The power of love

HOLOCAUST survivors Cesia and Abe Goldberg share insights into their inspiring 63-year love story in this extract from Jewish author SUZY ZAIL’S new book, Smitten, which profiles 12 different Australian couples.

Abe Goldberg shuffles into his lounge room clutching a silver box to his chest. Setting the metal case on a glass table, the silver-haired 83-year-old flips open the lid and pulls out a sheet of gold paper.

“It’s from the Queen, congratulating Cesia and I on our 60th wedding anniversary,” he smiles, laugh lines fissuring the pale skin around his eyes. He pulls out another. “This one’s from the Governor-General!”

He spills the contents of the chest onto the table and runs a spidery hand over the faded family photos, bundled birthday cards and newspaper clippings. Cesia and Abe Goldberg’s second-storey apartment is cluttered with fragments of their past: the walls are papered with framed photos of their children and the mahogany wall unit is crammed with travel mementos, graduation photos and their grandchildren’s artwork.

“You know, we started with nothing,” Cesia says as she enters the room. At 79, she is striking, despite the spots on her hands and her skin not fitting as snugly as it used to.

“Everything you see is everything we got —¬† nothing else — and we built it together,” Cesia says in her thick Polish accent. She sits beside her husband of 62 years, takes his hand in hers, and rests her head on his shoulder. “All we had when we came to Australia was each other.”

Neither had a home. Both had lost their parents. Cesia had lost her mother and father in August 1944. She was 14. Abe’s mother died the same month. His father had perished in 1942. Both knew their parents had been taken from them to die among a shivering herd of concentration camp inmates forced to stand naked in a shower block until the taps were turned on and the gas came out.

Abe Goldberg had grown up in Lodz, Poland, three blocks from Cesia Amatensztajn. She was four years his junior, a shy, quiet girl. He was an athlete, small but strong, with a fierce sense of social justice that, in anti-Semitic prewar Poland, often landed him with a black eye. The two never met as children, not even when their families were forced to leave their homes for the Lodz ghetto, where they lived streets apart, sporting the same Jewish Star of David; both hungry, both scared.

They saw death for the first time in the ghetto. He saw children thrown from second-floor hospital windows. She saw guards shoot grandmothers. Having only known love, hatred came as a shock to them.

One by one, their friends disappeared. Cesia and her family were loaded onto a cattle train and taken to Auschwitz concentration camp on August 23, 1944. Abe and his mother arrived at the death camp six days later. Both teenagers were separated from their parents and made orphans the day of their arrival.

They survived on stale bread and dreamt of potatoes. Nine months later the Allies bombed Berlin and Cesia and Abe were free.

They met in Belgium at a social club. Cesia was 16 and Abe 21. Both were anxious to make up for lost time. “Abe was playing table tennis when I walked in,” Cesia says, patting her husband’s hand. “He was so handsome: curly blonde hair, green eyes, a nice looking boy.”

“To tell you the truth, I only glanced at her,” Abe deadpans. “I was in the middle of a game.”

He liked her smiling eyes. She admired his intelligence. It was two months before he dared hold her hand; another month before they kissed. Cesia leans forward, cups a hand around her painted lips and whispers, “To kiss a boy was not something a nice girl did in those days ‚Ķ but I did want to kiss him. And when he kissed me, I liked it.”

They married in 1947, as soon as Cesia turned eighteen, and arrived in Melbourne in 1951, with 10 pounds in their pocket. Cesia looks around her plush living room, at the lace curtains, faux-glass chandeliers and zebra-print dining chairs, and smiles. “When we started our married life I wanted to kiss every little thing we bought: the towels, the knives, the forks. We didn’t have much, but we had each other,” she says, planting a kiss on her husband’s forehead.

Cesia got work as a dressmaker; Abe ironed clothes for a living. They rose at dawn, worked a 12-hour day, and spent their evenings out with friends. “We wanted to soak everything up. We went out till two in the morning, to the theatre, concerts, and dances — nothing was enough for us.”

They wanted to be happy. “Hate destroys people,” Abe says, “and if I had come to the marriage bitter and vengeful, that hate would have spilled over and destroyed the people I love. Sure, we had seen terrible things, we’d lost our homes, our friends and our families, but the thing the Nazis hadn’t been able to take from us was our ability to love. Love had helped us survive and we knew without this love, life would be empty.”

Their first child, Charlie, was born in 1952; their second, Helen, was born seven years later. It was 10 years before they could afford to buy their first car. They bought a delicatessen business and sold enough chopped liver and coleslaw to buy their first home. They worked together for 34 years. “It was eight days a week,” Cesia says. “By the time Abe was 60, it was enough for him. I didn’t want to sell the business and retire, but sometimes in marriage you just have to give in. Abe is a stronger personality than me. He is the head of the family ‚Ķ but I am the neck. And the head can’t move without the neck.” Abe is nodding. “We are a team, and you have to know when to let go and when to move away. Cesia has her space to do her thing and I do mine.”

Cesia spends her days at the Jewish Cultural Centre and Library, making lunches and organising special events for senior citizens. Abe spends his week at the Jewish Holocaust Museum, in keeping with a promise he made to his mother before her death: to survive, and when he does, to tell people what happened.

“He’s a good man,” Cesia says, looking up into her husband’s green eyes, “and a good husband. He makes breakfast for me, helps with the shopping. He even takes me to a hotel sometimes ‚Ķ”

“What?”

Abe laughs, “Just because we’re in our 80s, you think we don’t ‚Ķ”

Cesia giggles. “Age is no barrier,” Abe confides. “I’m still attracted to Cesia. We still love each other’s bodies, even if our bodies have changed. When I look at Cesia I see the girl I fell in love with 63 years ago. I see the person I went through life with. I don’t see wrinkles; I see a beautiful woman.”

“We are lucky to still be together. That is the most important thing,” Cesia says, her voice fading to a whisper. “I worry about the future. Once Abe didn’t come home on time, and oh my God, I worried something might happen to him. I want to go first. Imagine going into an empty house every night. It must be terrible,” she says.

Abe doesn’t worry about the future. He is too busy enjoying life, and planning how he will surprise his wife for their next anniversary.

The couple celebrated their 60th-wedding anniversary in the bridal suite of the Crown Towers Hotel. Abe hopes to return to the bridal suite with his wife for their 70th-wedding anniversary.

“We are doing our good things together, our naughty things together, and most important, we enjoy life,” Abe says, pulling his wife close. “We haven’t stopped loving each other, and I don’t think we ever will. It’s till death do us part.”