LESS IS MORE
When you’re as fit as Nate Ward, don’t spoil the view with too many clothes.
AUSCHWITZ: A PERSONAL JOURNEY
Auschwitz is not the first concentration camp I’ve visited.
One sunny afternoon in the mid-1990s, I made a chilling visit to Dachau, just outside of Munich in Germany. I recall the charming country farmhouses and fields of wildflowers that lined the streets, seemingly incongruously, to this notorious death site.
At this time I was teaching in what was formerly East Germany, next to the area of Oranienburg. On an otherwise pleasant boat trip with my mature-aged pupils, I remarked at the dark, sedentary nature of the river water. I was informed that the nearby concentration camp, during the war, had consistently pumped its ashes from the gas ovens into the stream. Over half a century later, the river bed remained as dark as that period in Germany’s history.
I have had romantic relationships with the offspring of people from both sides of the Nazi/ Holocaust experience.
During the 1990s I lived in Germany with my partner, whose mother was part of the Hitler Youth as a child and whose father was one of Hitler’s so-called “boy soldiers” during the last desperate days of World War II before Germany surrendered in 1945.
Years later I dated an Israeli whose grandparents had been saved from extermination by being on the famous Schindler’s List (another Oscar-winning movie documenting the atrocities of Auschwitz). The pair – one from the Baltic Latvian region and the other a German Jew – had met there and fallen in love among the ashes. They later married before emigrating to Israel to raise a family.
Somehow, all this became useful when my Israeli boyfriend took me on a trip to the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, on the dusty outskirts of Jerusalem. This dedicated place of mourning for the six million Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust, or Shoah in Hebrew, is one of the few true destinations in the world as unsettling as visiting Auschwitz itself.
One huge room at Yad Vashem retains name cards for every person who perished, or prevailed, during the Holocaust. With my knowledge of German – learnt through my previous German partner – I was able to help my Israeli partner track his grandfather’s information and birthplace to the Northern German city of Braunschweig. Through that we discovered the link to his wife – my boyfriend’s maternal grandmother – and her birthplace in Latvia.
There were tears, but also joy, that he was finally able to tell his mother about her parents’ past, which they had never spoken of at home due to what’s known as “Holocaust Survivor Guilt”.
At that moment, I felt a small part of something much greater and almost infinite – the warm embrace of humanity. It was another valuable, if unexpected, life lesson from Auschwitz.
AUSCHWITZ HELL TO AIDS ANGEL: KITTY FISCHER
In 1944, a 17-year-old Jewish-Czech girl, Kitty Fischer was sent to Auschwitz.
Shortly after arrival, she met the man who cleaned the toilets there – a German artist wearing a pink triangle on his uniform. She asked him what it meant, and he told her it signified he was homosexual. Naïve Kitty asked the man from Munich if this was a type of religion he practised, which made him laugh and the two became unlikely friends.
The Nazis had given him the job of cleaning the toilets as a “better use of his brush” yet he managed to smuggle food to Kitty daily. He later warned her there would be a selection for the gas chambers and that to save herself she must tell them she was a weaver because a German company located next to the camps required slave labour. Kitty lied successfully and survived.
The gay man was sent to another camp and nothing more is known of his fate. After the liberation of Auschwitz, and the factory she worked in nearby as a slave worker, Kitty eventually migrated to Australia.
In the 1960s and ’70s she became a prominent shopkeeper in Sydney’s then-red light district of Kings Cross. When the AIDS crisis hit in the 1980s, she devoted herself to caring for gay men dying from the disease; her way of thanking the homosexual man who saved her life some 50 years earlier.
Kitty Fischer, who lived through both Auschwitz and the age of AIDS, passed away in 2001.
Kitty Fischer lived through both Auschwitz and the age of AIDS.