Vera: My Story

By Vera Wasowski and Robert Hillman

‘My revenge on Hitler is a lifetime in which delight has reached me from a hundred sources, and been welcomed.’—Vera Wasowski

A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life.

Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her family into the Lvov Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure her and Vera’s survival. With unsparing honesty and the blackest humour, she recalls a world where the desire to survive was everything.

After the war, Vera studied journalism at Warsaw University, throwing herself into the bohemian scene. In 1958, she migrated to Australia with her husband and young son, to escape rising anti-Semitism. Here she would carve out an adventurous career as an ABC TV researcher and producer on pioneering programs such as This Day Tonight. It was a wild time for politics and the media, and Vera was at the centre of it all, mixing with the Hawkes in the 1980s, and forming a close friendship with artist Mirka Mora.

In Vera, acclaimed biographer Robert Hillman has captured the fierce and passionate life of an amazing Australian.

Shortlisted, 2016 NSW Premier's Literary Award

‘Vera was wild, exotic and utterly outrageous when I met her as a young journalist in Melbourne. When you’ve survived both Hitler and Stalin there’s not a lot to hold you back. She has a great story to tell.’ —Kerry O’Brien

‘Vera’s life is part tragedy, part farce but like the roast goose that she cooks so magnificently it is always succulent, rich and unforgettable.’ —Barrie Kosky

‘Wasowski is the grandmother we all wish we had. It’s a privilege to spend time with her.’ —Saturday Paper

‘It’s not just the distinctive voice that is impressive about this memoir, it’s the point of view … Better than the usual in this current memoir epidemic.’ —Spectrum

Robert Hillman’s memoir, The Boy in the Green Suit, won the Australian National Biography Award for 2004. His 2007 biography, My Life as a Traitor, written with Zarah Ghahramani, appeared in numerous overseas editions. His first collaboration with Najaf Mazari, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif has been a set text in many schools. He is also the author of Gurrumul: His Life and Music and the novel Joyful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781925203066

Book preview

HILLMAN

1  

TALK OF MURDER

Outside, at a café in St Kilda, a new place at the back of the Prince of Wales, we’re talking of murder. I light up a cigarette, of course I do – that’s why Robert and I are outside – but within ten seconds the woman at the next table is acting out a drama of suffocation. She points at her child, a pretty girl of six or seven, at the same time holding a hand to her own throat. I should be ashamed of myself – the mother wants me to understand that. So, okay, I am ashamed of myself. But, madam, listen to me for a minute – one minute only. I am eighty. Few pleasures are left to me. Nicotine, coffee, marijuana. Your child will survive.

Robert, hunched over his notebook, asks, ‘But you had a sense of foreboding?’

‘Yes. Maybe. I’m not sure.’

‘Jews were being attacked in the streets. Your uncle was attacked.’

The waiter appears with my coffee and Robert’s tea. He’s very good-looking. He, too, disapproves of my cigarette.

I live in a world of disapproval. My friend Jeni rolls her eyes whenever I pull out my packet of Drum and my papers. Others I know disapprove of my politics. When I was younger, my morals were an issue for some. Oh, but the greatest disapproval of all – that was in Poland. That was in Lvov. There, people like me were so disapproved of that we were murdered in large numbers.

Robert prompts me again. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? Your uncle was attacked?’

‘Yes.’

I don’t know that I want to speak of murder this morning. I don’t know that I want my book to start with death and despair – nor to end with it. Imagine an epitaph that reads: ‘Vera: She survived the Shoah’. Better it should read: ‘Vera: Lust for life’. Maybe also: ‘Loved music, books, philosophy’. Also: ‘Very good sense of humour’. And: ‘Loved not wisely but too well, mostly’. Something along those lines. It needs work.

Robert picks up on my mood and backs off. Good for him. He lights a cigarette of his own, sips his tea and studies my features.

‘You have,’ he says, ‘the most beautiful green eyes I’ve ever seen.’

It’s true. I do have beautiful eyes. It’s nice that he notices. May he notice a great many other things.

And may he also discuss with me what sort of book this is to be. I don’t think I’ll enjoy starting at Lvov then leaping back and forth between catastrophe and triumph over all the years of my life – interiors, landscapes, follies, lovers, betrayals.

Life stories hardly ever tell the truth about anyone. How can they? A life story of ten volumes is still a precis. To record all my thoughts from this Sunday morning alone, I would require twenty pages. Today I walked along Park Street with Robert, and every glance recalled something of St Kilda fifty years ago when I first came here from Poland The human mind is like – well, like what? Like a chaotic archive, a million scraps of paper stored in heaps – with no system, no chronology, no index, nothing remotely like a catalogue; bills and bank statements living cheek by jowl with love letters and, somewhere in the midst of it all, a petrified cheese sandwich forgotten years ago after a single bite.

Did I have a sense of foreboding? How can I answer that? Yes, of course I did! Jews are born with a sense of foreboding. Is this news? Is this the stuff of literature? I could say, ‘Robert, children as young as I was were hanged by their neighbours in many Polish towns, in my town, Lvov. Little Vienna as it was known. Yes, there was a great deal of foreboding!’

What now? A crowd of cyclists, adults and children, have stormed the café, all of them dressed in close-fitting outfits covered in advertisements. The mothers and fathers are in their mid-thirties; their children are mostly five or six years old. It’s a ritual, I suppose; instead of dressing the children for church on Sunday morning, their parents dress them for cycling and the café.

When I first came to Australia, only postmen and school children rode bicycles. Now the bicycling bourgeois are everywhere. Exercising has become religious observance.

Robert is ready to return to the themes. If I won’t talk about murder, maybe I will talk about Jan.

‘Tell me about your relationship with Jan, Vera. It wasn’t – well, it was not an exclusive relationship, as I understand. That’s right, isn’t it?’ ‘You mean did I sleep with other men?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course.’

‘That would have been unusual. Particularly in Australia.’

‘Everything was unusual in Australia in the nineteen-fifties. Presswurst was unusual, let alone kołduny or zraci. If you asked in a shop for presswurst, they thought you were a communist.’

‘And you were a communist, ironically.’

‘No, Robert. I was a bohemian, not a communist.’

‘Yes, you told me earlier, I’m sorry. I heard bohemian defined one time as a man who wears a dressing gown at midday and sleeps with his niece.’

‘Is that so? Well, maybe. Incidentally, I had an uncle who wanted to sleep with me. But he was no bohemian.’

I say ‘wanted to sleep with me’ but what I mean is that he tried to rape me. Dear God, I have experienced everything. My father took his own life – I watched him die. My mother resorted to a sort of voluntary rape, giving herself to my uncle in return for concealment in an apartment outside the ghetto on the Aryan side of Lvov, when the ghetto itself was about to be liquidated and the last of the occupants gassed. Later, she bought our survival by sleeping with a Russian general. Those less fastidious than my mother died: less fastidious, less beautiful. I can sit here with Robert, enjoying a cigarette and a coffee, because of my mother’s good looks and practical approach to fucking.

That’s what I brought to Australia all those years ago – I, and thousands of others. A first-hand experience of what the world could be, what people could do, what survival involved, what mattered and what didn’t. And also what presswurst tasted like. When you know what people can do, at their worst, you know forever what’s important and what’s bullshit. You know what life tastes like: not just presswurst, but life. When you’ve lived on crumbs, you never lose your relish for a full loaf of bread.

Well, maybe that’s not true. The full loaves of bread in the shops when I came here were uniformly white and free of taste and easy to do without.

‘So, what do you want in the book?’ Robert asks me.

‘What do I want in the book?’ I think for a minute. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t want you to say, Vera has beautiful eyes, Vera has slept with ten thousand men? I don’t want that.’

‘The book will be what you want it to be, Vera.’

‘I don’t know what I want it to be!’

‘This,’ says Robert. He lifts his hands and gestures at the bicycle bourgeois, at the mother whose daughter’s life I placed in mortal danger, at my empty coffee cup, at me.

‘This?’

‘Yes.’

‘Some book.’

‘Vera, you’ve lived a big life. It will all be there.’

I shrug. I look away. If it’s all going to be in the book, as Robert says, then let it record that these bicycle people irritate me. The suffocating lady with the pretty daughter irritates me even more. One type of arrogance has been replaced by another.

I came to St Kilda from Warsaw, where you couldn’t scratch your behind without someone from state security, some Urząd Bezpieczeństwa stooge making a note about it. But in Poland, we were free in our hearts. In university, we laughed about everything – in private. We drank with each other in the most irresponsible way, we made love, we argued, and we thought that art and literature were more important than anything on earth.

In Australia, we met the members of the middle class for the first time in our lives: so sure of themselves, so smug, so condescending. And so frightened. Their arrogance was brittle. They thought we owed them a great debt of gratitude. We should say ‘thank you’ all day, every day. We had been rescued from a hellhole behind the Iron Curtain and our gratitude should shine from our faces.

I couldn’t be bothered with gratitude. What person with any self-respect wants to say ‘thank you’ again and again? Okay, thank you with all my heart: now leave me alone.

Maybe we were also arrogant. I should concede that. Maybe, if I tell the truth, we pitied the middle class with a little too much enthusiasm. But the thing was, I didn’t come to Australia looking for a chance to show my gratitude. I came here with Jan and my son to be free of the tedium and vulgarity and stupidity of anti-Semitism, to be free from oppression and laugh at everything that deserved to be laughed at. And to watch movies – even movies as innocent as Danny Kaye comedies – without being accused of enjoying ‘decadent products of capitalism’. To do all this with the utmost seriousness. I wanted to do everything I had done in Warsaw, but without Jew-haters looking at me as if judging how long a rope would be required to hang me.

The Poles have episodes of madness when they believe that everything that troubles them or angers them is down to the Jews. The Poles and everyone else. The Poles especially. You could take a contingent of them through the ruins of Auschwitz and say, ‘Look, look! See where it leads! Anti-Semitism, Jew-hating, do you see where it leads, given time? Do you see?’ And what would their response be? I’ll tell you. It would be this: ‘What point are you making?’

Okay, okay, okay. Many Poles found the decency to help us. They have trees planted for them in Jerusalem. Righteous Gentiles. I honour them. But I also remember those like the village fool in a town in the west who was given an iron bar by the SS and permitted to apply it to the skulls of Jews rounded up in his village, and, when he was done, was applauded by onlookers as he sat on a heap of dead bodies, playing folk tunes on his accordion.

So when I came back to Poland from Germany (this will come later: how, after the war, my mother and I escaped to Germany – of all places, Germany! – even life in hell is rich in irony), I was like a wild creature that has been hunted by hounds and now lives in constant readiness to flee, every sense alert. The communists were taking control in Poland, and who was to say that the communists would be any better than the Nazis?

And yes, the time arrived – of course it did! – when the communists under Władysław Gomułka came up with the brilliant and original idea of persecuting Jews. Gomułka, that imaginative man, said that Jews could leave Poland on a one-way passport.

At that time, my feral years behind me, I was at university, with a child to raise and a husband to care for.

My friends promised to hide me, to protect my child. But I looked at them and thought of the many, many Jews whose friends had hoped to protect them from the Nazis during the war, and how the determination of those friends had in the end been unavailing.

So I came here, to St Kilda, a presswurst-free zone.

Well … not any longer. The bicycle bourgeois are enjoying sundried tomatoes and dill jelly and ciabatta and, for all I know, organic cabana.

I shouldn’t be so scornful. Isn’t this what we want for the world? A big, juicy democracy with parents dressing their children in lycra for a Sunday morning outing down Fitzroy Street to Acland Street to Barkly Street and back again? With an opportunity on the way to stop at a café and listen to the mother of a pretty girl deliver an extempore sermon on the wickedness of nicotine?

Yes, I suppose so. I suppose so.

My spirits revive, as they always do. I answer a few more questions from Robert and sip the last of my coffee.

But God, dear God, do I really have to go through the catacombs of my memory and gather together all the stories in the way Robert wants me to? It exhausts me to contemplate it.

Who slept with whom? So many whoms were slept with. Is this book going to enrich society? But what does enrich society? A well-made sandwich from a delicatessen. Good coffee. When I think of it, why should our taste in sandwiches matter any less than our taste in the people we sleep with?

Really, what should I complain about? I’ve known good people. And some of the worst.

‘Vera, can we go back to the ghetto for a minute?’ says Robert, in his conscientious way.

Can we go back to the ghetto for a minute? Do I wish to? Now that I’m cheerful again? But yes, yes, we will go back to the ghetto for a minute. You’re a Jew, you survive the ghetto: you tell the story for the rest of your life. You have to believe that it matters. Poor Primo Levi, the tiled floor rushing up at him, facing what the Nazis could not achieve: his death. And why? Because what Robert wants to hear from me Levi had ceased to believe meant anything to listeners, to readers, to anyone. Every Jew who survived has to fulfil the destiny of an Ancient Mariner – but a guiltless Ancient Mariner, if such a creature can be imagined: such a creature waylaying others on their way to wedding feasts, to the cinema, to the pub, to the football, to bed. And each time a person like Robert says ‘Can we go back to the ghetto for a minute?’, we risk discovering that our strange power of speech is not so strange any longer, the glitter in our eyes not so compelling. We risk that, every time, and we risk it more with the passing of another decade. Someday someone will say to me, ‘The Holocaust? Is that a movie?’ and like Primo Levi I will see the floor speeding towards my face.

I light a new cigarette. The woman with the pretty daughter rolls her eyes. Robert takes up his pen.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘The ghetto.’

2  

THE RUSSIANS

Lvov, in Poland, in Ukraine, in limbo.

The Russians have been here in Lvov for a week. The war began, and the city emptied; the Russians arrived and the city filled again. I am in the kitchen of our apartment, gazing down at soldiers in the street. Or not quite in the kitchen but on a balcony, looking down on Ulica Połczyńska, one of the city’s main streets leading through the centre of town. At the age of five, my hair in plaits, I can just barely peep over the railing.

It’s the first month of autumn in 1939, and what I am witnessing is the unfolding of the Stalin–Hitler pact, the mutually agreed division of Poland into portions to be exploited by Russia and Germany. I don’t know this – of course I don’t – and in the highly unlikely event of it being explained to me in pictures, I still wouldn’t understand. I would have to grasp the meaning of ‘war’, of ‘perfidy’, ‘deceit’ and ‘murder’ – no, I wouldn’t understand, and it would be cruel to make me try.

Something not quite as alien to my five years’ experience of the world is ‘anti-Semitism’ or, more precisely, ‘Jew-hating’: Jew-hating as a practice, as a hobby, as a predilection, as a sport. There are a great many Jews in Lvov, and a great many more Jew-haters. They have been busy over the past few years, encouraged by the more accomplished Jew-haters of nearby Nazi Germany. My father is a Jew. My mother is a Jew. I am a Jew. People who don’t know us – who have never been to our house, have never spoken to us, have never had the opportunity to form an opinion about us – hate us. A small gang of these highly motivated thugs attacked my father with walking sticks in which razor blades had been embedded. They beat his head, and it was only his hat that saved him. They made my father bleed and will, if they can, make him bleed again. That’s what I understand.

So, I watch the soldiers. I know that these men swinging their arms with rifles over their shoulders are Russians, because my mother has let me know. ‘Soldiers, Beloved – Russian soldiers.’ They wear khaki jackets with a black belt at the waist, small caps worn to one side, trousers loose on the upper legs and tight below the knee – what I will one day know as jodhpurs – and black leather boots. On their belts they carry leather pouches, one either side. I am curious to know what is in those pouches. The faces of the soldiers are not quite the faces I am used to in Lvov; I can’t quite say in which way they are different. Some of the soldiers wear a diagonal dark leather belt across their chests and carry holsters at their sides. I have seen such holsters on men before this day. I know what is kept inside them. The soldiers with holsters wear peaked caps with a red band and a red star.

From my balcony I can hear the rhythmic thud of boots on the road surface, but I don’t feel much menace.

My mother and father, who know of the Hitler–Stalin pact, who know that a war that will engulf the whole of Europe has commenced, who know that the greater part of our land of Poland is occupied by the armed forces of Germany and that our city of Lvov is in danger – they would have experienced a stronger sense of menace, and some confusion, too. Who should they trust more, who distrust less? The Russians? The Germans?

Five years old, my hair in plaits, just tall enough to see over the railing, curious enough to feel a type of fascination with the uniforms, the unfamiliar faces, the steady rhythm of the boots on the ground, the pouches on the soldiers’ belts, I am protected by all that I do not know. I do not know that the worst thing ever to befall the Jews of the world has been set in motion; that the number of Jews in the city will soon swell to two hundred thousand; that at the end of the war that is coming, only three hundred will remain; that in this city of ninety-five synagogues, none will be intact in three year’s time.

But I don’t know any of this at age five, and nobody else knows either, whether five years old or fifty.

When the soldiers have passed, I turn back and gaze at my mother in the kitchen, puzzled by the anxious look on her face.

‘What, Mama?’

She shrugs but doesn’t say anything.

This is not what I am used to from my mother, who is in her nature a woman full of opinions, full of advice. I never see her looking daunted. As is normal in children, my structures of comprehension are not sophisticated. I register alarm in others – fear, joy, displeasure – but the nuances are not there. In my mind, the Russian soldiers have taken up an unthreatening tenancy. I see no harm in them, but I am troubled by the ambiguity of my mother’s response.

To relieve myself of the troubled feeling, I return my gaze to the street and to the trees in the park, still in foliage at this early stage of autumn. I am returning not only to the scene that is spread out before me, but to the warm embrace of all that I don’t know.

Soon, I will sit at the piano and practise. But first my mother will tidy my hair, maybe replait it if the plaits have loosened, sitting behind me with the hairbrush, murmuring endearments one moment, commanding me – in her bossy way – to sit still the next.

This is Lvov. This is our life.

In a modern atlas, Lvov is ‘Lviv’, and it is not in Poland but in the far west of Ukraine, eighty kilometres from the Polish border. It is a city that has had a fraught life, sometimes ridiculously so: a plaything of despots, traded between states. It’s Latin name was Leopolis, and that name remains the root of all the versions of Lvov, except for the name the Germans gave it: Lemberg. It was founded in 1256 in a region then known as Ruthenia, the Roman name designating it as the home of a fairly insignificant rabble called the Rus. By fits and starts, the Rus became more or less the Russians. The Poles seized the city in 1349, kept it until 1772 with the help of the Lithuanians, lost it to the Austrians for one hundred and fifty years, took it back after World War I, lost it to the Germans in 1941, to the Russians in 1944, and it was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1945 as part of Ukraine.

Because of all that I did not know at age five, Lvov seemed the only possible world, the only possible home. The history of Lvov was a part of all that I did not know then, but knowing it now, in my seventies, it seems inevitable that the Russians should have marched into our city and that the Germans should have succeeded them. Almost everything that the Jews of Lvov endured seems inevitable.

If I fix in my mind’s eye my small shape on the kitchen balcony, watching the soldiers marching, I can extend the evidence of inevitability north, south, east and west. The most powerful military machine the world has ever known, as of 1939, is poised to seize for itself villages, towns and cities by the tens of thousands all over Europe. The German machine is so cleverly organised that its agents know exactly what to do once a town or city becomes German-occupied territory.

Nothing has been neglected. The resources of sites to be invaded have been catalogued, right down to the volume of water consumed in each household. The forms of resistance to be encountered have been studied, and dismissed. The names of likely sympathisers have been recorded. The headquarters that the invaders will require – the houses, mansions, castles and palaces – have all been marked on maps. Indeed, more maps of Europe’s nations have been commissioned and printed and filed by German High Command than ever before generated on the continent. The number of buses, automobiles, trolley cars and horse-drawn vehicles in all of the larger towns and cities is known. Age-old animosities capable of being exploited in every nation slated for invasion have been calculated: who hates whom in France, in the Netherlands, in Denmark, in Belgium; who would welcome the chance to take revenge, with the blessing of the German occupiers.

And then there are the lists of those who will need to be shot. Intellectuals with a vicious attraction to Marxism. Liberal politicians. Christians with a repugnance for murder who have raised their voices in protest at the Nazi program. Journalists of the left-wing press. Mayors of towns who have resisted friendly overtures, resisted invitations to provide certain information about the Jews of their region. And, of course, the Jews, like me, like my mother and father, like one hundred thousand others in Lvov, like a further one hundred thousand pouring into Lvov from regions of Poland where the Germans are already consulting their lists, already shooting those who require shooting.

In my mind’s eye, the mind’s eye of a woman now eighty, the small figure