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!

Why I wrote about the Holocaust

by Alice Nelson

Alice Nelson 

After This: Survivors of the Holocaust Speak was not a book I ever imagined writing. I am a novelist. My work is the translation of fragments of life into fiction, the crafting of beautiful sentences, the careful weaving together of imagined strands of narrative.  But sometimes in the life of a writer a project simply presents itself to you and cannot be turned away from. They had come upon me from time to time in my fiction, these unexpected obsessions and pressing imperatives to tell a particular story. In my first novel, The Last Sky, my research into war-time China led me on a literary detour into the lives and experiences of Jewish refugees in Shanghai. In my short fiction, I have written about pearl divers in Broome, cockle pickers in England and the rural poor of France, among other things. But I did not envisage that I would become engrossed in listening to and recording the stories of Australian Holocaust survivors for a non-fiction collection.

Alice Nelson with Holocaust survivor Isaac Piller at the launch of After This: Survivors of the Holocaust Speak

All writers believe in the power of witnessing, in the preservation of slices of life, in the tremendous power of telling. It’s the work we do in our fiction, no matter how varied. Two years ago, immersed in my doctoral research on the narrativisation of traumatic experience, I met with a local Holocaust survivor. Over morning tea in the sunny kitchen of his Perth home, he shyly pushed a pile of handwritten pages towards me. Scribbled in pencil on airmail paper, these were his memories of the abyss. He knew that I was a writer. Perhaps I could help him with his story.

Rosa Levy, whose story is included in the anthology, with her parents in Poland just before the war broke out

He was not the only one. All over the city were frail, elderly survivors whose stories had never been recorded in written form. They served me cups of tea and apple cake and told me their stories of extravagant cruelty, of humiliations and betrayals, of brutal mockery and grotesque torture. The unspeakable, incomprehensible past worked its way into their light-filled sitting rooms and pleasant homes. All the survivors I met with were aware of their own mortality, of the scarce handful of years or months left to them. 

Rosa at the book launch

Despite what it cost them to go over the details, they wanted all of their experiences to be recorded; the world that was destroyed, their war-time terror and, just as importantly, the life that came after. I also want you to write about what happened after this, one of the survivors implored me, tapping his finger on the sheaf of notes about the war years I had taken during the interview. All the survivors wanted the horror chronicled, but equally important was the tale of the new beginning – the long, full lives that came after.

And so the book came about; long, painful interviews, meetings with the children and grandchildren of survivors, painstaking research, searches for documents and photographs, a sustained limning of the kind of losses from which it is not always possible to recover. Fourteen narratives were ultimately included and the book was published by Fremantle Press in July 2015.

The postcard tossed from the window of a cattle train to Auschwitz

In 1943, The father of a Dutch survivor, Betty Niesten, whose story is included in the anthology, scrawled a few words on a postcard and tossed it from the window of the cattle train that was transporting his family across the country towards Auschwitz. Dear Family, he wrote. We are on transport. Tell it to others. We hope to come back.

Dear family, we are on transport. Tell it to others. We hope to come back. Levie, Floor and Jet

The stories in this collection are, in their own way, a series of letters scrawled from the haunting traces of memory. Letters tossed from the window of a sealed train to an unknowing and neglectful world where people kept on sowing their fields and mending their fences as the cattle cars lumbered by full of their desperate human cargo. These are letters written with terror, with desperation and, ultimately, with the hope that they might be read and understood.

Tell it to others, a doomed man wrote. With their precise details of human lives bent out of shape by a horrifying history, these narratives are at once a bulwark against forgetting, a warning and an inheritance. I am here. I endured, they whisper to us

As the Holocaust recedes in time, as the last living witnesses to its terrible memory pass from the world, it becomes ever more important to listen to the stories of survivors. To listen and attend and remember.

Alice Nelson will speak with Israeli Professor Zehavit Gross and Dr Avril Alba on Sunday August 30 from 3:15pm - 4:15pm on After the Survivors - Holocaust Memorialisation at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.

To see the full program and to buy tickets: www. sjwf.org.au