Searching for the future in one man’s past Abraham Biderman failed to find a publisher, so he funded his own book. Then he won a Banjo. By Larry Schwartz.
ABRAHAM Biderman rarely attends religious services. “I have God in my home,” he says. “I don’t have to go there.”
When he visited a synagogue in St Kilda recently, it was to drop off a parcel. As he emerged, he encountered two little schoolgirls pointing their fingers at him. “Joo-oo,” they sang. “Joo-oo, Joo-oo.”
At their age, he was regularly spat upon, beaten and taunted. He wanted nothing more than to be like the other kids. His father had fought in the Polish Army, he protested. But they would not listen: he was a Jew.
A Christmas card emblazoned with a swastika and “nasty, offensive language” once turned up in the mail. Otherwise, the 72-year-old author of an award-winning memoir has encountered little overt anti-Semitism in the 48 years since he came to Australia.
The telephone rings. Biderman’s publisher is on the line. He chats loudly about the media attention he’s received since his book, ‘The World of My Past’, won the National Book Council CUB Banjo Award for non-fiction and National Award for Biography. The morning of our visit, he had spoken to SBS. He jokes about being “a star”.
He wants to know about progress on its release in the US. Ironically, he says Random House was among many which rejected the manuscript. The Sydney office had sent it on to its American headquarters for final approval. Eventually, he got a letter from New York praising the book but declining to publish.
But for Biderman’s determination, the acclaimed book might not have seen the light of day. “In 1989, I started knocking on doors and writing to publishers,” he says. One by one, the publishers he approached wrote to say they were not interested. One suggested he give it to the Holocaust Museum in Elsternwick. Biderman was not impressed. He was not about to let it gather dust on a shelf.
Instead, he undertook to publish it himself. It was a costly venture, says the retired women’s fashion manufacturer. “However, I said, ‘So, bad luck. No holidays and no new car. I will have the book’.”
The self-published first edition of 1300 sold quickly and he soon faced the expense of a second edition. Random House, he says, had a change of heart after the Banjo. “They rang me and I said, ‘Here you are. You’re the first. You’re welcome to it’.”
An old schoolfriend once wrote to him that, “The darker the night, the brighter the stars”. He endured the darkness of Nazi atrocities. Though his parents, an older brother and most other relatives perished, he bears witness to the horrors in the Polish ghetto at Lodz and three concentration camps before being liberated by the British Army at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.
Disguised as American soldiers, he and a cousin jumped a freight train across the German border into Belgium where he met his late wife, who had spent the war posing as a non-Jew in France. “After I had lost everyone in the Holocaust,” he writes. “Madeleine brought life back into my soul. She was my resurrection . . . She showed me that I still had a life to live.”
SHE followed soon after he migrated to Australia in January 1951. Biderman established a women’s fashion manufacturing company, Champs Elysees Models. His wife was just 49 when she died in May 1980. “Since then, life has never been the same. But the sun still rises every morning, and I am here to live every day as it comes.”
Retired from his business, he turned back to re-create a past that continues to haunt him, indelible as the number B-8615 tattooed on his left arm, in an extraordinary vivid account of a time when some deemed a loaf of bread more valuable than a human life and others chose death rather than compromise with evil.
He has returned in memory to the quiet heroism of his father, a fruiterer before the war, his face swollen with starvation, limbs distended, refusing to steal so much as a potato to save himself or his family; the desperation of an ailing brother tempted to run beyond the barbed wire; the voice of his mother singing: “So what if I’m building castles in the air,/ So what if my God isn’t there at all . . .”
Nor has he forgotten overhearing a ghetto leader required to deliver the children and elderly to the Nazis, muttering to himself, “The wolf wants blood! What should I do . . .” The amusement of German soldiers after he and his family were found hiding in the ghetto. “Out! Out! You dirty Jews!”
The memory of chimney stacks in Auschwitz-Birkenau crowned with crimson cloud have remained. The stench of smouldering flesh and bones. “It only takes the slightest smell of burning to awaken my deepest fears.”
And his mother’s last words after selection at Auschwitz: “Remember, remember what they did to us!” “In all my life, I have never known such anguish,” Biderman would write.
Even so, an encounter with Biderman comes as some surprise. For all he endured he is still angrier, more impassioned than you might expect from the measured voice of the narrator. You sit and listen until you want nothing more than to get away. He can’t.
He had started writing his account while living in Brussels and revived his memoir after his son, Simon, persuaded him to read aloud a brief account he had written in Yiddish for a 1960s memorial publication by former residents of Lodz. He wanted also to tell a cousin in Israel, who was evacuated to London in 1938, what had become of his parents.
“I had a family,” he says. “I haven’t got a shred of evidence . . . that I had a father and a mother. I haven’t even got an album, a picture on the wall . . .”
Where others might display photographs, Abraham Hersz Biderman has re-created his past in oil paintings. He chose golden-yellow to represent the rich spiritual life of a scribe writing scrolls. “All this belongs to the world that is dead,” he says when asked about the extensive use of blue in a nearby synagogue scene and depiction of a village water carrier. To him, blue is the color of death. It dominates his work.
Elsewhere, vibrant colors abound in a busy marketplace. “This is the shtetl (village). How I remember it when it was full of life . . . Here I have a scene that has nice colors.” He laughs: “I am not altogether a morbid, depressed man.”
* ‘The World of My Past’, by Abraham H. Biderman is published by Random House Australia.
The Sunday Age,16-Mar-1997
Larry Schwartz Writer 