Rosa's Child (17 page)

Inevitably, there continued to be many times when Susi felt great bitterness, for she had been abused and her whole life overshadowed by a stifling possessiveness against which she felt powerless. When, all these years later, she had finally discovered that her mother had ended her days in Auschwitz, she felt as if she had been violated all over again.

It often sent a shiver down Susi's spine to think that she had escaped from the horrors of the Holocaust by a hair's breadth, and she was haunted by the thought of those children from the Antonienheim who were never to join a Kindertransport. Most haunting of all was the image of Rosa being herded into the gas chamber and, amid a struggling mass of defenceless humanity, being overcome by noxious fumes. And Rosa Bechhöfer was but one of two million to die in that hell.

In Susi's mind there persisted an indissoluble link between her mother's fate and her own. For had her mother not been abused too, in the vilest imaginable way? And she herself had wanted to lash out, to inflict harm, to exact revenge on the Reverend Mann whenever and wherever an opportunity arose. Yet here was Miss Weston, well-intentioned but ignorant of the facts, like so many others before her, urging her to be grateful. Let the Reverend be grateful, Susi seethed: grateful that he had never been reported to the police.

True, it helped to confront her father as she eventually did, yet it could not at one stroke exorcise all the years of anger. Susi had a lot more pain to go through - for anger is always painful - before she achieved the radical shift in perspective that she had by now realized was unavoidable. The key lay in taking power over her own life:

I came to the conclusion that I no longer wished to remain a victim for ever. I also realized that I had to take a measure of responsibility for my own behaviour too; that it's just not good enough to attribute anything and everything that might not have worked out in your life to another person. I think because of all the other things that were going on in the home, though, it has taken a long time to appreciate that his was also the hand that fed and clothed me, and that opening their door to us twins was an extraordinarily noble thing to do. It's all too easy to look the other way when confronted with suffering. But the Manns chose not to. I have also been helped in this process of reconciliation by my adoptive father's unambiguous acknowledgement of what he did to me. And I have come to sense his very real sorrow and shame. So I have finally been able and willing to offer the hand of peace and forgiveness. And as I did so I wondered why I had wasted so many years being angry with him, hurting myself in the process too. Why had I not done this a long time before?

'We went into a lot of detail when we met recently,' explained the Reverend Mann, 'as a result of which she said two very significant things. Firstly that she wanted to put the past behind us. And, more important still, I finally heard the words that I had been hoping to hear for a good many years, "I forgive you." My heart gave one huge leap.'

After so many painful years - years of denial, of anger, of rebuffing contact - Susi had at last acquired the strength to extend the hand of forgiveness, and to understand its value. And yet making her peace with the man who had brought her suffering along with the stability she now acknowledged, had by no means been the most significant achievement for Susi.

The most important piece of the whole jigsaw was to have found out the truth about my mother, and in so doing about myself. Even though what I found was more horrific than anything I had ever imagined. In my life that remains I will always have her in my heart. So how can I feel anything other than delight that I went on that voyage of discovery? Because at least now I know who I am.

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