by Sue Margolis
It’s a low blow. I regret it at once. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You didn’t tell me about it to hurt me. But at the same time, I feel that I should have been shielded from it until I was older.”
Mum’s face crumples. Sitting in the armchair, she looks even smaller and more vulnerable than usual. “I don’t know what to say. I’d experienced such terrible things. I wanted you to know. I thought I was educating you.” She looks as if she might break down, but she doesn’t. “Maybe I was wrong to tell you when you were so young. But you coped.”
“Only because I had Dad to talk to. And now you’ve scared Rosie. The poor kid’s petrified. It’s taken me ages to calm her down. If she has nightmares it’ll be your fault and you’ll have to explain to Abby.”
Suddenly my mother is back on the defensive. “You’re overreacting. She’ll get over it.”
• • •
The day I heard my mother’s story for the first time, she and I were in the kitchen. She was standing next to the cooker, stuffing a chicken neck. I was crayoning at the blue Formica table. She’d been telling me about the terrible food at Dad’s cousin’s wedding. “And such small portions.” I was almost certainly bored and probably wondering how to change the subject. Mum didn’t talk about her childhood in Germany very much. All I knew was that she’d been born in a place called Berlin and that her parents had died a long time ago. I was curious to find out more.
Mum carried on shoving thick yellowish gloop into chicken skin. She seemed thoughtful and happy to talk.
“Berlin was a beautiful city. And we had such a lovely house. It was nothing like this one. Much bigger. My bedroom had frilly curtains and rosebud wallpaper. There were two cherry trees in the garden—and a swing and a hutch for my pet rabbit. She was called Adelheid.”
“That’s a funny name.”
“That’s because it’s German.”
“Say something in German.”
“OK … Ich heisse Frieda und ich habe eine tochter. Sie heisst Judy. Sie ist sehr schön.”
“It sounds funny.”
Mum laughed and translated. I discovered that tochter meant daughter and schön meant pretty.
“Am I really pretty?”
Mum came to the table, holding out her matzo-meal and chicken-fat hands. I remember thinking she was going to cup my face in them. But she didn’t. Instead she kissed my forehead and both cheeks. “You are more than pretty—you are beautiful. You are a shaineh maidel … a beautiful young girl.”
She went back to her story. It wasn’t long before she got to the scary bit. There were bad people called Nazis who hated Jews. One night, they smashed the windows of Jewish shops and started taking Jews to “the camps.” I imagined fields of brightly colored tents. Then she explained. She spared me nothing. It was odd, but I wasn’t frightened. I’d been learning about Henry VIII in school. I knew all about him chopping off people’s heads and people getting burned at the stake. It felt a bit like that. Just history.
“So, what happened to you and your mummy and daddy?”
“By 1939 it was almost impossible for Jews to leave Germany. But Jewish charities in England offered the Nazis money to let the children go and they agreed. That’s how the Kindertransport got started.”
I repeated the word. I liked the way it sounded. My mother explained that thousands of children left Europe on Kindertransport trains.
“You mean they had to leave their parents?”
“Yes.”
That’s when I got upset. These were children just like me. How was it possible to hate them for no reason and then drag them away from the people they loved most in the world?
“So, did you have to leave your mum and dad?”
“I did. I left Berlin in May. It was such a beautiful day. ‘Führer weather,’ they called it. I remember saying good-bye to my brother, Joseph. He was eighteen and too old for the Kindertransport. ‘Bye, sis,’ he said. ‘See you in a few months.’ Then he handed me a bar of Ritter chocolate for the journey. My mother begged me to hug Joseph good-bye, but I refused.” My mother was managing to weep and chuckle at the same time. “I was going through a phase of not liking boys. So … after I’d waved my brother good-bye, we took the tram to Friedrichstrasse Station.”
I asked her why the Germans had such long words for everything. She said she didn’t know and promised to teach me how to say her favorite German word: Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister. It meant head district chimney sweep.
“Anyway, we reached the station. There was a woman struggling to get her baby carriage up the stairs. She yelled at my father, who with his dark complexion and black beard couldn’t have looked less Aryan, ‘You … Jew scum … I have given the Führer a child. Help me up the stairs.’ And he did. He was so polite. He never said a word.”
“And the woman never said ‘Thank you’ … right?”
“Right. That morning, fifty of us children got on that train. Some were young like me. Others were teenagers. The older kids understood what was happening. We little ones didn’t. Our parents told us we were going on an exciting adventure and that we had to be brave and grown-up. But most of us were crying. A few of the boys were trying to make light of it. They were laughing and sharing sweets, trying to be big, fearless men.”
“So, where did the train take you?”
“To the Dutch coast. At that stage the Germans hadn’t invaded Holland. From there we took a boat to England.”
“And did you have friends on the train?”
“No. My friends left before me. So I was all by myself. I remember sitting on the wooden seat, cuddling Lotte, my doll. I had a manila luggage tag round my neck. It had my number on the front and my name on the back. We were allowed one small suitcase. Mine was full of brand-new clothes. My mother didn’t want the people who took me in to think she didn’t have standards.”
Mum was choking back tears.
“Mutti held my hand through the window. ‘Write to us,’ she said. ‘And be good. Your father and I don’t want to hear bad reports. You mustn’t worry. Soon we’ll all be together again.’
“As the train pulled out of the station, she ran alongside. Vati didn’t move. He stood there in his gray overcoat with the yellow star, barely waving. As the train gathered speed Mutti couldn’t keep up and she was forced to let go. I can still hear her howling from the pain while my father tried to comfort her. She wasn’t the only one weeping. As I looked out of the window, all I could see was pitiful mothers waving handkerchiefs. There was one father who refused to let go of his son. While the train was moving, he pulled him by his arms back through the window. He must have used so much force because the child fell onto the platform, crying out and bleeding.”
“So he got to stay with his parents.”
“Yes … for all the good it did him.”
I didn’t ask what she meant by that. Young as I was, I could work it out.
“When we reached England, we were put on another train to London. I hadn’t slept for two days and two nights. By the time the train pulled in, I could barely keep my eyes open. We were ushered onto the cold platform where we waited for people to come and claim us. I had never felt so frightened and alone. The only words of English I knew were the ones my mother had taught me: please and thank you.”
Frieda was seven. She never saw her parents or brother again.
She was taken in by an orthodox Jewish couple who lived in North London. The Lewins loved her and raised her as one of their own. “Some children weren’t so lucky. People treated them like unpaid domestics.” To this day my mother refers to the Lewins’ three natural children—all of them now dead—as “my brother and sisters.”
By the time she reached her teenage years, my mother was done with God and religion—much to the despair of the Lewins. They took the view that everything—even the worst catastrophes—happened for a reason. God had a grand plan that we on earth weren’t privy to or meant to understand.
The Lewins began to fear
that Frieda would marry out of the religion—and she did. They were heartbroken. They felt they had failed Frieda’s parents. Frieda fell out with them when they refused to come to her registry office wedding—to see her marry Jack Harris, to whom she would remain devoted until the day he died. Affectionate relations with the Lewins only resumed after I came along.
During the war, Jack, his mother and his siblings had been evacuated to a farm in Devon. He chased sheep, collected eggs and fed baby lambs. He always felt guilty that my mother had suffered so much while he had this idyllic life in the country.
But my mother had her own guilt. Survivor’s guilt, they call it. Time and again she would break down and ask the same question: “Why was I saved when so many perished? I had no right to live. It should have been me that died.”
Growing up, I had no problem understanding why my mother felt guilty. What baffled me was her need to be ill all the time. It wasn’t until I started reading books about the lives of Holocaust survivors that I understood. My mother believed that because she had survived she didn’t deserve to be loved—at least not for herself. A sick person, on the other hand, always deserved love and compassion. I’m also guessing that she saw physical pain as her penance, the price she had to pay for being spared.
I couldn’t keep up with her ailments. If it wasn’t her head or her back, it was her heart or her stomach. It felt like every week she was finding “blood in my business.” She had a specialist for every condition. And they didn’t come cheap. At the same time, Mum longed to move into a bigger house.
“Fine,” my father would say. “Give up your specialists—or at least start seeing doctors for free on the NHS—and you can have a bigger house tomorrow.” But she was hooked on being ill. It was strange how the woman who thought she didn’t deserve to be loved insisted on consulting the best doctors in the land.
“Take my advice,” she would say to her friends, “and only make appointments with doctors who have long waiting lists. If he says he can fit you in immediately, he’s a lousy doctor.” Years later when I relayed my mother’s theory to Abby, she laughed and admitted there was more than a grain of truth in it.
Whenever I got ill as a child, Mum fussed around me, fed me junior aspirin, bought me comics and lemonade. But even if I’d wanted to, I could never have competed with her on the sickness front. I was off-color. She was always at death’s door.
Brian despaired of the way Dad and I—not to mention everybody who knew my mother’s story—walked on eggshells around her. “You’re letting Hitler win all over again. A kick up the backside, that’s what she needs to bring her to her senses.” He was speaking figuratively, of course. Even so, nobody—least of all he—was prepared to administer it.
But once my father died and there was nobody looking over my shoulder telling me how emotionally frail my mother was, I found the courage to confront her. One day, we were sitting in her kitchen having coffee and cake when I dared to suggest in the most tentative, roundabout way that maybe she wasn’t quite as ill as she thought she was.
“You’re calling me a liar?”
“No, of course not.”
“You think I enjoy being ill and in pain all the time?”
“No—not exactly.”
“Not exactly? Then what?”
“All I’m saying is that the mind is complicated. Sometimes feelings and emotions are hard to unravel.”
“So now I’m insane?”
“Of course you’re not. All I’m saying is that what happened to you during the war has taken its toll.”
“You’re not wrong there.”
“So maybe you need to find some way of dealing with those feelings.”
“You mean see a trick cyclist?”
“Maybe.”
“What are you trying to do? Get me put away?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Of course I’m not.”
“Let’s get one thing straight. I am not crazy. I will never see a head doctor. I don’t know how you can even suggest such a thing.”
Then she said I was giving her palpitations, so I shut up.
Over the years, I’d raised the subject a few more times, but the response was always the same.
• • •
Back in the living room, Mum is telling me that my outburst has made her acid reflux worse. She’s going to pop an extra PPI and have an early night.
She heaves herself out of the armchair. “I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. I suppose times have changed. These days children are shielded from all the terrible things that go on in the world. I suppose that’s a good thing… . But Sam couldn’t get enough of my story. He thought it was really exciting. He told me I was really brave.”
“Of course he did. Sam is older and more robust than Rosie. She still believes in witches and monsters. She thinks you can fit a burglar under her bed. She’s petrified that Hitler is about to make a comeback.”
“I’ll speak to her, tell her I didn’t mean to upset her.”
“That might be a good idea.”
“Right, I’m off to bed.”
“Mum—before you go … I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to upset you. You did your best when I was growing up. You’d been through hell. You thought you were doing the right thing.”
I hug her and kiss her on the cheek. Finally she pulls away. I wipe the tears from her face. “I’m a stupid old woman.”
“You are, but I still love you. Come on, let’s forget it.”
“So, are we OK?” she asks.
“Of course we are. Now go to bed.”
I offer to bring her a mug of cocoa and she says that would be lovely.
She trudges upstairs, her hand pressed into the small of her back.
“I thought you had heartburn.”
“I do. Now my back’s playing up.”
After I’ve taken the cocoa up to her, I lie on the sofa and wonder how you get rid of Hitlers under the bed. It takes a while, but finally I have it. Führer spray.
CHAPTER
six
I am standing at the kitchen sink, screwing the top off an almost empty bottle of Windex. Mum is in the shower. The kids are playing in their rooms, having demolished their nana’s special Sunday breakfast of crêpes with chocolate sauce.
I pour what’s left of the Windex down the sink and rinse the bottle in hot water. Finally I pour in a few drops of red food coloring, dilute it with water and screw the top back on. Ta-da. Führer spray. When Abby was small—and depending on what fiends she was terrified of at the time—it was known as monster spray, Dalek spray or ghost spray. We got through gallons of the stuff.
I head upstairs armed with my secret weapon. Rosie is sitting cross-legged on her bed, commentating as she unwraps I know not what.
“Sweetheart—sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got something that might help with the Hitlers.” I perch on the edge of the bed and show her the magic spray. “It’s amazing. Never fails. I’ll spray the room and the Hitlers will be gone in an instant.”
“That’s stupid,” she says.
“Why?”
“It’s for babies. When I was little and I was scared of monsters—that’s before I got scared of burglars and Hitlers—Mum used to make monster spray to get rid of them. But it wasn’t real. It was just red stuff and water. Sam told me.”
Of course he did.
“So I’m guessing it never worked.”
“Nope.”
Fabulous.
There’s a tap on the open door. “Mind if I come in?” Mum says. But she’s already in and asking me to budge up so that she can sit on the bed. I explain—perhaps too pointedly, seeing as I’m supposed to have forgiven my mother for telling Rosie about the Nazis—that we are looking for something to get rid of the Hitlers.
“Well, I think I might have just the thing.” She reaches into her apron pocket and pulls out a faded blue velvet box. I recognize it at once. She hands it to Rosie and tells her to open it. “This was mine and now I want you to have it.”<
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“Mum, are you sure?” Along with a handful of family photographs, the piece of jewelry inside the box is my mother’s most precious and treasured possession.
“Shh.”
Rosie lifts the lid and unfurls a long gold chain. Hanging from it is a tiny Star of David. It was a present from my grandparents to my mother. They gave it to her the day she left Berlin. I can’t believe she is parting with it.
“It’s very pretty,” Rosie says. “And it’s really for me?”
“It is.”
“Wow. Can I put it on?”
Mum secures the chain around Rosie’s neck and lines up the star. “Perfect.”
She explains how the necklace came to her and that the star is an important Jewish symbol.
“I’m Jewish. Mummy told me.”
Mum tells her that’s correct and explains how Jewishness is inherited entirely through the female line.
“And the star will look after you,” my mother says. “Just like it looked after me.”
“When you were escaping from the Nazis?”
“Yes. I promise—nothing will ever hurt you.”
“Including Hitlers?”
“Especially Hitlers.”
In my head I’m questioning the wisdom of telling Rosie that nothing will ever hurt her, but bearing in mind how frightened she was last night, it’s probably not such a bad idea.
“And I’m sorry I frightened you. The things I told you happened a very long time ago. We live in a different world now.” She kisses Rosie’s forehead.
“Apart from ISIS.”
What? The child knows about Muslim fundamentalists? “Good God, Rosie, who told you about ISIS?”
“Mum and Dad. It was when kids in the playground were calling Abad in year four a terror-something.”
“Terrorist,” I oblige.
“That’s it. I didn’t understand, so Mum and Dad explained to me and Sam. But I’m not scared of terrorists, because they’re a long way away.”
“Of course they are,” Mum and I say, practically in unison.