Stories from a Family of Survivors

 

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Dedication and Acknowledgements

 

Dedication
For my mother Rita, to whom I owe more than I can ever say or repay. She has been the most influential person in my life. In memory of all those members of our family who perished in World War Two, in particular my grandmother Sarah Eidelson, who died either in Treblinka or in the Warsaw Ghetto. She was a gardener, herbalist, activist, midwife, seamstress, nurse, musician and guesthouse owner. In other words, a mother. All her talents and energies were directed to her fierce unswerving devotion to her family. May we all emulate her.
This book was also written for the third generation including Eve, Sarah, Joe, Sam, Lucy, Max, and Gill so that they may feel a connection to their grandparents and the events that dispersed the family to Australia, America, Argentina and Israel.

Acknowledgements
Putting the story together was a family affair. It would have been impossible to write without Rita Eidelson, who provided three of her wonderful written stories and spent many hours recounting her history and correcting the notes. My brother Aaron provided notes and photographs from his travels to Chomsk and Warsaw in 1992, including information from the Chomsk survivors group. He also provided his translation to English from Hebrew of the testimony of a witness to the Chomsk massacre. My eldest daughter, Eve, designed the family tree. My other daughter, Sarah, designed the cover. My partner, Amanda, edited the book. Stefan Goldfarb provided his documents and photos while his daughter, Yola, kindly checked the text. Her son, Kemal, provided his history notes about his Grandfather.
The flight from war and persecution dispersed the family over many continents. I received assistance from my mother’s first cousin, Larry Scheff, in Chicago and my first cousin, Noah Borenstein, in Philadelphia for which I am very grateful. Noah sent me a score of photographs from the album of his mother, Franka, and checked the text. My Aunt Franka died in 1995, but left three hours of tape recordings that provided much information about the tribulations of the Eidelson family.

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BEGINNINGS

‘From fortune to misfortune is a short step. From misfortune to fortune is a long way.’
Yiddish proverb

A seventeen-year-old girl suddenly stands up beside her surprised father and leaves their train carriage, unwittingly saving her life. A starving man pursues a group of Uzbek peasants across a frozen landscape, desperately seeking a meal. A sixteen-year-old boy is forced to arrest his best friend, then secretly returns at night to break him out of gaol. A young woman travels miles in a storm to get medicine for a dying child. A wounded tank commander is sent to dig his own grave.

I was always fascinated by my parents’ stories. Those recounted in this book are about my mother Rita Strawicz, my father Joe Eidelson and his sister Franka, and my stepfather Stefan Goldfarb. They tell about luck, courage, tenacity, energy and opportunism that created the miracle of survival in circumstances where most others perished.

My parents and their immediate families had the bad luck to be born in the first half of the 20th century in the most dangerous place in the world. Poland stood between the fascist and communist superpowers of Germany and Russia in a period encompassing two world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930’s. To add to their bad luck, they were born Jewish during an era of rabid anti-Semitism. Miraculously they endured and gave us this wonderful country, Australia, as a birthright. But the cost was great.

In early 2003, my mother Rita and I achieved a space in our lives where she was prepared to talk and I was ready to listen and write. Up to then, I had given up hope of ever discovering the family’s history. My father, Joe, had died in 1986. My stepfather, Stefan, is seventy-eight. My mother is eighty-one and has been very ill in recent years. I sat on the edge of her bed and as she talked, I wrote at great speed, thinking any day the flow would stop. This collaborative effort brought us closer and made me realise, if I had ever forgotten it, how very fortunate I am to be her son.

I wasn’t just interested in the Shoah or Holocaust. In fact I was more interested in the details of everyday life. After all, my parents were the last generation of Jews in Poland to experience a culture at least six hundred years old. However, terrible things did happen to them that are not the sort of things you can discuss casually around the dinner table. My parents found it a very hard story to tell their children and I find it just as hard to tell my own.

But I did want my children to know their family history and how their grandparents came to Australia. Perhaps they may gain insights that will help them to make Australia a compassionate home for other courageous migrants. I also wanted to get to know my aunts and uncles and grandparents, even the half brother I never met. Writing this story was both wonderful and painful. To become personally involved in their lives was to grieve for their loss. There were also many surprises. I was astonished, for instance, to discover that my mother was married before she met my father.

Finally I wanted some my family member’s own stories to be published. As a lively intelligent teenager my mother dreamed of becoming a writer but was held back by poverty, racism and war. Most of my father’s history is sourced from his sister, Franka, who tape-recorded three hours of family history titled ‘Mama’ before her death in 1995 at the age of eighty-nine. Franka idolised my grandmother Sarah who perished either in the Warsaw Ghetto or in the deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka. She bought a notebook to write the history of the family before her arrival in America from Argentina in 1951 but never started it. I hope to complete it for her, somewhat, with this book.

Like other writers on the Holocaust before me, I struggled with the issues of truth and memory. My mother told me: ‘What you write is just one drop, a drop in the ocean. You cannot understand because you didn’t experience it. You have only written that small part I can bear to tell.’

I know that there are gaps in the record that I was unable to fill. Perhaps the next generation will pursue more of the story that may still be hidden in overseas archives. Ultimately it is my parents’ memories, not mine, filtered by time, opinion and belief. I searched the history books to discover how their stories fitted with those unbelievably chaotic and violent times and was amazed at how closely their accounts matched the historical record.

I started with the nervous view that perhaps my parents had made morally dubious choices to survive. The more I learnt, the more my admiration and respect for them grew. The injustices they experienced sometimes made me angry and depressed. But ultimately their stories have reinforced my passion for living. They tell me that life is short, precious and valuable. Our future is uncertain. Don’t complain. Don’t waste a single day. Love your children and your family fiercely. Live! Rejoice! Celebrate!

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MY PARENTS

My brother Aaron pointed out to me that our father, mother and my stepfather were good looking people, capable in the right circumstances of immense charm. I say this not to stake a claim for similar qualities, but because it helped, no doubt in their battles for survival, to be highly persuasive people.

As a young woman Rita was a radiant beauty. She was slim with long, raven black hair and hazel green eyes that revealed the intensity of her substantial intellect. At five feet and seven inches, she was always accused of being too tall. In character she is very persistent, assertive, generous, energetic, ambitious, quick and emotional, easily roused to both laughter and anger. Not surprisingly, she has always been attractive to men and has survived at least four husbands and partners.

Joe was five feet and six inches tall with a stocky athletic build. He had thick curly black hair that survived well into his early sixties and had sad soulful eyes separated by a strong nose that he claimed gave him ‘a lot of character’. He was a determined but gentle, generous, accepting man, capable of strong physical labour who adored his children.

Five feet tall, Stefan had thick black hair, all of which he still has on board. He has large protruding ears that served him well as a brigade commanding officer who had to listen to his men’s stories and excuses. Highly generous in nature, chivalrous and loyal, he has a casual radiant smile, which makes it hard to believe he was a soldier. However, his chest of medals, amazing hardiness and short stature led his nickname of Little Napoleon, appropriate to one of the most decorated soldiers of World War Two.

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BOOKS, TANKS AND RADIOS

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JOE AND FRANKA

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