The Fiftieth Gate Read online

  ‘Push,’ we scream, ‘lift the latch and push.’

  ‘No. They’ll think we’re coming back to take our house. I remember too much now. No.’

  ‘Dad,’ my brother and I urge him, ‘you’re being paranoid. Just push it and let’s see if you’re right.’

  We have always known him to be apprehensive, forever warning us that if we did this or that then this or that terrible outcome would emerge. He has a novelist’s imagination for the ghoulish: a mere walk down a suburban block rouses nightmarish premonitions ranging from traffic accidents to abduction. When my friends were allowed to visit each other on foot, my father and I reached a compromise short of total prohibition. I would walk and he would drive alongside me, guiding me through the leafy streets of Caulfield with his white Pontiac.

  The possibilities for disaster are endless. Even a normal family dinner fuels his anxious imagination. ‘You eat too fast,’ he routinely warns his family, ‘you might choke.’ Our home was always wired up with complex alarm systems, first in pads strategically placed under the carpet. I would be enlisted as an assistant for the daily ritual of stamping on the floor to test possible patches of unprotected carpet, until this system was replaced by a maze of electronic sensors with scores of tiny red spotlights indicating periphery alarm, central alarm, window alarm and various states of alert which connected the whole labyrinth to an armed guard service. Other sources of panic include dogs, spiders (‘Mummy,’ he will call to his wife who picks up these hairy things with her fingers), all forms of transportation, balconies, bare feet, strenuous exercise, and the suburbs which spill off Map 58 of Melway’s Street Directory; but nothing seems to set the alarm bells ringing as much as public demonstrations of Jewishness.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he will warn me before boarding an aeroplane, ‘d’you sink zay know I’m Jewish?’ Indeed, were it not for family pressures under which he always eventually bows, he would not attend a single Jewish assembly, be it Israel’s Independence Day or the Holocaust commemoration evening, not because he does not fiercely identify with these causes, but because his protective antennae are most active where more than three Jews are gathered together.

  Here in this town in Poland, we are four Jews, my mother Genia, my brother Johnny, myself, and of course my father, who is being egged on by the rest of us to open these two wooden gates. Once again he succumbs, and after taking two furtive glances behind each shoulder (‘Is anyone looking? I hope no one is there’) he lifts the latch and pushes.

  A stream of light rushes past us, and during the time it takes for my eyes to adjust, I imagine that the hand pushing open the gates belongs to a boy. Even now my father’s hands are small and unblemished by yellowing spots. What had he carried in those same hands when he last pushed open these gates sixty years ago? A sled? His school books? Perhaps even a young girl’s hand protected by a velvety mitten?

  The light forms a tunnel which guides our eyes down a long hilly path which opens into fields of grassy pastures and poplar trees. The first signs of spring can be seen in the distance.

  II

  ‘Mine. They’re all mine.’

  My mother is dancing in the fields and the snow is falling onto her hair. Her arms are outstretched like Julie Andrews in the opening scene of The Sound of Music as she pirouettes around the territory she is reclaiming from her past.

  We had never believed her when she told us that she was once rich, very rich, tremendously rich. Her father Leo Krochmal, she always said, was one of the most important people in town, a notary, a communal activist, highest amongst the ranks of the local intelligentsia. It was the bit about possessing a village that we found most difficult to swallow, a big village, a whole field, lots of land. It was too fairytale-ish, as if borrowed from my book of stories on Russian mythology whose main protagonists were scary Baba Yagas and peasant miracle-workers. In these fables, Jewish characters were either too poor or too rich. Mostly poor, but my grandfather, I was told, happened to be the Rothschild of Bołszowce, from a tiny Ukrainian town whose location was virtually impossible to find on a map.

  It was said that he purchased the tracts of land from the local Polish Count, someone whose name escaped pronunciation but contained lots of ch’s and sh’s. I remember it sounded like another familiar word with which I had grown up, the name for my great aunt whom we affectionately called Ciociu, pronounced cho-choo, like a train puffing smoke clouds into the air. This Count Cho-Choo regularly entertained my grandfather at his manor, and even borrowed large sums of money from him, the debts of which were paid off by parcelling out a neighbouring village to the industrious Leo Krochmal. While they, my grandfather and the Count, sat inside negotiating, my mother would be walked in her stroller through the manorial gardens by her maid, up and down the hill, into the adjacent forest where the oak trees gave shelter from the glaring heat. In the winter, she slid in a toboggan down that same hill, wearing her little white boots and an orange knitted sweater her mother had purchased from the most exclusive shop in Stanisławów.

  On my mother’s side, we were made to feel like royalty. ‘Graf Potocki,’ she would abuse me if I refused to collect my dirty clothes from the floor, a reference to the famous Polish Count who symbolised aristocratic sloth and indolence. To be sure, there was something aristocratic about my grandfather Leo, who would sit in a corner of his living room in Melbourne, surrounded by imitation German furniture and dark woven rugs, leafing through Heinrich Graetz’s monumental history of the Jews—Geschichte der Juden—under the light of a single lamp. ‘We come from a long line of Krochmals,’ he would say, ‘going back to the great eighteenth-century philosopher, Reb Nahman Krochmal.’ At this point, he would thumb through Graetz’s History until he found volume eleven, page 482, a description of Reb Nahman’s philosophical tract entitled Guide for the Perplexed of the Time. Over a cup of chocolate milk, I could decipher the letters amongst the Gothic jumble which made up the word K-r-o-c-h-m-a-l, although of the page’s other perplexities I understood next to nothing.

  Old age tarnished his noble aura as his mind fell prey to dementia. The lamp now illuminated the froth in the corners of his mouth, masticating on its own emptiness. I hated it when he kissed me, the feeling of gluggy saliva left glued to my cheeks. Was this the same man from my mother’s fairytale, the one who had declaimed socialist poetry in the town’s Jewish library? When did he replace his modish suits for the single woollen dressing-gown in which he always greeted me, buried in his armchair with an open book? Was there once a time when he was not closed off in darkness, an era when his mind was cunning enough to outfox the Count of Bołszowce?

  Half a century has passed before my mother agrees to return home. ‘You call this home?’ she says of her birthplace. ‘Better I should forget.’

  Not everyone in Bołszowce has forgotten.

  ‘Krochmal fields,’ the Baba Yaga says, leaning against her gnarled cane.

  The Ukrainian peasant woman bares a single tooth in the right corner of her mouth, and wraps a dark shawl around her head. She hobbles past a fallen gate which connects to a mud path leading from a wooden cottage with a thatched straw roof.

  ‘You’re Krochmal?’ she whispers to my mother whom she remembers as a mannerly daughter. ‘We still visit the fields. Pola Krochmala. Krochmal Fields. They’re your father’s fields. Come, I’ll show you.’

  My mother is dancing on her estate, a triumph of money and memory.

  ‘Porcelain!’ she mocks my father’s pre-war shop which sold glassware, ceramics, pots and pans, odds and ends.

  ‘I never knew I married such a wealthy woman,’ he smiles back, ‘maybe I wouldn’t have worked so hard all these years.’

  ‘Mine, it’s all mine! Wheeeee.’

  III

  In the fields there is an eerie silence, punctuated by the sound of rain falling on the trees which populate this fledgling forest. I enter past a railway crossing and step over the tracks. A sign hangs above indicating its location in northern Poland: Tre
blinka. I hop from one beam to the next, counting the steps along the way until the line stops nowhere. After the tracks, the narrow pathway opens up into a vast field bordered by a concrete platform upon which the contents of the cattle trucks were unloaded. ‘Human cargo,’ Franz Stangl, the commander of this camp, used to call it.

  Where once stood flower beds, barbed wire fences, residential barracks and a concrete temple whose doors beckoned almost one million Jews, there is grass, there are trees, and there are stones. Boulders are scattered throughout the field, hundreds of them, human forms in stony relief, each bearing the name of a village or city whose residents once visited this location. It is now a commemorative site, no longer the place where men and women and children and grandparents huddled before the gates of the temple whose entrance mocked its visitors with the biblical inscription: ‘This is the gate of God through which the righteous shall enter.’

  I begin my search amongst these scattered stones. Warsaw towers above them all, asserting its presence over the other locales spread across the central belt of Poland: Garwolin, Otwock, Kutno, Warka, Radom. I pause for breath in Radom, as this is the last major town I am to pass through before arriving at my destination. Szydłowiec, Ostrowiec, Skarżysko–Kamienna, Radoszyce, Wierzbnik.

  Wierzbnik. How does a tongue trained to pronounce Saxon words curl around it? Vyezhbnik. Zh. Zh. Like an engine revving, or a sewing machine punching its thread through a piece of cloth. Zhhh. Wierzbnik. I touch the stone, caress its crevices, and repeat the word over and over again. Wierzbnik. Wierzbnik. Here is my grandmother, Hinda, my father’s mother; his two younger sisters, here in this grain of sand, Marta. Here, Yenta. My father’s family. His friends, his town. In a rock. Buried, their bones inside the tombstone. Beat it with a stick, and what will come out? Water? Bodies? A tune? Only memory.

  My parents have not accompanied me to Treblinka today.

  ‘What for?’ my father pleads. ‘It won’t bring my mother back.’

  ‘It’s the only tombstone we have,’ I tell him.

  ‘A tombstone has bones underneath.’

  My mother intercedes: ‘At least you know where she died. Isn’t that reason enough to return?’

  ‘What do you mean return?’ he erupts. ‘No one who was there returns.’

  I know of one survivor who returns there every day. He spent a year in Treblinka, sometimes clearing bodies from the gas chambers, other times burning them. Now he lives in Melbourne, in an apartment fortified by double doors and numerous locks. ‘Come for coffee,’ he once invited me. I enter through the security doors, as he motions me into his living-room. The coffee table is set: elegant cups, a milk-jug, a piece of sponge cake. We sit down, pressed into a tiny corner. The room is dominated by an oversized table. He pours and mixes as I review the peculiar figures laid out on his table. It resembles a macabre scene from a perverted Lilliput: bodies spill out from buildings, men in uniform cart corpses on stretchers, barbed wire encircles this self-enclosed world.

  ‘It’s Treblinka,’ he says, ‘I built the model myself.’

  ‘It’s his revenge,’ my mother says.

  ‘What’s your revenge?’ I ask my parents.

  My father thinks for a moment. ‘I had a chance after the war.’

  ‘But now?’

  ‘Now it’s too late.’

  I turn to my mother.

  ‘You,’ she says, ‘my children are my revenge.’

  More feet are marching across the landscape. They come waving their flags, a contingent of Israeli students bearing the blue and white colours of a prayer shawl, at whose centre lies a Star of David. They observe the boulders from a distance, but do not lose themselves within the maze. They have no single thing to find here, just the whole cursed site. They stand as a group, establishing a new focal point against Warsaw, a unified entity at a distance from the dispersed villages. A girl steps forward with a flute, and plays for the students who accompany her melody in mournful voices. She plays ‘Hatikvah’, the Israeli national anthem: ‘The Hope’. Then another student stands outside the circle and recites a Hebrew verse:

  here in this carload

  i am eve

  with abel my son

  if you see my other son

  cain son of man

  tell him that i

  I recognise the poem from Dan Pagis, a Rumanian-born survivor who emigrated to Israel. ‘Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car’, it is called.

  The student completes his recital, and then another voice speaks the same words, each time stopping before the sentence is completed. ‘Tell him that i …’ Another plea, then another, until every member of the group proclaims the unfinished message.

  When I return to our hotel in Warsaw, I recite the poem for my parents.

  My mother says the train must have arrived.

  My father says: ‘When I was taken from my mother she said nothing.’

  I want to break the silence for him, to force him to look back for his mother, Hinda.

  He is crying; I look away.

  here in this carload

  i am Hinda

  tell him that i

  IV

  But look at me, I’m not done up, nothing. Should I at least put a little bit of lipstick on? No? How do I look? You can’t see my legs can you? I only thought you could see half of me. Oh, my God, I would have dressed up. I didn’t think I would be on video. Tell me now. What do you want me to tell you?

  What is the first thing I remember? I don’t remember when I was born. I had a nice childhood when I was young, I still remember that. The way I was dressed; a little hat, a little coat, it was an orangey-cinnamon colour, but that’s not important. I was born in Bołszowce, in Galician Poland, the western part of the Ukraine. My memory from Bołszowce is very poor; how old was I after the war? If I’m going to be sixty, what was I when we were liberated? Born in 1934, not quite ten.

  We were extremely well off and I used to go on holidays with my parents in a horse and carriage. My father was a very prominent man in the Jewish community. He was a solicitor, well-known in non-Jewish circles, and later I remember the war. Not all of it, not names or places, but I remember, you know, major things that happened to me as a child. It’s very clear from the past, more clear than now.

  The street where I was born in Bołszowce; the house, not so big, two bedrooms, a kitchen, a nanny who took me for walks. My brother was four years older. I vaguely remember his face. He was named Mattis after his grandfather and he was very handsome; dark-skinned and kind. I had twin sisters too, born after Mattis, but I never saw them, they died a few days after their birth.

  Both my parents, Leo and Raisl, were born in a nearby town, in Bursztyn. I used to spend my holidays there with my grandmother. We spoke Polish, not Yiddish. Before the war I didn’t go to school at all; maybe to kindergarten, but I don’t remember. I was only five when the war broke out. What do you expect me to remember? Only images: glasses, coloured and hand-painted. I was always enchanted by them. I liked to play around a verandah, and in the front was a bench.

  My father wasn’t very religious, he was enlightened. Books were always in our home. My mother, she was very Jewish, more than him, but modern too. A devoted mother. On Friday night my mother cooked soup and noodles, and we ate grated potatoes. We went for walks together along a beautiful garden near the Polish Count’s palace—what was his name? I’ve forgotten, but it will come back to me. My father was beautifully dressed, he had suits galore, dressed like a lord. Dressed to kill; nothing but the best. He used to go to Stanisławów to get his clothes made, and he was particularly fussy with shoes. Everything had to be perfect. He was so elegant, people would turn around when he walked in the street. Dark, dark, pitch black hair, dark skin, beautiful eyes, such greyish ones, like a gypsy. He was beautiful and he was extremely vain. Women spoilt him. He was a womaniser. I know he was; I remember little things, my mother crying, from before the war. I was young but I remember them talking, her crying. I didn’t res
ent him then at my early age, although I was always closer to my mother, much closer. I adored my mother. She was a business woman; she used to help buy land, orchards. We had a whole village with fields held in our name. We went there for holidays. It was beautiful, with lakes and fish.

  We had electricity but my grandmother didn’t. Telephones? No. The weather was the same as it is now: summer was summer and spring was spring and winter was snow and white and we used to … I remember this exactly like yesterday: there was a church with some hills and our nanny used to take me on a sleigh all the way down, and then she would walk up with me and slide down, again and again. I would wear tights, knitted ones, white mittens, and a coat with fur and a hood; and a scarf, like in Dr Zhivago. And she always took me on the sleigh.

  What I remember. What would you remember before you were eight? I wish I could forget what I remember. When the war started, like yesterday. Only a little girl.

  Enough. That’s all, my dear, for today. But what you’ve done, maybe you should do again. I didn’t know I was going to be on video. So you should start from the very beginning really. The beginning is no good. Hello, my children. Can you see my legs through there?

  V

  I wasn’t looking at her legs.

  I was listening with my eyes closed. Once my father interpreted this as boredom. ‘How can you sleep while I tell you about Auschwitz?’ he grumbled, refusing for the next hour to continue his story.

  ‘I’m focused on your face,’ I assured my mother.

  ‘Not my body,’ she pleaded, ‘can’t you see I’ve put on weight?’ Still, she was not deterred from wearing tight trousers as if her body were the same shape and could be tucked away under layers of exterior cloth. Shmattes, she called them, rags, categorised in cupboards, one for the row of neatly hung dresses, another for the pants and winter overcoats, and a special section for the shoes. These shmattes, she liked to say, were her memories. If she saw a narrative in her life, it could be found here in her bedroom cupboards. ‘These shoes danced for me at your barmitzvah,’ she once told me on a guided tour of her past; ‘and this cream dress, do you remember your wedding?’ She speaks of her rags as if they were independent of her own body, things she auditioned in shops for their capacity to dance for her, to sing, celebrate and cry.