After Auschwitz: A Love Story

by Brenda Webster

  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.

  Hannah’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 an
d 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.

  Looking at her, I wondered, not for the first time, whether she had been raped in the camps. But she said no. A young soldier had mocked her, spit on her, said that if she were a little older he would have taken her to bed, but no, no rape. I took the red washcloth off its peg and kneeling beside the tub, gently rubbed her back, her shoulders. She lifted her legs one after the other and I ran the cloth over them.

  “Did your mother ever do this?” I asked.

  She snorted. “I could never have imagined such a thing—with eight children to care for! Besides, we had no running water except what fell on us from the sky, dripping or pouring from the thatch of our hut. Sometimes we collected it in whatever bowl or tub came to hand or went down to the river with buckets. If it was winter we’d have to break through the ice.”

  “You sound angry. If it’s at me, I’m sorry if I offended you.”

  “It’s not you. It’s not even the hut and its leaky thatch. It just reminds me of my mother—so infuriatingly accepting of everything. For instance, she always said it was impossible to feed so many mouths. Then one day I saw from her swollen belly that she was pregnant again. ‘What?’ I said, ‘I thought we were too many already.’”

  “‘Shhh. It’s God’s will,’ mother said. But I had grown up on the farm watching animals in rut. ‘I thought you slept with Papa,’ I answered, and she slapped me across the mouth. So where was God that he didn’t see how it was with us?”

  Hannah sighed and slipped lower in the tub. I reached for the end of her blond plait, undid it and washed her hair, scratching her scalp, turning her head from side to side.

  One of the cats slipped into the bathroom. The big black one—her favorite (she had five)—stood on its hind feet and peered into the tub, quizzical.

  “I’ll never have children,” she told me soon after she moved into my apartment on Corso Vittorio near the river. I’d had two wives but no children. Now that I’d found a woman I thought I could stay with, I would have liked to have children, but Hannah was adamant. “How could I bring up a child? Tell him about the camps? Make him drunk on the milk of Auschwitz? I see what happens to my sister’s children. How fearful they are without knowing why. My cats are enough. My cats and you….” She lurched up in the tub and grabbed at my arm.

  “You’re getting soap all over me,” I laughed, but she didn’t let go, looking at me with green glinting mermaid eyes. “I shouldn’t let you care for me this way. It’s too good. Too much what I want. What if you leave me?”

  “I won’t,” I murmur. “Why do you tell yourself sad stories? The nightmare is over. Let yourself trust.”

  “I’ve lost everything—my language, my family. I can’t lose you.”

  “Stop it. Stop yourself. It’s over now.” I found myself shaking her. My hands holding her shoulders covered with soap.

  “Our neighbor offered me a place to hide,” she went on, holding the thread of her memory. “In her cellar. But my mother wouldn’t think of letting me go. She stood rubbing her hands on her apron and looking up at the sky, waiting for a sign while God spit on her.”

  “You’re so angry.” I pulled her even closer, ignoring the water soaking my clothes. “But still you sleep with a piece of your mother’s embroidered apron beneath your pillow.” She nodded. It was all she had left. I didn’t tell her then, but I had a plan to frame that scrap of mother love and surprise her by hanging it above her desk.

  The irony is that I couldn’t stand the burden. I stood it for many years and I can’t say they were unhappy years, but it was too much—to be there, to be always available to her. Always soothing, helping. Twenty years of married care. It was too much. I felt mean, small, but I couldn’t respond anymore to the endless physical ailments. I didn’t only have to sympathize, I had to talk her down. So brave as a child but now always fearful, lost in the streets in front of our house, expecting cancer, heart attacks. She had fears about losing our apartment, fears about travel. Once she had to get off the train when we were going for a preview of one of my films.

  I’m not sure when it started with Claudia. At first it was sort of a joke. When I was making my film, Journey into Madness, about a schizophrenic girl, the actress I had cast as the therapist had no breasts, but my dentist’s wife Claudia’s were superb. I asked Claudia to double in a few key shots and she was just vain enough to let me display her body. Or maybe she was impressed that I was a famous director.

  One of my films had just won an Academy Award for best foreign film of the year. I now had the unexpected luxury of being able to make whatever films I wanted. I wrote a script about a girl who is in crisis after a terrible automobile accident. When she is brought to the hospital, she is in a near-catatonic state, unable to move or speak; wrapped in mummy bandages, no longer struggling. Only if you looked closely you could see the skin of her mouth quiver. A Picasso world where eyes, noses, teeth hung crazily, known but unrecognized. And all seen in a glaring light making everything shiny and smooth. Metallic voices. Words without meaning spoken by puppets. No warmth anywhere.

  Her parents visit and seem just as frozen. Rich, spoiled people who couldn’t be bothered. Blind to her suffering. Making social chitchat with her doctors. Too bad she couldn’t be like her younger sister, they simper, a perfect, beautiful, gifted child.

  I had a perfect sibling too. Although of course I loved my brother, he always outclassed me; he was always more handsome, humble, modest, and appealing. Despite my successes in writing and directing, my brother
was always my mother’s favorite.

  So I put my heart into this film. I was daring. I wanted to convert the girl’s inner world to something an audience could experience. I wanted to make them see the sudden shifts. Frame 1: A child plays in the schoolyard. She is looking at the fence. Seeing it with the exactness of a camera. Frame 2: But now she doesn’t recognize it. The singing children become prisoners. She cries in anguish. The school grows immense, and presses against her. The children are like ants. She shakes the grating, trying to get out.

  I needed to show how the strangeness descends on the girl. Children are skipping rope. Suddenly one grows large as a lion, her features distorted. One, two, buckle my shoe. The girl is like Alice in a more dangerous Wonderland. Sometimes she fights the distortions, but more often she thinks of succumbing to what she calls the System, feels as if she is whirling on an infinite plane, crushed by the pitiless light. She wanders lost in an astral cold, terrified. She feels that if she sinks far enough into the System, she will stop feeling terror. I use painters to help me imagine her world: Dali with his bleak planes and distorted objects.

  While I was shooting the film, I thought of my mother unable to bear any more of her voices as she was dragged deeper and deeper into her madness.

  I thought of Hannah, too, making my own connections between the Gestapo guards and the elaborate punitive rules imposed on the schizophrenic girl by the System. Hannah described the inventive cruelty of the concentration camp matrons and the rage they inspired. The girl in my film has similar rages which I imagined in red tumor-like shapes, cancerous flowers, huge red mouths pulsing with the desire to eat, white stamens stark against the red like a Bosch painting. Some shapes with legs and arms kicking or striking. Some in the act of swallowing.

  “I hate everyone,” the girl says. “I want to blow up the world. Steal people’s brains and leave them as robots obedient to my will.” Her psychiatrist sits beside her, arm lightly around her shoulders and for the first time the frozen nature of things begins to thaw; she feels warmth. The therapist’s breasts became crucial to the character’s development and the relationship between the girl and her therapist in the film: big soft breasts that you could sink into like a pillow. Lying with her head on her therapist’s breasts and pretending to nurse, the girl gradually recovers.