Writing About the Holocaust – and its Australian Connections

Belinda Castles has a Masters in Novel Writing from the University of Manchester and, when not writing, works as an editor in Sydney. Her first novel was Falling Woman, and her second novel, The River Baptists, was the winner of the 2006 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. In her most recent work, Belinda Castles has researched her family history to discover an intrinsic tale of forebears who survived both the Second World War and the Nazi experience. To speak of this enduring memory, Belinda Castles addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 11 September 2012

WRITING ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST – AND ITS AUSTRALIAN CONNECTIONS

BELINDA CASTLES

Good evening and thank you for having me here at The Sydney Institute. I would like to tell you the story of how our family came to live in Australia. I know very much more now about this journey than I did before, because about five years ago I decided to write a novel based on my grandparents’ lives. Even now though, with my study full of boxes of paper and books on this history, and my own book published, I don’t know the things I would really like to know.

First, some background on the Australian connection. My grandfather Heinz Schlösser, a German veteran of the First World War and political opponent of Nazism, was forced to flee Germany in 1933, leaving appalling loss behind him. He met my grandmother Fay, a translator, at the Maison du Peuples in Brussels, where she worked for the trade union movement. They settled in England, her home, and ran a youth hostel until 1940, when Heinz was arrested as an enemy alien. He was soon afterwards sent to Australia on HMT Dunera with 2000 mainly Jewish Germans and Austrians and interned at Hay Camp in the Riverina.

There are many people living in Australia now who trace their Australian origins to this moment, and the men who were sent here made many contributions to the intellectual and cultural life of this country. The vibrancy of the life they made in Hay has been well-documented: the orchestra, theatre, chemistry lectures and chess games. Also, if you read the men’s diaries: the loneliness and bewilderment, the sheer uselessness of sitting out the war behind barbed wire.

Writing the book, I had to make a thousand decisions about what I thought might have happened, what it might have felt like, which things mattered, which did not. I thought of what I was doing as a presumptuous gift to my grandparents, who had died long before. On the one hand, to imagine what another person has suffered is an act of empathy that takes into account another person’s humanity, the importance of their life story and what it meant to them. On the other, there is perhaps an arrogance in presuming to know such things from this distant place.

Still, when it is family, you can’t help wanting to know, because it is your story too, and the story of your children. To know the past through family is fraught and partial but very powerful. The past we inherit is the one that interests us, that draws us in with its questions. How then to separate this family history out from the big history, with its deluge of material that does not tell me what I want to know, which is, put simply: What was it like for them?

For me the story was fuelled by photographs, personal papers and being in the places my grandparents had been. I would like to share some photographs with you, some of which were given to me in the process of my research, and some that I took when I visited my grandfather’s hometown in Germany. I hope that in seeing these, you may experience some of the strange flashes of feeling these photographs emit to me from my family’s past.

These pictures do not relate to the Dunera episode, but they are important to me because they conveyed the timbre of this story. They told me in their way of my grandfather’s life and in so doing what it may have meant to travel to the other side of the world during that war. Fiction can suggest the complexity of our personal histories. One thing matters because this, this and this happened first. These photographs give me the sense of a character defined by the decisions he made in those particular times, even if this character is not strictly speaking my grandfather.

Here is the first of the photographs.

It is part of a series, the others of which help me to establish that this is Winchester in the 1930s. Here Heinz ran a youth hostel with my grandmother Fay until his arrest in 1940. The enigma of this photograph is the boy on his shoulders. This boy, whose facial features mirror my grandfather’s, is neither my father nor my uncle, both of whom have black curly hair, and were born during the war, in Melbourne.

The existence of this boy was known to us. When Heinz died, Fay told her sons that Heinz had once been married to a German woman with whom he had had a son who fought for the Hitler Youth army. Heinz had never spoken of this and in my own mind such things were part of a dim, unfathomable family past. Heinz died before I was born and so his secrets were part of that misty era that precedes us, the time we think of as before.

And yet, here is the boy. Not a secret or a shadow. Sitting on his father’s shoulders in the sunshine, a makeshift cape protecting his bare skin, his father very gently holding his hands. If you look closely at their hands, you can see that my grandfather also holds a cigarette. This is not history, but a family photo. A moment in two lives that for all its casual intimacy must have been rare. It is also a strange kind of proof.

Here is another from the same sequence.

That is Fay, my grandmother, on the right. Between my grandparents are the boy and a woman as fair as the child. She was in the previous photograph, hovering in the background. Here they are then, Heinz, his ex-wife, their son and his English lover Fay. The boy smiles shyly, his skinny body leaning towards his father. Heinz looks off into the distance as though he can see the future, but this is fanciful of course. I never saw a photograph in which he smiled. I am told and well believe that he was a very serious person, although he sang and danced with the young people that stayed in their hostels and told grim, elusive jokes about his experiences in the First World War.

It is hard to explain what I took from these photographs. I think that many writers whose main work is fiction find such things difficult to pin down in anything other than narrative form. I do know that the sequence in the book that covers this episode in Heinz’s life took many drafts, and to me was the most important part of the novel. To know what the journey on the Dunera meant we have to know the men’s stories, what they carried with them on that long, brutal, dangerous voyage. In one of the secret compartments of my grandfather’s heart, I believe there was a boy with pale hair.

But this was not all he carried. To tell you about the next photographs I need to go back further, into Heinz’s life in Germany. Heinz was forced to flee the country because he opposed the Nazi regime. He was a Social Democrat and part of the Reichsbanner, who guarded SPD members from violence at rallies and organised to oppose the threat of Hitler. His father Johann Schlösser was secretary of the metalworkers’ union in Duisburg in the industrial Ruhr region of Germany. Johann had been a former, or moulder, as had his own father.

On 2 May 1933, following Nazi-controlled May Day celebrations, SS and stormtroopers occupied union offices across Germany. In Duisburg, they hung swastikas from the windows, harassed workers and, it eventually transpired, beat up and shot four union secretaries in the cellar. It is possible, I found in my research, that this local action, more violent than others carried out nationally, was in part a response to Heinz’s activities. It seems likely that Heinz was importing arms to oppose the Nazis. In notes taken at the murderers’ pre-trial hearing after the war, witnesses say that they were looking for hidden weapons.

Heinz’s murdered father and his three colleagues, are commemorated in the town, and I visited the memorials with my German cousin during my research. A current union official took us to them and described in detail what he believes happened that day. He has written about the episode extensively for publications on union history in Germany. I would venture to say that this history is very personal for this man. He writes in a kind of ‘folk’ style, which is intimate and affectionate about the personalities of the murdered men. He does not write fiction and yet perhaps he has been on the same kind of journey as I have, moved by the documents to bring these people back to life, to imagine them as living beings, not the corpses in the woods, later found by walkers, that they became.

The unionist showed us this memorial first, which is outside the current union offices in Duisburg. These very long sculptures are coffin-like, and their material, various metals, is designed to degrade in weather and to convey the men’s connection with metalworking.

Then he took us to where the original union building of my great-grandfather’s days had stood. On the pavement outside what is now a very ordinary block of flats was a row of four square metal chairs, each of them facing a concrete wall.

The official explained the symbolism to us. The place of work, where the chairs sit, is also a prison. The chairs symbolise the men, and their square shape represents the strength of the union. This sculpture was meant as a stolperstein, a stumbling block, something placed in your path, so that you stumble over it and remember.

Since the 1990s, the word ‘stolperstein’ has come to refer to the copper-coated plaques, the size of cobblestones, laid in the streets of European towns to memorialise a single deported and murdered victim of the Nazis, showing where they lived or worked. Joseph Pearson writes:

It is not what is written [on the stolpersteine] which intrigues, because the inscription is insufficient to conjure a person. It is the emptiness, void, lack of information, the maw of the forgotten, which gives the monuments their power and lifts them from the banality of a statistic. And yet from the inscription, the stumbler can infer the horror.[1]

Beneath our feet was the cellar where the men were beaten and shot. I knew from my grandmother’s memoirs that my grandfather, Heinz, was in a building across the street from his father’s office when the SS and SA entered, that he saw his father go in, and that he himself at some point after this fled. Here is the place where the homely or heimlich—my great-grandfather’s place of work—becomes unhomely or unheimlich, uncanny, haunting. Marking the place between life and death for those who were taken, these memorials ask us to imagine those moments.

Behind the chairs there is a vent in the building that presumably leads to the cellar where the men were murdered. I felt a horror of that vent, the threshold into that place, and a deep sympathy towards this ancestor that I had never met.

I want to present you with one last picture, one that I cannot show you, because it exists only in my head. There were other journeys in my research, one of which led me to Hay, Heinz’s first Australian home, on the vast flat red-brown plains of that part of the Riverina. There is nothing left of the camp. There is a rifle range there now, but people remember it, and at the now defunct train station are a couple of old carriages, used as a museum. From here, the men marched the several hundred metres to the camp.

The man who looks after the museum came out to talk to me as I looked around the carriages. As he asks everyone who comes here, I imagine, he asked me what my connection to this story was, and I told him. He let me take notes from many of the files in his office, and talked about his personal memories of the men, some of whom he got to know, and of their arrival. His father had had word somehow that they were coming, and took him to see. My host was a small boy at the time and remembers the wretched men pouring from the trains and a machine gun on the platform, pointed at them. I can see this man as a little boy on the platform, partially obscured by his father, watching as these thin, ragged men disembark and shuffle along to the camp. That day, more than seventy years before, was still with him. Perhaps he saw my grandfather. Perhaps my grandfather saw him, this little boy, sheltered by his father’s body.

Heinz’s journey to Australia was the first of many made by the members of our family. My grandmother Fay moved heaven and earth to follow him, and then again to eventually have him released for war work. Their journeys led to my father and uncle being born in Australia, as well as my brother and sister, their children and my children.

This is a migrant story, one that involves many crossings and re-crossings between Australia and Europe. I feel expanded and enriched by knowing as much as I do of my grandfather’s journey, and of hearing other people’s stories of those times. This presumptuous gift I have made to my grandparents is a more straightforward kind of gift to my living family. It is what I have made of what I have learned.

Still I wonder though, what was it like?

[1]. Joseph Pearson, ‘Nazi Victims and Stumbling Blocks to Memory’, accessed 28 June 2011,
http:// needleberlin.com/2010/08/23/nazi-victims-and-stumbling-blocks-to-memory/.