© Melina Magdalena (2006)
PART ONE: Bergen Belsen - August 1985
At the age of fifteen I went to Bergen-Belsen. I went only in the company of Christa, my German host-mother. To discover why my two host-sisters didn’t go, I would have to delve back into my letters and diary. Possibly, Anke was already in Adelaide, and Ina was at her father’s for the weekend. Christa often took me places without the other two. I had the sense that she enjoyed the opportunity; certainly I hope it was not done solely out of some onerous sense of duty as a host mother. I mostly enjoyed our outings unreservedly. We went to a sculpture park, art exhibitions, several castles and for walks in some glorious parks.
In 1985 I was still firmly closed to my Jewish heritage. This was a shameful secret part of me that would be dangerous to reveal, though with equal measures of shame and secrecy I had been exploring it the only way I knew how – through books that told stories of Jewish families. Most of these books were rather sinister in nature, set around the time of Europe during World War II. A notable exception was Snyder’s The All-of-a-kind Family, though in hindsight I had, during my childhood, been mysteriously drawn to contemporary writers who were Jewish, even when their subjects were secular. At that time I had not yet discovered Chaim Potok. I believed there were no Jewish people left in the world. At least – I had never met any.
Being Jewish was something I never spoke about. To this day I am not sure whether Christa knew that I was Jewish. She knew about my East German relatives, and probably knew my mother’s mother had left Vienna in 1939. She was smart enough to put two and two together. I vaguely remember the shock that I caused when I asked our neighbours upstairs whether they were Jewish, after noticing a candelabra that they owned. Possibly, Christa knew a great deal more than I gave her credit for. She and my parents talked, after all, plus who knows what kind of information my Onkel Immo and Tante Ursul in East Berlin had given her on the phone about me and my circumstances.
There is not much about that day that I remember, apart from the feeling. It’s really quite difficult to even approach the topic, and my reluctance to do so is making itself known by the frantic circles in which my mind is running, spider-webbing connections between other things that happened while I was in Germany, that impacted on me with similar emotional magnitude.
The one time I was really scared in Germany pales in significance against some of the things that really happened while I was there. Having my passport snatched at the East German border and spending a night alone on various train platforms in the limbo land between East and West Berlin was not nearly as frightening to me as the weekend I went away with a friend and her parents to their caravan. I wasn’t at all sure I would come back from that trip. Her father was scary, and I remember thinking he was a Nazi, though I had no reason for doing so, that I can recollect, apart from my emotional conviction. I gave him no reason for thinking he had any cause to eliminate me, but I judged him capable of seeing through my disguise as a white Australian girl.
We drove to Bergen-Belsen on the Autobahn. Ina was not with us this day, but she was with us that other day, perhaps the time we went out to see the fruit trees on the coast, in the country, when Christa’s face grew grim and mask-like in the rear vision mirror. Both us girls were sitting in the back seat and strained to see what she might be looking at.
Christa ordered us curtly not to look, unusually for the woman I knew only as kind and easy-going. She stopped the car and got out.
Ina has a physical appearance – thin, pale-skinned and freckled, with rambunctious red hair and a huge smile – which matches her highly-strung and hypersensitive personality. Neither she nor I dared to peek out the window. We found out what had happened later, via an overheard conversation. A man had deliberately turned his car around on the Autobahn and, at great speed, drove it under the trailer part of a semi-trailer, thus slicing his car and its occupants, neatly in horizontal halves. I doubt it was so neat for those who witnessed the carnage. Christa is a doctor, and had felt compelled to assist, if possible. The horror of that incident, which I cannot in my mind label as accident, lingers with the same emotional tone as our excursion to Bergen-Belsen.
This story is so hard to tell. My body’s reaction is to eat, eat, eat for comfort and distraction. Already I have consumed a bowl of white rice, a peacharine, nectarine and half a bowl of chocolate covered almonds, none of which brought me much satisfaction, let alone nutritional value. I feel jumpy and alert. The sound of a jackhammer at the building site down the street, shot through my head and shot me out of my seat as though whoever is using it had crept up behind me and turned it on in my ear.
So what happened, I ask the part of myself that holds these memories locked tightly away? What did I see, what did I hear, what did I smell, touch, taste, that day? I find it’s not so easy to separate that day from those others, before. And therein lies, potentially, the treacherous web of memory that stretches beyond my time and the other time.
I remember. I was a young woman. I wore a scarf over my dark plaited hair, and a dress I had made myself. The fabric was durable, the colours were dark, and the garment was faded. I wore shoes. Perhaps I had a child or two? We arrived. I do not remember the journey. I will not remember the before or the during. I will not remember my name. It doesn’t matter. We were stripped naked, driven into a room and gassed to death. And then, we were not. That’s all.
At Bergen-Belsen the sky was slate grey and dead. The stones were cold. With one breath I was there and another elsewhere. My senses were disoriented with the dislocation of being simultaneously in two times. It wasn’t the same yet it was.
This cannot have been at Bergen Belsen – there were no gas chambers there. Perhaps we were just passing through?
Christa and I did not join a tour – for that, I was grateful. With my heightened awareness I was able to understand the tour guide in a way that my rudimentary German in my 1985 could not have coped with. I did not want to listen to what that tour guide had to say. I felt offended, squeamish and on display. What she said about that place was anyway a crock of shit; meaningless and watered-down; apologetic because no one who went to that place could possibly speak of what was done there and still maintain their self-respect as a human being.
Perhaps one day I’ll find the courage to delve into my diary and letters and find out what Christa and I did at Bergen-Belsen that day. I have a sense that I misbehaved in some way. This is akin to my belief that there are holes and gaps in my life for which I have no recoverable memories. I am always afraid of what I might have done during those times. Did Christa pick up on my confusion and distress? Did I keep it all in, as we walked through the rooms and looked at the displays of clothing, shoes and jewellery?
Years later, as part of my degree, I chose to take a course about the German Holocaust. This took place during the time of my coming out as a Jew. I encountered Regina Zielinski for the first time that semester, when she came to our lecture and spoke of her experiences in Sobibor. She spoke of how her mother pushed her forward from the line and told the guards that her daughter was an excellent knitter. There was need in the camp for just a few women to knit socks for the German Army. Thus was Regina’s life spared, while her mother and sisters were led to their deaths. Not so long after that, Regina and the others who were still amongst the living were faced with a pile of clothing to sort. The reward was, they might find something to put on their own bodies in the cold, since they had no possessions and no warm clothes of their own.
When Regina described how she came upon her own mother’s coat in that pile of anonymous cast-offs, a clarion bell struck in my memory. I almost laughed in disbelief and horror at the impunity and hubris of what my mind was suggesting to me. It was just another example of my unrestrained and outrageous imagination and my obsession with identifying as a victim at any opportunity. That was not the way to wellness. One of the triggers for me at Bergen-Belsen in 1985 can surely not have been the sight of an article of clothing on that anonymous pile in the museum display that somehow linked me to my life, back then. How utterly absurd.
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