Let Me Go (8 page)

During those days we lived in utter chaos. Was there any solidarity? Certainly there was, but there was no sentimentality. Hunger had abolished all rules, all principles. If you had to steal to get hold of a bit of food, then you did: everyone, even the children and the old people.

One evening my brave grandfather by marriage risked his life at Anhalt station to steal a sack of dried peas. He shot without hesitation—and he a law-abiding man—at the legs of a man who had come after him. He had violated the
Sperrstunde,
the curfew imposed by the Allies. Anyone found on the streets of Berlin after a certain hour was shot on sight by the intransigent military police.

But the people of Berlin were survivors, which is why,
Sperrstunde
or no, they were forever in search of something, mostly food.

Once the catastrophe was over, the women of Berlin— I can bear witness to them above all—got busy clearing the streets of rubble and consoling and encouraging those returning, drained and exhausted, from Hitler's war.

SHE HAS DOZED OFF. She has leaned her head against the back of the armchair and gone to sleep like that, without having shown any sign of tiredness.

I look at her, my old mother, whom I'm seeing for the second time in half a century, and in spite of it all I can't help feeling an impulse of tenderness.

She sleeps motionlessly, her breath barely perceptible, looking unbearably defenseless and forlorn. A new thought pierces me, followed by an attack of anxiety. One day she will go to sleep like this, silent and vulnerable, never to reawaken, and I will be far away. Perhaps someone will inform me by telegram, by the time she's already underground. I feel a pang. She's still my mother, and when she goes, a part of me will go with her. But which part? I can't find an answer to that.

"Look at her—she's like a child," Eva whispers to me.

"Yes," I murmur in reply, "a little shadow."

"You mustn't torment her," my cousin adds, "I don't know what got into you."

"I don't know either. She provokes me somehow. She irritates me, and at the same time I'm moved by her. I'm so confused."

At that moment my mother wakes up, looks around with frightened eyes, and when she sees me mumbles with relief, "Ah, you're still here." She yawns. "What were we talking about?"

I avoid reminding her about the inmate she sent to the brothel in Buchenwald, and say, "Why don't you tell me something about yourself? How do you spend your days, for example?"

She runs a hand over her forehead.

"I stopped doing it in Birkenau," she announces, as hough to justify herself for something she mentioned earlier.

"Stopped doing what in Birkenau?" I can't help asking, despite my good intentions a moment before.

"Tying women to tables."

She angles her head, but I have time to see her eyes: Are they really misted with tears—or is it just my determi-lation to grasp at the merest hint of regret?

She leans forward once again and grips my hands before I can do anything to stop her.

"You mustn't think I was acting on my own initiative," she says quickly, revealing a hint of concern. Her hands, so cold and bony, fill me with a sense of unease.

"What are you talking about?" Her proximity disturbs me. I free myself from her grip with an almost hysterical gesture. I feel relieved, while she stares at her hands as though someone had just taken away something she was holding.

"I'm talking . . . about Birkenau," she replies slowly and uncertainly.

"You said you weren't acting on your own initiative," I suggest.

"Oh, yes! That's it . . . . I mean . . . the fact that I treated them strictly."

"Who?"

"The prisoners on my block. I couldn't treat them with kid gloves, could I?" She smiles, in search of agreement.

I nod mechanically.

"I had orders to treat them with extreme harshness," she crows, "and I made them spit blood."

The mask she was wearing a moment before slips from her face; all concern vanishes.

"I'm talking about those idlers who worked in the munitions factories—you know the ones? They were always tired and difficult, and at night they whined for the children they had lost along the way."

She adds with enthusiasm, "I put a rocket under them!" And she immediately continues as though explaining a technical term. "It's military slang. That's what they used to say. Putting a rocket under someone meant working them to death."

She stares at me, her expression as it was before.

"They needed discipline, you know? Those Jewish whores had to understand where they were and above all why. And there was only one way of doing that—discipline, harsh and inflexible discipline. That's the secret if you want to maintain control of a camp."

I look at you, Mother, and I feel a terrible lacerating rift within me: between the instinctive attraction for my own blood and the irrevocable rejection of what you have been, of what you still are.

THAT'S ENOUGH, I tell myself, you've come here to see her one last time, to try to ensure that it ends well. I try to smile at her, but my lips are set in a rigid grimace, hard as concrete. The demon returns to drive me onward. Why not give in to it?

What was the food like for the guards in Birkenau?

While she was acting the incorruptible SS woman, my brother and I were suffering from the most terrible hunger. After 1944, food supplies for the ordinary German population had almost entirely dried up. They ate bread made with rapeseed; they ground tree-bark and acorns to make flour—which gave you a terrible stomachache—or gulped down terrifying soups made of nettles.

"Were you short of food?" I ask. Eva casts me a disappointed glance, and my mother cackles. The question seems to amuse her.

"We had everything," she boasts, "the comrades made sure we wanted for nothing: real coffee, salami, butter, Polish vodka, cigarettes, scented soap. We had silk stockings and real champagne, although only at Christmas."

Your comrades, Mother. After more than half a century, you still talk of them with such a sense of solidarity, with such undying deference.

"I was an absolute bookworm, for example," she continues animatedly, "and the comrades, when they came back from Berlin, always brought me something interesting to read." She straightens herself up proudly. "I wasn't one of those who read only popular newspapers like some of my comrades, no, I read important books, you know? And that reading helped me to relax before going to sleep. After all, I was a human being, wasn't I?"

I can't contain myself: "How could you go to sleep knowing that thousands of corpses were burning only a few yards away?"

I don't need to look at Eva to feel her sad eyes upon me. But it's done now.

My mother, in turn, replies almost contemptuously.

"I never suffered from insomnia in Birkenau. And anyway I've already told you, I'd been strictly trained. I couldn't permit myself to . . . " But then a strange thing happens: Her jaw begins to tremble. It's a grotesque, piteous spectacle.

She presses her lips together tightly in an attempt to stop the trembling, but rather than diminishing, it grows; it becomes uncontrollable; it alters her features. Now her face is both helpless and contorted with rage.

"The ones who were burned were just scum," she announces contemptuously. "Germany had to get rid of every last
Stilck,
every last member of that wretched race."

"And did you support that?"

"What? Did I support the Final Solution? Why do you think I was there? For a holiday?"

She laughs, but her jaw is still trembling.

"Didn't you even feel sony for the children?" I ask. I don't dare meet Eva's eye.

"And why should I have?" she replies promptly. "A Jewish child would have become a Jewish adult, and Germany had to free itself of that loathsome race—how many times do I have to repeat that?"

I take a deep breath.

"But you were a mother," I object, "you had two children. While the children were being driven into the gas chambers, didn't you ever think about us?"

"What's that got to do with it?"

"I mean . . . didn't it ever occur to you that if we'd been Jewish children we'd have faced the same fate?"

"My children were Aryan!" she exclaims, outraged. "The Aryans had nothing to fear. My children were perfect, and no one would have touched a hair on their heads!"

Are you really sure about that? Do you really think that we Aryan children had a comfortable place in Hitler's greater Germany? When, for example, in February 1943, Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels announced the imposition of severe emergency restrictions, do you think that Aryan children would have been exempted?

As for not touching a hair on our heads, fine, they didn't send us into the gas chambers, but they did starve us appallingly: At night we dreamed of potatoes. And I had to confront all that without you. Because you weren't there; you had delegated your role as a mother to others so that you could follow your own path.

Even in 1971 when I came to see you in Vienna with my son, not for a minute did you try to recover the time we had lost or reestablish any kind of relationship with me: You tried to get me to wear your SS uniform.

And today, once again, I haven't had so much as a spark of genuine maternal warmth from you.

I look at you and I remember the slender diary that my paternal grandmother gave me shortly before she died. My father had placed it in her hands, and she wanted to give it to me. From those pages I understood that Papa had never forgotten you, even though you had broken his heart. He had never forgotten you, in spite of pretty young Ursula, the girl "of good family" whom he had married the second time around.

And I have never managed to erase you from my life either.

"NO ONE WOULD have touched a hair on your heads." We're still on that topic.

"During the war, didn't you ever wonder what had become of your children?" I've had that question inside me for so long. As I ask it, I notice with relief that her jaw is no longer trembling.

She looks at me vacantly.

"The war . . ." she repeats dreamily. "In Birkenau I didn't even notice it. I had so many things to do."

She pushes back her hair.

"But then the Russians came." Her face becomes animated again. "It was in January . . . yes, it was cold."

The memory comes into focus. "The Russians arrived and treated us like criminals." Her voice is stung with outrage. "They threatened us with guns and forced us to take off our uniform jackets."

She automatically makes the gesture of taking off her jacket.

"They wanted to see the inside of our arms," she goes on, "to check if we had tattoos showing our blood group."

Her teeth squeak strangely as she laughs.

"The SS women didn't have the tattoo, you see?" She pulls back the sleeve of her jacket and reveals her arm. "You see, no tattoo." What I see is her wrinkled and alarmingly white skin.

"But we put on the uniform," she repeats, growing more and more tearful, more and more senile, "we guards had SS uniforms. One comrade tried to be clever and said to the Russians, pointing at her uniform,
'Odolzhat! Odolzhat!'
She wanted them to think she'd borrowed it. But the Russians beat her, shouting
'Lguna!'Liar,
that's what they said."

She wipes away a tear. "We were separated, men from women. We were sad. The men shouted
'Heil Hitler'
from their truck, and the Russians beat them with their rifle butts, but some of them shouted
'Heil Hitler!'
anyway, putting their lives at risk."

I'M DISTRACTED. My thoughts return to the victims, to all the stories I know, the stories I've read or been told. I also think, Mother, that it's only by hating you that I could finally tear myself away from you. But I can't. I can't get that far.

I've got to get back to her. She's noticed my detachment, and she's demanding attention.

"Why have you stopped talking?" she asks sulkily.

I feel tired and disappointed. By now I'm close to resignation. She's gone. I've seen her for the last time. I can start to bring this meeting to an end. I look at the clock.

"I still have so many questions to ask you," I say prudently, "but I can see it's getting late. Soon you'll have to go to lunch and we—"

"Ask, ask away," she says quickly, with a hint of anxiety.

"Let's talk about your health," I suggest. "What do they do to you here? Do they give you any kind of treatment?"

"Just ask about Birkenau," she pleads. "Because that's what you're interested in, isn't it?"

Her expression is knowing and alert once again. Another of those astonishingly sudden changes of hers.

Nonetheless, I try to keep to the direction I've set myself.

"Talk to me about you," I insist. "So, do they give you any treatment? What do they give you?"

"I imagine Fräulein Inge will already have told you what they give me," she cuts me short. "Pills and syrups, that's what. And I'm not actually convinced that they do any good. They want to improve my memory, but what good is it to me?" And she adds astutely, "Everything I want to remember I always find in the usual place, and the rest doesn't interest me."

There's a moment of silence, and then she gives me an encouraging smile. "So? Don't you want to know more about Birkenau?"

Now that she's pressing me, I realize that I've run out of questions. But I do feel a faint sense of anxiety at the thought of our imminent separation.

"What are you thinking about?" she asks solicitously, almost sweetly. She leans forward and grips my hands again.

But I don't want to make her the gift of my confusion and fall back on one of those stories that have recently crowded into my mind. It was told to me by the protagonist himself.

"I was thinking about someone I know . . ."

"Who?" This time she's the one who looks me straight in the eyes, and I'm forced to avert my gaze.

"A friend," I reply.

"Why were you thinking about him?"

"He was deported to Auschwitz at the age of eighteen; he was castrated." And I quickly free my hands from hers.