Bram Presser: I found out my grandfather's secret history after his death

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 6 years ago

Bram Presser: I found out my grandfather's secret history after his death

Jan Randa left central Europe for Melbourne after World War II. His family thought they knew everything about his life under Nazi rule - until a sinister report emerged.

By Bram Presser

Almost everyone you might care about in this story is dead. Some disappeared up chimneys in plumes of smoke that, it will later be said, frightened away the birds. Some were shot like lame dogs, without so much as a thought, let alone a care. Some starved. Some froze. Some succumbed to disease. Some threw themselves at electric fences in the desperate hope of a quick end. Some died on the battlefield, believing to their last breath in the sacred cause. Some managed to live on, escaping to distant lands where they built new lives while being chased across daybreak by ghosts until death caught up to take the pain away.

Then there were the others, those who went on to live long and prosperous lives, never thinking back to who they once were or what they once did, and who certainly did not deserve the peaceful death that finally claimed them.

Author Bram Presser with his grandfather, Jan Randa, in Melbourne in 1989.

Author Bram Presser with his grandfather, Jan Randa, in Melbourne in 1989.Credit: Courtesy of Bram Presser

But that is all just speculation. Only the scantest of details remain that might offer clues as to when or where most of these people died. Train schedules. Ship manifestos. Names of places where we know some of them must have perished. Auschwitz. Treblinka. Dachau. There are, however, no dates. No graves.

I know little about the fates of the people in this story except this: in the early hours of December 12, 1996, my grandfather, Dr Jan Randa, died at Cabrini Hospital in his adopted hometown of Melbourne. He had survived my grandmother by less than eight weeks.

Jan and Dasa with their children Tom and Eva (the author's mother) in Melbourne, 1950.

Jan and Dasa with their children Tom and Eva (the author's mother) in Melbourne, 1950.Credit: Courtesy of the Presser Family Collection

He was born in 1911 in a village at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe. In the local parish register he is listed as Yaakov, son of Rabbi Aharon and Gusta Rand, the first of many names by which he would come to be known. As a boy, Yaakov was schooled in the rituals of the Jewish faith. He grew out his payes (sidelocks), donned tzitzis (ritual tassels) and would often hide beneath the billowing folds of his father's tallis (cloak), listening to the swirling chorus of prayers and lamentations that tumbled from the old man's lips.

At 19, Yaakov turned his back on his family and fled the village for the Czechoslovakian capital Prague. There, he immediately changed his name to Jakub and was soon accepted to Charles University in the Old City, where he attained a doctorate in law. It was an impressive feat for this country boy. Then, a fortnight after he graduated, the Nazis occupied the country and banned Jews from practising in the legal profession.

His career was over before it had started. And so he was forced into the line of work that would come to save his life: he taught Jewish studies and Hebrew to Jewish children. He taught them in Prague. He taught them in Theresienstadt concentration camp. And he taught them in Auschwitz. It's how he survived.

When the war was over, and he came to Australia, it's what he continued to do. He was a teacher and a survivor. For as long as he was with us, we knew this, or something like it, to be true. We had created this version of his life for ourselves and, when he died, committed it to the kiln of memory.

Advertisement

To doubt is improper. That is the thing with survival: it cannot be challenged. It cannot be subjected to interrogation. We did not seek details of his time in the camps. We did not question the likelihood of a school for children operating in the shadows of the crematoria. Above all, we did not dare contemplate the depths to which he might have sunk in order to survive. Every survivor is a hero. No survivor is merely human.

At his shloshim, the service to mark the 30th day after his death, I recounted a rabbinical tale that I thought best summed up my grandfather: Somewhere in Eastern Europe, in the late 1940s, a young student, fiery and rebellious, confronts his teacher. "Reb Yosef," he says, "you teach us of God and the goodness of our people. But I have lost my faith. Not in God, no. I have lost faith in my fellow man. Gone are the days of the tzaddikim, the righteous men. Everywhere I look there are ordinary, unremarkable people. And beyond them, there are only frauds. I need the guidance of a righteous man. If one cannot be found, then I see no reason to still believe."

"Young Reb Yitzchok," replied the rabbi. "I am afraid you have been looking in the wrong place. To whom did you turn? The man who prayed the loudest in synagogue? The man who stuffed wads of notes into the charity box? Me, your teacher? I am not a tzaddik. None of us is. You want to know where to find the tzaddik, the man of pure, honourable faith? Go into synagogue tomorrow morning and look under the straps of every man'stefillin. If, by chance, you spot a black mark, a tattoo, numbers, then there is your tzaddik. There is your righteous man. For this poor soul has been to hell, has faced death while God turned away, and yet he still believes. This, young Reb Yitzchok, is the only kind of man who can still be called a tzaddik."

"That righteous man," I went on to say, "was my grandfather." I was wrong.

My grandfather's former students approached me in the street to talk, wanting to ask if I had known.

Like many survivors, my grandfather renounced his covenant with God immediately after the war. He had survived. Most of his family had not. He didn't waste time looking for an explanation. He didn't even question how a loving God could have allowed the Holocaust to happen. His was a practical renunciation.

On returning to Prague, he changed his name to Jan Randa – less Jewish, less Germanic – and started work as a legal clerk, supplementing his income by serving as secretary to the city's Chief Rabbi, Gustav Sicher. Jan Randa continued to love the Jewish traditions, the language and, most of all, the literature, but felt he owed nothing to an abstract deity perpetuated to give meaning to things he could not explain.

He had married my grandmother, first in a civil ceremony, then later, when her childhood conversion from Catholicism could be proved, at a synagogue. By the second wedding, she was already pregnant. No sooner had their daughter been born, and Jan Randa's legal practice begun, than she fell pregnant again. A few months after the birth of this baby, a son, he got word that he was wanted for questioning. His political agitation in the fledgling communist state had fallen on "interested" ears. There was talk of labour camps, re-education. Or worse. The young family had to get out before the borders closed.

In his work for Rabbi Sicher, my grandfather corresponded with a man in Melbourne about the certification of kosher Czech pickles. In one letter he floated the idea of setting up home in that distant land and received an enthusiastic response. He was, however, unable to secure exit permits. Seeing no other option, he gathered the family and, under cover of night, paddled across a river into Germany on top of a mattress. From there he purchased four third-class tickets on a ship bound for Australia.

They arrived on October 29, 1949, and, along with several other families, were lodged by the local Jewish welfare agency in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs. Jan, now Jack, found work on the production line of the Ford Motor Company factory. He thought of returning to university so that he could practise law in his new homeland, but he had neither the time nor the money to do so.

The pickle importer told him about Mount Scopus College, a new Jewish school that had opened not far from where he lived. With a heart weighed down by broken dreams, he typed up a résumé that included all his previous teaching experience and walked to the school. He was employed on the spot. From that day on, he was known as Dr Randa, Australia's foremost expert on Hebrew grammar. Or, as some liked to call him, the Dikduk Doc.

My grandparents kept a traditional Jewish home, although it was by no means religious. For them, the Passover Seder was a story of human triumph. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was a time to reflect on the wrongs they had done to others. Every other holiday was just an other excuse for family and friends to gather and sing and feast. Jan Randa had no need for God. But that changed in 1976, when I was born.

I was a sickly child from the outset: prone to infections, pallid, lethargic. The diagnosis was over a year in coming: Patent Ductus Arteriosus. Ventricular Septal Defect. "A very slim chance of survival." My mother repeated the doctor's words. "His heart?" my grandfather said. "Yes."

"I'm sorry." My grandfather mashed his fist into his palm and lowered his head. He ran to his study, closed the door and refused to come out. My parents were stunned. My grandmother went to the study door and knocked. He did not answer. She knocked again, then banged with her fists. Still nothing. From inside, she could hear the clacking of his typewriter and the turbulent strains of Smetana's Má Vlast.

He did not emerge until the next morning. While she was still sleeping, he left the house and went to the synagogue. He had, it seems, resolved to make a deal. He gazed skywards. "God of my childhood. God of my father. You challenged me and lost. Now I challenge you. Prove you exist," he implored. "Save the boy!" If his survival had severed the tie between them, mine would fuse it back together.

After the operation, the surgeon made his way to the waiting room. My mother was asleep, clutching my father's arm. He nudged her awake. The surgeon smiled. Good news. The following morning, August 7, 1978, as rain tapped out a redemptive back beat on the roof, Jan Randa locked himself in his study and, for the first time since the war, prayed shacharit Jewish morning prayer.

My grandfather cheated death so many times that, until the last clump of dirt was tossed over his grave, I genuinely believed he was the Messiah. He survived Auschwitz. He survived the Czech secret police. He survived an industrial accident, prostate cancer and a botched heart bypass. In the end, my grandfather died because he chose to die. As long as my grandmother was alive he had something to live for, but once she was gone he simply gave up. She had always been his insurance policy against further tragedy after he had watched almost everyone he loved get wiped out in the Holocaust.

A vivacious young woman, Daša – my grandmother – must have represented everything he could have hoped for in his future. She had come through the camps but was still young enough to build a life away from them. Her Aryan looks, a life-saving gift from her mother, would protect him and his children from further tides of prejudice. I am told that he was certain from the beginning that she was the girl for him. Daša, on the other hand, took some convincing. When she was in hospital towards the end of her life, I sat down and asked why she chose him.

"He was not a wolf," she said. "And I saw the way he treated his mother. Any man who treats his mother like that… I could see he will make a good husband."

They married in 1947 when Daša was 21 and Jan was 35. He saw those 14 years as a guarantee that he would die before her. For many years, things went according to his plan. He was always sick, often in hospital. She, on the other hand, stayed healthy while smoking two packets of cigarettes a day.

The author's grandfather, Jan Randa, and grandmother, Dasa Roubickova, during their wedding ceremony in Prague's Altneu Synagogue in 1947.

The author's grandfather, Jan Randa, and grandmother, Dasa Roubickova, during their wedding ceremony in Prague's Altneu Synagogue in 1947.Credit: Courtesy of the Presser Family Collection

In her 68th year, 1996, she went to the doctor complaining of stomach pains. She was diagnosed with stomach ulcers and told to stick to a bland diet. The pain continued. By the time they opened her up to have a look, it was too late. They removed the cancer, and her stomach for good measure, which bought her six months.

September 22, 1996. The eve of Yom Kippur. While my brother and I raced to get to the hospital to be with her in her final moments, my father was trying to get Jan to come. He refused. He must have known he was about to witness one last tragedy. She was already dead when he was wheeled in. He began talking to her, clutching her still-warm hand. When she didn't answer, he looked up at us. "Is she gone?" he whispered.

My mother nodded and put her arm around his shoulder. "Baruch dayan ha'emet," he said. Blessed is the true judge. And with that Jan Randa sank into his wheelchair, into himself, and resolved to die.

It wasn't much at first, a light cough. Then we got a call from a nurse at his aged-care home that he had been admitted to hospital. He could barely breathe and had been refusing to eat for days. His stubborn march towards the grave lasted less than a week

I kept only one thing of his, a 1953 Penguin edition of The Trial, by Franz Kafka. He had left it face down beside his typewriter. I often hold it and think of him.

For nearly 10 years our collective memory of who he once had been rested undisturbed. He was the kindly, learned man we loved and revered. A man of worth, a teacher of generations. Photos found their way into frames on our dressers and walls. In our old family home, he was a greater presence in death than he had been in life. When we visited his grave we found comfort in the ever-growing pile of stones that his former students had left as marks of respect.

Then he appeared again, except it wasn't him. Resurrected in 2005, in black ink on the pages of the Australian Jewish News, this man with my grandfather's face, my grandfather's name, had a different story.

DR JACOB RANDA AND THE BOOKS OF THE EXTINCT RACE

It was called Hitler's Gift To The Jews. Theresienstadt, a concentration camp like no other, a self-governing Jewish town, only one hour's train ride from Prague. Behind its fortress walls was gathered the entire Jewish population of Czechoslovakia, struggling to survive in terrible conditions until they were sent on a train to their deaths in the East. Many stories have been written about this unique town but one has remained untold until today.

Born in Brno and raised in Prague, Dr Jacob Randa came of age just as the Nazis conquered his homeland. Forced to wear a yellow star, excluded from normal life, he was rendered an exile in his own city. In late 1942, he received his summons and, along with his mother and brother, was transported to Theresienstadt.

Soon after Dr Randa arrived in the camp, he found his name on a list of one hundred scholars, rabbis and academics summoned to the camp's German headquarters for special questioning. They were called one by one to a cramped office in the back of the building where a German officer, wearing a crisp uniform and a monocle, sat at a desk. He was an SS Obersturmführer – and explained that he had been a professor of Jewish studies in a German university before the war. He then asked Dr Randa to look over a pile of Jewish books and explain their significance. Dr Randa did so, noting all the while that the books were stamped with the names of libraries across the Occupied lands: Amsterdam, Warsaw, Budapest, Vienna.

The following day, the Jews who had been interviewed were divided into two groups and loaded into trucks. The first truck disappeared into the Czech countryside, while the other truck, carrying Dr Randa and about 40 others, headed in the direction of Prague. Only when they stopped did Dr Randa realise where he had been taken: the grand, gothic entrance to the Prague Museum. The scholars were unloaded and made to wait in a large hall from where, once again, they were summoned one by one into an adjoining room. Stepping inside, Dr Randa saw the same SS Obersturmführer waiting for him, a large collection of books spread out on his desk. "Sort these into groups however you feel is appropriate," the officer commanded him.

When Dr Randa had finished, the SS Obersturmführer nodded with approval. "Very good. You will remain here and be issued with special privileges. You will be joined soon by three others and your work will begin."

Dr Randa was shown to a cold room in the basement of the museum in which two bunk beds had been erected. The next morning he awoke to find three others in the room: Dr Eppstein was an antiques dealer, Dr Muneles, a museum curator, was an expert in Jewish calligraphy and illuminated manuscripts, and Dr Murmelstein, a former rabbi from Vienna, was a celebrated authority on Jewish ritual artefacts. They were the only men who remained of the 100 who had first been summoned. They had been selected, by order of the Führer himself, to put together a special catalogue of Jewish life and culture that would be turned into a grand display when the war was over. It would be called The Museum of the Extinct Race.

Each morning for the next two years, the men were separated, taken to a room filled with their respective type of artefacts, and forced to sort through the Nazi plunder. They met at night to discuss their progress. For the most part it was dull, laborious work but occasionally they would come across a book, a curio, a Torah scroll of immense beauty, a true treasure. They would describe it to one another with the wide-eyed wonder of cultural archaeologists. Eppstein even found his father-in-law's Chanukah candelabra.

One after the other, Dr Randa's colleagues disappeared – first Eppstein, then Muneles, then Murmelstein – until only he was left in the museum. By then the building had become as much a prison as Theresienstadt. He had never even had the opportunity to look out the window and see the streets of his beloved Prague. His solitude didn't last long. The work was deemed complete and he was deported to Auschwitz.

A building at Theresienstadt concentration camp, which held Czechoslovakia's Jews - including the author's grandfather, during World War II.

A building at Theresienstadt concentration camp, which held Czechoslovakia's Jews - including the author's grandfather, during World War II.Credit: Courtesy of Bram Presser

There is no documentary evidence, it is all hearsay. And yet the Museum of the Extinct Race has become the central pillar of the collective Czech memory. Hitler planned a museum to commemorate his greatest achievement: the total annihilation of European Jewry. It is what sets the Czech wartime experience apart from all the others – a ghoulish spectre from an alternative past, haunting the Jewish imagination. Just as this Dr Jacob Randa, who might have been my grandfather, now haunts mine.

His former students approached me in the street, wanting to talk, wanting to ask if I had known.

I was forced to wear the story like an old coat, all the while digging through its pockets for clues, anything that might have given me cause to doubt.

There is one clue, from when I was 10 years old, that I return to again and again. The garden bed lay at the far end of my grandmother's backyard orchard, behind the fig tree. Like all the other beds, it was framed with dry wooden planks, but the dirt inside was unturned, untended.

At first I just heard him. A soft, melodious humming. I was old enough to know that the tune had its roots in another country, another world. I sneaked past the fig tree and there he was, sitting in that lonely garden bed, his back to me, legs crossed. He was running his finger through the soil as if to plough it, but in a circular motion. There sat a man, always so impeccably clean, often to the point of vanity, now in scruffy clothes, covered in dirt. This was not the grandfather I knew.

His humming grew louder. It rose to a crescendo, but then descended to the doleful tone I had first heard. He rubbed out the tracks his fingers had made and fell silent. I ducked behind one of the trees, but I needn't have bothered. He didn't look up, simply resumed his singing. I recognised some of the words from the beginning of every Jewish prayer, blessing God, king of the world.

Without warning, he thrust his hand into the ground, pulled out a clump of dirt and, holding it to the sky, cried out. As I stumbled backwards, my grandfather spun around and looked at me, tears streaming down his face. I will never forget that look of fear and sadness. As if I'd just tripped over his soul.

How many lives does the Lord bestow upon one man?

If I had only known Jakub Rand, who found his calling in Prague's grand academic halls, only to have his dreams snuffed out by the malevolent course of history, it would have been enough.

If I had only known Dr Jacob Randa, handpicked by a monocle-wearing Nazi professor to curate an exhibition on the liturgical texts of an extinct race, it would have been enough. If I had only known that nameless, faceless man sitting in a five-by-five plot of dirt, humming and thrusting his fist to the sky, it would have been enough.

I knew them all and yet I didn't know my grandfather at all.

Edited extract from The Book of Dirt: A Novel by Bram Presser (Text Publishing, $33); to be released on August 28.

Most Viewed in Lifestyle

Loading