Читать книгу Doppelganger - David Finchley - Страница 9

Chapter 2

I was born on the fifth of July, nineteen forty-six in Waiblingen, Germany. The Germans pronounce it with a ‘V’,Vaiblingen. I have never met anyone who has heard of the place, so when the subject occasionally comes up, I always add, ‘It’s near Stuttgart.’ Most people have heard of Stuttgart, the headquarters of Mercedes-Benz.

Waiblingen is a little bit famous in its own right, however. It is the headquarters of Stihl, the world’s largest chainsaw manufacturer, founded in nineteen twenty-six. Stihl now produces other power tools, besides chainsaws.

My mother told me that July of nineteen forty-six was unseasonably hot and of course, hospitals were not air-conditioned. She told me that she gave birth to me after a long labour and in oppressive heat. The doctor did not make it in time for my birth and my mother was attended to by a midwife, who wore rubber gumboots and kept telling my mother to stop screaming so much.

‘That woman was an anti-Semite, Arnold, I’m sure of that,’ my mother told me. ‘And the doctor too,’ she added. ‘As soon as you were born he told me there was something wrong with you. There was a problem with your heart. The doctor didn’t tell me what it was. Even if he had, I don’t think I would have understood. Anyway, you had to stay in hospital. I wasn’t allowed to take you home.’

At that point of the story, my mother paused, there were tears in her eyes.

‘They didn’t feed you properly. I was told that you needed a special diet. A special diet! Their idea of a special diet was to starve you. You were so thin. I was afraid you would die.’

I had seen one or two photos of myself, small black-and-white shots and I looked emaciated. I certainly did not look like a baby who was thriving.

‘After two weeks, I’d had enough. I told the doctor I was taking you home. He told me I was crazy. Well, maybe I was. I was a crazy mother who could not bear to see her son being starved. So I took you home and fed you, fed you properly. You were so hungry. I couldn’t get the milk into you quickly enough. And in no time you filled out, you looked healthy, like a normal baby should.’

I had also seen photos from that period. I was far too fat, but I did look healthy.

When I was older and knew more about what the Germans had done to my people, I became convinced that there had probably been nothing wrong with me at all, but rather it was an attempt by the Germans to kill yet another Jew. I was grateful to my mother for the courage she had to foil their plan.

Germans and Germany were regular subjects of conversation in our household. None of those conversations was in any way complimentary to Germans or Germany, and with good reason. My parents, Jacob and Rivka, were born in Poland and somehow survived Hitler’s holocaust which claimed almost all of their families. They had every right to hate the Germans for the evil they inflicted on them and more generally on the Jewish people. And that hatred was communicated to me from an early age. I grew up with the knowledge that all my grandparents, most of my uncles, aunts, cousins and extended family had been murdered. The bizarre thing was that I didn’t remember ever being horrified or shocked by this information. For me it was a normal part of growing up, as it was for all my friends, whose families had come from similar backgrounds.

I never thought that these horror stories had any effect on me, but now that I’m older and perhaps wiser, I realise that they must have done. There is now a lot written and spoken about the so-called Second Generation, but more of that later.

To give the story context, I should start with my parents, Jacob and Rivka Rosen. Ideally, I should really start with my grandparents or even great-grandparents, but in my world, none of those relatives existed. Both my parents were born in Poland, in a small city in the south called Częstochowa. Like so many Polish words it is difficult to pronounce. There is the sound of an ‘n’ in there somewhere, an invisible but audible ‘n’.

Częstochowa is famous for only one thing, the Pauline monastery of Jasna Gora, which houses the Black Madonna, a shrine to the Virgin Mary. To this day, it attracts millions of pilgrims from all around the world.

I have no idea why my ancestors would have chosen such a staunchly Catholic place to live in. Some time back, I decided to research the topic. I wanted to find out how long my family had been in Poland, how many generations did we go back. There was no way of finding that out, but I did manage to find out that Jews first arrived in Częstochowa in seventeen sixty-five, when their total population was seventy-five. The population grew steadily. In the Częstochowa region, on the banks of the Warta River, there were vast ore deposits. As a result the city became a rich industrial centre in the nineteenth century. There was a large steelworks, which Jews were heavily involved in, as well as other industries, also banking and trade. A network of religious and secular Jewish schools was founded to cater for the ever-increasing Jewish population, which numbered over twenty-eight thousand at the outbreak of World War Two. That was one-third of the population of Częstochowa. Sadly, by the end of the war, this number had dropped to five thousand and by the next year, as a result of many of the remaining Jews leaving, to just over two thousand.

I had always assumed that in pre-war Poland, all Jews were Orthodox and were very strict in observance of their faith. All the photos I saw of prewar Jews showed the men with long beards, some with fur hats and most with severe expressions.

‘Was your family Orthodox?’ I once asked my father.

He paused to consider the question.

‘It is not a simple question to answer. By today’s standards they were, but you have to understand how life was in Poland before the war. My family would have been considered very orthodox by today’s standards but by the standards of those times, they were pretty much like everyone else. Our home was kosher, everyone’s was. My father went to synagogue every Friday night and every Saturday morning, without fail, all the men did. I went with him from an early age, all the boys did. As I grew older, I went less and less. My brothers kept going but I found it boring. And just between you and me, Arnold, I wasn’t a believer. Not in religion, and I’m ashamed to say, not even in God. And after what the Nazis did to us, I became even more certain that there was no God. A God would not let the Holocaust happen to his people, his chosen people.’

I didn’t say it, but I felt exactly the same way. I went to synagogue only on the High Holidays, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and spent most of the time in the front courtyard chatting up the girls. I am pretty sure I didn’t believe in God, although I kept that fact to myself. Just in case I was wrong and He did exist, I didn’t want to take the risk of Him striking me down.

My father was one of six children, four boys and two girls. His parents, Aharon and Sarah, had two more children but they died shortly after birth. My father was the youngest and, as he frequently told me, was spoiled rotten by his older siblings, especially his two sisters, Ruthie and Sheindel. Avraham was the oldest of the boys. He left Częstochowa in the early nineteen thirties and made his way to New York, where he became a successful accountant. Israel and Hershel were his other two brothers.

‘I want you to remember their names, Arnold,’ he would tell me. ‘They were your family, or would have been had it not been for the war and what the Nazis did to us.’

Apart from Avraham, who left Poland before the war, Ruthie was the only other member of my father’s family to survive. She now lived in the US.

‘I was in the army when they were taken,’ he told me. ‘I never saw them again, I never even got to say goodbye.’

I was named after my grandfather Aharon. My Hebrew name is Aaron (a version of Aharon) ben Yaakov. Yaakov is the Hebrew for Jacob and Arnold is the English version of my Hebrew name.

‘Did your father work?’ I once asked. This may have seemed like a silly question but I had always been under the impression that Jewish men spent all their time either in synagogue or studying the Torah.

My father gave me a strange look. ‘Of course he worked, how do you think he made a living?’

I was probably eight or nine when I asked that question.

‘He was a butcher, as his father had been. It wasn’t his own butcher shop, he was employed by someone. The wages were not great but we got by. At least there was always meat on the Shabbat table.’

My father, according to his telling, was a naughty boy. He did not do well at school, either through lack of interest or lack of ability. He never said which.

‘I didn’t like school,’ he often told me. ‘I couldn’t wait to leave.’

And he did leave when he turned fifteen. His father was not very happy about it but I had the impression that he had little control over his youngest child, Yaakov.

‘What did you do after you left school?’ I asked.

‘I worked, what else could I do?’

His father convinced his employer to take my father in to the butcher shop to learn the trade.

‘I worked hard, Arnold, but I didn’t mind. I was a good worker. Even at the age of fifteen I was very strong. It was better than going to school. I didn’t like school,’ he told me yet again.

‘I am sure I was a big disappointment to my parents, especially to my mother. She wanted me to continue my studies. I am sure my father did too, but it was less important to him. His father was a butcher, he was a butcher and he would have been happy enough for me to be one too.’

My father had a number of friends who were Poles, non-Jews, which was unusual at the time.

‘I was the only one of my brothers who mixed with the Poles. My father didn’t know. He would not have approved, I’m sure of that.’

It must have been a love-hate relationship, as he often got into fights with the Polish boys, which, according to my father, were fights he always won.

‘I never lost a fight,’ he said. ‘Not one.’

I guess he was accepted by the non-Jewish boys because of his toughness and because he didn’t look particularly Jewish. His hair was fair, he had blue eyes and at well over six foot, he was unusually tall for a Jew in pre-war Poland. These physical features were to come in very handy later in his life.

At the age of twenty my father was drafted into the Polish army. This should have occurred at the age of eighteen, but it was common for Jewish families to delay reporting the birth of boys to the civil authorities. This was done to put off the inevitable military service which they knew lay ahead. As a result, my father’s official papers showed him to be two years younger than he really was.

My mother, Rivka, came from a smaller family. She was one of only three children, which was unusual, as most Jewish families had large numbers of children. She was the oldest. She had two younger sisters, Hannah and Leah. They lived with their mother, Sarah, and their maternal grandmother, Fruma. My mother’s father vanished in mysterious circumstances when my mother was very young. The circumstances were mysterious to me, as she refused to ever speak about them.

‘What happened to your father?’ I once asked my mother. ‘You never speak about him.’

My mother looked at me and I thought I could see tears in her eyes.

‘He left,’ was all she said.

I looked at my father enquiringly but he just shook his head. Clearly this subject was taboo. Many years later I found out that my mother’s father left the family and travelled to South America, to Argentina, I think. For all I know he remarried and I might have a whole other family somewhere.

Both my mother and her mother were seamstresses, which is how they made a living, once my mother’s father had left. I know that Fruma, her grandmother, was a very important influence in my mother’s life. I have seen a black-and-white photo of her and in that photo she appeared stern and unsmiling. Perhaps it was just a bad photo, because my mother always spoke of her as a warm, loving and caring person.

‘My grandmother was a very clever woman,’ my mother told me. ‘She wasn’t educated but she learned to read and write in Polish herself.’

That would have been very unusual in those days.

‘Work hard at school, Rivka,’ she would say. ‘You’re a clever girl. You can make something of yourself. You’re very good at mathematics and you could even become an accountant. I did work hard at school and I did do well, I was even offered a scholarship. If it wasn’t for the war, who knows what might have happened.’

My mother was the only one of her immediate family to survive the war. She spoke of her wartime experiences reluctantly and sparingly. I could only imagine the horrors that she had to endure.

My mother told me that she knew my father before the war but not well.

‘You should have seen how he looked back then,’ my mother told me. ‘He was so tall and so good looking. And he was blond; very few Jewish boys were blond. I was much younger and I don’t think your father even noticed me.’

They reconnected after the war in Częstochowa, and were married in nineteen forty-five.

My father was twenty-two years old when Germany invaded Poland, on the first of September, nineteen thirty-nine. Just two weeks later, Russia invaded from the East and by the first week of October the war in Poland was over. Germany and Russia then divided Poland between them.

My father spoke very little about his time in the Polish army. I can imagine that as a Jew, it was not an easy time for him. Anti-Semitism in the Polish army was even worse than in Polish society generally. Fortunately for my father, the Polish army was defeated so quickly that he did not see any fighting at all.

The rest of my father’s wartime experiences were very different to most of the other Jews in Poland.

‘I was never in the camps, or even in the ghetto,’ he used to say. ‘I fought the Germans.’

I knew that my father joined the partisans, after Poland’s defeat. I cannot recall how that happened or which group or groups he belonged to. I do have a vague recollection of him speaking about Lublin, a city three hundred kilometres east of Częstochowa, where a number of Jewish partisan groups operated. Some of the partisans in that area became well-known, although when I looked up the list of names in a book on the subject, I did not find my father’s name.

‘I killed plenty of those bastards,’ he told me. ‘We blew up bridges, trains and buildings. We lived in the forests. In winter it was freezing. Sometimes, we had no food. It was difficult, but we fought. We fought and we killed those German bastards, as many as we could.’

When I was younger and had not yet heard my father’s stories too many times, I did ask him some questions. I knew that the partisans operated in fairly small groups, ten or twenty, at most. They were up against a vastly superior force which was much better armed.

‘How did you manage to get weapons and explosives?’ I asked my father.

‘It wasn’t easy, Arnold, but we managed. We got them from the Germans, of course. They were the only ones who had weapons. We stole their weapons during the night. Sometimes we had to fight the Germans for their weapons.’

‘Weren’t you outnumbered?’

‘Yes we were, always. That’s why we had to be smarter than those German bastards, and we were smarter. That’s how we survived. Unfortunately, not all of us survived, but you must already know that.’

I nodded. I had done some reading about the partisans. Very many were killed.

‘We managed to steal German uniforms,’ my father said. He didn’t add that those uniforms were taken from soldiers who they had killed, usually by slitting their throats.

‘I didn’t look particularly Jewish when I was young, I still don’t. I was the one who often made the first contact. I was able to speak a few words of German, which helped. Often there were dogs, German shepherds, trained to kill. I was bitten more than once by those dogs.’

That explained my father’s dislike of all canines. We were never allowed to have a dog when I was growing up.

‘I would carry small amounts of meat with me,’ my father said. ‘That would distract the dogs so we could get close enough to the German soldiers to kill them. We all knew how to use our knives. That’s how we got our weapons. We had to kill for them.’

To be honest, I could not imagine my father doing all those things, but I knew he did. He even managed to sneak back into Częstochowa a few times.

‘I put on a German uniform,’ he said. ‘I managed to see my family in the ghetto. The first time my mother saw me in a German uniform, she screamed. It was night and I had to put my hand over her mouth and whisper my name to her in Yiddish, so she knew it was me.’

I didn’t think I would have had the courage to do the things of my father did. Perhaps if I had been in his situation, I might have found the courage. I sometimes tried to imagine what it would have been like but it was impossible. I could not imagine constantly living in fear for my life, as I know my parents had done. Sometimes, especially at night, in bed, if I thought about it, I would break out in a sweat, my heart racing, and my breathing fast and shallow. It was a panic attack yet I was safe, in my bed in Australia, not in occupied Poland.

He continued. ‘On one of my visits, I found my sister Sheindel in tears. Everyone looked very solemn and I asked why she was crying but no one answered. I insisted and finally Ruthie told me that Sheindel had been attacked by Piotr, a Polish boy who I had known since childhood. He was a man now and from what my brother Israel told me, he helped the Germans whenever he could. They gave him a uniform and he strutted around the town as if he owned it. He often came into the ghetto to taunt the Jews, often striking or kicking anyone who got in his way. Piotr and I had many fights when we were younger, fights I always won. He was a friend of sorts in those days but even then I knew that he was an anti-Semite.’

My father stopped at that point. He then took a deep breath. ‘I knew where he lived and that night I paid him a visit. He was fast asleep and didn’t see it coming. He would never bother Sheindel again. He would never bother anyone again.’

My father didn’t say what he did to Piotr and I didn’t ask. I’m sure he would have told me had I asked, but I don’t think I wanted to know.

He told his stories over and over. He told so many stories and spoke of his wartime experiences so much and so often, that I eventually found I had stopped listening, something that I have deeply regretted for many years. I should have paid more attention, I should have documented his stories for posterity, but I didn’t. And when I was much older and wanted to know more, it was too late. He was gone. Taken much too early by cancer, brought on by many years of heavy cigarette smoking.

The war left my father with an anger which stayed with him until he died. And who could blame him, after everything and everyone that he had lost. Again, the details are now sketchy, maybe they always were, but somehow, my father, Jacob Rosen, the Jew, ended up fighting with the Russian partisans. My understanding is that the Russians were not at all fond of their Jewish compatriots, who had to contend with the Russians’ anti-Semitism and discrimination. My father was fair and tall and managed to pass himself off as a non-Jew.

‘The Russians did not know I was a Jew,’ he told me. ‘I had no problem with them at all. I was a good fighter, at least as good as they were, probably better. The Russians respected that.’

Hundreds, possibly thousands of partisans were killed in the fighting, or executed by the Germans but my father managed to survive and returned to Częstochowa with the Soviet forces in nineteen forty-five. It was there that he joined the Communist Party.

‘I had no other choice,’ he told me. ‘It was expected, demanded. I was no Communist, but that’s how things were in Poland then. And, Arnold, it did give me the chance to get revenge. Revenge on those bloody Poles, who were all too happy to help the Nazis kill us. The Nazis were bad, but the Poles were worse. Why do you think the Nazis chose Poland to build most of the concentration camps? Bloody anti-Semites, the Poles, always were and still are.’

My father did not spell out what he meant by revenge. He didn’t have to. I’m sure it gave him some measure of satisfaction but in no way compensated for all that he had lost.

What my father did not know then, but would eventually find out, was that his joining the Communist Party, of which he was a member for only a short time, was to have a profound effect on the course of the rest of his life and consequently on mine.

My mother, Rivka Rosen (nee Jotkovich) was seventeen when the Germans invaded. She was still in high school. She referred to it as ‘Gymnasium’. That term always confused me but it was one of the Polish terms for secondary school and was spelt ‘gimnazjum’ in Polish.

‘I was a top student,’ she often told me. My mother was a modest woman, not one to brag about anything, but clearly she was proud of her scholastic achievements.

She was not tall, perhaps five foot five. She had black hair and green eyes and a warm smile. It was obvious that she was very bright and she could have gone far had circumstances been different, although as a Jew in Poland in the late nineteen thirties, her educational opportunities would have been very limited. Very few Jews were accepted into universities at that time and those that were, came from big cities like Warsaw and from wealthy families.

My mother attended a Jewish high school, walking distance from her home, which was a small apartment, on the second floor of an apartment complex where all the neighbours were Jewish.

‘When we walked to school, the Polish boys would throw stones at us,’ she said. ‘This was before the war. Uh, the Poles! They were worse than the Germans. Anti-Semites, all of them! Remember Arnold,’ she used to say. ‘I never want you to visit that horrible country. Never! The Poles are no better now. Anti-Semites!’

I could never understand why my parents’ hatred for the Poles was even greater than their hatred for the Germans, but that’s how it was.

My mother was a proud and principled woman, traits she carried with her until the last few years of her life when she was struck down by Alzheimer’s disease and no longer had any traits at all.

The German army, the Wermacht, entered Częstochowa on the third of September, nineteen thirty-nine.

‘I will never forget that day,’ my mother told me. ‘There were so many of them, so many German soldiers. They just marched in and took over. No one stopped them. We stood in the street, my sisters and I, and watched. My mother and grandmother were too afraid to come out. I wasn’t afraid that day. Of course, I had no idea what was coming, no one did.’

The next day, Monday the fourth of September, later became known as Black Monday, or as the Częstochowa massacre. More than three hundred Jews were killed that day, as well as seven hundred Poles.

I found this out from reading books, not from my mother. She must have been aware of what happened, it would have been impossible not to. When I asked her about it, she looked at me, shook her head and turned away.

Over the coming months, Jewish households and property were confiscated. Jews were mocked, beaten and degraded incessantly. I can only imagine what my mother and her family had to endure during those months. But she never spoke about it, not once.

In the first half of nineteen forty-one, the Jewish ghetto was created. Around forty thousand people were confined there. Most were from Częstochowa but there were also others, from nearby towns and villages. That is where my mother lived with her two sisters, her mother and her grandmother.

The term ‘ghetto’ originates from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice where the authorities compelled the Jews to live in fifteen sixteen. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, other Jewish ghettos sprung up in various European cities, but not in Poland.

Poland had a long history of tolerance towards their Jewish community, whose history there dates back to the twelve hundreds. In the sixteenth century, eighty per cent of the world’s Jews lived in Poland. It was the centre of Jewish culture.

Jews did not live in ghettos in Poland before World War Two. The Nazis confined the Jews to ghettos in many Polish cities both as a means of ensuring that they had a supply of slave labour and to ultimately facilitate the transportation of the Jews to the death camps. The Nazis set up Jewish Councils in the ghettos, the Judenrat, whose role was to administer the occupants of the ghetto and eventually to help organise their orderly deportation.

I once asked my mother what life in the ghetto was like. I received a one word answer: ‘Hard’.

My father was more forthcoming. ‘Your mother does not want to speak about those times, Arnold. But I do.’

Tell me something I didn’t know, I thought, but I remained silent.

‘The ghetto was worse than hard. People died every day from disease, from starvation. There was not enough food, not enough medicines. I managed to smuggle in some food for my family the few times I snuck in but it wasn’t enough.’

‘Leave the boy alone, Jacob,’ my mother would say. ‘He doesn’t need to hear all this.’

‘But he does,’ was my father’s reply. ‘If he doesn’t hear our stories, then how will he know?’

My mother did not say anything more.

I thought about what my father had said. Did I really want to know more? I wasn’t so sure that I did. Knowing about the Holocaust was one thing, but did I really want to know the specifics of what my parents and their families had to endure? I wasn’t sure how I would cope with that knowledge. And it was clear to me that my mother didn’t want to talk about her experiences. It had been a mistake to ask her, I realised that and I had no intention of upsetting her by ever asking her again.

In September nineteen forty-two, a so-called ‘Aktion’, a large-scale deportation took place. It was known as Operation Reinhard, named after Reinhard Heydrich, its architect. Over the next two weeks almost forty thousand of the ghetto’s inhabitants were put onto trains and transported to Treblinka, the concentration camp, where the vast majority was murdered.

It was sheer chance, an act of inexplicable kindness, that prevented my mother from being sent to Treblinka, where her whole family was killed. My mother spoke little of her wartime experiences but this was one story that she did share with us.

‘I was in the line for deportation. My mother, my grandmother and my sisters were somewhere in that line too. I had lost sight of them in all the chaos and the screaming. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a German officer came up to me and pulled me out of the line. He was yelling at me but I couldn’t understand a word he said. He motioned for me to go back into the ghetto, which I did. As a result, I survived, while my whole family was killed. I never saw them again.’

At that point of the story, there were tears in my mother’s eyes, I was sobbing and years later, when she retold the story to my younger sister, Sandra, when she was old enough to understand, all three of us would cry.

And I used to be naive enough to think that these stories left me unscathed.

The next year, in June nineteen forty-three, the ghetto was liquidated and the four thousand or so remaining Jews were sent to HASAG factories to work. At the end of June an uprising broke out. The Organisation of Jewish Fighters barricaded themselves in bunkers to fight the Germans. The Jews were poorly armed and the uprising was short lived and led to the deaths of over fifteen hundred of them. My mother must have been aware of this event but never spoke about it and I knew better than to ask her.

My mother, who was by then twenty years old, was also sent to HASAG to work.

‘We worked long hours, every day, seven days a week,’ she told me. While my mother used the term HASAG, she didn’t explain what it was. I assumed it was a place. Years later I looked up HASAG. It was an acronym. It stood for Hugo Schneider and then a long word in German starting with ‘A’ and some other unpronounceable words. In essence, HASAG were a number of factories. My mother then lived in the so-called Small Ghetto and worked in the munitions factory of the HASAG group.

‘The factory I worked in made bullets,’ my mother told us. ‘I must have made thousands of bullets for the German army. I hate to think who those bullets killed,’ she added. ‘But there is no point in thinking about it. I had no choice, none of us did, not if we wanted to survive.’

After almost two years working in the munitions factory, the war came to an end for my mother when the Soviets marched in and liberated Częstochowa.

‘It was a happy day for me. The war was finally over and I was free. But it was also a very sad time. I was alone, all alone. My entire family were gone and before long I found out that they had all been killed in Treblinka.’

The arrival of the Soviets meant liberation for my mother and it also led to my mother and father meeting, or to be more precise, re-meeting.

‘He looked thinner than I remembered him, but he was just as handsome, especially in that uniform.’

My parents bumped into each other in the street a few weeks later, literally. My father was hurrying on some errand when he almost knocked my mother over.

‘I apologised,’ my father said. ‘I then realised that the pretty young woman looked familiar.’

That chance meeting led to my parents reconnecting and slowly a romance bloomed. They were married two months later.

‘We were married by a rabbi,’ my father told us. ‘It came as somewhat of a surprise to me that there were still any rabbis left alive after the war. We also had a civil wedding, which the authorities required,’ he added.

Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of the times, my parents had no documentary evidence of either marriage. Under normal circumstances, the absence of a Ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, written in ancient Aramaic, would have made the marriage invalid. But those were not normal circumstances and after the war, the religious authorities were prepared to overlook this.

My father extricated himself from the Soviets, and he and my mother began to plan the rest of their lives together. His oldest brother, Avraham, had gone to New York before the war and his sister, Ruthie, who survived one of the camps, had made her way to the United States, which is where my father also desperately wanted to go.

First, my parents knew they had to get out of Poland, which they did by a combination of walking and train travel. By then, my mother was already pregnant with me.

‘You should have seen us, Arnold. We walked over mountains. We walked for days. I don’t know how we had the strength after what we had been through, but we did it.’

And of all places, they ended up in Germany.

‘I had a cousin there,’ my father said. ‘He somehow managed to find me in Częstochowa and asked me to join him.’

Mietek, my father’s cousin lived in Waiblingen, which is where my parents finally arrived after two weeks of travelling. Mietek had a job in a textile factory and arranged a job for my father in the same factory.

‘I was a butcher, Arnold. What did I know about textiles or machines? Nothing, but I learned, I had to. I was a good worker and after a year I was promoted to foreman.’

My mother was by then heavily pregnant and could not work. She gave birth to me the next July.

Once they settled in Germany, my father began his quest to go to America. It was not to be. Fear of Communism was sweeping the United States and my father’s membership of the Communist Party, brief as it was and unavoidable as it was, meant that a visa to the United States was denied, over and over. I was much too young at the time to be aware of any of this. When I was older, he told me what he had to go through.

‘I went to one interview after another. I explained why I had to join the Communist Party. I explained that I had no choice, that I wasn’t a Communist, I never was, but it all fell on deaf ears. Every answer was the same – no.’

His brother, Avraham, in New York tried to intercede on his behalf but to no avail. The door to the United States was closed to my father.

Those experiences hurt my father deeply and continued to have an impact on him for the rest of his life.

So, at the age of four years and eleven months, I boarded a ship in Hamburg with my parents, for the long voyage to Australia, a country I’d never heard of and knew nothing about. A childhood friend of my father’s lived in Melbourne and acted as our sponsor. That is how we managed to get a visa to Australia. My father had mixed emotions. He was happy to get out of Germany, excited at the prospect of starting a new life in a country so far away. At the same time he was also disappointed. He would never get to America, never see his surviving siblings.

For me, it turned out to be the best decision my parents ever made.