My being two years older than I thought does explain why so many of my early childhood memories are so vivid. In preparing this book, I now assume I was born in 1934. Be patient with me, dear reader, for I will time-slip later in the book as if it was science fiction rather than fact and become younger once more when I arrive in Australia. For what I have always believed is embedded deeper than what I now know.
The missing birth certificate would have shown I was the result of a mixed marriage. My father, Yitzchak, was Polish and my mother, Gitel, was Lithuanian. Both, however, were Orthodox Jews, and the national differences were probably the result of the constant flux of borders and rulers in that part of Europe, because both countries at the time of their birth had long been under Russian rule.
The same missing certificate would most likely have identified my place of birth as the Polish town of Bielsk Podlaski, my father’s town, not far from the Lithuanian border. This town was only 40 kilometres from Bialystok, a much larger city with a revered Jewish community. Bielsk Podlaski was considered part of the Bialystok environs and both of them had Jewish maternity hospitals. While most births may have been home births at the time, my parents, being well-off, may have opted for one of the hospitals.
In 1956, when I was drafted into the Australian Army for National Service, I received two call-up notices in the mail, one for Herszel Lewin and a second one for Ernest Lewin. It was Ernie Lewin who arrived in Puckapunyal to serve his new country.
There is a quote from The Importance of Being Earnest that concludes that ‘memory is the diary that we all carry about with us’.
I wish it were so easy to keep such a diary in my mind. For to me, memory is like a sack on my back and each memory is an individual stone I carry in that sack. For a young child – and so much of what I want to tell you occurred when I was very young – perhaps the sack was too small, because the stones fell out and I now remember so little. Other heavier stones were added, stones that were painful with their jagged edges, stones that made me cry and stones that left little room in my sack for happy memories. Many of these stones are also missing, but they have left a sadness that has lingered.
To help me create this memoir, I am grateful for having cousins to help fill the gaps. My late mother’s younger sister, Bruria Pekelman, who has also passed on, created a family tree of my mother’s family with her daughter Mina and her son-in-law Harold.
Travelling into the past, like travelling at any time, requires a map. My map was this family tree and the starting point when placing my mother into her family. My father has no family tree; apart from the ghostly photographic presence of a few of his siblings and parents, nothing remains.
This concept of a family tree is something I hadn’t encountered until more recent years when the Jewish schools, in their wisdom, realised that with the passing of more than just time, the history of our community might well be lost. Each child was given a Roots project. I was soon being asked questions about my parents, their parents and so on. For Australian Jews, or those the Holocaust bypassed, a family tree might have many branches and deep roots, at times back to the seventeenth century, as evidenced by the hundreds attending publicised family reunions. The tree of my memory has few branches and is not very tall.
Aunt Bruria may well have been younger than I am when she created our family tree, the starting point for my time travels. There are questions about some dates she has allocated as the bookends for my forebears but then I sympathise, for I also have difficulty putting dates to people or events in my life. We are of the generation without the constant recording or sharing of events. Yes, there was a time before Facebook.
My aunt Bruria’s daughter Mina and husband Harold, together with their daughter Sharon, travelled a few years ago to Vishey in Lithuania, the town of our mutual grandparents – a town time has forgotten, but will never forgive. From them I learnt of some firsthand accounts of the destruction of a Jewish presence in what was once a vibrant Jewish community.
My other cousin, Azriel, lives in Israel and, being some four years older than me, is a more reliable witness to shared early childhood events. He has provided much valuable detail. Even so, it seems at times there were a few versions of the same stories. They differ in trivia more than substance. I will try, however (as those of you who know me would be aware), to stick to the facts and perhaps conjecture only when there are documentary or memory conflicts or a need to explain.
Why am I writing my memoirs, you might ask. Well, as I look with delight at my growing family, I realise how different my life has been and especially my childhood when compared to theirs. I look lovingly at my children and now their children, my grandchildren, as they attend kindergarten, school and university supported by caring parents and grandparents who feel joy as they learn in relative safety.
My life has been so different that it might appear to be the wildest fiction. Imagine, a young boy taken from his home, never to see his father again, transported half a world away to an orphanage on the road between China and Europe. A place where they didn’t speak his language, where he had virtually no schooling and his greatest memory is of constant hunger.
Imagine … that boy was me.
2
My mother Gitel was born in Vishey, Lithuania, in 1906. That date was consistent throughout her life. Her sister, Bruria, in creating the family tree, had her being born two years later, in 1908 – a simple error, for the document was made many years after the event. The tree documents my mother as being the fourth of nine children born to my grandparents, Chaim and Mina Lazovski – four girls and five boys.
At that time Lithuania had many neighbours, the largest being Poland to the west and Russia to the east. It wasn’t quite that simple, of course, because that part of Europe was dense with smaller nations. For example, when I was born, if you were to travel south from the Baltic Sea down along the eastern border of Poland, the neighbouring countries would have been firstly the German State of East Prussia, then Lithuania, a small portion of Latvia and then the Soviet Union – so many countries within such a short distance.
Lithuania is the most northern nation, also having a Baltic coastline, but one of the smallest of these countries. It is shaped somewhat like the Australian state of Tasmania. Tasmania is slightly larger than Lithuania. Down towards the southern tip of Lithuania, wedged between Poland and the then Soviet state of Belarus, is the very heavily wooded part of the country where the town of Vishey was located.
You are unlikely to have heard of this town, nor are you likely to pass it, for Vishey is not on any major transit route and over 10 kilometres from the nearest railway line. The famous cities in Lithuania are Vilnius, which had been annexed by Poland before I was born, so was no longer the capital, and Kaunas (Kovno in Yiddish) which remained the capital until after the war.
The Jews of Lithuania saw a passing parade of invaders and rulers over the centuries, but in Vishey life was mostly quiet and peaceful. In fact, if you were looking for Vishey today, you would only read of it in Holocaust literature, for this is the Yiddish name of the Lithuanian town Veisiejai, a town that now has no Jews.
Vishey was so close to the Polish border that the nearest large Jewish centre was Bialystok in Poland rather than another Lithuanian city. Bielsk Podlaski, in the Bialystok region of Poland, my father’s town, was just over 200 kilometres away, a distance that becomes important in my parents’ lives.
Vishey must have been an idyllic little town compared to the overcrowded larger cities of Lithuania with their poor hygiene and diseases. It was built on the steep banks of the curved shoreline surrounding Lake Ancia, a still lake that went for many kilometres in each direction, with tall pines surrounding it, and lush grass in many shades of green for the few cattle and goats to graze upon. The whole area is a lake district, with the lake of the same name as the town a few kilometres further south. There was no lack of clean water or fish from the lake, plentiful timber and productive land. Today, rowboats are moored beside the lake as a bevy of white swans cruise by. While the town is promoted for tourism,