“Doreen”
I have no one left to talk to anymore, only my wife Doreen, Doreen who I visit every Sunday down at the Meadow Bank Park Cemetery. My dear and so desperately missed Doreen, my faithful lover and friend to a man for an entire lifetime. Doreen Janet Wilkinson 1944 – 2004. Doreen who honoured me so much, just as my mother Evelina felt honoured to have known my father. Doreen who married me in 1963.
There are four of us in the family plot, the plot my mum Evelina bought back in 1956 for the return of my dad’s body that year. It’s a beautiful spot, this small piece of Earth, the 8 foot by 4 foot rectangle we own. It’s the only piece of land the family ever bought in fact, well the British side of the family that is. Dad was the first in and then followed by Mum in the spring of 1973, the year when she too went in. Born in 1920, she died in the April of ’73 at just fifty three years of age. I’m amazed she lived that long.
Mum had a terrible drink problem. It was controlled and she managed to work, but every night at 7 pm she would open her bottle. Always whiskey, she loved Irish whiskey. She was never completely drunk or even in fact any trouble at all. She just drank heavily, drinking to ease her pain and grief until she too eventually died suddenly. A massive heart attack it was, gone in an instant, her glass fell to her lap and the whiskey poured over Dad’s old war-time love letters that she’d been reading all alone that evening. Those letters, Dad’s very private letters, all posted from the front in Italy. They still smell of the whiskey today. I keep them very safe.
There is no cure for a broken heart and she died of loneliness for certain. She never remarried or even dated again after Dad. She was a fabulous looking woman my mum. Everybody tried to romance Evelina over the years but she was never interested in men at all after the war. She would say to me, “Son, when I see how much you and Doreen are in love, well that’s all I need. Your dad and I loved as you two do now, how can you ever expect me to become accustomed to the loss of such happiness? No son, I will be with your father again soon one day and that’s all that I want now.” My mother, Evelina Wilkinson died of a broken heart for sure. She never recovered from the loss of her husband.
Then Doreen, my wife, joined them both in that cemetery plot in 2004. All there together now, all three sleeping together in this little plot of earth below the old willow tree down at Meadow Bank Park Cemetery, the top left hand corner of it. Doreen had been so ill for so many years. I’m not happy she died, of course not, but I am relieved for her. Cancer is an awful thing. It comes at you from nowhere; it gives you no warnings of its pending arrival until it is so often just too late. Just like the German fighter pilots my dad would shoot down I suppose.
Doreen suffered with cancer for over three years until eventually she told the doctors she could take no more. No more surgery, no more treatment, and no more hospitals. It all started with a lump under her armpit, a lump that grew hard and painful. Surgery removed the first lump and all was good for a while until then, well, the removal of her left breast by mastectomy. She had a further seven operations in total until the final removal of her right breast two and a half years later. That was it. She would take no more invasive surgery. My Doreen had had enough, the tiredness and the sickness and all that pain. Doreen gave up her battle and let nature take its course. There was no more will left to fight anymore.
Doreen died peacefully at home as she wished. She had been in Banklands Hospice for several weeks and by negotiation with the palliative care team, she was allowed to return home for her end. Those last thirteen days back on the Drover Estate with me in our flat and with the camper van parked down below. She wanted so desperately to go away in that van for a few days but she could not walk the distance. Just getting out of bed became quite impossible for her. To see such a beautiful woman, such a strong-minded and determined character become so weak and frail was heart breaking to watch. The nurses would come three times a day to bathe and clean her. I wanted to do all her personal care for her but she wouldn’t have it. “No way!” she would say. “I want you to remember me for who you married, not this thing I have now become.”
Her second wish was, “In the end Brian, when the end comes, take me out in Winjin’ Pom for a last drive with you. Promise me you will do this for me, promise me this, won’t you Brian?”
And just as my dad, Brian ‘Bull’s-Eye’ Wilkinson had seemed to stop Liverpool from moving that day back in 1956, so too did Doreen. I think everybody who owned a vintage camper van from all over the world came to Liverpool that day for her, the club we were in together having organised a farewell procession. Oh Doreen, how I wish you could have seen it. Winjin’ Pom all covered over in flowers, tulips actually, her favourite flower, and Doreen there inside taking her last ride with me, there in the back for one last time.
We never had any children as I said earlier. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to; it’s just that it didn’t happen. “If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be,” she would say. It just never happened, the kids, we had each other and it was never a concern really. Honestly, it was never a real concern for either of us. It was just the way it was.
We were a very mixed family. Doreen was Roman Catholic, Dad was Church of England and Mum, Evelina, was of Polish-Jewish origin. I was Baptised Church of England, not for any specific reason of faith but I think it was just because that was what my dad was. Religion was never strict for any us. We had faith, but this faith was more a sense of self-spirituality. Doreen and I would later start attending Quaker meetings together, the religious Society of Friends down on Rawden Avenue. We would sit in silence for one hour and just think about what God, if God was ever up there at all, well what he would want of us.
Doreen was more active within the Society of Friends than I was. She would read and discuss things with the Friends present. She was always so inspired to say something beautiful, something poetic that would bring a sense of warmth and love into the room. Always involving herself with every activity, the peace campaigns and the jumble sales, the car boot sales, everything that went on. Doreen would write for many hours; letters to prisoners on death row in American, just writing words of love and forgiveness to them. Letters to prisoners of conscience in Latin America too, writing to them to let them know that the world had not forgotten their plight and freedom struggles, and that she was still watching over them.
I never became a Quaker. If you’ve ever met a Quaker, a true Quaker that is, well you are fortunate indeed. They are beautiful people, so committed to justice and peace. They are all pacifists. That was the problem for me, the pacifism. I wanted so much to believe in this but after Dad I just couldn’t. Dad had gone to war to fight and that meant he had to kill people, people who if he didn’t kill them would certainly and without fail kill him. I know that should the same situation occur now, that I too would go to war. I would be prepared to kill others if it meant that some other neo-dark fascist evil could be stopped.
We were a strange mix; Doreen the peace campaigner and me, the amateur military historian. I must have bored her so much talking about military history. Her, always so patient with me, smiling and saying, “Really dear, I didn’t know that.” The Military Channel on the TV was on almost on a daily basis, always that is, until the soaps came on in the evening. That’s when Doreen took control of the remote. It was a brave man indeed who would dare to stand between Doreen and Coronation Street. I hated it myself, but I did enjoy EastEnders with her. All day, tanks and war and planes and technology, and she would just sit there, tucked up in her favourite red fleece blanket, doing her favourite thing, embroidery.
Sparky, always curled up on her lap. The mutt, the homeless stray that we had taken on in the winter of 2001. God that dog was ugly. How she ever saw anything beautiful in it was completely beyond me. We found him down at the communal bins, in a dreadful state he was. His long hair all matted and coated with filth. You could only see one eye, such was that matted hair. He was a long haired dog, a real Heinz 57 but probably more miniature poodle than anything else. I
just couldn’t do anything with him. Every time I tried to trim his coat he’d try to bite me, such was his gratitude, the little bugger! Eventually we had to take him to the vets who gave him a jab to calm him down, and whilst he slept, off came all that old matted hair.
He was pink for weeks, a dog with no hair and pink and with the biggest ears you’ve ever seen in your life. He looked just like a gremlin! The hair soon grew back and he settled in at home with us. Living in the flat had never really been suitable for keeping of a dog but he was an abandoned one and therefore a special case I guess. He was so old anyway that he never really wanted to go out for walks. All he ever did was sit on Doreen’s lap as she did her embroidery. His breath was awful. I don’t know how she could stand it. ‘Sparky’ she named him, Sparky because he was so volatile and bad tempered with us.
They’re all together now. As I said there are four in that plot, three people and now including one homeless mutt. I suppose that when my time comes to go in there with them all, they’ll have to move him out of the way first. I put him in there when no one was watching; you’re not allowed to bury dogs in cemeteries. A policeman like me doing something illegal like that, who’d have believed it of me?
We had a modest wedding back in 1963, Doreen and I, at St Catherine’s Church. Close friends, workmates and family only. I was a security guard then and we didn’t have any spare money to speak of. I was only eighteen and she was just a year older than me. I worked for Macintosh down on the Dock-side. I only did the job for a few years until I joined the force when I was twenty one. Doreen worked in town, a clerk for a local bank.
Just as Mum and Dad had, Doreen and I had never known any other. We were in love together from the day we met and grew up together as children, sitting and holding hands every day on the wall at the end of our street. I remember when I first kissed her. I put my lips against hers and never moved, motionless I was. I had my lips to hers for ten seconds without moving my lips a millimetre. I know it sounds a little strange but I was only nine at the time.
The wedding was wonderful and everything was perfect. Me, just a tender eighteen years of age and her having just turned nineteen. You know, nobody, not a single person tried to talk us out of it, not one single person. Old Mr Parker, the man from the corner shop said, “That’s my boy Brian. She’s a cracker that one, that’s what your dad would want son, a cracker she is. Just like your mother, a real cracker.” Then his wife in return, Mrs Parker, hitting him around the back of the head with a sharp swift slap. The reception that evening was grand too, down the Dockyard Club; the swing band and all the food and drink we wanted. It was a fine day indeed, our wedding, Doreen and I.
Like I say, everybody wanted to flirt with my mother, Evelina. I think this definitely included Mr Parker. Mum was born in 1920, not in Liverpool but in Pontefract, Yorkshire. Her parents were from a small village back in Poland. I don’t know why or what the circumstance was, that made them decide to come and live here in Britain, but I do know it was in 1913. They arrived here, initially landing in Hull but soon afterward settling down in Pontefract, just before the outbreak of the First World War. He, Izaak Stoltzman was a coal-miner and never sent to the front as so many other men were. She, Haka Stolzman (neé Rejchgold) was a seamstress. The family again resettled later on Merseyside during the mid-1920s where they both opened a haberdashery shop together.
I had confirmed the following events during my research for this book, and the fate of both the Stoltzman and Rejchgold families in Poland, is not a happy one. Izaak Stoltzman’s father, Evelina’s grandfather, Josef B. Stoltzman, was executed by German soldiers in retaliation for Polish resistance and partisan activities. He was executed alongside his wife Greta, by firing squad. The remaining family members on both sides all died as a direct result of the Nazi Holocaust. My mother Evelina named me directly after my father’s first name. My middle names however come from my Polish great-grandfather, and those names are Josef-Benjamin.
The Nazi Operation Reinhardt was responsible for the death of over 2.9 million Polish Jews. Additionally, and throughout the entire period of World War II, a further 2.5 million non-Jewish Poles perished whilst under the control of Germany, murdered by the Nazi regime. Two million of this figure were ethnic Polish and half a million more were of non-Polish origin but were living in Poland at the time. A further 300,000 Poles were later killed directly at the hands of the Soviets.
In 1926, in his book Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler had sought to outline his plan and place Eastern Europe into the hands of a greater Germany. The German Lebensraum plan as it was known (German living-space) was to occupy and gain German ethnic control over the entire region. Slavs as an ethnic race were all viewed by Nazi ideology to be racially inferior. “Kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language,” was the express instruction given to the German occupying forces by Hitler. The systematic genocide of the Polish people soon followed upon Germany’s invasion of the region.
During 1939, Reinhardt Heydrich (September 7th) decreed that all Polish nobles, clergy and Jews were to be executed. Wilhelm Keitel extended this death-list on the 12th September to include and demand the murder of all Polish intelligentsia. By the end of 1940 Hitler had also demanded the liquidation of all leading elements in Poland. Himmler, March 15th 1940, then added: “All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complexes. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task,” he wrote.
Operation Reinhardt was the code name given to the German plans to exterminate, specifically, all Polish Jews. Reinhardt was the deadliest phase of the Holocaust, with the introduction of Nazi extermination camps where over two million people, almost all of whom were of Jewish origin, were sent to the death camps in Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Originally, German concentration camps were used for forced labour, imprisonment, and for the re-education of political prisoners. Nazi brutality and the direct policies of the German National Socialist far right ensured that human cruelty such as starvation, non-medical attention to control disease, ill treatment, and murder were tolerated. Within camps in Germany and Austria such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen-Gusen, murder was not only expected but also ruthlessly encouraged. In 1942 and as part of Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Operation Reinhardt would ensure the complete liquidation and the systematic murder of all Jews in Europe. Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka were built with only one purpose in mind: extermination camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were also extermination camps but were jointly used as forced labour camps.
Senior key roles within the development of these new extermination death camps were given to Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, and Irmfried Eberl. All three had been pivotal within the Aktion T4 operation in which over 70,000 German men, women and children with a physical disability or learning difficulty were executed between the periods 1939 – 1941. The SS Guards responsible for these murders would wear white coats to give them the appearance of medical authority. After medical assessment the unsuspecting patient was then sent away for ‘Sonderbehandlung’, which translated literally means ‘special treatment.’
The SS, Hitler’s own personal bodyguard were now in control of the operation and efficient running of all death camps and used many such disguised tactics. Commonality included railway stations with medical staff on hand at arrival, directing the unsuspecting prisoners to the disinfection centres. It is noted that Treblinka had a booking office with signs displayed throughout the railway station advising prisoners that connecting trains for other camps further east were expected. But of course, these connections never arrived for these connections never existed.
The very old or sick and infirm prisoners were directly transferred to the Krankenhaus (hospital) to help speed up the process of mass extermination of the others. This process could be hindered by the infirm. They would be kill
ed later on and after the death of the larger proportion of the transport, mainly the women and children.
Men and boys were separated, the stronger for labour, and criminal prisoner elements were often selected into the Sonderkommando where any previously known violent background would enable them to become a lower tier of camp guard. The SS and the Sonderkommando recruits, after separating the men, women and children, would order the transport to leave its valuables behind and then direct them straight into the cleansing centre. Here before entry, clothing was searched for any hidden valuables such as gold and personal jewellery. These valuables were collected and sent by the Economic and Administrative Department to the German Reichbank. Men who were still physically able to work were selected for forced labour at the labour camps.
Most of the prisoners who arrived at the camps on these transport trains were gassed immediately. Of the Aktion Reinhardt camps, it is certain that all died shortly after arrival. In 1942 alone, this number stood at 1,274,166 murders of Polish Jews.
Extreme brutality was used to force people into the gas chamber, such as rifle butts, clubs and whips as well as guard dogs, usually German Shepherds. These severe blows on their now bare human skin would eventually force everyone forward into the chamber. To avoid and minimise any unwanted available air, all were forced to stand as tightly as they could against each other inside. Gas such as the cyanic poison Zyklon B, was already being used at other death camps such as Auschwitz, however the Aktion Reinhardt camps used only the lethal carbonic monoxide exhaust fumes that were filtered into the chamber from captured Soviet tank engines.
After all sounds of screaming and panic had stopped, usually taking up to 30 minutes, the Sonderkommando would remove the corpses. Before the corpses were thrown into mass graves, any gold teeth were removed and all human orifices of the dead were searched for jewellery, currency and other possibly hidden valuables. From 1943 onward, and in an attempt to hide any evidence of German war-crimes, all bodies were burned in open pits. The Leichenkommando (specialist corpse disposal) exhumed all previously buried bodies from the mass graves and burnt them. Nevertheless, the Reinhardt death camps still left an evidential paper trail of its activity behind it. In an intercepted telegram sent by Hermann Höfle on 11th January 1943, to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, confirmation was obtained of a total number of 1,274,166 Polish arrivals. All had been gassed at the camps and all killed before the end of 1942.