Israellycool

A number of years ago, my father was interviewed for the Jewish Migrant Oral History Project. Thankfully, I have a copy of the interview, and I will be publishing excerpts from it in his memory.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Interviewer: Talking about your childhood memories you were also talking about travelling around to relatives houses…what do you remember of those occasions? Was that a sort of communal assistance?

Dad: It was wonderful. They all went out of their way. I was staying with my father’s family, his mother, who lived with her brother and he was a very religious man, had asthma, and he used to roll his own cigarettes. And because he could see I was bored, he let me roll the cigarettes. There was a theatre in that little place where they lived and through some connection he had a free pass so I practically lived in that theatre. He would come and bring me lunch and I would be watching the movies, Tarzan and you name it. Within reason. My mother’s side was also wonderful. It was also in the country. And I gradually began to know my relations. Apart from my grandparents, I never met them before.

It was Poland, the Danzig Corridor. And things began to worsen there because Poles by nature in those days were very anti-Semitic and when German influence began to move in, they showed it openly. You could imagine it wasn’t too pleasant if you were a German Jew, because there were two counts against you - German and a Jew.

Interviewer: So here you are in the midst of this anti-Semitism but having a bit of a holiday by the sound of things as well.

Dad: Yes.

Interviewer: What other stories do you have associated with that time?

Dad: Well, we got on the boat in Bremenhaven, North Sea, and…

Interviewer: Did you understand why you were getting on the boat?

Dad: No, we were leaving but my life was filled with activity. It was only on the boat that I began to learn what boredom was. But I was occupied and they were… those old people and my grandparents, they knew their stuff. Keep him occupied. They taught me how to ski, how to skate, a number of things.

Interviewer: All the talents you’re going to need in a place like Australia.

Dad: Yes. Anyway, on the boat there was already Nazism. They had a political officer and there were German passengers on the boat.

After my first Interview With My Father post, Israellycool reader and real life friend Kibi commented:

Hey Dave - my Grandfather David Tichauer was also from Friedrichsdorf which is right next to Katowitz. We must be related…

My mum has since confirmed that there were Tichauers in our family.

Given that most of my father’s family were wiped out during the Holocaust,  it would be quite remarkable if we turn out to be related.

You just have to love the Internet…

A number of years ago, my father was interviewed for the Jewish Migrant Oral History Project. Thankfully, I have a copy of the interview, and I will be publishing excerpts from it in his memory.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3

Interviewer: I want to talk about how life was to change. Presumably you didn’t have much knowledge of what was going on being a young boy?

Dad: No.

Interviewer: But from stories that your parents would tell you let’s go back to how things would change gradually for Jewish people in Germany from ‘33 onwards for instance.

Dad: Well Lipke was a village of about 100 people. It had a few necessities and my father, because of his position, was able to have a car so there must have been a petrol station. Anyway, we had a neighbour, Vanzerloper, I remember the name. He was an optician, or type of optician. If you were that way out in the country..your qualifications would be dubious. He was also a cripple, a hunchback, lame, and as a matter of fact he was the propaganda minister Goebbel’s caricature of what a Jew looks like. When Hitler came to power he put up a device which worked with the wind and it had a hook-nosed Jew gyrating around a pole.

Anyway, my father didn’t take any notice, it didn’t worry him. But when he lost his job in 1935, he realised what he had to do. So he went to the necessary Jewish committees in Berlin and they said “Oh yes, we can get you into Siberia, Shanghai China, Venezuela South America” but I think that’s where it stopped at that time. The rest of the time was visiting relations because we had to preserve our funds living with them and going back and forth - I was left with the relations in Berlin to see what could be done about getting out. But it had been left rather late and it was only through an Australian politician who had toured Europe earlier. McEwen was his name, and he was leader of the Country Party. He noticed there were a pool of professionals and craftsmen and he worked at it and he got 3,000 permits. You need a permit to be allowed to enter the country. I don’t know whether they were all filled but one of the requirements was the age and my father told a polite fib, he said he was under 40. In 1938 he was 42. He had to leave his mother, the widow, behind because she had a heart condition and was old.

Now I am going to say something I probably shouldn’t. My mother was pregnant, and you weren’t allowed in if you were pregnant so my mother had to have an abortion in Berlin. Once we had the permits, things became more organised and we got a ticket for the steamer “Bremenhaven, North Sea”. We left on the steamer in 1938 and came via West Africa to Adelaide.

A number of years ago, my father was interviewed for the Jewish Migrant Oral History Project. Thankfully, I have a copy of the interview, and I will be publishing excerpts from it in his memory.

Previous installments: 1, 2

Interviewer: As I understand your father’s military career would affect his life later on.

Dad: Yes.

Interviewer: In what way?

Dad: He came here and the war broke out, and when a couple of people he had met here told him they were going to join up, he went with them. They were very polite but they laughingly showed him where he’d been wounded and…I mean it was the upper body and one leg particularly badly.

Interviewer: But earlier on in Germany I understand that because he had served he was treated in a different way.

Dad: Yes… All government servants lost their job in 1933 when Hitler came to power. But there was a figure head, President of the Republic, he was a General and he said, “My soldiers will not lose their job.” So in 1935 he got the boot from Hitler because Hitler won that election and my father lost… oh my parents lost their jobs because my mother worked with my father, and no eating money. My parents lived very… we lived very well where we were but when you worked as a civil servant you don’t get fat.

Interviewer: Not in those days anyway.

Dad: No.

Interviewer: You were mentioning obviously his war service. What stories did he tell you about his war service in World War One?

Dad: Well No. 1, like most people who saw service in the First or Second World War, when the war ended and he came home he was about seven stone. He wasn’t a prisoner of war but lost a lot of weight. And he told me that he had learnt that his war service consisted of 95 percent sitting around waiting and five percent having to do something, and he found that particularly trying. He was very young. He found that horse meat wasn’t too bad when you’re starving. Young horse was a delicacy. What else did he tell me? I’ve got photos of him and they were close, his unit. It was only when Hitler came to power that they laid it on the line, they could not afford to have anything more to do with him.

A number of years ago, my father was interviewed for the Jewish Migrant Oral History Project. Thankfully, I have a copy of the interview, and I will be publishing excerpts from it in his memory.

Previous instalments: 1

Interviewer: I did want you to tell us what you know of your father’s military background. His experiences during World War One.

Dad: Well he was in the Horse Artillery, and his little unit - the ones who survived - ended firm friends after the war. You get a medal for volunteering, you get a medal for serving in the front line, you get a medal for being wounded twice badly and you get a few other things but those were the three medals my father was proud of. Because anti-Semitism had always been in Germany or Europe - even England - and even though Jews lived better in Germany until after World War One, they still could not achieve the ultimate. A Jew could not become a regular officer in the regular army. He could become a reserve officer but not a regular officer. I repeat that because of my father, because he never reached the rank he thought he had earned.

Interviewer: Did he ever explain to you possibly as a boy why this racism existed – why Jewish people were always going to be in a particular strata?

Dad: He tried to on the boat. We were together for about four, five months and he taught me Hebrew and he taught me chess and he taught me mathematics and I think he possibly tried to explain. All I knew was there were do’s and don’ts, full stop. When it came time for me to go to school I arrived all dressed up there and nothing too bad except it became embarrassing when I wanted to go to the toilet because all of a sudden there was a crowd of people there waiting to see what my penis looked like. The headmaster was a friend of my father. He told my father it was a bad mistake to go to school because under Hitler’s edict I wasn’t actually allowed to go.. So I didn’t understand too much because when the parades went past our little village of kids and the Hitler Youth etc, I asked my parents… I told them I would like to join. It was only later I learnt.

A number of years ago, my father was interviewed for the Jewish Migrant Oral History Project. Thankfully, I have a copy of the interview, and I will be publishing excerpts from it in his memory.

Interviewer: John can we begin the interview by you telling us your full name and where and when you were born please?

Dad: My full name, birth certificate, Joachim David —–. John David —–, born Lipke, L I P K E near Landsberg an der Watte, Province Brandenburg. Landsberg was the nearest town and Province Brandenburg about one million people, predominantly farming. Small farming.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about your family background. Who were your parents? Could you name them for us?

Dad: My father Hans David —– born 1896. Nicholai, Upper Salesia, Danzig Corridor. My mother Freida —– born Catowitz, also Upper Silesia – Danzig corridor. The importance of the Danzig Corridor being mentioned is it changed hands every war between Germany, Poland and whoever.

Interviewer: What was their background? How did they come to be in this part of the world?

Dad: My father’s family; his mother became a widow when my father was four and she lived with her brother Louie Berger. My father had schooling and then he went to war. He was the only Jew in the class and the whole class volunteered so he volunteered. He came back from the war and his relations there were quite well off. They were merchants. And because of them being so smug about everything my father developed an aversion to business people and he was going to study medicine. But lo and behold he didn’t have the money so he got into a veterinary course in Giessen. End of story he decided to really rub it in, he finished his veterinary course and then did a doctorate by working in an abattoir as director. He worked in the abattoir because that was close to where his mother lived and she was getting old and she hadn’t seen very much of her son.

I had assumed that the marriage was arranged because my father was 32 when he married, and my mother turned 21. Also my mother’s parents or family bought that practice in Germany, in Lipke. It was a government practice and he could have private patients if he wanted. It was a fixed income. So they moved there to Lipke after marriage. My mother found it a little hard at first because her family were closer to being more German than my father’s family who were ultra-religious. As my mother tells the story, she was introduced to my father’s family and the men sat in one part of the room, the women in the other. They moved to Lipke, and I was born in 1930 and all went well. My father belonged to all the organisations there, the ex-servicemen, the Front Line - that means active service - who have seen active service and had the medals. Due to my father’s background, my parents left Lipke and drove something like 15 kilometres to Landsberg, where there was a Jewish community, for the Sabbath. They drove there Friday afternoon and came back Saturday after the Sabbath. And they did this without thinking.

Part of my father’s work was servicing what they called a ‘gutt,’ a large property owned by, I won’t say nobility, but so-called junkers, the aristocracy. One was an ex-serviceman, ex-officer and he hadn’t married yet, and they were running wild, and doing things, but he was also like my father; he couldn’t sleep too well and he read a lot. So he and my father started exchanging books, but then he got married and domesticated and they became friends. He was the one later who told my father not to be crazy, to get out of Germany.

I just got back from the morning prayer service. As I was leaving the synagogue, a drunk man and woman were walking by.

Drunk woman: You wouldn’t happen to have a mobile phone we could borrow?

Aussie Dave: No, sorry (I really didn’t).

Drunk woman: What about in there (pointing to synagogue). Is there a phone we could use?

Aussie Dave: I really don’t know. I am just visiting, but I haven’t seen a phone in there (I really hadn’t, and I wasn’t going to bring a drunk man and woman in to look around for obvious reasons).

Drunk woman: Bullsh**! I’m a Christian you know, and I would help a stranger in need.

Aussie Dave: No need to curse! I would like to help. I really don’t have a phone and I don’t think there is a phone in there (pointing to synagogue).

Drunk man: What do you expect? He’s a f****** Jew (as the two walk off).

Aussie Dave: Hey. WATCH IT.

Drunk man and woman: [Cursing]

Aussie Dave: (sarcastically) Yeah, you’re REAL GOOD Christians.

You are probably almost as shocked at my brazenness as you are with the ease in which the anti-Semitism raised its ugly head. But you have to understand I was so infuriated that part of me actually wanted a fight. Bear in mind that this was the same area of Perth in which some Jewish teenagers were physically and verbally assaulted by a group of youths who shouted anti-Semitic slurs about a month and a half ago. I guess part of me wanted to show these cretins that we are capable of fighting back. Which was, of course, stupid, because:

1) for all I know, the man (or woman) had a knife, glass bottle, or black belt in Karate.

2) I live in a Jewish state which has shown the world we are more than capable of fighting back.

But I was so angry, I would have turned in to the Incredible Hulk (had I also been exposed to gamma rays as a child).

This was my first first-hand experience with anti-Semitism in a very long time, and while I read about it frequently, it both shocked and angered me.

Have I mentioned I am glad I live in Israel?

John David XXXXX (Dahvid ben Friedl)

1930 - 2008

Just after my father received the news that he had pancreatic cancer, he jotted down some notes on his life.

I am reproducing them below, as he wrote them.

JOHN DAVID XXXXX, born Joachim David XXXXX on 28.5.193O in Landsberg an der Warte, Province Brandenburg, Germany.

We lived in a small Dorf (village) called Lipke, where my father had our house and Government Veterinary Practice for the State of Brandenburg.  In our house were my mother, father and housekeeper, who had been my father’s nanny.

Hitler came to power in 1933 and all Jews lost all Government positions, except people like my father, who were WWI veterans with certain medals.  Hitler assumed absolute power in 1935, which meant NO JEW had any rights in Germany.  This meant that any Jew in Germany was living in a large concentration camp, with every German a concentration camp guard, with the power to do what he liked.

We left Germany in 1938 on a cargo boat with ten passengers, at top speed of 4-5 knots and arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, several months later.  We then went on to Perth, Western Australia, where my parents and I stayed for the rest of our lives.

After the war ended in 1945, we learnt that my mother’s mother, Berta Szaal had survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz and my mother succeeded in getting her to Australia in 1947.  My mother had two first cousins, Willie and Lotte Glucksmann, who survived and got to America.  That meant very few survived from a family of 168 people.  My grandmother died in 1954, and her tombstone in the Orthodox Jewish Cemetery is the only one to describe how our family died.

My father died in October 1967 and my mother died in October 1988.

My father - Dr. Hans XXXXX - got his Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine at the world renowned University of Giesen, Germany.  He studied after doing four years front line fighting in WWI, in the trenches, on both the French and Russian fronts.  He volunteered with the rest of his non-Jewish class in high school at the age of 17 years - was wounded twice - suffered typhus at the end of the war and was discharged, with medals.

My mother joined my father as his assistant, both in Germany and Australia and received restitution from Germany until she died, just as my father had.

I, JOHN DAVID XXXXX, arrived in Perth with only my parents..aged 8 years.
First residence, one room in a boarding house, Cnr. Norfolk Street and Hyde Park Road, North Perth.
Second residence - one bedroom unit in Pier Street, Perth.
Third residence - condemned house - 74 Stirling Street, next to horse stables, at back, which had been converted to a sort of veterinary practice.
Fourth residence - one bedroom house in Nedlands, with sleepout and extra bedroom added on top of garage.  This was our best residence in Perth.  It was an old house, built before WWI - 64 Tyrell Street, Nedlands.

I have a few distant cousins in Israel, who we have lost touch with, as they are 3rd generation of the original refugees, who were able to reach Israel, before, during and after the war (WWII)

I am classed as a holocaust survivor.

The name of my concentration camp was Hitler’s Germany 1933-1938

I am proud to say that I don’t need any explanations to describe what my parents and I went through.

My father had to leave his sick, widowed mother behind in a camp.

My mother had to have an abortion to be allowed to come to Australia.

I will be posting more about my dad’s life during the next weeks and months.

In the meantime, you can hear him on the last podcast I recorded.

Dad has been fighting valiantly, but his condition has been deteriorating in recent days. Please keep him in your prayers (or include him if you haven’t already). His Hebrew name is David ben Friedl.

After almost 3 weeks in Perth, I am flying back to Israel early tomorrow morning with the realization that this may be the last time I spend with my dad alive.

I thank G-d I was given this opportunity to spend such quality time with dad, given I have lived on the other side of the world for the past 7+ years.

On a perhaps related matter, I am re-evaluating the future of this blog, which takes much of my time and effort, and a not insignificant amount of money. While in the past I have seen the value of it as exceeding the cost, I am now not sure. It is but a small fish in a veritable sea of pro-Israel blogs, and shows no sign of growing. If I hang up my blogging boots, the message will likely still get out there, and I can perhaps spend the time and effort on other worthwhile pursuits.

Of course, I realize my current frame of mind is coloring my judgment, but perhaps this is the correct perspective.

In any event, I have over 20 hours of flying to decide.

1. Flying for over 20 hours is never easy.
2. Watching the film The Bucket List is not a good move for someone going to visit their terminally ill father.
3. Singapore Airlines usually rocks; especially so when half the plane is empty, you get the entire front bulkhead row to yourself, and one of the stewardesses takes a liking to you and goes out of her way to make sure everything is to your liking.
4. Sometimes when you imagine the guards at the Singapore Airlines counter are speaking Hebrew, they really are speaking Hebrew (I guess other airlines are employing Israelis because of their security know-how?)
5. Sometimes when you start speaking to one of the store owners in Zurich airport and you tell her you are from Israel, she will then proceed to explain how her good friend is Israeli and then point to her diamond earrings and explain how she bought them from Jews in one of the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods.
6. Sometimes when you are on a fully booked flight from Singapore to Perth, and you imagine the people sitting right next to you are speaking Hebrew (including a woman with a really ocka Australian accent), they really are speaking Hebrew.
7. When you just start speaking in Hebrew to aforementioned people sitting next to you, the look on their faces is priceless.
8. Sometimes when you are sitting next to an Israeli who has been living in Broome for a good number of years, she will know a very good friend of yours.