Author’s Note
I’m in the lounge of the home of an elderly man. I don’t know him well yet, but I’ve quickly come to know his dogs, Tootsie and Bam Bam – one the size of a pony and the other smaller than my cat. Thankfully I’ve won them over and right now they are asleep.
I look away for a moment. I have to tell him.
‘You do know I’m not Jewish?’
An hour has passed since we met. The elderly man in the chair opposite me gives an impatient but not unfriendly snort. He looks away, folds his fingers. His legs are crossed and the free foot raps a silent beat. His eyes look towards the window and the open space.
‘Yes,’ he says finally, turning to me with a smile. ‘That’s why I want you.’
I relax a little. Maybe I am in the right place after all.
‘So,’ he says, as though he is about to share a joke, ‘tell me what you know about Jews.’
Seven-branch candlesticks come to mind as I scramble for something to say.
‘Do you know any Jews?’
I come up with one. ‘I work with a girl named Bella. She’s Jewish, I think.’
I expect disdain but instead receive enthusiasm. ‘Good!’ he says.
I’ve passed another test.
Next comes the first instruction. ‘You will have no preconceptions about what I tell you.’ He pauses, as though searching for words. ‘I don’t want any personal baggage brought to my story.’
I shift uncomfortably. ‘Maybe there is some.’
He leans forward, unsteady. He catches the table with a hand. The table is unsteady and its uneven leg smacks against the floor, causing an echo. The dogs wake up, startled.
I swallow. ‘My mother’s maiden name was Schwartfeger. Her family were German.’
He relaxes. ‘We all come from somewhere,’ he says.
‘Yes, but I’m a Kiwi. My mother’s family have lived in New Zealand for over a hundred years.’
‘Immigrants.’
‘Yes.’
He sits back, relaxed now. ‘How quickly can you write?’ he asks.
I’m thrown off balance. What exactly is he asking here? ‘Well, it depends on what I’m writing.’
‘I need you to work quickly. I don’t have much time.’
Panic. I had deliberately not brought any recording or writing materials with me to this first meeting. I’d been invited to hear and consider writing his life story. For now I just wanted to listen. ‘How much time do you have?’ I ask him.
‘A little while only.’
I’m confused. ‘Do you have to be somewhere soon?’
‘Yes,’ he says, his gaze again returning to the open window. ‘I need to be with Gita.’
•
I never met Gita. It was her death and Lale’s need to join her that pushed him to tell his story. He wanted it to be recorded so, in his words, ‘It would never happen again.’
After that first meeting, I visited Lale two or three times a week. The story took three years to untangle. I had to earn his trust, and it took time before he was willing to embark on the deep self-scrutiny that parts of his story required. We had become friends – no, more than friends; our lives became entwined as he shed the burden of guilt he had carried for over fifty years, the fear that he and Gita might be seen as collaborators of the Nazis. Part of Lale’s burden passed to me as I sat with him at his kitchen table, this dear man with his trembling hands, his quivering voice, his eyes that still moistened sixty years after experiencing these most horrifying events in human history.
He told his story piecemeal, sometimes slowly, sometimes at bullet-pace and without clear connections between the many, many episodes. But it didn’t matter. It was spellbinding to sit with him, and his two dogs, and listen to what to an uninterested ear might have sounded like the ramblings of an old man. Was it the delightful Eastern European accent? The charm of this old rascal? Was it the twisted story I was starting to make sense of? It was all of these and more.
As the teller of Lale’s story, it became important for me to identify how memory and history sometimes waltz in step and sometimes strain to part, to present not a lesson in history, of which there are many, but a unique lesson in humanity. Lale’s memories were, on the whole, remarkably clear and precise. They matched my research into people, dates and places. Was this a comfort? Getting to know a person for whom such terrible facts had been a lived reality made them all the more horrific. There was no parting of memory and history for this beautiful old man – they waltzed perfectly in step.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a story of two ordinary people, living in an extraordinary time, deprived not only of their freedom but their dignity, their names, and their identities, and it is Lale’s account of what they needed to do to survive. Lale lived his life by the motto: ‘If you wake up in the morning, it is a good day.’ On the morning of his funeral I woke knowing it was not a good day for me, but that it would have been for him. He was now with Gita.