The Testimony (19 page)
Authors: Halina Wagowska
Most friends, former colleagues and neighbours of my vintage help their families to cope with busy modern life. Where both parents work, the children benefit greatly from time spent with their relaxed, retired grandparents. Some have to cope with broken marriages, not common in olden times. I think the grandparenting role is particularly important in our society at present.
Speaking out on behalf of the disadvantaged is my way of justifying my existence. A bonus is in meeting like-minded people, experts on specific issues and in learning about practical sociology.
I try to do this through submissions to relevant authorities, petitions, demonstrations, by participating in public debates, and by sending letters to the press and to members of parliament. I have also joined single-issue groups or those with a broad social spectrum, like the Humanists. I have joined and contribute to UNICEF, the United Nations Association of Australia and the ALP. People’s responses to me and invitations for my further input show me that mine is not a lone voice in the wilderness.
During the war I became indifferent to physical violence. Now I abhor it, and compared to others am more affected by it. I also feel a vague panic at the sight and sound of a marching army.
The mind is a strange place. You should be at home in your own mind, know the baggage stored there, the fixtures and items that shift position sometimes, and those that have to be ditched to accommodate change. There should be order. But it is difficult to keep this place under total control, like the physical rooms we inhabit. This is because emotions reside there and, occasionally, they wreak chaos. For most of the time practised rationality prevails, and resilience, that amorphous being, prevents dysfunction.
There is the filing cabinet of memories filled with items strangely varied in quality: some space-wasting trivia, vivid and in great detail; some matters of consequence, blurred and fragmented. Some, filed at the back of this cabinet, are able to spring out, triggered by a word, a picture, an event. Uninvited, they claim centre stage for a while.
There is a jewellery box holding pearls of wisdom collected from the thoughts of great minds. I’ve always been keen on wit and wisdom, those best and shining products of the human psyche. A couple of these pearls were hatched in the incubator of my own experience. When the box opens and pearls pop up, coming to mind on appropriate occasions, they enrich my perceptions and reflections.
Various signs are posted all over this place for smoother passage and softer landings: ‘This too will pass’; ‘Patience!’; ‘Mind your own business (but not always)’; ‘Is this important or a “so-what?” problem?’; ‘Mind your limitations and stay within them’; ‘Avoid disagreeable people’; and the big old one, ‘DON’T REMAIN A VICTIM!’
There are drawers holding mysteries, mainly of human actions and behaviour that, even after much thought and reading by learned experts on the subject, remain incomprehensible. Or is it a drawer that holds my limitations in understanding? I do have a great need to understand.
In another corner, fantasies are kept: of devising an important new test for diagnosing disease, or of making a great discovery, like Marie Curie (my role model from childhood in Poland) with radium; and the one about spending my life in an ivory tower away from the daily grind, engaged in passionate pursuit of knowledge and discovery. They still serve for a brief escape from the reality of the various coal faces I inhabit.
The wartime was a huge sledgehammer that reshaped my values and attitudes as it must have, in various ways, those of many others. I doubt that it was possible to emerge unaffected. At the outset of the war I was a child, not yet a developed personality, so comparisons between who I was ‘before and after’ are not valid. But comparisons with those who were not there are. I have a different frame of reference, priorities and sensibilities. I fail to empathise with many common concerns, often lack patience and resent harmless trivialities. I mock elegance without substance: conspicuous consumption and the waste of time and resources worry me. People’s preoccupations with their genetic origins and family trees puzzle me.
Gross violations of human rights, persecution of minorities and social injustice concern me obsessively. I have this kinship with the persecuted, the humiliated, the unjustly treated. Rational on many other issues, here I overreact. That my dear friends tolerate and seem to like me is a wonder. And so, to me, is my resilience, sanity and longevity.
In 1995 I took part in a project called ‘Child Holocaust Survivors: Scars left 50 years on’, which involved lengthy interviews by a psychologist. I referred to the sign ‘Don’t Remain a Victim’ that I had posted in my mind soon after the war, and my conscious efforts to recover well. The psychologist said she thought I had succeeded. There did not appear to be any significant scars in this mind.
Fifty years on and the shock, anger and humiliation are gone. For those responsible, I feel disgust and contempt. I still don’t understand how the Germans could behave the way they did, and what was it that brought the absolute worst out in them.
Beneath, in the subconscious, ghosts lurk. Now only occasionally do they float up in a nightmare. My conscious mind is well again. Long gone are the intense hatred and homicidal thoughts. That wartime reshaped my values, attitudes and passions but failed to smash the loving and the wonderment.
Loving occupies a lot of space here, and brings a warm, melting feeling behind the sternum. Love for dear friends, for kindred spirits who become kin. And it is an easy love—for good and without expectations. Just love. And the love of the beauty of nature, art, music, ballet, pictures that can express feelings for which there are no words. Love lights this place up. Without love it would be dark and cold here.
In Stutthof Frieda kept saying that if we survive we should have to testify and bear witness until we died.
Few survived Stutthof. For those who did, reporting about this extermination camp is a duty. Over the years, Holocaust archives and research institutes have sought information through questionnaires, interviews on tape or video, public hearings and symposia.
My first testimony was written answering a questionnaire in a project entitled ‘Consequences of Prejudice’. The twenty-seven questions mostly asked respondents to describe the conditions and treatment experienced in each place of incarceration. My responses took nineteen typed A4 pages.
A year later, in 1982, Thomas Keneally was researching a book on Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist and Nazi Party member who saved the lives of many of the Jewish slave workers in his factory, often at risk to himself. Those he failed to save were sent to Stutthof and perished there.
Keneally appealed on TV for any information that might aid his research. I sent a copy of the questionnaire I had answered. In his prompt and gracious reply, he added: ‘I am delighted that you have recorded your experiences. I believe all those Jewish survivors who can manage to confront their experience should leave a record of it. It is something to show the revisionist historians of the future who might well try to prove that it never happened.’
Next I testified on a video interview, for three long hours, at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne. And in 1995 I was interviewed for the ‘Child Holocaust Survivors: Scars left 50 years on’ project.
The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation was established in the US on the proceeds from the film
Schindler’s List
. This centre processes testimonies in a special way to obtain corroborative evidence. Oral histories are often regarded as inaccurate due to unreliable memories and perceptions. They are ‘anecdotal’. At the Shoah Foundation a testimony is typed into one of a long line of computers that are connected and cross-indexed in a way that sends a signal when similarities such as names of places or people occur among the testimonies. When two or more unrelated people report an event at a named place or an act by a named person, this is regarded as corroborated evidence. The report ceases to be anecdotal and is regarded as fact.
The researchers at Shoah posed additional questions to those who had testified previously and asked for careful and accurate spelling of all given names. The additional questions were many and elaborate. Another psychologist volunteered to act as an interviewer for this project. My answers were video-recorded over six-and-a-half hours.
Shortly after that I was at a conference workshop run by the International Council of Psychologists in Melbourne where I talked about Frieda and the boy from the pigpen.
After that I thought I needed, and deserved, a break.
In all these testimonies I tried to report what I witnessed and experienced. Each such effort left me with a sense of inadequacy. I can relate separate events, but the cumulative effect of them, the atmosphere and textures of the places, remain intangible. There is a lack of adequate words. I do not know how to describe the pervading stench of decaying bodies, burning bodies and excreta. Yet these indescribable aspects of our landscape had a profound and dehumanising effect on our behaviour.
And after all this testifying I have not yet found a way of doing it in a detached manner. Each time I am back there, walking through the ashes for many days. A difficult crossword and a fast-moving ‘whodunnit’ can help my mind return to the present.
I have never returned to Poland or Germany, not because I am neurotic about these countries but I just don’t expect my life to be enriched there. There is no one I know there. I have a fleeting interest in news of Poland as I catch it in the media, but no great involvement with it. I have no animosity towards the country, but perhaps a feeling that it would be painful to return there.
I know that massacres of humans occurred before and after the Jewish Holocaust. But none was carried out on such a scale, and with such detailed planning and efficiency. It involved sustained, professional engagement of doctors, organisers and builders for nearly six years—and so many of them eager and sadistic beyond the call of duty.
How did the cultured German nation find such a large army of willing perpetrators?
Sixty-five years on and I still ponder this question. I looked for an answer in the book
Reading the Holocaust
by Inga Clendinnen published in 1999. It paints a broad and detailed picture of those years, placing my personal experiences in a huge, macabre setting.
In it, she reviews the vast literature on the Holocaust: official German documents and diaries, testimonies of perpetrators and of survivors, historical and sociological research. This thorough analysis showed how a particular combination of factors could produce a social pathology. But my mind is still astounded by the vast number of volunteering executioners.
I emerged from the war thinking I’d seen it all in that part of hell I inhabited in Birkenau and Stutthof. But it seems that atrocities have no bounds. What happens to a mother forced to choose which of her young children will go to the gas ovens and which one can stay alive? I cannot imagine her agony.
Clendinnen’s forensically detailed research impressed me, as did, in all her books, her elegant prose and economy of well-chosen words. Her short, powerful sentences painted vivid pictures that rekindled some of my repertoire of nightmares.
When I befriended Sid and Julia Spindler and joined in their projects and activities, the issue of my testifying emerged again. Sid asked whether I had reported my experiences ‘for posterity’. When I said that I had many times and had a box full of copies of transcripts of tapes and videos, he asked to see them. I could not refuse, though I was uneasy about it, knowing the guilt about the Holocaust that tormented him. I gave him a copy of the questionnaire I had answered. Returning it some time later he said: ‘Thank you. I have no words for an adequate comment.’
A few years later Sid started to write his autobiography and urged me to write mine. I objected, pointing out that I have done my duty testifying to so many investigators. He argued that my story is only in archives and it should be a public record, and he suggested that I turn the question-and-answer form into a linear narrative. I objected, he nagged, and we haggled.