Driving to Treblinka Read online

  Winner of

  ROYAL SOCIETY TE APĀRANGI AWARD

  FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION,

  OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS, 2018

  Winner of

  E.H. MCCORMICK BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD

  FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION

  Praise for DRIVING TO TREBLINKA

  ‘I began to read this book and found the first page so sad I had to put it away until I felt strong enough to face what I was certain—especially given the title—would be a tale of unremitting suffering and sorrow ... Suffering and sorrow there are in abundance in these pages, but the book is not “just” another Holocaust memoir. That said, it may well become—should it find the international readership it deserves—a classic among those books which touch on that atrocity.... That first page demonstrates the brilliance brought to bear throughout.... Driving to Treblinka, which deals with some of the great themes of 20th-century history, and of one family’s history, manages to be both monumental and intimate, and is a remarkable achievement’

  — PAUL LITTLE, North & South

  ‘Wichtel’s prose is exquisite; her wit elegant. She imprints the scale of her longing into the marrow of your bones and I couldn’t help but wish to remind her of Siward’s epitaph of loss and memory from Macbeth: “Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.” Some of that worth has already been measured by the tears spilled in unearthing this story, and will be measured again by the tears of the book’s readers. Such is the earnestness, the vivacity, and ultimately, the profoundness of its conclusions’

  —JAMES ROBINS, Weekend Herald

  ‘A searing investigation into family secrets and historic horrors. Several chapters are genuinely distressing to read: not just the descriptions of Holocaust atrocities but also the intimate accounts of how those traumas resonated through the lives of survivors like Ben Wichtel, and then into subsequent generations.... Yet there’s plenty to enjoy. Descriptions of Wichtel’s childhood are frequently hilarious ... Wichtel has told the Hitler story again, beautifully, and it is very ugly’

  —ADAM DUDDING, The Sunday Star-Times

  ‘A stunning memoir ... Wichtel weaves a.... complex, braided narrative that moves forward and backward in time and place ... the book has a gripping detective thread, though what interested me equally, if not more, was the emotional suspense that builds as she confronts family skeletons’

  —MARION MCLEOD, Metro

  ‘This is a story that reminds readers of the atrocities that ordinary people did to each other, the effect on those who survived, and the reverberations felt through following generations. It breaks your heart, but the side effect of reading this remarkably compassionate approach to an extremely painful history is that it also encourages you to open your own heart, or at least think about doing so. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” said Franz Kafka. This book is that’

  —MARGO WHITE, The Spinoff

  ‘Diana Wichtel isn’t one to weigh the story down with a lot of unnecessary sentiment. She doesn’t need to. Rather than focus on the gloom of her family’s history, Driving to Treblinka is a brave tribute to the man whose descendants are here because of his actions. It is a story that had me in pieces’

  —DIANE MCCARTHY, Eastern Bay Life

  ‘I admired the fact Wichtel was willing to share intimate personal details ... This is not a book you “enjoy” in the usual sense of that word [but] a salutary reminder of the immense and lasting impact of Nazism. We tend to think mainly of the millions of Jews and others who died in the Holocaust but many of those who survived were, like Ben Wichtel, scarred for life’

  —JUDITH MORRELL NATHAN, Scoop Review of Books

  ‘The toughest task of any book, whatever the form, is to make a sentence so good that you just have to read the next one, and the next one, and then wish it could just about go on forever. So it is with Driving to Treblinka. Wichtel’s curiosity, alternately upsetting and uplifting, turns invisibly into a kind of mission. At its heart this is a family story, but one which cannot but shine a light on the vestiges of anti-Semitism that linger in Europe today. It is not just a beautifully written book, but an important book, too’

  —JUDGES, Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

  First edition published in 2017 by Awa Press,

  Unit 1, Level 3, 11 Vivian Street, Wellington 6011, New Zealand.

  Reprinted 2017 (twice), 2018 (twice)

  ISBN 978-1-927249-40-6

  Ebook formats

  Epub 978-1-927249-47-5

  Mobi 978-1-927249-48-2

  Copyright © Diana Wichtel 2017

  The right of Diana Wichtel to be identified as the author of this work in terms of Section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  Cover photograph courtesy of Wichtel Family Collection

  Author photograph courtesy of New Zealand Listener

  Cover design by Keely O’Shannessy

  Typesetting by Tina Delceg

  Editing by Mary Varnham and Jane Parkin

  Map on page 154 by Geographx

  Ebook conversion 2018 by meBooks

  Produced with the assistance of

  Awa Press is an independent, wholly New Zealand-owned company. Find more of our award-winning and notable books at awapress.com.

  Diana Wichtel is an award-winning journalist, and a feature writer and television critic at leading current affairs magazine the New Zealand Listener. After gaining a Master of Arts at the University of Auckland, she tutored English before launching into a career in journalism. She lives in Auckland and was awarded a 2016 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship.

  For Dad

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART I

  1 Daddy Mad Face, Daddy Angel Face

  2 Making it up

  3 In the basement

  4 The bar mitzvah

  5 It’s snowing in Vancouver

  PART II

  6 On the beach

  7 The Girl From Ipanema

  8 A call in the night

  9 A brief history of shouting at the newspaper

  10 Visitors from New York

  11 “Er iz a krank mentsch”

  PART III

  12 Driving to Treblinka

  13 Stolpersteine and stelae

  14 Uncle Paul

  15 On the rocks

  16 The Psych

  17 Comparing notes

  18 Rooted in this soil

  19 Żelechów

  PART IV

  20 A mitzvah

  Acknowledgements

  Illustration credits

  Index

  Author’s note

  THIS BOOK IS MY PERSONAL ACCOUNT of my father’s story. I’ve tried not to speak for other family members except where they have generously and bravely shared memories, photographs and insights.

  For the family members who were murdered in the Holocaust, there are often various versions—Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish—of names. I have mostly used those carried out of Poland in the memory of my great-uncle, Paul Jonisz, and passed on to me by my cousin, Joe Lubell. The birth years, where we have them, are from Paul too, backed up by the few documents that have been found. Many names, most on the Wichtel side
, are still missing.

  The family tree opposite is meant as a guide only to the relationships mentioned in the book, and as an indication that out of such tragedy some lines carry on. As with so many families with our sort of history, it’s a work in progress.

  Prologue

  1450 GRAMS. I know the weight of my father’s brain. 51 ounces, normal for a male.

  360 grams. Average size and shape. Ventricles: normal, contracted. Mild to moderate narrowing of the coronary vessels: I know the pathology of a broken heart.

  Weight: 165 pounds. Height: 65 inches. 165.1 centimetres. Was he really only 5’5”, or had he grown smaller and smaller on his way to disappearing entirely?

  Under a heading “External Marks of Violence” is listed ecchymosis on his face. Ecchymosis: a discoloration of the skin resulting from bleeding underneath, typically caused by bruising. Perhaps he had fallen, or maybe, not for the first time, someone had punched him in the face.

  The diagnosis of his madness is psychosis caused by arterial sclerosis.

  He has gallstones. He has emphysema. Cause of death:

  1 Acute bronchopneumonia

  2 Ecchymoses of right face and eye.

  AFTER OUR MOTHER’S BIG CATHOLIC FAMILY spirited her home to New Zealand from Canada with her three children, transported like a clutch of junior convicts, my father wrote increasingly strange letters from Vancouver and from an address in Montreal. Then our mother heard nothing more. That’s what we children were told.

  Many years later I begin to send letters, emails and begging requests to Canada. Nothing. My brother, living on Prince Edward Island, tries too. All we get are dreary bureaucratic fugues on the same theme: We regret to inform you there is no sign your father ever existed.

  I give up, shut the door on the black hole of my family’s crazy past into which everything vanishes. I catch myself doubting that the life we lived together in Canada ever really happened. Memory can be a trap. Life wants to go on.

  But it is always there, this loss, this mystery that shattered the remains of the Jewish branch of our family, and sometimes still threatens to split asunder what is left of us. For years fragments of a once large Warsaw family have floated free, untethered from each other and our history. The threads that hold us have tugged occasionally. Cousins have made contact, or we have, comparing notes, putting together what we can of a puzzle composed mostly of missing pieces.

  One day I talk to my daughter and my niece about the frustration of this search that always leads nowhere. How can you not know where your father is buried? It’s absurd, they say. Unacceptable. I’ve become so habituated to this narrative of gaps and absences that it has almost become normal. “Mum, it’s not normal.”

  Early in 2015 I interview Daniel Mendelsohn, the American classicist, critic, and author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, about his family’s Holocaust past. I take the opportunity to get some advice about my own search. “You just have to open the door,” he says. “Insert yourself into the stream of history and you’ll be amazed what happens. Open the door to the past for good, knowing there’s no closing it again.”

  My brother-in-law, a lawyer, possibly sick of all the kvetching about fruitless quests, does some research on the quiet and offers a lead. Without much hope I email off my father’s details, my birth certificate, and the fee of five dollars Canadian. I realise how many chances I have missed to find out what happened. You miss what you need to miss. For all the obsessing, there had always been a battle between knowing and the thing that might in the end be more bearable: not knowing. You hold on to the narrative you have: my father was meant to come and join us in New Zealand and he didn’t. He wrote for a while and then he didn’t. Nothing could have been done. End of story. Each time you send off for information about our sort of family you light a fuse and stand clear.

  The more I find out the more it dawns on me that all this information, so resistant to being assimilated, will have to be shared with my family. No more secrets and silences. My grandchildren, so safe and trusting in their sunny Kiwi life, will one day know what can happen to a human soul. They may ask how this could have been allowed to happen. How did we let it happen? I think: what have I done?

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Daddy Mad Face, Daddy Angel Face

  He came to Canada in 1947 ... Port of Entry—Montreal. He made his home in Vancouver where he operated a clothing store.

  Clinical record, Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, 1967

  "WHO IS THAT?" I ASK.

  We’re in my parents’ room, my mother and I. I’m five or six and studying the photo that sits on my father’s bedside table.

  "That’s your grandmother, Daddy’s mother. Her name was Rozalia," my mother says.

  "Is she dead?"

  "Yes, she died in the war."

  "What happened to her?"

  "She was killed by the Nazis."

  In my memory that’s the end of the conversation and I run off to play.

  THE HOUSE SEEMED TO DOZE when my father wasn’t there. When he came home, it woke up and stood to attention. When I was little I had names for things. There were grey days and good days. There was Daddy Mad Face and Daddy Angel Face. Daddy Angel Face was the one who pulled up in the Studebaker while we were playing in the street late on an endless Vancouver summer’s evening, and who enhanced our standing with the neighbourhood kids by producing nickels and dimes from their ears. "Show me a Jew that survives," says a character in Nicole Krauss’s novel A History of Love, "and I’ll show you a magician."

  He came bearing chocolate turtles and a whiff of danger. "Punch me in the stomach, hard as you can," he would insist, and laugh as my small fist bounced off muscles trained to withstand blows. He could make a sewing pin sink into his arm by flexing his bicep. "Ben," my mother would wail, "you’ll get blood poisoning!" He liked to add a lot of salt to everything, which my mother said would thin his blood. My mother seemed to worry about his blood.

  He could make a hole in the end of an egg and suck out the raw contents, which came in handy at Easter. One night when I was four he came home and picked me up and hugged me tight. More often he would scoop me up, set me high on top of the Frigidaire, and wait for me to launch myself into the air, trusting he would always be there to catch me.

  He loved to bring home toys and newfangled gadgets: a little bird filled with brightly coloured chemicals that made it perpetually dip its beak to drink; a magic mixer that whipped up a milkshake so frothy it erupted from my mouth and shot across the kitchen when a man came to demonstrate how to use it. We didn’t buy one.

  We were good at holidays, although not the Jewish ones—except for Passover, when my mother would get out the old mincer that clipped to the edge of the Formica table in our pink and grey kitchen and make gefilte fish, each little ball garnished with a round of carrot. We celebrated Christmas without the Christianity Thanksgiving without the patriotism.

  In those early days there were guests—a stray New Zealander passing through; a new immigrant from the tenement above the store; my father’s European friends. There was a feast: turkey; mashed potatoes and candied yams in Mum’s best silver chafing dishes warmed by the little candles underneath, all on the white embossed tablecloth I still have. We had a Sputnik ornament on our Christmas tree. "When you grow up, for your holidays you will fly to the moon," my father declared. He promised us the universe. He was in love with the future, then.

  At Halloween Mum would carve the pumpkin. With a candle illuminating its wonky jack-o’-lantern leer, it gave off a sickly, slightly sinister smell. One year Dad brought home from his store a tiny man’s suit for my older sister Ros, and a prank cigarette that emitted real smoke. I wore a green dress, discreetly padded, and Mum’s fox fur. Mum dotted rouge on my cheeks with lipstick and gave me a beauty spot with an eyebrow pencil: we were going for Mae West. Our haul of candy that year was impressive.

  My father would buy a pile of lethal fireworks for after the tr
ickor-treating. He loved setting them off, the bigger the bang the better. The finale was the traditional symbolic act of arson, the Burning Schoolhouse. If I was lucky he let me light it. I didn’t like school.

  My father worked six days a week: left early, came home late. Sometimes we would go on the bus and visit him at his store, English Textiles. In the front of the shop, all along one wall, were samples of cloth. There was a baroque silver cash register we were allowed to play with—there weren’t that many customers—and a changing room. Out back was a workroom with sewing machines and, sometimes, an employee working one. Next door there was a store where you could sit up on chairs that were like red velvet thrones and get a shoeshine. My father would measure up and fit customers, deftly marking with a slab of chalk the material, pinstriped or tweed, already tacked into shape with long even stitches. When he shut the store we would go to his friend’s restaurant for clam chowder and then drive home through a city glittering in the dark.

  Patricia and Ben Wichtel with Rosalind, two, and Diana, Christmas 1951.

  There was always music. My father liked to play his balalaika, which was really just a normal guitar; maybe he had had a balalaika back in Poland. I was impressed by him: his ease with seven languages, his ability to play any musical instrument he picked up. He had a zither and a banjo mandolin. Once he brought home a huge enamelled piano accordion like the ones that wheezed out polkas on The Lawrence Welk Show. And always there was the piano. My sister and I were sent to a music teacher up the road, a woman of a certain age whose cleavage loomed over us as she taught. I hated to practise and got to grade three only because, like my father, I was good at learning by ear.

  My father playing the piano in his pyjamas on Sunday morning: it was his only day off. There would be singalongs, until we were old enough to rebel. Dad’s self-taught style involved sensational swoops up and down the keyboard in the manner of Liberace. Liberace was schmaltzy, my father said, but he liked his show, and Perry Como. His tastes were catholic for a Polish Jew: "Cruising Down The River", "You Are My Sunshine", "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling". He sang "Beautiful Brown Eyes" to me but his clear favourite was "Oh My Papa, To Me You Are So Wonderful", delivered by his daughters with what was probably a disappointing lack of enthusiasm.