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