“I will see you very soon,” Papa assured us. “Lottchen, you will find someone who needs a willing worker. I can do anything, remember that-wait tables, haul wood or coal, play in a hotel orchestra.”
As the train pulled away I held the back of Hugo’s jacket and the two of us leaned out the window with all the other children, waving until Papa’s red scarf had turned to an invisible speck in our own eyes.
We had the usual fears all Kindertransport children report as we traveled through Austria and Germany, of the guards who tried to frighten us, of the searches through our luggage, standing very still while they looked for any valuables: we were allowed a single ten-mark piece each. I thought my heart would be visible through my dress, it was beating so hard, but they didn’t feel my clothes, and the gold coins traveled with me safely. And then we passed out of Germany into Holland, and for the first time since the Anschluss we were suddenly surrounded by warm and welcoming adults, who showered us with bread and meat and chocolates.
I don’t remember much of the crossing. We had a calm sea, I think, but I was so nervous that my stomach was twisted in knots even without any serious waves. When we landed we looked around anxiously for Minna in the crowd of adults who had come to meet the boat, but all the children were claimed and we were left standing on the dock. Finally a woman from the refugee committee showed up: Minna had left instructions for us to be sent on to London by train, but she had delayed getting word to the refugee committee until that morning. We spent the night in the camp at Harwich with the other children who had no sponsors, and went on to London in the morning. When we got to the station, to Liverpool Street -it was massive, we clung to each other while engines belched and loudspeakers bellowed incomprehensible syllables and people brushed past us on important missions. I clutched Hugo’s hand tightly.
Cousin Minna had sent a workman to fetch us, giving him a photograph against which he anxiously studied our faces. He spoke English, which we didn’t understand at all, or Yiddish, which we didn’t understand well, but he was pleasant, bustling us into a cab, pointing out the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, giving us each a bit of queer paste-filled sandwich in case we were hungry after our long trip.
It was only when we got to that narrow old house in the north of London that we found out Minna would take me and not Hugo. The man from the factory settled us in a forbidding front room, where we sat without moving, so fearful we were of making a noise or being a nuisance. After some very long time, Minna swept in from work, full of anger, and announced that Hugo was to go on, that the foreman from the glove factory would be coming for him in an hour.
“One child and one child only. I told her highness Madame Butterfly that when she wrote begging for my charity. She may choose to roll around in the hay with a Gypsy but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to look after her children.”
I tried to protest, but she said she could throw me out on the street. “Better be grateful to me, you little mongrels. I spent all day persuading the foreman to take Hugo instead of sending him to the child welfare authorities.”
The foreman, Mr. Nussbaum his name was, actually turned out to be a good foster father to Hugo; he even set him up in business many years later. But you can only guess how the two of us felt that day when he arrived to take Hugo away with him: the last sight either of us had then of any familiar face of our childhood.
Like the Nazi guards, Minna searched my clothes for valuables: she refused to believe the penury to which the family was reduced. Fortunately, my Oma had been clever enough to evade both Nazis and Minna. Those gold coins helped pay my fees in medical school, but that was a long way ahead, in a future I didn’t imagine as I sobbed for my parents and my brother.
X In the Mind Reader’s Lair
When I finally woke the next morning, my head was heavy with the detritus of dreams and difficult sleep. I once read that a year or eighteen months after losing them, you dream of your dead as they were in their prime. I suppose I must sometimes dream of my mother as she was in my childhood, vivid and intense, but last night she was dying, eyes heavy with morphine, face unrecognizable as disease had leached flesh from bone. Lotty and my mother are such intertwined strands in my mind that it was almost inevitable that her distress would overlay my sleep.
Morrell looked at me questioningly when I sat up. He had come in after I went to bed, but I was tossing, not sleeping. His impending departure made him feverishly nervous; we made love with a kind of frantic unsatisfying energy but fell asleep without talking. In the morning light he traced my cheekbones with his finger and asked if it was his leaving that had disturbed my sleep.
I gave a twisted smile. “My own stuff this time.” I gave him a brief synopsis of the previous day.
“Why don’t we go to Michigan for the weekend?” he said. “We both need a breather. You can’t do anything on a Saturday, anyway, and we can give each other better comfort away from all these people. I love Don like a brother, but having him here right now is a bit much. We’ll come back in time for Michael and Carl’s concert on Sunday.”
My muscles unknotted at the thought, and it sent me into the day with better energy than my tormented night warranted. After stopping at home to take the dogs for a swim, I drove into the West Loop to the Unblinking Eye, the camera and video place I use when only the best will do. I explained what I wanted to Maurice Redken, the technician I usually work with.
We ran my copy of the Channel 13 video through one of their machines, watching Radbuka’s naked face as he went through the torments of his life. When he said, “My Miriam, where is my Miriam? I want my Miriam,” the camera was right in his face. I froze the image there and asked Maurice to make prints of that and a couple of other close-ups for me. I was hoping Rhea Wiell would introduce me to Radbuka, but if she didn’t, the stills would help Mary Louise and me track him down.
Maurice promised to have both the stills and three copies of the tape ready for me by the day’s end. It wasn’t quite ten-thirty when we finished. There wasn’t time for me to go to my office before Don’s appointment with Rhea Wiell, but I could walk the two miles from the Eye to Water Tower if I didn’t dawdle-I hate paying Gold Coast parking fees.
Water Tower Place is a shopping mecca on North Michigan, a favorite drop-off place for tour buses from small Midwestern towns as well as an oasis for local teens. Threading my way through girls whose pierced navels showed below their cropped T-shirts and women pushing expensive baby buggies overflowing with packages, I found Don leaning against the back entrance. He was so engrossed in his book he didn’t look up when I stopped next to him. I squinted to read the spine: Hypnotic Induction and Suggestion: an Introductory Manual.
“Does this tell you how Ms. Wiell does it?” I asked.
He blinked and closed the book. “It tells me that blocked memories really can be accessed through hypnosis. Or at least the authors claim so. Fortunately I only have to see if Wiell has a sellable book in her, not sort out whether her therapy is legitimate. I’m going to introduce you as an investigator who may help collect background data if Wiell and the publisher come to terms. You can say anything you like.”
He looked at his watch and fished a cigarette from his breast pocket. Although he’d changed clothes, into a pressed open-necked shirt and a tweed jacket, he still looked half-asleep. I took the book on hypnotic induction while Don lit his cigarette. Broadly speaking, hypnosis seemed to be used in two main ways: suggestive hypnosis helped people break bad habits, and insight or exploratory hypnosis helped them understand themselves better. Recovering memories was only one small part of using hypnosis in therapy.
Don pinched off the glowing end of his cigarette and put the stub back in his pocket. “Time to go, Ms. Warshawski.”
I followed him into the building. “This book could help you end that expensive habit for good.”
He stuck out his tongue at me. “I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands if I quit.”
We went behind a newsstand o
n the ground floor, in a dark alcove which held the elevators to the office floor. It wasn’t exactly secret, just out of the way enough to keep the shopping hordes from straying there by mistake. I studied the tenant board. Plastic surgeons, endodontists, beauty salons, even a synagogue. What an odd combination.
“I called over to the Jane Addams School, as you suggested,” Don said abruptly when we were alone on an elevator. “First I couldn’t find anyone who knew Wiell-she did her degree fifteen years ago. But when I started talking about the hypnotherapy, the department secretary remembered. Wiell was married then, used her husband’s name.”
We got off the elevator and found ourselves at a point where four long corridors came together. “What did they think of her at UIC?” I asked.
He looked at his appointment book. “I think we go right here. There’s some jealousy-a suggestion she was a charlatan, but when I pushed it seemed to stem from the fact that social work had made her rich-doesn’t happen to too many people, I gather.”
We stopped in front of a blond door with Wiell’s name and professional initials painted on it. I felt a tingle from the idea that this woman might read my mind. She might know me better than I knew myself. Was that where hypnotic suggestibility got its start? The urgent desire to be understood so intimately?
Don pushed the door open. We were in a tiny vestibule with two shut doors and a third one that was open. This led to a waiting room, where a sign invited us to sit down and relax. It added that all cell phones and pagers should be turned off. Don and I obediently pulled out our phones. He switched his off, but mine had run down again without my noticing.
The waiting room was decorated with such attention to comfort that it even held a carafe of hot water and a selection of herbal teas. New Age music tinkled softly; padded chairs faced a four-foot-high fish tank built into the far wall. The fish seemed to rise and fall in time to the music.
“What do you think this setup costs?” Don was trying the other two doors. One turned out to be a bathroom; the other was locked.
“I don’t know-installing it took a bundle, but looking after it wouldn’t take too much. Except for the rent, of course. The nicotine in your system is keeping you awake. These fish are putting me to sleep.”
He grinned. “You’re going to sleep, Vic: when you wake up-”
“It isn’t like that, although people are always nervous at first and imagine the television version.” The locked door had opened and Rhea Wiell appeared behind us. “You’re from the publishing company, aren’t you?”
She seemed smaller in person than she had on television, but her face held the same serenity I’d noticed on screen. She was dressed as she had been on camera, in soft clothes that flowed like an Indian mystic’s.
Don shook her hand, unembarrassed, and introduced both of us. “If you and I decide to work together, Vic may help with some of the background checking.”
Wiell stood back to let us pass in front of her into her office. It, too, was designed to put us at ease, with a reclining chair, a couch, and her own office chair all covered in soft green. Her diplomas hung behind her desk: the MSW from the Jane Addams School of Social Work, a certificate from the American Institute of Clinical Hypnosis, and her Illinois license as a psychiatric social worker.
I perched on the edge of the recliner while Don took the couch. Wiell sat in her office chair, her hands loosely crossed in her lap. She looked like Jean Simmons in Elmer Gantry.
“When we saw you on Channel Thirteen the other night, I immediately realized you had a very powerful story to tell, you and Paul Radbuka,” Don said. “You must have thought about putting it into a book before I called, hadn’t you?”
Wiell smiled faintly. “Of course I’ve wanted to: if you saw the whole program, then you’re aware that my work is-misunderstood-in a number of circles. A book validating the recovery of blocked trauma would be enormously useful. And Paul Radbuka’s story would be unusual enough-powerful enough-to force people to pay serious attention to the issue.”
Don leaned forward, chin on his clasped hands. “I’m new to the subject-my first exposure came two nights ago. I’ve been cramming hard, reading a manual on hypnotic suggestion, looking at articles about you, but I’m definitely not up to speed.”
She nodded. “Hypnosis is only one part of a total therapeutic approach, and it’s controversial because it isn’t understood very well. The field of memory, what we remember, how we remember, and maybe most interestingly why we remember-none of that is really known right now. The research seems exciting to me, but I’m not a scientist and I don’t pretend to have the time to follow experimental work in depth.”
“Would your book focus exclusively on Paul Radbuka?” I asked.
“Since Don-I hope you don’t mind my using your first name?-Don called yesterday, I’ve been thinking it over; I believe I should use some other case histories, as well, to show that my work with Paul isn’t-well, the kind of fly-by-night treatment that Planted Memory therapists like to claim.”
“What do you see as the book’s central point?” Don patted his jacket pocket reflexively, then pulled out a pen in lieu of his half-smoked cigarette.
“To show that our memories are reliable. To show the difference between planted memories and genuine ones. I began going through my patient files last night after I finished work and found several people whose histories would make this point quite strongly. Three had complete amnesia about their childhoods when they started therapy. One had partial memories, and two had what they thought were continuous memories, although therapy unlocked new insights for them. In some ways it’s most exciting to uncover memories for someone who has amnesia, but the harder work is verifying, filling in gaps for people who have some recall.”
Don interrupted to ask if there was some way to verify memories that were uncovered in treatment. I expected Wiell to become defensive, but she responded quite calmly.
“That’s why I earmarked these particular cases. For each of them there is at least one other person, a witness to their childhood, who can corroborate what came up in here. For some it’s a brother or sister. In one case it’s a social worker; for two, there are primary-school teachers.”
“We’d have to get written permission.” Don was making notes. “For the patients and for their verifiers. Witnesses.”
She nodded again. “Of course their real identities would be carefully concealed, not just to protect themselves but to protect family members and colleagues who could be harmed by such narratives. But, yes, we’ll get written permission.”
“Are these other patients also Holocaust survivors?” I ventured.
“Helping Paul was an incredible privilege.” A smile lit her face with a kind of ecstatic joy, so intense, so personal, that I instinctively shrank back on the recliner away from her. “Most of my clients are dealing with terrible traumas, to be sure, but within the context of this culture. To get Paul to that point, to the point of being a little boy speaking broken German with his helpless playmates in a concentration camp, was the most powerful experience of my life. I don’t even know how we can do it justice in print.” She looked at her hands, adding in a choked voice, “I think he’s recently recovered a fragment of memory of witnessing his mother’s death.”
“I’ll do my best for you,” Don muttered. He, too, had shifted away from her.
“You said you’d be concealing people’s real identities,” I said. “So is Paul Radbuka not his real name?”
The ecstasy left Wiell’s face, replaced again by her patina of professional calm. “He’s the one person who doesn’t seem to have any living family left to be upset by his revelations. Besides, he’s so intensely proud of his newly recovered identity that it would be impossible to persuade him to use a cover name.”
“So you’ve discussed it with him?” Don asked eagerly. “He’s willing to take part?”
“I haven’t had time to talk about it with any of my patients.” She smiled faintly. “You only broach
ed the idea yesterday, after all. But I know how intensely Paul feels: it’s why he insisted on speaking up at the Birnbaum conference earlier this week. I think, too, he’d do anything he could to support my work, because it’s changed his life so dramatically.”
“How did he come to remember the name Radbuka?” I said. “If he was raised by this foster father from the age of four and wrenched from his birth family in infancy-have I got that chronology right?”
Wiell shook her head at me. “I hope your role isn’t to try to set traps for me, Ms. Warshawski. If it is, I’ll have to look for a different publisher than Envision Press. Paul found some papers in his father’s desk-his foster father, I should say-and they pointed the way to his birth name for him.”
“I wasn’t trying to set a trap, Ms. Wiell. But it would certainly strengthen the book if we could get some outside corroboration of his Radbuka identity. And it’s remotely possible that I am in a position to provide that. To be candid, I have friends who came to England from central Europe with the Kindertransport in the last months before the war began. Apparently one of their group of special friends in London was named Radbuka. If it turns out your client is a relation, it might mean a great deal, both to him and to my friends who lost so many family members.”
Again the rapturous smile swept across her face. “Ah, if you can introduce him to his relatives, that would be an indescribable gift to Paul. Who are these people? Do they live in England? How do you know them?”
“I know two of them who live here in Chicago; the third is a musician who’s visiting from London for a few days. If I could talk to your client-”
Total Recall Page 9