Driving to Treblinka Read online

  There was always "Du, Du Liegst Mir Im Herzen". My mother couldn’t understand why he would teach us a German folk song.

  "What does it mean?" I asked him.

  ‘You, you are in my heart," he said. "You, you are in my mind."

  There were trips to the delicatessen to get lox, matzo and rye bread for Sunday lunch. Afterwards there might be a drive to Stanley Park to feed the squirrels and visit an ancient bad-tempered emu. My father and this bird had a straightforward relationship: he would try to feed it peanuts; it would try to take his hand off. If he was in a particularly good mood he would declare, "The sky is the limit!"—a phrase full of promise of a full-scale blowout on hot dogs, pony rides, plastic windmills and balloons.

  My father had brown eyes, a mole on his nose just like mine, and what were considered in our neighbourhood strange continental ways. He would carry a picnic basket on his head, one hand steadying it and the other on his swaying hip, while we screeched with hilarity, and mortification. On one outing he opened a bottle of Coke left too long in our hot Studebaker. It sprayed him full in the face. That was a great day.

  My father in the garden: if he was doing chores we were doing chores. In shorts and singlet, he would fire up the lawnmower with its delicious heady smell of petrol. Although he was living a sedentary life by then, he still had the build of a weightlifter.

  It was my job to weed the rockery. I hated that rockery. If I was lucky he would let me take a little rod filled with goodness knows what toxic substance and poke the sharp end into the weeds. Garter snakes abandoned their papery skins on the crisply cut lawn, and moles made holes that had to be filled. The Millers next door had a pond with dragonflies and frogs. One winter when the pond froze we tried to skate on it.

  He could be funny and playful. For Christmas one year his brother in New York, our Uncle Sy and his wife Mollie sent my sister and me identical Tiny Tears dolls that cried real tears when you squeezed their tummies after a bottle. My father dandled both babies on his knees, singing a jaunty made-up song: "What a life wiz two granddaughters." There had, he said, been twins in his family.

  He had a certain old-world charisma. He would let me do his hair as we sat on the couch watching television or listening to the gramophone. He was my first love. Once, when I was very small, I tried to plant a romantic kiss on his lips—I watched far too many old movies in our darkened basement. He pushed me away, laughing, embarrassed.

  He was fastidious: one of the few largely useless practical life skills he passed on was how to cup a toothpick discreetly in your hand at a restaurant. He was always perfectly groomed in a continental fashion: black hair slicked back, white shirts with arm garters to hold his sleeves out of the way when measuring a customer for a suit. Sometimes he would wear a maroon paisley cravat that seemed dashing and then, as I got older, odd and old-fashioned.

  We had friends in those days. There was another Mollie, a New Zealand friend of my mother’s, her husband Dave, and their daughters Sandra and Debbie. My father called Mollie "a glamour puss" in a not entirely approving way. I was fascinated by her platinum hair and leathery skin—she liked to be tanned. I always knew when the New Zealand Mollie was on the phone by the way my mother said little for an hour but "Mmm ... Mmm ... Mmmmm."

  We had no real family in Vancouver. Mollie and Dave were the closest thing, apart from my father’s best friends, who we called Auntie Rose and Uncle Harry. I was a little scared of Rose, who was given to blunt assessments of our weight, dress and manners. At her house the cooking was kosher but she didn’t mind eating my mother’s Kiwified dishes. Uncle Harry was a lawyer, sweet, legally blind, and always a welcome visitor for his Yiddish-inflected "Donald, Where’s Your Troosers?" Once I turned to Auntie Rose at dinner and pronounced, "Daddy says you talk too much." Dad tried to laugh it off. My mother suddenly had the brisket to attend to in the kitchen.

  There were pinochle games with Rose’s father, Mr Tass, and Harry’s brother, Dr Greenberg, our family doctor. Mr Tass was Russian, enigmatic and ancient. Now that it’s possible to stalk people online I know he died in 1961 at the age of seventy-two. Dr Greenberg would bring disappointingly healthy treats of liquorice and crystallised ginger. No one ever mentioned the war.

  I WOULD GO A LONG WAY to avoid an encounter with Daddy Mad Face. The rage was sudden, out of nowhere: shouting, a fist thumping the table, dishes jumping and no reasoning with him. Once he blamed me and my sister when our brother Jeffrey, then a toddler, knocked himself senseless falling down the back steps of our house.

  "But Dad, we were at school," I said.

  "It doesn’t matter. Stay home from school. Your job is to look after your brother."

  I realise now he was terrified something would happen to us.

  Our mother never took our side. I remember her standing up to Dad only once. Uncle Leo was Dutch and also not our real uncle. He and his second wife Joanne had a beautiful baby boy who was named Benjamin after my father. When Benjamin was eighteen months old he drowned in a neighbour’s pond. The day we were told was the greyest I could remember. Uncle Leo and Auntie Joanne came to our house. As they talked my father said, "If only you had been watching him." I was just six or seven but I knew this was the wrong thing to say. "Ben!" my mother said. "What use is ‘if only’?"

  My father could change the weather in the house with a word, a look, but he never raised a hand to us; from Mum you’d get a smack in passing if you didn’t move fast enough. Once when I was naughty Mum told him to spank me. He couldn’t bring himself to do it and we ended up laughing.

  In the early years, if we felt like living dangerously, we would court his displeasure by making fun of his accent.

  "What’s going on in dat house?" he would demand when we played up.

  "Which house, Dad?"

  "Sit behind the table!" he would order.

  "Behind the table, Dad?"

  I tried to teach him how to say his words properly. "Not ‘tousand’, Dad. Th... th... th... thousand." It didn’t help that we both had a lisp.

  Ben Wichtel with Diana Wichtel (right) and a friend, Kerrisdale, Vancouver, 1958.

  In our house, where there were three different accents, language could be slippery. "Mum says she’s going to knock our back teeth out," I reported to my father after some transgression. It’s the only time I can remember calling on him to defend me from my mother.

  "Did you say that to the children?" Dad asked her. Mum indignantly pointed out I’d mixed up two of her maternal storm warnings: "I’m fed up to the back teeth with the both of you" and "I’ll knock your blocks off." Dad shrugged. Her New Zealand expressions mystified him.

  There was no question of defying my father but it was easy enough to enrage him without meaning to. Once at the lunch table there was a slice left of my mother’s meatloaf As I reached for it my mother said to leave it for Dad. "You’re not going to waste it on him, are you?" I wisecracked recklessly. My father exploded, angrier than I’d ever seen him. "How dare you! Get down from the table!" I was banished to the den. I know now he’d heard that sort of thing before—in the other world we didn’t speak of. Shop, job, house, food, water, air: don’t waste it on a Jew.

  I don’t know when I first learned that monsters didn’t just live in the basement. Apparently they were everywhere and could devour your whole family. There was that photograph beside my father’s bed of my Polish grandmother, who had brown eyes and a stubborn curl like mine on her forehead. I don’t remember when Dad first told me he had escaped from a train to a death camp, leaving behind his mother, his brothers and sisters Cheniek, Fela, Maurice, Tola, Szymon, and their wives, husbands and children. Maurice was handsome, my father said, and Fela was his favourite sister.

  My father and another man had jumped from the moving train. He rolled down a bank in the snow, he said, and lay there waiting to be shot. Somehow the guards didn’t shoot. The train moved on and he took off into the forest.

  One day he and a companion ran into two young German sold
iers in the forest. That should have been the end of them but they pretended to have guns. He demonstrated, putting his hand in his pocket and making a gun shape with his fingers. The German soldiers, just terrified boys, ended up making friends with them and bringing them food.

  Most of the time they ate what they could find or steal. They made holes in eggs and sucked out the contents. My sister, a horse lover, remembers my father saying he ate horse meat. They dug up potatoes and devoured them dirt and all.

  Rozalia Wikhtel (née Jonisz). Born in Warsaw in 1890, she married Jacob Joseph Wichtel and the couple had seven children, including Benjamin, born in 1910.

  My father had nightmares. My mother said he would run in his sleep. We knew he had spent a lot of time hiding in a box under the ground. No one told us about the gas chambers, the crematoria, the horrors, but Mum had set herself to read everything she could get her hands on. When I was about eight I made off with her copy of Exodus by Leon Uris and read it cover to cover. One of the characters, Dov Landau, is an orphan from the Warsaw Ghetto. He is sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and forced to join a Sonderkommando, a prisoner work unit made to dispose of bodies from the gas chamber. "He stood by until the shrieks of agony and the frantic pounding on the iron doors stopped," I read. "Dov had to go to work with ropes and hooks to untangle the hideous tangle of arms and legs..."

  Members of the Wichtel and Jonisz families, from a page in a photograph album. Clockwise from top left: Israel Herszenborn, who married Dora Jonisz after the war; Tola Wichtel; unknown family group, possibly including Brandla Jonisz; Maurice Wichtel; Dora Jonisz.

  I made up a game to play with my father. When he arrived home late on a cold dark night my sister and I would turn up the collar of his overcoat, muss up his hair, and make him go out the back door again. Cast as a poor homeless wanderer, he would knock at the door and we’d take him by the hand, pull him into the warmth of the kitchen, take his coat, and lead him to the dining-room table, which would be set with hors d’beuvres of mashed avocado and egg, anchovies, and his single shot of rye whiskey. It was a strangely satisfying ritual I wanted to repeat over and over again.

  When I played make-believe games I called myself Fela because she was my father’s favourite sister, but after I read about the ropes and hooks and tangled bodies I couldn’t be Fela anymore. I no longer tried to imagine what it might have been like for them, for my father, because I couldn’t. Think of a panic attack on a plane when you feel you’re about to die. Think of feeling that for years, every minute, day and night.

  IN HER GRAPHIC NOVEL I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors Bernice Eisenstein writes of a compulsion that came upon her when watching the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in her basement as a small child in 1961: "Suddenly I’m injected with the white heat rush of a new reality. The Holocaust is a drug and I have entered an opium den, having been given my first taste for free ... my parents don’t even realize that they are drug dealers."

  At eleven I also felt the white heat rush of my father’s reality as we watched the Eichmann trial. Eichmann, in a glass bulletproof box: I find myself fighting a sort of pity for this thin balding man, caged and on show, playing with his earphones. But he is the worst human being I have ever seen, a mass murderer. It’s here I first hear the word Holocaust. In my memory my mother thinks Eichmann should die. My father does not.

  I developed some compulsive rituals to stop the bad things from finding us. On the bus, if my right cheek touched the cold steel pole I had to press my left cheek to it as well or a nameless catastrophe might befall us. Cupboard doors needed to be shut or the clothes and shoes inside would be unhappy. Lollies needed to be consumed in even numbers. (If I’m honest, they still do.) My coat pockets were soggy with abandoned bus tickets I had rescued from winter puddles where they looked sad and cold.

  Dad didn’t bring home used bus tickets but puppies and kittens and people he rescued. Our spare bedroom was often populated with what my mother called Dad’s lame ducks. Peter Weiss, who worked for Boeing, was a regular. I never knew what he was doing there but he taught me to make an omelette and was kind to our cat Goldie. Maybe he was a sort of boarder. There was a glamorous woman called Donne from South America or somewhere, whose elderly mother stayed with us while she had all her teeth pulled out. I walked by the bathroom as she was spitting up gobs of blood, and for years couldn’t eat raspberry jelly. Once it was a new immigrant from Poland who was living in the tenement behind his store. Dad asked us to give the man’s little girl one of our dolls. I dressed up Rubber Dolly and guiltily handed it over, unable to bear having to choose from the dolls I loved.

  By then we had moved to 3389 West 43rd Avenue in the leafy suburb of Kerrisdale, where no one was like us. The house seemed grand, two storeys with mullioned windows upstairs and, in the spare bedroom cupboard, a secret door that led into an attic. There was a backyard with a walnut tree and a cherry tree. Auntie Rose and Uncle Harry came over for cherry-picking parties. The properties across the road ran down to a stream where we were allowed to play, or at least no one stopped us. West 43rd was the house where my father played the piano and we were happy. I still have dreams about houses and they are all enchanted versions of the one in Kerrisdale.

  My father, too, had his rituals. Every night he had his one rye whiskey in a small crystal glass, served from a decanter, and his hors d’oeuvres in crystal bowls. He liked things a certain way. He didn’t want to answer the phone or a knock at the door. One day we went to Cultus Lake, where our neighbours the Mitchells had a holiday cabin. It was a magic place where you could rent pedal boats, play at the game arcade, and swim. We stayed too long and Dad had to drive home in the dark on the unfamiliar roads. He became more and more frantic. It was our fault for making it happen.

  Perhaps he was having bad memories triggered by the trees and the unknown place, panic attacks relieved by shouting at us. Sometimes I asked questions that must have caused him pain.

  "How could you leave your mother on the train?"

  "They would shoot you."

  "Why did you just go? Why didn’t you fight?"

  "They would shoot you."

  "Why didn’t everyone run away?"

  "They would shoot you."

  "How can you be sure they are all really dead?"

  "I went back."

  For a while he banned us from having toy guns, until we nagged long enough to get Roy Rogers and Dale Evans six-shooters, with caps that gave off an intoxicating whiff of gunpowder. One day he picked up a toy rifle he had bought for my little brother and looked down the sights. "I saw them shoot the breasts off a woman," he remarked casually.

  Our wasteful ways enraged him. There was much sitting over congealing plates of porridge. I once carried a hard-boiled egg around in my kindergarten basket until it rotted, rather than admit I hadn’t eaten it.

  But he was a soft touch. Delegated one morning to take me to kindergarten, he couldn’t bring himself to leave me when I clung to him sobbing as the teacher tried to wrench me from his arms. Years later it occurred to me what memories such a scene might have conjured up. He took me home. I could tell my mother wasn’t pleased with either of us by the furious way she pulled on her stockings before marching me back again.

  He had all sorts of friends: Jewish, German, a Cuban communist called Vic with a beautiful pregnant black wife called Trinny. A neighbour asked Mum how she could let these sorts of people into our house. Mum once mentioned over coffee with some local women that we were going on holiday to Harrison Hot Springs in the Fraser Valley. "Why are you going there?" one said. "That’s where all the Jews go."

  I knew we were Jewish because Dad was Jewish. When the kids across the road taunted us with boasts that they were related to the royal family, Dad said, "You go and tell them you are related to Moses." We may have been related to Moses but we never went to synagogue, and when Uncle Harry offered to teach Ros and me Hebrew Dad said no. He brought in a young man to teach us French instead.

  Later I b
egged to go to Sunday School like everyone else in the neighbourhood. "My father is Jewish," I happily announced when we were learning by heart the names of the books of the Old Testament. "Maybe your dad could come and talk to the class about being Jewish," the teacher said. I ran home and asked him. "No," he said.

  I was so embarrassed by his refusal I never went back.

  WHAT DID I KNOW THEN about my father’s childhood? I absorbed fragments by the sort of osmosis that conveys information to children in families where there are silences. He was the youngest of seven children. The favourite, he liked to say. In Arabic, Benjamin is Ibn Amin, favoured son of the father; in Hebrew Binyamin, son of the right hand. In the Bible he is the youngest son of Rachel. His mother’s name was Rozalia, Rachel in Hebrew.

  He almost never spoke Polish, although I begged him to because it sounded funny and singsong and foreign. There was a rhyme that he sang when he bounced a rubber ball, something I could see he was very good at. The rhyme lodged indelibly in my mind so that decades later I would still remember enough to look it up on the internet:

  Kipi kasza, kipi groch,

  Lepsza kasza niz ten groch,

  Bo od grochu boli brzuch,

  A odkaszy cztowiek zdrów.

  It’s about boiling grits and boiling peas—peas give you a stomach ache so better stick to the grits, something like that. He never explained it. He seldom explained anything. "Don’t ask questions," my mother would say. She worried about upsetting him.

  There were tantalising glimpses of his pre-war world. "I would never dare to talk back to my father," he said pointedly. "I would never dare to sit in my father’s chair." But it seemed to give him some satisfaction that he’d raised daughters who were less afraid of him. "You are the master of excuses," he would say when I’d learnt to construct elaborate arguments to try to get out of a chore. "You will be a lawyer," he would say, hopefully. Sorry, Dad.