When Lily Brett was a child growing up in Melbourne she would wake up to hear her mother screaming in the middle of the night. From her earliest years she knew something dreadful had happened to her parents. She gradually pieced the story together from the fragments her parents told her and from her own reading about the holocaust.
They were Polish Jews living in Nazi-occupied Lodz during the war. They were eventually transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau where they were separated. They somehow survived, and after the liberation it took them six months to find each other. Lily was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1946 and it was another two years before the family moved to Melbourne.
Like so many children of Holocaust survivors, Lily Brett was haunted by her parent’s suffering, and by the ghosts of the family she would never know – the ones who had perished in the ghettoes or the death camps. She was consumed by a desire to visit the places her parents had lived and to share and perhaps understand what they had endured.
After her mother’s death in 1986 Lily embarked on a campaign to persuade her father, Max, to go with her to Poland. He was reluctant, but eventually agreed.
Brett wrote a partly-fictionalised memoir of the experience in her book Too Many Men, published in 1999. In it, Brett grapples with her own intense emotional response to the Holocaust and muses, Hannah Arendt-style, on questions of evil, guilt, and personal and political morality. It won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.
This movie, Treasure, is a streamlined version of the memoir, focussing on the relationship between Lily and her father on the Poland trip. In both book and movie they are given the fictional names Edek and Ruth Rothwax, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and his American-born daughter, both New Yorkers. Lily Brett has lived in New York for many years (with her Australian-born artist husband David Rankin) but here the Australian connection is left out, which makes no difference to the central story except that we miss the nice detail, told by Lily to ABC Radio, that when she finally convinced her father to visit Poland with her, he said ‘alright, you pick me up on the way’, blithely ignoring the fact that she would have to make a detour of many thousands of miles to do so.
Stephen Fry plays Edek, and Lena Dunham, who co-produced the movie, plays Ruth, the Lily character.
Stephen Fry is nothing short of brilliant as Edek/Max. Despite his initial unwillingness to even go there, he’s instantly at home in his native land and as soon as they arrive in Warsaw a battle of wills erupts between father and daughter as he tries to thwart her family-and-Holocaust mission with a kind of pretence that they are there as tourists and for him to show his daughter around the sights of his homeland.
Ruthie has the itinerary all planned – train tickets paid for, accommodation booked, destinations chosen, but Edek constantly sabotages her plans by doing things his way. He won’t go by train; they must have a driver. He finds one to his liking and makes a private cash deal. He bribes hotel clerks, he tips doormen extravagantly, he doesn’t stick to the budget. He exasperates Ruthie by engaging with strangers, staying up late, singing and carousing. He picks up a couple of older ladies, charming them with his olde-worlde manners – exaggerated courtliness, extravagant compliments, hand-kissing.
He embarrasses Ruthie by telling everyone she is a famous journalist. Brett did work for many years for Go-Set magazine; in this telling it’s become Rolling Stone, of which all the locals have heard, of course, and Edek never fails to boast about it to everyone they meet.
He wins some, he loses some. Ruthie digs her heels in and they go to Lodz, where both Edek and his parents were born, and where he courted and married Ruthie’s mother. They find his family home, now in a state of dilapidation but occupied by the same family that was ‘assigned’ it after the Rothwax/Bretts were kicked out in 1940. This now-impoverished family, bribed to let Edek and Ruth in to have a look, insist the place was empty when their ancestor moved in. This turns out not to be true. Ruthie for once is prepared to go along with Edek’s unorthodox methods – she even outdoes him in her steeliness – to take advantage of this family’s poverty and reclaim some of what is rightfully theirs. The details of this episode have a powerful ring of truth.
Ruthie is adamant that they go to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and she wins that round too. At the ticket office a cheery clerk asks if they are there to see the Auschwitz museum. She corrects him almost angrily: no, it was a death camp!
Ruthie has engaged a guide. They ride around the vast enclosure, up and down the seemingly endless neat rows of precisely spaced wooden huts on an open motorised cart, as the guide reels off tonelessly the ghastly mechanics of the death camp and the horrendous statistics: so many people per cattle car, so many people per hut, so many killed in one day, so many bodies to dispose of, so much horror. Edek at last abandons his light-hearted façade and becomes deeply sombre. He even finds the exact spot where he and his wife were separated – the infrastructure has been demolished but he knows it with dreadful certainty. He jumps off the cart to go and kick the dirt as he finally succumbs to his grief.
At the time of their visit – the early 90s – Auschwitz was not yet an Instagram destination overrun with hordes of tourists posing against the Arbeit Macht Frei sign and the cattle cars. We can only imagine how much more painful it would have been for them had they gone 20 or so years later.
I’m not ashamed to admit I shed many a tear watching Treasure. Not so much during the Auschwitz scenes – you can kind of detach from that because of the deadening emotional effect of having seen it all before. But when you evoke all that suffering and misery alongside hope and love, as happens in the upbeat ending here…that’s when I’m a goner. I hope the details are true to Lily Brett’s story. No spoilers.
Stephen Fry’s performance is central to the power of this movie. Lena Dunham is also very good as Lily. As well as being an actress she is a highly-regarded writer and producer. She created the multi-award-winning TV series Girls (21012 – 2017) which I will now seek out and watch. She co-produced this movie, with Lily Brett as story consultant.
Just one thing, which is more of a postscript than a quibble. Lena Dunham is overweight, and this fact figures in her characterisation of Ruthie. Lily Brett is and always has been stick-thin. She has explained that this is down to her mother’s lifelong obsession; in the ghetto and in the camps, weight gain was a form of betrayal. If you weren’t starving you were doing something wrong – collaborating with your tormentors perhaps to benefit yourself at the expense of your fellow sufferers.