Letter from my Father Read online

  Letter from my Father

  Dasia Black

  Dr Dasia Black (whose given name is Ester Hadasa) was born in Poland in 1938, survived the Nazi occupation of her country and at the end of the War escaped with her family to West Germany. At the age of twelve she arrived in Sydney, where she completed her schooling and university studies. She has lectured on Child and Adolescent Psychology, Intercultural Education and the Psychology of Racism at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney for most of her professional life. She considers her seven-year involvement in a teacher education program for indigenous students in remote communities a most rewarding part of her professional life. She is now a psychologist in private practice.

  Letter from my Father

  Dasia Black

  Brandl & Schlesinger

  Copyright © Dasia Black, 2012

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  First published by Brandl & Schlesinger in 2012

  www.brandl.com.au

  Book design by Andras Berkes-Brandl

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Black, Dasia.

  Title: Letter from my father / Dasia Black.

  Edition: 1st ed.

  ISBN: 9781921556197 (pbk).

  Subjects: Black, Dasia. Immigrants – Australia – Biography. Polish people – Australia – Biography. Mental health personnel – Australia – Biography.

  Dewey Number: 305.906912092.

  In memory of my parents Szulem and Chana Kahane and for my grandchildren

  What surrounded me was totally unfit for my inherent nature, yet I survived. I survived through some mysterious, encoded talent in my being, through some unshakeable ancestral commitment to hang on and keep going.

  Magda Denes: Castles Burning

  This book is a personal and subjective memoir of real people and events, but names have been changed to protect the privacy of those who appear in Ester’s life story.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing Letter from my Father over a number of years has been a challenging and all-consuming task. I was fortunate in having generous friends who contributed to the completion of the book, each offering a special viewpoint and talent. To each I am grateful. I would like particularly to thank Yola Center, Diana Encel, Rina Huber and Clara Stein for their meticulous reading of the manuscript in its early stages and for giving me thoughtful and practical advice. The late Sol Encel gave me heart by simply saying: This is a story worth telling. I am grateful to Diane Armstrong for her gentle but persistent questioning about when I was going to start writing and later whether I was giving my writing adequate time. Letter from my Father would not have been written without my editor Diana Giese. She has been consistent in asking for more and better, in maintaining my courage when it flagged, in suggesting structural changes and showing remarkable sensitivity to what I wanted to say and what I needed to omit. My thanks also go to Veronica Sumegi of Brandl & Schlesinger for her insightful guidance and wisdom on the purpose and shape of the book. My devoted and patient husband, children and grandchildren were consistent in giving me the space and moral support in what was at times a painful journey.

  Dasia Black

  Sydney 2012

  PROLOGUE

  The Broken Vase

  A woman is sitting on the floor in a dimly-lit room, trying to glue together the shards of a broken clay vase. She does it over and over again, but the shards will not stick to one another.

  The woman is me.

  The Broken Vase Protocol was a workshop for psychologists I attended in April 2003 in Melbourne. It was offered by Erik De Soir from Belgium, who has worked with traumatised people involved in large-scale disasters. De Soir’s basic premise is that once a trauma has occurred, a person’s life structure and core beliefs change irrevocably. They cannot be ‘fixed’ or ‘repaired’. We need to create a new structure based on a new reality.

  The workshop aimed at helping traumatised clients integrate their experiences into their post-trauma lives. We divided up into groups of three. Each group was handed a red clay flower vase, and asked to go outside the building and smash it. We were told: Come back and, using the strong adhesive provided, make what you can of it. We could make a collage or another shape, since restoring the vase to its original shape was clearly impossible. That was the fundamental fact De Soir wanted us to experience.

  While other groups threw their vase to the ground outside and soon returned with several broken shards, we were not satisfied with our first breakage. Since we agreed that it was not broken enough, I stood on a bench and dropped it again from a greater height. It shattered into many more pieces, some just small particles of clay. We returned to our window-less room, sat down on the floor and each of us started putting different bits together. We responded as if we could rebuild from scratch. Sue worked on the sides of the vase, Jane on the upper part and I focused on the base and a major connecting side. I spread a plentiful amount of epoxy adhesive on the edges, held them together for more than the required time and set down what I had made. Immediately the shards fell apart. I did it again more carefully, aware that the edges were rough due to their having crumbled after it had been dropped. Again it fell apart. Our group kept on working, unsuccessfully trying to fit together the shards. We were not getting anywhere.

  Halfway through the workshop it was time for lunch. By that time, a number of the groups had created quite attractive arrangements of their shards. We went up to the dining room for the buffet lunch, where we found most people enjoying the break, relaxing on the terrace in the sunshine. Not I. I hurriedly ate my lunch, returned to the empty room and continued my task of restoring at least the base of the vase. I carefully spread the glue on the edges, held them together and set the base down. Again it fell apart. I repeated the same action over and over again.

  Eventually Erik and the others returned. I told them what I had been doing, and the other two in my group suggested that since it was so important to me, I should take the broken pieces home to work on later.

  My husband, who had accompanied me to the conference, was surprised to find a plastic bag with shards of the broken vase in our room that evening. He was even more surprised that I intended to take them home to Sydney. Later that night, I woke and decided that I was carrying things too far. I got out of bed, found the bag and tossed it into the garbage bin.

  The next morning I took it out again, not sure of its future. In the lobby I met Erik who thought that I should take a few of the pieces home and see what I could do with them. This book is the result.

  I

  With my Mother and Father

  The whole world was white. The snow was like a huge, high fence around the house which was also white. Father had to dig a path for us to go in and out. Some big girls took me on a sleigh down a steep hill that sloped towards our door. I had my legs spread one on each side of the sleigh, and had to hang on tightly to the girl in front. I loved the thrill of going down really fast with the sun shining on the snow. My mother Chana was standing outside the house, hand shading her eyes, looking up towards me and calling out. She had on a dark blue jacket. She was pretty.

  The Seret River had frogs in it. Beside it was a meadow where in summer I picked yellow and white daisies. In our house my mother and father and I lived with my Grandma Sara and Grandpa Israel. They owned a flour mill. I had been told that there was a Baba Jaga in town, a sort of witch, an old woman I imagined with beady eyes and a long nose that stuck out. She took naughty children
away, they said. When I saw any old woman with a bent back I thought it was her and grasped Mother’s hand tightly. Baba Jaga was often on my mind since I didn’t like being good all the time.

  Then I was sick. The doctor told me to lie on my tummy so he could cover my back with hot little suction cups, small glasses heated and placed upside down. This was a good way of making a sick person’s fever go away, they said. I didn’t like it but did not complain. I was savouring the lollies that my Grandpa Mendel from Zbaraz had brought for me. I also loved the doll that my mother’s sister had given me.

  One very cold day, I was standing by our living room window which faced the street, looking at the beautiful patterns on the glass shimmering in the winter sun. Why had they put sand between the window panes? Outside, children were making a snowman. My father Szulem called me. I went and sat close to him on the sofa, while he taught me the Hebrew alphabet, the Aleph Bet. I was happy all over.

  It was April now and the days were getting warmer. The Jewish people of the town were busy preparing for the Passover festival. It was exciting to go with Mother and Father to a house where people were standing at rows of wooden tables in a large room, kneading dough, rolling it out and cutting it into squares, then pricking little holes with a special fork. They laid out the squares on large flat trays which went into the oven to bake. Matzos, the unleavened bread we Jewish people eat right through Passover smelled good as they cooked. Everyone seemed to be busy doing something, talking all the time.

  Then suddenly everything changed. It was summer, July 1941. I was three-and-a-half years old. We heard the news that the German army was advancing. They were expected to pass through our town, Mikulince, in the next twenty-four hours. I didn’t know what German army advancing meant but I could feel that the grown-ups were nervous. We went to the forest to hide and wait. We had to be very quiet. Though it was night, we saw and heard the German soldiers march and drive along the road in big cars called tanks. I was scared, terribly frightened of the dogs barking and of the roar, the terrifying roar of the Germans’ motorcycles. Finally they were gone. I didn’t understand what was happening but now I knew danger.

  We returned to our house but we didn’t stay there for long. My father decided to leave Mikulince and join his family in Zbaraz, the small town where he was born. It was not far away. One evening we set out for this new place. I was not put to bed but allowed to lie on the sofa, fully dressed and clutching my doll. A horse-drawn cart arrived and we packed our belongings on to it. It was so quiet. No one seemed to want to talk. We drove through the night. I was alert to new sounds and sights around me: the driver whipping the horses, the bright stars, my parents whispering. My father held me wrapped tightly in his arms. I sensed that scary things happened in the world, but knew that when I was in my father’s arms, nothing bad could happen to me.

  We arrived in Zbaraz. I heard people whispering about something called the Jewish Problem. A very bad man called Katzmann, head of something called the SS and the police district of Galicia, had ordered a vigorous evacuation of Jewish people from the area. I really didn’t understand what all these new words meant, but I did understand that SS were people who terrified everybody, like a large crowd of Baba Jagas. Katzmann ordered all of us to live inside the Zbaraz ghetto, an area near the marketplace with many people already crowded into it.

  It was the beginning of autumn and I was nearly four years old. We lived in a room on the first floor of a two-storey house, with my father’s Aunt Gutele. We shared the kitchen and bathroom with some other families. Our room had a bed for Mother and Father and a little sofa for me. There was a table with some chairs. Sometimes one of Aunt Gutele’s sons, my father’s young cousin Simcha, came to visit. I loved him. He played with me and liked to pick me up and carry me high in his arms. One night I was allowed to stay up until he was due to arrive. I was so happy. But I fell asleep waiting for him. He came and went and no one thought to wake me. When I realised I had missed out on seeing him, I thought how cruel grown-ups could be.

  I was smacked by Mother for not eating enough, but I did like the sunflower seeds that my Aunt brought me. I enjoyed drinking tea from a saucer after it became nice and cool. My mother kept telling me not to slurp it. At bedtime, Father would take me to the toilet, holding me close in his arms.

  We were given white armbands imprinted with the blue Star of David. They were meant to let everybody know that we were Jewish, though I never went outside the house. Outside there was danger, bad danger. I forgot what the sky and the sun and the trees looked like. But I liked sweeping the floor of our room and the hallway where other people lived, with a little broom. This was my favourite pastime.

  I knew that the grown-ups were more and more frightened and nervous. They talked about mass killings in forests and about people digging their own graves. All this was somehow in the air. I really did not understand it, but was distraught when I heard that my fun-loving cousin Simcha was one of those who had to dig his own grave.

  Mother and Father, helped by the other people in the house, built a hiding place, a bunker, in the space beneath it. The entrance was concealed under a false step leading from our room to a little balcony. We climbed a ladder down to the bunker every time someone warned us that an organised raid was about to happen. This, I was told, was when the SS came into the house and took Jewish people away to be killed. One day there was no time for us to go down and we quickly hid under the bed as the men burst in. We lay quietly, barely breathing. I was becoming good at being very, very quiet. They made a lot of noise, then left. Good. Then there was another raid. We hurried down to the bunker and closed the step. On top of us we could hear the sound of the SS in their heavy boots stamping back and forth, throwing furniture about and shouting, always shouting. We sat there in silence. My heart beat fast with fear. Terrible things would happen if someone made a sound, they said. A child started to cry. People froze. It stopped. Everyone breathed out again. There was a long, long silence. At last it was safe to go up again. For now.

  Another family moved into our room with us. Now it was really crowded. There was a mother and a father and their two little sons, with whom I sometimes played. The father was a tall man. They seemed nice. One day the SS came and took the whole family away. After a while the father returned alone. Everyone understood that the mother and the boys would never come back. The father behaved strangely. He just lay on a narrow mattress in the corner of our room for hours, staring at the wall, refusing to eat. After a few days he was moved to the hallway. They made chicken broth for him but he would not swallow it. He just wanted to be left alone. I could see that he was very sad but kept away from him as he got thinner and thinner. He died. His skeletal body was put in the room at the end of the hallway and covered with a sheet. I kept sneaking in along with another little girl to lift the sheet and see what a dead body looked like. We were curious and wanted to find out if he would move again. He remained completely still.

  II

  A Child Alone

  I was now four years old and learning new exciting words. But there were also other words, words that scared me. The most important was aktion. This is when the SS came into the house and took Jewish people away to be killed. I heard the grown-ups talk about how in August and September hundreds of Jewish people were taken to a concentration camp at Belzec or shot in the forests near the town. I didn’t fully understand what these words meant, but I knew camps were places where some really bad things happened. In the midst of all these bad things my father kept teaching me the Aleph Bet every morning.

  It was becoming colder. People felt that worse things would happen. In Zbaraz the SS rounded up Jewish men and women by dragging them from their houses and hiding places and sending them to Belzec. People whispered that the Zbaraz ghetto was like a city of death. The eighth and ninth of November were important dates to remember because many, many people were killed. My mother and father could not see how our family could survive. This meant staying alive. They decided
that I must stay alive and arranged for me to be cared for by a Polish lady, Sabina, who was a Catholic. I was to go and live with her as an Aryan child while they remained in the Ghetto.

  Sabina lived with her Jewish husband Yaakov and their two little boys in Tarnopol, a much bigger place than Zbaraz. Yaakov was born in Czechoslovakia and had known Cousin Simcha. My parents gave Sabina all the money they had as payment for looking after me. Mother and Father told me that I would be staying with Sabina and her family for some time and that they would come and fetch me after the War.

  I didn’t want to leave my parents. I didn’t understand how they could love me and give me away to strangers. But Father explained that I must go at once. I was allowed to take my favourite toys, a salt and a pepper shaker and a little white ball. You must pretend to be a little Aryan girl, they told me. I understood that meant Christian, not Jewish. I could no longer be called by my own name Ester Hadasa with its diminutive Dasia (from Hadasa). Now my name was Stasia, a real Polish name. Sabina told me that my Slavic looks, which meant high cheekbones, light brown hair and green eyes, would make it easier for me to pass as a child who was not Jewish.

  My father explained over and over again that I must never tell anybody what my real name was. If I did, something terrible would happen. I must hide the real Ester. I absorbed this message. He took me through some streets I had never seen and then through a gate. Sabina was waiting for me. He left me with her.

  I began a new life in Tarnopol. I was now Stasia, a Catholic girl and Sabina was supposed to be my mother. But she did not behave like my own mother. She never hugged or kissed me so that I forgot what it was like to be held and loved.