Writer re tells father's story, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust.
In a way, Diana Wichtel says, she's been looking for her father most of her life but until recently hadn't considered writing about her search forthe man who was a rarity -a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust.
Before World WarII, Warsaw's population was about 30 per cent Jewish (more than 350,000 people), the largest Jewish community in Europe, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
But in 1940 German authorities forced more than 400,000 Jews into the closely guarded Warsaw ghetto, an area of 3.4 square kilometres, bounded by a wall more than 3m high topped with barbed wire.
The museum estimates that 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians died during the war, as well as at least 3 million Polish Jews.
And Ben Wichtel was meant to be among those appalling statistics.
The 29-year-old and his family - widowed mother, five siblings, their spouses and children - were on a train headed to Treblinka, a Nazi death camp. Made thin by life in the ghetto, Ben wriggled out a barred window and threw himself from the train, expecting to be shot as he lay in the snow. No shot came and he and another man from the train ran into the forest.
In her newly published book Driving to Treblinka Ben's daughter Diana Wichtel writes: "My father had nightmares.
My mother said he would run in his sleep. We knew he had spent a lot of time hiding in a box under the ground. No one told us about the gas chambers, the crematoria, the horrors ... "
Ben Wichtel emigrated to Canada in 1947 - his brother and an aunt had moved to the US before the war - establishing a clothing business in Vancouver.
"He certainly had survivor's guilt," Wichtel says of her father. "And today I have no doubt that he'd be diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. They were a big family and only three were left after the war.
"In Canada he tried to catch up, quickly starting a business, quickly getting married, quickly having children. But when things started to go wrong he had no resilience left, he'd used it all up during the war."
To me my father's story is an unremitting tragedy but to my children he was a man who jumped off a train and beat the odds.
The long-time Listener columnist and feature writer was 13 when in 1964 her Kiwi mother brought her three children to New Zealand, leaving her husband in Canada "to follow". The family never saw Ben Wichtel again and he died alone in an institution in 1971.
She has experienced her own guilt about her father's lonely death. "Our life in New Zealand hadn't been particularly easy and he became ill and out of reach but that doesn't stop me wondering if there was anything more I could have done."
Stepping on to Polish soil for the first time in 2010 felt, Wichtel says, like stepping on to a graveyard.
"There was a resurgence of Jewishness in the country - but no Jews. We went to a restaurant in a building where several Jewish families had run businesses. There were photos and it was all very nostalgic but there was no mention of what happened to those people."
Her most recent visit in 2015 was less alienating. "There's still anti-Semitism there but many Poles also saved Jews so it's very complicated. People say it's all in the past but these histories don't go away."
She hopes that as more of the world goes online she may yet discover new information about her father and more members of the extended Wichtel family. She has recently made contact with a branch in Mexico, descendants of Dora Jonisz, a cousin of Ben Wichtel's who escaped the ghetto after her mother bribed guards.
Dora used papers belonging to her Catholic school friend's dead sister and was the only one of her immediate family to survive.
Regularly meeting up with other children of Holocaust survivors through the Second Generation Group in Auckland has for the first time, Wichtel says, offered a sense of recognition and affinity.
"And writing this book has made me see very clearly that although my sister, brother and I grew up in the same family we all had very different experiences and took on the same story in different ways. It's made me understand that a lot of what we think we know is not the whole truth."
She has always been open about her father's story with her own children, not wanting to repeat the silences that she grew up with.
"My kids have always been interested and always known the story. My daughter has been to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw and wept for the family there.
"To me my father's story is an unremitting tragedy but to my children he was a man who jumped off a train and beat the odds."
event
Diana Wichtel appears at Tauranga Arts Festival on Saturday, October 21 in Lives on the Line with Phil Jarratt. Tickets from Ticketek or Baycourt Theatre (Tauranga). See more at taurangafestival.co.nz