Bloodhound (20 page)

As it turned out, Rubin Soldaner's story was important, the stuff of the best courtroom dramas. Born in the village of Szrensk, twenty-five kilometres from Mława, he was five years younger than Max. He was chosen to work as a personal slave for Walter Paulikat, who was in charge of the ghetto. Soldaner cleaned Paulikat's quarters and his office, chopped wood for him, shined his boots, prepared his shaving water in the mornings, groomed and fed his four horses, and mucked out the stables. He later reported being beaten constantly by Paulikat, no matter how diligently he'd done his tasks.

Once, he had asked why these beatings continued and Paulikat answered by showing him one of his hands with half a finger missing. He'd fought in the Spanish Civil War on Franco's side, he said, and his finger had been bitten off by a man he called ‘a Jewish Communist', so Soldaner had to pay for it.

At the trial, when Soldaner was giving evidence, Paulikat said that he didn't recognise the man who claimed to be his personal slave.

Soldaner reported saying, ‘You don't remember me? You used to beat me up every single night because a Jewish guy bit off half your finger. Let him raise his hand and show the court—see if half a finger is missing.'

Paulikat was asked to raise his hand, and everyone in the court could see that Soldaner was correct.

They gave Paulikat a life sentence. ‘You know what a life sentence is?' Rubin Soldaner says in his testimony. ‘He had to register his presence in the police precinct each week, and that was his life sentence.'

I wondered if Max ever learned of this, or if he continued to believe that the group of survivors who'd joined together to testify in the trial had ‘got him'. Paulikat would merely have visited his former workplace once a week, making a mockery of the idea of ongoing punishment. Perhaps he continued to have a beer with his old colleagues, silently cursing the inconvenience of having to report to them while making a joke of his sentence.

Rubin Soldaner said he'd been in Auschwitz between November 1942 and January 1945, after which he was rounded up and taken on one of the infamous ‘death marches'. When the Russians were rumoured to be coming to liberate the camp, those in charge sought to cover up what went on there. Six thousand prisoners were marched the twenty-five kilometres to Dachau; half of them were killed along the way.

I didn't know if Max was on the march. Some stayed behind in the camp, too sick to walk, even though the Nazis told them they'd buried gelignite around the camp perimeter, so that all the evidence of the atrocities would be obliterated.

More delicate people, Rubin Soldaner said, couldn't handle life in Auschwitz. He said that if your life in Poland was rough before the war, you had a better chance of survival in the camp. He was living in Block 7A with many others from Mława. They were taught to be bricklayers and plasterers, in order to build extensions to the camp. He was proud, in a way, that those buildings were still standing decades after the war.

If you knew someone who worked in ‘Canada', the warehouse that processed clothes and belongings—the goods and valuables of those who arrived in Auschwitz and were stripped of everything, including their hair, and then sent to be murdered—they might steal something and trade it. You might have a chance of getting extra food, which meant extra time, and perhaps you might live till the war was over. This black economy was punishable by death, but those who knew how to trade and who were lucky were able to sustain themselves.

‘Everything was a miracle,' Rubin Soldaner said.

Alan had told me that Max made uniforms in Auschwitz, but I needed to check if this was possible. Maybe he worked as a bricklayer with the other men from Mława who survived with him to testify at Paulikat's trial? I also needed to investigate Alan's report that Max had ‘a good job' in the infirmary. How did he get it? What might a tailor have done in an infirmary?

Perhaps I was being too literal. Some survivors said in their testimonies that they'd lied about having certain skills and had watched what others did, learning on the job. They'd survived not because they were trained, but because they were skilled bluffers and fast learners.

If you had food, you survived; if you didn't, you died. If you got sick, you died. One of the men whose testimony I heard wore a stolen suit from ‘Canada' under his striped camp uniform. On the forced march to the camp at Dachau they stayed in a barn for the night. He left before dawn under cover of darkness and shed his striped pyjamas. ‘I kept walking,' he said. ‘I was now a civilian.'

Hersh Forma—or Harry Forman, as he later became—was another of Max's group to give evidence against Paulikat. He was also in Block 7A in Auschwitz, and helped build the women's camp and the SS camp. He said that everything in Auschwitz was done by prisoners: the baking, the slaughtering of meat. ‘A camp is a city, it's a big place.' He talked of his number, too: ‘Our numbers made people realise we were “old soldiers” and people knew we were experienced.'

Harry Forman said that the decision to go on the death march was the worst one of his life, as he almost died in the four months between leaving Auschwitz and finally being liberated by the Americans. He said that the Gestapo did not give up trying to kill them till the last possible minute.

I didn't know what he meant by the worst decision of his life: did he have agency in deciding whether to stay or go? Those left in the camp were the sick and the dying, and typhus was common, but in the end they were liberated nine days after the march began—much earlier than those who were marched away from the advancing Russians. Maybe Forman was ill and could have stayed, but thought his chances were better with the marchers?

After the war the survivors roamed the countryside looking for food, first asking for it and then, when they were denied, killing chickens they'd taken from local farmers. Now the Allied forces were the occupiers, and no one dared complain. The remnant people of the camps registered for rations and got coupons from various places. They used the survival skills they had learned in Auschwitz.

I thought about Max and how he had lived in the years before his arrival in Melbourne to set up with his brother. He must have thought, as Mama did, that Australians had no idea how hard life had been for the new arrivals, and could not imagine what they had seen and survived. On reaching Melbourne, Mama thought she had fallen into a child's garden of verses. How could his brother or any of those who had escaped early begin to understand Max's story? Like me, they wouldn't have grasped the language of silence that Jacob Rosenberg had described.

Fitfully, I began searching Google with the keywords ‘Auschwitz + infirmary + tailor'. The photographs I found made me queasy and my gut exploded in liquid reaction. I remembered Dad showing me photographs like this once when I was a child. He was trying to get me to sympathise with him, to understand him, but I was only eight.

I still think he was wrong in doing this. Mama was furious with him. After that day, I was afraid of the wardrobe in which he kept the glossy commemorative magazine with the gold-embossed Hebrew letters on the cover. I wanted the wardrobe doors to be closed, any wardrobe door in any room, especially at night when I was going to sleep.

Curiosity about my beginnings now took me to the depths of the filth and depravity of the infirmary at Auschwitz. Was this where Mengele carried out his experiments with twins and typhus? Where babies were killed at birth, and others died from phenol injected directly to the heart? Maybe these were the scenes that Isabel remembered when she told me about being punished for not wanting to have children and for having abortions. I found it hard to sleep and, when I did, I sometimes had nightmares.

I dreamed I was in my white cotton nightie, riding a bicycle to meet a friend. I passed by a paddock with a large horse. I knew it had something to do with me, but at the same time it was not my responsibility. I saw that there were scars and welts on the horse's flanks, evidence of some terrible cruelty visited upon it. I knew that someone had given me the horse, but I hadn't wanted it, so I had left it in this paddock with plenty of grass and water.

The sky was darkening, and I encouraged the horse to take off and gallop to the far end of the paddock. As he picked up speed I saw that his coat was moth-eaten, and his welts and scars were weakening; and, as I watched, his belly opened up and all the liquefied innards spilled out, and the animal collapsed. I knew he was dying and wondered if I should ride the bike to get a vet; and I also knew I could do nothing for the animal, that horses die every day; and that I had to get to my appointment, even though I was still in my nightie, which might well catch in the wheels; and I got on the bike and rode away. I told myself again that it was not my fault.

As his ninetieth birthday approached, Dad refused to wash for twelve days straight. His wife decided it was time. She and her daughter and son-in-law found a bed in a nursing home in a faraway suburb, but Dad baulked at getting in the car. My older daughter was summoned: by some miracle she coaxed him and he followed her into her car and she drove him there. This was all conducted without my presence. I had no power, no influence, and no inclination to be involved.

I visited him the following day. He was the only patient in a double room, a tiny man in bed. His food was delivered and they sat him propped up at the edge of the mattress, his feet hanging over the side, but he would not eat. He had been washed and his hair had been cut, yet he was not shaven. That was too much, his wife told me. She was smoking a cigarette, against the rules, and she had the air of an elderly Marlene Dietrich, with a gravelly, accented voice. She had come for lunch, as they let spouses eat there, and she was complaining that he didn't want to sit in the dining room. She was acting like she'd made reservations in a fancy restaurant and the maître d' hadn't given them a table yet. Was she a little demented, too?

She showed me someone's Hawaiian shirt that had been mistakenly placed in Dad's cupboard. But anyway, she said, he doesn't care anymore.

The slippers fell off his feet and I saw that both of his big toes had grown inwards towards the other toes, so much so that they took a dive underneath them. I was shocked.

I didn't know he had such disfiguring bunions. I had small bunions. I knew bunions could be hereditary—did Mama also have bunions? I tried to visualise her feet but she'd died young, so maybe her bunions hadn't developed properly by then. Like her, they had run out of time.

Did Max have bunions? How common were they, anyway? Maybe I could go from bed to bed here and do a bunion survey?

I'd sometimes considered having an operation to straighten my toes, and this discovery settled it. I rang an orthopaedic surgeon who'd operated on me in the past and made an appointment. I would cut off my toes, like the girl in Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Red Shoes', in order not to be confused about who my father might be. After all this time I was not going to let a couple of stray digits undo all my good work.

My sister called to tell me that Dad was vomiting bile and seemed to be suffering from organ failure. His wife and her daughter had told the nursing home that they wanted him resuscitated under any circumstance, but they hadn't left formal instructions. His GP was away for the long weekend, and the nursing home couldn't contact his stepdaughter and her husband, the ones he trusted. He needed assessing, even if only for palliative medication, and the nursing-home people thought it best that an ambulance took him to the hospital. My sister knew about these things, so I left all this to her. What did I know of bile? More, in fact, than I would admit.

I met her at the emergency department and found Dad on a trolley, hooked up to a drip, in an immodest theatre gown. He was very distressed and they had to tape up the needle in his vein, as he kept trying to pull it out. The trolley had been lowered to the floor, to stop him from injuring himself as he threw the cotton blanket off and tried to leap over the edge. I kept covering him up, so firmly did I wish not to look upon his nakedness, and he kept trying to struggle with me. No, I told him. No, no, no. He insisted he was coming home with me. But you're not well, I said, and you are in hospital and they are helping you. He was wild-eyed, like a sick beast, like the horse in my dream.

I asked my sister to call the nurse. Give him something, I begged her, give him some Largactil. I remembered this from my days as a doctor's wife: that was what you gave belligerent, psychotic patients. A big fat injection was what I had in mind. They had already given him something, the nurse said. I was struggling with him over the blanket again.
Please give him more.
I felt like giving it to him myself. Or giving myself a big fat injection to take me away from there.

She explained that he'd had everything they could give him without it being dangerous. Dangerous? What was the danger in settling down a mad old dying man? Settling him right down in his grave.

I was more upset than I had been in years. It was horrible to be unable to calm him, without the power to remove him and not wanting him home with me. It was as if our whole relationship, stunted and hopeless, was being enacted in miniature in the little cubicle, its porous curtains unable to shield us.

Dad was returned to the nursing home without being admitted, as it was deemed the best place for him to die. Why he'd had to go on a nightmare ambulance ride and have me tussle with him at the hospital was beyond my understanding.

A phone call came in the morning from my older daughter to tell me that Dad had died. His stepdaughter and son-in-law made all the arrangements for the funeral. They had his power of attorney, and why not—he was closer to them than to us. I felt like I attended the funeral as a guest, except that I was sitting at the mourners' bench with my sister in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery, Dad's wife and stepdaughter sharing it with us.