The Fighter (9 page)

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Once upon a time she lived in a village north of Odessa, in the southwest Ukraine, newly annexed by the Soviet Union. Her passport states she was born on 22 July 1922, but her children say the date is not certain. They have heard variations. There is no birth certificate, no document of registration.

She was named Sonia. Her family name was Binkowicz. Little is known of her childhood, of her parents, Zalman and Pola, and of her younger brother. There is no record of his name. Sonia's children never heard it spoken.

Little is known of her life in the village. It is not known whether her family was well off or impoverished. There are no photos of where she played, of her friends, or where she went
to school. Nothing is known of the house she lived in, whether the street was dirt or cobblestone. Whether there were visits to Odessa, or outings to the Black Sea beaches; whether she climbed the famed staircase that ascends from the harbour or rode the funicular railway that ran beside it.

There are photos. A handful. Sonia rarely acknowledged them. She did not arrange them in albums. One is a studio-portrait of her father, seated before a backdrop of black curtains. His chin rests on his right hand. His right elbow is propped on the armrest, and his left hand is in his trouser pocket. His hair is short and parted on the left. He wears an army shirt. It is believed he was a soldier.

There is one photo of Sonia as a child. She is one of four in a family portrait. She looks to be about ten years old. Her black hair is cut in a bob, with a straight fringe low on her forehead. She wears a short-sleeved cotton dress.

The four are close, touching. They appear to be a tight family unit. Sonia stands between her parents. Her left arm is pressed against her mother, and her right arm rests behind her father's shoulder. Her brother stands on the right and leans on his father.

Father and son wear high-necked white shirts, and Mother a dark coloured dress. Her hair too is black. Mother and father, brother and sister gaze at the lens with the solemn expressions then common in posed photos.

It is said that Sonia once loved reading—Russian novels, the classics. And that she read poetry and recited Yiddish verse on stage, a much-loved art form in the cities and townlets of Eastern
Europe: but these are minute glimpses that bear no relation to what became of her—though she did read the daily paper, cover to cover, and word by word, years later, in her newly acquired language.

It is known that her life in the village ended abruptly. Romanian and German troops marched into Odessa and the surrounding villages, and rounded up the Jewish and Romani populations.

Nothing is known of how Sonia survived the early years of occupation, the mass murder and the deportations. Did she avoid capture? Or was she imprisoned? Did she escape later? Was she caught up in the October '41 Odessa massacre? Was she detained in the Odessa ghetto? Or in one of the concentration camps set up in nearby villages?

Nothing is known of the fate of Zalman and Pola. There is no record of how or when Sonia was separated from them. She never said a word about her last sight of her mother and father, or of her brother. Or of the last time she touched them, whether she was torn from them, or told to run or slip away under the cover of darkness. No hint of the brutal scenes that must have confronted her.

All that is known is that somehow she fled deep into the Soviet Union, and she would never again see her immediate family. There is no word about how she survived. Who took her in, and who rejected her? Did she end up in the infamous camps of the gulag? It is known that she spent time in Siberia. How she got there, and how long she remained there, of this, too, little is known.

Siberia is vast: swathes of forest and field, mountain ranges and concealed valleys. Rivers rejuvenated by melting snows raged through ancient canyons. Villages blazed in summer heat, and pathways vanished in snowstorms. Wildflowers erupted for their hour in the sun, and lay dormant during winter blizzards. Hungry gangs raided farmlands at night, and clawed the frozen earth in search of roots and tubers.

Trains shunted across horizons with cargoes of the dispossessed. Contending armies crisscrossed the empire. Prisoners worked as slaves in remote labour camps. Within this immense space, and in these tumultuous times, Sonia cannot be seen. And she will remain silent about what happened, bar one brutal act that she will speak of, only once, years later.

It is known that she ended up in a Soviet factory manufacturing uniforms for the Red Army. Not one of her children know where the factory was located, except that it was somewhere in the Soviet–Polish borderlands—thousands of kilometres from Siberia. How she got there, over such distances, will remain a mystery.

Of Father more is known, albeit in snapshots. He was born in the village of Kurow on the outskirts of Lublin, southeast Poland, on 8 August 1922, or perhaps 1917. There is confusion about the year, and the precise dates. There are contradictory documents. His birth was not immediately registered. Named Simche, he was the second child of Chaim Nissenbaum and Tauba Lajsman.

Kurow stands on the banks of the Kurowka River, a tributary of the Wisla. To this day weeping willows and reeds lean
in from the riverbanks. Woodlands of maples and oak give way to marsh and farmland. In winter the countryside disappears beneath snow and the river freezes over.

The harvest was ground in mills powered by water. Fish were trapped in the river's muddy shallows, there for the taking. Villagers picnicked on its banks. Children swam in its waterholes. Lovers strolled its pathways. This is how it has been recounted in the memoirs of those who fled, never to return to the idyll of their childhood.

When Simche was two, it is said his father went missing, and was believed killed. How and where remains unknown. There is a document that indicates he may have still been in Kurow in 1927. He may have divorced. Or he may have abandoned the family.

Chaim left behind an infant son and his firstborn child, a daughter, Dvora. She appears years later, in
The Kurow Memory Book
. Published in 1955, the book was compiled as a sacred duty by the few surviving Jewish residents who lived out their years in exile. The photo is the only known picture of her.

Dvora: black eyes, full lips, rounded cheeks, and black hair parted in the middle. Two thick plaits fall below her shoulders. She wears a necklace of beads and a sleeveless floral blouse. Her arms are white; her gaze is direct, and her expression earnest. She is beautiful. The photo is haunting.

Tauba remarried and bore three more children. When Simche was nine, he was sent to his uncle Moshe Lajsman in Warsaw to be apprenticed as a tailor. Simche hated it, so family lore has it, but in years to come he would be grateful for the training.

As a young man, Simche was active in politics. He dreamt of revolution and a workers' paradise. He was drawn into the fiery ideological battles of the times, rivalries upon which lives and livelihoods depended—the fierce debates within the left over how to address mass impoverishment, racial tension and the rise of fascism. Simche never spoke of the details, but for the rest of his life he remained a communist.

When war broke out, he fled the advancing Germans with Dvora. There are several accounts of their escape. According to one, Simche was in Warsaw, working for his uncle, and he and Dvora got out in the early weeks of the invasion as bombs rained down on the city. Another has it that they left directly from Kurow.

One way or the other, brother and sister made it to the Soviet border. They were two among many thousands fleeing in panic before a rapacious army. There are no details of their ordeal, whether they were strafed and bombed, or whether they travelled by train or on foot, or hitched rides in trucks or horse-drawn wagons. Nothing was ever said about the horrors they witnessed.

Dvora turned back at the border. Or perhaps she made it across and returned later. Either way, it seems she couldn't endure living away from Kurow. Or was it her family? All that is known of her fate is recorded in the caption beneath the photo in
The Kurow Memory Book
: ‘Dvora Nissenbaum, Alkelle Shloyme Zalke's grandchild. Perished.'

Simche pushed on after parting from his sister. He was conscripted by the Red Army cavalry somewhere near the Soviet border. On
his first day of duty he was helped into the saddle. He toppled off before the horse began moving. So the story goes. He was no Cossack. He could not ride if his life depended on it. His feet were wedded to the ground, and his hands were trained for the tailor's workroom.

He was assigned, as a supervisor, to a factory manufacturing Red Army uniforms: a young man with a boyish face and a toothy grin in a position of authority. The work-floor was full of women cutting, stitching, assembling—row upon row of them leaning over sewing machines.

There, he fell in love with one of the workers, a woman who had fled a village in the province of Odessa, a seamstress with the skills of a tailor. Nothing has ever been said of how the romance began, and its progression. No one knows if it was a true romance, or the coming together of two lonely people robbed of family and stripped of community. Or both.

Either way, the couple stuck together. There is a document that indicates Sonia and Simche married in 1944, in Odessa. Others state they were married after the war, in Poland or Germany. What does it matter? They returned to their homes at war's end in search of surviving family. All had died except Moshe Lajsman and an aunt of Sonia's, Rivka, who had settled, before the war, in Palestine.

The Kurow Memory Book
is a book of lamentations. Two thousand eight hundred Jews were killed, the majority of the town's Jewish population. Their names are listed on page after black-edged page, like a prayer for the dead.

Those who survived had fled, or had been hidden in bunkers
and caves, under floorboards and in stables. Behind false walls, or, out in the open concealed under false guises, in perpetual fear of betrayal. Some joined bands of partisans and lived in underground forest rooms camouflaged by logs and branches, from which they stole out on missions against the enemy.

The memory book locates the sites of massacre. It tells of ancestral tombstones desecrated by the Nazis and their accomplices. The stones were used as lintels and doorsteps. The bones of the murdered were ploughed into the soil. The book records: ‘On the site of gravestones they sowed wheat and oats, and there they planted potatoes.'

For a time Sonia and Simche lived in Opole, in southern Poland, a town where survivors gathered. Then they continued the trek westwards, one couple among millions of displaced persons. They set their sights on Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, and began life anew in the shadow of the former concentration camp.

British troops had liberated the camp months earlier. The soldiers were met by the stench of the dead and the dying, masses of men, women and children shrunken to skin and bone, expiring of typhus and typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. Starvation. Exhaustion.

The survivors were deloused and the sick moved to a hastily assembled hospital. Thirteen thousand corpses were cleared with bulldozers and buried in mass graves. The troops set fire to the huts and the inmates were relocated two kilometres away, in the former German Panzer army barracks. They were the first
residents of the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp.

An entire continent was on the move, maps were being redrawn, and countries re-assigned to contending spheres of influence. East was divided from West; ancient conflicts were resurrected in new guises. In the ensuing months the camp drew displaced persons from as far away as the expanses of the Soviet Union. Among them, Sonia and Simche: two family lineages reduced to one young man and one young woman.

It was a time of pregnancies and marriages, of tribes regrouping. Regenerating. There were more than one thousand births in 1946 alone in the camp. And more than fourteen hundred weddings—some say the number is higher—driven by loneliness, a need to recreate lost families, and a fierce desire to make up for lost time and move on as quickly as possible.

So it was that Solly, the oldest boy, was born in the former German army quarters in October 1946, and the twins fifteen months later, on 15 January 1948, in the Glyn Hughes Hospital, named, in 1946, after the British medical officer who, in the first weeks after liberation, converted the German army hospital into a hospital for Jewish survivors. Leon was born at 6.30 in the morning. Henry, ten minutes later.

Leon came out head first, Henry feet first—so family legend has it. ‘I kicked him out,' says Henry. ‘You should respect your elders,' retorts Leon. Mid-winter births: a time of long nights, and new beginnings.

*

Simche traced his uncle Moshe Lajsman via the Red Cross. Moshe had survived and made it to Australia. He sent his nephew three visas—he didn't provide visas for Henry and Leon, as he had no knowledge of Sonia's second pregnancy. Another version has it that four visas were sent, that twins had not been anticipated.

The Nissenbaums made their way by train from Belsen to Paris and, after a brief sojourn, to the city of Trieste. At the docks the SS
Partizanka
was waiting.

The port was swarming with emigrants. The ships that were to take them to new worlds were lined up at the waterfront. Simche carried the twins in a basket. The customs officers refused to allow the babies on board without visas. The
Partizanka
was about to lift anchor. Simche pleaded. The officers were resolute. Simche planted the basket on the floor of the customs office.

‘They are yours,' he said. ‘We are leaving. You look after them.'

He turned and began making his way to the
Partizanka
. The officers ran after him and handed over the basket. So the story goes: one of very few. Deeply cherished.

The family sailed for Australia in December 1948, leaving behind the continent that had failed them. Little is known of the journey, and the sights on the way through the Adriatic and Mediterranean. Whether they registered the beauty of the islands and the rugged coastlines. Or whether, on their stops in Suez and Colombo, they watched the boys diving into the sea to collect coins tossed by passengers.