The document summarizes Mark Baker's book "The Fiftieth Gate". It explores how Baker combines his parents' memories of surviving the Holocaust with historical evidence and documentation to understand and represent their past. The narrative style incorporates poems, official documents, and oral stories to create a polyphonic work like the Talmud. It examines the challenges of verifying traumatic memories and reconciling individual and collective versions of history.

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Elective 3: History and MemoryElective 3: History and Memory
Explore theExplore the relationshipsrelationships between individual memory andbetween individual memory and
documented events.documented events.
Consider theConsider the interplayinterplay of personal experience, memory andof personal experience, memory and
documented evidence to broaden your understanding of how historydocumented evidence to broaden your understanding of how history
is shaped andis shaped and represented.represented.
AnalyseAnalyse the ways in which thethe ways in which the elements intertwineelements intertwine in complex andin complex and
often contradicting patterns to shape history.often contradicting patterns to shape history.
The meaning of the concepts of history and memory are usuallyThe meaning of the concepts of history and memory are usually
taken for granted, however, upon analysis, such concepts becometaken for granted, however, upon analysis, such concepts become
difficult to define and the line between the two can become blurred.difficult to define and the line between the two can become blurred.

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Introduction
History
a discourse of documented events both written and oral.
A scholarly discipline that claims to record the truth of
past events.
Memory
is the faculty by which events are recalled or kept in the
mind.
History is often used to validate memory however as
explored by Baker, both history and memory have
limitations as well as being able to be explored through
the use of different mediums
Individual and collective memories, as well as historical
evidence and fictional recreation based in history and
memories are used in the text to recreate and
understand the past

3. 3
Overview
The novel is essentially a biography of Baker's parents
narrated by its author, Mark Baker.
In Jewish mysticism, it is believed that there are 49 gates
that separate good from evil. They are gates in our hearts.
Beyond them, lies a fiftieth gate, the point at which we stop
moving but become aware of who we are. It is the gate we
pass through when we say 'I am'. – The Fiftieth Gate
http://www.yashanet.com/studies/revstudy/fifty-gates.htm
Its sequential form is insistently landmarked by the device of
the numbered gates. The opening gate suggests the
confusion & loss of darkness & ignorance ‘Nothing. I don’t
recognise a thing. Why did you drag me here?’ but we are
promised a journey to an end point – the 50th gate.
As its subtitle, 'A Journey through Memory' suggests, the
book is comprised of reminiscences from his parents about
their lives and experiences during the 1930s and 1940s.
Baker, a Melbourne academic, supplements their stories
with material from his own research into the period to paint a
more complete picture of his parents' lives.

4. 4
Overview (continued…)
 Its sequential form is insistently landmarked by the device of the
numbered gates. The opening gate suggests the confusion & loss of
darkness & ignorance ‘Nothing. I don’t recognise a thing. Why did you
drag me here?’ but we are promised a journey to an end point – the
50th gate.
 Ironically though, The work resists all sequencing. The memories are
fragmented and despite his attempts at some kind of order, there can
be no purely logical order of events as the past emerges from the
present rather than the other way around.
 Baker frequently reflects the heavy accents of his parents in his
spelling, which forges a stronger bond between the reader and two
elderly Jews reliving their horrific Holocaust experiences.
 The author is involved with and affected by the project at every stage so
that there appears to be no authorial distance between Baker and the
material he records.
 Baker includes documents from his research in the book, as well as
reconstructions of events, records of his parents speaking about their
memories on tape and records of his conversations with them.

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The Plot
A very personal story
A journey for the author through the experiences
of his parents during the Holocaust.
Baker has researched the events surrounding
the persecution of the Jews in the areas of
Poland in which his parents grew up, and from
which they were removed during WWII.
His father, Yossl, was imprisoned in some of the
most notorious concentration camps
His mother, Genia, was forced to hide for
several years once the Jews of her village had
been murdered.

6. 6
The Plot (continued…)
The relationship between Baker and his parents becomes
strained at some points during Baker's probing of the past.
When the family revisits the villages and death camps
familiar to his parents, the emotional pressure for Genia and
Yossl becomes intense.
The author's parents were born before the war in small
towns where the majority of the population was Jewish.
Yossl Baker (previously Bekiermaszyn) lived in Wierzbnik
with his family, and Genia Baker (previously Bekiermaszyn)
lived in Bursztyn with her own family.

7. 7
The Plot (continued…)
During 1942, both towns were occupied by German forces.
Yossl and his future wife Genia were forced to move; Yossl
to various labour and death camps (Buchenwald, Auschwitz,
Birkenau) Genia into hiding.
It is this time period, during which his father was incarcerated
and his mother was on the run, in which Mark Baker was
most interested. His father was captured and taken first to
Auschwitz then Buchenwald before his liberation in 1945.
His mother hid with her parents in forests and in small towns
wherever possible. Their stories are different in terms of the
horror they both had to endure, yet there is no mistaking that
both were left with powerful memories which the author
began to unlock when he journeyed into their pasts.

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Baker’s Parents
Genia Krochmal
Baker's mother, born in Bolszowce, Galician
Poland, 1934 & was the only child to survive
the deportation of 1,380 Jews to Belzec in Oct
1942.
Survived for 2 years, hiding in blackness in a
bunker in a nearby village.
History does not validate her memory.
Baker's search for archival signs of her former
existence in Bolszowce prove redundant &
force him to dispense with the historian’s truth
& rely on his mother's memory as the
evidence & hence justification for her pain:
"[I]t was not the facts that were held under
suspicion, but her credibility as a survivor.
Unlike my father, she could never show her
children the scars on her arm; hers were
invisible, numbered in the days & years of
her stolen childhood”
Yossl Bekiermaszyn
Baker's father, from Wierzbnik, southeast of
Warsaw.
The Nazis' murder of his two younger
sisters, Martale & Yentale, & the missing
history of his father, Lieb Bekiermaszyn,
weight his story.
Baker returns with his father to one address
from his past: Buchenwald. There he is able
to depend on history, since he can quote his
father's incarceration & so validate his
experiences:
"My father is on pages 42 & 109 of a
Register of Jewish Survivors published by
the Jewish Agency of Palestine in 1945 …
He is listed as Josek Bekiermaszyn, officially
arrested by SS on 28 October 1942, after
which he was imprisoned in Starachowice,
Auschwitz & Buchenwald.“

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Issues and Themes
The power of traumatic experience in shaping a person's
life.
The experiences of Jewish refugees in Australia after the
Second World War
The struggle of the children of Holocaust survivors to
understand, respect and move on from their parents'
experiences.
The cultural life of Jewish Australians.
The effect of the Holocaust on Jewish thought, culture and
community
The role of memory and remembrance

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The Narrative Style
The Fiftieth Gate reshapes the genre of
conventional memoir writing
The book is divided into 50 chapters, each
symbolizing a gate on the path to a religious
revelation, the triumph of good over evil.
Vignettes of memory are juxtaposed in the
context of the present-tense journey of
Baker's investigation of archives, the
acquisition of historical details, & a self-
reflexive analysis of the right to occupy his
parents' pasts as a historian and son.

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The Narrative Style (continued…)
While spirited by the historical weight & empiricism of
archival evidence, Baker surrenders to his mother's
memories of unspeakable darkness:
- her story of a young girl denied the right to be one,
- her dual roles as Holocaust survivor and mother,
- permitting her to speak without qualification,
- and he is almost ashamed for having
required the initial documentation of history.
The details of the physical return to Poland—as the source of
both wound and revelation—recalls the methods of writing
the detective genre: the burial of evidence & its rediscovery,
the travel from archive to archive, with documents in hand,
desperate to corroborate his parent's memories forged in the
addresses of Birkenau, Bolszowce, and Buchenwald.

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The Narrative Style (continued…)
In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the
Archive, an examination of survivor testimony,
Giorgio Agamben remarked that the vocation of
the survivor is to remember.
The Fiftieth Gate is a vivid incarnation of that
particularly Jewish vocation of the storyteller and
the commandment of Zakhor ie "Remember in the
heart, do not forget…That you should say it with your
mouth”
We watch Baker inhabit the roles of the vicarious
witness—the teenage son, historian, writer, heir &
embodiment of this vocation.

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The Narrative Style (continued…)
The narrative content of Baker's reconstruction of the
everyday journey of the intimate, physical & empirical
topography of Genia's & Yossl's persecution, incarceration,
survival & postwar refuge reveals not simply a son in search
of knowing his parents but also his own Australian-Jewish
identity that is anchored to an incomplete present.
The responsibility to write the story of that identity, the text
of his memory of their shared history, is reflected in Baker's
monumental gift to his parents, which is, finally, to enter into
the fiftieth gate, in which memory has survived the attempt
to destroy it & where blackness is overwhelmed by light.
—Simone Gigliotti at http://www.novelguide.com

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Representation
The Fiftieth Gate is written in an abstract manner:-
Poems/song lyrics/prayers
p14,71,93,191,203,227,243,249,261,276,314,
Official documents including:
-archives (p40) and certificates (p31,126),
-lists (p116) and indexes (p294ff),
-tombstones (p245),
-geog. dictionaries (p54),
-school reports (p63,67,306), other reports
(p76,131,149ff),
-letters (p79,118,238,303ff,) and written
testimonies (p156ff,178ff,214)

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Representation (continued…)
Old tales (p61,174)
General narrative, tying it all together like the
Talmud where a passage of law is placed in the
centre of the page &
different interpretations are
written around it so
that each page is a
discussion among
scholars across the
centuries.

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Representation (continued…)
Like the Talmud, The Fiftieth Gate is polyphonous, made up
of fragments & self reflective.
It is innovative in form & approach and explicitly intertextual.
As such, it is essentially a postmodern text.
The author uses interesting techniques to narrate the story
of his parents' survival:-
-Italicized writing to relay points his parents have told
him of in the past (“talking-head on video”)
-Non-italicized writing to relay what his parent are telling
him at the moment of his narrative.
However, the story does not read as if penned from a
meticulous and calculating historic hand.
Instead, it is touched with descriptions of such elegance that
the language could almost be taken from a piece of fiction.

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Representation (continued…)
It’s obvious, from the type of history that the book tries to
cover, that most topics & memories will be dark. We know
the Holocaust was a bleak, savage event. Baker tries to
convey how it has affected his parents in their memories &
thoughts.
Their memories are hidden away in the past & confused.
Perhaps the inability to remember is due to the large lapse
of time between the "now" & the "then.“
The inaccuracies are also possibly due to burdened minds
trying to live again, away from the blackness of their early
life. Whatever the reason, the lapses in memory posed a
problem for Baker.
He couldn’t simply accept the "facts" his parents gave him,
instead he needed to investigate the lives of which they
claimed.
This was the biggest problem of history the author faced
while writing this book; the accuracy of memories gathered.

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Representation (continued…)
So what we have in The Fiftieth Gate is a
confluence of different representations –
personal stories (memory) and public stories
(history). In neither case are we dealing with
the material, yet, each story makes its claim
on reality.
The idea of history as unfinished narratives
is captured here and reiterated towards the
end of his book on (P.302) ‘In the end, the
beginning’.