Getting Here
Danuta Electra Raine BA (Hons), Dip Ed
A Novel and Exegesis Submitted in FulFIllment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
University of Newcastle, March 2015
The thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository**, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. **Unless an Embargo has been approved for a determined period.
Signed: ______Danuta Electra Raine
Acknowledgements
This is an unusual project, and it would never have been completed without the support of many people. Firstly, I would like to thank my mother, Danuta Raine, and my now deceased grandmother, Jozefa Drab, for their support. Without their dedication and courage, this story would never have been discovered. I would also like to thank Raffaele Giampaolo, my ex-husband Peter Shaw, and my children, Alexis, Eliot, Salem and Ka’yil. Their stories have informed this work as much as the work has informed our lives. Secondly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Christopher Pollnitz. He has supported this project for more than a decade, meeting with me fortnightly for much of it. His scholarship, integrity and clarity have infused my writing and, I hope, my personality. I would also like to thank Keri Glastonbury for her supervision, support and insight. Her guidance and academic acumen have underpinned every success I have achieved during my candidature. This project has involved the personal and intellectual support of many people, both in Australia and in Germany. I would like to thank Dr Gisela Schwarze for travelling to Waltrop to meet with me and providing photocopies of my mother’s birth records. My thanks go to the vendor who set up our meeting and acted as translator, Marie, and to Paul Reding for showing me the site of the Frauen Entbindungslager. I would also like to thank Andreas Pilger, Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Christophe Laue, Kommunalarchiv Herford/ Stadtarchiv Herford, for revealing my mother’s documents and story. Thanks to Tim Sparding and Anne Roerkohl for sending a copy of Unerwünscht und Vergessen (Unwanted and Forgotten), the German documentary about the camp. Thank you to all those who assisted with translations, particularly Associate Professor Fred Walla, Michel Pöppinghaus and Margaret Chapman for all your insight and patience, and to Hope Sneddon for the formal translations. I would like to thank my colleagues and academics at The University of Newcastle who made this project possible, as well as all those who have read
drafts of my work and offered feedback. In particular, I would like to thank Associate Professor Kim Cheng Boey, Professor Hugh Craig, Professor Pamela Nilan, Associate Professor Alistair Rolls and Associate Professor Marguerite Johnson for their support, and Professor John Germov for extending funding for the research trip to Europe. I would like to thank the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Newcastle for its collegiality and for the long-running postgraduate writing seminars, and my fellow postgraduate colleagues who made attending worthwhile, particularly Peter Bower, Michael Sala, Christopher Palagy, Timothy Masters, David Kelly, Patrick Cullen, Ivy Ireland, Therese Dryden, and other Humanities postgraduates in our community, Emma Joel, Scott Brewer, Elizabeth Hayes, Elizabeth Kinder and Kymme Laetsch. Thanks too to the many who read and gave feedback on my work. Thank you to the WWWriters and New Confabulation group for direction and support, particularly Sheree Kable, Jenny and Russell Blackford, Rob Riel and Thoraiya Dyer. I would like to thank Brian Joyce, Jean Kent and Judy Johnson for reading and reviewing part of my work, as well as Peter Bishop and Cheryl Hingley for their outstanding manuscript appraisals. Finally, I would like to thank a small group of friends who have supported me for many years. They pulled me through and kept me going: Antonia Diacci, Sally Fitzpatrick, Diane Lenham, Clelia Park, Mary Woolley and Caroline Webb. To this list, I add special thanks to Paul Kavanagh who established the writing program at The University of Newcastle and introduced me to the joy of writing literary fiction. Your faith in me has given me faith in myself.
Contents Novel: The Glass Mountain
The End...... 1 Far Away...... 3 Immovable Objects...... 8 Frauenentbildungslager...... 21 Feminae Copulate...... 29 Looking Through Windows with Caitlin...... 42 The Glass Mountain...... 65 Three Blind Sheep...... 78 Kelvinator...... 93 Non-Player Characters...... 102 Matka Boska Częstochowska...... 106 Teaching and Learning...... 113 Let Sleeping Dragons Lie...... 123 Postcard...... 129 Ric...... 136 Venus...... 150 Service...... 155 Broken Eggs and Omelettes...... 162 Auslesebestimmungen...... 168 Living Proof...... 174 Beaumont Street...... 179 The American...... 186 Getting Here...... 192
The Red Box...... 197 Another Spring...... 206
Exegesis: The Legacy of Danuta Anita
Introduction...... 223 Chapter 1: Essaying the Self...... 233 Chapter 2: The Practice of Genocide...... 261 Chapter 3: Savage Children...... 279 Chapter 4: The Cipher’s Daughter...... 305 Chapter 5: The Autist’s Affect...... 321 Chapter 6: Breaking the Silence...... 345 Conclusion...... 359 Appendix...... 365 Works Cited...... 401
Abstract
In January, 2009, as part of my research for this award, I discovered my mother had been born in a Nazi concentration camp for the extermination of Slavic infants. The following Palm Sunday, I was the first descendant of a Polish infant survivor to have visited the site of the Frauen Entbindungslager, Birth and Abortion Camp, in Waltrop, Recklinghausen, North Rhine- Westphalia, Germany. In Waltrop I shared communion with a predominantly octogenarian congregation that been young men and women in 1943, some of them residents of this German Catholic town when the nearby Lager was in operation. Nearly seventy years after my mother’s escape, I became the custodian of a story I should never have been born to tell. Although more a piece of literary fiction than an autobiographical novel, The Glass Mountain engages with family stories to explore the depth, transference and healing of trauma across four generations. The narrative weaves between the contemporary Australian lives of Kaz and her autistic 17-year-old son, Jason, and the experiences of Ziutka and her infant daughter,
Julka, during the last years of World War II. In 2011, Christoph Laue from the Herford Archive, Herford, North Rhine-Westphalia, emailed Nazi documents relating to my mother, as well as an historical book and a museum program in which she is named. Scholars have asked, “What happened to Danuta Anita?” The exegesis, The Legacy of Danuta Anita, responds to this question, at the same time exploring practice- led research in creative projects that examine intergenerational trauma and migration. It engages with issues that include: the researcher as subject; authorial authenticity and performativity; the science and literature of trauma and intergenerational (transgenerational) trauma; the unreliability of memory in researching trauma narratives; the origins and ongoing influence of eugenics, infanticide and genocide; and the representation of trauma and autism in literature.
The Legacy of Danuta Anita
Creating The Glass Mountain
Contents
Introduction...... 223 Chapter 1: Essaying the Self...... 233 Chapter 2: The Practice of Genocide...... 261 Chapter 3: Savage Children...... 279 Chapter 4: The Cipher’s Daughter...... 305 Chapter 5: The Autist’s Affect...... 321 Chapter 6: Breaking the Silence...... 345 Conclusion...... 359 Appendix...... 365 Works Cited...... 401
Introduction Authentic Voices Performing Truths
Kicking and screaming, that’s how I sometimes describe the beginning of my PhD candidature. Some come to research with a topic of choice, but it wasn’t like that for me. I had no burning desire to explore the issues surrounding my migrant background. Even when I drafted my final proposal for a Research Higher Degree, the project failed to excite me. Growing up ethnic-Australian in Newcastle had been difficult to experience as a child. Memories of my grandparents and their stories of migration and the war were so commonplace to me that they had become banal. Could reworking them make a real contribution to the body of human knowledge? What I didn’t understand at the time, and what I am only beginning to comprehend now, is that resistance to these stories is symptomatic of my difficult childhood. Practice-led research is a volatile and sometimes serendipitous form of investigation that has the potential to change the researcher as he or she uncovers the material informing the project. My research has involved me in a series of experiences which have exposed the torn and hidden pattern of my Polish-Australian heritage. It has offered an understanding of the reasons why my family functions as it does, and revealed 224 The Legacy of Danuta Anita explanations for the illness and disability that have beset our family. One aim of this exegesis is to offer some insight into why I would not have chosen this project on my own, and why I remained dedicated to it despite the terrible effects some discoveries have had on both my family and myself. Authenticity and authority, having the right to speak, can be undermined by trauma or erased by an utter inability to speak. Just because you own a story doesn’t mean you know it. Even if you know it, it doesn’t mean you are capable of telling it. While I agree that hegemonic others have no right to usurp the voice of the ethnic minorities they have marginalised, it isn’t always the case that members of these minorities can access the stories that are most worth telling. In the case of experiences of trauma, the burden of the past events disables the victim from speaking. Stories of these events can be silenced, either by loss of knowledge, or by taboos and repression perpetuated across generations. I could not tell my story. I did not even know the nature of my story. My consciousness resisted the research and the telling until someone other than myself insisted that my story was worthy of investigation. The process of researching this project was as important as were the discoveries made during the research. The facts are only a small part of what the project has been about. My research uncovered many elisions and many evasions of truth, and showed that the primary cause of those elisions and evasions rested within my self- concept. Psychological homeostasis required diversions, and the closer I came to unraveling the truth, the more this homeostasis worked against me. To find what I found was to unravel the self that functioned, privately and academically.
At times I must have appeared downright unstable, but such instability was a valid component of the practice-led research I was undertaking. It takes Introduction 225
time and dedicated practice to follow a line of research that redefines your identity, particularly when that redefinition involves revelations of genocide and survival. Freud’s work on war neuroses applies the term “traumatic” to “an experience that within a short period presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way” (Introductory Lectures 275). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle he expands this explanation to uncover the psychological adjustment by which, “under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle” (5). Freud uses the example of traumatic neurosis. While he acknowledges that sufferers from traumatic neurosis experience dreams that repeatedly relive the traumatic event: “I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it” (11). Those suffering from traumatic neurosis subconsciously work towards healing, Freud argues, by a repetition or recreation of events approximating the trauma. In dreams and other behaviours, they are “obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (19). These involuntary repetitions continue to work out in the life of the traumatised individual until some awareness of the event can be articulated, which forces the trauma to be processed consciously and completely. In this case, the pleasure principle, or the desire to not relive the horrific events which caused the trauma, is undermined by the reality principle, or the desire for survival which requires the individual to remember and process traumatic 226 The Legacy of Danuta Anita events in order to reach a more fulfilling understanding of self. In Moses and Monotheism Freud also contends that this process does not just belong to individuals, but to families, peoples and races. As early as the turn of the twentieth century, Freud claimed that psychology had inherited attributes, and that future generations inadvertently take on the role of unraveling the causes of trauma that constrained both them and their forebears. The proposition that a person of hyphenated Polish-Australian heritage should commit herself to exploring the nature of that ethnic experience can be seen as an example of Freud’s “compulsion to repeat”, and the desire to follow through, despite the discomfort caused, as an example of the reality principle in action. From the perspective of a creative writing program, having a hyphenated- Australian write on her experience also had a generic impetus. The growing body of ethnic Australian writings inside educational syllabuses points to the embracing of this voice of otherness, perhaps in an act of romance, perhaps in an act of penance. Over the last twenty years, the Australian intelligentsia has attempted to empathise with the loss experienced by those belonging to subordinated cultural minorities. Since the invasion of Australia by the English in 1788, people have suffered social, political and cultural restriction as a result of racially elitist policies of cultural assimilation and genocide of indigenous people. For most of the twentieth century, non-Anglo minorities were oppressed and assimilated under the White Australia Policy (1901). While 1965-1990 saw many of these practices fall out of favour, and then out of law, some have resurfaced this century under the guise of inclusion. The creation of a market for authentic indigenous and migrant voices also gave rise to a number of hoaxes and writers with questionable claims to authenticity. The Demidenko/Darville controversy is now usually dismissed Introduction 227
as a hoax. The revelation that Colin Johnson had appropiated a new identity
as Mudrooroo led to questioning of his status as an author and academic.
Debate on authenticity and hoaxing has continued, and on what it is to
have an authentic voice, particularly an authentic ethnic-Australian voice
(Gunew Haunted Nations 47, 67-78). These debates reveal a significant issue
surrounding Australian authorship: if you are going to write authentically
about topics that involve identity, marginality and ethnicity, you had better
be able to prove your social context aligns with your claims. My Polish-
Australian heritage gave me a niche from which I could talk about the issues
surrounding Polish-Australian identity, including assimilation, migration and
performative ethnicity. It presented me with a voice that could call upon and
analyse the experiences of my life and those of my friends and family, joining
a growing discourse on marginality in Australia. It is reasonable to say that
this is a large enough scope for a PhD, but approaching the topic from this
angle did not interest me. Rather, I was drawn to a particular problem that
I noticed in my family and the families of some of my friends: dysfunction,
fractured communication, and the inability to tell the same story twice. For
me, performative ethnicity was a way to explore the reasons why I couldn’t
talk about the things that mattered with the people I cared about most.
Helen Darville’s novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, was an anathema to migrants who had arrived in Australia as a result of Nazi “germanisation” policies, policies that formed the basis for the genocides perpetrated in World
War II. The fact that such a text could win major awards suggests scary things about how educated Australians viewed themselves and others. While
Darville’s opening paragraph could never have been true for her, the sentence 228 The Legacy of Danuta Anita speaks to an alienation that is experientially true for me.
As I drive down the Pacific Highway, the French are busy dropping bombs into the waters in which my nieces swim, the Americans and Iraqis are engaged in a bizarre competition to see who can destroy the world many times over most, and my uncle will soon be on trial for war crimes against humanity. (1) I don’t have family who deserve to be tried for war crimes, but Darville evokes a dissociation like that I felt when I first learned of the Birth and Abortion Centre where my mother had been born. The flatness of self, the understanding that nobody else knew this, and that I owned this knowledge not just in my head but in my cells, overwhelmed me. It took some considerable time to process, and I am yet to share the enormity of it with my sisters and brother. My mother still does not want to know. To say that I know more than I can speak, that I am still processing the knowledge that my mother was quite literally a poster-child for Nazi atrocity, a museum exhibit, is an understatement. I could be that person driving down the Pacific Highway, as I do a number of times a month, musing on world issues and trying to tie it all in with what has happened to my family and me. A further question I pose is why all my children suffer from Autistic Spectrum Conditions, why both my sisters live with mental illness, and why my brother struggles with functioning at the most basic levels—all despite the fact that the members of my family are extremely intelligent. Does the strike rate for psychological hypersensitivity in my family being higher than ninety percent have anything to do with my mother being born in a death camp? In 2009, after returning from a research and conference tour in Europe, my research topic changed from stories about ethnicity to the serious questions underpinning my topic title, Getting Here. How did we Get Here? Where is Here? Is there a way to get some place better? Would knowing the facts of my Introduction 229 mother’s infancy and childhood help dismantle the challenges faced by my children and myself? The results of the work we have done as a family over the last seven years suggests the answer to the last question is yes. My project split into two sections on my return from Europe: the act of understanding; the act of communicating. The first part of this process was intensely personal. Not only did it involve reading science and psychology, history and sociology, it also necessitated the implementation of my findings in our everyday lives. It included working with my children’s health; recovering from the secondary trauma caused by the discoveries made during my travels and creating a set of lives that can thrive, despite the havoc which eugenics and genocide have wrought on preceding generations. These were historical realities that I needed to incorporate in my own identity and the identities of my children. I also had to work with the fractures this new information brought into my world. I remember sitting my mother down at a café the morning before my grandmother died and explaining to her that all the isolation, neglect and pain she had felt was not Nanna’s1 fault, so they had a chance to make peace before my grandmother died. While the knowledge gave my mother the opportunity to make her peace, the following years saw her life unravel. With nobody to understand what had happened, and my mother in profound denial, there was little I could do. The second part of the project was creating a way to communicate what I had found. How would I speak the unspeakable? How would I reveal to a reader something that cannot be explained in words? How could I deal with the yawning gaps, the breaks in the narrative where nothing hangs? I realised
1 Throughout this work, “Nana” is spelt “Nanna”. This is not a misspelling on my part. It is the way I always wrote to my grandmother, on cards and in notes. It is also the way she signed her name to me. While in the novel I changed spelling to align with common usage, in the exegesis I have chosen to keep the familial spelling when referring to my actual grandmother. 230 The Legacy of Danuta Anita that much of my life had been diverting my gaze from the horror that had always been in front of me. My discoveries had forced me to re-read my life, and then tell it anew. The process now seems to have been one of readings and conversations, of entering into a dialogue with many different people through their writings and through their constant compassion. Together, we created a way of seeing an unspoken truth embodied in my life and the lives of my family. I had always seen this doctorate as the merging of two labours. One was reflecting upon the things I had learnt, the knowledge I had gained. The other work was creating an affect. It was clear that the former would be a work of non-fiction, in essay form. There had been some conjecture about the form of the creative work. Some advised a work of creative non-fiction, but others supported my wish to write a novel. I have always felt that life was too complex for memoir, even though this exegesis verges on memoir in some parts. The people I know are too complicated to put into a book of non-fiction. Also, novels require a reader to enter into the emotions of the characters. Novels are the shoes that we walk around in so that we can identify with others. An author can put her mind into essays, but her heart is best revealed in literary fiction. I had long been confident about intellectual self-expression in essays, but only recently have I felt brave enough to bare my heart. Creating The Glass Mountain allowed me to reveal and explore an interplay of emotions that would never have found a place in essays. Writing The Glass Mountain, I found that my children were the soul of my work. I had to tell of the shock they were absorbing as they learnt of a family history of which they had no clue. I was forced to acknowledge that, although I don’t like looking at or revealing myself, a large portion of the Introduction 231 powerful story I had to tell was mine. Finally, despite a life of kicking and screaming, I discovered that I was in awe of the power and resilience of my mother and grandmother. It mystifies me how two women dealt a hand of minor clubs were able to play no trumps so successfully. Investigating the historical basis of The Glass Mountain and writing the novel haven’t been just crafting a work of fiction, but recrafting of a life, as I have realised writing this exegesis. I am often told by friends that I should hurry up and get on with it, because there are a lot of people who need to read this. I am not too sure about that need, but I am sure that, despite a very difficult time of it, I am glad to have worked through these processes. Without this opportunity I would never have known things that we should, all of us, have a right to know, about ourselves and our family.
Chapter 1: Essaying the Self2 When the Researcher is the Subject
From an early age, I couldn’t see the difference between a good argument and a good story. I grew up in Newcastle, in a street with a pipe works down the end. My mother was a migrant, my father was a teacher, but not a regular sort of teacher. He was a teacher who had done his Leaving at night school while working as a carpenter during the day. In my house, instead of doing academic things like reading Jane Austen, we immersed ourselves in tradesmen’s English. That’s why it is strange to think that my life was shaped by Bacon, Stevenson and Orwell, how in a house of calamities my father found a way to love me through his night-school texts of nineteenth and twentieth-century essays, and through his roach-eaten edition of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.2 In a world where books are closed away, protected from grubby hands and poor living conditions, there is a desire which cannot be sated by the cultural artifacts that come readily to hand. Children learn by osmosis: they learn speaking and walking and singing in the same way that they learn to
2 Much of the beginning of this chapter was previously published in a different form as “Essaying the Self: ethnicity, identity and the fictocritical essay.” TEXT Special Issue No. 5 The Art of the Real. (2009) Web.
When I come to myself, to my work with family stories, I need to sift through these voices. I need to recognise that the fragments and unknowings, 236 The Legacy of Danuta Anita the elements of memory and history, are the sounds which call me into being. I am my own act in creation (Jones 14). I work with the songs of knowing and knowledges, laying melody over melody, until I have composed the personal truth that I can play for others. I was only four or five when I learnt the term “black sheep of the family”. I was about ten when I realised I was the “black sheep” of mine, not because of anything I did wrong, but because of the maps I used and the songs I sung. I’d left home a long time before I packed my bags, and I didn’t just follow a different drummer: I composed my own dance. In my attempts to straddle the hyphenated cultures of my childhood, working-class Anglo-Australian and ethnic-minority cultures, I had to create a map of my own. This map drew itself from a synthesis of “real life” with my imaginings of how life was lived. It was a map that Deleuze describes as an “interstitching of routes” (Deleuze, “What children say” 63), Gail Jones as a childlike “proto-awareness of heterotopic space” (Jones 14). I began to draw my relief map of self early, connecting points of differences I observed but hardly understood. My identity was birthed in that time between Assimilation and Multiculturalism, in a community where being bilingual was not supported and being “transcultural” did not exist. My parents didn’t have post- structuralist theories to help them get along; they were not looking for traces or negotiating marginal spaces; they were surviving. Nothing was explained. Sitting in a living room or kitchen or in a park with people who all spoke broken English, and who would fall back into their first languages whenever they could, is a world beyond understanding. I could not understand them: they could not understand each other. Many times there were too many Essaying the Self 237 languages, too many cultures. Poles, Italians, Czeks, Yugoslavs, Russians, Greeks; they all seemed to use English as a language of trade. When it came to culture, to the deeper things of life, they struggled with English, which was the only language I knew, and then pulled out a word of their own. Often it was a word without translation, a word I would end up living but not remembering or being able to express. Body language and verbal language, myths and cultural assumptions, were jumbled up in me as if I were a knotted ball of wool impossible to disentangle. I had become like a map made by a child with autism, all “wandering lines, loops, corrections, and turnings back” (Deleuze, “What children say” 61). As a child, and even now, as an adult, I was and still am culturally restricted both within my familial environment and outside of it. As Susan Ervin-Tripp writes, “vocabulary development is both affected by and affects the semantic and cognitive organization of the child, so it can be a focus for socialization” (Ervin-Tripp 2). I was a daughter of hyphenated-ethnicity living within a milieu which precluded my proper acquisition of the languages that surrounded me. I had the trunk required for understanding without the necessary branches to bear social fruit. There is a part of me which cries that I have no language; I have no knowledge; I have no world. I do not and cannot belong with ease. The proliferation of worlds and understandings have left me in one of those gaps Stephen Muecke and Anne Brewster write about—a gap between what has made sense in the past and what no longer makes sense (Brewster, “Fictocriticism” 30). In an effort to comprehend the incomprehensible, I am forced to draw my own maps and write my own songs. Gary Weaver writes that behaviours and communication issues such as I have experienced can be explained using 238 The Legacy of Danuta Anita psychological constructs “autistic hostility” (Weaver 144). It appears that, like my autistic son, I too suffer the dislocations of autistic thought: I layer meanings upon spaces, and define objects and places by their affects rather than their positions (Deleuze, “What children say”). I was compelled to go beyond the uninterpretable otherness of my transcultural experience in order to “become.” Like a late twentieth-century version of Gatsby, I was deluded into believing that I could arrive at myself by engaging in the acceptable structures of mainstream culture, by adopting the voices of Dr Who, Blake’s Seven, Dad’s Army, The Good Life, and the sub-vocalised sounds of books. My mythology was neither Slavic nor Celtic, but incorporated the myths and legends of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt. My social mores were formulated by the Brothers Grimm, and my thoughts were shaped through reading essays. I was drawn to essays because I believed they explained the kind of thinking people typically engaged in; they appeared to offer and define a coherent cultural context. Looking at the adults around me, I found it difficult to comprehend more than the rudiments of their behaviours. The gestures and phrases which constructed the minority cultures I occupied had different interpretations depending upon who performed them. Shouting from one person meant that they loved you; shouting from another meant you should hide. While this confusion isn’t necessarily unusual in any social setting, it appears more prevalent in “ethnic minority” cultures, where the absence of strong social cues and the breakdown in communication can result in “culture shock” (Weaver 144). In response to this “shock”, people attempt to create meanings which will ease their experiences of “pain and frustration” (Weaver 140). One of the most frustrating problems faced by people coming into a new culture is the absence Essaying the Self 239 of clearly understood cultural cues and reinforcers, a vacuum that results in the adopting of many ambiguous terms and gestures. Such errors can become established through repeated misunderstandings. My great uncle had been a Polish DP, a Displaced Person. He was a loud and generous man who had his own farm out the back of Sydney. Every time I went to visit the farm, he would come up to me and hold his hands out, laughing loudly. “Ya bodgy,” he’d yell, “ya widgy.” To this day, I have no idea what he was trying to say. I was four or five when I first remember him calling me a “bodgy” and a “widgy”. While I now know it refers to delinquent kids of the 1950s and early 60s, I have no idea why he said that to me. For the longest time I thought it was some sort of Polish pejorative. Uncle seemed to think it a great joke, something he would equally say to kids, his wife or the dog, which causes me to think that he didn’t know what he was saying either. It seemed to mean “gidday” in one instance, and “get out of that” in another. Uncle wasn’t the only unfathomable member of my family. My Polish grandfather, Dziadek, appeared to use the same words and the same tone of voice to compliment and insult. He was almost impossible to understand until he spoke in Polish, but as I didn’t speak Polish myself, I had to rely upon others to interpret his intentions for me. The interpretation usually went along the lines of “Don’t worry love, he’s alright,” or “Better go up the park.” Going up the park often meant Dziadek gave me a handful of twenty cent pieces for the corner shop. Even being told to go out was difficult to understand: was I in trouble or was I not? It was the drive towards understanding that anchored me in essays.
Essays, unlike literary fiction, were much better at explaining connections concretely because they did not appear to rely so heavily upon tone and cultural 240 The Legacy of Danuta Anita reference. Fiction plays upon understandings that are often difficult to obtain without adequate immersion in certain types of cultural experience, whereas the discursiveness of the essay allows the reader to be located further outside the context of its argument. Essays are good for creating maps of thought and behaviour, as they often explain both language and culture. Orwell not only taught me about language and politics, and thus the vital importance of English (Orwell “Politics and the English Language”). He showed that Beaumont Street, the main road of Hamilton in Newcastle, N.S.W., wasn’t the only place in the world where ethnic marginalisation had created little countries inside bigger ones. During my childhood, the separation between the Anglo-Celtic Australian community and the agglomeration of “New Australian” communities was such that I could go for days in the holidays when the only Anglo-Australian face I saw was my Dad’s. In his essay “Marrakech”, Orwell took me through the Jewish quarter, where, just like the Italians, Greeks and Slavs of Hamilton, “the Jews [of Marrakech] live in self- contained communities [and] follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers … butchers, leatherworkers, tailors … whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews” (129). Yet it was the aesthetic value of essays that became for me the most important aspect of this art form. The breath of the author across the page is a cultural experience of its own. Stevenson’s “An Apology for Idlers”, and his view that “idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity” (243), was just as important as Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey”, and his belief that “we go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others” (171). Essays like these taught me that I could discover myself within the Essaying the Self 241 form. Words were more than tools used for recollection or argument, they were constructive. I began to structure myself through essays: if I wanted to know what I really thought about something, I would map myself out in this art. Beyond argument, essay writing becomes self. Because of close relationship between identity formation and the process of constructing a familiar essay (Hazlitt 163), the fictocritical essay became significant in exploring the biographical material surrounding my ethnic heritage. Rosalia Baena writes that life writing possesses “value as a complex dynamic of cultural production, where aesthetic concerns and the choice and manipulation of form serve as signifying aspects to experiences and subjectivities” (Baena vii). In fictocriticism, the beauty of life writing blends with the cultural discourses surrounding the subject I. There is freedom for me to move, to breathe and reflect upon the layers of my self-mapping. I can explore the positioning of my thoughts within the context of the trajectories which have formed them, “not in order to assign an origin to them but to make their displacement something visible” (Deleuze, “What children say” 66). This is important in negotiating “transculturality” beyond the boundaries of biography and experiences of marginalisation. The reduction of identity to an issue of personal struggle is too crude a model of the non-Anglo-Celtic Australian experience: rather it is necessary to explore the margins which have been formative for so many Australians. According to Sneja Gunew, “being marginalised cannot be reduced simply to a struggle between oppressor and oppressed in which the latter remains utterly passive. In their spatially conceived representation of exclusionary gestures, margins have always been ambiguous signs which have served to frame the centre” (Gunew, Framing Marginality 27). 242 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
Fictocritical writing allows a familiar voice to emerge for life writers. It allows us to negotiate marginality without tidying up the edges. Fictocritical writing does not deliver us from anxiety over the production of meaning; where some reading practices work to reassure and to confirm narrative expectations, explorative methodologies such as fictocriticism avoid the trajectories of received knowledges. The effect can be unsettling and disturbing. (Brewster, “Fictocriticism” 30) Entering marginal worlds ought to be disturbing. The experience should be like Alice’s exploration of Wonderland: there should be dead-ends and wonderings about how these crazy games work. The form should reinforce childhood experiences of creolized and mixed languages which left those like me wondering about what was actually going on around the dining-room table. There is wonder in “transculturality”, and uneasiness. I have been a hyphenated Australian all my life, and I still don’t have any answers. Sometimes I belong and sometimes I don’t. I am constantly amazed by the walls that I bump into: life can be “like birds that strike their beaks against the window. It is not a question of interpreting them. It is a question instead of identifying their trajectory to see if they can serve as indicators of new universes of reference” (Felix Guattari in Deleuze 63-64). In everyday life, those borne on the post-World War II waves of migration often find themselves isolated even from their own families. We flow like water, and our maps are meanderings. There are many things in common between this type of “ethnic minority” and the sorts of tensions experienced by indigenous people. There is a loss of place, a shared experience of “the violence of assimilation”
(Brewster, Literary Formations 15), along with its accompanying sense of grief and need to redraw the map of identity. Essaying the Self 243
There is a Romany saying, “He who wants to enslave you will never tell you the truth about your forefathers.” But what can we do to emancipate ourselves when there are no records of who we are, or when we have been so constructed that our very heritage is an intractable web of seemingly meaningless connections? Not everybody can find their genealogy: not even DNA can make all passages clear. The way ahead appears to be through the construction of a solid image of the present, through an exploration of our present trajectories and becomings. “Every work is made up of a plurality of trajectories that coexist and are readable only on a map, and that change direction depending on the trajectories that are retained. These internalised trajectories are inseparable from becomings” (Deleuze, “What children say” 67). Whether these trajectories are the result of real journeys or imagined ones does not matter in the construction of self. The existential self can retain its sense of reality despite its constructedness. I am a Polish-Australian: my mother is an immigrant, born in Germany to a Polish mother; my father is Anglo-Australian whose family, on his mother’s side, has been in Australia for six generations. My cousins are indigenous, children from the stolen generation. What does this mean? I don’t know. All I know is where I am. I know I grew up in a mining and steel-milling town and in a confluence of different ethnicities. I know that this has both enriched me and deprived me; it has been both a source of confusion and enlightenment. But, just as my Dad taught me long ago, enlightenment can come from the oddest boxes. The oddest of boxes opened at the end of 2008. After nearly three years of exploration, writing and research, I was presented with an unexpected opportunity. Although the beginning of the project had seen constant 244 The Legacy of Danuta Anita movement forward, with consistent output and recognition, my research had suffered from both clumsiness and opacity. The deeper I probed, the more intently I listened, the more tangled and confusing the narratives became. It was then, after years of reading and doing things that turned out to be mostly unhelpful, I began to hear differently. It was as if I had been listening to the same recording for so long, that I finally noticed what was happening behind the music. I stopped, picked up one of the motifs. It was messy and scratchy, churning in the background with white noise. I opened a new notepad and began to notate its progression. Slowly the knotted ball of history began to unravel. I asked a question of Professor Ann Curthoys at Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association’s (ACRAWSA) Re-Orienting Whiteness Conference held at Melbourne University in December 2008. Raphael Lemkin was her answer. A week later, sitting in my back shed, books piled up around me and sweat dripping over the keyboard, I read Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and pondered a life of conversation with my grandmother. Fragments of family stories coalesced as Lemkin’s definition of “genocide” recast my understanding of them. There was a relationship between my life, the insect- eaten books of childhood and the mind before me. My father’s attempts to aid intellectual escape revealed a sensibility to which I had been born blind. There had been no words for the desperate chaos of my childhood, until now. Lemkin codified the causes of familial distress as if they were prepositions to our conclusions. If genocide, then? For the first time I began to take my intuitions seriously.
Lemkin’s genocide “has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national Essaying the Self 245 pattern of the oppressor” (79). The idea of a nation is not the same as that of a state. States may be occupied by peoples of a number of nations. Poland before World War II had a long heritage of many nations living together, Polish nationals, Jewish people and Romany, to name a few. “Essentially the idea of a nation”, according to Lemkin, “signifies constructive cooperation and original contributions, based upon genuine traditions, genuine culture, and a well-developed national psychology” (91). Lemkin’s argument for codifying an international law against genocide rests on his awareness that “nations are essential elements of the world community”, and that “the world represents only so much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component national groups” (91). To destroy a nation is to destroy its future contributions to the world. It not only impoverishes those who might survive the destruction, it impoverishes the future of humanity itself. There was nothing palatial about where I worked. My life was exactly the way it should have been: dishevelled office; heat; Aspie kids bickering in a house still unrepaired after the 2007 floods that left much of Newcastle and Lake Macquarie in a state of reconstruction. Existence was humble, troubled, and I escaped it into my father’s boxes of books. The boxes had multiplied over time. They had grown into libraries and archives and papers piling above head height. In essence I was still escaping the desolation of my nation by hunting through the remnants of other people’s cultures. I was no different to my grandmother in her kitchen, or my great aunt in her garden, plodding slowly forward and unable to explain why my hands felt so empty despite the apparent abundance flowing through them. As I read Lemkin’s work, it became obvious that my hands felt empty because they were empty. The wealth that they ought to have held was long gone. 246 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
Where did we lose it? Was it in Poland? Was it Germany? Where had my mother been born? Nanna had told me that she worked in Minden during the war, first in a farm, then in a hotel. She had been a maid. When she was pregnant with my mother, she had been sent to a hospital for the wives of Russian prisoners. It was a very bad place. She worked in the field every day up to the birth, and all they fed her was a broth of dirty roots cooked in the middle of the field. If she did not work, she did not eat. If she did not move fast enough, she was beaten. I rang my mother and asked where she had been born. “In Germany? Why?” “But what was it called?” “It was a hospital near a farm. Waltrop-Holthausen. It won’t help you. It burned down.” After years of asking questions, finally I had two place names: Minden from my grandmother, and Waltrop-Holthausen from my mother. I opened Google and queried “Waltrop-Holthausen forced- labour babies”. Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy: Coming to terms with Forced Labor, Expropriation, Compensation and
Restitution, edited by Oliver Rathkolb was the only result. It hyperlinked directly Gisela Schwarze’s paper “‘Any misunderstood leniency is to be avoided’. The Enslavement of Soviet-Russian Women and Children during World War II”. All my searches using traditional academic resources and databases had been fruitless. As late as 2014, searches made on primary historical and literary databases including Proquest, Sage and Jstor resulted in no citations with a query involving combinations “Waltrop-Holthausen; forced labour; baby/ies (infant/s).” While broader queries such as “Germany; forced labour; Essaying the Self 247
infant” returned some results, none related to the German policy of abortion
and starvation of the progeny of Slavic forced labourers and slave workers
during World War II. Even at the time of writing, the story that I am about
to tell is almost absent from the academy. There is an international discourse,
but little of it is available in English.
Gisela Schwarze is a German historian whose work throughout the
1990s and early 2000s explored the maltreatment of women and children
under the Nazi regime during World War II. Her two histories of Slavic
forced labourers, particularly in Westphalia, Germany, uncover the policies
and practices surrounding the establishment of special camps dedicated
to unwanted pregnancy and childbirth amongst Slavic women.3 “Any misunderstood leniency” is the only published translation of Schwarze’s significant body of work. That first day, I had access to less than half a dozen pages of sample text.
The history was foreign to me. Like most educated people, I was well aware of Nazi policies regarding Jewish people, Romany, the disabled and those they deemed socially undesirable, such as Communists and homosexuals.
I had known since high school history that the Nazis planned to eradicate the Slavic peoples in one generation, but had never understood how clearly conceived their procedure had been. In this paper, names that belonged within the context of genocide and ethnic cleansing were linked to the treatment of
Poles, Ukrainians and Russians.
3 Both published in German by Klartex Verlag, Essen, the first is a history of the findings based upon her research into government documents of the period and interviews of survivors, Kinder, di nicht zähleten: Ostarbeiterinne und ihre Kinder im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1997). This was followed in 2005 by the publication of many of the stories of the women whom she interviewed, Die Sprache der Opfer. 248 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
As early as December 12, 1942, Müller, the Chief of the Sicherheitspolizei im Reichssicherheitshauptamt, had suggested to Himmler the different handling of the children according to their origins, i.e. German, Germanic or bad-race fathers. He considered a racial check of the children necessary, which should be carried out by the SS race and settlement departments. “All the children of the good races are to be taken into children’s homes that have to be erected for those children who are to be educated like German children … The inferior (bad) race children are to be handed over to gathering stations in order to prevent their upbringing together with German Children and to enable their mothers to go back to work.” (Schwarze, “Any misunderstood leniency” 90) In practice these “gathering stations” were places where even well fed infants who had been harboured in German households perished from neglect and starvation in days or, at most, weeks (Zegenhagen 70). In 1943, policy was passed to change the practice of sending pregnant Polish workers home to their families. In April 1943, the state-labour exchange Northrhine-Westphalia- Lippe (Landersarbeitsamt) erected the Frauen Entbindungslager Holthausen, run by the “Waltrop and district vegetable co-operative” with the assistance of conscripted staff from “petty-bourgeois families in the vicinity” (Schwarze, “Any misunderstood leniency” 90-1). While the local people literally called it a “Women’s Maternity Camp”, as recorded on their memorial and place markers, Schwarze describes it as a birth and abortion camp, the largest of its kind, and associates it with places such as “the birth-, abortion- and death-camp ‘Pfaffenwald’” run by the Hersfeld labour exchange (90). As she writes, “nearly all the ‘homes’ for the babies and toddlers of Polish women and Eastern workers were places of horror” (90). This was the hospital to which my grandmother had been sent in June of 1943.
It is still difficult to describe how affected I was reading these few pages over Google Books. Two things struck me while reading the paper: firstly, a Essaying the Self 249 sense of realization, as if all the fragmented pieces of my family history had begun to fall into the correct places; secondly, that I could never have known about this when I had started. It was as if I had looked into a mystery only to find myself standing in the middle of it. This story was the focal point of every nightmare I have ever had. I was overtaken by an otherworldly sense of denial. I can remember exhaling, “My God! It was a death camp for babies.” It would be four years before I would discover that in January 1946, the New York Times called places like the Waltrop camp “slave baby death farms” (Zegenhagen 65). For the first time I began to appreciate the unusual position I occupied in completing this research. What does it mean to be born in a death camp? What does it mean to be the eldest child of a woman who was born in a death camp? Does that even happen? I had gone from the daughter of a Polish DP and an Anglo-Australian tradesman to a survivor of genocide in less than twenty minutes. My tongue went dry, my chest heavy, and all I wanted to do was shut my eyes. I stopped. I had been using essays to get through these periods of detachment, the times when my body refused to follow my mind into the bizarre connections that were forming because of this project. The uncertainty of the oral history was destabilizing, and the consequences that these tales implied were extremely concerning. They were almost too strong to write as fiction. Yet I had never found anything to verify the truth of my grandmother’s tales. Others invalidated much of what she said, while sooner or later she usually denied the rest. Here I had concrete external evidence that the stories Nanna had told me had a basis in truth. A nasty place had been set up for the pregnant wives of the Russian prisoners of war; of course, that is how her teenage mind would 250 The Legacy of Danuta Anita have framed it. And there, in the tiny bit of detail on Page 91, was the same deputy commandant, the woman with the cane, who had beaten her while she was pregnant. There were the babies dying in less than three days. There was the story of working for the farmers while heavy with child (90-1). The fragments of Nanna’s stories were coalescing across the years faster than their shifting forms could be comprehended. Still, apart from the name of the town and a reference in one book, I had nothing. During the conference in Melbourne, my research had hit a snag. I had spent months working at ethics approval, when my mother removed her permission for a story and forced me to rewrite the paper at the eleventh hour. While Human Ethics is entirely appropriate and responsible, in practice it undermined the security of my academic work. There is a caveat that permits interview subjects to remove their information at any time during the process, a caveat I am more than happy to enforce. In many cases, this sort of fail-safe would be a technicality. Subjects would rarely exercise their right to pull their interview information, but that probability did not apply to this project. The attitudes of people who suffer from long-term trauma are often changeable. When I began my project, however, I had no idea the level of trauma with which I was dealing. Like many migrant children, I just thought my mother could be difficult and unreliable at times. In Melbourne, it became apparent that I could no longer rely upon the firsthand accounts from family as primary source material for my research. The inability to confirm which of the conflicting narratives were actually true caused me to become concerned about the veracity of the oral history with which I was working. It was necessary to find evidence supporting this work within the public sphere, or risk having to rewrite the entire project. Essaying the Self 251
Then, in my fibro shed, drinking iced water, reading Lemkin’s description of genocide and tapping searches into Google, my intellect failed me. The fragmentary strings of my personal history synaesthetically layered over similarly patterned strands of intellectual enquiry brought my thinking to a halt. I began to tangle inside the academic research in the same way that I had struggled with the fragments of family stories. Works on Australian migration and assimilation policies during the post-war period fractured against the examples of Nazi policies of “germanisation,” policies Lemkin used to define his new term for a new conception: “genocide” (79). At the same time as I borrowed the copy of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, I came across a longitudinal study of immigrant assimilation in Western Australia from 1952 to c. 1965. Ronald Taft, Reader in Psychology at the University of Western Australia, had crafted a report on successful assimilation that exposed the shocking way mainstream academics viewed migration after World War II. Just as Lemkin broke up genocide into eight techniques, Taft’s From Stranger to Citizen offered a clear, tabularised “Analysis of Assimilation Process”, or seven steps of assimilation. Concepts and abominations echoed between the texts, the resonances made more pronounced by Schwarze’s history of the Birth and Abortion Camp in Waltrop. Perhaps if I had been reading this in the cool of The University of Newcastle library, I might not have been so confused. I floated in the heat, and drafted an imagining that drew together the loose ends of my mother, my family and myself. There were characters on the page, and the essence of our troubles had entered into them. Seven steps of assimilation: eight techniques of genocide—did any of us ever have a chance?
The title of the PhD, Getting Here, asks not just how did we travel from Europe to Australia, but how did we end up in the lives that we are living. It is 252 The Legacy of Danuta Anita heartening to think that my family life was atypical. I would have hated it to be commonplace. But it was not atypical in that it was working-class, or that it was ethnically marginalized, as I had thought when I was younger. I remember asking my father why my cousin’s life was functionally different from my own. I was about eight at the time. The difference wasn’t socioeconomic, it was behavioural. It wasn’t the amount of money available, but choices that were made with it. Our choices were impaired because of the complexity of trauma that reverberated through our home on a daily basis. This isn’t to say that other households lacked trauma, only to intimate that the trauma we suffered had its roots in extremities of the earlier twentieth century. Over the next years, I would gradually discover these causes. With the support of The University of Newcastle, Australia, I travelled to Europe for a conference in Częstochowa, Poland. Famous for Jasna Góra Monastery that houses the “miraculous” icon of the black Madonna and child, Matka Boska Częstochowska, it was the shrine my grandmother had visited in the late 1970s, her only return to Poland after her transportation to Germany in 1941. After the discovery of my mother’s birth, and of a little known concentration camp, the University extended funding to include Minden, Waltrop and Italy. Every place I travelled offered new insight. Częstochowa proved to be more than a conference experience. Polish academics were able to offer me new perspectives on my research. Poland was still healing from the war, and people were still searching for the fragments of their families. The dislocation caused by Axis policy, the murders, the long years of Soviet occupation, had left a deep scar on the Polish landscape. People spoke of the vibrancy of minority cultures, particularly the Jewish enclaves. Częstochowa is close to Krakow, and people spoke of the way intellectual, Essaying the Self 253 social and cultural life had changed. I was told that I should not expect to find very much. “You will not find your family. All the records are destroyed.” I visited Jasna Gora. I bought amber from the folk art shops. I ate the food that my grandmother and mother used to cook when I was a child. There was a particular fruit my grandmother described to me, a small citrus like a kumquat. It was local to the area. At Jasna Gora, I made a petition to the Madonna. I asked for help with this project, amongst other supports. Perhaps the petition worked. Before I went to Germany, it was difficult to find out much about the places where my mother and grandmother lived. Not only was it difficult because I lack fluency in German, but while I was in Germany I found Google searches for information about camps and forced labour resulted in many more references. In Minden, I discovered more about the camp in Waltrop, and was able to access contact numbers for different people. Professor Oliver Rathkolb helped me to obtain contacts for Gisela Schwarze, and through the internet I was able to discover the contact for Paul Reding, the artist responsible for the memorial at the site of the camp. I rang Gisela Schwarze from my hotel in Minden, but she did not speak English so she hung up. In Minden, the archivists at the local museum assisted me with discovering where my family had stayed while in the district. They still had good records for wartime employment in the town. My grandmother had not worked or lived in the area during the war. The archivist, however, was sensitive to my story, and he contacted the nearby archive in Petershagen, which after the war had been the Polish Displaced Persons Camp, Lahde. From
1945-1949, Polish nationals who had been in forced labour in Westphalia during the war were relocated to this camp for processing. It was here that my 254 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
grandmother married my grandfather on February 11, 1949. I was informed that Ladhe was closed later that year, and that many couples were marrying in order to assist with successful migration to countries such as America, Canada, Argentina and Australia. This aligned with Nanna’s claim that it was Dziadek who insisted my mother travel with them. He refused to leave her in a German orphanage while Nanna returned to Poland, as her younger sister did. On marrying my grandmother, my grandfather decided to be my mother’s legal father. While this was a common practice, it was not something he had to do. It was a choice he made.4 The archivist in Waltrop was also helpful with information regarding birth details, and gave me instructions regarding accessing records while in Waltrop. He informed me that my language and background could meet with some difficulty in Waltrop, because it was “very traditional in its ideals.” This proved quite accurate, as my stay in Waltrop was odd. After my experience with the archive and municipal officers in Minden, who were all very helpful, the officiousness of the archive in Waltrop caused many problems. The archivist in Minden was more than happy to access records and make calls without a fee. The archive in Waltrop insisted in a precisely worded document in German and a substantial fee. Fortunately, a shop owner in Waltrop had become a friend, and she made the application for me. Unfortunately, the documents were never forwarded. My stay in Waltrop proved to be difficult for my friend as well. The area around the shop was vandalized by neo-Nazis. It was disconcerting. Without this vendor, I couldn’t have discovered what I had. The debt cannot be repaid, and because of the difficulty of the situation, the vendor requested not to be
4 The archivist explained that when a child had a change in parent due to a permanent change in care a new birth certificate is issued. Essaying the Self 255
identified. I have since tried to contact the vendor using the details I had, but have not been successful. This vendor was helpful as a translator and a guide. assisting me to set up an appointment with Paul Reding at the Heimatmuseum in Waltrop. Herr Reding took me on the tour of the site. It was emotionally much more difficult than I expected. According to Herr Reding, I was the first descendant of a Polish infant survivor to visit. The camp was located not far from the railway, and had abutted what used to be a small forest outside the town. By 2009, the site had become a lawn farm, and the area of one of the concealed abortion centres had been built over with an attractive barn which served as function centre. After the information regarding the camp had been made public by Gisela Schwarze’s work, Paul Reding had liaised with the Catholic Diocese and the local youth group to establish a memorial for the infants and
mothers.5 He said that there were too many memorials in Germany with crosses, and he thought that the ring of totems made from railway sleepers spoke deeply of the unnamed faces of the murdered infants. He drove me around the local farms and showed me where Nanna would have worked. He described what life was like in Waltrop when my mother was born, and how things had changed. He whispered things in my ear that I can never repeat, and which still cause me to shiver. It was obvious that I was in shock after seeing the site, so when we returned to the Heimatmuseum he took me into one of the back rooms and sat me down for a time. He offered to speak to me again at length, but I never took him up on the offer. I physically shook as I returned to the village. I had not expected this reaction, and if I had I would not have travelled alone. There was a sinister
5 See Appendix. 256 The Legacy of Danuta Anita undertone to some of the conversations. I went back to visit my friend, and was instructed that from then on I was to tell nobody that I was the daughter of one of the children born at the camp. The vendor helped me to contact Gisela Schwarze, and arranged for the historian to meet me at my friend’s shop. While I had a feeling that the information I had found was unusual, it was not until this venerable woman, who walked with two canes, arrived at the shop that I began to appreciate that there was more to this journey than I had anticipated. Dr Schwarze had travelled from Dortmund to meet with me, a trip that was quite difficult for her. She said that it was an honour to meet with me because, although she had been able to trace Russian and Ukrainian survivors of the camp, it had been difficult to find Polish ones. Again I was told, this time by Dr Schwarze, that I was the first descendant of a Polish infant survivor to visit the site, and to hear that there was such a large family in Australia was exciting. During the interview, Gisela Schwarze was able to give me photocopies of the documents relating to my mother and grandmother. A line in one ledger that relates to Nanna’s incarceration in the camp, and a line in another is effectively my mother’s birth certificate. The children of this camp were not entitled to formal birth certificates because they were not German. The conversation was transformative. Our host fed us coffee and cakes, and acted as our translator. I could see my friend sometimes withheld information, but what I was offered was more than I could have expected. As a scholar who was responsible for confirming the veracity of applications for compensation from forced labourers, Dr Schwarze would have been directly responsible for confirming my grandmother’s pension. As a liaison for the Essaying the Self 257
German documentary, Unerwünscht und Vergessen6 by Anne Roerkohl, she would have had knowledge of the use of my mother’s documents in that film. These things did not come out during the conversation. Rather, Dr Schwarze politely offered me leads. She gave me the name of the film. She made suggestions as to how my grandmother would have escaped the camp. She informed me that the townsfolk were not as ignorant of the camp as they suggested, and that the town was a Nazi stronghold. The people were extremely supportive of the National Socialist movement, and that was the probable reason why the security at the camp could afford to be as lax as Nanna claimed. The women who escaped were sent back the moment they were noticed by townspeople. These women would then be sent to the punishment barracks, where many were executed on gallows erected outside the barracks. When I returned to Australia, I attempted to contact various people. Eventually, I was able to make contact with Anne Roerkohl’s production team, and was sent a copy of the documentary. This came in June, 2010. I was watching the documentary in my daughter’s bedroom when my partner pointed out, “Isn’t that your mother’s name?” I didn’t believe him at first. We scrolled back, and I had to look at the document a couple of times, but there it was. My mother’s name was on official documents supporting a story about what happened to the children who survived the camp. This was the beginning of the next period of discovery. It took a year to trace this and other documents, but in February 2011, Christophe Laue, a historian from the Herford Archive sent me a cache of documents about my mother, Danuta Kępa (Kempa). These documents contained an exhibition brochure that again included the document used in the documentary by Anne Roerkohl. Included
6 Unwanted and Forgotten 258 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
in these documents was an excerpt from Deckname Genofa: Zwangsarbeit im Raum Herford 1939 bis 1945, edited by Helga Kohn and Christoph Laue.7 Babette Lissner writes of my mother:
Intern allerdings wurde kein Hehl aus den Absichten gemacht: ,,Es gibt heir nu rein Entweder-Oder. Entweder man will nicht, daß die Kinder am Leben bleiben — dann soll man sie nicht langsam verhungern lassen und durch diese Methode noch viele Liter Milch der allgemenine Ernährung entzienhen; es gibt dann Formen, dies ohne Quälerie und schmerzlos zu machen. Oder aber man beibsichtigt, die Kinder aufzuziehen, um sie spatter als Arbeitskräfte einsetzen zu können. Cann muß man sie aber auch so ernähren, daß sie einmal im Arbeitseinsatz vollwertig sind.”
Das Kind der Polin Josefa un des Polen Anton, Danuta Anit, hatte das Schicksal der »schlechtrassigen«, zum Tode aussortierten Kinder zu teilen …
Das weitere Schicksal von Danuta is bisher ebenso unbekannt, wie das ihrer Eltern oder das anderer Kinder und Eltem, die hier in Herforder Akten erwähnt sind Einige wenige Kinder haven diese furchtbarn »Pflegstätten« überlebt, viele Mütter, vor allem die, deren Kinder »eingedeutscht« wurden, haven ihre Kinder dennoch nicht wiedergesehen.8 (152) The original text has been included here, because it needs to be
7 Codename Genofa: Forced Labour in the Herford Area 1939 to 1945, published in 1992 by Verlag für Regionalgeschichte (Publisher for Regional History), Bielefeld. 8 Lissner translated by Hope Sneddon: Internally, there were no secrets made about the [Nazi] intentions. There was only either/or. Either you do not want the child to stay alive. If so, you should not let them starve slowly. Rather there are ways of doing this painlessly and without cruelty. Or, you intend to raise the children so that they can be used as labourers. Then you have to feed them well so that they will be adequate workers. The child of the Polish woman Josefa and the Polish man Anton, Danuta Anita, had the fate of being “poorly bred” and was selected to be put to death. … The further fate of Danuta is unknown. The same can be said for her parents or the other children and parents, who went through Herford. Only a few of the children survived the dreadful “childcare camps”. Many mothers who allowed their children to be “made German” never saw their children again. Essaying the Self 259 understood that all of these documents came in German. As noted above, I do not speak or read German with any fluency. To begin with, I asked friends to help with translation. A close friend of mine, and a supporter of this project, had her husband translate the entire documentary for me as it ran. I was so humiliated to have him do this, because the documentary said such horrible things about German people. He was not one of the people responsible, and I could see the translation made him uncomfortable. Subjecting others to this trauma left me feeling guilty. Translation of documents was a continual issue. Only very select parts of books and documents could be translated. I relied upon friends to scan information for me, and family and closer friends to check the translations were correct. My supervisor, Christopher Pollnitz, arranged for an interview with Associate Professor of German, Fred Walla. As a favour, Fred Walla agreed to look at the documents from Herford. During a long conversation he verbally translated the documents, and then explained the difficulties posed by one of the terms. The German from the Third Reich carried nuances that made them particularly difficult to translate, even for established scholars. It was fortunate that in 2012 I was able to meet with Hope Sneddon, a graduate student at the University of Newcastle working on the letters of German servicemen during the war. She provided the formal translations cited in this thesis. The discovery of the documents, books and documentary film provided a number of research solutions. Firstly, my personal experiences and the evidence in these documents resolved many of the difficulties with ethics. There was no need to rely upon either the veracity of oral history or the permission of family members to work with the material. My mother’s documents are in the public record, they have been used as historical evidence 260 The Legacy of Danuta Anita and have been on display in museums since at least the 1980s. While there were still many questions about how to proceed ethically with this project, the academic position was clear. Documents and writings that are part of the public record and previously published in scholarly work do not need to undergo ethics approval as a part of research. However, my personal sense of ethics held me to a higher standard. While the question German scholars have asked is “What ever happened to Danuta Anita?” I wondered, “How much do you have a right to know?” This project is a response to those questions.
Chapter 2: The Practice of Genocide Science, Literature and Practice of Intergenerational Trauma
In discussing the nature of intergenerational trauma, memory and elision in the creation of my writing, and in the act of writing, I have had to make peace with the tendrils of chaos that genocide has entwined about my family and me. Writing The Glass Mountain offered the opportunity to understand the complexities of identity and survival, and to explore the way undergoing severe, long-term trauma alters the personality. Based on the stories my grandmother told me and on my personal relationship with her, the novel interprets the malleability of the self and the subtleties of complex post- traumatic stress through parallel representations of Nanna and her much younger self, Ziutka. Antonio Damasio writes “conscious minds begin when self comes to the mind mix, modestly at first, but quite robustly later” Self( Comes to Mind 22). Furthermore, he adds, “building a mind capable of encompassing one’s lived past and anticipated future, along with the lives of others added to the fabric and capacity for reflection to boot, resembles the execution of a symphony of
Mahlerian proportions. But the marvel … is that the score and the conductor become reality only as life unfolds” (24). For Damasio, the self is a play of cells 262 The Legacy of Danuta Anita and systems, relations and readings, which develop as the biological organism interacts with the environment. Some of these modes of interpretation are reflective and ratiocinative, and some are instinctual, hard-wired into our biochemistry. Tendrils of genocide participated in my being long before the University of Newcastle funded research trip to Europe in 2009. Before then, I knew so little about myself, about my mother, about the trauma that haunted our cells and thought patterns. I didn’t know enough about sorrow or forgiveness. All I knew were scattered fragments of childhood illusion, fairy tales and the personal mythologies spun by well-meaning elders who thought it best that the past was left in the old world, and that being here, in Australia, was good enough. In epigenetics, neuroscience and neuropsychology, nothing is ever left behind. If human beings were books, we would deconstruct our cells in search of the traces of our identities. Our forebears are not dead, they live on our bodies through residue of their DNA, and through the DNA methylation that we inherited along with eye and hair colour. “DNA methylation is the epigenetic mechanism for long-term regulation of gene expression” (Alvarado et al. 2). When I began this project, geneticists and neuroscientists were just beginning to explore how epigenetics reshapes genetic expression in our immediate progeny. As recently as February 2015, the prestigious journal Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience published a provisional PDF of a paper, “An epigenetic hypothesis for the genomic memory of pain”, in which Alvarado et al. demonstrate that “up-regulation of a gene involved with synaptic function,
Synaptotagmin II (syt2) ... is associated with long-term changes in DNA methylation” (2). We can now say with reasonable confidence that the trials The Practice of Genocide 263 our parents faced, particularly their chronic pain and long-term suffering, inform our propensities, our hormonal secretions. More strongly, Alvarado et al. propose that “long-term alterations in DNA methylation could provide a molecular substrate for chronic pain-related change in the CNS [Central Nervous System], forming a ‘memory trace’ for pain in the brain” (11). Genetics, and gene expression, are only the first installment of the story of intergenerational trauma transmission. Louis Cozolino, in The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, discusses how the brain and interaction with others develop in tandem: “using evolution as an organizing principle, we begin with the assumption that our social brains have been shaped by natural selection because being social enhances our survival” (12). Relationships, he concludes, “are a fundamental and necessary building block in the evolution of the contemporary human brain” (13). Founder of neuropsychology as both psychological practice and discipline, Cozolino has worked with the findings of contemporary neuroscience to create a picture of how nature and nurture, DNA and our social, material and biochemical environments, conspire to create individuals. He posits a corollary to Darwin’s survival of the fittest: “Those who are nurtured best, survive best.” But the contrary is also true of our nurture:
When a parent abuses, neglects, or abandons a child, the parent is communicating to the child that he is less fit. Consequently, the child’s brain may become shaped in ways that do not support his long-term survival. Unloving behaviour signals to the child that the world is a dangerous place and tells him Do not explore, do not discover, and do not take chances. When children are traumatised, abused, or neglected, they are being given the message that they are not among the chosen. As they grow, they have thoughts, states of mind, emotions and immunological functioning that are inconsistent with well- being, successful procreation, and long-term survival. With all due respect to the old adage, we could also say that what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker. (14) 264 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
When I began discussing topics for postgraduate research in 2004, my position as an ethnic-Australian was suggested as an area of research by the academic supervision. My mother and grandmother encouraged me to tell their stories “warts and all”, and I thought I possessed a good understanding of the area by virtue of lived experience. After all, these women had shaped my very sense of being. They talked to me for hours at a time, letting me take notes and record our conversations. For three years I listened, asked questions, worked through ethics approval with my institution, and wrote stories and essays, only to meet with a pattern of elision, erasure and refusal. They told stories, changed stories, and had me delete stories. Despite this pattern, they both continued to insist I complete. Standing on the shifting sands of family politics, I found myself writing about how those sands shifted, how that influenced my sense of self and my craft, how the research created performative instability. I also began to question who we were as a family. It didn’t take a genius to realize that the myths Nanna had been trundling out as truths were markers of a secret. We already knew she could keep a huge one. I was nineteen and my mother forty-three when, in a hall outside the hospital room in which Dziadek lay dying, my Nanna told Mum that he wasn’t her father at all. As I listened to Nanna’s stories change with each telling, they began to reek of reconstruction. Every time I bumped up against a boundary of her persona, she wriggled away, avoiding any direct revelation of the self she had been during the war. Some stories were solid, like the one of being beaten by the deputy commandant in “the camp for the wives of Russian Rebels”. From the first time she told me about the place, this fragment of memory had remained consistent. When I transcribed her wartime experiences for a German pension claim in 1999, Nanna had spoken of an “upright” woman with a cane that she The Practice of Genocide 265
used to beat young, heavily pregnant women. Other details, such as the name and nationality of my genetic grandfather changed at each retelling, as did the names of cities in which she stayed. I would learn that not even my mother knew the correct date and location of Nanna’s marriage. Despite my uncertainty and growing mistrust of Nanna’s oral histories, some details smacked of authenticity: the jobs she had, the buildings she lived in, the hotel with its smell of polish and timber, the farm house with her clean straw bed in the warm pantry. My sensory body seemed a truth filter, but there was no chronicle of dates and places against which to test that truth. A. S. Byatt comments that “imagination is nothing but decaying sense, and that when decaying sense is ‘fading, old and past’ we call it memory” (xix). Her implication is that, of sensation, imagination, and memory, memory is most flawed. The dense matter of sensory experience is not recordable; our senses cannot retain the immediacy of an event; and like any other complex system running a heuristic algorithm, information is refined. Human beings are optimizing machines: brains contract sensation into sequences of neuronal interconnections requiring sensory choices be made, albeit unconsciously. In making those choices our biology enforces a compression of reality.9 Only when unpacking this information do we become aware of the cracks and chasms formed by the process of remembering. Recollection becomes the art of making sense of the gaps, of filling them in. As we become more practised at it, we create ever more seamless representations of reality, so that when we recollect we both elide and recreate.
9 Contemporary research is continuing to find evidence for the holistic processing of sensory information throughout the body. While the central nervous system (CNS), the brain and spinal cord, is the central hub, much of our sensory input is preprocessed in situ, as it were. Much of what we see is processed directly in the eye and optic nerve, and even our ear is the location for preprocessing of sound. Our bodies “make choices” before our brains do. 266 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
Writers and researchers live by their guts. Some call it intuition, others judgment. I like to call it serendipity. Damasio explains judgment and intuition as one and the same thing, a state in which our cognition and emotions work in harness to enhance rationality:
The quality of one’s intuition depends on how well we have reasoned in the past; how well we have classified the events of our past experience in relation to the emotions that preceded and followed them; and also how well we have reflected on the successes and failures of our past intuitions. Intuition is simply rapid cognition with the required knowledge partially swept under the carpet, all courtesy of emotion and much past practice. (Descartes’ Error, xix) Serendipity works similarly, through practice and the optimizing function of the central nervous system. An optimizing machine resolves problems iteratively to progressively find a better solution or fit. When we set ourselves a task, our central nervous system sifts incoming data for the best fit to our query. Hence solutions “jump out” at us. With adequate practice, we sense the spark when the truth is told or a lead is found. The light of insight illumines a path to be followed. It is a highly attuned sensibility, a set of skills honed to a particular discipline. In traditional research, there are the skills of hard scholarly work that bring to light truths obfuscated by time and intrigue, the sort of work done by Gisela Schwarze and Christoph Laue in combing through and conserving archives, and in creating documented histories that validate the stories of survivors like Nanna. The practice of creative research requires different skills. While not academic rigour in the sense of generating theories and falsifying hypotheses, it does involve some of the same talents: ability to manipulate knowledge bases so as to draw disparate concepts together, both across disciplines and across lives; research skills that simultaneously take in the “big The Practice of Genocide 267 picture” and the most minute detail; a gift of asking the right question of the right person at the right time; and the tenacity of a bull terrier with a meaty bone. All are keys to identifying and following the educated hunch. In late 2008 I had a hunch that the secret Nanna was hiding was something to do with genocide, and a hunch that Mum’s vacillation had to do with childhood trauma. Though we are not Jewish, I could see patterns of ill health and mental dysfunction within my family, patterns that were reflected in the literature I was reading about war trauma, childhood abuse and neglect, and in the memoirs of survivors of concentration camps. Nanna’s description of Mum’s birth left me imagining scenes of her escaping under the wire, babe- in-arms. When my supervisors asked me about my work, I responded that Nanna was lying about something. She wouldn’t tell me who my grandfather was. Originally she had claimed that he had been German, but by early 2009 she had acknowledged he was a Pole. I suspected that he may have been Jewish or Romany, she was so tight-lipped. She also said that my mother was the reason she could not return to Poland, that her family would not have accepted her. For years I had thought Nanna was deliberately obscuring the past. Some family members suggested she had dementia, but Mum insisted this wasn’t the case. These narrative inconsistencies had persisted for as long as Mum could remember. Maybe there had once been something deliberate in Nanna’s confusion of the past, maybe there was some memory loss, but the most plausible explanation is psychological. In 2008, I was yet to learn about the intricacies of memory and the interplay of trauma. I had not read Cozolino on neuropsychology and his amazing image of the brain as a tree, grown from the scaffold of our DNA and nurtured by the system of triggers and responses 268 The Legacy of Danuta Anita that pass between infant and care-giver. I was yet to learn of epigenetics and how certain experiences and exposures can alter how DNA expresses itself. I had not yet engaged with Damasio’s neuroscientific framework, and his notion that the brain’s imaging of the body brings about the conscious self. Jigsaw pieces of this information were not yet available. It is likely Nanna never fully understood the purpose of her incarceration. She was young, only 21, and her brain was still forming. She was also a slave in a foreign country subjected to consistent and uncountable terrors. She found it hard to explain what she knew, and she found it difficult to run her story in a linear narrative. Nothing beyond an educated hunch and broad background knowledge gave me cause to suspect what I would find during my research trip of Europe. Despite the elisions of public history and personal memory having all but erased the truth, I was being caught up in a Freudian drama, a recapitulation of trauma and the intergenerational push to resolve the deeply forgotten. There are various explanations of how the transmission of trauma might come about. Traditional Freudian explanations involve an almost mythic repetition of trauma in the lives of those affected by it, until the pattern is finally recognized and the trauma resolved through psychotherapy and cathartic articulation. Key is the repetitive nature of trauma experiences, where individuals relive shadowed analogues of the original events. For example, a mother suffers the trauma of the death of a child. She cannot recover from this loss, so her life abounds with examples of similar losses until a catharsis occurs that resolves the issue of the loss of the child. The similar losses may be experiencing the repeated loss of other children when on outings, the loss or abortion of creative projects, the loss of items that The Practice of Genocide 269 are of intense value. The corollary to this experience of repetition is that the traumatised individual cannot communicate the traumatic event effectively. If he/she could, then the repetition would cease (Beyond the Pleasure Principle). In Moses and Monotheism, Freud extends his notion of traumatic repetition to include intergenerational repetitions through families and national groups. After Freud, biological and neuropsychological explanations have been formulated to explain how trauma might be transmitted between successive generations, and how these traumatic after-shocks are manifested both psychologically and behaviourally. Cozolino notes that eye-contact between parent and offspring is significant to neurological development in newborns, and that, “later, autobiographical memory will rely on these somatic, emotional, and physical sensations to construct the stories of the self that will further shape our identities” (72). The limbic system—emotion and hormone production centre of the brain—is not fully developed until an infant is eight months old. It requires a complex set of environmental factors to facilitate healthy maturation, a set that is centred on positive interaction with a well- adjusted primary care-giver. Poor caring environments increase an infant’s propensity for trauma symptoms, such as hyper-attentiveness and anxiety:
Much of the brain’s functioning is based upon primitive fight-or- flight mechanisms as opposed to conscious and compassionate decision making. Because of this reality, the conscious and unconscious management of fear and anxiety are core components of our attachment relationships and character. (29)
The new field of epigenetics provides a contemporary explanation for intergenerational trauma that places the medium of trauma transmission in the expression of genes rather than the genes themselves. The trauma is inherited at conception. Epigenetic theory postulates that, while genetic change at the evolutionary level only occurs after many generations, the facility which 270 The Legacy of Danuta Anita encodes how genes express themselves allows for rapid adaptations through changes in genetic expression. For example, a parent who has undergone a traumatic event, such as long-term abuse or incarceration, can undergo epigenetic changes that alter the gametes.10 According to evolutionary theory, such changes function to increase the likelihood of survival. More sensitive adrenals, hyperactive fight-and-flight responses and attributes that increase focus and awareness of potential danger, as well as facilitate emotional detachment, enhance the chance of survival of those born into situations of long-term threat and horror. This is exactly what research into cortisol levels in the offspring of Holocaust survivors has revealed. Rachel Yehuda has researched extensively the relationship between PTSD in trauma victims, particularly Holocaust survivors, and the occurrence of PTSD in their children and grandchildren: “PTSD in children of Holocaust survivors appeared to be strongly related to parental PTSD”. Many studies since 1918 describe “a significantly higher rate of familial mental illness in symptomatic trauma survivors with PTSD (or ‘shell shock’) compared to either nonexposed subjects or similarly exposed survivors who did not develop posttraumatic syndromes” (Yehuda et al., “Low Cortisol and Risk for PTSD” 1252). Yehuda et al. relate this to low ambient cortisol levels found in both PTSD sufferers and their offspring:
The observation of low cortisol levels in PTSD was initially considered counterintuitive, because cortisol levels have generally been found to be high in conditions of acute and chronic stress and in certain types of psychiatric disorders that are associated with stress … In cases of chronic stress … increased cortisol levels usually indicate that the hypothalamic- pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis has grown resistant to the effects of cortisol. … In contrast, low cortisol levels in PTSD
10 This is one significance of the new paper by Alvarado et al. The Practice of Genocide 271
are associated with enhanced cortisol suppression after dexamethasone administration, suggesting that the HPA axis may actually be overly responsive to stimulation. The hypothesis that the HPA axis may be hypersensitive in PTSD is consistent with the more general phenomenology of increased reactivity to both explicit and implicit trauma reminders and as well as a more generalized hypervigilance in trauma survivors with this disorder. (1253) Low ambient cortisol levels correlates to more sensitive fight-and-flight reactions. Such children of survivors are hyper-vigilant to the dangers of their environment. Being reared by care-givers who still suffer from post-traumatic stress would further exacerbate such hypersensitivity and is potentially destabilising for children. They are like hair-triggers set to react to the first intimation of a threat (Yehuda et al. 1258, Solomon et al. 865). In Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth Leys refers to Ilse-Grubrich-Simitis and Marion Olner when she outlines the
quasi-psychotic anxieties, peculiarly concrete or demetaphorized modes of thinking, traumatic fixations, dissociative doublings or splittings, actings-out and memory disturbances … defensive depersonalizations, altered states of consciousness, and mental “absences” found in the children of Holocaust survivors. (26) The list of symptoms makes me think of my own children who live with autism. It’s like reading a textbook symptomatology for ASD. Both neuroscientific and psychological models can be used to explain the dysfunction evident in trauma sufferers and their offspring. As Cozolino says, the “speechless terror often reported by victims of trauma appears to have a neurobiological substrate” (Cozolino 29). A substantive body of research lends credence to the existence of intergenerational trauma. The victim of the original trauma does not have to report the traumatising event to their off-spring for the neurological affects to be transferred. Both Freudian and 272 The Legacy of Danuta Anita neuropsychological schools of thought concur that “healing” of transferred trauma depends upon revelation of the original trauma, and commitment to appropriate psychological treatment.11 Two pertinent questions arise from my research into family history. First, what forms of trauma and generalized trauma have been identified by my research? Second, how are the various forms of trauma to be represented in the medium of fiction, and is it possible some will finally resist representation? Psychological trauma impedes communication of information about the original event. While somebody who suffers a trauma may be able to state the facts of the matter—“The light turned green, then the red car hit me”—he or she will be unable to communicate the emotional impact of the trauma. The closer the victim comes to expressing the core of the traumatic response, the stronger post-traumatic symptoms become. Furthermore, victims of referred trauma often resist recognizing, or have trouble identifying, the source of their psychological difficulties when it originates in the abuse and suffering of an earlier generation. The author of a personal memoir must question whether the truth of the original event or events can be discovered. The author of a novel on intergenerational trauma, given the extent to which her information may be based in the fabulations of an earlier generation, must question the fictional means by which she represents the mode of transmission of the trauma and the extent to which the transmission can be made to seem psychologically truthful. Both the author of a memoir and the author of a
11 Shirley Jean Schmidt adapted some of the attributes of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) developed by Francine Shapiro in the 1980s to create DMNS (The Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy) in the early 2000s. The treatment does not require the client to know the cause of the trauma in order to be treated. Rather the process works with maladaptive introjects, effectively personality fragments, formed in order to cope with the trauma symptoms. This method has a reputation for being less retraumatising than traditional talking cures or cognitive behavioural therapies. The Practice of Genocide 273
fiction must acknowledge that their psychology cannot choose the details and the disjunctions between memory and reality that they bring to the page. Both for author and his or her generation, the deep truth may be unutterable. In The Glass Mountain, one disjunction is made apparent, in the juxtaposition of Nana with her younger self, Ziutka. Trauma rewrote Ziutka, and Nana came into being.12 By running multiple narratives, and offering multiple points of view, the novel permits readers to interact directly with the characters’ self-awareness. In the case of Nana/Ziutka, the younger persona reveals an innocence and flexibility of self that the older Nana lacks. We see Ziutka’s strength and fidelity in her willingness to risk herself for others: Anton, Julka, Galena. Despite the difficulties she faced, she drew upon the resources of her childhood, her experiences with her family and employers, and her cultural background—folklore, fairytale and myth—to make sense of her world. Like Kaz, Ziutka “always did what was right” (“Broken Eggs and Omelettes”). Sixty-five years later, Nana is much more rigid and unforgiving. The trauma she suffered has made its way into her body and hardened her. She isn’t just old, she is often cruel. Kaz’s image of Nana is a woman commanding a totalitarian domestic world. Those who infringe upon her expectations suffer, as we see in Kaz’s memory of abuse in “Kelvinator”. Memory forms within us and, in turn, rewrites who we are. Remembrance, as a physical experience, is embodied as a nesting of physical sensation and external objects. This perspective on how trauma can be recapitulated through the lives of those without memory suggests the possibility that the creation of self is a continual “re-collection”, a relocation of identity within its physical and psychological spaces. These acts of “re-collection” task the author with
12 As noted earlier, ”Nanna” refers to my maternal grandmother, while “Nana” refers to the character in The Glass Mountain. 274 The Legacy of Danuta Anita expressing traces so evanescent that they evade representation. When discussing the problem of both researching and representing intergenerational trauma in my own fiction, I am exploring the issues of practice-led research. During my PhD, I developed a number of practices to assist me engaging with material surrounding both my mother’s story and the ongoing trauma responses faced by my siblings, myself, and all our children. Two of the most important practices were born out of a model that I call re-collected identity. This model involves seeing the material artifacts and theoretical research involved in the project as a tangle of interconnecting threads. The idea is that a complex identity can be gathered up from the documented and narrative threads that have intertwined to create the present self; through a process of mindful reflection these threads can be organized in ways that facilitate the generation of a cogent possible self. The creation of this possible self is a mapping of paths that may be taken beyond intergenerational trauma, a kind of catharsis if you wish. From the perspective of that possible self, the complex dysfunction of characters in my fiction can also be seen more clearly and captured in a meaningful way. The other process of mindful reflection is akin to “nesting”. While developing the character of Ziutka, there came a period when all I could do was “nest” with her. In 2010, Nanna was already too frail to speak at length. Her language reverted to macaronic Polish and English. Being with her could result in long conversations involving Nanna talking energetically in Polish, and ended with her laughing, “But you don’t speak Polish, do you?” All I could do was gather the things she had given me, the cards, the jewellery, the stories she had told, and sit with them. I also gathered up books containing stories she would have known, childhood games, folk tales and recipe books, and a The Practice of Genocide 275 finally small artifact from Częstachowa—an icon of the Black Madonna. I sat in the middle of them. It was a mindful synthesis, an attempt to go behind the 87-year-old woman as she then was, to reconfigure in my imagination what she might have experienced in Germany—before my mother’s birth. In the camp, all she would have had to fall back on were the impressions of home and the girl she had been. A sense of who she was as she prepared to give birth in the bestial environment of the Waltrop-Holthausen Frauen Entbindungslager must have been anchored in family, in the strength and resilience of her childhood, in folklore, folk stories and the physicality of a country upbringing. To meet that person, I needed to follow her into that space. I needed to understand the embodied sensations that helped her survive the brutality, and to recreate that body of sensations in my novel. When representating long-term and intergenerational trauma, it is no less significant that the physicality of such pain be conveyed. But is such pain too physical to be communicated in language? In The Practice of Everyday Language de Certeau writes, of Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy, “Rarely has the reality of language—that is, the fact that it defines our historicity, that it dominates and envelops us in the mode of the ordinary, that no discourse can therefore ‘escape from it,’ put itself at the distance from it in order to observe it and tell us its meaning—been taken so seriously with so much rigor” (10). From a Wittgensteinian perspective, it might seem impossible to develop a discourse about trauma and its alleviation, or to conceive such a discourse as having any meaning outside its own terms of reference. But another perspective is of a writer whose conviction is that, while trauma has a power and a mode of existence which resist communication, it must still be possible to communicate its reality and historicity, and hence assist in its 276 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
alleviation. Linguistic means should be discoverable to convey the historicity of genocide and the life-sapping trauma suffered by those who have survived genocidal practices. According to Freud, trauma is healed through the articulation of the traumatic event, so to have trauma is to be trapped inside a horror, unable to express its nature or consequences (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 38-9). How can an author represent an experience her characters cannot express themselves? This is the question of trauma fiction and trauma theory. “It is impossible,” Susan S. Lanser writes, “to separate the text of a culture from the text of an individual” (in Horvitz 1). The emerging genre of trauma fiction is defined by Laurie Vickroy as “personalized responses to this century’s emerging awareness of the catastrophic effects of wars, poverty, colonization, and domestic abuse on the individual psyche” (x). I would further suggest that trauma fiction includes the recounting of trauma transmission, particularly through families, thereby opening up the possibility of generalizing from the individual to the greater cultural experience. Intergenerational trauma or transmitted trauma,13 in which the subject suffering from the symptoms of trauma is not the person who experienced the original traumatic event, is a particular species of post-traumatic stress. Most research in this field has focused on Holocaust survivors and their families. More recently, research has shown similar infective trauma symptoms amongst communities that experienced terror events, such as 9/11, and
13 Not all transmitted trauma is intergenerational in nature. Secondary trauma is a form of transmitted trauma which can occur in many different circumstances, such as the trauma suffered when one witnesses somebody else’s suffering, or listens to a tale of abuse or disaster from a survivor. The Practice of Genocide 277
natural disasters, including the 2009 and 2012 earthquakes in Italy.14 The sense of being unable to communicate is more severe when the person suffering from the trauma was not party to the traumatic event. Rashkin calls this the transmission of a secret, “a situation or drama that is transmitted without being stated and without the sender or receiver’s awareness of its transmission” (Raskin 4). This form of trauma is significant in my work, but not new to it. As Rashkin points out, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels involve transmission of a secret, such as Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, Balzac’s Facino Cane, Henry James’s The Jolly Corner, and Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Recent Australian fictions dealing with transmission of secrets, both generationally and by association, include Tsolkis’s Dead Europe, Juchau’s Burning In and Scott’s The Architect. All three are concerned with how we, as Australians, are dogged by and need to resolve our relationship with the European past. In them, Europe is the keeper of nightmares as well as the holder of the key to restitution. Similarly, Hoban’s Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer explores the way trauma is transmitted through abusive social contracts. The Australian works, which position my creative work within a national creative discourse, are of particular interest, and will be discussed in Chapter 6 of the exegesis. These works demonstrate how other authors have overcome the dilemma of representing the inexpressible. Disorientation, psychological breakdown, visionary experiences and the paranormal are some of the generic leaps the novelists perform when representing the points of view of the characters with little or no understanding of their erratic behaviours and psychological
14 The XIII ESTSS Conference: “Trauma and its clinical pathways: PTSD and beyond”, in Bologna, June 2013, presented an overview of the discourse into trauma, trauma transference, and transgenerational (intergenerational) trauma. Yehuda et al. have examined cortisol metabolic predictors in survivors of the World Trade Center attacks, and show that psychotherapy can reduce cortisol levels in those suffering PTSD (Yehuda et al., “Cortisol metabolic predictors”). Yehuda’s earlier work with cortisol metabolic predictors in children and grandchildren of holocaust survivors has been used to prove the long-term predictive capacity of low ambient cortisol levels as a marker of intergenerational trauma transmission. 278 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
distress. Sue Woolfe is another exemplar of how to work with characters unaware of their own constrictions. 15 Such unawareness has paralleled my own. When I travelled to Europe in 2009, I was in search of facts. Family experiences suggested that there were gaps not just in the story of where we had come from, but also in the story of who we were today. I had spent years recording and working with the stories told by my Polish grandmother, all the time knowing that they were “at best” a blue thread in a bower bird’s nest. It was not until I had walked across the field in Waltrop, Westphalia, in which had stood the Frauen Entbindungslager, the death camp for babies, that I could begin to weave those threads into a fabric. In March 2009, the week before Palm Sunday, I discovered what it was to “survive” genocide. I discovered the eternal present tense of trauma. As I wrote in a journal:
Standing beside a curator for the local folk museum, I am numb. He is holding a violet, new life in the German spring, and telling me time does go on and new things grow. I look out across the green lawn and experience what words are inadequate to explain: the silence, the reason, the incomprehensible shifting of a story that may change with each retelling. The Nazi occupation of Poland and Greece, slavery and genocide are experiences that have followed the migrant generations preceding our own. It is no longer enough that we are here now. Now it is time to question how we got here. Even when the author is not directly a descendant of a Continental family, our national flirtation with the eugenic policies of Nazi Germany can be the source of serious contagion from which we, as Australians, need to be inoculated.
15 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of Sue Woolfe’s representation of autism in The Secret Cure. Chapter 3: Savage Children A Failed Eugenics
Ballarat, June 2013. A man with a white hood obscuring his face sits in the courtyard of a steam-punk inspired nightclub. He is silent while young bohemians and I chat about neuroscience, Wittgenstein and the cultural ramifications of language formation. We talk about Polish culture and fairy tales, about the change caused by the War. When the conversation breaks up, he speaks. “Go on,” he nods, lowering his hood to reveal striking Slavic features. “Tell me more about Poland.” I feel nervous when asked about my work. This project has taken so long even the question has its own rhythm. People ask what my PhD is about. I tell them intergenerational trauma and garble something about families of post-World War II migrants. It’s in creative writing. I’ve written a novel. When the enquirer says he would like to hear more, experience has taught me this is seldom the case. It is rare to look into the dark-ringed eyes of a survivor. I see myself in them. He is shrouded by his father’s mystery in the same way I am shrouded by my mother’s. He tells me a story; I tell him another. I see the same loss in him that has penned my life: gaping absences of history; the vacant ground 280 The Legacy of Danuta Anita beneath us; the lack of footing. Maybe these things belong to the man in the beer garden; maybe these images reflect the similarities of our stories. We are both partially erased, but our erasure is nothing compared with the emptiness that defines our parents. In The Glass Mountain, Kaz’s mother, Julie, is not revealed from her own perspective. Not fully extant in her own world, Julie (Julka/Julia) is relative to her shadowed background, the embodiment of the secret running through the family. Julie is the point of no-story. She is gate and key to the answers Kaz and Jason seek, while Nana (Ziutka) is the gatekeeper. The most significant component in our tale of eugenics and genocide, Julie cannot interpret her own condition. Rather, she is revealed through her interaction with other characters, through conversations, and through the internal perspectives of Kaz and Jas. Julie’s personality and interactivity (or lack of it) are given context through the atrocities she experienced as an infant. She continues to suffer the effects of those atrocities, but she lacks the distance necessary to reflect upon them. During her conversation with Jason in “Broken Eggs and Omelettes”, Julie touches on the trauma of her childhood, but alights from it as quickly as she lands. Passing Jason a photo of herself as a young girl, fresh out of Nelson Bay Displaced Persons Camp, she explains:
“Your mother doesn’t know what happened to me when I came here. It’s not that I don’t like this country, I do. It is the only place that has ever been happy to have me. But things weren’t easy for me,” she said, “not like they are for you.” … “Great-Nana, Dziadek, the people who came here after the War, they didn’t make things easy for people like me. The Australians didn’t make things easy for any of us. It was hard. Life has always been hard, Jason.” Savage Children 281
In “Beaumont Street”, Julie again attempts to give voice to her terror while speaking with Kaz.
“People have forgotten what it was like for us,” Julie said into her coffee. “Nobody wanted us. If it wasn’t for your father, I don’t know where I would be.” “But you were smart. You were beautiful.” “I was Polish. I was dark. Girls like me worked in cafés, or nightclubs, or in factories …” But it isn’t until she has been drained of all her other stories that she is able to approach its source.
“You don’t understand. I went to a reunion with your Nana a few years ago. A woman there, I had known her at Nelson Bay, when we were girls. Her mother was Polish, and she had given birth while she was in Germany.” Julie paused. “During the war, that is. Her father was unknown. They said he was a Nazi, but there was no way that could be true. Her mother had married a Polish man in the camp before they came to Australia.” … “This woman comes up to me and says, ‘I know what has happened to you. I know.’ I must have looked odd or something, because she tells me this story.” Julie’s mouth was agape. She reached out and patted Kaz’s hand. “You don’t have to worry about this stuff. It’s over. We grew up, left home and the craziness stopped.” (“Beaumont Street”) Unspeakable events have imprinted themselves upon Julie. Encoded into her behaviours and speech patterns, they determine the foci of her attention and subvert her personal agency. She is trapped in a cycle of traumatic reaction and does not thrive because she is unable to identify with the broader ramifications of her actions (Vallacher & Wegner 661-2). A fragmented personality has limited her capacity to identify with the causes and consequences of her choices. Despite her giftedness, malevolent forces have washed over Julie’s life, eroding her joie de vivre, leaving her to the mercy of addiction. Like Perseus avoiding the gaze of Medusa, Julie’s only weapon is to look away. 282 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
Much of Julie’s underlying trauma is revealed implicitly, in the half- told story of her childhood neglect and abuse that can be reconstructed from Ziutka’s narrative. In “Service,” Ziutka is already blaming the child for their difficulties, and although troubled by her reaction to her baby, she continues to distance herself. “The first time Ziutka had been thoroughly grateful to have her baby” was when Frau Grundmann chose to help her for Julie’s sake, and later Ziutka is relieved to send Julie into care. Here we see the way the child is put aside in order to make mutual survival a possibility. Though the love of mother for daughter reveals itself in Ziutka’s repeated risks and sacrifices, the pair have been deprived of the freedom and time necessary for maternal bonding. The lack of attachment ripples throughout Julie’s life, distancing her from those she loves. Her survival-based relationship skills leave her poorly equipped to nurture herself or others. As young mother to Kaz, she looks on as her daughter is abused (“Kelvinator”). As grandmother to Jason, she alternates between condescension and confrontation, even though it is obvious she dearly loves him. As she says to Kaz in “Beaumont Street”, “I don’t want to be like this.” Absence of an integrated self is a symptom of protracted exposure to traumatic experiences. According to Judith Herman, children suffering from “complex post-traumatic stress disorder” develop a raft of symptoms that are often misdiagnosed (Herman: 119). As discussed in Chapter 2, these symptoms can look like Autistic Spectrum Disorder (cf. Leys: 23, 26). They can also take on the character of other psychiatric conditions, such as borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorders (DID), depressive illness and mood disorders. Citing L.C. Kolb, Herman observes
the “heterogeneity” of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Savage Children 283
“is to psychiatry as syphilis was to medicine. At one time or another [this disorder] may appear to mimic every personality disorder … It is those threatened over long periods of time who suffer the long-standing severe personality disorganization.” Others have also called attention to the personality changes that follow prolonged, repeated trauma. (119) Pervasive long-term child abuse fashions adults with fractured and secretive identities; “it forms and deforms the personality” (96). Families in which child abuse occurs are socially isolated, so that even those children who are able to “develop the semblance of a social life experience it as inauthentic” (100). Alice Miller draws a correlation between the dissociation caused by systematic childhood abuse and neglect of infants in early twentieth- century Germany on the one hand, and on the other the sort of personality development required after 1939 to carry out the worst of Nazi policy (“Political Consequences of Child Abuse”). In her later book, The Truth Will Set You Free, Miller refers to the “schwarze Pädagogik (‘poisonous pedagogy’)”, which typifies the child-rearing advice of nineteenth-century German educators such as Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber. “In my view,” Miller writes, the “cruelty they experienced turned them into emotional cripples, incapable of developing any empathy for the suffering of others” (17-18). Inauthenticity and isolation overshadow a childhood in which Julie is forced to make attachments to caregivers who were, in a variety of social senses, her enemies (Herman 101). While her mother and German foster parents did provide her with some protection, the disruptive environment of Nazi Germany meant that no-one risked the close attachment Julie needed to form a cohesive identity. During the first years of researching this topic, taboo and secret-keeping matted and made it impossible to analyse the tenuous connections between 284 The Legacy of Danuta Anita people and their stories. My father had recently passed away and Dziadek had died some twenty years earlier. These men had been consolidating personalities in a world of fragmentation. Their experiences of deprivation, both here and abroad, had polarized their characters. At times they were austere, violent and distant, but they also demonstrated the power of loyalty and generosity. It is unlikely these men deliberately took responsibility for familial cohesion, since all the women were strong and determined. Even so the presence of these men put boundaries on the fissures that spread through the extended family. After their deaths, the women splintered around me: shattered glass, shards, unfixable identities. Mum and Nanna changed their position on story after story. They didn’t recount family history correctly—didn’t have an objective attitude towards their captors. Despite having had her arm broken during a Gestapo interrogation, Nanna spoke of how lovely they looked in their uniforms. Mum, who holds a Degree in History and Drama, spoke insightfully about abuse she experienced during the early 1960s. Then she walked away, paused and returned to declare that people weren’t like that at all. More than fifty years later, Mum and Nanna continued to protect the reputations of their abusers. Herman explains the psychological origins of such contradictory attitudes:
People in captivity become adept practitioners of the arts of altered consciousness. Through the practice of dissociation, voluntary thought suppression, minimization, and sometimes outright denial, they learn to alter an unbearable reality. (87) There was constant play between what was true and what could be said. Mum and Nanna would let me express my opinion, but retracted their own. It took a long time to realise that the truth of events was less in contention than the conclusions drawn from them. It was one thing for Nanna to say an SS officer Savage Children 285 broke her arm, another to admit that he had been cruel or wrong in doing so. Victims develop complex attitudes toward responsibility and guilt, agency and culpability. Stockholm’s Syndrome and what Herman terms “double think,” after George Orwell’s definition of “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them” (87), demonstrate how difficult it is to truthfully acknowledge that one has been abused. Victimisation is often seen as a weakness of character; it contradicts popularized understandings of free will and self-determination. Those who have been abused are often caught in a cycle of denial and self-punishment. The trauma of prolonged victimization has a similar impact to the trauma of prolonged war service. No one is impervious to it. According to J.W. Appel and G.W. Beebe, two American psychologists working on combat trauma in 1946, “Any man [can] break down under fire and … psychiatric casualties [can] be predicted in direct proportion to the severity of combat exposure. … 200-240 days in combat would suffice to break even the strongest soldier” (Herman 25). The significance of Herman’s work for this project is that she relates war trauma to domestic and other forms of psychological trauma:
Only after 1980, when efforts of combat veterans had legitimated the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder, did it become clear that the psychological syndrome seen in survivors of rape, domestic battery, and incest was essentially the same as the syndrome seen in survivors of war. (32) Nanna’s prolonged exposure to slavery and degradation during her incarceration as a forced worker in Nazi Germany had an equivalent long- term effect upon her personality and biology. Likewise, my mother must have been “formed and deformed” by the imprisonment, separation and deprivation of her infancy and childhood. Yet it would be false to assume the women of my family were passive 286 The Legacy of Danuta Anita in their suffering, or that the tremors that shook their lives were voluntarily passed on to others. Documentary evidence suggests that those who suffer long-term abuse tend to succumb to cycles of victimization rather than becoming abusers themselves (Herman 112; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 25-6). When my mother’s family came to Australia, the abuse of the Nazi regime was replaced with other forms of abuse. Some of these were forms of self-abuse, periodic alcohol addiction for example, but the lives they fashioned were chaotic and explosive rather than deliberately cruel. Other abuses were common to the “Australian way of life”, assimilation and practices of “inclusion” (Jupp, White Australia to Woomera 19-21; Batrouney 51-2). These ongoing experiences entrenched a psychology of survival, with the tacit expectation that life would be unfair. The years of incarceration and internment in camps, both in Europe and Australia, formed a particular identity: “Long after their liberation, people who have been subjected to coercive control bear the psychological scars of captivity” (Herman 95). Over time, survivor’s scars made mosaics of Mum’s and Nanna’s features, but even so, their demeanours were not complacent. Lines of triumph played against those of acquiescence. In the tale my grandmother told of having her arm broken, she had been defending another Polish woman. In the story where Mum was abused in Newcastle, she had been supporting an elderly Italian woman who couldn’t understand how to pay the correct change for the bus. There were many anecdotes of them standing up to their abusers, and there are many others of compliance. I am shaped by both, as is Kaz.
The sense of being alien is more than a lack of belonging. Immigrants and refugees often have a heritage, a place origin they look to as “home”. My Savage Children 287 family were métis, alien despite our citizenship and birth. My mother came from no place and her connections to others were like spider-silk: strong and tacky, yet easily brushed away. Despite an active Polish community in our city, my experiences of that community were tangential. I was reared with an amorphous sense of being Polish, but with no close connection to Poland or its language. Being Polish was a default definition during a time when hyphenated Australians, such as myself, were still constructing a way of entering into the Anglo-Celtic hegemony (Jupp 34-5, 83-6).17 We were left to determine our own identities, and to affix ourselves like barnacles to whatever culture would have us. The obscurity of my first name labeled me as “ethnic” and made the possibility of inclusion more difficult. My father’s Anglo-Celtic heritage created a barrier of language and socialization that alienated me from European migrant culture. I belonged nowhere. Awkward writing habits came from these tensions. My narrative work was stilted, almost inarticulate. I wrote fragments because sensory slivers were all that I had. Not only did trauma silence my mother and grandmother, it also silenced me. I could not speak; I could not tell the tale. When I came to myself, to work on my family’s stories, I sifted them through muted voices. These fragments and unknowings, with elements of both memory and history, could only be understood through the silences of shaking heads and shoes tapping across floorboards. Two women continued to write, erase and rewrite my identity, often with no more than a short spoken sentence. I could not find myself in any of their tellings. It was the drive to understand their convoluted and shadowy narratives that re-anchored me in
17 See also Ghassan Hage’s discussions of “guest” and “honour” in “Citizenship and Honourability: belonging to Australia today” in Arab-Australians Today (4-8). The conversation about being Australian because we were invited was frequently and colourfully explored during my childhood. 288 The Legacy of Danuta Anita a lifetime practice of essay writing. I had to determine my personality and identity despite the continuous changes of reference in family narratives. Essays gave me a literary strategy for overcoming the transience of self, and helped me to accept the authority of my own memory. They helped me to contextualize myself in a larger literary tradition. Orwell’s writing revealed the importance of diversity, whereas growing up in Newcastle taught me how easily cultural amnesia and insensitivity can erase difference. At home we might be Polish, Yugoslav or Italian, but on the street we were simply ethnic. In the end, we were nothing at all. This feeling of cultural nothingness is the residue of genocide. As in the extinction of a species, the extinction of a people can equally result from negligence, apathy or violence. The powerful tools of organised annihilation and redefinition used by the Axis powers during World War II left no person untouched, and the consequences of this biological and social reconstruction have reached far into the future—too many have lost their identity and place. As David Kazanjian explains, this leaves a legacy of grief that casts out the one displaced by such treatment. In discussing the place of the métic in the discourse of genocide, he describes Creon’s punishment of Antigone as “metoikos by virtue of her act of mourning” (372). Her desire to grieve for the pariah alienates her, and she becomes an entombed scapegoat. Like myself and the man at the nightclub, Antigone
is doubly excluded … Cast outside the city and the hearth, strange and homeless, ordered to live an inhuman life, entombed Antigone is meant, from Creon’s perspective, to give meaning to the state and home by serving as their ongoing limit. In his enforced prohibition on mourning, then, Creon insists on the state’s power to define what counts as human. (372) Those condemned to the fringes live half-lives which decay with cyclical Savage Children 289 regularity. As the community of the belonging moves forward, we are left drifting fragments of matter without the energy or will to bind ourselves to the whole. Before I began this project, I never used the term genocide in reference to my family. My mother’s difficulties were rarely attributed to experiences in Germany. My grandmother’s “accidents” when she “forgot” to turn off the gas oven, and her issues in caring for her two daughters, were seen as neurosis rather than war trauma, a case of “the nerves”. The evidence is clear that she suffered severe war trauma until her dying day, and that other members of my family suffer it still, but my family did not refer to the slaughter of ethnic Poles as genocide. Genocide, like Holocaust, belonged to the experiences of Jews, Romanies and other minorities. The relocation of Poles and the wearing of the “P” were a bureaucratic evil, not a “Final Solution”. A metallic glow haloed the old Polish men in my life, as if they had been refined in the furnaces of Pasminco and BHP along with aluminium and steel. They were burnished with resilience; their backs seemed unbreakable. Dziadek and his friends were callused all over, mentally and physically. Their voices were gravel, and their hands could dance across a delicate finish despite being rough. Growing up, I listened to a legacy of narratives about family members who were killed or executed by Nazi soldiers, but these deaths were never identified as consequences of a policy of genocide. Despite the fact that many of the labour camps were penal in nature, and that an unknown number of Poles died in “forced labour”,18 not once did a relative say that they were detained in a concentration camp or a death camp. Poles were forced to labour, or were
18 There are many lists accounting for the ethnic Poles who were deported, incarcerated or killed during World War II, but none of them appears complete. While numbers of deportations to Germany for forced labour vary, Tadeusz Piotrowski adopts Czesław Łuczak’s estimate of 2,826,500 (300). 290 The Legacy of Danuta Anita sent to prison, was the consensus; they were not put in concentration camps. It took me years of doctoral research before I could correlate the unfolding story of my mother’s birth with a technical definition of “genocide”. Perhaps those who raised me inherited the defensive sensitivity Kazanjian identified when he argued that the term “genocide” had an exclusionary tendency:
When we utter “genocide” today, then—even when we do so with the most decent of feelings for human suffering—we do not simply name a horrific crime. We also risk giving that crime a very specific kind of horror: namely, a horror that is essentially cast out from our most intimate space of being and assigned a radical alterity, but whose casting out must be continually performed to keep the horror external to ourselves. (372) There is a sense of otherness in the concept of genocide, particularly in reference to the genocidal policies enacted during World War II. The sense is twofold, at least: that of the other as being victim; and also that of the other as being perpetrator. Neither of these roles can include “us” or “me”. I would nonetheless argue that Kazanjian does not do justice to a communal need for the term. I need to know that genocide belongs to me so that I can create space in which to surpass my belonging to alterity. His claim that other names for such catastrophes exist does not overcome the prime difficulty that would be thrown up by having to dispense with Lemkin’s globally recognized term. Although I grew up knowing the stories of genocide, of mass killings, of acts of barbarism and vandalism, I had no term for them. Absence of terminology left that part of me unexplored. Secrets do not cease to define us merely because they are kept. Minutiae of body language, a sudden reticence or warning glance, are sufficient to transmit to another generation the taboos and trauma of those who have been brutalized. Not until an appropriate term and set of Savage Children 291 definitions have been found can solutions and forms of support be determined and distributed. The chronicles of the Old Testament record with satisfaction how the apostate kings of Israel and the northern kingdom, Jeroboam, Baasha and Ahab, had the male members of their royal households put to the sword except for their successors, so that there was “left … not one that pisseth against a wall, neither of … kinsfolk, nor of … friends” (I Kings 14:10, 16:11, 21:21). In the The Iliad, Agamemnon commends the extermination of all the Trojans to the relatively kind-hearted Menelaus: “Let us not spare a single one of them—not even the child unborn and in its mother’s womb; let not a man of them be left alive, but let all in Ilius perish, unheeded and forgotten” (VI: 51-60). The killing of an entire tribe or city’s inhabitants is not unheard of in early histories of the Mediterranean and the Near East, but the policies and practices of the Third Reich did bring something new into history through its pedantic redefinition of what it is to be human. According to Raphael Lemkin, “New conceptions require new terms” (Axis Rule 79), and the new term Lemkin coined for the Nazi policy was “genocide”. Genocide is based on the premise that, not only are “some animals more equal than others” (Orwell, Animal Farm 128), but to adapt George Orwell, some human animals are not fit to exist. But if Lemkin’s term was new it was not without etymological precedent, and its etymology points to one of the important antecedents of the Third Reich’s public policy. Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, created the term eugenics in 1883 from the ancient Greek εὐγενής meaning “well-born” (OED Online).
Responsible for the mathematical treatment of heredity, Galton “intended it to denote the ‘science’ of improving human stock by giving ‘the more suitable 292 The Legacy of Danuta Anita races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable’” (Kevles ix). By the early twentieth century Galton’s ideas, amongst others, had influenced intellectuals and policy makers across the globe. Research into biology, psychology, medicine, education and social policy was stimulated, at least in part, by the desire to advantage the best components of the human gene pool. There was a breadth to this debate, in which many of the leading intellectuals of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries joined. Joanne Woiak explores this diversity of discourse, classing Aldous Huxley as a thinker whose attitudes were aligned with what Daniel Kevles terms “reform eugenics”. Authors such as Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell demonstrate “how intellectuals from all points on the political spectrum—not just conservatives or fascists—were drawn to eugenics as a progressive, technocratic means of improving the health and fitness of populations” (Woiak: 109-10). Many of these intellectuals continued to support eugenic ideals even after the atrocities of World War II were unveiled, as is indicated by both Aldous Huxley and his brother Julian’s publications in the 1950s (Woiak 109, 125; Julian Huxley 9). Today eugenic ideas remain current in the discourses of medical health, family support, and population studies and in medical practices such as IVF, gene profiling and cancer research. Even though there were conjecture and debate about what human characteristics were desirable, the primary concerns of early twentieth- century eugenics were the “threat of differential fertility and fears of racial deterioration, or ‘race suicide’” (Soloway 639). According to Richard Soloway:
From the late nineteenth century on, when a relentless decline in the birthrate had become obvious, the correlation between family size and class, race and national origins, as well as occupational, educational and economic status, increasingly alarmed those who read in the comparative statistics, gleaned Savage Children 293
mostly from census data, the portents of race degeneration. (639) Cultural prejudices and fear influenced interpretation of this data. In Great Britain the fear was class-based, with the common view that better genetic material must correlate with a rise in social status. The fear was that the infirm, insane and unintelligent were breeding like criminal rats under the floorboards of upper and middle-class excellence. By the 1960s, Sir Julian Huxley had been forced to re-examine the veracity of these fears, but he did not abandon eugenics. Rather, he created an evolutionary model that could embrace “anomalies” such as the “schizophrenia paradox”, continuing to believe “in ‘a strong genetic component’ in the aetiology of the disorder”, although “the ailment seems to reduce significantly the fertility of those who suffer from it” (De Bont 144-5):
Huxley et al. claimed to solve the paradox by stating that schizophrenia could be interpreted as a so-called ‘genetic morphism’ … [Sir Julian Huxley] originally defined it as a ‘polymorphism […] in which (usually sharply distinct) genetic variants or morphs coexist in temporary or permanent balance within a single interbreeding population in a single spatial region, and in such frequencies that the rarer cannot be due solely to mutation’ (Huxley, 1955: 3). … In other words, according to Huxley et al. a genetic equilibrium existed between the 1% schizophrenics and the 99% non-schizophrenics of the human population. (De Bont 145) According to Raf De Bont “Schizophrenia as a genetic morphism”, the 1964 paper published in Nature, by Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr, Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer, demonstrates the longevity and resilience of eugenics, its capacity to adapt to new scientific and political environments (151-4). In Germany and the USA, where migration and racial diffusion were significant concerns, race rather than social status became the predominant 294 The Legacy of Danuta Anita measure of this “nobility of birth”. A new lexicon was created in which people were categorised according to physical, mental and social attributes, and their role in society ranked accordingly. The redefinition of the feeble-minded into classes of idiots, imbeciles and morons by Henry H. Goddard was adopted by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-minded in 1910, and is one such example:
The feeble-minded may be divided into: (1) Those who are totally arrested before the age of three so that they show the attainment of a two-year-old child or less; these are the idiots. (2) Those so retarded that they become permanently arrested between the ages of three and seven; these are imbeciles. (3) Those so retarded that they become arrested between the ages of seven and twelve; these were formerly called feeble-minded, the same term that is applied to the whole group. We are now proposing to call them morons, this word being the Greek for “fool.” The English word “fool” as formerly used describes exactly this grade of child—one who is deficient in judgment or sense. (Journal of Proceedings and Addresses) Goddard is no Mengele. Reading his introduction to Education of Defectives in the Public Schools (1917) makes evident his concern for and appreciation of the constraints faced by students with special needs. Given the limitations of his own knowledge, his attitude is insightful. Despite his good intentions, however, the prejudicial and cruel ramifications of his model of classification have continued well into current times. People do not need to be evil to generate evil. The concept of positive and negative eugenics was formulated in an intellectual and social environment dedicated to the “betterment of humanity”. Positive eugenics focused on encouraging the most desirable to have more children, while negative eugenics was concerned with the eradication of deleterious traits. Policies were developed to encourage increased birth- Savage Children 295 rates among the desirable. As early as 1933, pro-natalist policies of the Nazi government included tax incentives for families, increases in children’s benefits for civil servants, comprehensive family compensation through the social security system, marriage loans and changes to divorce law (Voegeli 130-2). Wolfgang Voegeli claims that in contemporary Western democracies the “present system of redistribution with respect to family burdens, in parts of divorce law and of the recognition of single mothers, is based on the legal structures introduced in the Third Reich” (123). While the educational and social changes in Germany did affect birth- rates, policies in America and Great Britain had little impact. By the early 1930s, the Eugenics Society in both America and Great Britain had conceded “prevention or ‘negative eugenics’ was likely to be more effective than elective, positive, prenatal propaganda in stemming the dangers of differential fertility” (Soloway 640). Eugenicists supported adopting negative eugenic methods, including sterilisation, birth control and segregation. Soloway intimates that the primary focus of eugenicists in Great Britain and America was birth control, yet the USA had compulsory sterilization laws as early as 1907. While often contested, eugenics-based sterilisation laws were enacted in some states of USA in the 1970s. Little wonder that, despite concern about Nazi race ideology, “the 1933 German sterilization law aroused envy (amongst European and American eugenicists) owing to its comprehensiveness” (Wioak 126). The policies implemented by the Axis governments in Europe during World War II were extensions of earlier twentieth-century thinking. While often viewed as dystopian, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World accurately represents a state modelled on eugenic ideology. The world of Mustapha Mond, Bernard Smith and Helmholtz Watson is the culmination 296 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
of centuries of eugenic selection. The goal of perfect happiness for the largest number of citizens has been achieved by the delicate biological and psychological manipulation of everything from basic demography to desire: “‘The optimum population,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘is modeled on the iceberg—eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above’” (180). While the role of the Alpha class is to maintain the optimum of human potential, it is achieved at the cost of deliberate restriction of the under-classes. For those whose genetics and conditioning unravels the solutions are sacrifice or exile. Mond, who has sacrificed his love of scientific research to enter the ranks of the leadership, claims that he was forced to sublimate his interest in enquiry to ensure the happiness of others. As much of the action of Brave New World is framed as one of Mond’s social experiments, the extent to which he does either is questionable. According to Mond, exile is an unusual privilege. Someone being “‘sent to an island” is being
[“] sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self- consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Everyone, in a word, who’s anyone.” (182) As nobody returns from these islands, we cannot know if there is a sinister side to being isolated on them. It is unlikely even an islander would be permitted much creative freedom. The view that social stability and a type of cohesive happiness can only be attained at the high cost of creativity and diversity of personality was a mortifyingly long-held view of Huxley’s. In Brave New World, the Nine Year’s
War was the social justification for relinquishing the human right to creativity and anarchic desire: “‘What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge Savage Children 297 when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?’” (183). A similar fear of social disintegration drove men of Huxley’s intellect to explore eugenics as a solution. In his essay “On Eugenics”, first published in 1927, Aldous Huxley warned that “superior individuals tend to be sterilized in proportion as they succeed”, because even the “superior individuals who rise from lower to higher social levels … tend to acquire the habits of birth-control current in the class in which they have made their way” (“On Eugenics” 276). “If the degeneration is allowed to continue unchecked,” Huxley continued, “the breed of superior men will altogether be eliminated; and the process is likely to be hastened by a revolt of the numerically powerful sub-men” (277). In mitigation of that conclusion, he admitted that a “population of men and women descended mainly or exclusively from the successful … would live in a state, so far as I can see, of chronic civil war” (281). Hence, in 1927, Huxley concludes that stable society can only be achieved by striking a demographic balance of superior individuals and “sub-men”.
States function as smoothly as they do, because the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled. The socially efficient and intellectually gifted are precisely those who are not content to be ruled, but are ambitious either to rule or to live in anti-social solitude. (282) Reading Brave New World in the light of Huxley’s essay makes one wonder whether would-be utopian elements might not outweigh the dystopian in Huxley’s speculative fiction. It is only John Savage, straddling the barbaric past and the socially stable future, who can find no outlet for his unruly passions in the medicated calm of the New World. Savage, like the man in the white hood and myself, is a hybridised anomaly, somebody who belongs nowhere 298 The Legacy of Danuta Anita because he ought not have been born.19 Lemkin suggests that what set Nazi racial policy apart from earlier forms of racial destruction was the attempt to systematically redesign their nation and recast their world. “By ‘genocide’”, he writes, “we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” (Axis Rule 79). Lemkin derived his noun from the Greek genos, a race or tribe, and the Latin caedere, to kill, but Lemkin saw the practice and consequences of genocide as not restricted to mass killing:
Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of the national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. (79) Eugenics is a similarly coordinated plan, as Aldous Huxley reveals in his novel and essay, an imaginative stroke of a genetic sword, where society assumes the right to determine what sorts of individual can exist. Even if the only intention of a racially-based eugenics program was to allow one race to die out by restricting its change to procreate and give birth, while promoting another race, by giving it better opportunities to procreate, bear and nurture children, such a plan would be genocide under Lemkin’s definition. Lemkin does not arrive at his term through a study of eugenics. Rather, he explores the motivation and outcomes of such policies, what in business circles would be termed their metrics. How is a racially undesirable group removed? Firstly, that group must be oppressed and their culture or national
19 While in the 1946 “Foreward” to the novel Huxley claims that Savage should have been offered a third alternative to “an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village”, it is likely that the world of Our Ford would allow no other alternatives by the end of centuries of eugenic stabilisation. Such a person could be little other than a pariah or a sociological novelty in any community to which he affiliated. The suicide of John Savage, a man suffering from dislocation, isolation and long term neglect, is as likely an outcome as is the increased suicide rate amongst those suffering from war trauma and early childhood abuse (Herman 95, 123). Savage Children 299 pattern must be destroyed. Secondly, the oppressor must usurp the group’s cultural and physical environment. For Lemkin, the destruction of the national pattern required the destruction of significant records of the undesired people, denying their identity and culture before their physical existence was eradicated. Those allowed to live would be sublimated and taken up into the new culture. Their heritage would be erased and their identities subsumed in the national pattern of the usurper (Axis Rule 79). According to Lemkin, the success of this process, indeed the actions of this process, have logistics that can be itemised and quantified. Lemkin’s definition of genocide draws uponhis research into international law in the 1930s. Genocide consists of two crimes that he proposed be legislated against by the League of Nations: “‘vandalism’ and ‘barbarism’” (Axis Rule ix; Acts Constituting a General Danger). Lemkin defined genocide inAxis Rule in Occupied Europe, a book published in Washington in late 1944, but probably completed while he was working at Duke University in November 1943. Eastern European and Jewish, Lemkin was born in Bialystok, Russia, and educated in law at Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). In Warsaw, he earned a reputation for criminal law, “including its international dimension” (Axis Rule viii), and represented Poland internationally at conferences on penal law. In 1933, “in a report to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law, he proposed the recognition of two new international crimes” (ix). Vandalism was “the crime of destruction of art and culture in general”. Barbarism involved “acts directed against a defenseless ‘racial, religious or social collectivity’, such as massacres, pogroms, collective cruelties directed against women and children and treatment of men that humiliates their dignity” (ix). These crimes were never ratified within the framework of an international treaty because, Lemkin claimed, “‘the lawyers argued that the crime appeared too seldom to legislate against it’” (ix). 300 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
After the German invasion of Poland, Lemkin escaped through Sweden and made his way to the United States. Lemkin’s work in international law before the outbreak of the war prepared him to look beyond the mass killings practised by the Nazi regime, and beyond the debates and hand-wringing of concerned intellectuals, and to analyse the theoretical structure underpinning Nazi practices. He codified Germany’s eugenics before the war and traced how their theories were articulated in Nazi practice. His work on the occupation laws made a major contribution to understanding the reach of Nazi policy, how fully it was enacted in the subjugation and destruction of racial minorities and invaded peoples. In due course his work also provided a basis for investigating the marginalisation and assimilation of oppressed peoples across the world. Contrary to Kazanjian’s claim that Lemkin’s work “unnames Euro-American civility’s long tradition of catastrophic global violence” (Kazanjian 370), Lemkin’s analysis provides a method for examining similar practices of other governments. William A. Schabas assesses the contribution Lemkin has made to the work of contemporary scholars:
Many of today’s scholars who turn back to Axis Rule in Occupied Europe are struck by the breadth of definition of genocide that Lemkin proposed. It involved attacks on the various components of the life of captive peoples, including the destruction of institutions of self-government, the disruption of social cohesion, closing of cultural institutions and educational facilities, and even the promotion of alcohol and pornography in order to weaken the spiritual health of the victim. Of course, Lemkin also acknowledged the most extreme and brutal form of genocide, the physical destruction of a people, but that was only part of a larger concept. (Schabas x) While there is need to reflect upon the Euro-American values underpinning Lemkin’s definition, the definition enables marginalised diasporic groups a means of articulating their own experiences. Genocide is about eradication of an entire genos: who they are, who they were, and if any of the captives have been lucky enough to survive, who they might become. Savage Children 301
Although Nazi eugenic selection was most evident as implemented against large racial groups, such as the Jewish and Romany peoples, it was first practised upon selected minorities within the German community itself. Reflections upon phrenology, mental health, and social and emotional normality led to the incarceration, “re-education” and murder of Germans of difference.20 The insanity referred to in Huxley’s Brave New World and warned of in his essay necessarily ensued: “The best is ever the enemy of the good. If the eugenists are in too much of an enthusiastic hurry to improve the race, they will only succeed in destroying it” (“On Eugenics” 282). Too often the claim made against the Nazis was that Hitler was a madman. It truth, Hitler was not alone in his insanity, and eugenicists before and after the war stood by many of the practices that his regime had used in order to pursue similar outcomes.21 The unquestioned articles of eugenic faith may be one reason why only the physical aspects of Lemkin’s definition were ratified by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. The convention excluded cultural and psychological acts of genocide as part of its definition, permitting international policies of“accommodation” or
20 J. Daryl Charles explains: “One of the tragic legacies of social Darwinism is that it assisted in giving justification to the elimination oflebensunwertes Leben, life that is unworthy of living, or, in the language of Darwinists, life that is simply unfit” (42). 21 Charles continues: In addition to the ascendancy of biological determinism, an important step in legitimizing the killing of the weak, the infirm, the terminally ill, and the incompetent was the shift in ethos among medical doctors and psychiatrists several decades prior to WWII. Historian Robert Proctor has argued persuasively that the Nazi experiment was rooted in pre-1933 thinking about the essence of personhood, racial hygienics and survival economics, and that physicians were instrumental both in pioneering research and in carrying out this program. In fact, Proctor is adamant that scientists and physicians were pioneers and not pawns in this process. By 1933, however, when political power was consolidated by National Socialists, resistance within the medical community was too late. Proctor notes, for example, that most of the fifteen-odd journals devoted to racial hygienics were established long before the rise of National Socialism. (42) 302 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
“assimilation” to continue.22 The unratified crime of vandalism followed my mother’s family from the Old World to the New, which shared with the Old a faith in the paradigms of social stability and demography. The concept of “Australianisation” had been part of the cultural and political thinking of the new nation since Federation. Eugenic ideology is evident in the formulation and practice of the White Australia Policy. Ronald Taft’s seven-step program for assimilation outlined the desirability of migrants being integrated into Australian culture through the “necessary” suppressing of their own cultural associations, including familial affiliations. Taft used “assimilation” rather than “integration” because he assumed that “in societies like Australia it seems to be realistic to recognize that in one or more generations, immigrants or their descendants will become completely assimilated to some appropriate Australian group which is not distinguishable as an ethnic group” (4). He also assumed that these relocated and disenfranchised migrants would endure the intolerance and make the sacrifices necessary to survive in the new environment (71). For people used to the dangers of being “undesirable”, being Australian became a negotiation of identity. By the time I was growing up in the ethnic hinterland of Newcastle, NSW, my experience of my grandmother’s native language
22 Article 2 of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” declares that: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Savage Children 303 had been significantly creolized. Cultural practices had retracted to Polish School on Saturdays, the occasional Polish Mass, and the food Nanna cooked for holidays and birthdays. Polish culture happened around me, but rarely required my participation. It is one thing to be alone, almost a sole survivor. It is another to share a past and a present with a stranger. Sitting in the nightclub, I am overwhelmed with revelation. Gisela Schwarz suggested that as many as five hundred infants survived the Holthausen camp (Schwarze, “‘Any misunderstood leniency’” 90-92). A number of those would have been taken to be “germanised”. Most would have ended up the victims of other negative eugenic practices, such as the camps for young children in which they were exposed and neglected while their mothers were forced to work long hours (Zegenhagen 72-3). But like Savage from Huxley’s Reservation, some of us survived. We have the same rings under our eyes, the same aura of loss, a presence which separates us from others. I am used to feeling different, as if I have something in me I cannot communicate, a gap I cannot traverse. But a bridge had been silently laid between us, and everything could be said. Despite the affluence our parents may have achieved and the semblance of middle-class authenticity, my fellow survivor and I both spoke of brutal secrets. We both listened hyper- sensitively for any whisper of an escape from the pattern of existence which haunted us.
Chapter 4: The Cipher’s Daughter Broken Belongings and Erasures of Self
In Homi Bhabha’s preface to The Location of Culture he asks, “What would it be like to live without the unresolved tensions between cultures and countries that have become the narrative of my life?” (x) This is a haunting question to those second and third-generation European migrants in Australia for whom their ancestral homeland is shrouded by veils of grief, horror and the exotic. As many Australian academics have acknowledged, including Jupp, Gunew, Brewster and Hage, assurances of belonging and the convictions of otherness have created a migrant stigma that persists into the twenty-first century. “Assimilation was seen as necessary to full acceptance in society”, and those seen as “incapable of assimilation … were unable to become naturalised and could not bring their relatives, including their wives, into Australia” (Jupp, Whiteness to Woomera 19-20). Before changes in immigration policy made in the 1970s, these “New Australians” were expected to relinquish all signs of their origins in order to achieve social integration. Remnants of culture marked migrants and their families as other, which withdrew them from mainstream Australian culture and opportunity. Just as Nazi propaganda isolated minorities by caricaturing 306 The Legacy of Danuta Anita them as demons and horned beasts, Australian stories of “reffos” and “DPs” made these migrant families seem less than human. Those fleeing the horrors experienced as slaves and prisoners during World War II had already been subjected to “the social construction of this evil other”. According to David Frankfurter, “the stories we tell about people out on the periphery play with their savagery, libertine customs, and monstrosity” (Zimbardo 24). Hence the language, names, food, music and religious practices of “New Australians” generated stigmatising myths and attitudes within the Anglo-Celtic Australian population. To the Australian majority, a European did not need to be a person from Europe: Australians bearing some trapping or mannerism of international otherness were equally ostracized from the arid monoculture of mid-twentieth-century Australia. Kazimiera Philips is a European/Australian who has inherited the trauma of Slavic genocide and post-war Australian assimilation policies. She is my cipher, just as Julie is the cipher of my mother’s generation. She is not me, in the way I am not myself. I am a silence, an invisibility, an untranslatable word that is unheard because it remains unspoken. Like a drowning swimmer, I have flailed to find my footing in the pool of otherness. The water is not transparent. I am no longer conscious of the mystique that imbued childhood festivals and Christmasses overflowing with presents andpączki . My ethnicity has become alien to me. Unlike the backtracking and looping Deleuze writes of in his essay, “What Children Say,” my map has become a crosshatching of lines, my body an amorphous shape feathering out into the territories of the unexplored. I am a ship’s roll of navigation charts, forever flipping back to get a bearing on where I am bound. The past revisits me, and with each visitation it draws out The Cipher's Daughter 307 another world of memories. I have had to listen for bells that ring true and plot my course by their sounds. In order to look forwards, I must look backwards, in full knowledge that the tracings of the past are erasures and the mappings of speculative future trajectories. The boundaries of being and becoming fuse interpretation and intention, and the result is a tenuous awareness of the present. I can tell you my memories, and create a path of bread crumbs for you follow, but I can never be sure if the crows will get to the bread before you do. Like most maps, moving from the past into the future is good in theory, but you can never know where you are going until you have made the journey yourself. Like a map without edges, there are no boundaries for this journey. Too often, I am in shock. I live with the shock of my forebears; I have learnt it in the same way that a child learns language at her mother’s knee. I live the stresses of “cross-cultural adjustment,” just as my grandmother and mother did, just as my father did because he married my mother. “Transcultural,” “multicultural,” “cross-cultural,” “assimilated”—terms laid down and layered in the past, their meanings determined by others for the migrant’s own good. Kaz’s story is likewise the story of a fulcrum, of someone standing midway between the past and the future. At the novel’s outset, she knows nothing of who she is and where she has come from, except for the morsels of story that have fallen from the family table. She is the embodiment of performative ethnicity, the socially engineered product of a White Australia in which to be other meant to be nothing. Even her name is a badge of isolation that she keeps hidden at all costs. Uncomfortable in her own skin, and dazed by a life too complex to live within the bounds of social norms, Kaz embodies a liminal space only partially of her own making. It would be inaccurate to 308 The Legacy of Danuta Anita presume this is her fault, or the result of her choices. She is the manifestation of the tensions and intersections that partition a multigenerational map of inequity, a map handed people from non-English speaking backgrounds, and drawn in invisible ink as it crosses into Anglo-Australian society. This map cannot be read; it can only be lived. This is the life I wanted to convey in The Glass Mountain. Although Kaz is not an autobiographical character, she does walk through the standard chaos that made up day-to-day life before I discovered some solutions to assist with the intergenerational trauma that my family suffered. The day represented in the novel is a typical day from that time. After returning from Germany, the days became more chaotic as our identities were unraveled by newly discovered family stories. A lot of time had to be devoted to creating a narrative of self, one in which we could overcome the limits imposed upon us by cultural myths and expectations. It had to weave the narrative of genocide and eugenics suffered in Europe with the low self-esteem and lack of self-determination into which we had been conditioned by our particular experience of White Australia and assimilation. Kaz has a complex personality, fractured by the varying obligations she is forced to meet. The fractures and obligations can only be understood in the context of the societies, past and present, that imposed them. In a nation which actively sought only “white” immigrants until the late 1960s, language was deemed to be the most significant cause of inequality. People with poor language skills could obtain menial employment only. As late as 1992,
a longitudinal study of disadvantaged children … pointed “to the continuing and in some cases increasing economic disadvantage of children of NESB (non-English Speaking Background) families in the early 1990s. It is evident that poverty among NESB families is not simply a short-term The Cipher's Daughter 309
problem for newly arrived families, but is also related to economic recession and restructuring as well as to long- term aspects of the migration process such as the impact of the refugee experience and of English-language proficiency”. (Jupp, Whiteness to Woomera 35) In From Stranger to Citizen, Ronald Taft examined the effect of assimilation policies upon post-World War II migrants in Western Australia. The concurrence with and support for the actual policies of the day in this old sociological survey give a powerful insight into the social pressures brought to bear upon immigrants and their families. Taft’s general findings were that
social acceptance and respect for vocational and cultural aspirations of immigrants are the keys to assimilation. On the other hand, the teaching of English, and the Australian mores, and the encouragement of naturalisation have only a limited effect on other aspects of assimilation. These facilities are needed by those who are moved by other considerations to utilize them in order to further their assimilation. (74) The “other considerations” included “a good knowledge of English” that would enable a migrant to “perform other than manual or routine clerical work” (70). Policy changes away from assimilation and towards multiculturalism in the 1970s reflect what migrant populations had already learned: poor English language skills equated with poor employment prospects and cultural exclusion. Even though multicultural policy attempted to promote multilingualism, in practice many migrant families who suffered from the stigma and social limitation of assimilation had already given up teaching their languages of origin to their children. Social and economic pressures to abandon their own languages ensured that “most of those using a language other than English
[remain] first-generation immigrants” (Jupp, Whiteness to Woomera 22). Second and third-generation migrant children found themselves learning a 310 The Legacy of Danuta Anita creole at home, in which some words and structures of the family’s original language were enmeshed with what quickly became the younger generation’s first language, English. As Anglo-Celtic Australian peers were routinely taught foreign languages to broaden their cultural awareness and equip them for business, government or academe, many working-class migrant families insisted that the only way to get ahead was to assimilate, to cast off their languages of origin in order to look and sound Australian (Jupp 2007: 35). It is not so unexpected that second and third-generation members of migrant families, like Kazimiera, still suffer marginalization and isolation. Cultural markers such as names, food, music and religious habits serve as longer-lasting resonances of ‘ethnic’ heritage. Aural memories of the languages and music of earlier generations suffuse the depths of our hyphenated Australian personalities, and produce a sense of loss, of being cut off from cultural memory. For those of us who grew up around elders who spoke their language of origin, this sense of loss is exacerbated by the way that early exposure to our languages of origin altered our “semantic and cognitive organization” (Ervin-Tripp 2). Exposure as infants to our parents’ tongue inclined our minds and personalities towards certain cultural and cognitive expectations. When those experiences did not occur, we were left culturally adrift without knowing why. European Australians born out of the post-World War II diaspora of refugees and bonded workers were also severed from their heritage by parents’ and grandparents’ desire to forget the pain of persecution and war. Our identities were unmoored, without anchor, and laden with protean associations that had nowhere to touch down.
The little Europe of cosmopolitan Beaumont Street commemorated in The Glass Mountain is not the Europe of August 2008, but a blended product The Cipher's Daughter 311
of differing cultural memories. It is an anachronism, a recreation in food and conversation of all the things that bring comfort to the alien in another world. Bhabha writes of such a street in “DissemiNation” and describes it as a place of gathering:
I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of “foreign” cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of otherworlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also the gathering of people in the diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statutes, immigration status – the genealogy of that lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man.21 (Location of Culture 199-200) Such a “construction of nationness”(201), deconstructed by Bhabha as arising from a need to “[fill] the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and [turn] that loss into the language of metaphor” (200), illuminates the
21 In A Seventh Man (1975), John Berger describes the life of the migrant worker in Europe. It is a life without clear autonomy, motivated by socio-economic and cultural restrictions which, to a large extent, are passed down to his children along with other family heirlooms. As he explains: To outline the experience of the migrant worker and to relate this to what surrounds him—both physically and historically—is to grasp more surely the political reality of the world at this moment. The subject is European, its meaning is global. Its theme is unfreedom. (7) His migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another. As a figure in a dream dreamt by an unknown sleeper, he appears to act autonomously, at times unexpectedly; but everything he does— unless he revolts—is determined by the needs of the dreamer’s mind. Abandon the metaphor. The migrant’s intentionality is permeated by historical necessities of which neither he nor anybody he meets is aware. That is why it is as if his life were being dreamt by another. (43) 312 The Legacy of Danuta Anita chimerical cosmopolitanism of Beaumont Street. Ghettos technically cannot exist in a place such as Australia, where the hegemony of Anglo-Celtic culture all but suffocates other cultures (GunewHaunted Nations, 48). New international affiliations are created as cultural identity decays beneath the thicker humus of a common continental origin: Poles, Greeks, Germans and Russians are all European Australian, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese are loosely grouped as Asian Australian. This raking of cultural identities into larger geographic regions breaks down national distinctions and difference, and alters individuality and imagination at personal and societal levels. In the creation of cosmopolitan business and social structures, being European is a catabolic process in which diverse cultural imaginations are reduced into a communal mélange that could exist nowhere other than that particular amalgam of peoples. Beaumont Street is unique in the same way that other cultural agglomerations in Berlin, Paris or London are unique. This gathering of diverse cultures is nonetheless deeply rooted in the traumas of the past. Histories are not erased because they are left unspoken. The horrors of war and persecution enter the everyday world of the Continental European in Australia like a barely audible whisper in a foreign tongue. The whisper is played out in the anxiety between parents and their children; it is the silence that cannot answer the gently asked “What’s the matter?”; it is the inherited unease with which we face the wider world of national and international events. There is something not quite right about who we are, where we are and how we live, but, at the same time, there is no homeland to which we can return. “After all, you belonged to a place only in so far as the place itself—its inhabitants, its culture—felt that you belonged to it,” writes Abbas El-Zein (22). Like the experience of earlier Australian immigrants, The Cipher's Daughter 313
El-Zein is overtaken by the multifaceted questions of identity involved in belonging and not belonging to a new land.
Clearly, the analogy between a “physical home” (an actual house) and a “homeland” (a heimat or ‘place of belonging’) had its limits. One of the differences was that a homeland was part of your identity in a way that a physical home, for all its importance, would never be. A homeland defined you in some ways. A physical home did not. (22) From this perspective, Kazimiera is destined to be an alien always and everywhere, suffering Heimweh in Australia and Heimweh abroad. Such a life has its own darkness. The Europe of the homeland is not necessarily a place of wonder, since it can be destroyed or stolen. The cosmopolitan quarter of Newcastle is steeped in the silenced memory of its migrant creators. I am the residue of that redefinition, a side effect. There are no neat territories in me. Culture and being are woven together to form an assemblage from which I draw my identity. The machinery of assimilation makes me sick without my knowing it. The past irradiates me as secretly as the isotopic residues of an atom bomb.
People going through culture shock are not aware of what is causing them pain nor why they often behave in such irrational ways. They have a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. The situation is controlling them, and unless they understand the process of communication breakdown, they fail to develop coping strategies, lose their sense of control, and cannot find alternative ways of behaving. Instead of acting, they end up reacting. (Weaver 144). I took the map of my mother and drew over it in textacolour. Like her, I coloured the edges blue, then shuddered when I saw that other people’s maps were shaded pink.
Our family experience of assimilation has been fraught with many different kinds of animosity. Assimilation itself is a violent and destructive 314 The Legacy of Danuta Anita process, as Anne Brewster points out:
If nations are defined against their “others”, they are formed by the dual processes of inclusion and exclusion, of remembering and forgetting. Colonial myths of “discovery” ignored the histories of Aboriginal people and their experience of the violence of the colonizing project. Migrant people in turn have experienced the violence of assimilation. (Literary Formations 15) For me, assimilation is a crime on the same scale of vandalism as genocide. It insidiously compels marginalized peoples to dissolve themselves in order to belong; those who make themselves most soluble in its acid are deemed fortunate. While the world of Anglo-Australia expects one set of behaviours, one revelation of being, migrant parents and grandparents, as they deal with their own fractured cultures and personalities, call upon their children to be somebody else. People such as Kaz need to be everything to everyone. She stands in a space between trauma and the future. She acts as interpreter without ever fully understanding the language she must speak. In “Living Proof”, Kaz wrestles with alterity: “All this craziness, this resentment? Where did it come from?” Not only does she want to understand Julie and Nana’s relationship, she wants to understand what causes the chaos in her own life. In the end she is forced to accept that she might never know:
Nana shook her head. “You don’t understand. You cannot. We are apart. You do not know my language. I do not know who I am in yours.” Kaz knelt down on the floor beside her grandmother. They were level. She reached around her grandmother’s shoulders and hugged her, gently at first, and then firmly. Nana hugged her back with the same strength. “Some things don’t need saying,” Kaz whispered. “Yes,” Nana said, “that is true.” (“Living Proof”) In that liminal space, her identity and desire are dissolved because of the The Cipher's Daughter 315 multiplicity of incommensurable roles she must play, day in, day out. Even those roles are eroded by the cultural distances between herself and those she loves. Performative ethnicity is not a route that looks to the holy grail of inclusion. Although I respect the scholarly and reflective work of those who propose performative identity as a satisfactory solution to the need to adapt to new social circumstances while preserving loyalties and precious continuities, I would point out that, for people of hyphenated or migrant or marginalized cultural backgrounds, this theoretical model is not without issues. While it might be a fact of life for many migrants and their progeny, the “performative identity” required of marginalized peoples is devoid of that sense of play enjoyed by post-modern performers and readers of the self. There is no choice. The creativity with which we play out our identities is curtailed within stereotypes and belittling social expectations. The horizons within which we imagine the self are restricted, and we struggle, both in public and domestic arenas, to act out the bit parts scripted by failures of the collective dramatic imagination. To conceive of ethnicity as a performance which changes with every shifting of social context is psychologically exhausting. If I have to perform six or seven different “personalities” every day, I may never form a stable self-concept, let alone be a whole person at peace with myself. While it might be claimed that we all do this every day, the displacement in identity needed to fulfill social roles is more extreme for those from diasporic backgrounds. Shifting between social performances sets up a ritual of forgetting. It is impossible to be conscious of all the transformations needed in a world of multiple ethnicities, particularly when some ethnicities are more equal than others. Although the Anglo-Celtic background of her father takes precedence 316 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
in Kaz’s work and social spheres, unconscious residues of genocide and assimilation mark every aspect of Kaz’s life (Lemkin, Axis Rule 81; Taft 7). Like her mother, Kazimiera is born a victim of genocide, with no secure connection to any culture (Lemkin 79-95). When her mother and grandmother came to Australia, the remnants of their ethnic ties were stretched and torn asunder by the social policy of the day. This created an affective rift between Kazimiera and her family. Traumas of the magnitude of those inflicted by the German sub-Slavic solution and the White Australia Policy are not usually realized until subsequent generations (Miller, “Political Consequences of Child Abuse”). Kazimiera suffers her mother’s trauma without having experienced the original events. Just as the effects of assimilation policies did not end when Gough Whitlam finally abolished the White Australia Policy in 1973 (Jupp Whiteness to Woomera 37), the ongoing legacy of Nazi Germany did not end with the war. The attitudes live on in so many of us, not only those who are the descendants of survivors or perpetrators. Robert Jan van Pelt discovered architectural plans which, he claims, support the argument that “Auschwitz was first and foremost a labour camp: death was a by-product of the inclusion of individuals unsuited for work among the transports of potential workers” (Rose 91). That is, the extermination sector of the campus, the gas chambers, the graves, were only an after-thought, a response to the delivery of creatures unsuitable for work. The real purpose was labour, and the final solution was to work these dangerous inferiors to useful death. Short rations were an economical response to a grander plan to re-cast Poland in a German image. Starvation and its close relative, death, were by-products of an efficient Reich. By following this line of thought, one might re-envisage genocide as a side-effect of a German cultural The Cipher's Daughter 317 aesthetic. How wonderful to imagine Poland planted with German trees, redesigned with German architecture, populated with German intellectuals who could enjoy the height of German art and culture. Likewise, Kaz’s life of underachievement might be viewed as a misfortune resulting from a lapse in German efficiency. The Third Reich was merely less effective at reaching its desired outcome than Australian racial policies proved to be: “[shooting] Native men and [breeding] Native women until they were white,” (King, 2003: 52) so to speak. Familial experiences of genocide and assimilation have implanted expectations in Kazimiera that she works with and works against. She runs about all day at the behest of others. She follows directions from anybody who gives them. Her ex-husband tells her to care for their disabled son, and leaves her. Her mother insists she visit her grandmother; her grandmother insists that she return. Ric suggests her sandwiches are substandard, and she hunts for better bread. She does the work of love without being loved. On the other hand, her work with children with autism reflects a desire to battle with institutional giants in order to heal the isolation of childhood. She understands the need to communicate and the impossibility of it. She stands at the window and waits for the opportunity to enjoy a moment of unison with Caitlin (“Looking Through Windows with Caitlin”), just as she refuses to break the spell when the infant Jason opens up a crack into his world (“Far Away”). In every activity, however, she must mould her personality to suit those around her. The real Kaz is only met during a moment of silence, at one of those “irregularities in the universe” (“Far Away”), when her naked personality stands entranced. We see this with Jason and Caitlin, and see it again when she hides from Nana as a small child (“Kelvinator”). The core of 318 The Legacy of Danuta Anita her personality still rests in prelingual infancy. So endlessly has she performed herself; it is as if her “essential” identity has not had world enough and time to develop. The myths of assimilation and inclusion erase recognition of the very large price the migrant is forced to pay. Two things leapt from the page when I first read Anne Brewster’s book, Literary Formations. In her discussion of Aboriginal women, she noted first that many of them “commented on experiences shared with poor whites” (6). Second, when analysing Ania Walwicz’s work, Brewster cited Sussex and Zubrzycki’s claims that “Poles in Australia have escaped ‘ethnic animosity’, and that ‘if there is a distinction between acceptable and suspicious Europeans then Poles are acceptable’” (12); and developing the notion of “white ethnics”, Brewster contended that Poles had assimilated more easily than other ethnicities (12). Unfortunately, this has not been my own experience. Like Kaz, naming and identity are fractured for me. Lack of language has kept me at a distance from my mother’s culture, while the enculturation of my European family made it difficult for me to participate freely in mainstream Anglo-Australian society. A solid grasp of English and a good Strine accent do not an Aussie make. These experiences have shaped my sense of the liminal lives of second and third-generation migrant Australians. My readings of those lives correspond with sociological studies like Jupp’s (2007) on ethnicity or Gary Weaver’s (1993) on cross-cultural adjustment stress. If one does not fit the frame of Anglo-Celtic ethnicity, then one is other. To be other in Australia is to be exiled from the egalitarianism of Australian society, and the only way to overcome this exclusion is to meld with mainstream culture. While “white ethnics”, such as Polish migrants, could accomplish this with some success, integration came only by paying the price of cultural and personal identity The Cipher's Daughter 319 loss. Kazimiera has paid this price. She feels uncomfortable with her own name and her own body, and cannot understand those who are at ease. She cannot accept her own success, nor that anybody would value her professional or personal contributions. She is baffled by the motives of those who would support her. Kazimiera is trapped in minutiae, reading the world through the reflections in other people’s eyes. Hypersensitive to every detail in her environment, she misjudges the tenor of her life. Kazimiera leaves me pondering two proverbs of old, one Polish and one Romany. Kowal zawinił a Cygana powiesili is a Polish proverb that translates, “The butcher was guilty, but they hanged the Gypsy.” Kon mangel te kerel tumendar roburen chi shocha phenela tumen o chachimos pa tumare perintonde is a Romany proverb meaning, “He who wants to enslave you will never tell you the truth about your forefathers”. Even before I knew of them, their meanings filtered through my life. They resonate with who I am and where I come from. What I have learned has sensitised me to my inner “Gypsy”, to parts of myself that have been hanged because I don’t have the full story of my past. Retelling these stories, both through the novel The Glass Mountain and this exegesis, probes the intimate losses which have formed and reformed my personality. I am not a detached observer: I am inside the research, a product of living these types of narratives. Even with all the intellectual resources brought to the task of literary creation, nothing can do justice to the identity complex generated by a heritage so fractured. In the end, the map I have is a treasure map, and the history of the children lost to the Nazi policy of Germanisation and the Australian policy of Assimilation is the treasure. It is an unfinished map, burnt at the edges, torn and frayed, faded through years of neglect and secrecy. There is no “X” to mark the spot, rather twisting paths that point to many countries, and scrawled 320 The Legacy of Danuta Anita notations that hint at different places to dig. Kaz’s home is one of those places. She is hidden in a little-regarded city in a distant land, surrounded by fragments and fictions written in runes. She does not understand her own world, let alone the world of her mother and grandmother. No wonder the possibility of discovery terrifies her. It goes against the inherent ideology that has constructed the story of her being. Her courage to go beyond her fear, however, is one powerful strand that has been handed to her by her lineage. Like her mother and grandmother before her, she marks out a new path, one that leads in a wandering line into the future. Chapter 5: The Autist’s Affect A Picture of a Dragon Child
People with ASC, autistic-spectrum condition, have been depicted by psychologists as without visible affect, while the families who care for them have been represented as cold, heartless, without humour or love. The work of Leo Kanner and Bruno Bettelheim in the 1950s and 1960s created the myth of the “refrigerator mother”, and that misogynistic putdown popularised an image of the ASC child as traumatised by emotional neglect (Osteen 10; Severson, Aune and Jodlowski 65ff). The autist, like the child suffering from intergenerational trauma, is depicted as a cipher, an invisible person who does not interact with the world outside his or her own mind. Frequently those with autism are represented as puppet-like or robotic: their primary skills are mimicry and recall; their inability to interact with others results in self-injury and violent confrontation. They are rarely shown as people with agency.
According to Anthony D. Baker,
When the public has no direct experience with a disability, narrative representation of that disability provides powerful, memorable definitions. In films, novels, plays, biographies, and autobiographies that depict a character with a disability, the character comes to exemplify people with that particular disability—demonstrating how individuals with that disability 322 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
behave, feel, communicate, exhibit symptoms, and experience life. In short, a character with a disability serves as a lens through which an audience can view and define that disability. (229) In literary and film representations of people with autism, too often the primary personal motivation ascribed to them and their family members is the wish to overcome the disability. Despite their personal success or their actual goals and desires, they are depicted as seeking a means to solve an issue deriving from autism. This is not the case in everyday life. Although much of life does revolve around managing and working with a disability, such self- management is not the only concern of the majority of those with ASC. It may not even be of prime importance. A person’s particular goal determines the skills they require, regardless of whether they live with ASC or not. Like their neurotypical peers, those with ASC are driven to achieve all sorts of ambitions, like obtaining university degrees, solving mathematical problems, creating art, forming meaningful relationships with friends and family, or owning a house. Inaccurate representation does people with autism and their families a powerful disservice. As Mark Osteen explains,
Despite the proliferation of writing by and about autistic people, much of it is not truly representative: it too often misleadingly implies that most autistic people are savants while also suggesting that autistic people are worthy only if they overcome their disorder. (8-9) Although it is widely understood that autism is a spectrum rather than a single disease or disorder, with a single cause and treatment schedule, the stereotyping of those with ASC erases the complexity and diversity of their personalities. What makes The Glass Mountain’s representation of ASC atypical is that The Autist's Affect 323 resolving war trauma rather than autism is the primary focus of the novel. Working with Jason’s autism is only one of the issues impeding Kazimiera’s formation of a solid, independent personality. It is another layer of her lifelong experience of ongoing trauma. The performativity of Kazimiera’s daily life is not only forced on her by the differing demands of her migrant family and her professional and social environments. Her isolation and dissociation are exacerbated by the restrictions imposed upon parents and carers of those with disabling difference. Within this is a special life of restriction reserved for mothers of children with autism. In The Glass Mountain the social, emotional and identity issues experienced by those suffering from intergenerational trauma and autism are juxtaposed against the difficulties faced by their carers and loved ones. Their difficulties allow for role-shifting: Kazimiera supports Jason in his efforts to manage a life with autism; Jason supports Kazimiera’s recovery from intergenerationally transferred complex post-traumatic stress. “Far Away” shows us the all-consuming nature of caring for a child with autism, and the isolation that comes with it. When George leaves after Jason’s meltdown, Kazimiera notices his smile “wash out, as if looking at her from the other side of the galaxy”. Only an “irregularity in the universe” closes the chasm separating her from the rest of the world, but Jason comes to understand his mother’s isolation as a form of dependence. He knows that his mother will not leave him unless he pushes her out: “‘Mum needs to do stuff. I need to be somewhere else’” (“Let Sleeping Dragons Lie”). His determination to live with his father is his way of empowering her. Kazimiera and Jason each act as the other’s carer. The Glass Mountain depicts autists as people with agency by offering 324 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
a dual narrative of continued disability and the disabling life of care. The everyday constraints and worries of being a mother of a near-adult child with autism is explored through Kazimiera, while Jason offers a representation of the complex sensory and inner life of a particular person living with ASC. Unlike stereotypes of autism in film and literature, Jason demonstrates the rapid personality and psychological evolution that can be experienced by those within the spectrum. He also exemplifies how individuals with a psychological condition can suffer from a cluster of disabilities, in his case intergenerational trauma and ASC. The hypersensitivities inherent in both conditions have a compounding effect so that, when Jason sees a way through his traumatic affect,23 he also enhances his general capacity to interact. He doesn’t cease to be autistic, but he does develop better strategies for interacting with the world. Intergenerational trauma becomes a mountain he can climb, even though autism remains an ocean in which he must swim. This representation is based on changes witnessed in my own children, and the wisdom they offered me while I adapted their ASC and care to accommodate a growing understanding of our intergenerational trauma and family origins. While much of this may seem atypical, ASC appears to be a condition marked by atypicality. It is important to show that the autist’s affect is not a fixed state of being but mutable. The ability to interact with autism can be transformative for both the carer and the person with ASC. Those with autism can and do shape their own lives. Most are not savants, although they may be talented and have powerful memories. Jason works hard, and he has to create a picture of life for himself, a picture with personal meaning. The meaning motivates him to change. People with autism are not so different
23 Used by Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson as the title of their collection of studies on the intersection of trauma theory and affect theory. The Autist's Affect 325 from everybody else. While many of the images and ideas underpinning the creation of The Glass Mountain are based upon research undertaken and discoveries made during my candidature, my appreciation for people living with ASC is based upon personal experience over a much longer period. A mixture of wonder and frustration, of elevation and dissociation, fuels this appreciation. To say that I adore my friends and family who live with ASC is inadequate. They have a way of engaging and illuminating everyday life that I have not ever experienced with those who live without ASC. They have wisdom and insight: when they notice something, they do so with acute precision. When they synthesize information, their creation of knowledge is unexpected and original. The reward for knowing these astounding people outweighs any of the detriments attending their social, psychological and physiological awkwardness. Jas, Caitlin and the other children in Kaz’s class embody these attributes. Often known as ASD, Autistic Spectrum Disorders, and listed as such in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic tool, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), it is heartening to see long- term and highly respected research groups, such as the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge (UK), supporting the term “autism- spectrum condition” and its acronym, ASC. Simon Baron-Cohen and his fellow researchers “favour the use of the term ‘autism-spectrum condition’ rather than ‘autism-spectrum disorder’ as it is less stigmatizing, and it reflects that these individuals have not only disabilities which require a medical diagnosis, but also areas of cognitive strength” (Baron-Cohen et al., “Prevalence of autism- spectrum conditions” 500). Although the traits of ASC have been disabling 326 The Legacy of Danuta Anita for those I love, they are also keys to their most interesting and beautiful traits. They could no sooner cease to see the world through the lens of their selfhood than we could. Because of the extreme differences in the way they sense, process and respond to their world, however, people with ASC need special assistance and consideration. I have lived my adult life in the presence of ASC, through the lives of my ex-husband and our children. This has not been the unhappiest of sequels for someone who had undergone a childhood like mine. The isolation of autism was soothing in its predictability after the chaos and detachment I experienced in my youth. Hyper-vigilance transmuted easily into the hyper- awareness necessary for reading and appreciating my loved ones with autism, and so enabled me to enter the silences that often characterize their lives. Although well-meaning friends pointed out that my ex-husband was different, it took me a long time to notice the difficulties I would face because of his eccentricities. He was intelligent, thoughtful and in an odd way charming, traits which helped me overlook his divergent behaviours. Growing up in the post-World War II explosions of my mother’s migrant home had left me shell-shocked, so when interpersonal problems arose, I presumed they were predominantly mine. We have four children together, all of whom fit in different places across the spectrum. I can remember when I first thought my eldest son, Alexis, had autism. He was about three months old and having another fit of screaming. I didn’t know what to do. Everything I tried made him more distressed. He flailed when I held him. When he finally settled, the house went quiet. Yet it didn’t feel like the silence of a sleeping child, but the silence of an empty house. Whether he was screaming or sleeping, I couldn’t feel him with me. The The Autist's Affect 327 aspect of a person that says they are with you, they are present, the empathic connection most of us establish with each other, didn’t seem to exist between us. My son wasn’t distant; he was absent; or it seemed as if he were on the other side of a very long, high brick wall. I had never had that experience before; I had always been able to feel other people, to sense their emotions, and usually to know what they needed. The eldest daughter of a migrant family, I lived my life anticipating the needs of others. Even though I breastfed all my children for at least six months, the intense connection of breastfeeding did not happen for me with my eldest son. The connectedness Cozolino described as essential to the formation of the infant’s and mother’s social brain, a connection which “helps mothers feel calmer and makes them more receptive to relationships” (98), was alien to us. My first baby baffled me, and it made our relationship unstable. A mechanistic breastfeeding and child-caring routine made me feel that I was merely an object that my son used for sustenance; he felt like a parasite. When I attempted to explain this to medical practitioners, my already gifted son was seen as “developing well”, and I was tagged with a range of disorders, including post-natal depression (PND), borderline personality disorder (BPD) and Munchausen’s by proxy. In 1991, the symptoms of these conditions were more clearly articulated than those of ASC, and made such diagnoses of a young mother more plausible than her being able to notice autism in an infant who was otherwise developing normally. As is unfortunately the case for many women in my situation, it took a couple of hospital stays and several years of therapy before a well-regarded therapist informed me that I never had any of these conditions. It took several years more before my son was diagnosed with severe Asperger’s Syndrome. By then, my adult life appeared as chaotic 328 The Legacy of Danuta Anita as my childhood had been. Alexis was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at the age of six. His condition is quite debilitating, and he continues to work hard to accommodate the difficulties that his differences can cause. In the nineties, however, by the time he was six and my relationship was eight, I had lived almost a decade in an environment of small but accumulating aberrations. The slightest unexpected outcome could send the household spiralling. My mental health was tested, and quite contrary to the expectations that my relationship would provide a safe space for growth and nurture, it had become a constant drain on my energy. The life I lived was limiting on thought, expression and personal choice. When a minor personal choice can result in unpredictably escalating levels of instability, the possibility of making any choice is damagingly restricted. Like Eliza Doolittle, I was trying to get by on good pronunciation when the problem was not the language but the culture. This was a startling inversion of a childhood where the alien languages occluded the culture. I found myself isolated in my husband’s world, and unable to understand the choices he made. Furthermore, I could not explain what was happening because there was no language for it. There were few explanations of what life was like for the child with autism back then, and no understanding of what it was like for the family. In the 1990s it was believed that the main difficulties in family relationships were caused by a lack of empathy, but I didn’t see it that way. Lack of empathy is difficult to define, because it can mean anything from the egotism of a narcissist to social awkwardness caused by failures to appreciate class or cultural difference. As a Polish-Australian, I was particularly aware of the latter awkwardness. I had spent my life excusing friends and family for The Autist's Affect 329 their clumsy behaviour, and likewise being excused for mine. The motivations and intentions underlying actions had been more important to me than the behaviours themselves. At first, I wasn’t particularly talented at reading intentions, but over time I became more observant. From his perspective, my ex-husband attempted to be sensitive to my needs, but he was unskilled at meeting them, particularly when my needs conflicted with his own. There is a difference between recognising another’s emotions and knowing what to do with that information (Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy 80-1). In creating the characters of Jason, Caitlin and George, I drew upon my experiences with my husband and children. The dissociation Kazimiera suffers because of her experiences of abuse and neglect as a child parallels the isolation and social awkwardness of her ex-husband, son and students. They are trapped in the isolation of ASC just as Kazimiera is trapped by the dissociation of intergenerational trauma. The lives of all of them are repetitive and focused upon detail. Just as her mother and grandmother suffered the recurring psychological torment of war trauma and genocide, she lived an adult life where the only option was servitude to the neuro-biological condition that marred her son’s future. While he was a child, her entire intelligence was expended discovering ways to help Jason interact effectively with others. Later, those discoveries were distilled in her professional personality. None of her life had been determined by her free choice and personal interest, and the cost of her selflessness was physical, emotional and intellectual exhaustion. This exhaustion is important both to Jason and his mother. While Jason has intellectual space to see through the issues surrounding Julie’s birth, Kazimiera is trapped in the futile recycling of fragmented childhood memories. Her personality is under-formed, and her identity can’t process 330 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
the new narratives of self being forced upon it by Jason’s discoveries. Not only is her personality limited by the issues of her childhood, but the incessant demands of raising a son with ASC has left her without the resources necessary to mature an adult personality. As reported in many online chat- rooms, the intractability of people with ASC can lead their carers to defer paying due attention to their personal needs and interests. In the 1990s, there was very little social or therapeutic support for carers of people with ASC. Like a proverbial frog boiled as the temperature rises unnoticeably in the pot, long-term constriction of desire slowly dissolves a sense of self. The world of “autists”, as Hans Asperger called them, is a world experientially different from those who do not live with ASC. Such difference has led to the exploitation of autists in television or film, where they are sometimes re-conceptualised as beings from other worlds. Mr Spock (Leonard Nimoy), the Vulcan in StarTrek—The Original Series and the first film franchise, is the most recognizable of these extra-terrestrial aliens, whereas a social outsider like Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) in Big Bang Theory—an egotistical, isolated technophile, seemingly incapable of forming a relationship—is at first sight representative of all that is crass in such stereotyping. It has been suggested that such simplifications arise because many with ASC are preoccupied with excessive detail and are prone to repetitious behaviours (Osteen 9). Another prejudice arises from autists’ love of solving puzzles and using computational devices, a penchant which is taken as precluding them from asking the deep questions confronted by those without ASC: What is love? What is society? Where do I come from? How can I make things better? The difficulty people with ASC have with answering such questions has led to the view that they do not ask them. Such beliefs are absurd. The Autist's Affect 331
It is important to conceptualise those with ASC as participating in a range of typical human experiences. For too long they have been labelled as unreachably different. Popular representations of characters with ASC have been drivers of that perception. Throughout many franchised series, characters representative of neurotypical personality types are the only ones depicted as undergoing character change. This categorisation reinforces Osteen’s claim that “most popular representations of autism ... either make spectacles of autists or impose neurotypical formulae or conventions on them, thereby eliding difference in order to validate neurotypical experiences” ( 9). Such validation is also the case for more acclaimed film and television representations of ASC, in which the character with ASC is often a foil to the psychological development of a neurotypical character. From Rain Man (1988) to The Black Balloon (2008), it would be hard to find a film depicting autism that represents the autist as the character who undergoes primary
character change.24 According to Anthony D. Baker, “Rain Man (1988) serves as the public’s primary definitional text for autistic spectrum disorders. People now use the term ‘rain man’ to describe individuals who exhibit autistic characteristics in general” (Baker 229). Baker explains that “feature films define autistic behaviors consistently”, and “whatever the film genre, the recipe for including an autistic character remains unfortunately limited” (Baker 231). The plot of Rain Man is of an autistic victim being saved by a non-autistic hero, who learns in the process of saving the autist that the autist can play a valuable part in his non-autistic life. Although Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman) does become slightly more expressive by virtue of leaving
24 Autobiographical representations such as Temple Grandin (2010) are a notable exception to this. This is, however, the only film of which I am aware that does not follow this traditional “autism” formula outlined by Baker. 332 The Legacy of Danuta Anita an institution and entering everyday society, the real character reversal occurs in Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise). The film ends with Raymond returning to his institution, and Charlie realising that he does not want to live without his brother. While a sensitive portrayal of a person with autism, there is no hint in Raymond that people with autism are capable of change. Rather, those caring for them need to see beyond their disability into a world that cannot be comprehended without immersing themselves in a close relationship with an autist. Likewise, The Black Balloon is less about the autist, Charlie Mollison (Luke Ford), than it is about his neurotypical brother, Thomas Mollison (Rhys Wakefield), coming to terms with the limitations that autism places on both of their lives. Both these films are about social acceptance of the differences inherent to ASC, and accepting people for who they are. They are not stories involving character inversions for those with ASC. As against these representations, Sue Woolfe, in her novel The Secret Cure, offers a complex exploration of people with ASC. From Woolfe’s first words, we enter a world of misunderstood isolation and difficulty. The reader becomes involved in characters scattered across the spectrum of ASC in a way seldom represented by those without the condition. We become spies, stalking those “whom nature has [not] smiled upon”, who were not “made whole”, and in doing so, join in their dishonour (7). We see a large portion of this world through the lens of Owen, who paints himself more harshly than he needs: “He’s such a big, hearty, kind man, not at all like the pale, creeping spy you’d probably imagine from his memoir” (420). The story of Owen, Clara, Tina and Gunther is a story of impossible loves told from the perspective of impossible lovers. People assumed to be incapable of affect or empathy, of emotional connection, reveal themselves to be more observant and sensitive than their The Autist's Affect 333 neurotypical cousins. A key to autism is that people are seldom the way they seem. From the earliest exploration of ASC, there has been debate about both the origin and characteristics of the autistic condition. Controversy arose not only because of the difficulty of developing an appropriate clinical symptomatology, but also because of the range of conditions that present with symptoms suggesting autism. Hans Asperger noted that autism was a personality type not produced by schizophrenic degeneration, nor by handicaps resulting from birth trauma or brain injury:
A crucial point which makes clear that the autistic personality type is a natural entity is its persistence over time. From the second year of life we find already the characteristic features which remain unmistakable and constant throughout the whole life-span. (67) As early as Asperger’s observations in the 1930s and 1940s, it was clear that features of autism included not only a level of “contact disturbance” which impinged upon social integration, but also a degree of “original thought and experience” that could lead to “exceptional achievements in later life”. “With the type of personality disorder presented here,” he writes, “we can demonstrate the truth of the claim that exceptional human beings must be given exceptional educational treatment, treatment which takes account of their special abilities” (37). Although Leo Kanner is credited with defining the concept of “early infantile autism”, Lyons and Fitzgerald note that it is highly likely that Kanner was aware of Asperger’s work as early as 1938, when Asperger’s lecture “Das psychisch abnormale Kind” (“The psychically abnormal child”) was published in
Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift (Viennese Weekly Clinical Magazine)” (2022). Uta Frith notes that despite the marked similarities between the case studies 334 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
presented by both Kanner and Asperger, Asperger saw the aetiology of the cases presented in the American literature as very different from his own, because severe handicap suggested “brain insult rather than constitutional causes” (Asperger 67 note 38). Both practitioners nevertheless investigated cases which came to their attention because the children presented with long- term learning disabilities and difficult behaviours. If, as Asperger suggests, autism is a personality type, it is possible that there is such a person as a “well adjusted” autist, and that for such a person aberrations in behaviour are the result of other causes, such as a failure to provide alternative learning programs, or to cater for alternate learning styles, or to consider other disabling aspects of the autistic spectrum, such as differences in sensory acuity.25 It is only from this perspective that Bruno Bettelheim’s correlation of trauma symptoms in concentration camp victims with the behaviours of children with autism could prove insightful, because it suggests that a component of the debilitating effects of autism may be traumatic in origin. In such a case, the person with ASC would also be suffering from some other traumatic condition, such as
25 This is exactly what psychologist and internationally recognized autism expert, Tony Attwood is saying when he writes of “Discovery Criteria for Aspie” on his webpage, “The Discovery of ‘Aspie’ Criteria” (2013). If Asperger’s Syndrome was identified by observation of strengths and talents, it would no longer be in the DSM IV, nor would it be referred to as a syndrome. After all, a reference to someone with special strengths or talents does not use terms with negative connotations (it’s artist and poet, not Artistically Arrogant or Poetically Preoccupied), nor does it attach someone’s proper name to the word syndrome (it’s vocalist or soloist, not Sinatra’s Syndrome). Focusing on strengths requires shedding the former diagnostic term, Asperger’s Syndrome, for a new term. The authors feel that Aspie, used in self-reference by Liane Holliday Wiley in her new book, Pretending to be Normal (1999), is a term that seems right at home among its talent-based counterparts: soloist, genius, aspie, dancer. With fading DSM potential, the authors submit a description of “aspie” for placement in a much needed but currently non-existent Manual of Discoveries About People. The Autist's Affect 335
PTSD. Revelation of Bettelheim’s fraudulent practices became known after his
suicide in 1990.26 It is therefore difficult to support any of his claims, including the relationship he posits between people suffering severe trauma and those with ASC. There is a startling correlation between the psychological and somatic symptoms experienced by children of concentration camp survivors and by those with ASC. In stark contradiction to Bettelheim’s conclusions, however, the trauma need not originate from bad parenting, nor suggest the existence of “Refrigerator Mothers”. The belief that trauma must be universally horrific in order to be debilitating excludes the sorts of trauma that can be suffered when our senses are overwhelmed in everyday environments. In his 1944 paper, translated by Uta Frith in 1991, Asperger supports the view that children with autism are not psychotic, but extremely sensitive:
However difficult they are even under optimal conditions, they can be guided and taught, but only by those who give them true understanding and genuine affection, people who show kindness towards them and, yes, humour. The teacher’s underlying emotional attitude influences, involuntarily and unconsciously, the mood and behaviour of the child. Of course, the management and guidance of such children essentially requires a proper knowledge of their peculiarities as well as genuine pedagogic talent and experience. Mere teaching efficiency is not enough. (48) He acknowledges that a degree of debilitation is one of the characteristics of the ASC personality type, but notes that the level of disability can be exacerbated by additional factors, such as poor intelligence, other psychological and physical conditions, injury or environmental issues. The environmental
26 Autism and Representation (2008), edited by Mark Osteen, offers a valuable overview of the influences and errors of Bettelheim’s work. In particular, “Bruno Bettelheim, Autism, and the Rhetoric of Scientific Authority” by Katherine DeMaria Severson, James Arnt Aune and Denise Jodlowski provides a detailed examination of these issues. 336 The Legacy of Danuta Anita issues he observed did not only pertain to social or familial environments, but the individual’s interaction with nature and the physical spaces they occupied. Perhaps it is because Asperger focussed on the sensory and intellectual requirements of students in his care that many of them made significant improvement over time. One might even go so far to say that Asperger’s stories have happy endings. These happy endings seem the product of a sensitive observation of and responsiveness to the children in his care. While the means to assess the neuro-biological causes of autism were not available to Asperger and his fellow researchers, his practices demonstrate an advanced understanding of the needs of children with ASC. He recommended schedules and routine, sensitivity and compassion, observation and listening as pedagogic means to assist students. He recommended that autists be taught in small groups, and that teaching and assessment methods be adapted to fit students’ personality profiles. As recently as the last decade, such practices would have been considered as the cutting edge of educational methodology for people with autism. Something of a Hans Asperger disciple, Kazimiera’s observational and interactive practices produce results that win the support of Peter McFarlane, her school principal, the Board of Education, and ultimately academic researchers in a Faculty of Education. Her professional sensitivity and practicality are the consequences of immersing herself in the world of her autistic son. She has experienced moments where her understanding has merged with her son’s, experiences that have given her an insight into a different way of interacting with the world. While few of her students possess the same ASC profile as her son Jason, she uses her intimate knowledge of her son to create an environment conducive to their needs. Furthermore, she is The Autist's Affect 337 particularly sensitive to those students who have a similar personality to her son. Caitlin and her family offer Kazimiera a means of seeing how others view her as a teacher, and to reflect upon the distance she has travelled as a mother and an educator. Recent research points to neurobiological causes underlying the autistic symptoms which Asperger, Kanner and other researchers observed during the mid-twentieth century. Focuses have included the issue of disability, the questions of empathy and affect, and the co-occurrence of extreme talent (savantism) and hypersensitivity. Two significant differences between those with and without ASC are now seen as acute sensory awareness, to the extent that people with ASC suffer information overload, and social ineptitude, often caused by poor empathy and a regimenting attitude on the part of the autist to what seems the chaos of daily life. Perhaps the day will come when the symptomatic issues that people with autism face are described as reasonable outcomes of their sensory sensitivity. Simon Baron-Cohen et al. argue that many of the non-socialising symptoms of ASC can be explained by “evolutionary forces positively selecting brains for strong systemizing, a highly adaptive human ability” (Baron-Cohen et al., “Talent in autism” 1377). In writing of Jason and Caitlin, I was not attempting a literary analysis of ASC. I was exploring the nature of trauma in characters particularly sensitive to their environments. My lived experience gave me insight into the personalities of people with ASC, and I had the opportunity to show my work to people who live within the spectrum. They confirmed that my representations were accurate, and began speaking with me about their experiences and insights.
We discussed issues ranging from anxiety in the classroom to circumstances inducing sensory overload. There were conversations about synaesthesia 338 The Legacy of Danuta Anita and intuition, and still more interestingly about issues of empathy and their preference for rules and regularity. One conversation with my eldest son, Alexis Shaw, explored the topological quantum attributes of the brain, where the brain is viewed as a biological computer that works on an optimisation heuristic. He suggested autism might be viewed as a survival adaptation in groups suffering from trauma. We speculated that traumatic experience might turn on genes that would make the brain more rigid, better able to cope with high levels of stress and trauma at an earlier age. Juveniles are less capable of focus due to the volatility of their neurology. Because their brains are still in flux and developing rapidly, optimisation of neural processes cannot yet occur. In autistic children, however, neurological rigidity sets in sooner, as seen by the child’s increased ability to focus, with associated intellectual spikes in technical and, some might say, survival areas. So it is that autism is concomitant with genius and “excellent attention to detail” (Baron-Cohen et al., “Talent in autism” 1377). Neurological rigidity enables the child to be functionally independent at a young age, unless, of course, the child is at the severe, disabling end of the spectrum. A rigid ASC child requires less emotional support, and is not as reliant on bonding. If autistic rigidity contributes to the development of survival skills at an early age, it might explain why no particular genes appear to trigger autism, and why there is a wide range of symptoms and causes for the condition. Autistic rigidity was perhaps less a genetic abnormality than a genetic adaptation waiting to be switched on by the parents’ interactions with the environment. It is an epigenetic difference, not a genetic one. Hence the incidence of autism in the general population would significantly increase in the third-generation after the World War II, as the genetic material of the The Autist's Affect 339 grandmother was passed on in the gametes of the mother. Speculations and anecdotes do not constitute proof, but they do speak to the reasoning behind the creation of the novel. Extrapolations of current science from artificial intelligence, biology, psychology and neurology, alongside a life integrally aligned with autistic personalities, caused me to ask, “What if the trauma of World War II continued well beyond its end? What would that look like? How might it be remediated?” Jason offers us insight into the nature of what third generation trauma might look like. His autism, like that of Temple Grandin, “cannot be separated from [his] creativity and identity” (Osteen 26). His ability to detach and appreciate the world from a different sensorial approach enables him to fashion a plausible narrative to explain the consequences of his grandmother’s birth. All the images and narratives he has constructed for himself, from identification with dragons through to his love of technology, are part of this readjustment. When he is able to see his difference in the context of his grandmother’s birth, he is able to assess his role in his own life. The question posed Jason is not about whether autism is disabling, but how is he to create a stable identity in the face of unspeakable horror. Osteen, in writing of Temple Grandin’s “‘rescue’ from autism”, explains: “Grandin didn’t emerge from autism so much as merge with it, crafting a self from within autism that enabled her to keep one foot on each side of the threshold” (26). Jason’s understanding of the horror of his family history empowers him to engage his empathy and straddle the psychological and interpersonal divide separating those with ASC from those without it. It is impossible to articulate such empathic connection except as an epiphany, a deep knowing. Asperger writes of Fritz V. that “since the affectivity of the boy was so deviant and it was hard to understand his feelings, it is 340 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
not surprising that his reactions to the feelings of his care-givers were also inappropriate” (47). When the teacher or care-giver is able to put aside assumptions about his or her own way of being, and allow a space for the child to manifest her or his own affect, remarkable interaction can occur. A basis for translation is laid, even though what communication takes place cannot be explained with verbal precision because of the incommensurability of the two world views. For Asperger, such understanding was an attribute of the carer/teacher, but it is equally an act of translation on the part of the person with ASC. If Temple Grandin is proposed as a suitable exemplar, then such translation is achieved predominantly through the skills of the autist. Jason’s epiphany in the classroom is achieved through his empathy for others. It is that appreciation that changes the way he sees his classmates, though perhaps they too undergo a metamorphosis from sheep, fit only for dragon food, to warriors standing beside him. Awkwardness conveying different world views and sensory experiences can be mistaken for lack of empathy. The Internet abounds with conversations where people who live in contact with ASC (autist, carers and friends) discuss the empathy of those with ASC. Sites such as autismandempathy.com are set up to “undo the myths about autism and empathy that have stigmatized autistic people for so long” (Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, 5/3/2014). Investigation into alexithymia and empathy by Geoff Bird and his fellow researchers shows “that it is not autism per se, but high levels of alexithymia27 (in both individuals with and without an autism spectrum condition diagnosis) that are predictive
27 Bird et al. offer a definition: “Alexithymia has been described as a subclinical phenomenon marked by difficulties in identifying and describing feelings and difficulties in distinguishing feelings from the bodily sensations of emotional arousal” (Bird et al., 1516). While this is said to occur in about 10% of the general population, it is estimated that severe degrees of alexithymia are suffered by approximately 50% of individuals with ASC. Alexithymia is not a diagnostic criterion for ASC. The Autist's Affect 341 of reduced empathic brain responses” (Bird et al. 1522). Other studies have found that the relationship between autism and lack of empathy warrants further investigation. Asperger wrote of a correlation between malicious behaviour and autism, but it must be noted that in all cases the young people he treated were brought to his clinic because of their severe behavioural and learning difficulties. This was also the case with Kanner and other clinicians of the mid-twentieth century. Given that the behavioural issues abated with appropriate education and social considerations, there is room to consider that the prevalence of “malicious behaviour” in Asperger’s students was a result of their capacity to learn “without being consciously aware”—that is, of their ability to “learn instinctively”—being impaired (58). If people’s mode of sensing their environment is so significantly different that they construct alternative mappings and understandings of themselves and their world, then it is plausible that autism is the manifestation of difficulty in communicating, not because of a lack of language skills, but because mapping sensory input is not a skill the autist can learn from those around, or share with many others. If the way we sense things is at odds with that of others, our fundamental ability to see, hear, taste, smell and touch is affected, as is our means of learning. From this perspective, what is intuitive or instinctive for neurotypical individuals is neither intuitive nor instinctive for those with ASC. The incommunicability of one’s inner life can leave a person dumbstruck. In the case of Caitlin and Jason, their internal worlds are much more vibrant than their verbal report of those worlds. It is interesting to note that the discovery of a secret family trauma is the crisis that brings Jason to a new view of who he is and what he must do. He has been living the silence of that trauma his entire life. In “Three Blind Sheep”, his initial reaction to 342 The Legacy of Danuta Anita the discovery of the camp in Waltrop is a blind and self-alienating rage, a complete incomprehension of how people could allow such a thing to happen. The rage is physical and he cannot explain it, cannot even acknowledge it. His emotions take on a synaesthetic quality, a luminescence in the way he sees the classroom. Rage brings on the dragon vision that sums up his reaction to the History class. His senses have gone askew and he cannot understand them, let alone communicate his perceptions. He is rendered speechless, another belated victim of Nazi infanticide. Jason’s fixation on minutiae is indicative of hypersensitivity, his attempt to organize himself indicative of his need to order sensory and mental overload. We see this need to create order out of complexity when Jason collapses at home amongst the scattering of computer chips and other items that he now sees as holding the kaleidoscopic pattern of his life and his mindset (“Non-Player Characters”). The tangle of objects reminds him that chaos has entered his life through a web of Fascist influences that have infiltrated his physical and intellectual worlds. His breakdown at school is the transition to a new level of awareness, but it isn’t until he is home that he can begin to process his concerns. What does this mean to me? Who am I because of what has happened? How can I make things different? Less like a dragon than a phoenix, his new self rises from the residue of his old interests, more aware than before of what connects him to others. A catharsis of old anxieties and rigidities is succeeded by Jason’s revelation that he is not alone in the world, nor does he have to make the choices he always has made. He can sweep away monotony and chaos with one blow to the Babel tower of computer chips and toy soldiers. His solution is the result of his own insights. He creates a narrative of self within the constraints of his The Autist's Affect 343 neurological makeup, a choice that enables him to interact better with others, but accepts his points of difference. He doesn’t understand his mother, yet he sees that she needs the option of living a future rather than being trapped in her past. Neither of them can envisage what such a future may be, other than being different from their pasts. The Glass Mountain does not suggest there is a cure for autism. It suggests that people become more resilient and self- determined if they can resolve and shed some of their trauma, and that this is true for both the neurotypical and the neuro-atypical.
Chapter 6: Breaking the Silence Literature Review: Trauma, Memory and AFFect
Practice-led research shapes the creative individual: it is the synthesis of experience and knowledge, of acts and words, of praxis and lexis. Much of this exegesis has focused upon the serendipitous experiences that have shaped fragmented stories and memories into knowledge, experiences evolved from a life subsumed in the residues of genocide and eugenics. They include hearing and telling family stories, meeting with strangers, visiting some of the sites where my mother and grandmother lived in Europe, and the secondary trauma and subsequent therapy that my children and I underwent while the project was completed. These experiences inform the praxis component of this research. The other side to the research is more traditional. It is the framing of the mind within the context of the minds of others through a long practice of reading. Traditionally, people read for information and entertainment, but the writer also reads to better understand the craft of literature. Before writing, the author must read. We embody narratives that crystallize in our imaginations through reading, and we are shaped by language of others that slowly becomes our own. So it is our words take shape, and our personal lexis 346 The Legacy of Danuta Anita is discovered. The lexis of The Glass Mountain could be termed “intergenerational trauma”. While we can look to Freud for the first representations of the transference of trauma across generations in works such as Moses and Monotheism, it is not until the 1990s that literary criticism engaged directly with trauma psychology both as a means of critical interpretation of texts and to better understand the recurrence of trauma. Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra explore problems associated with veracity and modes of representation that take into account the rupture trauma causes in memory. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth claims that an understanding of trauma enables us to “recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference)” (11). On the other hand, LaCapra’s History and Memory after Auschwitz questions the “significance of trauma in history” and postulates that its recognition may permit “a more complex and nuanced interaction between history and memory” (1).
Memory—along with its lapses and tricks—poses questions to history in that it points to problems that are still alive or invested with emotion and value. Ideally, history critically tests memory and prepares for a more extensive attempt to work through a past that has not passed away. (8) Both critics acknowledge that “latency,” as described by Freud, is the key to trauma narrative. Latency, or the “period during which the effects of the experience are not apparent” (Caruth 7), is like the pupal stage in a lepidopteran life cycle. Hidden within the shell of a chrysalis, the larval grub collapses and is rewritten. It is when the cocoon is ripped apart that the imago is revealed as either moth or butterfly. Likewise, latency is the period in which the unknown qualities of the trauma rest in silence, as the identity of the victims is shaped Breaking the Silence 347 by experiences they cannot fully remember: “The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all” (Caruth 8). The problems that ensue for victims may also “raise problems of identity for others insofar as it unsettles narcissistic investments and desired self-images, including—especially with respect to the Shoah—the image of Western civilization itself as the bastion of elevated values if not the high point in the evolution of humanity” (LaCapra 9). The trauma cycle of experience, repression and remembering has an organic rhythm that can radically alter how the “facts” of history are interpreted and represented across time. In The Glass Mountain, the latency period extends for more than fifty years. The secrets of Julie’s birth echo through familial behaviours and taboos until Jason’s unexpected discovery breaks the silence. The younger generations become the confessors to their elders. As the progeny of the trauma, they are left to take on the tasks of quelling its eruptions in the present. The ones least capable of communication are, in the end, the ones who pronounce the way to liberation. Jason recognizes resonances of self in the horrors he uncovers, but intuitively grasps that the solutions cannot rest entirely with him. He may be the keeper of his great grandmother’s secrets, but Kazimiera is the reluctant champion thrust into the role of breaking the spell that primary trauma has cast upon affect. The spell-breaker is what Jason assumes it must be: his mother must visit the site of his grandmother’s birth. A problem of trauma theory, which looms even larger in trauma fiction, is how to escape the repetition compulsion of unresolved trauma. La Capra points out:
One may question the extent to which Caruth’s version 348 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
of trauma theory, as an ambitious rewriting of de Manian deconstruction, is able to get beyond the repetition compulsion other than through allegories of excess, incomprehensibility, and empty utopian hope. (History and Memory 208 n.22) A facile conflating of history with trauma runs the risk of oversimplifying the persistence and complexity of traumatic symptoms:
Indeed, one may entertain the possibility of modes of historicity in which trauma and the need to act out (or compulsively repeat) may never be fully transcended but in which they may to some viable extent be worked through and different relations or modes of articulation enabled. (Representing the Holocaust 14 n.10) The problem of representation is not just a matter of articulation, nor of conflating history with trauma: it is about finding a way beyond trauma, if such a way exists. For Freud, the individual must find the way through embodied self-awareness. The point of coming through the period of latency and compulsive behaviours is to reach a personal catharsis that releases the individual from the unyielding blindness of traumatic repetition. Trauma fiction represents an opportunity to break the paralysing silence that ensnares individuals, families and communities by working in the space between traumatic event and personal revelation. Anne Whitehead claims that:
The rise of trauma theory has provided novelists with new ways of conceptualising trauma and has shifted attention away from what is remembered to how and why it is remembered. (3) A steady flow of works in the area of trauma and fiction has grown up alongside the studies of LaCapra and Caruth. New paths have been forged to understand the trauma underlying works as disparate as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which Laurie Vickroy has analysed, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, which Esther Rashkin explores in relation to trauma and family secrets. As Caruth Breaking the Silence 349 explains and Deborah M. Horvitz reiterates, “If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing” (Caruth 3; Horvitz: 5). The point of the inexplicable is where fiction performs at its best, because that is the point where language and intellect give way to the transmission of affect. Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson offer a new view of trauma theory in Traumatic Affect. They bring together a series of essays that merge the boundaries between trauma theory and affect theory, creating an understanding of the representation of trauma that goes beyond linguistic models of Freudian catharsis and enters spaces where words fail to speak. Language can be seen as more than a means of communication. In Anna Gibbs’ phrase, language may be vehicle for “affective contagion” (Atkinson and Richardson 12): “Gibbs explores that which is inherent to the viewing of images, the way in which something is communicated before being cognitively grasped, as a structure analogous to trauma itself” (13). The problem all writers face in confronting trauma, particularly the trauma they have unconsciously inherited, is that recounting the facts of the matter does not recount the experience of ongoing trauma. Neither theory nor history can share the crippling nature of living with the inexplicable and unknowable debilitation produced by intergenerational trauma. Even writing critical analysis must take on a performative aspect if the “circuitries of trauma and affect” are to be successfully revealed. In this way, reading trauma becomes contiguous with knowing trauma.
For me, the aim of fiction is to transfer affect without transmitting the contagion. Ever since reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, where 350 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
Atticus explains to his daughter Jean, “You never really understand a person … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (Lee 58), I have seen the primary quality of literary fiction as the provision of that skin. In the case of intergenerational trauma, this goes beyond merely relating a history, or creating a character who can tell a story of horrors. It requires a narrative that conveys the continuing blight of trauma, its continuing constriction and debilitation, its ongoing ability to infect others. To know intergenerational trauma the reader must go beyond sympathising with the horror of its causes. She must taste its repetitive chaos. The text must embody the trauma if the affect is to be transmitted. In looking at intergenerational trauma originating in the genocides of World War II, we must look to but go beyond the histories and literature of diaspora and survival. During my candidature I examined a broad selection of fiction and creative non-fiction that addressed ongoing responses to post- World War II Europe in translation, including W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Andreï Makine’s A Life’s Music, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Amando’s From Berlin. Alongside these, I sampled genre works and young adult fiction, such as Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose, Jackie French’s Hitler’s Daughter, and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus. In recent years there have been a number of best-selling novels later adapted to film which offer an intimate view of the horrors of World War II, and which I examined in both media, Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. These texts follow the tradition of World War II trauma and survival narratives translated to screen, such as Günter Grass’
The Tin Drum and Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, later adapted to film as Schindler’s List. Breaking the Silence 351
Some of these texts do not merely offer new stories, but new ways of representation. Sebald’s novel use of language, the extensive stream-of- consciousness narrative, envelops the reader in the mind of Jacques Austerlitz. We breathe with him, observe with him, and suffer loneliness with him. The residues of early childhood trauma, the nightmares of Nazi brutality, and the isolation the protagonist feels because of his survival of it, are echoed in all of the European works in translation that I have read. The use of fragments, images and mixed form in Amando’s autobiographical exploration of survival and culpability demonstrates masterfully how juxtaposition can bridge the silences of trauma. Multilayered narratives are used, for instance in the novels of Makine and Yolen, narrators looking back on the past while cautiously negotiating a path through the present. The use of letters and artefacts to access secrets is evident, as is substituting visual and literary images for straightforward narrative. Invariably, death is addressed, either literally or metaphorically. In Zusak’s novel, he is personified and takes the narrator’s role, like the narrator in medieval passion, morality and miracle plays. Every one of these works modifies genre and structure and adapts form and language to overcome the difficulties in a straightforward narrative of recounting the isorlation and confusion of trauma. While all these works have informed the way I approached the content that I was discovering behind my own experience of intergenerational trauma, Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe, Mireille Juchau’s Burning In, John Scott’s The Architect and Russell Hoban’s Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer were the most significant forerunners for scaling my own fictionalMountain . These works capture the lingering residue of Nazi depravity and the continuing influence of the Third Reich on the contemporary imagination and construction of self. In 352 The Legacy of Danuta Anita each of these novels, the self is perverted through the seemingly ineradicable contagion of trauma. In the first three novels, the pervasiveness of that contagion is further enhanced by the seeming isolation of the protagonists, all of whom are Australian, while in Hoban’s fiction the theme of incurable infection is underscored by the threat of HIV. The war has not ended, it has mutated. The four novels focus upon the disastrous ease with which the self can be rewritten. The haunting of Isaac in Dead Europe turns the suburban Melbournite into a twenty-first century vampire; Hoban’s Jonathan Fitch is enticed to sell his death to the sexually abusive Rinyo-Clacton; the abduction of her daughter leads Juchau’s Martine Hartmann home to Sydney, where she discovers the repetitive nature of her loss; in The Architect artistic idolatry rescripts Andrew Martin’s life when he falls under the spell of the psychopathic genius, Johannes Von Ruhland. In all these novels, good people make bad decisions because of intergenerational or transferred trauma. In each case, the trauma manifests as both loss and ignorance. The characters sense their loss, but it remains unfathomable to them until they observe a parallel trauma. They all suffer from an unknowable past, and a pathological desire to pursue it; they are all complicit in conjuring up anew their self-destructive trauma. As Katerina says to Jonathan in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, “My own life is incomprehensible to me; I can feel it following some unknown line like a dog on a scent but I don’t know what it is. Your life too is following a line unknown to you” (88). They passively submit to self-destructive behaviours as events unfold around them, internal scripts subverting their feeble gestures towards self-direction. The line each follows is a path into the underworld. Submission to destruction, and a Faustian obsession that leads one into Breaking the Silence 353 the fires of hell, appears to be a trope of fiction concerned with intergenerational and transferred trauma. Some authors also feel the traumatic possession experienced by their characters: a blending of shame and compulsion to complete while not knowing exactly what story is being told. Meera Atkinson writes of the creation of Luna Alaska, the forthcoming novel that explores her experiences of intergenerational trauma.
I myself had been, dare I say it, haunted by the specter of Luna Alaska for two decades before its completion in 2012, having scribbled the first tentative and embryonic passages way back in 1996. What kept me returning to it and redrafting it until I eventually realized what the novel was about and what I was attempting to write was this keen pull of introjectory promise and the propensity for ghosts and phantoms to inhabit that mysterious inspiration called creativity. This promise and inspiration was, however, held in tension with a persistent sense of shame. (“Channeling the Specter” 267) It is difficult to know if the “introjectory promise” is of absolution, of restitution after catharsis, or perhaps of a dissolution that will bring silence. The pain of traumatic repetition is haunting faced in both fiction and reality. The need to still pain is what pulls the victim of trauma beyond “the pleasure principle” and “[u]nder the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 6). Sufferers, in pursuit of an ending to unspeakable horror, struggle “through, by roundabout paths, to a direct or substitutive satisfaction, [and] that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure”(7). It is this pursuit for “neurotic unpleasure” that marks the narrative of intergenerational trauma. In Dead Europe and Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, the neurotic unpleasure of the substitutive event involves an apparently supernatural haunting, but this Gothic machinery is not a necessity in trauma fiction. The neurosis experienced 354 The Legacy of Danuta Anita by Martin in The Architect and Martine in Burning In takes place at a level of everyday wakefulness that is distressing in itself. Common emotions of loss and grief create aching chasms that repeat until the protagonists begin to internalize them. In Burning In, Martine is haunted by loneliness: the loneliness of her mother’s grief, of her father’s isolation, of her parents’ divorce, and finally of the life she has constructed by “forcing the camera between herself and each encounter” (39, 42). The ideal of adventure, of taking off to a new land to realise a new destiny, is subverted in Martine by a neurosis which causes such pain that she makes disinhibited and self-destructive choices. In “aching for company”, Martine takes up with a stranger with no past (42), “a man she slept with but did not trust” (40). “How easily she’d forgotten her own company; he’d magicked away her self-sufficiency, her containment. In a week she’d become dependent. It was sort of disgusting” (37). Her deflection of responsibility is telling, because Joe had not magicked any part of Martine away. Her performance of containment has always been incomplete, her practice of aloneness has never approached the fulfillment of solitude. Her craving for company has provoked her to binge on the first meal she is served. Alone and in a foreign land, her over-indulgence seems not to matter: “nobody [knew] you, [you could] act in any loose way you like” (32). But in a life where a claim of happiness “does not equal happiness” (64), all relationships are lost, as are all identities. Martine’s ability to empathise is undermined by self-obsession, an obsession originating in her own feelings of loss and isolation. All her relationships are marked by detachment rather than proximity. Loss breeds loss. It is as if Martine has been born grieving. A feeling of inadequacy despite success is the void that Andrew Breaking the Silence 355
Martin cannot fill in The Architect. His flaw creates the fatal opening for an intellectual seduction that leads to the perversion of his body, mind and soul. His trauma is anchored in the curse of colonialism, in the insubstantiality of a New World that is void of great historical achievements. The early loss of his father resonates with an Australian artistic sensibility that still grieves the loss of Europe. Europe is personified in the myth Martin constructs around fragmentary traces of Johannes Von Ruhland, a myth that shapes his intellectual fascination with form and absence. Martin’s “exploration of how absence could be seen to shape what is present, in particular how an architect, no building of whose survived, might be seen as capable of influencing the design of so many buildings”(9), expresses both the enduring immediacy and infective nature of Freud’s concept of psychological trauma. Like a virus, Von Ruhland’s Nazi ideology and psychopathy slot into Martin’s unformed sense of self, and leave Von Ruhland to reflect that “unless one learns to love oneself, one cannot love others” (173). The seemingly familiar realities of Burning In and The Architect are couched in a poetic prose that inveigles readers into sharing the protagonists’ perspectives. The choice of the characters are made to seem sensitive and educated responses to their charged social environments. That is what makes these novels challenging. The aberrance of the traumatized personality is represented as unexceptional, as if Lotte’s repressive mothering or Von Ruhland’s psychopathic narcissism are the real perversions revealed; but when Martine and Martin are no less frightening depictions of traumatic psychology. Even Martin’s attachment to a Nazi architect is made to appear a reasonable decision by Von Ruhland’s startling genius. Martin and Martine appear almost sane, almost until the moment their addiction to unpleasure precipitates 356 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
them into their final dissolution. While Martine envisages a reconstruction of herself through the discovery of her lost sister, her imaginings remain as insubstantial as her original personality. Martine fails to understand her sister’s solution to traumatic affect, as revealed in Blanca’s reference to Rumi: “I am neither Muslim, Christian, Jew or Zoroastrian; neither of the earth nor of the heavens, neither body nor soul” (Juchau 293). Martine continues to perceive her identity through the gaze of the world outside herself, and so clings to others, to culture and family, to the void created by trauma, to substantiate herself. Her resolution of traumatic dissolution is no more a resurrection of self than Martin’s death at the hands of German neo-Nazis. Like Von Ruhland’s unfinished “hall for death” (Scott 156), Martin and Martine remain blueprints from which the lines of trauma cannot be erased. Dead Europe and Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer leave the reader with no refuge from the horrors of transferred trauma. They both depict nightmarish confusions caused by perverse contagion, the language slowly intoxicating the reader with the promise of death. While Scott presents the infectious ideology of the European legacy as a seduction, Tsiolkas and Hoban depict the intergenerational domination of World War II as a continuing rape. Trauma travels from victim to victim as a blood-borne disease. For Tsiolkas it is as an inherited disorder, a curse, a haunting by a vengeful spirit trapped at the point of death and lurking in wait until the unwitting progeny returns and unleashes it—sets it free to feed on the blood of Europe’s unwashed and unwanted. For Hoban, the rape is real, the threat is physical. As Rinyo-Clacton says to Jonathan Fitch, “I saw death looking out of your eyes. And if the death in you wants to come out, as I think it does, I’ll buy it from you” (10). Jonathan’s agreement to the purchase is seductively sought, then sealed with a violent Breaking the Silence 357 rape. Rinyo-Clacton’s sodomizing of Jonathan sheds blood, and leaves Fitch terrified he has contracted HIV. In Dead Europe, death also possesses Isaac, overwhelms his senses, and fills his body and mind with a lust for blood. The supernatural is actualized in Isaac’s insatiable thirst for blood, the blood of retribution, the blood of “Creation”, “Sweet Armageddon, beloved genocide” (378). The craving is not satisfied until “Life is extinguished”, and then “The taste of blood has changed, lost its potency, become stale” (82). Hoban and Tsiolkas’ novels do more than personify death, they infuse it with life. Resolution of trauma is the only escape from the life-in-death of post- traumatic shock. “So rarely is anything separate from anything else. Nothing is simple. Sometimes we move toward what we think we move away from” (Hoban 18). The trauma keeps tumbling through time, scooping up victims in its lustful arms until, at last, a victim takes the curse upon himself or herself, and pays the price. A sacrifice is required, a death for a death. The fated events that entwine Jonathan Fitch with Katerina, the ageing psychic and victim of Nazi genocide, connect them through Rinyo-Clacton to Thanatos himself. Katerina’s life has been shattered repeatedly: “Many times I have foreseen my death and many times it has not happened” (Hoban 34). In the end she proves to be Jonathan’s “dea ex machina” (169), when her appearance at the tube station ends in Rinyo-Clacton’s death. He was her son, stolen from her at birth by his father, Dieter Kandis, when Dieter, one of Mengele’s assistants, handed the boy to the eugenicists to study “cross-breeding” (173). Trauma is a stain or poisonous powder, like the dust of Rinyo-Clacton’s ashes blowing back over Katerina and Jonathan as they tip them into the Thames. “‘That’s all there is,’ he said. … ‘Now and for ever’” (177). There is no true freedom from ashes such as these. 358 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
“‘Not alone, but together. You and I, together, for all of time, for all eternity’” (Tsiolkas: 411). The last line of Dead Europe implies that traumatic possession is a condition not even death will end. Rebecca’s sacrifice for her son, her willingness to be cast from the fold as the scapegoat for her line, appears to be the only means of releasing Isaac from the coma that holds him in its deathly thrall. “If you save my son, Lord, she repeated, the Devil can have my soul” (410). A life for a life is necessary, but not sufficient. “Isaac returned to the world but as he did they all noticed that his appearance had changed forever” (410). The spilling of blood, the stain of our own error and guilt does not leave us, even if the family curse has been lifted. We cannot save ourselves, we can only, if we are very careful, save those who follow, and we can only do that by acknowledging the darkness that has tainted our souls. In these novels, the malleability of the protagonists’ identities rests upon an underlying instability of the self. This instability is symptomatic of the traumatic affect; it is the point where the personality has never developed the ability to speak. It is the still-birth of self-awareness, the silencing of ipseity. The word infant comes from the Latin, infans, meaning speechless; inarticulate, as well as newly born, a young or little child (Lewis and Short 942-3). Being caught inside the traumatic affect is being confined by misconception and inarticulacy. Resolution requires intervention, accountability, and an ardent declaration of the trauma, a true catharsis. None of these novels offer the option of an easy release. All the dramatis personae are darkened by their encounters, and we are left asking, along with Martine’s sister Blanca in Burning In, “‘What shall we do?’” (Juchau 298). Conclusion The Legacy of Danuta Anita
The mere idea of listening to anyone brought on a wave of revulsion, while the thought of talking myself, said Austerlitz, was perhaps worse still, and as this state of affairs continued I came to realize how isolated I was and always have been. … I was linked to other people only by certain forms of courtesy which I took to extremes and which I know today, said Austerlitz, I observed not so much for the sake of their recipients as because they allowed me to ignore the fact that my life has always, for as far back as I can remember, been clouded by unrelieved despair. (Sebald 177-8)
In 2009, just after returning from Germany, I was asked, “‘How do people survive genocide?’ … ‘They don’t,’ I said” (Raine 74). Five years later, I am not sure to what degree this is true. While the full complexity of what is lost is unrecoverable, current research suggests there is a degree to which recovery is not only possible, but a neuro-biological necessity. Yet any beneficial changes induced by severe trauma, such as was suffered by those exposed to Nazi racial practices, are extremely limited, even though in attempts to survive and recover the human organism has a set of instinctive responses to fall back on. Without conscious intervention, the intergenerational effects of trauma appear to be profoundly debilitating. 360 The Legacy of Danuta Anita
Bodies and human beings are intelligent, not only at a rational level, but also at an autonomic level. We change, adapt, and work toward survival in times of threat, and we continue in this state, generation after generation, until we intervene in ways that alter our neuro-biological system: consciously and uncounsciously we cease to perceive survival as our sole and unrelenting concern. The strengths of this are also its weaknesses. We know many descendants of concentration camp survivors have significantly lower ambient cortisol levels. While it has been argued that these signal a more sensitive hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and so heightened fight-and-flight responses, such an adaption, by readying our nervous system to react to every situation as if it is a crisis, may lead to chronic disability (Yehuda, “Low Cortisol and Risk for PTSD” 1253). Hypersensitivity to a dangerous or threatening environment results in neurological abnormalities and psychological disorders, such as PTSD. This project was prompted by questions about the extreme dysfunction I had noticed in families like mine: families that had suffered incarceration, slavery and starvation as a result of German racial policies. It has been an exploration of family stories to discover how we come to be who we are. It hasn’t been a comfortable project. At times, I have collapsed beneath the overwhelming weight of it. I have discovered a person I never knew existed, the infant Danuta Anita who grew up to become my mother. I discovered the traces of genocide and infanticide that had constructed our identities, and in doing so unravelled my very sense of self and belonging. The intensely personal nature of this project made it difficult to separate the work from the person, and from time to time boundaries between self and other eroded. Without the compassionate support of my supervisor, Christopher Pollnitz, who met Conclusion 361 with me fortnightly for much of the last seven years, and the persistence and patience of friends and health professionals, this project would have ended badly. The legacy of Danuta Anita haunts my family. She is unknowable, and her potentialities are inexplicable. Who my mother could have been if her world had been kinder is a question that evades a proper enquiry. It is occluded by a much harsher reality, where she never had the opportunity to fully experience acceptance or love. The psychological manipulation of Nazi propaganda, followed by the educational programs of Australia’s Assimilation policy, irrevocably altered the way Danuta Anita could be received by both her own community and the broader Australian population. It led to a life of maginalisation and abuse that struck at every sphere of this child’s identity: daughter, wife, mother, girl, woman, teacher, student, and self. Who is Danuta Anita? She cannot be known. When I began this project, Christopher asked if it would have a happy ending. I couldn’t give him an answer. Some people presume the rest of my world is as high performing and articulate as I am at times. This is not the case. It would be too invasive to describe the lives my brother and sisters lead, so invasive that instead of writing a biography or memoir, I wrote a novel. Despite my mother’s directive to write everything, warts and all, I could not do that. We don’t deserve to be put on display like museum exhibits, even if my mother’s documents have been museum exhibits for the last forty years. All that can be said is that without serious intervention and deep compassion there is no uniformly happy ending to the nightmare we just so happen to be living. It does go on. It does not end. That is why this project has been broadly interdisciplinary, not because 362 The Legacy of Danuta Anita that was my original intention, but because those are the directions the practice led my research. The key to practice-led research is to be free to follow the trail of knowledge and expression wherever it takes you. While that may seem an haphazard itinerary, it is not. The research is a continual practice of reflection and exploration, a synthesis of external influence and internal processing of those experiences that leads to the creation of a creative work. We are like the poet in Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”; we stare across the seas that Vasco Núñez de Balboa or Hernán Cortés or Odysseus discovered and try to discern some pattern in the seascape. We are the embodiment of the process and the work that comes out of the honing of our literary skills and creative intellect. Although it is not always the case in creative endeavours, this project resulted in and was born of a fundamental reworking of the writer’s identity. Literary art, like all art, cannot be separated from life. Rather, art is the reified representation of life rendered to the best of the practitioner’s skills. The practitioner, the artist, can no more stop the continuing cross-current of sensibility and lived experience than a medical practitioner can stop herself from applying her understanding of medicine to what she does at home. The artist thinks of form and structure, light and shade, word and image. The doctor thinks of hygiene and health practices, and notes reactions that may be symptoms of infection or infirmity. The skills we have are intrinsically adaptable to other situations, and we cannot keep ourselves from adapting the skills and knowledge acquired in one sphere to another. This adaptability is the primary survival skill of humanity, both as a species and as individual organisms. The life of the artist becomes the substance of her art, and the act of artistic production informs the artist’s life. Conclusion 363
This project has irreversibly altered my life and the lives of my children. We cannot go back to who we were before this began. In line with Osteen’s observation that “disabled people are less likely to believe their lives worthy of being narrated, and hence may not write about them at all” (17), I never presumed that there was anything of merit in pursuing an investigation into my family. This exploration of intergenerational trauma, of self and genocide, would never have happened outside the confines of a university research environment. It could not have been done. As my mother is a product of an extremely destructive set of societal practices, I have also been redesigned as the product of what, in the end, has proven to be among the more nurturing and felicitous aspects of Australian intellectual culture. It will be some time before it can be judged whether the changes in myself and my children will have the same enduring influence as the traumas suffered by my mother. Until then, this is perhaps the happiest ending such a project can offer.