After Auschwitz: A Love Story

Other books by Brenda Webster:

Fiction:

Vienna Triangle

The Beheading Game

Sins of the Mothers

Paradise Farm

Drama:

The Murder Trial of Sigmund Freud
(with Meridee Stein)

Memoir:

The Last Good Freudian

Translation:

Lettera alla Madre,
by Edith Bruck

Critical Studies:

Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study

Blake's Prophetic Psychology

Edited:

Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher

After Auschwitz: A Love Story

© 2014 by Wings Press, for Brenda Webster

Cover image © 2013 by Guillermo Webster

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-60940-359-1

paperback original

ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-360-7

Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-361-4

Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-362-1

Wings Press

627 E. Guenther

San Antonio, Texas 78210

Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805

On-line catalogue and ordering:
www.wingspress.com

All Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by
Independent Publishers Group

www.ipgbook.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Webster, Brenda S.

After Auschwitz : a love story / Brenda Webster.. -- First Edition.

      pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-60940-359-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-360-7 (ePub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-361-4 (MobiPocket ebook) – ISBN 978-1-60940-362-1 (pdf)

1. Husband and wife--Fiction. 2. Diaries Authorship—Fiction. 3. Alzheimer's disease—Fiction. 4. World War, 1939-1945 Prisoners and prisons--Fiction. 5. Auschwitz (Concentration camp) Buildings--Fiction. 6. Holocaust survivors--Fiction.

      I. Title.

PS3573.E255 A69 2014

813'.54

2013038604

Thanks to Lisa who designed the yellow lettering on the cover.
And special thanks to Rose Webster for her help
and to Sari Friedman for her caring and careful proofing.

To my husband, Ira,
and my children Lisa, Michael and Rebecca,
who are always there for me.
I couldn't have written this
without your support and love.

H
annah's brother Eddie
used to dance with her when she was a child in their Romanian village, she told me, to make his wife jealous. Then, after the liberation of Auschwitz, when the war was over, Eddie pushed Hannah into an early marriage—so early it was ridiculous. She was only sixteen and had lived much of her short life in a death camp. Though she never admitted it, I got the feeling that she had been pregnant. Once Hannah was married, Eddie encouraged her to emigrate to Israel with him and their sister Leah. He painted a picture of the land of milk and honey. Instead, Hannah said, Israel became part of her nightmare. She and her boy-husband were housed in tin sheds, hot to the touch at midday, and after a week he was inducted into the army.

When she complained, Eddie and Leah were unsympathetic. Unlike Hannah, they had taken their dead mother's religion to Israel, clinging to it with ferocity. Naturally they expected Hannah to go along.

“I'm for peace,” she'd tell them. “That means I hate the violence on either side.” They shook their heads as if she were a
meshugeneh.

I was impressed by the very things her family hated, Hannah's evocations of her Romanian village life: the sled made from an old platter, the river, the surrounding forest, and especially their poverty—poverty her siblings were ashamed of, just as they were ashamed of the brutal expulsion by their Christian neighbors. Hannah didn't deny the expulsion; she talked freely about it, admitted how it hurt her, even how it was the source of her phobias—her “stuckness” as she still calls it—but she also talked about running wild in the woods, getting mud all over her second-best dress, and being slapped by her mother when she came back because she played with the boys as though she had a right to some freedom.

In 1959, fourteen years after the liberation of the death camps, Eddie had a heart attack on the boat from Israel to Rome, where he was going to visit Hannah. While he was
recovering, she tried to talk to him about their father's death. He wouldn't listen, couldn't talk about it. So instead she talked to me, lying with her head in my lap while I ran my fingers though her hair. I drew it out of her like a bee draining a flower.

I'll never forget the first time I saw her. She was chainsmoking, her blond plait down her back, thick and glossy. Her early marriage was over and she was surrounded by men. I say I'll never forget, but it's more accurate to say that it will be one of the last things to go when my memory is ultimately lost. I keep her photo in my pocket and take it out several times a day, communing.

It's easier to remember that Hannah than the one who sits at her typewriter, furiously typing day after day.

“Go away, Renzo,” she says. “I'm working. Later we'll walk. I'll fix you a
spagettino
—you'll like that won't you? You go now, work a little on your poems. No, really, let me work for a bit! Weren't you the one always urging me to write?”

She has the slightest smile. I can't tell. There might even be a touch of malice.

“Be careful what you wish for,” she says, smiling.

My poems are stillborn now. I lack the force to tie the isolated images together. Instead my thoughts flow easily to her at twenty with the blond braid and the blue eyes scanning my face, judging.

The year after she came to Rome there was a new documentary about the
Shoah
made by a friend of mine, a fellow director. I would gladly have gone alone but she insisted on coming too; she was always testing herself. Trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Towards the end of the film, or maybe it was the beginning, there was an image of a pile of men—so thin that at first they seemed to be rags. It took a
moment to make out the skeletal bones of hands or feet, bones barely covered with skin.

Suddenly, Hannah screamed and fell to the floor between the red velvet seats, tearing her hair. I dropped to my knees and put my arms around her, soothing her the way I would a heartbroken child. That night when we were lying in bed listening to the church chimes, she told me what had happened. Eddie and their father had been interned together. Eddie had gone out to work one day. When he got back their father wasn't in his bunk. Eddie finally found him in a pile of corpses. He said the prayer for the dead.

I held her while she cried. “I want to be close to you, Renzo,” she mumbled, burrowing into my shoulder like a small animal. “But you've never even seen a dead person. You live here in a
palazzo
on top of the world and talk about death, about misery … you know nothing.”

“A little,” I said. “I know a little. My mother was very sick when I was small. If every minute you are awake you are afraid of dying, doesn't that … and my sister …”

“It's not the same,” Hannah said.

“All right” I said. “I'm not going to argue about degrees of suffering.” I caressed her back and murmured, comforting her. I knew even then that this wasn't a casual affair. I wanted to care for Hannah, protect her, heal her. She lived in a state of nightmare. I wanted to wake her up. I hadn't been able to do that for my mother, when I was a boy watching her pain.

The funny thing about my memory now is that I don't remember in straight lines with dates. Only flashes like stars in a black sky. I'm not even sure if before and after matter. But if I relax and let images come, it cheers me and makes me feel less alone.

The night was warm. We drank champagne and the crowd spilled out onto the street. Israel came up, as it often did,
and someone, a woman, was defending the occupation of the West Bank as necessary. Hannah had had quite a bit to drink.

“You sound like a mother defending her child,” she said, flushing. “The Shoah doesn't give us the right to mistreat the Arabs.” She gave a bitter laugh. “But who am I to talk? My own family feels the way you do. They stare at me and roll their eyes as if I were mad. ‘Give away Jerusalem? Never—we have it, let's keep it. The land is sacred.'”

She is stronger than she looks, this girl. She of all people might strike out blindly vengeful: half her family killed. Mother, father, brothers. But she is without the slightest sentimentality and rejects hatred.

“Jerusalem is an image of safety that everyone wants but only some people get,” she says, her voice soft. I see the energy go out of her. Her walk slows, she leans on my arm, seems to get younger and younger as we walk home.

“Little one,” I say holding her close, “Piccina.” It is the same name I call her now even though I am the one who is weaker.

I started giving her baths one day when she'd been lying down with a bad headache. I thought it would relax her. She had so many physical symptoms left over from the camps.

What kind of a world do we have, where a twelve-year-old girl was made to drag corpses to a pit and throw them in?

Even the sound of the water was soothing, the steam, the fragrant bubbles making soft mounds in the tub—we were in our little bathroom, with its view of Borromini's cupola framed by sweet-smelling honeysuckle.

At first she resisted like a two-year-old wanting to do it herself, hands busy unbuttoning her blouse. I pushed her hands away.

“No,” I told her, “Let me do it.” I unzipped her skirt; it slipped down and fell to the tiled floor. I hung it on the brass hook next to her robe. Then I leaned over and tested the water.
“Perfect,” I said looking at her breasts, nipples hardening under my gaze. Slowly, like a sleepwalker, one elegant leg at a time, she entered the bath. How I loved her body, the breasts voluptuous, and all the rest—waist, hips, thighs—still girlish.

Though I was older, you mustn't think that we were like father and child. Hannah was strongly sexual; or rather sex was one of the ways she … by which she exerted her power. I think that in addition to wanting to help her and lull her, I felt I could possess her more thoroughly by bringing her back to childhood.