Soul survivors

LARRY SCHWARTZ  
`I’M SURE you know the story. Here is another story. Here, you have to know a little story.” Des Lee picks at rough gems in the dust of memory. “Here. Another one. See.” One moment he’s on a train headed for Auschwitz; the next, pinching potato peels in Theresienstadt.

Then back to early childhood, wandering the Hungarian countryside with his grandfather, a butcher, ritual slaughterer and farmer who cultivated horseradish, celery and mustard seed for export.

“You see, here is another story,” he says. “I’ve got millions of stories …”

He lives near the beach in a bayside surburb. There are glossy books on his native Hungary on the coffee table and bowls of toffee in foil. But the good life is a cellophane wrapping, transparent, in his case, to a ruined childhood.

“Survivors of the Holocaust never overcome the Holocaust,” says James Moll, co-founder of Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and director of a new documentary, The Last Days, that records the plight of Hungarian Jews, such as Lee, in World War II.

Though big for his age, and bold, Lee was just 11 when he and his family were taken away in a cattle train.

His father and 17 aunts and uncles would not return to a synagogue that had been used as stables, bricks and windows prised loose, Torah scroll and prayer books gone.

“I have to show you something,” he says, unfolding a piece of paper a neighbor gave him when he came back from the camp. It’s a list, in his grandfather’s handwriting, detailing the synagogue’s expenditure, dated 1914. That, he says, is all that remains.

The Last Days is the third documentary by an organisation that has, so far, recorded testimonies of more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors, and others, including soldiers who liberated the camps, aid providers and other persecuted groups, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and Sinti/Roma (gypsy) communities.

As many as 10,000 survivors live in Australia. Des Lee was among 2500 whose testimonies were recorded and sent to the foundation’s headquarters in Los Angeles.

It’s been a daunting project. “You’re sitting there,” says the foundation’s Australian representative, psychologist Pauline Rockman. “Someone’s telling you the most intimate details of their life. Sometimes that they’ve never spoken to anyone about before, and it’s not easy.”

Interviewing began in Sydney in 1994. More than 1300 were conducted in Melbourne. Several involved – both survivors and interviewees – dropped out, deciding it was too difficult to proceed. Rockman coordinated the Melbourne interviews, matching survivors with appropriate interviewers. Some would talk only to Jews, others insisted they speak to Christians. Some would discuss intimate detail only with someone of the same gender. Three of the interviewers were child survivors, born in Europe in the late 1930s. Some felt driven by the need to record, particularly when parents were survivors.

“In some ways, it’s a funny thing,” Rockman says.

“But doing so many, you take on their stories. You take on what’s happened to them and you’re almost in there.”

She held six-weekly debriefing sessions for interviewers and video photographers. Few of the survivors took up the offer of counselling after their interviews.

Rockman’s mother had come here from Poland in 1932, her father from Berlin six years later.

“When I was young, I just heard things and it was enormous and, in my worst periods of persecutory anxiety, I would say it will happen again.”

Born in 1947, she talks of being moulded by an experience she didn’t live through.

“We’re doomed to live out this experience somehow. We’re the recorders.

“OK, we didn’t suffer it. But we’ve seen the ramifications on our parents and associated people. We’re going to be the candles. We’ll bring it forward. We won’t let them be forgotten.”

Rockman talks of “the strange marriage between Hollywood and the Shoah”.

But, she says: “I don’t believe this whole endeavor could have accomplished what it did without the resource, the money, the whole network that Spielberg was able to bring to it. If he hadn’t been there at the time and said: `This is my project’, I don’t think anyone else would have had the foresight to do it.”

A hotelier and former butcher, and father of two, Lee, 66, has a farm at Seaford to remind him of the idyll that was ripped away by the Nazis. Lee was reluctant when first approached to recount his wartime experience.

“I said, `Forget about it’. But the family pushed me and somehow I opened up.”

Rockman first met with him for several hours at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick, in October 1994. He was interviewed again for the foundation in December 1996.

“Here is another thing,” he says, and takes you off on another tangent. Now he’s behind the wheel of a hired sedan. It’s July 1988, and he’s driving through the Bohemian landscape.

“I was about six or seven kilometres from Theresienstadt,” he says. “I just couldn’t control myself. My wife said to me, `You not going in’. And I didn’t go in. I was in such a condition. I couldn’t handle it. I was shaking from inside out. I couldn’t hold the steering wheel. I had to go home.”

TWO YEARS later, he went back. “I could handle it better. I just let everybody go away. I said to my wife, `Maya darling, just you go and let me be by myself’.”

The Last Days is largely told through reminiscences of three women and two men. Lee is acquainted with one of them, US Republican Congressman Tom Lantos, with whom he serves on an international survivors’ organisation.

The story of the Hungarian Jews is often overlooked and the extent of their suffering underestimated because they were the last to be deported, their ordeals in the camps briefer than others. But by the time they arrived at Auschwitz, the Nazis had refined their killing procedures and sped up the murder.

In Germany, the annihilation had taken 12 years from the Nazi rise to power in 1933, to the end of the Reich in 1945.

In Hungary, the process in which Jews were defined, assets confiscated, most deported and killed, was completed in four months. Deportation began on 15 May 1944. By 9 July, 440,000 had been sent to Auschwitz.

Lee was raised in the Hungarian village of Vertes, near the Romanian border. His mother was the eldest; he an only child. He would traipse along with his grandfather after morning cheder (Hebrew classes), learning farming skills that would help him endure in a labor camp in Austria, from which his father was sent to a death camp for reading a newspaper when he was supposed to be working.

He was on an Auschwitz-bound train, which was forced to turn back after Josip Tito’s partisans bombed the line. He spent 27 days in a cramped cattle train compartment, somewhere in Slovakia, with occasional bread and water, and a bucket for a toilet.

The Germans had transformed the late 18th-century town Terezin, in northern Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, into a concentration camp. More than 33,000 people died in Theresienstadt in the war; another 88,000 were sent on to death camps.

He became Des Lee after settling in Australia in 1957. Elsewhere, a relative took the name Lugosi.

His mobile phone rings. It’s a nephew in Michigan. Lee’s father’s brother has died. They talk quietly. He won’t be there for the funeral. But he’ll return to Hungary next week to keep a promise to his mother when she died in 1986.

On the anniversary of his mother’s death, he will recite the mourner’s prayer, the Kaddish, at a monument to family he has had installed at Debrecen, 28 kilometres from the old home.

“Ah, I didn’t tell you another story.” It was night at Theresienstadt. He heard a cry in the darkness. “Deszlo! Deszlo! Deszlo!”

He turned to see a small woman with a shaven head. He gestures to show hollow cheeks.

“But the voice was my mum, saying, `That’s my son’. She came out screaming.”

Lee’s mother and one of her brothers were with him when the Russians liberated Theresienstadt. “You know what,” he says, “we were just praying and crying.”

He’d come from sturdy stock. Uncles had been hussars in the Hungarian army. One was a European wrestling champion. His mother was adamant. Surely they would come back.

“Here is another story,” Des Lee says, picking up the thread of narrative.

“Ah. I didn’t tell you a story …”
The Age, 17-Jul-1999