The Mascot (24 page)

“I remember the night that the war ended. Everybody from our floor had crammed into the room of one family who had a radio set. We listened in silence to a broadcast from the American military, who announced that the town was now in the hands of Allied forces. The atmosphere was solemn. I glanced at Uncle, but his face was immobile. Everybody was like that—their expressions were frozen. God knows what was going on in their heads at that moment. I guess they thought that their number was up, as they say.

“Suddenly Uncle rose and left. Auntie told us to go back to our room and then followed Uncle out. We waited silently in the darkness of our room. Even Mirdza was quiet, for a change—but not for long!

“‘Uldis,' she whispered, ‘what will happen to us?'

“‘We're all going to die!' I exclaimed in a terrifying voice. I wanted to frighten Mirdza as revenge for all the trouble she caused me.

“She jumped up in a panic. Then, suddenly, she weakened, because I saw her silhouette stumble and reach for the wall for support. I rushed to her, regretting what I had just said, and tried to comfort her. ‘We will be fine,' I said. ‘Uncle won't let anything happen to us.'

“Despite her fear, Mirdza dropped off to sleep. But I couldn't. I sat there in the darkness, listening to her breathing. I was petrified, and I worried about what would happen to me. After all, if we were captured by the Allies, then there was the chance that they'd find out the truth about my past and then see me as the worst traitor of all. This time it'd be the Allies who'd put me up against a wall and shoot me for what I was—a Jewish boy among Nazis.

My father on the steps of Moritzburg Castle, outside Dresden, during the firebombings of 1945.

“I didn't know where Auntie and Uncle had gone, but they didn't return till just before dawn. I suppose that they must've been with other Latvians, discussing what was going to happen in the immediate future.

“They woke us up. Uncle wanted to talk. It was as if he'd read my mind. He put his arm around my shoulders and sat me down on the side of my bed. Then he crouched down to my level and stared into my eyes.

“‘From now on,' he said, ‘if any person, no matter who they are, asks who you are, you say that you are the son of my cousin. You must remember this!'

“Then he turned to the others in the room and warned them, too. ‘Young Uldis is the son of my cousin whom we care for because his parents died in the war. Remember that.'

“Uncle had heard that the Americans were going to hand Schwerin over to the Soviets. He said that this was the worst thing that could happen to us. No Latvian could live under the oppression of the Soviet Union again.

“Among the other Latvian refugees he'd met, it'd been agreed that we needed to head farther west to Hamburg, which was in the British zone. We'd be safer there. We had to leave immediately, before the sun came up, and to pack only the bare minimum.

“There was a truck waiting for us in a nearby alleyway. Families were crammed onto the back of it, so that we had to squash in as best we could. I was wedged into a corner, but at least I could get some air and see through the slats.

“The truck soon picked up speed, and we had got some way out of Schwerin, when it came to a sudden halt. We were transferred to an old bus, so quickly that it was all I could do to hold on to my case. Still it was wonderful, finally, to be able to sit down and breathe properly.

“I nodded off with my head on Auntie's shoulder and didn't wake until the bus came to a halt in the middle of nowhere. It had broken down, and nobody had any idea what we should do. We simply sat there quietly on the bus while the driver examined the engine.

“A short time later, two soldiers—American—appeared in a jeep and took over. They ordered everybody off the bus. It was quite warm, so everybody headed for the shade of some trees by the side of the road. They lounged there passively, making occasional complaints about their discomfort and the heat of the afternoon. I was embarrassed by their complaints and laziness.

“I returned to the bus, where the two soldiers and the driver were working on the engine. Soon another jeep pulled up. For a second, I froze to the spot when I noticed that there was a black soldier among them. I had never seen a black man before. Full of bravado, I resolved to tell him that it was about time for a wash. I walked over to the jeep, but when I got close enough, I got an enormous shock! I realized that he wasn't dirty—it was the color of his skin! I just stood there, transfixed.

“At a certain moment, he looked across and noticed me. I don't know what expression I had on my face, but he laughed out loud and flashed me a big smile. His teeth were brilliant white, not yellowed and decayed like the Europeans'. I imagined that he must've come from some sort of paradise. ‘That's where I want to go, this place called America,' I said to myself.

“The soldier reached into his pocket and pulled something out, beckoning me over the way Sergeant Kulis had done all those years earlier in the schoolhouse. This time I was not tentative. I knew that I'd be safe. I went over to him. Then I saw that it was a chocolate bar. I was so pleased. In Riga, I'd almost lived on the stuff.

“He leaned back against the side of the jeep, watching me as I gulped down the chocolate. It was richer and creamier and so much better than Laima's.

“I could tell that he was a kind person, and I wanted to communicate with him, despite the—to me—still-disturbing color of his skin. I tried to say thank you, but he didn't understand a word of what I was saying. But something about me must have moved him because he tousled my hair and smiled warmly at me. He passed me more chocolate and some chewing gum as well. He even gave me a puff on his cigarette. I almost choked. I'd never had one before: the Latvian soldiers had never let me smoke because it wasn't good for my lungs, they said.”

My father raised his eyebrows. “I witnessed atrocities, but they wouldn't let me smoke.”

“Then the soldier pulled out a scrap of paper and wrote something on it. He pointed at the words and at his chest. Then he kept repeating ‘America!' and ‘Illinois!'

I didn't get it. ‘Illinois. What a strange sound!' I remember thinking to myself. ‘American won't be easy to learn.'

“It's obvious now that he'd written down his name and address in America.” My father's mood became somber. “In all the mayhem,” he said, “I lost that scrap of paper.” He shifted in his seat. “It's a deep regret to me,” he murmured. “I'll go to my grave without meeting this man who showed me kindness. Who knows how life would have turned out for me if I'd gone to America and found him?”

I wondered the same thing. Australia was a land of refuge from the war in the 1950s, but it would be fair to say that it lacked then the entrepreneurial spirit that prevailed in the United States. Even though my father loved Australia, I believe that America would have better suited his temperament and sense of adventure.

“Where was I?” I heard my father say.

“The bus…” I prompted him.

“That's right,” he said. “It was eventually repaired, and everybody climbed back on board. I hid behind the jeep. I didn't want to rejoin the Latvians. I wanted to stay with my new friend, the soldier. I decided that somehow I would be able to tell him what had happened to me, and that he wouldn't let the Allies punish me. ‘Who knows,' I thought, ‘he might even be able to find out who I had once been.'

“At that moment I heard Uncle calling out my name. He'd noticed that I hadn't taken my seat on the bus.

“The soldiers began a search for me, and in a matter of only moments they'd uncovered my hiding place. The black soldier nudged me out into the open. I tried to convey to him that I wanted to stay with him and that I knew all about soldiering—I even marched about while miming shooting a rifle—but he only laughed out loud, thinking I was playing the fool.

“He offered me his hand to shake and then grabbed me around the waist and carried me over to the bus. Uncle was waiting for me on its steps, and I knew that he had witnessed my feeble effort to be rescued, even this late in the game. He deposited me, roughly, I might add, on a spare seat next to Mirdza, who gave me a disgusted look. I waved a final good-bye to the soldier from where I was seated and then the bus took off in the direction of Hamburg.

“The journey seemed to take forever. The roads were blocked with cars and tanks and convoys of soldiers. People were fleeing in both directions. I even saw German soldiers in their Wehrmacht uniforms, standing with their hands in the air, having just surrendered.

“It was bittersweet. I was glad that the Germans had been defeated, but I also tasted bitterness for the first time. I don't know whether it was hate or not, but my anger for what they'd put me through suddenly overwhelmed me. I thought my head was going to burst. And all around me, the Latvians were deadly quiet and staring straight ahead. They seemed too frightened to even glance at what was happening outside the bus windows. They must have feared being caught. Part of me hoped they would be.

“The bus moved on slowly and was eventually stopped by British soldiers on the outskirts of Hamburg. They directed us to Geesthacht. There was a camp there, an officer told us. When they heard this, some of the Latvians panicked and tried to scramble off the bus.

“The word ‘camp' must've triggered the worst possible associations in their minds. The soldiers had to draw their rifles to calm the potential stampede. Then, through an interpreter, the officer explained that the camp was administered by the British. We'd all be fed, clothed, given a bed, and looked after by the Red Cross. What's more, the soldiers told us that they had named the camp Saules—that was Latvian for sunshine—and that stopped people in their tracks.

“Most remained standing in the aisle of the bus, and many turned to look at Uncle, who was still seated toward the rear. He'd already become a sort of de facto leader among us, having dealt with several difficult situations en route to Hamburg. He nodded without speaking. That calmed people's nerves, and they returned to their seats. Then the bus moved on toward Geesthacht. That's where we ended up finally. Our escape from Latvia was over.”

I
t was now almost 3:00 a.m. The house was silent, apart from the ticking of the clock on the kitchen wall.

But my father showed no signs of flagging. Now that the floodgates had opened, it seemed that the flow of memories could not be stemmed.

“Over the next days more people arrived at the camp,” he said. “It turned out that the camp had been designated especially for Latvian displaced persons, or DPs, as they called us. The camp must have held over a thousand people—and there were about seventy in our barracks, number forty-one.

“There was a long queue on the first day we arrived. Hundreds were milling about, waiting to be assigned to huts and receive their provisions.

“When we reached the head of the queue, we were met by a British officer and a Red Cross worker, who wanted to check our papers. The soldier looked down at me and asked Uncle if I was his son. Uncle hesitated and then thought better of it.

“‘No, sir,' he said. ‘His father was my cousin. Both his father and mother died in the war, and I am the boy's guardian, sir.'

“The soldier did not seem suspicious or even particularly interested in Uncle's explanation, but he did ask for my papers, and to my surprise, Uncle pulled out a wallet full of documentation. ‘Here are documents from the Riga Orphan's Court in 1943,' he said, ‘where I was awarded custody of the boy. His name is Uldis. My family wants to continue to look after him.' Uncle passed the papers over to the officer.

My father lifted the lid of his case and fished out a piece of paper. “Here is the certificate,” he said, passing it across.

I looked down at the paper. It was dated 1943 and written in Latvian, so I could only make sense of a small portion of it. What stood out most sinisterly was the address of the court—Hermann Göring Street.

“I didn't know that Uncle had adopted you formally.”

“He didn't. It's more like a guardian's certificate—though he did try to adopt me on a number of occasions. He really wanted me to be his son.”

“Why didn't it happen, then?”

“I don't know, to be honest,” my father said. “Uncle could have done it without my consent, but for some reason he was determined that I agree to it. But I wouldn't. He asked me at least three times and each time I refused. He was shocked and disgruntled, but he never insisted that I cooperate nor asked me my reasons. Eventually he let the matter drop. I wouldn't have been able to explain myself in any case.”

“Do you understand now?” I asked.

My father grimaced. “They were not my people,” he said, “and inside me I felt that if I let myself be adopted then, I would have surrendered completely to them.”

“How long were you in the camp?”

“Over four years. We had to wait for a country to accept us. It wasn't so bad, except that they tried to get me to attend school. I did go on occasion, but mostly I played truant. I was still too restless after my life with the soldiers to sit at a desk.”

I was not surprised to hear my father speak of his restlessness, since he had been that way for as long as I could remember. And he loved the little adventures he cooked up for us, sometimes enjoying them more than we did. Perhaps it was a way for him to create some of his missing childhood, or what he imagined a childhood should be.

He was great fun to be with, precisely because he sidestepped the difficult times of our childhood: he was rarely ill-tempered and not the type of father to scold, forbid, or punish us. He always put pleasure and enjoyment above the practicalities of money, and many people, including my brothers, understandably came to judge him harshly for what they saw as his financial profligacy.

One day, on trust, he handed over his life savings—our security—to a Frenchman known only as Michel, with whom he'd become acquainted. Michel had tempted my father with a business proposal and convinced him that it would be a surefire winner. The money had barely touched Michel's palm when he vanished. Incredibly, my father had demanded neither contract nor guarantees of any sort from the Frenchman. We lived hand to mouth for many years after that.

There was a time when I, too, found it difficult to forgive my father for this mistake. I worried especially on behalf of my mother, who found our financial insecurity extremely difficult. Living in a constant state of exasperation with my father, she made an almost saintly effort to cope with his recklessness and to protect us from its consequences. If we turned to our father for fun, we turned to our mother in times of trouble, looking for love and affection. This more than anything was a testament of her love both for him and for her sons.

Learning about my father's early life was akin to looking through a kaleidoscope: its shifting colors and shapes kept me enchanted for hours on end, but my eyes ached from searching for patterns. I now saw his attitude toward money, especially, as symptomatic of a “madness” that had infected him—money, like life itself, was a gamble that came and went easily.

But it was not the madness of a poor soul lost to himself: my father's madness somehow tempered the coexistence of child and man within one being. I realized now that part of my father was still a child of five, frozen in time at the split second before he had witnessed the extermination of his family.

He removed two photographs and laid them both on the table. I reached for the one nearest to me. It was a group photograph of the Latvians who lived in Barrack 41 at Saules. In the photograph, my father sits at the very end of the front row with all the other children, while the adults stand behind.

My immediate impression of the picture is that my father seems to be a stranger or an outsider among these people. It is not simply because he is positioned at the edge of the frame; rather, it is his demeanor, and, most notably, his clothes. By looking at the Latvians, dressed as they are in thick woolen overcoats with drawn, pallid features, it is easy to discern that it is winter.

My father wears short trousers, and his feet are bare. His body language indicates that he is freezing: he is hunched in on himself, trying to keep warm. Nonetheless, his small face grins determinedly out of the photograph.

I wanted to ask my father directly about how he saw himself in this photograph. But it seemed such an intimate question, and I was too shy. I returned the photograph to its resting place and picked up the other one.

This one, too, told a story different from the idyllic depiction of camp life my father had offered us as children. I'd seen the photograph just once before, during one of my father's storytelling sessions years earlier. It was stuck to the back of another picture he wished to show us, and he had inadvertently drawn it from his case. As it fluttered to the floor, I made a grab for it ahead of my father. I caught a glimpse of it for an instant, before he snatched it back from me with an unexpected force. Even though I was only a child, what I had seen in that moment filled me with unease.

Free to examine it at length now, I understood why the photograph had disturbed me. It is an ostensibly innocent-looking snap of my father: around ten or eleven years old, he is sitting alone at a table decorated with flowers. But if one looks closely, the boy appears deeply unhappy, as if, despite his own best efforts to maintain his composure, the mask has slipped from his small face to reveal terrible damage. His expression is so raw that it pained me to look.

I wanted to ask my father about this photograph as well, but again I held back, not wanting to further intrude upon his suffering.

I suddenly remembered that Auntie had told us that during his time at Saules my father would frequently wake up screaming in the middle of the night. It now occurred to me that in both the photographs I had just seen the aftereffects of his nightmares were still visible on his face.

My father at the kitchen table at Saules, 1943: “His expression is so raw that it pained me to look.”

Was he oblivious to his own suffering? Whatever effect he'd imagined these photographs would have upon me, I could only feel anger against all the Latvians in the camp, including Auntie and Uncle.

My father spoke again.

“The living conditions in the hut were cramped,” he said. “All the families created their own space by hanging blankets to create rooms of sorts. In our place, we'd crammed in the bunk beds and a small table that we sat around for hours on end.

“Uncle worked in the camp's office, and sometimes Auntie would get me to take something over to him. He was never busy when I dropped by. He usually sat behind a large desk, chatting with other Latvian men who were also in the office.”

My father paused and looked at me excitedly. “Do you know who one of them was?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, went on. “Apparently it was Konrad Kalejs. The war criminal who's been in the news recently.”

I had heard of Kalejs, who'd been a member of Latvia's notorious Arajs Kommando, an extermination squad that even unreconstructed Latvians had difficulty explaining away. Kalejs had lived freely in the United States and later in Australia before his true identity had been uncovered. Shamefully, the Australian government had vacillated over his prosecution for war crimes, and Kalejs had died before being brought to justice.

“Whenever I played hooky from school, I'd go out to deal on the black market. When I'd return home with the day's booty, I'd make a grand show of it. Uncle and Auntie would look up, smiling, as I flung down my forage bag—the same one Kulis had given me to collect wood—and laid out what I had bartered for that day: chocolates, tobacco, and the occasional note or coin.

“I'd sit on the edge of my bunk while Uncle counted the coins. He kept a small box hidden under the floorboards. He would get it out, untie it, and add the day's takings to the coins and notes that were already in it.

“Auntie would be responsible for the food. She had her own secret box and would store the chocolates and sugar in it. But before retying the box and hiding it, she always passed me a chocolate as a reward. Sometimes I'd forget that I was supposed to be civilized, as Uncle demanded, and I'd revert to my habits in the forest. I'd snatch the chocolate from Auntie's hand and retreat to my bunk, like an animal returning to the lair with its catch. Auntie would shake her head despondently. Those days in the forest have left their imprint on me.

“But they were always pleased with my work. Uncle would compliment me, saying such things as, ‘You are truly—what do these English say?—a wheeler and dealer!'

“Once, when Mirdza was still living with us, and she heard Uncle praise me, she harrumphed indignantly, ‘He must have a touch of the Jew in him!' At the mention of that word, I headed for my bunk—I half-expected to hear the sound of Mirdza receiving a slap like the one Ausma had once gotten for making a similar accusation. But nothing happened. It was no longer a crime to be Jewish, though it was obviously still an insult.”

“Did you ever think of telling the Dzenis family that you were Jewish?” I asked. “After all, as you said, it wasn't a crime to be Jewish by then.”

“What would've been the point?” he answered.

“Would they have accepted you?” I pressed him.

My father didn't answer. His body language made it clear that he didn't wish to dwell on the issue of his Jewishness, which even now seemed to make him nervous. I wondered what made him want to skirt around the issue.

When he spoke again, it was to change the topic. “I spent four years in Geesthacht.”

“You said that,” I replied. “What other things did you get up to?”

“This and that,” my father answered, shrugging and rubbing the back of his neck. His reluctance slightly annoyed me, though I assumed that it was due to the almost instinctive caution that he had lived with for so long.

“Weren't you ever tempted to tell anyone about the kind of people who were in the camp?” I asked.

“To be honest, it never crossed my mind.” My father paused. “I was still in another world. Looking back, I know I had no idea what had happened to me and who these people really were. I was shell-shocked and vulnerable and disturbed by what I had gone through. I can tell you that I wasn't the only one like that. There were individuals in that camp who died under mysterious circumstances. In other words, they committed suicide.