Let Me Go (2 page)

My father had first met her when he was on leave, and from what I was told, it was a classic
coup defoudre.
But it was also possible that one of his reasons for deciding to request a divorce and rush into this rather hasty marriage was to give his small children a second mother. Their other mother, their real one, had left the previous year, in the autumn of 1941. I was four years old, and Peter was nineteen months. Our mother had abandoned us to join the SS. Left on our own, we had been taken in by Aunt Margarete, my father's sister. But given my aunt's precarious health, that could only be a temporary solution. Grandmother would have been happy to bring us up, but she was old, and it was thought better for the two children to grow up around a young woman who still had all her strength. The argument was theoretically flawless, but in practice it turned out to be a disaster.

After his sudden reentrance into married life, my father went back to the front; from the very first, life with our stepmother was hell. Within a short time she got rid of me by locking me up in an institution for difficult children, a kind of storehouse for children whose families didn't want to have them underfoot, and once I was there I almost starved myself to death, unable to see any other way of escaping that desperate, horrific place.

"How DO YOU feel?" Eva asks me. We're having breakfast in a quiet room whose windows look out onto a tree-lined courtyard, choked by smokiness and dampness.

"Dreadful," I reply, casting a resentful glance at the Italian-made espresso machine that produces all kinds of things but not an Italian-style coffee. "I'd give anything for a decent cup of coffee," I sigh.

"You've had three," she reminds me.

"Dishwater," I complain.

"I can't believe how devoted you Italians are to your coffee." My cousin smiles. In her eyes, by now, I'm "the Italian."

"And you to your Würstel," I reply, although without acrimony: I love Eva, and despite the passing of the years, I feel as close to her as if she were my sister.

"Chin up," she encourages me. "I'm here."

"It's going to be a shock," I predict. "She'll have aged a lot. I might not even recognize her."

"Well," she agrees with affectionate irony, "that's how it is, mothers age."

"It's one thing watching your own mother getting older day by day," I protest irritably, "and quite another to meet her almost for the first time when she's sixty, the second time when she's nearly ninety!"

"You're right," she agrees thoughtfully, placing a sympathetic hand on mine. "But you can't pull out now. And you never know, you might be happy after all?"

"I feel sick," I announce disconsolately.

THE TAXI IS on time: I booked it in advance because the home is outside Vienna.

The taxi driver is a man in his forties, broader than he is tall, with a sizable beer-belly. For a while we all listen in silence to a cheerful polka by Smetana. It's still drizzling and the sky is leaden. The wipers squeak monotonously against the windshield. I remember my mother's file. Eva and I got it out yesterday at the Wiesenthal Center; it included a resume that was even more disturbing than I had expected. Early activism in the National Socialist Party, then Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, and finally Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück she had collaborated on certain experiments that were carried out on the prisoners, and then she had undergone the training for future extermination camp guards. The hardest, the toughest of them all had been sent to Birkenau.

We are driving through the outskirts of Vienna when Eva asks the taxi driver to stop outside a florist's.

"Flowers?" I ask suspiciously.

"You're not going to turn up empty-handed?"

"Isn't that a bit hypocritical?"

"Sometimes you have to make formal gestures," she declares with implacable sweetness.

Shortly afterward the taxi driver pulls up outside a flower shop. The interior is entirely clad in pale wood and has a strong funereal smell.

"What flowers were you thinking of?" Eva asks in a practical voice.

"I wasn't thinking of any kind of flowers," I reply sulkily.

"Fine, then I'll take care of it."

She chooses sober flowers, not too showy, and when the bouquet is ready, she nods to the assistant to hand them to me. I take them almost with revulsion, as though they concealed something dangerous. I feel them pricking my fingers.

"There are thorns," I protest.

The assistant, a woman with chamomile-colored hair tied at the back of her neck with a velvet ribbon and eyes of an intense blue, looks offended.

"There aren't any thorns," she replies.

"But . . ." I stammer.

"That's enough nonsense," Eva whispers to me.

We pay and go. I turn around and see that the florist is peering after us through the glass door of the shop.

"Thorns . . ." Eva laughs with a mixture of affection and irony.

We arrive a quarter of an hour early for our appointment, which has been arranged for ten o'clock.

The taxi stops near a big gate: On the other side of an old medieval-looking wall I can see a complex of pale buildings. The taxi driver opens the door, wishes us
"einen
schonen Tag,"
slides his beer-belly back into his vehicle, and drives away.

We are about to walk up the drive when all of a sudden I feel as if I'm choking.

"Stop," I whisper.

"What's wrong?" Eva asks, worried.

"I can't breathe."

"Take deep breaths—it's all the emotion."

"I'm not emotional," I maintain. I'm paralyzed with panic.

I step away from the gate and lean against the trunk of an old plane tree. I'm confused and furious with myself. I could have avoided all of this by ignoring the letter. Now, as I gradually catch my breath, I'm thinking about how to get myself out of this and go back the way I have come.

"Are you ready?" asks Eva.

"No," I reply, kicking the tree that was supporting me.

I'm suddenly seized by a violent fit of coughing. I cough until tears come to my eyes.

"What's happening to me?" I sob. I open my purse, look for a handkerchief, but the entire contents tumble out onto the wet grass. In a moment I'm really going to burst into tears.

Eva bends over to help me pick up my things; I look up and we're staring into each other's eyes.

"Do you remember what you said to me in 1942 in Berlin, when we last saw each other?" I ask, balancing on my heels.

Eva frowns.

"I think I called you a stupid cow."

"That's right," I reply. "What prompted that?"

"You'd called me a stupid nanny goat!" she remembers.

We both burst out laughing.

"Just think, fifty-six years have passed since then." I sigh, as our laughter subsides. I stand up with some difficulty, one hand on my back. "We're old now . . ."

When I'm on my feet again, Eva studies me critically.

"What is it?" I ask suspiciously.

"You should do your face. You've got lipstick on your eyelids and eye shadow on your lips."

"Wunderbar,"
I say, and get the requisite tools out of my bag: mirror, powder puff, compact.

"Ready?" says Eva.

"No."

"We're OK," she observes dryly. "There's just a few minutes to go."

At the caretaker's lodge we ask for Fräulein Inge, as I was told to do when I phoned from Italy to announce my visit.

The porter, a sprightly beanpole with mousy whiskers, starts fiddling with an impressive-looking telephone switchboard.

"You see that beige building behind the fountain?" he says finally. "Go over there and ask again at the desk inside."

The tension, broken a moment ago by our laughter, starts gnawing at me again—naked and oppressive. And on top of that, I feel ridiculous clutching that bunch of flowers.

"They're sticking into me," I murmur, as much to reassure myself that my voice hasn't dried up in my throat. I feel parched and the soles of my feet are itching.

"Wait," I say to Eva, pulling her by the sleeve of her overcoat.

"What is it now?" she says, looking like a loving and impatient sister.

"I've got to take my shoes off."

"Your shoes?" she stammers in consternation.

"The soles of my feet are itching," I say pleadingly.

But Eva shakes her head.

"Just don't think about it. It'll go away." And taking me by the arm, she guides me toward a wide gate.

"We're on time; it's ten o'clock now," she observes with satisfaction.

Once we've crossed the threshold, we find ourselves facing a transparent glass cage occupied by two young women who look like flight attendants. One of them is working at a computer; I turn to the other one and give her my name, asking whether Fräulein Inge has by any chance )been informed of my arrival.

She dials a number with her pink painted nails.

"She's coming," she tells us with thoroughly professional politeness.

But she immediately turns away and her smile fades, tier colleague has drawn her attention to something that s showing up on the computer screen. They both stare at t, reading intently. Finally they turn around, glancing at Tie from below. I think I understand. I'm the ex-Nazi's laughter.

I become aware of a familiar feeling of unease. I approach the wall, pretending to look at a print showing a tillage on one of the fabulous lakes of the Austrian Salzkammergut, and think again of that time in Milan two years ago.

I had been invited to take part in a commemoration )f the 1938 racial laws. The participants, in a theater hat was packed to the roof, included a historian, a writer, representatives of Milan's cultural life, two people who had been deported to the Nazi extermination camps, and me—daughter of a guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

During a break, a woman survivor from Birkenau came over to me. She stared right into my eyes, then exploded: "I hate you!"

I was speechless for a moment.

"Why? Why do you hate me?" I asked once I had recovered myself.

"Because your mother was a guard at Birkenau, and I even think I remember her. She was a heavy-handed blond who once knocked out one of my front teeth with a baton. That was her, wasn't it? A tall, strapping blond . . ." And she stared at me with resentful aggression.

"I don't . . . I don't know," I stammered.

"You don't know whether your mother was blond or not? You must have a photograph, something! I want to know, I want to know if that blond in Birkenau was your mother!"

She had gripped me by one arm and her nervous fingers contracted around my wrist.

I shook my head impotently.

"I couldn't say. When my mother was in Birkenau, I had no contact with her. I . . . I . . ." My voice died in my throat.

"It doesn't matter." The woman loosened her grip; her hand fell back. "Forgive me . . ."

She fell silent, and her shoulders bent in a strange and apparently painful movement.

She was about seventy, small and fragile, her face marked by ancient, ineradicable suffering.

One of the organizers, who had been following the scene, came over: "Quite honestly, I don't think that this is the place—" he began.

"You're right," the woman interrupted him, her shoulders more and more bent over. "I'm sorry. . . . I couldn't help myself. Forgive me." She started to return to the stage. But I clutched her arm and looked into her eyes. "You have nothing to ask forgiveness for," I said, "but neither do you have any accusation to level at me. I was seven and a half when the war ended."

Something softened in her face.

"Seven and a half," she repeated. "You're right. Forgive me once again."

And she slipped away.

"You have to understand them," commented the academic who had intervened in my defense, watching her as she left. "They'll never be able to forget."

"I know," I answered.

No one who was in the camps has ever entirely left them. No Auschwitz survivor has ever been healed once and for all of the effects of evil.

"ARE YOU WAITING for me, ladies?" asked a young, clear voice. Fräulein Inge is a woman in her thirties with a round face, pink and cherubic.

We exchange our first few pleasantries.

"So, you haven't seen your mother for twenty-seven years?" She smiles, not a hint of reproach in her voice.

I reply with some difficulty, swallowing hard. It's as though my vocal cords are paralyzed.

"Yes. But of course there are reasons for that—I mean, it might sound strange for a daughter."

Fraulein Inge gently shakes her head. "You don't have to justify yourself; it's a strictly private matter."

I appreciate her discretion, but at the same time I feel frustrated. I wanted to explain.

I wonder what the people in here know about my mother.

"I'd like to ask you something," I finally manage to articulate. "Has . . . has my mother kept her past a secret or—?"

"Nothing of the sort," she replies. "But it isn't a problem, believe me."

"So my mother talks to the others about it?"

"Sometimes."

"And—" I swallow hard again.

"—how do they react?" She smiles almost tenderly. "Many of them—like your mother, by the way—have difficulty remembering things. After an hour they've forgotten it all again."

"There's one more thing I'd like to ask." My heart is pounding loudly against my chest.

"Please ask anything you like."

"How does my mother talk about her children?"

Fraulein Inge replies in a neutral voice.

"When she came here, she announced that her children had abandoned her, but a few days later she revised her version of things and said that they were both dead. She has continued to believe that until today."

I glimpse a flicker of cowardly hope.

"Mightn't it be dangerous for her mental health to see me appearing effectively out of nowhere?" I suggest. "Mightn't it give her a shock?"

Fraulein Inge smiles faintly.

"Haven't you spoken to the doctor who's dealing with your mother?" she asks discreetly. I can't deny it.

"Yes, I have. And he said that . . . that there were no contraindications."

"Fine," she replies, putting a hand on my shoulder, "in that case I have no contraindications either. I'll walk you in."