Driving to Treblinka: A long search for a lost father
IDiana Wichtel, Awa, $45. t’s not as if Diana Wichtel doesn’t give the reader notice that things aren’t going to end well. In the opening lines of this remarkable memoir, the Listener journalist is reading the autopsy report from November 1970 of her father Ben, dead at 60 in a Canadian psychiatric hospital. He had pneumonia. He had bruises on his face. He had been psychotic for years. The note about the funeral states: ‘‘Family and friends: none.’’
He had stayed behind in Canada when his Kiwi wife had taken 13-yearold Diana and her two siblings back to New Zealand. They were told their father would be following soon, but he didn’t. Five years later, he was dead.
So, as the subtitle puts it, this book is ‘‘A long search for a lost father’’, an account of Wichtel’s attempts to learn the truth about her father’s demise, including a guilt-stricken examination of her own culpability. But then there’s the actual title, with the name of the Nazi extermination camp in Poland where 900,000 people, almost all Jews, were murdered.
Because Driving to Treblinka is two horrifying stories in one: Ben Wichtel was a Polish Jew who dodged death in the Warsaw Ghetto, then squeezed himself out the window of a train bound for Treblinka. When he lost everything in Canada in the 1960s, including his family, it was for the second time.
His medical file said he was paranoid, with delusions of persecution, but is that so strange, Wichtel asks, for a man who’d known a time when the entire apparatus of state was turned to the systematic destruction of him and every single one of his relatives?
It’s conventional, when a book is full of horror and sadness, to say it’s ‘‘moving’’ – a reviewer’s code for admitting you welled up a few times, but Driving to Treblinka goes far beyond that. Several chapters are genuinely distressing to read: not just the descriptions of Holocaust atrocities but also the intimate accounts of how those traumas resonated through the lives of survivors like Ben Wichtel, and then into subsequent generations. In the days since finishing it, I’ve been feeling really quite gloomy about humans.
Yet there’s plenty to enjoy. Descriptions of Wichtel’s childhood are frequently hilarious, including her culture shock at moving from cosmopolitan Vancouver, where she wore nylons, kitten heels and makeup, to Auckland’s North Shore where the PE teacher at uptight Westlake Girls’ makes pupils kneel on the gym floor to check skirt lengths.
As she surveys the weirdness of mid60s New Zealand through 13-year-old eyes, I can’t help wondering what contribution this early dislocation made towards Wichtel’s later genius for TV reviewing at the Listener. Her reviews often strike a tone of tolerant bemusement; she’s a visitor from Mars bearing witness to the latest bonkers manifestation of modern culture.
That’s roughly how she sounds when describing the sex-segregated screenings of Ulysses in 1967, or the sheep-brain dishes offered by her Auntie Jill, or her alarm on discovering that there’s only one TV channel in New Zealand, and it shuts down at 10.30pm after a prayer. It’s this voice, sceptical yet warm, that then leads the reader into the dark.
Wichtel’s search for information about her father’s two catastrophes is the thread on which the narrative hangs, but there’s much more to Driving to Treblinka than that. The book loops through time, integrating public histories of the Holocaust with the private stories of Ben Wichtel and members of the wider family.
Wichtel reflects on the alarming persistence of modern-day antiSemitism. She reads the research on how victims’ traumas redound on their descendants. She claws away at familial and personal guilt – ‘‘remembering is an exercise in selfloathing’’ – about how Ben Wichtel could be left to die, lonely and mad, in Ontario. She notes, with remorseless clarity, the s... she’s putting herself through. After finally receiving the psychiatric file, she’s stunned for days: ‘‘Grief, I find, has a metallic taste, like blood in the mouth.’’
She travels to Vancouver, New York, Berlin, Warsaw. She finds new shoots on the family tree that Hitler failed to cut down. She talks, and fights, with her family about clashing versions of history. She drives to Treblinka. She finds, eventually, some answers.
There are many moments of hope, humanity and nobility amid the horror, but Wichtel is careful not to tie things in too tidy a bow. In 2015, she interviewed Daniel Mendelsohn, whose memoir The Lost is about his search for six relatives killed in the Holocaust.
Mendelsohn reckoned some Holocaust memoirs skirt rather too close to ‘‘What I got out of the Holocaust’’. He’d tried to avoid that, and so has Wichtel. As she says, ‘‘there’s no personal growth to be had in that fathomless void’’.
Wichtel tracked down her father’s cousin Joe, who was born in Brooklyn and worked as a Holocaust educator at local colleges. He said to her: ‘‘You can’t tell the Hitler story enough. Young people find it unbelievable because it is unbelievable – the best Germans devising the best method of conducting mass murder and the participation of ordinary Germans, Ukrainians, Hungarians, volunteers to kill the Yid.’’
Wichtel has told the Hitler story again, beautifully, and it is very ugly.