UNPACKING THE SUITCASE

Upon birth, I believe we are handed a suitcase that someone else has packed.  It is baggage we will carry all our lives and yet, if we were passing through customs with it, what would we answer when asked: who packed it?

This suitcase that we lug everywhere is filled with the hurts and happiness, triumphs and disasters, traumas and terrors that our parents have gifted us and often includes leftovers from what their parents handed to them.  The burden is passed along without conscious intention; it’s inexorable.

Some suitcases are no bigger than tote bags while others, often those handed to children of survivors who struggled to stay alive through one war or another, weigh the most.

Being accustomed from birth to shouldering the weight, most of us accept the burden as if it is an integral component of our make-up – an intrinsic part of who we are.  Of course, as we grow older, we will acquire a new and empty suitcase, and start filling it with our own things.  It is only around middle age, when exhaustion and aching backs start setting in do we think to stop in order to examine the contents. 

If our parents are still with us, we might tentatively begin asking questions.  Many of us don’t, however, either because we’re afraid to learn that we are more like our parents than we thought or because we fear that we will be forced to question what we believe (the notions we are most comfortable with) and who we truly are. 

If death robs us of our parents at an early age, that is, before exhaustion can set in, we have forever lost the option - the luxury - of asking for an explanation. We are left to our own devices to decode the DNA of our history.

That is my story. 

By the time I realized that I was carrying someone else’s bag, I was 45 years old and had been an orphan since 30.  Compelled to explore the contents, all I found were fragments of memories and puzzle pieces that failed to make a complete picture.  I struggled like an apprentice shaman, trying to divine a narrative from bones and shrouds, shreds of stories.  When you wait too long, the runes do not give up their mystery easily, if at all.

And so I was forced to learn how to pull apart the shreds and spin a story.  I now take these stories and send them out as cautionary tales. 

“Stop,” I say.  “Put down that suitcase.  Open it.”

Until that time you have examined the contents, you will be lugging two suitcases through your life.  You need to empty one to make room for understanding your own story.  With any luck, the load will grow lighter after that.

After war’s end (Books Review)

Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experiences

by Carolyne Van Der Meer

Wilfred Laurier University Press

Appeared in roverarts.com  23.02.2014

In reading Carolyne Van Der Meer’s remarkable work, Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experiences, I was reminded of the intricate lace curtains found on the windows throughout Holland. In this creative reinterpretation of memories and experiences, Van Der Meer has eloquently succeeded in intertwining short stories, poems, and essays with the delicate touch of a fine Dutch lace maker. 

Based on the recollections of the author’s mother and other Dutch Canadians, as well as letters from and interviews with Canadian soldiers and resistance fighters, Van Der Meer takes these accounts and her first-hand research to craft a compelling view of what we are left with after war’s end.

]The journey begins as the author, a journalist, PR professional and university lecturer, goes in search of her mother’s memories as a young child in Nazi-occupied Holland.

Her quest is fuelled by the need to find a connection between that childhood – a world of hunger, bursting bombs and a father in the resistance who hid Jews in the space between the home’s two floors – with the placid, safe world they now live in. The fear of traumatizing her mother leads the author to seek other recollections as well, and these individual memories are seamlessly interwoven linking the past to the present with the power of shared memory.

Van Der Meer visits her mother’s hometown and even the house where she had lived.

However, it is in Amsterdam, after exploring museum archives that she is struck by “the taste of memory” while eating speculaas, her favourite Dutch spice cookie. Despite being Canadian-born and raised, she notes: “I get that odd feeling again – of being home, of feeling like I belong.”

That feeling of belonging when there is no experiential history is not uncommon among first generation Canadians. In the poem, The Bartender, the author wryly muses about a young Pakistani,

…in September. He goes home to find
his, I leave home to find
mine.

Van Der Meer is also driven to understand what forged the woman who became her mother, to understand the connection, that indefinable element that separates yet binds women to their mothers. The gentleness and awed respect that arises from the author’s journey to her mother’s town will resonate with all those who have gone searching for clues as to what forged the strength they both struggle with and admire.

It is in Van Der Meer’s poetry, in its sparse clean lines, that she best delineates the lasting tragedies of war – the inescapable memories – as in the poem, The Department Store that describes people hopelessly trapped beneath the rubble of a bombed building.

No more Vroom & Dreesman
Only a fine coating of dust –
and echoes everywhere.

In Search of Roots

Ten years ago I  began a journey with a visit to two cemeteries in Poland.  I did not know then I was beginning a journey. I had no way of knowing that it would be what I didn't find which would set me off on the road I have been travelling for the past ten years.  A decade is a benchmark, worthy of a little introspection.  It warrants stopping a moment to turn your head and see where the path began.

Chrzanow's main square

It is the Fall of 2004. I am standing in the Jewish cemetery at Chrzanow, searching for graves that have been numbered and correspond with the list I printed off my computer back in Montreal months earlier.  It’s a long way to have come to learn that there are weeds in this Polish cemetery with roots deeper than I will ever have.  Suddenly, I’m not even sure why I am here.

In my hand is the piece of paper with five names – all Klugers, like my mother – who are buried here, the last in 1924.  I printed the list off the JewishGen website. But I don’t know how these people were related to me, merely that we are connected somehow by these six letters.  I watch oversized snails trail slime across the face of a stone. My driver, Zbigniew, says that many tons of these fat, juicy snails are exported from Poland to France each year. I wonder if some are harvested from cemeteries.

I have come to Chrzanow, 35km west of Krakow, 15km north of Auschwitz, looking for my roots but have little to go on, only my mother’s memories and five names with six letters to connect me to them, to prove to me that I will not forever remain a displaced person.

~~~~

My hunger for some personal history began in 2000 with a casual visit to Pier 21 in Halifax. In 1949, my parents and I landed there, just three of the 100,000 Displaced Persons who immigrated to Canada after the war. I was 19 months old.

Exploring the exhibit four decades later, I recognized in the stories a familiar blend of the hope and sadness inherent in every immigrant tale about what was lost and what might be found. In the centre of the exhibit were two banks of pews and facing them, a wooden teacher’s desk. Across its front in big, block letters was: IMMIGRATION, and behind, a sign in several languages, proclaiming Welcome to Canada.

I sat down facing backwards, surveying the immensity of the space now so quiet, so empty. When I turned around, however, I was dumbfounded. As if in a dream, I recognized the immigration sign. I suppose we had sat there for a very long time. And I wondered, if I could recall the sign, what else was buried in me? What if I went back to my birthplace in Passau, Germany, or to Chrzanow where my mother was born?

My mother never ceased telling me stories - about life in Poland before the war; what was lost; how she met my father in the DP camp outside Passau; and how she insisted on giving birth in town because too many babies died during childbirth in the camp, even though the war was over. My mother told me stories I didn’t want to hear. It was her road to sanity. But for me, it was a road littered with corpses. When she died in 1976, I believed the stories were laid to rest beside her.

I have been a Holocaust denier. Not in any of the usual ways: I don’t deny that it happened, but I have denied the need to turn and face the horror head-on, and enter into it fully. Was it not enough to grow up without grandparents and only a handful of relatives I’ve rarely, if ever, seen, or that my mother carried a palette of grief that coloured the happiness in our lives?

When asked where I come from, I tell my parents’ stories, how my father left Belarus and a wife and three children when he was conscripted by the Soviets. He went to Siberia; they went to Auschwitz. My mother and her husband escaped to Kazakhstan (or was it Uzbekistan?) where she had a son. Her husband died of malaria, her son of starvation. When my parents met, they married to begin life anew. I was the new but I didn’t want the history, just the hope.

When I was young I planned to be a journalist, but quickly learned I couldn’t ask the tough questions. Putting a positive spin on things is my natural inclination, so I became a publicist instead. But now I would gladly trade a rosy future for some family history. Today I want facts, street addresses, a genealogy – some notion of where I sprang from. I want to ask questions and get answers.

~~~

The town where I was born is trying to bury its strong Nazi predisposition says Anna Rosmus, a Passau native and author of several books including, “Out of Passau: The Town That Hitler Called Home.” But I’m unconcerned. I’ve been to Germany before. On my initial trip, the first sight to greet me in Frankfurt Airport was a pious Jew, facing west and saying his morning prayers wrapped in phylacteries and a tallis. I took it as an omen that it was safe to come back.

Street sign in Berlin

Passau is a little jewel of a town and I find myself playing the tourist because, although I was born here, I am not from here. I’m not sure where I’m from.

In a small shop next-door to the superb Baroque St. Stephen’s cathedral, I find a tiny Star of David, silver with an amethyst set in the centre. Leonardo da Vinci believed amethyst was able to dissipate evil thoughts. I buy it and place it on my bracelet, ensuring I will have a story to tell.

Here in Passau, three is a magic number. Three rivers - the Ilz, the Inn and the Danube flow into one. The corners of three countries - Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic – uneasily touch borders. And here, my father, mother and their respective ghosts came together to form me. Where no memories exist, I invent metaphors.

Heading back to the train station, I pass a travel agency, its window filled with Maple Leaf flags and signs touting the wonders of Canada. One sign proclaims: “Human Nature.” I catch myself reflected in it and smile.

I go from Passau to Chrzanow but there is nothing left there, either. After the cemetery, Zbigniew takes me to the City Hall where a young man explains that all records of the Jews in Chrzanow were destroyed during the war. Zbigniew tries again, rephrasing the question, but there is nothing. He looks at me sadly. The young man too seems sad to have disappointed me. But I’m not sure what I feel, definitely not hopeless; perhaps I feel adrift, rootless.   

It is my belief that we need to know where we come from to know where we’re going so I went to those towns looking for the past but all I found was my reflection in the Canadian flag. Perhaps, it’s another metaphor, suggesting we’re each responsible for building our own history.

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