Out of Tune (2 page)

As I sat there last March, wondering why a film that contains so many false scenes and false ideas should be considered worthy
of an Oscar, I decided I would try to right some of the wrongs. This book is not the plea of a devoted daughter desperate
to defend her father at all costs, but an attempt to present the real story behind a film that cynically distorted the truth
for marketing purposes. I hope to repair the damage that has been done to the Helfgott family by recounting the truth about
my brother, his father, and our family.

T
o understand where David comes from, it is necessary to know a little about my father, a key figure both in David’s life and
in
Shine
. Pinchas Elias Helfgott—who later anglicized his name to Peter— was born in 1903 in Kamyk, a small town in Poland that was
famous for making matzo, the unleavened bread that the Jewish people eat each year at Passover. Kamyk is located not far from
a larger town where my mother grew up, called Czestochowa, which lies about 125 miles southwest of Warsaw.

My mother, Rachel Granek, who is known as Rae, was born in 1920 in another little nearby town, Klubutzka, but moved with her
family to Czestochowa when she was seven. Her mother, Chaya, died when Rae was two, leaving her father Mordechai to look after
her and her brother Morry. Eventually Mordechai married Chaya’s sister, Bronia, and they had threemore children—two girls,
Gutka and Henya (both of whom were to die in Treblinka), and a son, Johnny.

Like many towns in Poland before the Holocaust decimated Polish Jewry, Czestochowa had a sizable Jewish population, and by
1900, 30 percent of the 40,000 residents were Jews. Czestochowa is known internationally as the city of the Jasna Gora Madonna—the
Black Madonna—Poland’s holiest icon. Because of this, Catholics from all over Poland traditionally made a pilgrimage to the
city, particularly around Easter time. Unfortunately, many of them took part in anti-Semitic attacks on the local Jewish population.
My mother has often told me of her experiences when she was out in the town with her friends, on a trip to the movie theater,
for example. Anti-Semitic Catholics would shout abuse and hurl stones and all sorts of objects at them and other Jewish residents.

As was common among Jewish families in eastern Europe at that time, my father’s family was fairly large. There were seven
children in all: Miriam, Zelig, Na’acha, my father Peter; and then after Peter came Rivka, Abraham, and Hannah. Hannah, regrettably,
suffered from a hereditary mental illness almost certainly associated with the one that my brother David later developed.

The Helfgotts were a very religious household, against which my father rebelled. They were ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Jews, who
worked as leather merchants but also spent a great deal of time praying. Peter was a very forward-looking thinker, interested
in technology and progress, and not very happy with his restrictive family environment. He believed in the notion that equality
and the betterment of mankind could be achieved through socialism, which at that time was a very common view, and was shared
by many world-famous figures such as George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, and Charlie Chaplin. Personally I don’t think they
fully took into account man’s nature, which doesn’t always allow for such an altruistic way of life; but my father nevertheless
retained much of his early revolutionary outlook for the rest of his life.

Peter not only longed to see a better world, he also wanted literally to see the world, and he ran away from home three times.
The first time, when he was only about twelve years old, he was caught and brought back. But eventually, at fourteen, he succeeded
in running away for good.

As World War I drew to a close and revolution stirred in Russia, it was a tumultuous period for a young teenage boy to be
wandering around eastern Europe, and perhaps not surprisingly he made his escape by joining the navy, although he never talked
much about this. An old cousin of my father’s here in Israel, Zelig Lewcowitz, told me that as far as he knew Peter had probably
enlisted in the British Merchant Navy. And this was something quite unheard of for a young Jewish boy from a small
shtetl
to have done in those days.

The term
shtetl
is a diminutive for the Yiddish word “shtot,” meaning “town.” Kamyk was a
shtetl
similar to those depicted in the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the paintings of Marc Chagall, and films such as
Fiddler on the Roof
and
Yentl
. Life in the
shtetl
was very much based on a sense of community, with a warm and intimate lifestyle centered around the synagogue, the home,
and the marketplace. Everyone tended to conform to common values. For my father to have run away and broken free shows that
he was very strong-minded in those days, as he was later on, too.

In 1926, after his stint in the navy, my father moved to Palestine, where he stayed for nearly a year. He looked for work
but at that time there was a great depression there, and he failed to find steady employment. Not having much money also made
it hard for him to leave the country, a problem he eventually solved by joining a traveling circus as a circus hand. My father
used to tell me stories about his circus life. For example, how he had nearly been crushed by an elephant that had pinned
him into a corner. If a tamer hadn’t happened to walk by and pull the elephant away, I wouldn’t be here writing to tell the
tale.

He also used to show me the scar on his hand that he had received from a playful tiger. There is a scene in
Shine
where he shows the scar to my sister Suzie; but the director chose to move the scar from my father’s hand to his forearm—and
not to identify clearly what it was. In my opinion this was done deliberately, leaving the audience to assume that this mark
was a concentration camp tattoo and that Peter was a concentration camp survivor, which was not the case. They are helped
to arrive at this conclusion by the film’s dialogue: almost immediately after revealing the mark on his forearm, Peter says,
“No one can hurt me! Because in this world only the fit survive. The weak get crushed like insects.” Certainly several film
critics describe Peter Helfgott as “a concentration camp survivor” in their newspaper reviews, no doubt as a result of this
and other scenes in the film—for example, the one where David says, “Like Daddy and his family before they were concentrated”
(scene 18 of Scott Hicks and Jan Sardi’s officially published screenplay). This is a subject I shall discuss more fully in
Chapter 17
.

After leaving Palestine, my father ended up rejoining the navy. In the early 1930s this took him to Australia, where he decided
to settle, becoming a naturalized Australian citizen in 1936 at the age of thirty-three. Before that my father had paid one
more brief visit to Poland; he missed his family, particularly his mother, whom he still cared deeply about in spite of having
run away.

Once in Australia, he went to Melbourne, a place where many of the Jews from Czestochowa and nearby towns went to in those
days. What usually happened was that someone from a particular town, often when fleeing pogroms, arrived in a certain city
and then wrote to his friends and relatives to come out and join him there. Thus many Polish Jews bound for Australia ended
up in Melbourne while Jews from Hungary, for example, tended to go to Sydney. The Jews would build up a
landsmanschaft,
an informal organization for Jewish people who came from the same town in Poland. Self-help has long been a very strong trait
of the Jewish people: with the huddled, supersupportive communalism of the Diaspora, one could say the
shtetl
was the epitome of self-help, and these traditions were continued in Melbourne and Perth.

By the time my father arrived, the Jewish community in Melbourne was already well established, having been officially created
in 1841, which was only six years after the foundation of Melbourne itself. In fact, two of the fifteen members of the Port
Phillip Association who founded Melbourne in 1835 were Jewish, and since then Jews have done extremely well there. Indeed,
the city’s two most honored citizens, Sir John Monash and Sir Isaac Isaacs, were both Jewish. When Monash (who commanded the
Australian and New Zealand forces during World War I) died in 1931, tens of thousands of people lined the route of his state
funeral procession in what was one of the biggest funerals Australia has ever witnessed. Sir Isaac Isaacs—the son of a Polish-born
tailor who went on to become Australia’s first native-born governor-general—also received a state funeral. There were several
other prominent Jews. For example, Edward Cohen was mayor of Melbourne in the 1860s, and Sir Benjamin Benjamin was mayor in
the 1880s.

On arriving in Melbourne, my father lived in a little cottage in Pigdon Street in an area called Carlton, near the center
of the city. Carlton used to be a poor working-class district full of Jewish refugee families, but today it has become a fashionable
neighborhood, filled with designer boutiques, spaghetti bars, and ice cream shops. Peter tried his hand at a number of trades.
He started a clothing company called Original Suits and he opened a tailoring factory, primarily for the manufacture of ladies’
clothing, in a little lane at the top of Bourke Street in the center of Melbourne. My father would cut, design, sew, and make
up garments, as well as deal with all the mechanical aspects of the machinery. (It was very common for Melbourne Jews, particularly
at that time, to work in the garment industry.)

By nature my father was a very creative and enthusiastic person, always thinking up new schemes. Among other things, he invented
a pressing machine for ironing clothes. The machine was designed to lift up the very heavy irons and presses used in tailoring
factories, thus taking the weight off the person operating the iron. My father’s machine was fairly successful and he sold
at least twenty. He also invented a special kind of boiler.

He tried his hand at a number of inventions, but he didn’t make much money from them. He also had several partnerships over
the years, but his businesses were usually failures. As his good friend Ivan Rostkier recalls, his trusting personality meant
that even though some of the businesses went well, his ideas were often copied by others and he was taken advantage of.

Although it was reasonably successful at first and he employed twelve people there, his clothing factory eventually went bankrupt.
My father, who was very good at adapting to changing circumstances, then turned the premises into a coffee lounge. A self-taught
musician, he used to entertain the customers in the evenings by playing the violin and piano and sometimes also singing. The
place was apparently very successful and people have often talked to me about its enjoyable atmosphere and lively ambience.
“It was the hot spot of Jewish immigrant life in Melbourne,” one of my father’s old friends told me. It was also of great
significance because it is there where he met my mother in 1939.

My mother, Rae, was the eldest of five children. She was born in 1920, her brother Morry was born in 1922, her half-brother
Johnny in 1924, and her two younger half-sisters Gutka and Henya in 1926 and 1928. My mother’s father, Mordechai, was a very
poor tailor. The whole family lived in a three-room flat in Czestochowa and Morry and Johnny had to sleep together in a box.
In the daytime, Mordechai would close up the box and convert it into a work top for cutting coats and doing his tailoring
work. My mother shared a small bed with her little sister Gutka.

After the widespread pogroms in Poland in 1936, and with Hitler intensifying both his expansionist and his anti-Semitic policies,
Mordechai was desperate to flee Europe. He decided the family should move to Australia, where a brother of his had already
settled and could secure them visas. But my grandfather didn’t have enough money to buy tickets for everyone, so it was decided
that he should travel first with the older children, and that Rae’s stepmother Bronia and the three younger siblings would
follow them a short while later.

My mother, Mordechai, and Morry bade an emotional farewell to the rest of the family, confident they would soon be reunited
in Australia. But with the outbreak of war the other half of the family became trapped. It was not until 1946 that Bronia
(having survived Bergen-Belsen) and Johnny (who survived Buchenwald) were finally to make it to Australia. The two youngest
girls, Gutka and Henya, were gassed to death in Treblinka.

But my mother sailed from a port near Gdansk on the Baltic Sea on November 6, 1938, and arrived in Melbourne seven weeks later,
on Christmas Day.

It was at his coffee lounge one evening when my mother went to go dancing that she first met my father. Dances were often
held there in the evening, when the place changed from a serene central European-style coffeehouse to a boisterous dance hall.
My mother loved to dance, especially to the kind of music that was popular at the time: waltzes such as Strauss’s “The Blue
Danube,” big band music such as Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” and “Moonlight Serenade,” or the swinging sounds of Benny Goodman.
My mother says that the dances held at my father’s coffee lounge were grand affairs, with the upbeat music and lively crowds
mingling to produce a superb atmosphere.