The Book of Dirt Read online

  The rabbi looked at his student and could see that he was wise. ‘Young Reb Yitzchok,’ he replied. ‘I am afraid you have been looking in the wrong place. To whom did you turn? The man who prayed the loudest in synagogue? The man who stuffed wads of notes into the charity box? Me, your teacher? I am not a tzaddik. None of us is. You want to know where to find the tzaddik, the man of pure, honourable faith? Don’t look to the sky, don’t search a man’s eyes. Look instead at his forearm. Yes, go into synagogue tomorrow morning and look under the straps of every man’s tefillin. If, by chance, you spot a black mark, a tattoo, numbers, then there is your tzaddik. There is your righteous man. For this poor soul has been to hell, has faced death while God turned away, and yet he still believes. This, young Reb Yitzchok, is the only kind of man who can still be called a tzaddik.’

  ‘That righteous man,’ I went on to say, ‘was my grandfather.’

  I was wrong.

  Like many survivors, my grandfather renounced his covenant with God immediately after the war. He had survived. Most of his family had not. He didn’t waste time looking for an explanation. He didn’t feel abandoned, as so many others had described it. He didn’t even question how a loving God could have allowed the Holocaust to happen. His was a practical renunciation. His beliefs were sacrificed on an altar of pragmatism. On returning to Prague, he changed his name to Jan Randa—less Jewish, less Germanic—and started work as a legal clerk, supplementing his income by serving as secretary to the Chief Rabbi, Gustav Sicher.

  Jan Randa continued to love the Jewish traditions, the language and, most of all, the literature, but felt he owed nothing to an abstract deity perpetuated to give meaning to things he could not explain. Anyway, he had married my grandmother, first in a civil ceremony and then later, when her childhood conversion from Catholicism could be proved, at the Altneu Synagogue. By the second wedding, she was already pregnant. No sooner had their daughter been born, and Jan Randa’s legal practice begun, than she fell pregnant again. A few months after the birth of the baby, this one a son, he got word that he was wanted for questioning. His political agitation in the fledgling communist state had fallen on ‘interested’ ears. There was talk of labour camps, re-education. Or worse. The young family had to get out before the borders closed. He would not make the same mistake twice.

  In his work for Rabbi Sicher, my grandfather corresponded with a man in Melbourne about the certification of kosher Czech pickles. In one letter he floated the idea of setting up home in that distant land and received an enthusiastic response. He was, however, unable to secure exit permits. Seeing no other option, he gathered the family and, under cover of night, paddled across the river into Germany on top of a mattress. From there he purchased four third-class tickets on the SS Sebastiano Caboto bound for Australia.

  They arrived on 29 October 1949 and, along with several other families, were lodged by the local Jewish welfare agency in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Jan, now Jack, found work on the production line of the Ford Motor Company factory. He thought of returning to university so that he could practise law in his new homeland, but he had neither the time nor the money to do so. Within a year of starting at Ford, a chassis fell on Jack’s chest and crushed his lungs. He was hospitalised for weeks. No longer fit for manual labour, he was forced to look for another job. He tracked down the pickle importer and was told of Mount Scopus College, a new Jewish school that had opened not far from where Jack and his family lived. With a heart weighed down by broken dreams, he typed up a résumé that included all his previous teaching experience and walked to the school. He was employed on the spot. From that day on, he was known as Dr Randa, Australia’s foremost expert on Hebrew grammar. Or, as some liked to call him, the Dikduk Doc.

  My grandparents kept a traditional Jewish home, although it was by no means religious. For them, the Passover Seder was a story of human triumph. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was a time to reflect on the wrongs they had done to others. Every other holiday was just another excuse for family and friends to gather and sing and feast. Jan Randa had no need for God. But that changed when I was born. God, who might perhaps exist after all, had called his bluff.

  I was a sickly child from the outset: prone to infections, pallid, lethargic. The diagnosis was over a year in coming: Patent Ductus Arteriosus. Ventricular Septal Defect.

  ‘A very slim chance of survival.’ My mother repeated the doctor’s words.

  ‘His heart?’ my grandfather said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ My grandfather mashed his fist into his palm and lowered his head. He ran to his study, closed the door and refused to come out. My parents were stunned. My grandmother went to the study door and knocked. He did not answer. She knocked again, then banged with her fists. Still nothing. Turning the knob, she pressed her shoulder against the wood and pushed. The door did not budge. He had wedged the daybed up against it. From inside, she could hear the clacking of his typewriter and the turbulent strains of Smetana’s Má Vlast. With one last smack for good measure, and a curse from the old country, she stormed off to the TV room. He did not emerge until the next morning. While she was still sleeping, he left the house and went to synagogue. He had, it seems, resolved to make a deal. Donning his tefillin, those weathered phylacteries, he gazed skywards. ‘God of my childhood. God of my father. You challenged me and lost. Now I challenge you. Prove you exist,’ he implored. ‘Save the boy!’ If his survival had severed the tie between them, mine would fuse it back together.

  After the operation, the surgeon made his way to the waiting room. My mother was asleep, clutching my father’s arm. He nudged her awake. The surgeon smiled. Good news.

  The following morning, 7 August 1978, as rain tapped out a redemptive backbeat on the roof, Jan Randa locked himself in his study and, for the first time since the war, prayed shacharit.

  He tried his best to make sure we didn’t inherit his trauma, although he struggled to navigate the diverging streams of memory and freedom that distance brought with it. When I was approaching thirteen, the age of bar mitzvah, he sat me down in front of the old TV in the back room of his house and made me watch Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, Shoah, in its six-hour entirety. I wasn’t to ask questions. I wasn’t to look at him. Just watch and absorb. After the famous moment when the railway engineer, Henryk Gawkowski, runs his fingers across his throat, I turned to my grandfather and looked at the number on his forearm. A-1821. ‘No,’ he said and jabbed at the screen. ‘Watch.’

  Three years earlier, at my brother’s bar mitzvah party, he had tried a more direct approach. Late in the evening, he took to the podium and started to speak. ‘In periodic nightmares I relive this experience and awake in a cold sweat with the confusion as to what is reality and what is dream.’ His words jarred in the revelry. He spoke of his best friend who should have survived in his place. ‘To this very moment I have not even mentioned this to anybody. Why now? Because deep in my heart I have often wondered about my reality, since there is no rational explanation for my being alive. Why me? Why not Glanzberg?’

  And then he spoke of his mother in Birkenau.

  I remember it was June 1944. I would come out every evening to meet her. One day, towards the end of the month, I came to the meeting place and waited. She came out, but this time had tears streaming down her face, for I must have looked like death. I looked down. In my mother’s hand was her daily ration which she laid out before me. I grabbed without asking and wolfed it down in one go, with a burning in my eyes. I felt like a starved animal. The next week we were called out for selections. I was chosen. My mother was not. For the last forty-six years, every night in my prayers, I have begged her for forgiveness. How could I take that one little piece of bread that meant life or death? I often see her in my nightmares, there, in the distance, and I ask, ‘How could I?’

  I have watched the video over and over. His forty-five minutes were edited down to less than five. Seeing the audience wriggle uncomfortably, some
going outside to smoke, others talking among themselves, I know that we weren’t ready to hear it. And now that we are, we can’t.

  He gave up on us after only one try.

  My grandfather cheated death so many times that, until the last clump of dirt was tossed over his grave, I genuinely believed he was the Messiah. He survived Auschwitz. He survived the secret police. He survived an industrial accident, prostate cancer and a botched heart bypass. In the end, my grandfather died because he chose to die. As long as my grandmother was alive he had something to live for, but once she was gone he simply gave up. She had always been his insurance policy against further tragedy after he had watched almost everyone he loved get wiped out in the Holocaust.

  A vivacious young woman, Daša—my grandmother—must have represented everything he could have hoped for in his future. She had come through the camps but was still young enough to build a life away from them. Her Aryan looks, a life-saving gift from her mother, would protect him and his children from further tides of prejudice. His children would not be stopped on the street, hit or spat upon. They would not know what he had known. I am told that he was certain from the beginning that she was the girl for him. Daša, on the other hand, took some convincing. When she was in hospital towards the end of her life, I sat down and asked why she chose him.

  ‘He was not a wolf,’ she said. ‘And I saw the way he treated his mother. Any man who treats his mother like that…I could see he will make a good husband.’

  This is what she didn’t tell me: my grandfather was not her first choice. There was another man. He wasn’t Jewish; she didn’t care. After my grandmother died, I was given a photo of them that her youngest sister, Hana, had kept. It could almost be a stock photo, the sort you see behind the glass in a frame when you first buy it, a suggestion of what you might put in its place. Daša looks to be around twenty. Beside her is a dapper young man in a heavy grey trench coat. The two are walking along Národní Street, near the National Theatre. He is tall and holds himself with pride. She is smiling, a young girl in love.

  Soon after the photo was taken, the man broke off their romance to take up with a non-Jewish society type. Daša was heartbroken. She saw in that man what her soon-to-be husband saw in her—a future far removed from the horrors she had just survived. She hid away at her mother’s apartment in the Žižkov district of Prague. Every few days my grandfather would visit and try to coax her from her torpor. He brought flowers, jewellery, little cakes, none of which he could really afford. It soon became ritual, a way to escape the silence of an empty house. He had no one. Only her. But she was not interested. Each time he knocked on their door, her mother and three younger sisters would welcome him with affection and a tinge of pity. I suspect one or two of the girls fancied him for themselves.

  My grandfather would not be swayed. He met his love in Theresienstadt and took an instant shine to her. He knew she would grow to be a beautiful woman, but at the time she was too young, only a teenager. Nothing could come of it. But I imagine he fantasised about her, dreamed of the two of them, free and well fed in the open fields, surrounded by three—no, five—children. Far from the teeming ghetto where sewage slopped over the ditches and brown-uniformed soldiers hit you in the head with the butts of their rifles.

  My grandmother had no such dreams. When she returned to Prague in 1945, she tried to distance herself from anything that might remind her of the camps. That included my grandfather. She was irritated by his presence. Why must he come, wrapped in memories of barbed wire, dysentery and Zyklon B, to vie for her hand? She had found love. Until it abandoned her. Then, one particular memory resurfaced: my grandfather, standing with his mother at the platform in Theresienstadt. She was there too, watching their quiet farewell.

  Any man who treats his mother like that…I could see he will make a good husband.

  They married in 1947 when Daša was twenty-one and Jan was thirty-five. He saw those fourteen years as a guarantee that he would die before her. For many years, things went according to his plan. He was always sick, often in hospital. She, on the other hand, stayed healthy while smoking two packets of cigarettes a day. In her sixty-eighth year, she went to the doctor complaining of stomach pains. She was diagnosed with stomach ulcers and told to stick to a bland diet. The pain continued. By the time they opened her up to have a look, it was too late. They removed the cancer, and her stomach for good measure, which bought her six months. As she grew frail, she boasted that she would soon be skinny enough for the catwalks of Milan.

  Twenty-second September 1996. The eve of Yom Kippur. While my brother and I raced to get to the hospital to be with her in her final moments, my father was trying to get Jan to come. He refused. He must have known he was about to witness one last tragedy. She was already dead when he was wheeled in. He began talking to her, clutching her still-warm hand. When she didn’t answer, he looked up at us. ‘Is she gone?’ he whispered. My mother nodded and put her arm around his shoulder. ‘Baruch dayan ha’emet,’ he said. Blessed is the true judge. And with that Jan Randa sank into his wheelchair, into himself, and resolved to die.

  It wasn’t much at first, a light cough. Then we got a call from a nurse at his aged-care home that he had been admitted to hospital. He could barely breathe and had been refusing to eat for days. His stubborn march towards the grave lasted less than a week. I tried to keep him hydrated, wetting a cotton bud and sticking it in his mouth. Then he died.

  I kept only one thing of his, a 1953 Penguin edition of The Trial, by Franz Kafka. He had left it face down beside his typewriter. I often hold it and think of him.

  For nearly ten years our collective memory of who he once had been rested undisturbed. He was the kindly, learned man we loved and revered. A man of worth, a teacher of generations. Photos found their way into frames on our dressers and walls. In our old family home, he was a greater presence in death than he had been in life. The peaked cap, the tortoiseshell glasses, the pipe. When we visited his grave we found comfort in the ever-growing pile of stones that his former students had left as marks of respect.

  Then he appeared again, except it wasn’t him. Resurrected in 2005, in black ink on the pages of the Australian Jewish News, this man with my grandfather’s face, my grandfather’s name, had a different story.

  DR JACOB RANDA AND THE BOOKS OF THE EXTINCT RACE

  It was called Hitler’s Gift To The Jews. Theresienstadt, a concentration camp like no other, a self-governing Jewish town, only one hour’s train ride from Prague. Behind its fortress walls was gathered the entire Jewish population of Czechoslovakia, struggling to survive in terrible conditions, busily passing the days until they were sent on a train to their deaths in the East. Many stories have been written about this unique town but one has remained untold until today: that of our very own Dr Jacob Randa.

  Born in Brno and raised in Prague, Dr Randa came of age just as the Nazis conquered his homeland. Like all Jews he felt the German noose constrict around his neck; forced to wear a yellow star, excluded from normal life, he was rendered an exile in his own city. In late 1942, he received his summons and, along with his mother and brother, was transported to Theresienstadt.

  Soon after Dr Randa arrived in the camp, he found his name on a list of one hundred scholars, rabbis and academics summoned to the camp’s German headquarters for special questioning. They waited outside in a large group and were called one by one to a cramped office in the back of the building where a German officer, wearing a crisp uniform and with a monocle screwed into his eye, sat at a desk. The officer stated his name and rank—he was an SS Obersturmführer—and explained that he had been a professor of Jewish studies in a German university before the war. He then subjected Dr Randa to a most peculiar examination, asking him to look over a pile of Jewish books and explain their significance. Dr Randa did so, noting all the while that the books were stamped with the names of libraries across the Occupied lands: Amsterdam, Warsaw, Budapest, Vienna.

  When the officer’s inquisit
ion was over, he excused the young man and had him escorted from the room by an SS guard. Dr Randa was sternly forbidden from discussing what had happened in the office until day’s end. That night, one hundred scholars crammed into the camp library to compare their experiences. Some had been curtly dismissed almost immediately after having entered. Some, like Dr Randa, were grilled for what felt like an eternity. A strange game was afoot, and Dr Randa sensed that it had a sinister edge. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  The following day, the Jews who had been interviewed were divided into two groups and loaded into trucks. The first truck disappeared into the Czech countryside, while the other truck, carrying Dr Randa and about forty others, headed in the direction of Prague. Only when they stopped did Dr Randa realise where he had been taken: the grand, gothic entrance to the Prague Museum. The scholars were unloaded and made to wait in a large hall from where, once again, they were summoned one by one into an adjoining room. Stepping inside, Dr Randa saw the same SS Obersturmführer waiting for him, a large collection of books spread out on his desk. ‘Sort these into groups however you feel is appropriate,’ the officer commanded him.

  When Dr Randa had finished, the SS Obersturmführer looked over the desk and nodded with approval. ‘Very good. You will remain here and be issued with special privileges that even the elder of Theresienstadt cannot imagine. You will be joined soon by three others and your work will begin.’ Before dismissing him, the officer sat back down and said gravely, ‘Don’t get any ideas. You are still a prisoner.’