bit difficult to do that. We have just met and sure, we do have an uncanny resemblance to each other, but we’re total strangers. You’ve just told me some pretty personal stuff. A bit odd, don’t you think? Not to mention, offensive.’
Gus did not reply.
‘Okay, Gus, if you want to get personal, then let’s get personal.’
Arnold realised he was speaking a little too loudly but he didn’t care. He was annoyed by Gus. Arnold usually avoided confrontation but Gus had it coming.
‘I have a confession to make too. I was brought up to hate the Germans for what they did to us Jews during the war. How does hearing that make you feel? It was drummed into me from a very early age. My parents were Polish. They were Holocaust survivors, so I could understand how they felt. I suppose I could understand why they wanted me to feel that way too. And as a result, I have no love for Germans, none at all, although I have to admit I don’t really know any.’
Gus didn’t say anything for a moment. He was looking at Arnold. He appeared to be weighing up whether to say something else. Finally he did.
‘I was born in Germany, Arnold. I guess that makes me German.’
‘Can I ask where?’
‘You wouldn’t have heard of the place. It’s a small town near Stuttgart, called Waiblingen.’
Arnold was holding a glass of whiskey in his right hand, about to take a sip. His hand started trembling. He put the glass down. He looked at Gus and, in a voice that was barely audible, he said, ‘So was I, Gus. Waiblingen, that’s where I was born.’
PART TWO
Waiblingen, Germany
To Melbourne, Australia
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