The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory

by Mark Raphael Baker

′This gate here, I recognise it. Behind it is a steep slope, a hill, fields, grass. We would slide down it in winter.′
At last, an incontrovertible test through which my father′s memory might be vindicated. Two lone gates that appear to lead nowhere.
′Push,′ we scream, ′lift the latch and push.′
′No. I remember too much now. No.′

A love story and a detective story, a study of history and of memory, this spellbinding new work explores a son′s confrontation with the terror of his parents′ childhood.

Moving from Poland and Germany to Jerusalem and Melbourne, Mark Raphael Baker travels across the silence of fifty years, through the gates of Auschwitz, and into a dark bunker where a little girl hides in fear. As he returns to scenes of his parents′ captivity, he struggles to unveil the mystery of their survival.

The Fiftieth Gate is a journey from despair and death towards hope and life; the story of a son who enters his parents′ memories and, inside the darkness, finds light.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Holocaust, History, Read For School, Jewish, Historical

339 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 1997

About the author

As well as The Fiftieth Gate, A Journey Through Memory, a prize-winning book on his parents’ experience during the Holocaust, Mark Raphael Baker has written a compelling memoir, Thirty Days, A Journey to the End of Love, about death and grief. Both books are published by Text Publishing. He is currently writing a novel.

Reviews

[Un · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though it made for an informative read, The Fiftieth Gate was at times confusing, with its abrupt time hops and unmarked dialogue. I can appreciate the way Baker made unconventional decisions in the novel's composition, but ultimately, it didn't make for a compelling book. Two stars.

[Velvetink · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Review - now it's finished)!
"Freedom is not a happy ending. It is a flame that dances in remembrance, inside the blackness". p.314

Baker's parents lived through the Holocaust and he writes about journeying back with them to Europe, their memories and finding some kind of hope and what it means to be Jewish. There are some sections towards the end that are a bit confusing and disjointed - may have benefited from better editing perhaps, but a thought provoking book. The sources, biblio and info provided about searching for Jewish relatives, towns (pre WW2) etc are extremely helpful. For instance, this website "The Lost Jewish Communities of Poland" aka "Valley of Destroyed Communities"
http://www.zchor.org/hitachdut/introduct...
This publication lists the names of 4,500 Jewish
communities which were destroyed in the Holocaust.They are recorded according to the geographical boundaries of 1938, before the territorial changes which were caused by the expansion of Nazi Germany.

I might also add Baker's book is a good adjunct to read along with Everything is Illuminated - Johnathan Safran Forer AND Konin: A Quest by Theo Richmond as they all deal with the Holocaust area around the shifting borders of what was once called Volhynia..(Poland,Belarus,Ukraine, Galicia etc) but each give different perspectives and information which compliment each other, and so far I've found finding books on this topic in that particular location quite a challenge. It seems that for this geographical area one needs to know Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Ukrainian and German if one is to do serious research pre WW2, and I am going to have to live a long time to learn them all I think to find what I am looking for.

Baker's father and grandfather's original last names was Bekirmaszyn or Beckermashin (one is Polish, one is Yiddish) and I've yet to learn the difference. The author wondered why he and his brother were called John and Mark, "gospel boys": the Bakers of Galilee. Mark Baker "knew there was something more deliberate in the names chosen for us, an attempt to obliterate not only my parent's foreignness but the memories attached to it". In Yiddish the author was named informally "Mattis", but no one in Australia knows him by that name. It comes from his father's memory of a boy killed on the road somewhere between Bolszowce and Belzec long before he emigrated down under. "Belzec" stumped me till halfway through the book. It is of course Belsen, & then the name Mattis takes on something chilling. No wonder Baker wondered.

I've read how migrants arrive to new countries with difficult sounding surnames - often they westernised their names, choosing something familiar sounding: cutting the name in half: symbolic of the meaning, choosing something random, going by your occupation. The Baker's in this case were not Bakers, but glass carters or haulers and traders. Mark wonders "by what right did his father have to lop the branches off the trees in their garden (family tree)? Baker-Machine?!!!!!!! Mark asked his father, "Why Baker"? and his father answered ""by telling a joke about Berel, Merel and Shmerel, who changed their Yiddish names to Bok, Mok, and Shm... At this point he laughs, even before pronouncing the punchline. "So Shmerel said, "I'm going back to Poland." 'D'you get it, Shmerel! Shmock!, How could he be a Shmock in Australia?'"" Baker's father could have chosen to change their their name to something sounding like their name in Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Polish or even German; OR if the customs official couldn't say it right but to whatever he pronounced it as -ending up with a mispronunciation as their name, has often happened from migrant histories I've read of those entering the USA via Ellis Island. This makes tracing someone very difficult, (& don't forget those informal Yiddish names either! as you will find those on records as well) particularly when working backwards in time - add the fact of destroyed records - in fact whole towns razed in Galicia, Poland, and the Ukraine - records gone, it's a jigsaw pickup game...fitting the pieces together not knowing what the final picture will be.
Baker has gone some way to completing the jigsaw, for himself, what he accomplished and found, he is satisfied.

I am searching for where my great grandfather originally came from - for he shucked his past, his Jewishness on board the ship sailing here, like so many others..the past to be forgotten. Too Painful. Start anew. The glitch is what name(s), what language did he go by - we are only guessing so far from odd comments said, inferred or not mentioned. avoided.. Sifting and sorting. Picking up clues here and there, from books, from things handed down.. I have an ancient trunk handmade, hewn wood, he brought with him to Australia, full of crockery made in Eastern Europe - that my mother inherited - the trunk it's been painted over tons of times since. Should I get the wood dated?,or see if a museum or collector can fix it's origin; doesn't sound too hopeful, or stick with the paperwork trail. Frustration at finding nothing for months or elation with sudden discovery of a minor detail hounds me, and like Baker it feels like a crazy circus ride you can't get off till the end and you don't know when that will be till you find all the clues: to fill the empty silences, the things not ever spoken about.

There are many still searching, still many lost and unaccounted for. Reading all these holocaust memories, and journeys through the past, like "Konin" and "Everything is Illuminated" and "The Fiftieth Gate", & like so many others there's at once a huge hole in my heart, an uncomprehending at the horror man can do to his fellow man.

"it always begins in blackness, until the first light illuminates a hidden fragment of memory.." p.316

I won't tell you what "The Fiftieth Gate" refers to. You'll have to read the book.


*********************************************
Another excursion into the Jewish past, memory, despair, hope and life?

$2 op shop find.

[Mgn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it for school. I wrote a killer essay about it but I really struggled to read it. Baker's idea is interesting- to research the Holocaust and team it with eye witness accounts from his Jewish holocaust survivor parents and draw a comparison between history and memory- But I found it rather difficult to read as it seemed to lack some element to tie it all together. I'd enjoy it if it was logically presented and consistently narrated, otherwise I found it hard to motivate myself to figure out what was going on. I did find the structure to be interesting though, it is called The Fiftieth Gate, has 50 chapters and has a motif about gates- such as the mention of gates of the concentration camps, a Jewish parable about gates and the gate of their house. It is a great idea and maybe I am a bit young to appreciate it but I really struggled.

[Soph · Rating 2 out of 5]

i literally cannot deal with mark baker

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a while but I got there

[Text Publishing · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Combining precise historical research and poetic eloquence, Mark Baker’s The Fiftieth Gate remains the gold standard of second generation Holocaust memoirs on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary edition.’
Christopher R. Browning

‘Baker does with memory, what Rembrandt does with light. He uses it to model, to imagine, to illuminate, to astonish.’
Philip Adams

[Diya · Rating 1 out of 5]

NEVER AGAIN MATE.

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Content was extraordinary. Writing style was very thought provoking. He writes like he is trying to make sense of things for himself - hard to follow often but I get the feeling it was not necessarily written for an audience. Can relate. Of course heart breaking all round.

[Arfa · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's interesting but confusing 😕

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Baker conveys the journey through the fog of 'truth' incredibly well. Pattered between his narrative is the voice of his parents, clutching their memories close to their chests. Does sharing your story make it stronger? Or do you lose some ownership, something that tethers you to your origins?
He pieces it together with equal parts of pain and joy. His mother's utter loss, who barely exists on paper. His father's irritation as Baker demands 'fecks', and then the disparate excitement when finding the right barrack at Auschwitz..
A lifetime's research has gone into reconstructing the lives of Baker's parents. I can't imagine the torment it must have been to rake over the past in this way. To find himself questioning their memories in his search for truth. He must have a strong and wonderful relationship with them.

I understand the gaping void of not knowing your own history. My own grandparents, and my infant mother, arrived in Australia in 1949. They came in part of a "group resettlement". To this day I dislike calling them "migrants". It's not like they chose their path. They passed away when I was too young to want more, and now I have nothing but a ship manifest that surfaced on the web a few years back. I've always wondered if searching for my family history would take me anywhere meaningful, or if their history disappeared with them when they fled. Baker makes me believe that there is something out there worth finding.

I didn't buy this book. Or borrow it. But somehow it came into my possession, and I am glad that it did. The cover art does not do it justice.

Ultimately, The Fiftieth Gate is well written, and incredibly well researched. It offers a warm narrative to an otherwise cold and dark timeline. Essential reading for anyone whose family rebuilt their lives after being branded only as 'refugees' or 'displaced persons'.

[Rudi Landmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory is, at its core, historian Mark Raphael Baker's journey to record, contextualise, and understand his own family history: the Holocaust through the eyes of his parents, Polish Jews who survived it as children. His process combined interviews with his parents with meticulous combing of Polish, German, Russian, and American records. He even returns his parents to Poland--to their childhood villages and to Auschwitz--to discover what memories these places will shake loose.

The results are as potent as might be expected, and Baker's book is a mixture of his parents' statements in interviews and in the field. He combines this with descriptions of what he has learned from documentary evidence of the period and with creative non-fiction to fill in gaps.

What emerges is a meditation not just on family history, but on much bigger questions, including the reliability of memory, the ownership of the past, the need for and nature of memorialisation, the "value" (or even sacredness) of place, and even on the past as a kind of a fetish (in the anthropological sense of the word). Ultimately, what's at stake here is identity: Baker's own, that of his family, and of dor dorot, the generations to come. This quest for identity is thrown into sharp relief by the understanding reinforced by the book of just how perilously close the families and even their ethnic group came to annihilation. The stakes for identity are much higher than just "finding oneself".

Of course, the source material makes this an incredibly, horribly sad book. But it is Baker's contemplation of and reflection on his material that makes this book so fascinating and significant to me.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I joined Mark Baker on his journey through both history and memory, I felt countless emotions. The way in which he approaches piecing together his parent's story is truly one of a kind - a combination of documented evidence and personal experience. At several points throughout the novel, I had to put the book down simply to contain myself; countless tears were shared whether from happiness, sadness, anger, or frustration. This novel was gorgeously written. While Baker struggled at several occasions to find the right balance between researcher and son, the result of his efforts culminated in a sense of closure - for both himself, and his parents.

[Bellybubble16 · Rating 1 out of 5]

I absolutely hate this book with a passion greater than anything in the world. Although the subject of the book is a moving subject and quite an important one which I have much respect for... I find this book quite annoying and hard to understand. Baker is forceful and annoying to his parents and can't seem to understand that they do not wish to share their memories with him because they are in pain. I hate it. It's jumpy and boring. I can't even get past the 8th chapter.

[Hermien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting would be the most accurate word for me to describe this book. Even though it deals with the writer’s own family it has the feel of a book researched by an historian with a certain distance to his subject. I liked the parents who never over-dramatised what happened to them and were a lot less interested in digging up the past than their son. I’m glad I read it because it provided insight into the feelings of children of holocaust survivors.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good (this is an understatement - reading it under the module of Representation & Text in many ways reveals even moreso how powerful the construction of it is - well for me anyway) book despite being rather confusing. Main hamartia? Being a HSC prescribed text which has led to its really low rating on Goodreads haha.

[Ria Lize · Rating 2 out of 5]

T_T I never understood what was going on. Probably because I was reading too fast to get it all over and done with.

[Sofia · Rating 2 out of 5]

ughhhhhhhhhh

[Caren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Historian Mark Baker writes about "all those of [his] generation, the sons and daughters of [Holocaust] survivors bear[ing] the wounds of unresolved guilt." His journey to break the silence of his parents about their experiences in Poland and in the Ukraine during the Holocaust is courageous and riveting. Taking his vulnerable parents back to where their lives began, to where they suffered, to where they lost their families, to where they hid or were imprisoned, Baker combines the power of their oral testimony with the strength of the meticulous historical evidence he uncovers. And, not always, were the details the same. Thus, Baker asks "And what counted for more - the facts I assembled about my parents' past, or how they remembered it?"

His intentions and effort were both for his parents and for himself: to "return memory to them" and to "assume responsibility for their stories". The result is intense, for the family and for the reader, who is magnetised by the strength of what is uncovered. This twentieth anniversary edition of the memoir comes at a crucial time in Holocaust study, when we are facing the demise of the small number of survivors who are still alive and willing to educate the younger generation with what they witnessed. The impact of Baker's parents' memories, substantiated by his documented research, stands against those today who deny the Holocaust.

Only at the end of the text does Baker delve into fiction, when he poignantly imagines the last moments of his parents' families in the gas chambers. I initially questioned this inclusion, but accepted his note in the introduction in which he distinguishes the scene as "an act of empathy" and not "fabrication." I also questioned his choice not to include a family tree with the map he provided of both his parents' journeys. Because the narrative moved from parent to parent, from grandparents' fate to grandparents' fate, I was often confused and would have benefited from a quick glance at who was who.

The text is a must read. It explores the atrocities of Baker's parents' histories, and also, importantly, reveals the palpable impact of their past on their children, the inherited trauma of the 2nd generation survivor.

[scarlett♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up as a recommendation from one of my professors for a fun read. She was fully aware of my family connection to the period and thought I might enjoy this.

To begin with I found all the historical information aka. the Yiddish and Hebrew words that I didn't know and the complex characters fascinating. It was fun to read something so diverse. After about 100 pages I became tired of reading what seemed like the same paragraphs over again.

I really enjoyed the storytelling aspect where there was direct dialogue and discussion between the characters and equally was captivated by the flashbacks and visits to old places and peoples. It felt as though I was dredging through pages of a nothingness stream of consciousness to get to the meat of the story.
I would have enjoyed more characterisation and more of a rise and fall plot as it seemed that I couldn't really find any point's of tension. I also became confused at times, finding that my mind wasn't able to fully keep up with what was going on.

Overall, this was an ambivalent read. I loved aspects of the book and commend it's unique form but it wasn't one that I was dying to keep reading. I was touched many times by the personal stories of the characters and that was my only motivating factor to continue reading it
I would recommend this for a historical read more than anything.

[jadealiahlisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love a good memoir about the Holocaust and genuinely are interested in hearing all the different experiences but the way this book was written didn’t make sense and many times I felt lost.

I thought the way Mark chose to switch between time frames (memories v present day) and the numerous conversations that didn’t add much value to the wider story (I.e. the multiple times his mother kept repeating ‘I don’t remember, why are you asking me?’) made me want to quit reading.

I felt he could have tidied up the story by leaving out the nuances of his conversations with his parents and only focused on what they did remember backed by what his research supports. I wouldn’t call it a story exactly, it was more like I was invited to different rooms where he was mid conversation with either parent - hard to follow and definitely could’ve tidied up the different chapters.

The most tidy chapter is XLII.

[Amy Nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall The Fiftieth Gate is an intriguing read as Baker challenges historical discourse by exhibiting both discrete facts and personal accounts in parralel, thereby questioning the nature of truth regarding the Holocaust. The form is also interesting which consists of fragmented dialogues, recollections and historical dara, intertwined with creative elements and religious intertextuality.

However, his book is kind of boring for me, I could not care less. Maybe it's because I had to read it for school.

[Rohan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the weaving of narratives, to show the process of making history. You have all these sources from different places, bits and pieces, including oral testimony, with all its dangers of lost memory, but a neat "narrative" doesn't just come about. These people's lives were in the margins of history, no one wanted to write about them, they weren't the main characters, so it's like a puzzle.

But it's 3 stars because of this, I wanted a quick synopsis at the end, or something to help me see what the author did think of his parents life. It left me confused.

[amelia__v · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a book we read in class, and I have never been so bored and confused in my whole life. The writing was good but there were too many characters with so many little parts that it became hard to follow. The perspectives were constantly changing, and it was hard to recognise what part belongs to what person. The book could have had a lot more context. Overall, the writing seemed to be the only thing is this book that was okay. The plot and characters were confusing and not explained to the full potential. Everything about it was robotic and void of emotion

[Ben Scobie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An aggressively OK book. It reminded me of Schindler's List (film) in its heavy handedness of the content and it's desire to show as many aspects as possible. I can see why schools teach it. It also raises some interesting ethical questions around authorship.

[Jane Heo · Rating 2 out of 5]

really did not enjoy this, the style of writing wasn't for me. Some good ideas but overall really difficult to get through

[Jaysa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always enlightening

[Emma :)]

Read for school. I might read it again later in life for funsies who knows

[Jody Palmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s a struggle to read but I kept going because I respect the content... writing style is a red hot mess

[Katy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obviously incredibly moving due to the vignettes of Holocaust memories, but at times I found these vignettes hard to follow.

[Hannah]

FUCK THIS BOOK SO HARD FLOP