The Fiftieth Gate Read online

  And the other thing I would remember is the Shul—the synagogue, it was in the back of our house, and on festivals we used to go there together. It was an Orthodox synagogue, a large one; anyway, at the time it seemed big to me. I don’t remember much, I remember my mother sitting there with a hat, nicely dressed. I know exactly where she sat, and I used to sit next to her. If it’s still there, I would remember everything from the Shul.

  ‘I forgot. The Shul? Where is the Shul? It was near our house. Behind it. Go back. It was here, no? Here on this spot. So if this is the town hall, this is our house where it stood, then the Shul must be there. There. Where that building is. It was a big Shul, a beautiful one. Where that building is. This building here. Shhh, people standing outside. It had big doors. Shhh. Like these. A mezuzah? Nothing. Shhh. Upstairs stood my mother. Open the doors. They won’t know. Shhh. Was here. Shhh. Shhh. A fairytale. Look. It wasn’t a stage then. Not a curtain. There was the Torah. And downstairs the men. Look how big? Can you see how big it was? I don’t remember the rabbi. Not at all. I remember I played outside with the children. Shhh. Look. Here, the stairs. Upstairs was for women. This door. There. How she was dressed. Did I tell you how she dressed? I remember what she wore: the hat, the clothes from Stanisławów, she was beautiful. Mameh, she was so beautiful. My God. And I sat here. Next to her. Next to my Mameh. Raisl. Look down. We used to look down. Here, on this chair. She sat here and I sat there. A light was hanging from here. A big light, a chandelier. Can you see what a Shul it was? She was here. Right here. I remember like yesterday. Here. Here.’

  For sure I will remember bits and pieces if we go back. For sure the church, the church I will remember. I used to play there, on the hills with a sleigh. And that’s where they gathered the Jews. The church I will most definitely remember.

  ‘Come. I want to see the church. It’s down here. Look at it. Should be a valley. A hill coming down the side and a valley. You can see the church from here. It wasn’t like that. Look, the windows are broken. No, it was the most important building in Bołszowce. Walk around. It’s not here. You can see it’s on a hill, but not here. Careful of the rocks. Not a pond. There wasn’t a pond. But look, there’s a hill. Just there, on the side. That’s where my nanny took me down on the sleigh. It was snow. I was, how old was I? Six? Seven? Up and down. Up and down. Down here. This is where they took us. We were all here. The whole town. All the Jews. In this valley. Me, my brother, my mother, everyone. And they told me to run. They told me to run to the Judenrat where my father was hiding. I ran down here. I remember it was the Judenrat office. Must be through here. There. There I remember was a fence, and next to the fence a toilet. Can you see? A fence. Look, it was here. A fence and in there is a toilet. My God, how old was I? Only eight. No more. Can you imagine? Alone. Frightened. More than frightened. Here I pished myself. I was so scared. But my mother said, “Run to the Judenrat.” I ran, I ran. Here, to this spot. This toilet here saved my life. You will never understand. You will never understand what it means to be a young child, a poor little girl, standing here on her own. The shooting. What I saw. You will never understand. I don’t know if I understand. How? How can anyone? My God, what I remember now. What I can hear. Feel. Alone. Crying. “Run,” she said. “Run.” From there. Where the church is. From the valley. “Run.” Can you see it’s still there? “Run.” ’

  IX

  ‘As fast as you can.’

  My parents are jumping on their feet, flapping green streamers, the colour of my school team. I hear their voices, rising above the shouts of other parents: ‘Run, Marky, run.’

  My feet won’t carry me any faster. I try not to let the competitors in front distract me. I cast a glance behind my shoulders. I am relieved; there are two other boys trailing me.

  They hug me anyway. ‘So proud,’ they say.

  I have a photograph of my father taken in Switzerland after the war. He is sitting in a field, gripping a soccer ball between his hands, the Swiss alps capped in snow behind him. He looks like a mountain-climber, not an Auschwitz survivor. ‘That’s Zeyde?’ my children ask about the youthful likeness of their grandfather. So I ask him: ‘Did you play, or just pose with the ball?’

  ‘Played,’ he says. In a youth-camp for Jewish orphans, established to train emigrants for the gruelling life of an Israeli pioneer.

  I also have a photograph of him sitting on the moon. It was taken at Luna Park, and my brother and I are seated on his knees, the stars hanging above our heads.

  ‘You went to the moon with Zeyde?’ my tiny daughter asks.

  I’ve not been to the moon, but I feel like saying sorry to my daughter.

  I also want to say sorry to my parents.

  I went to a fancy-dress party as Hitler. It was in my teens, the long hair, sloppy sweat-shirt stage. I hired a Nazi uniform, slicked my hair to one side, painted a thin moustache. In front of the mirror I practised the salute: ‘Sieg heil, Sieg heil.’

  When my parents returned home, I heard the key turning, then my father’s familiar cry: ‘Anyvun home?’ I meant to warn them, but didn’t. I emerged from the bathroom goosestepping, my arms raised to the ceiling, shouting my rehearsed salute: ‘Sieg heil, Sieg heil.’

  My father turned and ran; my mother looked right through me.

  ‘How did you survive?’ I once asked my parents.

  ‘Mazal,’ my father says, ‘luck.’

  My mother says: ‘Courage.’

  ‘It was luck,’ he insists, ‘was I smarter than my father or friends?’

  ‘No one was lucky, some of us were alert.’

  My mother is still alert, even when she lies in weakness on her bed: ‘I feel anger inside me,’ she accuses her children. Or, needling me for information: ‘Something is bothering you.’

  Sometimes my mother pries too deeply.

  ‘What do you mean you resent my illness?’

  She is quoting my words. ‘Here, it’s in your diary. You shouldn’t leave it lying on your desk.’

  I discarded my diary, threw away the key. But she still knows what I am thinking.

  ‘A mother always knows,’ she says.

  She is a born survivor.

  My father is not. ‘A moss,’ he screams when a moth invades his bedroom. My mother takes a tea towel and flicks it from the wall. He hides in the bathroom. Sometimes she will grab the moth by its wings, and follow my father into his hiding place. ‘A moss, a moss,’ she laughs.

  And I know about the fleas which infested his barracks. Talking about it still sends a shiver down his spine. ‘Phooy,’ he will say, ‘everywhere they were, on our heads, our arms, our legs, even our toches.’ Bums, he means.

  The point is he survived it, fleas and all.

  ‘That was nusink,’ he says, ‘compared to the food or the freezing cold.’

  Today he despises the cold, even fears it. ‘Don’chu dare go out,’ he warns us when it rains. We resist his warnings, laughing them off until a solitary sneeze vindicates him. ‘See, if you’d listen to me you wouldn’t ketch cold.’

  He is not a born survivor. Maybe he is right; all it takes is luck.

  ‘Your father is much cleverer than you think,’ my mother tells me. ‘Cunning,’ she says. ‘Strong and obstinate.’

  I recognise some of these qualities from his stories.

  ‘You had to be tough,’ he admits when I press him, ‘or else you’d be dead in a second.’

  Now he has abandoned his toughness; all that remains from his past is his luck.

  As for me, who knows? I hate fleas, although I don’t mind moths. I shun physical labour, but I can usually talk myself out of a crisis. I am stubborn like my father, weak like my mother, and strong like her too.

  I got my first shiner from a boy half my size. We were skating on an ice rink and I glided over his hand. ‘Jew!’ he called me, then thrust his fist into my eye.

  Me? I just cried, ran home, and nursed my eye with an ice-pack.

  And I hate running.

  X
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  From the Geographical Dictionary of the Polish Kingdom and Other Slavonic Countries, 1880:

  BOŁSZOWCE: Bułszowce, originally Bohuszowce, a small town in the Rohatyn district, situated on the Dniester plains; 1 mile from Halicz and the River Dniester; 15 miles from Lwów to South East. This small town is spread over the marsh plain along the river Zgniła Lipa which, in its turn, falls into the Dniester, and along the streamlet of Narajówka. The locality, together with adjacent villages, is in the possession of Kornel Krzeczunowicz, member of the Galician Parliament and …

  That’s him.

  Kornel Krzeczunowicz.

  He sold us the fields. To my father. Nobility, he was. Now I remember.

  Count Cho-Choo.

  XI

  We commence our search amongst the fallen stones remaining in Wierzbnik’s Jewish cemetery, located in an abandoned field on the edge of the town. The graves look like broken tree-stumps, grown mouldy from neglect and decay, many of them uprooted from the soil beneath which lies a world of dry bones.

  ‘The only sign of Jewish life left in my home,’ my father comments despondently.

  The stones protrude from overgrown grass, leaning against each other like a family cowering before an ominous threat. Some of the stones lie flat on the earth, as if they themselves were the human figures commemorated by the names etched into their surface. My father walks amongst his departed friends, seeking signs of intimacy with fragmented moments from his childhood. He bends down to read the inscriptions, as if he were accepting an invitation for coffee, or pausing to play a round of cards.

  We had lots of fun in those days. I had friends, and we used to play cards together. I was only about nine, ten years old. Different games we played, outside the house in the backyard on a wooden box, sort of like Twenty-One today. But we would hide because our fathers didn’t want us to play. We were meant to be learning with a rabbi after school; and we were too young to gamble anyway. Sometimes we played buttons, like marbles. I would pull the buttons off people’s coats hanging in Shul on Friday nights. And then we would go and play, instead of praying. Really, I had a fun childhood.

  Except he isn’t smiling, but wiping away the only tear I witnessed during his return home that day. A sign hangs from a rusted pole, urging visitors not to desecrate the ruined remnants. My brother and I, meanwhile, are calling out names to each other, as if summoning the bones to rise from the grave. We divide the terrain, and meet midway in this field of memories. There is no one there from our family.

  It is an empty and chaotic landscape of death, so different from the Jewish cemetery in Melbourne where each gravestone is assigned a number and row. My father even knows the position of his own plot, an area of real estate purchased in advance so that our family will always stay together. Not that death does not frighten him, but he disguises his fear by treating the tombstones as surrogates for his dead friends. He walks through the cemetery in Melbourne as if he were strolling through the heart of a Jewish street in Caulfield. ‘Poor Shloymele,’ he will say, or, ‘Look at Berel.’ It does not seem to matter that his interlocutors are buried beneath the ground, their bodies already decomposed. He continues his conversation as he walks from one end of the cemetery to the other, naming the graves he recognises and reviving the memory of friendships he has never surrendered.

  An elderly Polish man whose wooden house stands adjacent to the Wierzbnik cemetery has followed us. He points in the direction of an iron gate, one side of which is still attached to the remains of a brick wall. ‘The entrance to the Jewish cemetery,’ he tells us in Polish, before launching into a whirlwind of stories about the history of death in this region. When Pan so-and-so, the wealthiest Jew in all of Wierzbnik died, he informs us, the rabbis refused to bury him because in life he had separated himself from the community, even refusing to pay membership dues to the Jewish burial society. In desperation, his family paid a princely sum of money to erect a brick wall around the perimeter of the cemetery, after which he received the grandest burial of all.

  The two locks purchased in 1930 to seal the gates of the Wierzbnik Jewish cemetery no longer hang from the ramshackle fence.

  The air is still; I listen for voices from my father’s childhood.

  Dad, can you hear?

  Rest your head against the tombstones and listen:

  Buba Laya serving ice cream to your friends on the corner of the rynek on their way up the hilly path to school? Your uncles; Rachmil bartering stockings from his market-stall on a Friday morning, not far from David’s tea-house and Gimpel’s bakery? Do you remember the local cinema, the first one in Wierzbnik which was closed down because it screened films without legal permission? Or did you prefer the Yiddish theatre, its repertoire expanded by touring actors from Vilna? Perhaps these cultural events were not nearly as exciting for you as the gymnastic activities organised by the Maccabi Jewish Sports Society. Did your father raise you on his shoulders so you could witness your soccer team vanquishing Stern of Ostrowiec, feeding you peanuts just like those Sunday afternoons we shared watching Hakoah play at Albert Park in Melbourne?

  Can you hear, or do the screams from the mass grave drown out the sounds and melodies of Wierzbnik in its innocence? It was 27 March 1942 when a Jewish squad was appointed to bring the murdered bodies to this cemetery:

  ‘Will this be my last privilege?’ asks a member of the squad. ‘By what merit have I been chosen to serve in the holy task of burying our martyrs?’

  Forty-eight bodies are counted—twenty-six men and twenty-two women, each of whom is placed into one of the two graves prepared for their bloodied corpses. Dad, can you see your friends? Three of the men are covered in ritual prayer shawls; another young child is dragged from under his bed, placed in a tip-cart and cast into the common pit.

  The old man reaches out for us, as if to lament our loss. He releases us from his warm grip and waves his open hands before our eyes, laughingly explaining:

  ‘Last year a Żyd came; he left me five dollars.’

  We oblige him with more than that amount, as my father repeats a mournful prayer for his shtetl before returning to the car.

  ‘The only sign of life; and we have to pay to see it,’ he laments.

  As we meander back to the centre of my father’s town, the rattling of discordant prayers can be heard reaching out from the muddied earth toward the cloud-covered skies.

  ‘Yisgadal ve yiskadash shmei rabba.’

  ‘May His name be exalted and sanctified.’

  XII

  Our sages taught:

  Four rabbis entered a field, past a gate guarded by an angel brandishing a sword made of fire.

  One looked and was struck down amongst the flowers.

  The second lost his mind while gazing at the fruits.

  The third pulled out all the trees by the root.

  Only Rabbi Akiva, the learned one, entered in peace and only he exited in peace.

  To what can this field be compared?

  To the Garden whose fruits reveal the secrets of the world.

  My parents taught:

  Rabbi Akiva entered the field,

  through the gate,

  past the fiery sword.

  He does not exit.

  XIII

  Where were you when the war broke out?

  They do not remember, so I remind them.

  ‘You were sick,’ I tell my father.

  ‘Sick?’ he says.

  That’s exactly what the teacher wrote in his school report for the third term of 1939: ‘Nie chodził do szkoły z powodu choroby.’ ‘Did not attend school due to illness’ printed, in neat handwriting, alongside a column which indicates that he had already missed ninety-six days of school that year.

  ‘Well?’ I urge my father, who appears embarrassed by his fourth-grade secrets.

  ‘If it says I was sick, then I must have been sick. What more should I remember? Do you remember what month or year you had the flu or a cold or the measles?’

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sp; There was more to this episode than he is prepared to admit and I—his son turned informer—confront him. I thrust his report card under his eyes and command him to read. He obeys, like an intimidated schoolchild.

  ‘BEHAVIOUR: bardzo dobry. That means very good.’ He smothers an involuntary laugh, hiding the thoughts that lie behind it.

  ‘RELIGION: dostateczny. Satisfactory.’

  ‘How can you be satisfactory in religion?’ he protests. ‘Anyway, most of us in the class were Jews—Żydzi, the Poles called us.’

  I ask why he insists on granting Catholics the exclusive right to call themselves Poles. He reads my thoughts.

  ‘We were not Poles! Do you think they cried when the Jews were taken away from Wierzbnik? Don’t you know about Kielce?’

  I did know about Kielce; I had heard the stories of betrayal from my father and his friends. It was 4 July 1946 and forty-two Jews who had returned to their home town were brutally murdered by roving pogromists, prompting the panicked flight from Poland of 90,000 remnant Jews. So they carried their bitter memories with them to other parts of the world, conflating Nazis, Poles and Ukrainians into the single monstrous enemy.

  My father had learned his first lesson in the school playground: The Polish children used to call us ‘Żydzi, Żydzi,’ and we would fight a lot of times. Once somebody threw a stone at me. I had a black eye so I didn’t go to school for a few weeks. Most of the time the Jews played by themselves, soccer, and other games, one with a piece of wood and a ball, like cricket. We used to fight and box with the Poles; we were little children, not so strong, but we fought back. Even children understand.

  What do they understand? That in the streets of Wierzbnik some of his schoolmates’ parents had joined the local branch of the National Party which sought to limit the alleged ‘flood of Jews’ into Poland. ‘The National Party in Wierzbnik has become more active,’ noted a government official in 1938. ‘It holds meetings, gives out anti-Jewish leaflets, and suggests a conspiratorial union between the Polish Socialist Party and the Jews.’ Most damaging of all was the Party’s agitation for a boycott of Jewish shops, spearheaded by a local parish priest who hoped to squeeze Jews out of Poland altogether.