Documentary maker Eve Ash grew up knowing little about her parents’ experiences during the Holocaust. Then, years after her mother’s death, she discovered a startling truth.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size It was the snow that helped Feliks Ash make his miraculous escape that night, the wispy, white snowflakes that drifted down over the barbed wire fences and brown brick buildings of the Janowska concentration camp in the southern part of Poland (now part of Ukraine). Just before 7pm, Feliks and another Jewish prisoner were in the woods – the barrel of a machine gun trained on them – collecting firewood for the German soldiers huddling inside their barracks in their heavy overcoats. Feliks had performed this task many times before, slowly gaining the trust of the guards. But time was running out for Feliks and the other prisoners at Janowska: the camp was to be “liquidated” (“Still too many Jews,” they’d heard the SS officers complain), and escape – however remote its likelihood of success – was their only hope. And on this evening, November 19, 1943, the guard was lazy, turning slightly away against the frigid breeze to light his cigarette. Feliks had been preparing for this moment for weeks. He and his accomplice jumped the guard, killing him with their axe, seizing his rifle and hand grenades. Taking cover near the German barracks, the duo hurled two grenades towards the patrol guards, and when the soldiers raced out, Feliks fired, wounding an unknown number of soldiers. As the camp siren rang out, 150 Jewish prisoners who were in on the plan fled from their barracks and tents. The yelling German soldiers, some with growling dogs straining at their leashes, fanned out into the forested darkness. Feliks collapsed in the rubble of a bombed-out house, piling snow over his body until it swallowed him. For the next eight days and nights, Feliks lay in this frigid tomb, the snow his sole source of sustenance, and a shield from the scent of the tracker dogs. He may have looked like death, but what he called his “smiley” dark brown eyes still shone with life, even though they’d led to beatings by the guards who thought he was laughing at them. These SS thugs, drunk on their own sadism, were forever finding new ways to torture and execute, even organising a prisoners’ orchestra to play while they carried out their atrocities. They called one tune The Death Tango. Feliks had spent years like this, surviving day by desperate day. The day in 1941 when the Nazis herded his family, among thousands of others, into a ghetto in his then Polish home town of Lviv and set them to work as slave labourers. The day they shot his father in the courtyard of their block of flats. The day they came to take away his mother and younger sister, and when his sister resisted, grabbed her two-year-old by the legs and flung the child against a brick wall. The day he and his young wife each tucked a small vial of cyanide into a seam in their clothing, making a pact to take it when the really “bad day” arrived. The day she ingested the poison within minutes of their arrival at the Janowska camp, dying on the spot. The day his youngest brother was shot after a month in the camp. The day he uncovered his brother’s partly decomposed body after being dragooned into the “Death Brigade” to dig up corpses and burn them in huge piles, as the Nazis set about destroying evidence of their atrocities. After he finally pulled himself out of his bunker in the snow, Feliks slowly made his way to a Greek Orthodox church about eight kilometres away, where a Polish gardener took him and a couple of other survivors into hiding, covering a lean-to at the back of the church grounds with coal, leaving a small hole in the side for ventilation. After dark the gardener brought them food and medicine. Here, Feliks remained for more than six months, coming out of hiding in mid-1944 when the Russians seized control of nearby Lviv. A free man at last.


After bearing the weight of so much profound loss, moments of lightness followed. That October Feliks walked into a Russian supplies office in Lviv to ask for a job and met the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, called Martha. The couple were married a month later, two Jewish survivors with spines of steel, alone in the world with no family left, finding hope in second marriages. The newlyweds moved to Krakow, where their first child, Helen, was born in 1945, and later to Belgium, where they lived for two years before migrating to Australia in March 1949, wanting to get as far away from Europe as possible. Martha, who also grew up in Poland, in the picture-postcard town of Zolochiv (now part of Ukraine), had also been a victim of barbaric hate. She’d lost her mother and her young husband in the same week in 1941, her husband shot right in front of her in a police courtyard by the Nazis; her mother herded into the grounds of a local castle, where she was shot along with hundreds of others, surviving for some hours with a bullet in her leg, sitting there in shock among a pile of bodies, sifting the dirt through her fingers (so Martha heard from a witness). Ultimately, Martha’s blonde hair and blue eyes saved her; because she didn’t look Jewish, she was able to obtain forged papers through some non-Jewish friends and live in hiding until the war ended. The couple built a happy and prosperous new life in Australia: Feliks running a successful clothing and swimwear company in inner-city Melbourne, which attracted glowing stories in Melbourne’s press, while Martha became a respected local artist. Their second daughter, Eve, was born in 1951, and the two girls enjoyed a happy, stable childhood. Feliks remained an unsung hero of Janowska, in large part because he didn’t want to re-enter the darkness by telling his tale. He turned down a request to testify at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, and also later at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the so-called “Final Solution” (exterminating the Jewish race) in Israel in 1961. One of Feliks’s fellow inmates at Janowska, Leon Wells, who was 16 when he was trucked in to the concentration camp, gave harrowing testimony at Eichmann’s trial, and went on to write The Janowska Road, widely considered one of the most significant accounts of the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Feliks calculated that of the 134 people who made it out of the Janowska camp that bleak November night, only 13 survived until liberation (out of a complex containing at least several thousand prisoners at any one time). Forced labour in Janowska concentration camp. Feliks didn’t talk much about the Holocaust to his daughters while they were growing up, certainly not about his role in one of the very rare escapes by Jews from a concentration camp. But in 1980, when Helen was 35 and Eve 29, he finally recounted his story in a TV documentary called Proud to Live, televised on SBS, which contained interviews with Holocaust survivors living in Australia. Feliks only made it through the first half of his interview before calling it quits, overcome with emotion. Reflecting on his legacy, he declared:


“What’s the good of me being the survivor and coming to my children and saying that I am a hero? Of what? Of circumstances? What’s the good of them saying that my father was that and that …?” Feliks had his first heart attack only a year or so later, and died in 1985, aged 73. The much adored father and husband was gone, but younger daughter Eve was left with a couple of big questions about her Jewish heritage, questions that had been nagging her since her teens. The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas called this “the unthought known”– what we feel deep inside but can’t fully process. While Eve’s older sister Helen wholeheartedly embraced her Judaism, and relished her European heritage, Eve was an atheist and felt as Aussie as Vegemite. The two sisters also looked nothing alike, leading Eve to long suspect they may be the product of different fathers. But in the late 1980s, after her father’s death, when Eve flatly asked her mother whether she’d had any affairs during her marriage, Martha skirted the question. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she scoffed. It took more than a decade after her mother’s death in 1996 for Eve to learn the truth. The Ash family at home in Melbourne’s Murrumbeena in the 1950s (Eve at bottom right). Credit:Courtesy of Eve Ash Eve Ash is sitting at a small table in the stately lower bar of the City Tattersalls Club in Sydney. It’s quiet and civilised here, amid the interior’s maple columns, Chesterfields and clinking crockery, and Eve, with her bright scarlet framed glasses and tousled brown hair, looks totally at ease. It’s a universe away from the horrors of the Holocaust. “Dad’s family, Mum’s family – they were all wiped out. About 80 people,” recalls Eve, alternating between sips of a black coffee and sparkling mineral water. “Growing up, we had no aunties or uncles, no grandparents, to visit.” Despite all Feliks and Martha had been through, the enormity of their loss, neither displayed the mood swings or bouts of depression typical of trauma survivors, she says. If they were battling demons, neither exposed their emotional wounds to their two children. “My father was a very gentle man, and extremely encouraging to us kids,” recalls Eve. “He avoided discussing the past, but he did suffer these incredible headaches, where he would get up, say he needed some air, and go for a walk around the block.”


In his television interview of 1980, Feliks was clearly suffering from some degree of survivor guilt. “There were no Ashs left [after World War II] … Now there are a few Ashs …” he says with a glint in his eye, referring to his children. Indeed, Eve and her older sister Helen enjoyed a happy, privileged upbringing. Their mother threw birthday parties for the girls and their friends, fancy dress parties for the adults, and Martha faithfully recorded the family’s local and overseas holidays on her Super 8 camera, an interest in documenting lives – and visual storytelling – that Eve inherited. In the fullness of time, it was a single scene from one of Martha’s home movies that would yield up a family truth Eve had long suspected. Eve, who is 68, has spent the past 40 years working as a psychologist and multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, telling other people’s stories – most recently, the 2019 TV miniseries Undercurrent, about the case of Sue Neill-Fraser, convicted of the murder of her husband, radiation physicist Bob Chappell, on a yacht off Hobart’s Sandy Bay in 2009, in a trial that divided Tasmania and seized the country’s imagination. (Neill-Fraser lodged an appeal against her sentence this August.) But Eve’s most recent documentary is one she began working on part-time 11 years ago, after she received an email from a stranger claiming to be her half-sister. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Micheline Lee knew that her father, known as “Dixie”, had been good friends with the Ashs, and had a number of affairs when their kids were small. Micheline had seen a photo of Eve online and was immediately struck by their close physical resemblance to each other. A subsequent DNA test confirmed they were half-sisters. Feliks, it turned out, was not Eve’s biological father. Eve’s subsequent investigations unearthed one bombshell after another, which she masterfully mines for suspense in Man on the Bus, which will be shown at the Jewish International Film Festival for a month from next week, and which has already snagged awards at a number of overseas film festivals, including at the Colorado International Film Festival. Ronald "Dixie" Lee in his mid-20s in the late 1940s.


Lest you think Man on the Bus might be unremittingly serious in dealing with subjects like the Holocaust and the family fall-out from latter-day DNA testing, there is a strong thread of humour running throughout; you sense Eve had a damn fine time stitching together the threads of this narrative, which has a soundtrack composed by award-winning Polish-born Australian Cezary Skubiszewski (Red Dog, The Sapphires, Beneath Hill 60) and compelling archival footage. The protagonist in Man on the Bus is really Eve’s mother, Martha, the more outspoken, glamorous and unapologetically flirtatious of Eve’s parents. While Feliks seemed content to play the hard-working, doting husband, Martha, bored with her suburban life, sought fulfilment in motherhood, her art and batting her eyelids at the occasional handsome man. “Mum and Dad were soul mates, bound by all they had been through, and I don’t think my mother would have ever left my father for another man,” observes Eve. Dixie and Eve in Tasmania in 2013 researching his family roots. Eve believes her mum would be proud the two of them have bonded “as he was part of her life, too”. Credit:Cesar Salmeron When she set off more than a decade ago to contact her birth father, whom she learnt was still alive, Eve knew she had to record it all on film, supported by interviews with family members and friends. But it was when she was combing through her mum’s old home movies that she came across a scene that stopped her in her tracks: family friend Ronald “Dixie” Lee, whom she remembered visiting the house when she was young, playing with his toddler son in their front garden. As the camera lingered on Dixie’s face, Eve realised with a thunderbolt that the woman holding the camera – her mother – was in love with this man. At 83, Dixie was still working full-time as a surveyor when Eve met him in 2008. Captured on camera, their encounter in the food court of a shopping mall in Melbourne’s Werribee is a study in awkwardness and dramatic mutual recognition. She learns her mother and Dixie started chatting on the North Road bus between Clayton and Brighton one sunny afternoon in 1949, and they went on to have an affair that lasted 15 years (the scene of the pair meeting on the bus, and kissing behind a folded-out newspaper, was later recreated for the film). Eve Ash's film, Man on the Bus, includes a re-enactment of the meeting between Martha Ash and Ronald "Dixie" Lee. Eve also discovered their trysts included secluded places in public, like behind the brightly coloured bathing sheds at Brighton. She also learnt Dixie, as a surveyor, had named streets – “Martha” and “Eve” – after them.

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