The Testimony    (12 page)

As a country, Australia probably helped rehabilitate us better than others would have through its remoteness and its absence of visible war scars and neuroses. The people were easygoing and tolerant: a few outbursts on the ‘bloody reffo!’ theme carried no real threat and did not have official sanction or general support, and I was able to work and continue my education.

The arrangement with my ‘family by acceptance’ was an effective surrogate, offered emotional security and was a great help in coping with the culture shock. Also important was—and is—the friendship of two Australian families: a young couple in Melbourne and a family settled on a farm near Tarcutta in New South Wales, where I used to go for my school vacations. We became honorary members of these ‘dinkum’ Aussie families, the Reads and the Martins, and sixty years on I am the honorary old great-aunt to their grandchildren.

It was with those families that I was first able to talk about the war years. Anxious and not yet articulate in English, I was hardly good company. These warm and patient friendships meant acceptance. After almost six years behind barbed wire, such acceptance was very healing.

After this period of bewilderment and amazement we began to seek rationales for our new experiences, and to compare the order of different societies. We made assessments of Stalin’s perversion of socialism, of the liberating features of democracy, and of the origins of the confidence around us that ‘she’ll be right’. We wondered what made the Aussies so easygoing. I thought that it was because they had never experienced a feudal system, a police state or invasion by a hostile power.

Feudalism establishes a master–servant ethos that lingers for generations after its official demise. A police state damages the social fibre by instilling mistrust, fear and insecurity. The national psyche is damaged by the experience of violated sovereignty. Language carries embedded shadows of such times—special words and images—and history books are a reminder. These factors are not conducive to easygoingness.

White Australians were very lucky to escape these legacies, so common in Europe. But the First Australians were not. I became aware of the plight of the Aborigines long before I met one of them. Discrimination against a racial minority was something I knew a lot about, and the experience of being persecuted connects me to other persecuted minorities. The brotherhood of ‘I know how it feels’.

The cycle of work, study and weekend jobs was demanding, and it took some years before I was able to participate in activities to foster human rights and social justice for the First Australians.

WARRAMONG

A lady who had volunteered to teach English to refugees befriended our ‘family by acceptance’. She mentioned us to her friends, the Reads, who lived on a farm in the Riverina, in New South Wales, and these kind and brave people invited us, sight unseen, to spend Christmas and other holidays on their farm. Two or three of us went at a time, as work commitments allowed.

I remember my first visit, in December 1949. A city slicker, I had always found the Polish countryside exhilarating. On the train journey to Wagga Wagga, the town nearest the Reads’ farm, I imagined a little wooden cottage with a farmer guiding the plough pulled by the horse, and other charms of country life. The property, Warramong, was not like this: it had a large, well-appointed homestead with a wide verandah. There were sheds for tractors and other motorised farm implements.

Our hosts, the Read family, completed the contrast with a Polish farm. Margery and Don Read were well spoken, well read and most knowledgeable. Margery was a graduate in medicine and Don was admired locally for his agricultural knowledge and success. They kept a small library of books and classical records. Their three children, Michael, Anthony and Elizabeth, were at the time eleven, nine and five. Don’s father and two older sisters lived in Wagga Wagga, and the three generations of Reads were a close family in frequent contact with each other. Margery and Don made every effort to make us feel welcome and at home, and soon succeeded. For a while the children were alarmed at our lack of Anglo-Saxon reserve.

Warramong was a beautiful place. A creek ran through one section; a forest abutted another. In the green paddocks there were several solitary eucalypts, large, magnificently asymmetrical and silhouetted against the sky. The farm ran a large flock of sheep, had several milking cows, several horses, some chooks and piglets.

Elizabeth milked the cows swiftly into the bucket with an unerring aim. My attempt produced a wide spray of milk all over the cow, myself and my very surprised teacher. Clearly, Elizabeth had never seen anyone quite so clumsy. The boys too had allotted tasks, such as feeding the chooks and pigs, and sweeping the verandah. But mostly they did school homework, read or sketched animals or scenery. Both were very accomplished at drawing.

Margery and I used to go for long walks along the creek. It was the way she asked about and responded to our wartime events that made it possible for me to talk about them. It was not so with Don, who kept shaking his head in disbelief. Much of what I said was incomprehensible, I could see; and yet I was protecting them from the worst. I still don’t like to shock the people I like.

* * * 

People’s questions often showed that the extermination process was beyond their comprehension—and no wonder. So there was, and still is, the difficulty in explaining the incomprehensible. But I tried and they struggled to understand.

There are difficulties of talking about the war even now. There is still some small emotional difficulty on my part; there is the awareness that what I am saying causes discomfort, if not horror. Then there is the feeling that I am not getting enough across, even in response to specific questions, because the whole setting is unimaginable to those who were not there. And there are the limitations of my descriptive talent. But there is also another problem for me: there usually follows sympathy and attentiveness when people find I was in concentration camps. That embarrasses me; the last thing I would want is to get mileage out of Auschwitz, to reduce it to a sob story, to trivialise it. I don’t know how other survivors deal with that.

* * * 

The fresh country air must have gone to my head one day, because I asked Don to let me help in herding the sheep into another paddock. He asked if I had ridden a horse before. I said yes, recalling a pony ride when I was eight years old. Don gave me an old mare, slow and broad as a table. The riding was a pleasant experience, and I went for several hours, ignoring the advice to take it easy on the first day. That evening every muscle in my body went into painful spasm, and I was hardly able to move for a couple of days. Hot baths and painkillers helped a bit. Later, shorter trips that gradually increased in length of time fixed the problem. Horseback riding at the farm was my idea of a good time.

Warramong was regarded as a model farm, and neighbouring farmers used to pop in often for some shoptalk and Don’s advice on methods of preventing soil erosion or salination, types of fodders and fertilisers, the pH of the soil or the latest research in agriculture.

The tricks of the trade fascinated me too. Lambing seasons inevitably produced cases of stillborn lambs, and twin births with one of the twins often rejected by its mother. The trick was to dress a rejected twin in the skin of a stillborn lamb and present it to the bereaved mother. It was usually accepted because of its familiar smell.

Sometimes a sheep would refuse to suckle its single newborn. The trick here was to put the mother into a tiny enclosure where, virtually immobilised, she could not get away from her hungry baby. After suckling started, the bond was established. It puzzled me why some sheep stood and bleated pitifully over their dead babies, while others rejected their live ones.

One day I was helping Don to get a rejecting sheep into the bonding enclosure. The creature was huge and looked like a bale of wool on four legs. I asked Don why the mother refused to suckle her baby, and he said it was because she didn’t want to lose her figure. I love the dry Aussie humour.

And there was the matter of the curdled milk. We could not bear to see so much milk discarded when not needed, so we asked to keep it. When it curdled we made cottage cheese and yoghurt out of it. (This was years before these products appeared on the market and became popular.) The Reads struggled to conceal their revulsion. Don asked if there was anything we could make out of bad eggs or rotten potatoes. I promised I would think of something.

(At the 2007 Christmas gathering of the Reads—children and grandchildren of the late Margery and Don—Michael Read told his fifteen-year-old granddaughter that many years ago at Warramong they had always kept a bucket of curdled milk when I was due to arrive. We were eating yoghurt with mixed berries at the time!)

We marvelled at the long-term planning of matters such as the children’s university education, at the generational continuum, the predictability of the future. To me, Warramong was peace, permanence and beauty. Since then, at stressful times, I have imagined myself walking or horseback riding along the creek, and it has been a respite.

Our visits continued over several years, and a warm and durable friendship developed, now into the fourth generation. I marvel at this friendship, a solid bridge built across a gulf of profound differences: the Reads were deeply religious—we were infidels; they were conservatives—we were lefties. Their Anglo-Saxon reserve was in sharp contrast to our East European outspokenness, our ebullience and lack of social niceties. We ate unacceptable, revolting food and mangled their elegant King’s English.

I think that the common ground of humanity is so solid that it can support bridges spanning wide across deep gulfs of personal, cultural and ethnic difference. And I can’t help thinking that, were present-day asylum seekers not isolated and demonised, many would bond with the locals in this way too.

HENTY HOUSE, LITTLE COLLINS STREET

This was where I had my first job in Melbourne, and it was a place of much learning for me between 1949 and 1950. I was one of six charladies who cleaned this six-storey building each working day from 4 am to 8.15 am. The building was occupied by the Department of Civil Aviation. The various offices were on floors one to five, while the top floor, with the best access to daylight, was used by the draftsmen.

This floor was my domain and mine only. While other floors had several rooms each, with desks, chairs, filing cabinets and carpet-covered floors, the draftsmen all worked in this one large room. All along the window-lined wall were slanted desktops holding large blueprints of aeroplanes and their parts. There were high stools for seating, and the floor was covered by linoleum that had to be waxed and polished each day. In one corner there was a small hand basin. Outside this room there was a tearoom and toilets. In my locked cleaner’s cupboard I had the tools of the trade: broom, mop, dusters, bucket, soap, hand towels, toilet paper, brushes, canisters of beeswax and a large electric floor polisher.

Doris was the cleaner-in-charge. She was a short, cubical lady whose words and body language inspired fear. With arms akimbo and head out, as if aiming to butt, she ran a tight ship of chars. She opened the front door at 4 am every day, and we went to the cleaners’ room on the ground floor, picked up our cupboard keys and took the lift to our allotted floor. At 6 am we returned to this room for a ten-minute break, then known as ‘smoko’. A hot-water urn on the wall allowed a ‘cuppa’ to be made. There were benches along the walls, a kitchen sink, a board with hooks on which to hang keys, and shelves for supplies of soap, towels, toilet paper and so on. This windowless room had barely enough space for six people to sit. After the tea break we filed into the lift and pressed all the buttons to deliver the designated lady at each stop. We returned to our room to hang up the keys at 8.15 am. The department’s offices opened at 8.30 am.

This routine changed whenever someone was absent due to illness. At such times all present sped through their work and descended on the absentee’s floor to clean it in a quarter of an hour of combined effort.