Bloodhound (5 page)

I asked to see my parents' wedding certificate. For two hours the archivists searched, without success. The last thing they did was look through a book titled ‘Unfiled documents, those incomplete or without dates'. By this stage it felt like another of my hopeless quests. I felt like the queen of hopeless quests.

Then my translator called out. He couldn't believe it: they had found something. There was Mama and Dad's wedding certificate, with their signatures at the bottom of the page, the handwriting I would recognise anywhere—but no other parts of the certificate were filled in.

My translator explained, after speaking to the woman in charge, that Mama and Dad had been in a hurry: ‘So there was this rabbi here and they said “I do”, but there was no time to make a proper certificate. They signed here and didn't pick it up later for completion.'

Dad had told me that after hiding in the cellar he was liberated at the end of 1944, when the Russians came to town. He said he met the girl who would be his wife on the streets of the town a few months later, and married her ‘not for love but for pity and loneliness'.

Mama and Dad were in such a rush because they had to register their religious wedding to ensure that in the future there would be no trouble getting passports to travel together. A new birth certificate was made for Mama: they lied about her date of birth because she was underage. They didn't stay to pick up the document as it was the day after the Kielce pogrom, when forty-six Jewish concentration-camp survivors returning to their homes were murdered by their neighbours. Instead they escaped to Berlin by Russian army transport for the price of a bottle of vodka.

After I saw the abandoned marriage certificate in the Palace of Records, I drove several kilometres out of town in the direction of the arrow on Dad's map. There was no sign that this or that house or barn was the one I was looking for. When I got back to the hotel, I recorded my call:

After my return from Poland I did what I should have done before I went there: find out more about the places on my itinerary. Miriam Weiner's classic book
Jewish Roots in Poland
had just been published and the entry on Siedlce had a photo of the Jewish cemetery at the end of Dad's street. I learned that it had been established in 1807. In 1939 there were thirty-five thousand inhabitants of the town, nearly half of them Jewish. The town itself was founded in the mid-fifteenth century and Jews settled there a hundred years later, first as innkeepers and later as craftsmen and merchants. The town burned down at the end of the seventeenth century but it regained its position as an important commercial and cultural centre by the early eighteenth century. It fell under Austrian and then under Russian rule. A Jewish high school opened during World War I, and after the war several Jewish newspapers were active, as well as a Jewish hospital. Dad had drawn the Jewish hospital on his odd little map.

The Germans occupied the town on 11 September 1939. They burned down the synagogue on Christmas Eve that year; the ghetto was formed in August the next year, and in October it was sealed off. In August 1942 ten thousand Jews were deported to Treblinka. This must have been when Dad jumped on one of the departing trains to look for his family. Several thousand more Jews were shot in the forced-labour camp established in Siedlce. This was the camp that Dad had been working in when his brother came to take him to Bimbrowski's place.

I'd known nothing about this.

Occasionally Dad would tell me about his mother crying because she couldn't afford for him to go to high school, and he once showed me a school report that proved he had been an excellent student. He must have taken it with him to the cellar. He was apprenticed to a tailor at age thirteen and described being sent to the blacksmith's forge for coals to place in their irons for pressing clothes. Dad's stories sounded like they'd been written by the Brothers Grimm.

By the time I arrived, Siedlce was yet another shabby town in eastern Poland, in a state of neglect since the war and through the years of Soviet rule. The buildings' cast-iron balconies, which you see in old photos and which the Nazis took for making armaments during the war, had not been replaced.

Dad had never spoken about Siedlce's history: it was as if he'd arrived in a puff of smoke. When I offered to show him photographs I'd taken of his town, he was reluctant. I had to force him to look at them, and I gave up after a few minutes. He did not feel the least bit sentimental about my having gone across the world to stand in the street where he played as a child.

Searching online, I found a reference to a memoir of survival in Siedlce by Shimon Goldman, written in Hebrew. There is an English translation, but it's in the New York Public Library and you can only look at it there. I imagined flying across the planet to read it. If this were one of the Goldman brothers with whom Dad had shared the cellar, it would be a great find. Or maybe it was another Goldman altogether?

Instead I read about what happened when the Germans took over Siedlce, organising the labour camp and death squads. The Reckmann camp was established in the town's fire station in January 1941, with barracks by the railway tracks. The labourers built and repaired the tracks, and carted coal. In March 1943 the camp was liquidated, as they say (my parents used the term, too); but before that Dad had made the journey to Treblinka and back, then gone into hiding in Bimbrowski's cellar with the Goldmans. I found accounts of other people escaping from Treblinka in the same way, saved by hiding in the piles of clothing and waiting there till the train left the station, carrying the stowaways.

One was from the Siedlce ghetto memoir of Cypora Jablon Zonszajn, who wrote her notes in an exercise book before she managed to place her eleven-month-old daughter, Rachela, with some brave and honourable Polish people, who hid her and looked after her till the war was over. Cypora took things into her own hands before she was shipped out with the others: she killed herself with poison. Her journal, reproduced online, is harrowing reading.

I was taken aback by this confirmation of Dad's own escape story, which didn't need to be confirmed at all. I spent a miserable time looking at survivor testimonies, with my heart in my mouth.

And yet it was the wrong father and the wrong town, and my trip there—finding the paranoid anti-Semitic singer and suspicious neighbours—left me with no feeling of connection at all. All I'd discovered was that my parents had failed to fill out their marriage certificate. It seemed symptomatic of their life together, which was also empty of the correct information, of the flowering of love and of any remnants of empathy.

But if I'd spent that time in Mława, Max Dunne's birthplace, about 125 kilometres north-west of Warsaw, would my reception have been any different?

4

Who are you again?

I WAS haunted by the words of the older of Max's two nephews. What did he mean by Max having been made into a ‘beast' by his experiences in Auschwitz? In Mama and Dad's circle of survivors, those parents who'd been in Auschwitz seemed to inhabit a special category for us kids, as though outlasting that particular circle of hell dealt you a perverse trump card. My parents had been ‘in labour camps', ‘in hiding' and ‘with false papers' on the Aryan side. Which seemed to me to be less horrible than the experiences of those in the concentration camps. How had I worked that out? Sometimes one of my parents' friends would say or do something angry or aggressive, or break down in tears at an afternoon-tea gathering, and Mama would whisper to me ‘She was in Auschwitz' as a way of explaining things.

There was also a line in the sand between Holocaust survivors and Holocaust refugees—those who had come after the war and those who had arrived in Australia before it was no longer possible to get out. Even those who came alone as refugee children and subsequently lost their families were considered the lucky ones. So, while they had both been adults before the war, there must have been a chasm between Joseph Dunne and his brother Max, five years younger, one here before the war and the other who came at the end of 1948.

I found journal articles about these hierarchies of suffering that look at populations of survivors across the globe. Again, child survivors were considered to be low in the pecking order. Was the thinking that they must have had someone looking after them, or that they couldn't remember horrible things like adults could? Or that they couldn't interpret what they were seeing, that shocking things might not be so shocking to those who didn't understand how far they fell short of a measure of humanity and civilisation?

Mama and Dad had no visible tattoos. The only evidence of their traumas was the private horror show inside their minds. They had friends with the tattooed black or navy or green numbers on their left arms, and when we asked about them we were told that it was only a way for them to remember their phone numbers. Why couldn't they remember them, I thought—I knew mine. Recently I met the father of an old Sunday school friend who told me he used to say to kids of my generation that the tattoo was his phone number, but now he tells his great-grandchildren that it's his PIN.

The adults in my parents' circle were mostly remote: they ignored us, and wanted us to play outside all the time; and they ignored their own kids, unless they were smacking them for being annoying. That was my impression, although I never stayed overnight with any of their families, which is the only way you can see what families are truly like. But I could see that you didn't want to cross them. How much tougher could Max the beast really be?

I was in a frenzy of activity. I telephoned the daughter of Max's best friends and arranged a meeting. Once again I parked my car in a stranger's street. I approached the house with a mixture of bravado and embarrassment. In her kitchen I told my ridiculous story. I was getting adept at explaining to strangers the odd theory I had developed about my parentage. It felt like one of those dreams where you are in your nightie while everyone else is dressed. I would have been more ashamed if it were not such an intriguing tale to tell.

The daughter of Max's friends was a glamorous woman, a few years older than me. Her father had been a heroic fighter in both the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising and the 1944 Polish Resistance uprising in Warsaw. Would such a man befriend the Beast of Auschwitz?

Perhaps slightly shocked, she was nevertheless helpful. She told me what she could remember about Max, and that he was not so much a beast as a man who could sometimes be difficult. He had been close to her parents.

She remembered his son Alan, a handsome curly blond and blue-eyed boy, a troublemaker. She'd had a crush on him. She found a photograph of Joseph's younger son, a general practitioner now in his mid-fifties, a very good friend of hers. I looked at his face and saw echoes of my own. I was beginning to worry that I'd lost perspective, that I would see echoes of my face in any photograph, if I willed it.

She promised to ask her mother if there was any possibility of a dark secret that Max may have shared with his friends. Her mother still saw Max's widow. Perhaps the woman had talked about this scandal in the past. So many afternoon teas and dinners and parties. So many chances for whispers and raised eyebrows. If Max was difficult, his wife must have fought with him. Perhaps she confided in her friends about how hard it was to live with him. His affairs, his illegitimate child. Now I was running purely on imagination. I had to resist that and stick to what I knew.