The Fiftieth Gate Read online

  Mark Raphael Baker is the author of Thirty Days: A Journey to the End of Love, about the recent death of his wife. He is also Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

  To my parents,

  Genia and Yossl …

  … For my children,

  Gabriel, Sarah and Rachel

  Contents

  Introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition of The Fiftieth Gate

  Epigraph

  The Fiftieth Gate

  Map: My Parents’ Journeys

  A note to the reader

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition

  Almost exactly twenty years ago, I handed my mother my first advance copy of The Fiftieth Gate.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve told you everything, my darlink.’

  My darlink!

  Stung, I wanted to grab the book out of her hands and rewrite it: how could I publish it with bits of her life missing? What if the part she had not told me distorted her story? Didn’t she owe it to me to tell me everything?

  Memory is a two-way interaction. Perhaps in my retelling of her memories I was guilty of skewing her life by refracting the story through my own experiences. And what counted for more—the facts I assembled about my parents’ past, or how they remembered it?

  The next morning I telephoned her.

  ‘So? What do you think?’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she answered. ‘I haven’t finished.’

  I called a few hours later. ‘It’s dark,’ is all she said.

  When I rang the next day, she said, in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘I’ve finished, darlink. I’m going off to the casino now.’

  What did she mean? Was it too hard for her to tell me what she thought about how I had represented her life? Or was she playing me, telling me in her own way that, no matter what I’d written, I would never understand, just as Elie Wiesel wrote in 1983, in the New York Times, ‘Those who never lived that time of death will never be able to grasp its magnitude of horror.’

  When I first thought of writing a book about my parents’ Holocaust stories, I had no ambitions for its publication. I simply wanted to know about their lives, and particularly about that time, during the Holocaust, which was withheld from me. After all, I had carved out a career as a university teacher of the Holocaust, and read countless books about the testimonies of famous survivors. I was an adult with three children, but if one of my young students had turned the tables and asked about my own parents, all I could have offered them was, ‘My father has a number on his arm and my mother was from somewhere in the Ukraine.’

  How could I let my parents go to the grave without asking them to share their experiences, their secrets, with me? It was the same question I found myself asking my wife about her life, her secrets, as I watched her die of cancer last year, in the presence of my elderly parents. ‘Take me, take me!’ my mother bargained with God in her appeal to save my wife, while all I could offer was a memoir about my grief.

  One doesn’t need to be an analyst to recognise that, on all sides of the family, there were layers of repression that generated an unspoken pact. Don’t ask, and we won’t tell.

  Many readers have expressed astonishment at my earlier ignorance of my family history. I’d like to exonerate myself, at least partially, by situating the writing of The Fiftieth Gate at a pivotal time, twenty years ago, both in the lives of survivors and in Holocaust historiography. While many historians have debunked the notion that survivors didn’t speak about their wartime trauma, it is nonetheless true that a veil of secrecy hung in the households of most Holocaust survivors and their children.

  Awareness of the Holocaust has its own history. The application of the word to the genocide of the Jews (a neologism coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin to categorise and prevent mass murder) only came into common usage in the 1960s. No one in the death camps, or in hiding, would have understood the common links between their fates across Europe, or used Holocaust as a catch-all term. The etymology of the word itself carries a problematic association with the biblical idea of a burnt offering, suggesting that the murder of Jews was a sacrifice to atone for that timeless Christian libel of deicide.

  My bookshelves are now filled with hundreds of studies about the Holocaust, yet, as late as 1960, Raul Hilberg, the author of the magisterial tome The Destruction of the European Jews, couldn’t find a publisher for his authoritative work. It was only in the late-1970s that the events of the Holocaust entered mainstream culture, in large measure due to the television series Holocaust. What followed was a decade of vigorous historical debate about how best to interpret the evolution of Nazi policy. Revisionist arguments relied on official German archives, which documented the perpetrators while largely dismissing the experiences of the victims, whose accounts were in the form of oral and written testimonies, and deemed ‘unreliable’ or ‘inferior’.

  To be sure, there were landmark precedents signalling the changes that were to proliferate in the 1990s, notably the survivor testimonies given at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, brought to public attention by Hannah Arendt’s controversial reportage commissioned by the New Yorker. In 1979, Helen Epstein also introduced the idea of transgenerational trauma in her book Children of the Holocaust. With the fall of the iron curtain in 1989, new opportunities for visits to the sites of destruction became possible, ritualised through the huge annual March of the Living ceremonies in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marianne Hirsch captured the spirit of these return journeys by introducing the term ‘postmemory’. Similarly, Claude Lanzmann’s landmark 1985 documentary Shoah provided a new way of speaking and thinking about the Holocaust. But, despite its triumphalist structure, the Hollywood blockbuster Schindler’s List, released in 1993, did more to popularise the Holocaust than anything preceding it. New technologies, and fear about the inevitable death of the survivor generation, led to the 1994 creation, by Steven Spielberg, of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, the largest repository of testimonies about any single event in history, including more than five thousand Australian interviews. All of this took place before the invention of YouTube, and before the creation of a mass-produced culture of confession enabled by staging pages such as Facebook.

  We are now living in what cultural historians have defined as a ‘memory boom’, whose theoretical terms of reference were refined through study of the Holocaust, but which have now spread to awareness of other genocides and our responsibility (and failure) to prevent them. This testimonial culture has roots in antiquity through the notion of martyrdom—acts of self-sacrifice that bore witness to the divine name—but in its modern secular guise it gained new currency in the wake of the twentieth-century ruptures of two world wars.

  My book, The Fiftieth Gate, was written at the outset of this burgeoning culture of testimony, yet was inspired by my own interest in the interplay of Jewish history and Jewish memory, prominently framed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s seminal book, Zakhor.

  Zakhor is the biblical imperative of remembrance, repeated one hundred and sixty-nine times in diverse scriptural contexts. When I first approached the task of transmitting my parents’ memories, I intended to draw on this Jewish tradition of memory through the structure of a page of the Talmud, which gathers layers of commentary on a single folio without regard for leaps in time and place. Unlike the linear approach of secular western writing, this Jewish literary form known as midrash operates in a circular fashion, anticipating the hyper-text layers of the internet. Initially, I conceived of planting my parents’ testimonies as a block at the centre of a page, and encircling it with commentaries dra
wn from other sources: primary archives; historical monographs; memorial Yizkor books, compiled by survivors about their decimated villages; and my own voice as a secondary, vicarious witness. The ambition to depict the Holocaust by re-imagining a story, and even subverting it, was also influenced by the liturgical aphorisms of the festival of Passover, which enjoin us to re-enact our ancient enslavement as if we were there, and to expand on the original story as an act of empathy.

  Yet what right did I possess, as a child of survivors, to recreate an account of the Holocaust as if I was there, when almost every philosopher had warned us that the event was an unprecedented rupture in human history, which rendered it beyond representation, be it through poetry (Theodor Adorno) or any familiar vocabulary (Primo Levi)?

  My parents might not have been trained philosophers, but, in their own instinctive way, they communicated that it was impossible—for them, or anyone—to understand what happened to them, which is perhaps why they never told their two sons. Did they even have the emotional resilience to confront their experiences as they set about building new lives in Australia, especially when the telling of the Holocaust was at that time relegated to film and literature rather than the family table?

  Moreover, at the heart of almost all testimonies is a paradox. Those who lived to testify witnessed only a partial aspect of the Holocaust and bypassed that absolute heart of darkness in which millions were murdered. My father did not see my mother hiding in the forests, and she did not see her future husband in the camps; neither of them saw the Jews being shot in pits or murdered. My father saw the smoke rising from the chimneys and the lines of people being led away to their deaths, but, when he arrived at Auschwitz, he was directed away from the gas chambers, tattooed with a prisoner number, deloused, and sent off to slave labour in one of the satellite camps.

  As a son and as a historian, I wanted to record my parents’ memories, while also giving expression to the wider context of murder that can be obscured by survivor narratives. And so I turned not only to their testimonies, but also to archival documents, historical monographs and eyewitness accounts. I wrote alternative endings to highlight the randomness of life and death. I reconfigured ancient tales of hell. But eventually I hit a dead end—the place where memory ends. That is the point at which I made the leap into fiction—not fiction as fabrication, but as an act of empathy, so that I could recreate for my parents the last journey of their murdered families.

  How far, though, can one go without fetishising the gas chambers and treating the Holocaust as a voyeuristic spectacle? Once I had imagined myself on the train with my grandmother and her two daughters, I was struck by the limitations of language to portray the terror of their journey. Do I disembark once the train arrives at Treblinka death camp, I wondered, or do I allow my imaginative eye to travel further so as not to abandon to oblivion the family I never knew. And, once inside the camp grounds, do I watch those women undress, and then peep through that hole in the door—the one used by Nazi operatives to ensure that their grand experiment of mass murder was properly executed?

  I wanted to avert my eyes but I also wanted to represent the agony of their death throes. In negotiating these two contradictory impulses, I turned to Jewish mysticism—a language that attempts to describe the ineffable force of creation, which, during the Holocaust, appeared as a destructive absence. A metaphor that resonated for me was that of a celestial palace surrounded by forty-nine gates, at whose heart is the original gate—one that is closed to us, yet contains all the light and all the darkness of the universe. Ultimately, all that was left to me was the deconstruction of language—the shape of the broken letters of the Hebrew alphabet, as a counter-vocabulary to capture the final seconds of death—and my task to articulate the lingering silence of the victims.

  I am, at the same time, mindful of the words of the historian Yehuda Bauer, who warned us against mystifying the Holocaust and transplanting it to an extraterrestrial realm where there is no human culpability or causal explanation that allows us to learn lessons for the future.

  Conscious of these contradictions, I have attempted in my own life and work to elaborate on the stories of the Shoah by stretching the meaning of ‘Never Again’ to events that lie beyond the Holocaust. The memories of The Fiftieth Gate have expanded to incorporate atrocities that—whether by gas or bullet or machete or drone—challenge the emphasis on the Holocaust as a unique event.

  That is why, when my mother said, ‘Don’t think I’ve told you everything’, she was striking a profound chord. There might be facts that still haven’t been revealed in this twentieth-anniversary edition of The Fiftieth Gate, or fallacies of memory that expose deeper emotional truths. Memory is circular, and, in its circularity, connects to other stories that have unfolded in the past two decades since the publication of this book. It is up to us to find ways of bringing light into the dark places of the world—be it Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur or Syria—and to find new understandings of what lies behind that most mysterious of gates where all of us inhabit the one room.

  Mark Baker, April 2017

  There is a palace of hidden treasures.

  In this palace there are forty-nine gates that separate good from evil, the blessing from the curse.

  Beyond them is a fiftieth gate larger than the entire world.

  It is a hidden gate.

  On this gate there is a lock, which has a narrow place where the key may be inserted.

  Come and see.

  Through this gate all other gates may be seen.

  Whoever enters the fiftieth gate sees through

  God’s eyes from one end of the world to the other.

  The darkness or the light.

  Come and see.

  The key is the broken heart, the yearning for prayer, the memory of death.

  The key is the forgotten heart, the murdered prayer, the death of memory.

  It opens the blessing or the curse.

  Come and see.

  I

  It always begins in blackness, until the first light illuminates a hidden fragment of memory:

  ‘Nothing, I don’t recognise a thing. Why did you drag me here? You could take me to a country town anywhere in Australia and by me it would be the same.’

  A gate confirms that he knew this town once before; double gates, to be more precise, unvarnished and wooden, painted roughly in red, and bolted together by a heavy latch. The gates do not appear to provide entry to any one particular house, but stand between two flimsy arches on the market-square, opposite a central memorial to the Second World War over which a large wooden cross balances. My father hesitates before these gates, having completed his second circuit of the town square.

  ‘Couldn’t be. You’re sure this is the right place? A different square altogether. It was much bigger—horses, people, fruit; it was a market-square. Where’s our house? It was there; or maybe here. Nothing, nothing.’

  He pronounces nothing as nusink, and instinctively breaks out into his native Yiddish, a language which this town has not heard for over fifty years. ‘Vey iz mir. My God! Vi bin ich? Where am I?’ He swings around, and points his hands in every direction. His small eyes scan the entire area and he shakes his head, sad, pitifully angry at his memory for failing him.

  This memory thing is no light matter for my father. He holds it over his family like a university degree. He is not a reader of books, although he devours the morning newspaper with his breakfast, munching on difficult words as if they were another mouthful of cheese. He especially loves the Australian Jewish News, and ritually, after the chicken on Friday night, he steals the paper to his favourite couch and heads straight for the obituary column to see if he recognises any names. ‘He was from Raków near my town,’ he might say of the person whose name is announced in a neatly boxed column; or, ‘She used to dance the best rhumba at Maison de Luxe. I remember where she lived in Carlton when she came to Australia with her sister.’

  There are many things my father re
members. Ask him anything about his clothing business in the suburb of Brunswick and he can recite it by heart: reams of cloth, order numbers for fabrics categorised by weight (250 g, 300 g, 350 g), fibre (cotton, polyester, nylon), and structure (knitted, woven, stable), price per square metre, department-store orders by size and colour, down to the most elaborate details about fashion ranges from the beginning of his business in 1951 to the present day.

  Except names. Names he always forgets, even those of his own family, although to be fair, the problem of recall is compounded by his confusion when pronouncing non-Yiddish words. I am my brother and his niece is his grandchild and his friends are always somebody else, so that in the end all names sound like a jumble of consonants that do not identify anyone at all. It is a minor lapse (‘Who’s he?’ he will hiss into my ear while pulling at my elbow), which in business can easily be covered up by his store of raunchy jokes about a roguish rabbi. ‘It’s funnier in Yiddish,’ he explains to his associates, who come from provincial towns in rural Victoria. They laugh anyway, because my father Joe is such a good bloke whose infectious smile and dancing eyes lure them into his alien world.

  Pausing before these two gates, he now taps his bottom lip with his index finger, a nervous rhythm played out against his mouth beating tap tap tap. I watch him, as the wrinkles on his forehead fold and unfold like an accordion, betraying signs of old age on his boyish face. I have seen him like this before, when he is working out a complex business problem, involving numbers and multiplication patterns that visibly compute in his head.

  When his hands cease tapping, releasing the tension in his eyes and face, we know a neglected site of memory has been retrieved.

  ‘This gate here, I recognise it. As a boy I went through here with my friends. Behind it is a steep slope, a hill, fields, grass. We would slide down it in winter.’

  At last, an incontrovertible test through which my father’s memory might be vindicated, his pride restored. Two lone gates that appear to lead nowhere, connected to the commercial district of the town.