Baba Schwartz and The May Beetles

by Joan London

Baba Schwartz, and her husband Andor, survived the Holocaust before emigrating to Australia.

Joan London
Photo: Abby London

Morry’s (Baba’s son) is a brave voice in publishing, and it is now hard to imagine our Australian culture without The Quarterly Essay, The Monthly, and The Saturday Paper. And without Black Inc, with their books, as beautifully presented and edited, and necessary, as The May Beetles.

One of my most intense and formative reading experiences took place when I was 11 years old and read Anne Frank’s Diary of A Young Girl. 

Up until then, I had never heard of the Holocaust, and knew only two Jewish people, a couple who played bridge with my parents. Anne Frank’s diary opened my eyes to mid-20th century history,  to the devastating, incomprehensible mass murder of millions of one race by another, a tragedy that could even sweep up a girl, my age, with my young hopes and aspirations.  

I could hardly believe when I got to the end of the book, that Anne Frank was not saved. It left me bereft, shaken, that in her world, that existed only 15 years before I got to read about it, and unlike any other book I’d read, evil had won.

Baba Schwartz
Photo: Caitlin Muscat

One of the privileges of having spent some time in Melbourne over the past few years has been getting to know Baba Schwartz, and enjoying her wise, calm, and generous company. The last time that I visited Baba was in her new apartment on the 16th floor, where I ate some of her delicious freshly cooked pastries, and where it seemed entirely appropriate that Baba should have such an overview of the world all around her. 

Baba has written a wonderful memoir, The May Beetles. A beautiful, generous, book, both in its  physical presentation – the irresistible cover photo of the girl with the dazzling smile, the quality of the paper, the endpieces which reproduce traditional embroidery that speak of a lost pre-war world – and then, most importantly, in the acuity of the memory that informs the book and the generosity of the spirit of the writing.  

It is, of course, also a horrifying book, with its account of a culture turning on some of its own people, their rounding up, deportation, and subsequent slaughter, made so vivid in the writing, alongside the reproductions of chilling old documents issued with ruthless Nazi efficiency.  

Baba writes: 

This life I am revealing – this father, this mother, this family – is the life I would wish for everyone. No harm in any of us, but a sense of the inexhaustible sources of delight in the world. Yes, if I could bestow a gift on others, it would be to live as my family had lived before the great darkness. (p.75)

Again and again she refers to the beauty and happiness of that old world, that lost way of life:

I recall the summer of 1942 more vividly and in more detail than any season during the years of growing danger. I recall the warm winds that carried the fragrance of blossoms. I recall flirting with boys with intense delight in the long evenings. The dusk crept over us by such slow degrees that the darkness settled without our noticing it…Each evening, as I entered our house, I hoped that tomorrow would be as enthralling as was today.

Thirteen years ago, Baba’s husband, Andor Schwartz also published a memoir, Living Memory, and both books constitute a profound witness of the devastation that overtook the Jews of Europe in the late thirties and early forties of the 20th century. These books are there for the record, in all their vivid, detailed testimony of that great darkness that must never be forgotten. 

The wall above the eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes Deuteronomy:

Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children and to your children’s children. 

The Schwartzs’ survival, and the subsequent remaking of their lives in this country, has been part of the infinite enrichment brought to Australia by postwar immigration.

Baba, a huge reader, is a natural writer, with the writer’s impulse to record, to witness, to interrogate. She has always been a writer.  

As she says in the preface to The May Beetles: I write all the time – diary notes, contemplations, poetry, recipes … And most recently, this wonderful memoir. 

Baba Schwartz will be talking about her story for the first time in the session 'I'm still here: Survivors speak', alongside Frank Vajda and Marcel Weyland, moderated by Rita Nash, on Sunday August 28, 10:00am - 11:00am at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. 

Book today at www.sjwf.org.au!

Resistance and courage during World War II

By Kate Forsyth 

When I was twelve years old, I read The Diary of Anne Frank and found myself changed forever.

Anne Frank

Up until that point, my reading was dominated by Enid Blyton and C. S. Lewis, books in which there was always a happy ever after. I had never before read a book in which the heroine died in such awful circumstances. Anne Frank’s story sent a shock wave through my psyche.'

Author Kate Forsyth

World War II has fascinated me since, especially stories of resistance to the Nazis. I began to read books like I am David by Anne Holm, and The Silver Sword by Ian Serrallier.

As I grew up, I continued to read all the books I could find about World War II, from spy thrillers to Holocaust memoirs and poetry. I knew that I wanted to write a novel set during those dark and terrifying years.

I had always imagined I would set my novel in France, or Italy, or the Netherlands. It never occurred to me that I’d set my novel in Berlin itself, the nerve-centre of the Nazi death machine. Yet that is where my new novel, The Beast’s Garden, is set, among the courageous men and women of the German underground resistance.

Kate Forsyth's latest novel

I did not know, when I began working on The Beast’s Garden, just how many different German people had risked their lives – and the lives of their loved ones – to stand up against the Nazis. I had heard about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose group of students in Munich, and I knew about the Generals’ Plot to assassinate Hitler, given the Hollywood treatment a few years ago by Tom Cruise in the movie ‘Valkyrie’. Otherwise, I believed the Germans had been – in Daniel Goldhagen’s chilling phrase – ‘Hitler’s willing executioners.’

Over the course of months of research, I discovered that there were others who had tried to resist Hitler. Some worked together in large, well-organised groups that infiltrated the Nazis’ key organisations and sent inside information to the Allies that may have helped them win the war. Others were individuals who did small acts of extraordinary bravery on their own, risking everything for what they thought was right.

Most were betrayed, and paid for their courage with their lives.

In The Beast’s Garden I focus on five different circles of resisters.

The first was called THE RED ORCHESTRA by the Gestapo, because they were suspected of spying for the Soviets. In fact, this Berlin-based group did most of their work trying to change the attitudes of the German people towards the Third Reich. They published leaflets, spread anti-Nazi graffiti, and collected proof of German atrocities.

Mildred Harnack 

Its members were a mix of Jews, Catholics, Protestants and atheists, and included artists, musicians, journalists, actors and academics. Their ages ran from 16 to 86, and about 40% were women – including Mildred Harnack, the only American woman to be executed by the Third Reich. In The Beast’s Garden, my heroine Ava is drawn into this underground resistance group, risking her life to help those who were suffering under the Nazis’ brutal regime.

The group called THE BLACK ORCHESTRA by the Gestapo is better known today as the perpetrators of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, called Operation Valkyrie. In The Beast’s Garden, my hero Leo is employed by the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris.

Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris 

The Abwehr was the German military intelligence & espionage. They played a double game for most of the war, helping Jews escape Germany and the Netherlands, providing Hitler with false information, and making numerous attempts to assassinate him.

The Abwehr was ultimately brought down by the Gestapo’s infiltration into another small circle of resisters, generally called THE SOLF CIRCLE. A small group of friends who hated Hitler and his policies, they mainly worked to help ease the lives of the Jews and political prisoners used as slave labour in the armaments factories in Berlin. They smuggled them food and old clothes, and helped a few escape from Germany. One day, meeting to celebrate Frau Solf’s birthday, they were tricked into expressing anti-Hitler sentiments by a Gestapo spy posing as a doctor. They all paid for it with their lives.

One of the accused managed to send a warning to friends of his who were working for the Abwehr in Istanbul. Ordered back to Berlin by the Gestapo, they instead defected to Great Britain. The scandal brought down the Abwehr, and Admiral Canaris was one of those executed in the last days before the German defeat in April 1945.

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke

Another group of non-violent dissenters were THE KREISAU CIRCLE, led by Helmuth James Graf von Moltke. He and his friends met to discuss what kind of society they wished to build after the collapse of the Third Reich. Von Moltke was connected to both the Red and the Black Orchestras, and to The Solf Circle, and was arrested and executed after he tried to warn one of the Solf resisters to flee.

Herbert Baum

THE BAUM GROUP was one of the most tragic circles of resisters, with the participants nearly all in their late teens or early 20s. Led by the pro-Communist Herbert Baum, the resisters were mostly Jewish, and worked as slave labour in Berlin’s factories. They tried to blow up Goebbels’ anti-Soviet exhibit, “The Soviet Paradise”, in 1942. Not only did most of them pay for their defiance with their lives, either being beaten to death, beheaded, or sent to Auschwitz, but their action led to an escalation in the round-up and deportation of Berlin Jews.

Finally, in my novel I refer to THE BUCHENWALD RESISTANCE, one of the most valiant and heart-breaking bands of underground resisters. It was formed in one of the largest and most horrifying of the German concentration camps, infamous for its brutal commandant, Karl-Otto Koch and his wife Ilse (called ‘the witch of Buchenwald’). With no hope of escape, the Buchenwald resisters worked to sabotage the production of weapons in the camp’s armament factory, hid Jewish children from deportations, set up schools and hospitals for inmates, and stockpiled weapons in the hope of manning a camp insurrection.  They took over the camp just before its liberation by Allied forces, and, after the war, set up a support group for survivors.  

There were, of course, many hundreds of thousands of people in Germany (and elsewhere) who supported the Third Reich, whether through conviction, self-interest, or fear.

I have tried, in The Beast’s Garden, to imagine what it must have been like to be an ordinary person, living in such terrible and extraordinary times.

Would I have had the courage to resist?

I can only hope so.

Kate Forsyth will speak about Reimagining our History with Alan Gold on Sunday August 30 from 10am - 11am at Waverley Library in Bondi Junction as part of the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. Book now at www.sjwf.org.au