The Testimony Read online

  All royalties from the sale of this book go to the Just Society fund. Towards a Just Society was set up by Sid Splindler in 2002 to work towards the reduction of injustices affecting particular groups and individuals in Australian society. Priority is given to projects enabling Indigenous people to participate in education.

  Published in 2012 by Hardie Grant Books

  Hardie Grant Books (Australia)

  Ground Floor, Building 1

  658 Church Street

  Richmond, Victoria 3121

  www.hardiegrant.com.au

  Hardie Grant Books (UK)

  Dudley House, North Suite

  34–35 Southampton Street

  London WC2E 7HF

  www.hardiegrant.co.uk

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Copyright © Halina Wagowska 2011

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  Wagowska, Halina, 1930-

  Title: The Testimony / Halina Wagowska.

  eISBN: 978 1 7427 3807 9

  Subjects: Wagowska, Halina, 1930–

  Holocaust survivors – Biography.

  Immigrants – Australia – Biography.

  Jews – Victoria – Melbourne – Biography.

  940.53180922

  Cover design by Josh Durham/Design by Committee

  Cover photograph by Mark Jones

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Dedication

  The Parents

  My Room

  Stasia

  The Labour Camp—Litzmannstadt Ghetto

  Auschwitz-Birkenau—The Swamp

  Frieda

  Sasha

  Lodz

  The Boy from the Pigpen

  The Boat

  Melbourne

  Warramong

  Henty House, Little Collins Street

  The Alfred

  USSR, 1987

  Homeplus Living Inc.

  The Spindlers

  William Cooper

  Judith

  Black Saturday

  Speaking Out

  The Mind

  Postscript

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Friends nagged, urged and encouraged me to write about these experiences, then aided and abetted my doing so in many ways.

  To Julia, Sid and Lindy Spindler, Meg Paul, Renate Kamener, Anthony Smith and Maureen McPhate, my very sincere thanks. My deep gratitude to Nigel Sinnott and Adele Hulse for their invaluable help. This augmented edition was brought into being thanks to Sally Wallis, Denise Ryan and Rose Michael.

  PREFACE

  These stories are autobiographical but I am not their main subject. Some pay homage to remarkable people I have known and loved. Some describe unusual places and events, and are a testimony. Others are commonplace: I share with the reader some of my perceptions and reflections.

  The consequences of prejudice have extinguished or crippled many lives along my way, so prejudice features in some of these stories—I have borrowed paragraphs from my official testimonies to ease my constant struggle to find adequate words.

  Bridge-building across human divides is a recurring theme. I find such bridges triumphal.

  Lacking confidence in my ability to write a story well, I read two ‘how-to’ books and took their advice to imagine telling the story to a friend—hence my colloquial style.

  I used to feel frustration when my attempts at description were met with disbelief or incomprehension, but I have come to realise that I do not know what it is not to have been there. It is perhaps unrealistic to expect understanding from those who were not there.

  Halina Wagowska,

  Melbourne, 2011

  In memory of Jiři Strnad

  Experience is not what happens to you,

  it‘s what you do with what happens to you.

  Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, 1932

  THE PARENTS

  A family friend once told me that my parents were known as ‘the couple madly in love’. I was eight or nine then, and I thought people in every household were besotted with one another, like we were. The ‘getting of wisdom’ in subsequent decades led me to recognise that my parents were a remarkable couple in many ways.

  I don’t know many details of their early life, but I know that both were orphaned and impoverished during World War I. Mother was apprenticed to a dressmaker. Singing lessons, to develop her fine lyric soprano voice, were abandoned, even though they were later offered to her free of charge. Singing could not assure breadwinning. Father progressed from messenger boy in a large textile-retailing firm to bookkeeper’s assistant, and then to chief bookkeeper.

  They met, fell in love, married, and combined their skills to run a textile, clothing and couturier business. Mother’s flair for designing dresses and fur coats boosted the success of this venture. I think they started in some disused warehouse then moved to two-storey premises in the central part of the city of Poznan.

  Poznan, the capital of Poland a millennium ago, often came under German occupation in subsequent centuries. It was so before World War I, which is why both my parents were schooled in the German language as children. When ‘Poland’ re-emerged in 1918, Poznan was in the western part of a country of ever-changing frontiers.

  After I was born, in 1930, my parents moved from their bedsitter to a larger flat and Mother stayed at home. I remember the many sketches of garments she made while I played at home or in the park. During my afternoon sleep she tutored fashion-school students in our home. When I turned four a housekeeper, Stasia, joined our family. Mother returned to long days at work, and I had my parents all to myself most evenings and on Sundays.

  Both were tall, slim and, I thought, good-looking. Mother had bright-green eyes and thick, wavy brown hair. She smiled readily and made friends easily. Father’s eyes were brown, and his dark hair was receding above his high forehead. He was sombre and often lost in thought.

  They dressed with a simple elegance and wore subdued colours, unlike one pair of neighbours who wore a riot of colours and were dubbed ‘the rainbows’.

  Father wore a buttoned waistcoat. When I was little I demanded, and was given, the task of unbuttoning it when he came home from work. Sitting on his lap, I took my time undoing the ten or twelve buttons while he held his arms around me. When I grew taller I could do this standing up. I guess it was my way of reclaiming him after a day’s absence.

  In the summer Father used to hire a boat and row it across the lake, with Mother singing arias and lieder. I sat between them, melting with pleasure. This clear memory still encapsulates bliss for me. In winter there was skating, building snowmen and joining friends for excursions. My time and activities were organised for me: piano lessons, carefully selected books to read, sport and outings with friends.

  I enjoyed school and tried to get good marks to please my parents. There was no scope to develop autonomy, make decisions or learn basic coping mechanisms, but I was given a great sense of security and an early introduction to sources of beauty and joy: concerts, ballet, theatre, art galleries. Though as a child I was not able to fully appreciate them, now they continue to enrich my life the way my parents no doubt intended.

  These hard-working parents of mine found not only time but also a lot of patience for me. I was one of those tedious kids forever asking, ‘Why?’ (‘Why’ even became my nickname at school.) I was greedy for info
rmation, which was always supplied, with only the occasional, ‘We don’t know’. I came to regard explanations and information as my right. This caused some problems later at school where the teachers weren’t quite as patient with my demands.

  While Mother could descend to my level of comprehension when explaining things, Father couldn’t, and often used idioms and metaphors that baffled me and required translations by Mother. I recall one instance when, exercising my right to know, I asked why it was that other kids at school had brothers and sisters and I didn’t. Father replied that it was not wise to bring children into a world of gathering clouds. I looked at the sky from our balcony, but found it entirely cloudless.

  My parents were my fount of all wisdom and I often eavesdropped on the conversations they had with friends or each other. I was vaguely aware it was wrong to do so, but not quite sure why. Father once said that it was good to learn as much as one could, so I persuaded myself that it was in aid of learning. And in many ways it was. Mother was given to dropping pearls of wisdom, some a bit beyond my tiny wits, and I struggled to get the message. Others made sense and became memorable.

  I recall that when a friend of hers said, ‘With those legs and a figure as beautiful as yours, I would proudly walk on my hands,’ Mother replied that surely one can only be proud of something achieved or created. Her figure was not her doing.

  Or when Stasia, our housekeeper, asked why Mother was not wearing her new, elegant dress to dinner with our visitors. Mother said that she would wear it to go out, but at home it might make the visitors feel upstaged. It was their opportunity to dress up.

  Or when she said to Father, ‘I sometimes think that our child was meant to be a creature of the wild because she is happiest in the forests, creeks and mountains.’

  I have a vivid recollection of an incident, not a very significant one, and it is a mystery why I remember it in such technicolour detail. Mother and I were sitting in a waiting room at a railway station. It was late evening and there was a heavy snowfall outside. The room was well heated by a coal fire in a potbelly stove in one corner, while in another a lady served hot tea and refreshments from a small kiosk. Of the dozen or so tables in the room only four or five were occupied. A gentleman walked in, looked around and came to our table. He was tall and elegant in a long, dark coat and a fur hat. He bowed politely, took off his hat, introduced himself and asked whether he could have the great pleasure of joining us. And could the beautiful young lady (me!) tell him her name? I did, and he recited part of a romantic poem about my namesake.

  He was charming, well spoken, polite and elegant. I was enchanted. He talked to Mother, asked about our destination and said he was going in the same direction. Then he went to the kiosk to buy a box of chocolates. I noticed a strange thing: my mother, that friendly warm person with a ready smile, sat in frosty displeasure. She refused his offer of chocolate with a curt, ‘No, thank you.’ And when he invited me to choose as many as I liked, Mother lowered her voice and spoke very slowly (both ominous signs), ‘Halina, I would rather you did not have chocolates now.’ She gave no explanation, which was my due, and spoke in a tone used rarely and only for reprimands.

  Before I could ask for an explanation, two burly policemen and a wiry older man rushed into the waiting room. One policeman guarded the door. The other stood with the older man, who looked around the suddenly silent room and then walked towards our table. He pointed to our charming companion, who got up, put on his hat, pushed the box of chocolates towards me and offered his arms to be handcuffed.

  The trio left and the remaining policeman came to our table, took out a notebook and asked Mother a lot of questions: how long had she known this man? where were we going?

  We were soon surrounded by the others in the room, who confirmed to the policeman that the wanted man had arrived a short time previously. An elderly babushka who sat at the nearby table, and who must have been watching us closely, supplied details of how the stranger introduced himself, asked permission to sit with us and bought us chocolates. Oh, yes, she could see that the lady did not like him and all his sweet-talking. The policeman made notes, but refused to say what crime had been committed—‘That will be discussed in the court of justice, not here’—and left.

  I sat, stunned, while the others talked to Mother and speculated about the arrest. How on earth did my mother know that this nice, elegant, polite and well-spoken gentleman was a crook? She said she had a bad feeling about him. ‘But how did you get this feeling and what sort of feeling was it?’ I asked. Mother said it was a vague feeling, hard to explain. It was called intuition. I pondered about that for a long time and decided that intuition was what the fortune tellers had: a clairvoyance which Mother had and I did not. I started asking her questions about the future and other mysteries. When Mother pointed out that my questions were strange, and how could anyone know the answer, I reminded her of how she knew about the elegant stranger at the railway station.

  My parents must have followed a rule of ‘not in front of the child’, for I never witnessed, nor was I aware of, any conflict or angry exchanges between them. Is it possible that there never were any? This made dealing with conflict later in real, unsheltered life a bit difficult for me for a while.

  Looking back at my parents’ 1930s parenting skills with the greater wisdom of the present time, I see much of value. I was disciplined with reasoned disapproval, and recall having an early sense that rights are connected to obligations. Corporal punishment was anathema. When a new teacher in my primary school smacked my palm with a ruler, my parents kicked up a fuss and their protests about corporal punishment were mentioned in an article in the local newspaper. I was never told to do or think something ‘because I say so’. My right to receive explanations and negotiate complaints was really a lesson in respect and reciprocity. And my parents’ affection was never conditional.

  My parents believed that if one was not crippled, physically or mentally, then there was an obligation to be an active member of society—not just to look after one’s own backyard but to help those who cope less well.

  I knew my parents only as a child, so wonder how valid these assessments of them are. But they are all I have. When interviewed by a psychologist in 1995 for the project ‘Holocaust Child Survivors: Scars left 50 years on’, I asked what builds resilience. The interviewer said it could be forged from emotional security in formative years and, like an inner rod of iron, it could prevent one from crumbling under blows, humiliations and in adversities. This made sense to me.

  My parents were agnostics. While of Jewish origin, neither their appearance nor their name was Semitic. I don’t know why they did not obtain false Aryan papers, as some others did, and move to another town to try to escape Hitler’s Final Solution.

  MY ROOM

  It was not a large room, yet I think it revealed a lot about a sheltered, carefree childhood in a middle-class family. Shelves held my books, crayons, various games, strangely shaped stones, seashells, an ornate box full of old photographs, a box brownie camera and, later, a stamp collection. There was a small, upright piano, my bed and wardrobe, a little table and chair near the window. When I started school, the small table was replaced by a student’s writing desk.

  The window looked down from our first-floor flat onto a square courtyard surrounded by other apartment buildings. Housekeepers met there for their daily gossip or to have their fortunes told by itinerant Gypsies. Buskers, alone or in duets, sang heart-rending ballads, invariably about a maiden seduced and abandoned. Housekeepers with tear-stained faces appeared at open windows, and threw down small coins.

  Puzzled then, I now know that this entertainment reflected life in the rural areas, a legacy of the feudal times when the lord of the manor and his sons ‘had their way’ with village maidens. The housekeepers, mostly women from the country, identified with this popular melodrama. But for me it was a bewildering glimpse into the real world from which my room sheltered me.

  There were various item
s of decoration in my room: pictures, a colourful woven wall-hanging and a large stork made of wire and wool. It had a beady eye in its cocked head and was about to take a step with its one raised leg. Mother had made it at a time when it was much taller than I was. Mother urged me to change or rearrange my art objects, in a nudge towards my appreciation of the finer things in life.

  My most treasured possessions were my photographs: either duplicates of those displayed in family albums or those not good enough to display. This black-and-white world of family members living in other cities, of the places we had visited—me as a grinning, toothless baby and my parents before they were married—endlessly held my fascination and filled me with imaginings. Mother’s dress and hat from the 1920s seemed very funny: I thought she had acted in some comedy show.

  In a special envelope proclaiming that this photograph had won first prize at a photo competition was a picture of me as a three-year-old about to hug a large Alsatian dog. An enlarged and framed copy of it hung in our foyer and throughout my childhood most of our visitors exclaimed, ‘Oh, what a beautiful dog!’ Nary a word about me. Great damage to the psyche can result from being upstaged by a dog in one’s formative years, but I too thought the dog was lovely.

  The stamp collection started when I was about eight and recovering from diphtheria. In those days, before antibiotics, the received medical wisdom was to have a long recovery period in virtual isolation to prevent the onset of complications. I was housebound for three months, mostly in my room. Homework sent from school did not fill those endless days, but my father’s idea of philately did. Each day he gave me a packet of used stamps from all over the world. I was to find their countries of origin on the map, look up basic information about each country in a special book and place them in the proper order in the stamp album. I loved doing that. Each evening I presented a geography lecture to my parents and Stasia. It was brief but in-depth, with the help of a globe and a pointer. Stamp collecting became a hobby, and I assembled several albums full of stamps from many countries.