| By LARRY SCHWARTZ |
| A Holocaust survivor finds a rapt audience for her stories and songs in far north Queensland. A TEACHER on Thursday Island, north of Cape York Peninsula, contacted a friend in Sydney, an academic he thought might be able to provide material for Year Nine students who were learning about the Holocaust. ”And I said, what if I were to bring a survivor up there who could tell her story?” says Joseph Toltz, a University of Sydney doctoral student who in recent years has been recording and transcribing songs sung in factories, bawdy songs, lullabies and much more recalled by Holocaust survivors in Australia, Britain, the US and Israel. Mr Toltz approached Guta Goldstein, a Melbourne woman who he knew had spent time in the Auschwitz concentration camp before being sent to Bergen-Belsen and was labouring in a factory in a German village called Mehltheuer when it was liberated by the Americans in April 1945. She readily agreed to accompany him to Thursday Island. ”She is amazingly musical,” Mr Toltz says, adding, ”She knows songs that nobody knows.” Mrs Goldstein is among the few relatives from a large extended family to survive the Holocaust. ”We were singing, always,” she says. My grandmother was always singing to me. My mother was singing. My father was always singing, especially on Shabat (the Sabbath) after dinner, and I always sang during the war.” Some of the songs she learnt were from children in an orphanage where she was housed for a time, most of whom were sent to their deaths in the Chelmno extermination camp, 70 kilometres from Lodz, Poland – young Guta was rescued by her aunt before the children were transported. She says Mr Toltz recorded ”only about 17 songs but I know many, many more”. ”There were lullabies and all kinds of songs,” Mrs Goldstein says, ”lots of Polish songs also. Those songs told stories. It’s not like today, you have songs with one sentence and you sing it forever and ever. They were like ballads. They tell stories about times even before the war. I know a lot of songs that tell the story of the way people lived and the way they were.” She was in her teens in late 1944, when she lay in the dark in a Nazi concentration camp and sang a Yiddish lullaby. ”God has closed the world to us and it is dark everywhere,” she sang to the four women with whom she shared a blanket on a winter night in a tent at Bergen-Belsen, in north-western Germany, ”and it is dark everywhere”. The lullaby she sang that night, composed in the Lodz ghetto where her father and younger sister had died, is well-known today. But Mrs Goldstein, 80, says she feared some of the many lesser-known songs she remembers from that era would be forgotten. ”I thought, when I die nobody will care. They will be lost.” She was reassured, then, when first approached by Mr Toltz – ”miraculously, like everything else in my life” – who had been alerted to a few songs she had translated in her memoir, There Will Be Tomorrow, published by the Makor Jewish Community Library in Melbourne in 1999. Mr Toltz says the visit by Mrs Goldstein also led to the welcome opportunity to tell students about the indigenous leader William Cooper, who in late 1938 led a delegation of the Australian Aboriginal League to the German consulate in Melbourne to protest against the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. The three-day visit to Thursday Island late last year, funded by a commercial law firm, was an adventure for Mr Toltz and Mrs Goldstein. They flew via Cairns to Horn Island and took a boat to Thursday Island. ”It went wonderfully,” Mrs Goldstein says. She was particularly impressed with some of the questions asked by the the Torres Strait Islander students. One asked if it upset her to talk about her experiences in Nazi Europe. Others asked about the location of the concentration camps. One wanted to know what Hitler looked like. Nor was she fazed by the prospect of singing to students in a language they would not understand. ”I knew songs in languages that I haven’t got a clue about,” she says. ”I was in a camp with Hungarians after the war. They used to sing this song so I sang it too. I have no idea of what it means. It’s just the melody. I think it’s the music. It talks to people. It talks to me.” Deborah Belyea, head of English and SOSE (Study of Society and Environment) at the Thursday Island branch of Tagai State College, says there is much to learn from the Jewish experience of survival. She says national and international events often seem remote to her students, many of whom haven’t yet visited the mainland, and ”a world away from where they live in reality”. Theirs is a strong Christian community, Ms Belyea says, and the students were ”shocked and surprised” to learn about the genocide of Jews in Europe, ”because of their religious beliefs and culture”. ”I myself am an Islander,” she says. ”I think it’s about appreciation of culture. That’s what it really comes down to. Our students respond well to any performing arts. They love to sing.” Pub: The Age Pubdate: 12-Jul-2010 Edition: First Section: News Subsection: Page: 5 Wordcount: 631 Holocaust memories preserved in museum’s new home By LARRY SCHWARTZ HENRYK Kranz’s father taught him to draw by candlelight in a hiding place he had helped a farmer dig into the hillside during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II. His father, Zygmunt, would make aeroplanes, houses and other toys from wood, metal and matchboxes to amuse him in the dark, cramped space where they hid until liberated by the Red Army in August 1944. “He was quite gifted with his hands,” the retired neurologist, 72, says of his father, who years later sculpted a series of bronze busts that reminded him of some of the people he once knew in his Polish home town of Boryslav, now in western Ukraine. Almost a decade after Zygmunt Kranz’s death, seven of these busts have pride of place in a redeveloped new museum that opens officially this month at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick. Henryk Kranz does not believe his father set out to recreate faces of specific people but “archetypal individuals from his memory of that period”. Also on display are two artworks from an unpublished children’s book by Henryk’s daughter, Andrea, celebrating the heroism of farmer Jozef Baran and his wife Eleonora, who risked their lives to save her father and his parents. Like her father, Andrea Kranz is a medical practitioner. She works in palliative care with cancer patients. She has been reading the story about the heroic Barans to her 4-year-old daughter, Iliya. Her grandfather would often retell it. “It was woven throughout my childhood,” she says. The new multimedia museum updates the Selwyn Street facility built 25 years ago. Audio-visual displays, photographs, artwork and memorabilia present the stories of its increasingly frail survivor guides to students and other visitors. “This is a big concern many survivors express, this fear that in the future no one will be left to talk about their murdered families,” curator Jayne Josem says, noting that technology will ensure their stories continue to be heard. Zygmunt Kranz was a mining engineer in the petroleum industry at the start of the war. He was sent to a labour camp near Boryslaw, as it is known in Poland, and put to work digging out old pipelines. The farmer had befriended him after offering his team shelter for a day on which the Germans were rounding up Jews. He took a liking to Zygmunt and offered to hide his family. The two men dug about a metre high and wide and 1.3 metres long behind the rear wall of the farm shed. They installed a pipe so they could breathe and, later, planks to keep back the crumbling earth. Zygmunt Kranz, who took his family across the Czech border to Norway and Germany, worked as an engineer at CSIRO and Unilever after settling here in 1950. He wrote in a letter in 1993 nominating the Barans as Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem that Jozef Baran was “broadly straight and just”. He brought his wife Frances and three-year-old Henryk to the “bunker” in October 1941, visited them when he could and escaped the camp to join them in January 1943. The Barans would leave buckets with food in the shed. The Kranz family would emerge for a few hours at night. Henryk, ill at one stage, was cared for in the farmhouse and remembers gazing fearfully up the hill at a boy walking a bicycle. The boy stopped and stared before continuing. Through a crack in the door he saw sunlit fields with bright yellow flowers. And once he heard sounds of people searching the shed. “They were trying to find some hidden trapdoor; we were very quiet trying not to make a sound at all.” He was six when they were finally able to come out of hiding. “I was just speaking in whispers,” he says. The Sunday Age, 17-Apr-2011 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 