Into the Light

Even in the most comfortable suburban homes you can feel it - a kind of heaviness. It hangs over hushed rooms of Persian carpets and photographs of cherished children and grandchildren. It permeates antique bookshelves overflowing with titles such as Elie Wiesel's The Forgotten. It suffuses lives that are now rich with love and reward.

Auschwitz survivor Judy Adamec lives in one such home, a home weighed down by history. The air is even heavier here after the recent death of Fredy, her loving husband of 59 years. The couple met in Slovakia only a few months after the war - both grieving for parents and siblings wiped out by Hitler.

"We were more dead than alive, surprised we were still living," Judy says. "We didn't know what to do with ourselves - we had get-togethers, the older boys drank. Everything seemed useless."

About 18 months later their son Peter was born. "Fredy was desperate to replace our families."

They migrated to Australia and worked hard. They were difficult years. "But sometimes," Judy recalls, "we'd just be coming home at night after seeing friends and Fredy would say: ‘How can we do this? How can we go out and enjoy ourselves? Why are we the ones who survived?' "

She is silent for a moment, then says: "When I look back now at how we just picked ourselves up, after everyone we lost, everything we went through - I just think it's horrible."

Her words, coloured by grief, come as a question not a judgement. Far from being "horrible", the urgent hunger with which Holocaust survivors embraced life after liberation is an inspiring testament to human resilience.

And yet 60 years after Allied forces liberated the Auschwitz death camp, opening the gates of hell, the speed and success with which so many survivors rebuilt their lives is almost as hard to fathom as everything else.

"It's extraordinary, I mean this was a calamity created by humanity, not a freak of nature like the tsunamis," says Melbourne University historian Mark Baker. "It would have been easy (for survivors) to turn their backs on humanity. But instead, in displaced persons camps the first thing they did was got married and had children, which means, symbolically, the focus was not on acts of revenge but on the biblical ethic of ‘choose life'.

"Yes, many suicided, but why didn't more of them suicide or create a cult of death? If you ask the survivors what was their greatest achievement they'd say their families."

Many Auschwitz survivors credit this longing for a family as the spiritual food that sustained them through the darkness.

When Arnold Erlanger was interned at the Westerbork transit camp in Holland, en route to Auschwitz, he watched the Nazis selecting people for the transports, including parentless children. He thought to himself: "If I ever survive this war, I'll adopt parentless children like them."

Erlanger did survive, but the children were sent to the gas chambers on arrival at Auschwitz. When he returned to Holland after the war, he met Zet, a Jewish widow with two young children whose husband had perished in Mauthausen concentration camp. They married, had another child of their own and left Europe for Australia where he worked as a welder and later a salesman.

"I raised those children like I was their own father," Erlanger says. "I felt like I got my wish to adopt child survivors after all - it was one of those miracles."

He aptly titled his autobiography, Choose Life. The same light shines through in the titles of other survivor testimonies: George Ginzburg's A Will to Live, Emil Braun's Into The Light, Maria Lewitt's Come Spring, Chava Rosenfarb's The Tree of Life.

In their books, they all reflect on their journey back from the abyss. It is a journey Nathan Werdiger knows well. He greets me with a nervous smile: although he has appeared on BRW's top 200 rich list with an estimated fortune of $360 million, it is his first newspaper interview.

We sit in his study where exquisitely illustrated, 150-year old Jewish marriage certificates adorn the walls. He never used to talk about the past, he explains, but three years ago his children urged him to open up before it was too late. So he took the family to Poland and showed them the town of Sosnowiec where he once lived and the concentration camps where he once lost the will to live.

Werdiger was 16 when his family was transported to Auschwitz. Of six children, only he and a brother, now living in the United States, survived Dr Mengele's selection. The extended clan was also wiped out.

"A very large family, my father had lots of brothers, lots of cousins, they all perished - the usual thing," he hurries, flicking his wrist. He won't say any more about Auschwitz.

The two boys were then taken to a labour camp where they built a petrochemical plant for I. G. Farben-Industrie - the company that fuelled Hitler’s war machine.

On the morning of January 15, 1945, they were ordered to assemble with their blanket, plate and spoon. The prisoners lay with their ears literally to the ground, straining for vibrations that could signal tank movements.

"The feeling was the Russians were closing in. But from hour to hour you were never sure what will happen to you."

Then they were each handed bricklike loaves of bread and told to march.

Werdiger speeds up again, sometimes appearing breathless. His account is sparse, but now and then an image catches in the frantic searchlights of memory. Like the prison orchestra bleating out German marching songs as they filed out the camp's gates that morning. He hums the tune briefly.

For two-and-a-half weeks they marched in the snow with only flimsy blankets to cover them, locked up in farmers' barns at night. "But after a few days, people started to fall like flies." They arrived at Gross-Rosen, "a shocking camp," although it was here that Werdiger met an acquaintance who gave him food he had stolen from the kitchen.

They were later transported to Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp in open railway trucks. "This was a journey where we were bombed all along, by the Americans, the British, the Germans. The SS hid under the trains."

By the time the camp was liberated a few weeks later, Werdiger, stricken with pneumonia, had exhausted his reserves, physical and spiritual. They put his near-lifeless body on a stretcher and paraded it before General Eisenhower, who had come to inspect.

"I was a muzelman, a man willing to give up," he says, flicking his wrist again. "When you become a muzelman this is it - the end!"

So how does a muzelman take back the fight? How did the skeletons rise from the ashes and decide to give humanity another chance?

Some succeeded, some stood up but were too weary to move. But others were just too shattered to start afresh. Like the lonely, middle-aged men who rubbed shoulders with artists Albert Tucker and John Howley at Acland Street's Cafe Scheherazade.

They came to the iconic restaurant, founded in 1958 by survivors Avram and Masha Zeleznikow, for delicacies such as cholent or gefilte fish - food that evoked bitter-sweet memories of their mother's cooking, of families and homes obliterated by the Holocaust. They came after a tough day's work at the Holden factory or the knitting mills. A few were even doctors.

But, says Masha: "They were broken people to the end …"

"They couldn't find a new family," Avram interrupts.

"Till the end," Masha says.

But you can find a new family, build a new life and still be broken. In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy such as the Holocaust, it was almost as if people felt they weren't entitled to their own, personal grief. But deferred grief, like buried trauma, tends to demand its rightful place eventually.

This is what Alice Halasz discovered the first time she had to leave her husband after dementia forced him into a nursing home. Suddenly, a memory surfaced.

After Dr Mengele's selection at Auschwitz, Alice and her aunt were sent to the right - to live - while her mother and little sister Zsuzsi were sent to the left to be gassed. As the four of them parted, Alice's mother begged of her aunt: "Please, look after my little girl."

Tears fall as she tells of this now. In 1944, she was just 17, and her family had been deported to Auschwitz from Budapest. Those who died on the journey were thrown from the cattle train. Tears too as she remembers how her aunt weakened in the camp.

"I was always giving her my bread ration, I always gave it to her because I wanted to help her - but I couldn't!"

There was also the Polish girl who lay next to her in a sick bay attached to a munitions factory near the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

"She was nearly the same age as me and I always gave her food too, but she died," Alice chokes. She collects herself and says: "But I always had a feeling that I'd pull through everything - I never had a feeling I was next."

In Budapest after the war, she found out her father had survived when she bumped into him on the street: "I think you can imagine," she sobs, "that this was the nicest time in my life."

Alice's son, George, a psychiatrist who treats children of survivors, began urging his parents to talk of the past after his father's memory started to wane. He listens grimly now. For years he would go into "an internal frenzy" before getting on a train and never understood why.

For most survivors, repairing the body came first, the spirit could wait. The Red Cross took Werdiger, the muzelman, to Switzerland where he spent four years in a sanatorium, letting the alpine air and the penicillin work their magic. The day one of the staff gave him a watch something finally thawed.

"It was the first time I'd seen normal people," he explains. "And I started crying - I just couldn't cope with it and they couldn't cope with me."

He wanted to join his brother in America, but his health stopped him from obtaining a visa. Australia was more accepting. He only wanted to stay a few years but marriage and a successful fabrics business intervened.

"I wanted to succeed to really show that I'm a human," he says, grasping at the air with his fingers, rising slightly from his armchair. "I had a lot of complexes that I needed to overcome. I didn't even speak English; I was an orphan, short, uneducated. I felt that if I didn't overcome these complexes I'd never get anywhere in the world.

"Not only did I overcome them but I became a very confident person."

He is triumphant now, no longer breathless. "I didn't even have time to go to night school, I just had to get my hand on a few dollars. My kids, as they were growing up didn't even know I was a survivor - I never talked about it."

He pauses, fidgets. "You know, I've analysed myself and I think there's probably two Nathan Werdigers, or else I couldn't cope. I can put things into a box very quickly and move on."

His brother, on the other hand, still lives in the camps. A longer pause now, his face softens. "You know when I see Jewish friends going through the traditional 30 days of mourning (for their parents) I'm always jealous. I never got a chance to mourn my parents - and they would have been so proud of me with my success, with my beautiful children, and I really feel angry about it."

But he doesn't look angry at this moment - sad, yes, but not angry. .

Into the Light: The Age interviews Holocaust Survivors