Suddenly, Anna says, she found herself on the platform, in the town where she grew up. What if someone recognized her? Sure enough, a man spotted her, yelled at her, called her a Jew. She had to act quickly. That man, she told one of the German soldiers, is harassing me just because I’m a girl. The German soldier didn’t hesitate. He confronted the man and told him that he had better stop or he would be shot.
Fräulein Anna had escaped detection once again.
She spent the rest of the war in Memmingen, primarily working as a translator for a construction company that was using Allied POWs from a nearby stalag as forced labor. Within three weeks of Germany’s formal surrender on May 7, 1945, Anna went to the local office and emerged with a new I.D. card and her old identity. Anna Prokopowitsch, having served her purpose, ceased to exist; in her place stood the reborn Anna Schlajn, of Radziwillow.
She was just twenty-one.
Her words came back to me, the ones she used in describing her angry reaction when Mom had told her to stop driving Tillie to Eloise:
I’m too strong. I’m too strong. When I want to do something, I do it.
She saw the major in Germany after the war, she says. He was dying of cancer. She told him she was Jewish. He said he always suspected. Whether he did or not, they agreed on this: She was more valuable to him alive than dead.
I had read the history books, but I wanted a first-hand account of what Anna hadn’t seen, to hear what she hadn’t heard, so I go to the Shoah Foundation’s archives at the University of Southern California, repository of 50,000 videotaped interviews with Holocaust witnesses, including one who had survived the Radziwillow massacre of May 29, 1942.
Bella Kron was sixteen when the Nazis came for her and her family. She waited for her turn to die, as the killing squads lined up their victims on wooden planks across the open pits, seven at a time, and shot them. On the videotaped interview, made in 1996, her voice shakes so much from her Parkinson’s that she is difficult to understand at times, and when she describes the massacre itself, she sobs so violently that her words become incomprehensible, just like the events she witnessed, until she is unable to say anything at all. She doubles over, presses her fists into her eye sockets so hard that her knuckles turn white. I can hardly bear watching, her pain is so great. She apologizes to the interviewer, saying she rarely speaks about what she saw. “Too hard,” she says. “Please forgive me.”
She wants to tell her story, though, she wants to be understood, and she knows that the Parkinson’s is slurring her words, these precious words that she wants to leave behind on tape so that others will know what happened in Radziwillow that day. As she stood with her mother and her eleven-year-old sister, Rivka, at the edge of the pit, her mother shoved her two daughters, shoved them hard, yelled at them to run. She and Rivka began sprinting, the bullets missed, and the girls kept going, kept running, all the way to Brody. Later, Rivka was shot trying to flee the Brody ghetto. “I had such a big family,” Bella said to the interviewer. “I was alone.”
Such a big family. I was alone. Anna’s words, too.
Bella hid in the cornfields outside town—“like a wild animal,” she said—and survived through a series of lucky breaks and lies she told as she made her way toward the Russian front. Eventually, she was captured and ended up at a military hospital, where a doctor suggested that she stay on after her recovery. He put her to work as a nurse. That was just part of her journey, a journey that lasted until the Soviets chased the last Nazi forces out of Ukraine in October 1944.
“To tell you everything,” she told the interviewer, “takes days.”
Watching Bella Kron reinforces my feeling about the gulf between Anna’s life and my mother’s. You could say that Mom had escaped the Holocaust because her parents had left Radziwillow a generation earlier, driven away by pogroms and enticed by the prospect of a better life in America. Did Anna, at some level, resent Mom’s good fortune? Did Mom, consciously or not, look at Anna and resent her moral superiority?
Despite their differences, though, these two women also shared a bond: Growing up thousands of miles apart, destined to meet, they both had reinvented themselves to survive. Anna shed her deception, but her experience defined her and shaped her worldview. Mom never shed her secret, and it also defined her. She did what she had to do.
I suspect that Mom never intended for her secret to last a lifetime. Most of the time, we make a decision based on the circumstances at a particular moment, in a particular context; we rarely think about the long-term consequences, or if we do, we tell ourselves, don’t worry, circumstances change, nothing is forever, I’ll think about that later. In this case, however, once Mom created and began keeping the secret, she became stuck with it. Why? What made it so difficult for her to let it go?
{ SIXTEEN }
Abandoned
Mom-in-waiting: Spring 1945, seven months pregnant
I grab myself a bowl of cereal, and sit down with the morning Free Press. It’s late December 1970, and I’m home for the holidays during my freshman year of college, my first return visit. The night before, Dad went off to bed while Mom and I stayed up to talk, just like the old days. She wanted to know everything—room, classes, food, friends, professors, weather—and it was after midnight when I finally said I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. Mom always sleeps later than I do, and this morning’s no different, but she appears at the kitchen counter in the middle of my second bowl.
“Have a banana,” Mom says, peeling one.
“No, thanks,” I say, without lifting my eyes from the paper.
“No banana?” Something odd in her voice makes me glance at her. She looks sad enough to cry. “You always had a banana on your cereal,” she says. “I don’t even know what you like to eat anymore.”
Pain and the mundane often go together.
That’s the thought that pops into my head as I pull into the parking lot of Botsford Memorial Hospital on a windblown June morning, my laptop in my backpack and a notarized letter in my pocket, authorizing the hospital to let me examine Mom’s medical records. I’m looking for buried treasure, or at least clues as to why Mom decided to mention Annie to Dr. Hazan at their first meeting in 1995.
Walking the path from the parking lot to the entrance gives me this feeling of traveling back in time. The scene outside looks unchanged from that August day in 1999 when I stumbled out of the hospital into bright sunlight after watching Mom take her last breath at the age of eighty-two. There are the unsmiling family members, shoulders hunched, sitting on the same wooden benches, having the same worried conversations; there is the slow procession of cars making their drop-offs and pick-ups at the circular entrance; there is the small knot of smokers, banished from inside the hospital to huddle around the same ugly tan pot, taking one last puff before feeding its long, goose-like throat. I bend down, and yes, there it is, the same stupefying product name: Smoker’s Oasis. On that August day, after witnessing Mom’s lungs finally surrender after their long battle with emphysema, I wanted to commit an act of violence on that oasis, but now I just wince. Pain and the mundane go together.
I enter the hospital lobby, so familiar after several dozen visits while Mom was alive, and something feels different, something other than the lattes being served at a sleek new coffee stand near the main door. Then it hits me—it feels different because I don’t have to worry about how Mom looks or what the doctor is going to say. What’s left here is history and memory: This is where the ambulance took her when she had her panic attacks and couldn’t breathe. This is where she spent eighteen days in the Botsford psychiatric ward, and this is where I spent hours warding off her anguished pleas to get her out of that den of dementia, to free her from that place where she had to surrender her pencils upon entering so that she couldn’t even do a crossword puzzle.
I can’t stay here, Steven. Please don’t leave me here alone. You don’t understand.
After Sash and I said good-bye to Mom on that Friday in May 1995, we
took the professionals’ advice: Give her your support, but back away, go home, let us do our job. To reassure Mom, to let her know that we loved her, to show her that she might be alone but she wasn’t forgotten, all of us agreed to make our presence known through daily phone conversations, consultations with the staff, a conference call with her and Hazan to discuss her progress. But as requested, we did all this long distance, outsiders looking in.
Now I would see what it looked like from the inside out.
The hospital and I had exchanged the necessary letters and legal documents in advance, without debate or dispute, so Mom’s records are waiting for me. I’m ushered into a tiny room occupied by two employees entering data into computers, and while they tap, tap, tap, I open the thick folder documenting Mom’s stay in the psych ward.
First realization: Mom’s pleas to go home didn’t stop when Sash and I left her, they just became more indignant and less tearful. The peak came on Day Five, when she told Hazan, “I have been stripped of my dignity. I have been stripped of my freedom.” But when Hazan pointed out that she hadn’t tried to exercise her legal right to sign herself out, she softened, saying she knew she needed treatment and didn’t want to upset her children. By Day Eleven, she had turned almost conciliatory, informing social worker Mary Bernek: “I don’t like it here but I’ll see it through.” On Day Thirteen, she had converted her dislike of the place into proof of her resilience: “I still don’t like it here but I am tolerating it. I feel that if I can take it here, I can take anything outside of here.”
Second realization: Mom’s secret remained as subterranean as ever.
Mom was so terrified when we left that day—I can’t stay here Steven I can’t stay here Steven you don’t understand—that I thought she might have said something more about Annie, in therapy sessions or conversations with staff members, to explain her fears about staying there while Hazan switched her to nortriptyline, the antidepressant that he thought would be more effective than Xanax. If the Botsford ward was anything like other psychiatric environments, I was sure Mom would have had ample opportunity during her confinement to discuss her anxiety and her family secret.
No such luck.
The only mention of Mom’s sister in the Botsford file comes from me, during an interview I had with social worker Bernek on that first, awful day. I remember thinking that it was important to alert Bernek to Rozanne Sedler’s call and the startling news that Mom might have a sister, as skimpy as our knowledge was, in case it might prove helpful in understanding Mom’s anxiety. “Pt is reported to have had a sister,” Bernek wrote, “who was institutionalized for mental illness and was described as a ‘family secret,’ which only recently was revealed to Informant.”
Informant. That would be me.
At the end of the file, in Hazan’s discharge summary, a sentence jumps out at me, like a single illuminated window in a vacant, boarded-up building. Hazan writes that he has had lengthy therapy sessions with Mom “in order to address the patient’s extensive anxiety and disappointment and feelings of betrayal at being hospitalized in this unit and then abandoned, she felt, by her family, even though they were very attentive to her.”
Betrayed. Abandoned.
Don’t leave me here alone, Steven.
When Anna Oliwek stopped driving Tillie to Eloise sometime in the early 1960s, Annie’s list of visitors dropped from one to zero. If Tillie were trying to pass the baton, as Bill Regenold had suggested, she didn’t have many options. Hyman had never gone to see his daughter, and his failing health left him largely a shut-in until his death in 1964. Mom was keeping her secret, and Annie had already rejected Anna.
Patient has had no visitors in years. That’s what social worker Jim Mulherin wrote in May 1972, three months before Annie’s death.
Abandoned.
Is it fair to draw this connection between Mom in 1995 and Annie in 1966? I think about it this way: There’s nothing fair about fear. As Hazan had noted in his discharge summary, Mom felt “abandoned” even though we were “very attentive” to her. The facts didn’t match her perception, but that didn’t make her fear any less real. When we left her at Botsford, she could think about nothing other than her fear. Wouldn’t her mind focus on the personal experience she knew best, wouldn’t her fear conjure up an image of Annie at Eloise…alone?
Yes, Mom had voluntarily committed herself to the Botsford psych ward, but she also understood this wasn’t like checking into a Holiday Inn—she couldn’t just check out in the morning after a good night’s sleep. I remember Hazan making this clear at the time: Even in a voluntary admission, the hospital’s director still would have the right to hold Mom for three days if she wanted to leave—or even longer if the hospital asked the probate court for permission to keep her, and the court agreed. Mom had to trust the system, trust that she wasn’t being railroaded into a long-term stay, and trust that her family was looking out for her in case things went wrong. But it’s hard to have trust when you’re afraid. Fear destroys trust.
Mom loved to read—novels, newspapers, magazines—you name it, she devoured it. Her taste ran to the popular rather than the ponderous, but she loved words and those who wrote them, no doubt one of the reasons why I acquired a reverence for newspapers and a belief that working for a good one was a fine way to make a living.
She didn’t leave behind a list of her favorite publications from the 1930s and 1940s, but her letters to Dad from the war often included clippings, mostly from the Detroit papers and Reader’s Digest, as well as occasional references to the Saturday Evening Post. When I was growing up, we had Look and Life around the house, and I remember Mom saying that when she was younger, she would pick up those magazines if she saw them somewhere, but that her family couldn’t afford to subscribe.
Mom’s reading habits have brought me to the Johns Hopkins University Library. I want to know what articles about mental illness appeared in popular publications during the late 1930s and early 1940s. I’ll never know for sure whether Mom read any of them, but it seems like one way to get a sense of the attitudes that swirled around her before and after Annie’s commitment to Eloise.
After several afternoons with articles such as “The Age of Schizophrenia” (an essay bemoaning the ever-growing numbers of patients with that specific diagnosis, a widely discussed trend in the late 1930s) and “But Is the World Going Mad?” (an essay arguing that the ever-growing number of patients in mental hospitals was not cause for alarm, but rather proof of psychiatry’s progress in identifying and treating mental illness), I come away with a strong feeling that Mom’s worries about mental illness in her own family would have centered around two popular notions from that era: First, that psychiatry was a long way from curing the seriously sick; and second, that genetics must be a factor.
For a young woman with a sister thought to be schizophrenic, either notion must have been nothing short of terrifying.
The barest sliver of a memory:
I’m eleven or twelve, and when I don’t have a ball in my hand, I have a book. For the most part, I consume the fictional series aimed at boys of my age: the Hardy Boys’ detective skills, Chip Hilton’s jump shot, Roy Tucker’s fastball, Tom Swift’s bravery and inventiveness. When I’m not solving crimes or winning the championship game or hopping around the galaxy, I transport myself to Britain, where I discover the adventures of a runaway named David Copperfield and the highlanders of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Scotland. I mostly make these trips alone, but I sometimes ask Mom: Have you read this? Do you think I’d like that?
Mom rarely tells me what to read and never suggests that a novel is too old for me. But when I ask about some of the English classics—Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Silas Marner—she says she didn’t care much for Jane Eyre, that it was too creepy and maybe too romantic for a boy not yet in his teens. I leave it off my list.
Did she subconsciously steer me away from the book? Did she read the novel in high school, as so many students did in her day? Did she know then,
as I know now, that the novel’s main male character is keeping his wife a secret, that she’s shut away in the attic, that she’s insane and that her name is…Bertha?
And of course it makes me wonder: Did her friends or classmates tease her about having the same first name as the madwoman in the attic? Was that just one more reason why Bertha vanished, and became Beth?
Lisa Hovermale has spent a good portion of her professional life around people like Annie. She works with so-called “dual diagnosis” patients, those with both mental disability and mental illness, a relatively new branch in her field. It’s a marriage of disciplines that didn’t exist in Annie’s day—a patient was treated as either mentally retarded (a phrase that has been replaced in the modern lexicon by intellectual disability) or as mentally ill, and the system divided itself that way. There were institutions for the “feeble-minded” and others for the “insane,” but none for patients diagnosed as both. Now, Hovermale’s job exemplifies the changing times: She acts as the liaison between Maryland’s mental health and developmental disability agencies.
“Tell me about Annie at the time of her admission,” I say. “Do you think she was schizophrenic?” We’re sitting at her kitchen table, Annie’s records spread in front of us.
“That’s hard to know,” she says. “Certainly the observations of the court-appointed doctors are consistent with schizophrenic behavior, and she is exhibiting both paranoid behavior and catatonic posturing.” She points to the Routine History’s description of Annie’s long hours sitting in the same chair. “But that’s not surprising. Their observations would need to match their conclusion.” She wonders whether Annie’s condition might now be considered a mood disorder. “In those days, everyone like Annie was called schizophrenic. Bipolar didn’t get here until the late 1970s, early 1980s.”
Annie's Ghosts Page 28