked to be the life of the party and on the surface he was all bluster. It was a shallow crust, though, and you couldn't ask him questions about his past unless you were prepared to deal with his sobbing. I soon learned not to open the floodgates. Possibly I saved up all the questions for later, for my years as a journalist, a professional asker of questions.

In the 1960s reparation pensions became available to Holocaust survivors. We'd get letters from Germany via a firm of Melbourne solicitors, Kahn Clahr & Garsa, that dealt with survivors' claims. The gothic script and long dark-cream envelopes made it seem as if the missives came directly from the Third Reich.

Each year Mama and Dad had to attend the German consulate in Melbourne to prove they were still alive. This was traumatic for both of them. They went separately. Mama came back from one of these visits and said she'd told the consular officer that Hitler hadn't succeeded in killing her yet. It must have been traumatic for the younger officers, too: I don't imagine Mama was the only survivor who took the need for proof of life so personally.

For their initial assessments my parents had to submit to psychiatric evaluations to determine the extent of their damage. Mama showed me the psychiatric report of Dad's mental state. The lawyers were claiming that he had ninety per cent incapacitation. Ninety per cent, she repeated. I thought that meant Dad was ninety per cent insane—a humiliation I hoped to keep hidden from my friends. The report described his memories of and dreams about cleaning up the square in his hometown of Siedlce after German soldiers had mown down groups of his school friends and neighbours. He had to pick up the brains of the dead with his hands. I imagined them dripping through his fingers. When I looked at his hands, in my mind's eye I could see the blood. He seemed tainted and disgusting.

‘Now you might understand why your father is the way he is,' Mama said. She didn't show me her evaluation, and I didn't ask to see it. One report like that was enough for any girl. It was already one too many.

And now, a few decades later, I was about to cloud the mix with the twisted and cruel (according to his nephew) Max Dunne. A photograph of the man who might have been my real father was en route, yet my willingness to believe was wavering. The father I had was infuriating and inadequate, but I remembered that he had given me my first typewriter, an old Olivetti portable that someone offered him; he had taught me to drive; and at least he hadn't been made into a beast in Auschwitz. I thought about being the daughter of a cruel and twisted man. I thought about my mother lying down with that man.

And I remembered her picking me up at the end of one of my shifts at a knitting factory in Collingwood. I worked there over the summer after my fourteenth birthday, fixing the labels onto acrylic jumpers and cardigans. It was 1968 and psychedelics were all the rage: hot pink and purple, lime green and navy blue, orange and brown in swirly geometric patterns.

Mama took me to a room off the large open factory floor: windowless and concrete-walled, with a naked globe hanging down, like an interrogation room in a spy film. There was a low metal bed with a small pillow and a rough grey blanket. She asked me what I thought went on in here, and I said that it must be the sick bay, like at school, and this was where you could rest if you had a headache or period pain.

Mama laughed scornfully. This, she said, was where the owner of the factory took any girl he summoned from the floor if he wanted to have sex with her. And she had to go, or she'd lose her job. If I was having thoughts about leaving school and working in a factory, she wanted me to understand that this was what I would face.

I was baffled. I was an excellent student; I loved going to school; and I had no intention of leaving behind my beloved maths and science, English and French for a job in the rag trade. What was she talking about?

Now I could think about this encounter in a new light. Was she showing me what happened in the factory when she worked for the Beast of Auschwitz? Was I the result of a tawdry transaction at work—was that the reason she couldn't bring herself to tell me? But what kind of secret-keeping made her introduce me to such an unexpected, ugly scenario: was it subconscious?

At the time I filed the episode away with Mama's other mysterious lessons on life. Like being careful not to fall asleep in the snow, no matter how tired and hungry you were, because you could freeze to death. I hadn't even seen snow, but I remembered the lesson, just in case.

And when it came, the envelope, the holder of all this mystery, the clue to an answer for my many questions, was small and unprepossessing.

Just before I opened it, I sat in the bay window of my sitting room, looking out into the garden. I loved the comfortable yellow couch, which I had bought with the money I earned from writing, and I liked to read there, stretched out on my own words, as I imagined it. I knew that I had to use all of my critical faculties—my training as a scientist and my experience as a journalist—to evaluate whatever evidence was before me, despite what I wanted to find.

I was looking for evidence that supported my deeply held conviction about a hidden story. I thought that searching the faces of strangers for hints of a connection seemed pathetic. And here I was, about to do it.

In my hands was a photograph taken in 1937 of a twenty-four-year-old man, before he embarked on his journey to the inferno. The man looked familiar, and I wondered if I had seen him before. He was handsome and taller than the people next to him, who'd been cut out of this photo except for their shoulders. And there was something especially familiar about the eyes, their depth, their set, and the shape of the face.

A thought, alarming yet moving, came to me. It was
my
face. This is what I might have looked like, had I been a man of twenty-four in 1937. I drove with the photograph on the seat beside me to several friends, and asked them to tell me what they saw. ‘The eyes,' they said, ‘and the shape of the face.' I carried the photograph with me, and tested it with workmates and with strangers. They all agreed.

I called Max's nephew and told him that everyone said the man in the picture looked like me.

‘Well then,' he said, ‘you'd better come over and meet us. But don't tell my father that you think we're related. He's nearly ninety, and for him it would be a shame and a disgrace.'
A shandeh un a charpeh
is the way you say it in Yiddish.

This I agreed to do, but I felt resistance. Why should I be ashamed of the possible story of my birth? It was hardly my decision to have my parents go outside the bonds of holy matrimony. Was I the sort of person a man might be ashamed of having as a relative? Still, I held back my feelings, because I was on a roll and I was following a trail, and made an appointment for four o'clock the next day.

It was a Friday in summer when the temperature was over forty degrees, and there I was, in a summer frock and clutching a large wooden-framed photograph of Mama with me at age three on her knee, ostensibly so that the old man could look at it and might even recognise the woman who worked for him forty-five years before, and shopped at his wholesale showroom later, and was the mother of his secret, shameful niece.

When his son opened the door, the first thing I saw was his wavy hair and blue eyes. In his late fifties, he was still a striking man. We shook hands and laughed at the absurdity of the situation, me clutching the photo frame, sworn not to mention that I had already seen a photo of his father's dead brother. Soon I was sitting at their kitchen table and, while the old man was charming and friendly, he didn't recognise Mama, although he said what an attractive woman she'd been.

I wondered why he couldn't place her. Did they have so many underlings in the days of vast numbers of women bent over Singer treadle machines, like those you see in old newsreels? How could the centre of my being, my Mama, mean so little to him?

After his son engineered it, the old man started to show me the family photo album, starting with shots of his grandchildren and his wife. All the while I was dying for him to get to those of his brother and his brother's son, my possible half-brother.

‘And who's this?' I asked eventually.

‘That's my brother Majlech, in our tailor's shop in the town of Mława in Poland before the war.' The same face that I had seen in that first photograph, smiling now, and here again with a family group. His eyes. They almost told you they had seen many things, even as you knew they were yet to see many more. Uninterested in Joseph's wife's side of the family, I was cavalier, desperate to get to my quarry. I was a bloodhound and the trail was hot. I drank black coffee and asked for another cup, stretching out the time I could have with the album, and eventually came across a photograph of his brother's son, who also looked like me.

And all of this only one week after I'd started my search. I was excited, and then I felt pathetic again, like a child trying to ingratiate herself into a family to whom she is really a stranger. Is that my father? Are they my uncles? Is this my grandmother? Was this man, this butcher named Adunaj in a provincial northern Polish town, my grandfather?

I thought of P. D. Eastman's story for children
Are You My Mother?
A chick hatches when his mother is away looking for food, and he starts searching for her in all the wrong places. He asks ‘Are you my mother?' of a kitten, a hen, a dog and a cow, and then he turns to inanimate objects: a boat, a plane and finally a great power shovel on a building site. The story has a happy ending, when the shovel places the bird back in the nest as his mother returns with dinner. Would I find the power shovel of my dreams? Not that I was expecting dinner, as all the personnel were long dead.

I felt a pang of envy seeing all these photographs from Poland before the war. Joseph had emigrated in 1937 (under the names Izrael Yosck Adunaj and Israel Josek Adunaj, according to documents I later found in the National Archives), and must have brought many photos with him, or perhaps his family sent them in the ensuing couple of years.

Growing up, my sister and I had no set of photographs. There was one of Mama's grandfather, an old man with a black cap, a long coat and a long beard. She said the beard was red, like my sister's hair. There was a group photograph that included Mama's mother, who wore a large sun hat and whose face we couldn't really see. These must have been sent by distant cousins in Israel, and I knew they were a source of pain for her. To my shame I can't even find them now—I fear they were hidden at the back of a piece of furniture that I donated to charity when she died. I was never privy to her hiding places.

I might have envied these people their family album, but at least I discovered that Adunaj was a Polish name meaning ‘from the Danube'. From the Danube to Adunaj to Dunne. I was relieved again not to have to think of myself as English.

The old man was getting tired. He became puzzled and asked me to explain again why I was there. It was time for me to go.

His son gave me the name of the daughter of Max and his wife's best friends. He thought she might be able to give me more information about what kind of person Max had been. He didn't know exactly what had happened to Max in Auschwitz or even how long he'd been there.