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Aftermath – Another Unknown World
In early 1948, my brother wrote to inform me that he had met a woman named Renee Engel, from Khust in the Carpathian regiona survivor who had relatives in Canada. He said that in all likelihood he would emigrate to that country whose streets I thought were paved with gold. In May 1948, my sister called me from Liberec, frantically telling me that Josko was sick and needed penicillin, which at that time was impossible to find in Czechoslovakia. I asked Dr. Mauer for the help he had offered me when I arrived in Schatzalp. Once he agreed to prescribe the penicillin, the problem at hand was how to send it without it being confiscated by the government. Mr. Schneider, the owner of the candy factory in Davos, and I disguised the glass tubes containing the drugs by covering them with chocolate. I sent the box of chocolates special delivery along with a birthday card. I repeated this a few times using different addresses so as not to arouse the suspicion of government officials.
Schneider's in 1997 was the store where 50 years earlier Peter disguised penicilin in candy to send to his sister Zsenka, who was linving in Liberec. (Photo: Naomi Kramer)
The Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in June 1945. I was notified that the service of currency exchange would no longer be permitted and that my immediate return was requested. Without the cooperation of the Czech government I could no longer stay in Schatzalp. Anticipating the problems of an unstable government, I had saved money from the monthly sums that had been forwarded to me during my two years in Switzerland. I was friendly with the baker in Davos. He offered to rent me a room, which I took in November 1948.
My brother visited me in Switzerland while he was en route to Canada in October 1948. He stayed in a hotel in Davos for three nights and four days and arranged a visit with Dr. Mauer. If I moved out of the sanatorium I would become an alien in the country Bumi was concerned about my future.
After 24 months in Schatzalp, I had become a seasoned patient and my daily routine included smoking, drinking, and playing poker. On the second evening of Bumi's visit, he discovered me with other Schatzalp veterans engaging in these ignoble pursuits. Struck by the empty life I was living, he scorned my behaviour. I promised him that I would examine the direction in which I was taking my life. This was the first time I considered the advantages that individual choice offers us in determining our fate. Recognition of the moral responsibility I had toward a cultural and religious heritage that includes some of the highest ethical standards known to the world was the reason I redirected my goals.
A new life in Davos. Peter is walking with the doctor from Palestine, who showed him how to use cutlery properly. (KFF Archives)
I changed clothes in my room and we went to dinner. My table was on the left side of the dining room. Bumi walked past it and as I followed his rapid gait there was an outcry: "Happy birthday, Peter!"
Thirty of my friends in Schatzalp burst into greeting, in almost as many languages at this celebration of my 23rd birthday, which Bumi had quietly organized for me.Anxious to join his fiancee in Montreal, he left a few days later. Shortly after, he wrote to inform me that my visa to Canada was complete, conditional on a medical report indicating I was in good health. This report included the requirement that an X-ray be taken at the Canadian Consulate in Berne, Switzerland. Dr. Mauer offered to accompany me. I was anxious and apprehensive on the train to Berne and grateful for Dr. Mauer's company, The Canadian doctor at the consulate was aware of Dr. Mauer's medical discoveries and his innovative treatment of tuberculosis. Having obtained my visa and passport from the Swiss police in Davos, I booked a train to Le Havre with a connection in Paris.
A birthday card made for Peter by a patient in Schatzalp with greetings from the patients. (KFF Archives)
Saying goodbye to Dr. Mauer was a difficult and emotional experience. I thanked him for his participation in my recovery, He was like a father to me. My experience with Dr. Mauer satisfied the expectation of help, which in itself is a fundamental condition of the human psyche such as is the desire to survive. The Nazi empire was one of destruction whose methodology included the obliteration and elimination of any opportunity that would allow its captives to possibly help or aid one another. In this regime any human touch or gesture was suspect and one could be shot for offering a helping hand to a fellow inmate. Dr. Mauer helped me to recover from my physical ailments and this restored my trust in humankind.
Unfortunately, Dr. Mauer, like many people in the socalled helping professions at the time, overstepped his role as physician and offered me advice outside his area of expertise. I think this was based on his irrational and unjustifiable conviction of absolute causality, My experience was too painful for him to hear and he predicated the following advice on the mistaken notion that ignorance is bliss His final words to me when I left were the following: "In Canada, forget your past as much as possible. Put all of your experiences behind you, work hard, do physical labour, and move on. Do not talk about your experiences during the war This is the best cure for your illness."
Peter in Schatzalp in 1997. Today the former sanatorium is a ski resort. (Photo: Naomi Kramer)
In retrospect, I take exception to his referring to me as ill. I did not cling to a will to survive the hell of the Nazi reign only to be called ill by a man who spent the war years protected in neutral Switzerland. I think that my vulnerable state at that time led me to follow this bad advice for too many years. It was prescribed by a man who was trained as a pulmonary physician, yet took the liberty to act like a psychiatrist.
From the port of Le Havre, I travelled six days on the SS Scythia. The Atlantic Ocean in April was stormy and turbulent, and with eight men in a cabin suffering from seasickness, conditions were not pleasant. I tried to spend as much time on the deck as possible. I arrived at pier 51 in the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia on 13 April 1949. From there I immediately travelled by train to Montreal, Quebec. Exhausted from the journey and hoping to sleep on the train, I upgraded my ticket to coach class from economy, I regretted this decision every inch of the way to Montreal as we screeched forward and lurched backward on alternating ties. Windsor Station! I had arrived at my destination. But there was no one there to meet me.
I asked a taxi driver to take me to 425 Laval Street, the address I had written on a piece of paper, fearing he would not understand my accent. Around the city we toured. He pointed out many sites, including the cross on top of Montreal's largest mountain, and told me it was lit up in the evening. Growing impatient, I pulled out the paper and demanded that he immediately drive me to that location. A $15 taxi ride, which at that time should have cost $3, was my introduction to Canada.
I looked up the peculiar exterior staircase that is indigenous to Montreal architecture, walked to the first landing, and rang the bell to the flat on the third floor the Engels.
"Dudi is that you?" asked an attractive middle-aged woman in Hungarian.
"Yes," replied Dudi, a.k.a. 83150, a.k.a. Dezider, a.k.a. Dovid Wolfe, a.k.a. Peter.
Five years had brought me through a diverse set of identities. Mrs. Engel invited me to her apartment and showed me to my room. I nearly fainted when I entered this cubicle, which was no more than four feet by six. I unpacked my belongings and laid the gifts I had brought on the kitchen table leather belts, shoes, and a wedding ring. I purchased the ring in Paris from a jeweller friend of Josko's for my brother to give to his fiancee.
Al, as my brother had come to be known in Canada, was the first to return to Mrs. Engel's flat. The company he worked for bussed their immigrant employees from the Main, the central street in what was then the immigrant area of Montreal, to Longueuil, a town off the island of Montreal located on the South shore. Al was employed in a lumber factory, a business he knew well.
Next, Renee and her young sister, Sonia, arrived from their respective jobs as a dry cleaner and a bookkeeping clerk in a butcher's shop. They were both tall and quite beautiful and regarded themselves as highly desirable to men.The topic of conversation that evening revolved around Al and Renee's forthcoming wedding. The marriage had been postponed until I arrived. They told me a little about life in Canada and I sensed that this would be quite different from my last two and a half years in Switzerland. There were moments that evening when I wondered whether I had made the right decision in declining the offer of adoption made to me by the baker's family in Davos. I knew that implicit in this offer had been an expectation of marriage to his daughter.
Peter's landing immigrant document issued in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 13 April 1949. The ship was the Scythia. (KFF Archives)
Peter's Canadian Identity certificate. (KFF Archives)
Monday morning I was employed as a manual labourer by Canadian Plywood, a wholesale outlet owned by George Goodfellow on McGuire Street, about a half-hour walk from my apartment. My first job consisted in carrying four-by-eight sheets of plywood, a task for which I was paid 35c an hour. From April to September of that year I did not miss a day of work; I was the model employee already edging my way up the ranks of the company from manual labourer to the less taxing and more lucrative position of lumber grader. On Yom Kippur, 1949,1 took my first day off from work and attended services at the Romanian Synagogue on St. Joseph Street. The following day, I was no longer referred to by name, but as Jew I mistakenly had thought that rights and responsibilities of all citizens were upheld by all citizens in Canada. After about two weeks of repeatedly being referred to as Jew by a co-worker, Roger, I simply got fed up and turned to him and said, "Roger, I call you by your name and I expect you to do the same for me." That evening we both worked late and while he was operating a forklift he claimed that he accidentally slipped into reverse and in doing so crashed into me. Anyone who has used industrial machinery knows that you must make a very conscious physical effort to slip into reverse. When Roger got off the truck, despite the fact that he had dislocated my shoulder, I came to blows with him. The Jewish community in Montreal, I am sorry to say, was prejudiced and often cruel toward survivors. There was an unwritten rule that most Jews understood concerning the Shoah. People knew but did not want to hear. I was often called a geller and a greener and regarded as a second-class citizen - a refugee. My first encounter with the humiliation and degradation of being spurned by the Jewish community occurred on this same Yom Kippur. Two of my friends, both survivors, Arthur Schwartz and Simon Weiss, attended services with me.We entered and remained by the banister in the rear of the shule, listening to the cantor. At the end of the prayer, an official of the synagogue stood in front of the half-empty room and said, "Everybody standing in the back without seats, please leave the synagogue."
Peter and his brother Al (Bumi), in Montreal, Canada five years after liberation. (KFF Archives)
For three young men who had been in Canada less than six months, and who had neither family nor community, these comments stung with a poisonous venom—more deadly than any animal could inflict.
In general, Shoah education and commemoration were not priorities of the Jewish community, The need for survivors to have a memorial site to mourn relatives that perished in the Shoah was generally shunned. Funding for construction of such sites was not forthcoming from Jewish communal organizations or synagogues in Montreal.
My own experience erecting a monument to memorialize victims of the Shoah, through the Beth Ora synagogue in Saint-Laurent, a suburb of Montreal, reflects this insensitivity, For several years I requested that a monument be constructed in memory of the congregation's family members who did not survive the Shoah. Initially the congregation's objections were based on the financial constraints of the synagogue's budget, then as the congregation's members matured and the finances grew, the President questioned the need to remember the past. Only after I drew a parallel with his 2,250 kilometre round trip to say Kaddish at a relative's grave in the United States did he realize the meaning a memorial has for survivors. Much lobbying and many discussions aimed at convincing other younger Canadian-born members of the Executive and the Board finally resulted in the erection of a monument to the victims of the Shoah. This monument stands in the Beth Ora cemetery.
It is a liberating and empowering experience to see oneself in the past. Conversely, it is a cruel trick that the present plays on the past when one appears to be invisible in history, This is the effect on survivors whose past is neither heard nor remembered.
"Monument" derives from the Latin verb monere, meaning simultaneously to remind and to warn. If we accept the need to memorialize then we must reiterate history, Given the proper balance between depictions of the life that was and destruction of this life, we do indeed fulfil our legacy and bear witness for those who did not live to tell the tale. What greater homage can one pay? This can also be achieved through witness testimony, which is a different type of memorial than that carved from stone or etched in metal. Survivor testimony, either firsthand or recorded on audio visual tapes or through the written word, is a kind of living memorial. Memorialization, commemoration, and education are themes that have become of increasing concern to me.
Memory is the way in which the mind represents experience to itself. Deep memories, such as those of dreams, invoke the senses and with that, the reality of the experience. This is why we awaken screaming panic-stricken from nightmares. The intellectual memory to which I resort when describing events to an audience does not invoke the reality of the past for me. If it did I could not speak.
When I weighed 40 kilograms in Flossenburg and my body had overcome my mind,no matter how hard I tried I could not conjure images from my past to comfort me. It was impossible to escape into the recollection of the warm wind blowing over my face on an idyllic lazy summer afternoon in Munkács. My life was almost dependent on being able to transpose and detach my mind from the hell on earth my body was in to the reality of a pleasant memory, It was as if the only escape was through memories of my previous life. The horror of camp life could not be physically combatted. It could only be challenged through a spiritual resistance and that I accomplished first by transposing myself into the past. I could meet the present, which was constantly being consumed by the future, only with knowledge and memories of the past. There came a time when no matter how I tried I could not conjure up even an impression from the past to help me through the desperation of the present.
Earlier in Auschwitz, I had been able to use this memory technique to trick my body into believing my stomach was full; but less than a year later, however, memory failed me. My body ruled my mind in this struggle. In Flossenburg, I was no longer capable of invoking a memory in which to project myself. Now and for the last 52 years this same demon memory is still conspiring for control and is the abductor of my reality. Today my memory holds me in the past and in the reality of the past. Like a good friend, it can always be depended on, to be there and, sometimes more than other times, allows a parallel me to exist in today's reality,
Fifty years ago I could not experience memory and today I cannot escape it.
Memory for me allows me to be completely transported into my past and to glare at how things were. My memory is not a personal or temporal memory, It is a sacred memory as it is on behalf of a community that did not evolve but was expropriated and destroyed. There was no evolution or natural change for the community of Munkács. Even for me there is a enigmatic significance that accompanies my yearning for the past. It is involuntary and the need to reproduce through reconstruction is overwhelming me. I associate mission or fate with my need to visualize my memories for others. But there is a competition with the here and now and I am not conscious of where I am a part in the past and a part needing to preserve the past. The conflict in the increasing heightening and intensification of the past results in an impoverishment and denigration of my life now Half existence today is the cost paid imbuing a legacy through presentation of the past. Renouncing the present and loss of enjoyment in the present are effects of perpetuating the past.
One cannot return to an exile although everyone of us is exiled from our past. I feel a special obligation for my people, that of their bridge from past to future. The majority did not have the opportunity to continue. I am haunted by my exile. Man's brains have a place that are archives—the storage place of memory. For me these are not held under lock and key and visited only when there is a need to do researchthey are omnipresent.
Returning to Czechoslovakia was impossible, for my memory of this past had almost become almost idyllic. I feared shattering this image. Each time I recollect my prodigious past I am conscious that the memory is being influenced and indeed changes with each image I conjure up. My experiences today affect every memory I represent to myself. Change and separations in my life have caused me to dwell much of my life in memory. I have lived much of my life reminiscing in a kind of half mystical or dreamy state.
There are many ways of categorizing memory in the academic world. There are those theorists who view memory like layers in the earth. Each time we recall it is subject to the analysis of the present. There are others who see memory recollections as static and dependent on the needs of the one who recalls. They debate the status as reconstruction or reproduction. Some say there are pathological forms of memory that are immune to the effect of time. Each time I recall a memory I petrify it in the present to those who are privy to know it. My memory is dynamic. I hold my past but it is subject to the moment of recall. The emphasis or slant of description I choose to focus on depends on both the audience and my mood and feeling at the time of recollection. My recollection nevertheless involves effort and responsibility. It is conscious and an art in the sense of creation and deliberate intention. My memory today is a function of my personality today and is to be understood in terms of my present needs, fears, and interests. There is no such thing as objective memory. I am always conscious of consecration, preservation, and sanctification when I recall my past.
I sometimes wonder about this obsession I have with memory I wonder if my identity has become dependent on this need to remember. Is it because I did not have the usual opportunity to develop and acquire a personality that was not dependent on reconstruction? I was afraid to return to Munkács because I thought I may have to reconstruct a new memory and perhaps a new self. So I must dwell in the present with representation of the past. I have vowed to recreate the past for those who were not able to live in the present.
The most poignant way we can know the events of the Shoah is through the transmission of survivors' memories and that is achieved through memorialization and education.
Memory has no single meaning for survivors or educators who have access to multiple memories present in an array of resources. We must guard against the danger in the presentation of memory as having only one meaning. As Jews,we are familiar with according to memory an as-if-it-happened-to-us status. The myth of a common past, evidenced in Israel's national day of memory, Yom Hashoah, is of grave concern to me. In a recent trip to Israel I had the opportunity to discuss with scholars their fears regarding the development of Israeli identity around victimization, which is inevitable when remembering as if.
Our collective or public memory will be determined in part by the monuments and memorials we erect. Monuments and commemorations can turn the most poignant memories to stone if they are insensitively created and do not evoke the emotional response intended. On the other hand, appropriate monuments and commemorations will arouse within visitors a social conscience, or function as a catalyst inspiring them to action.
The presentation of memory in social settings inevitably carries the bias of the presenter. The memory of the Shoah is realized in diverse ways. We are more often than not referring to the politics of memory and not to the meanings of the memories as denoted in monuments. To have an in-depth understanding of the motives for memory, we should review the many proposed monuments that were never constructed, but remain as models or ideas on paper.
We must also recognize that the motives for remembering change from generation to generation as memory fades over time.
All of us who survived want to be remembered as part of communities that once flourished and not as a members of communities that for the most part ended up as victims, anonymous bodies in piles of corpses that were barely recognizable as human beings. I speak about my past to defy this image of willing victim. The historical summary must include the life that was and not only the destruction. The memory of the Shoah is humankind's memory. The obligation to preserve and protect the many facets of this precious memory extends to all peoples.