Letters From the Lost (30 page)

The central Office of Labour immediately set all gears in motion in order to exempt me and by automatic extension, to exempt Vera as well. And now, just imagine, my dear ones, their efforts were crowned with results, but the decision came one small half hour too late. When the clerk arrived at the train station with the exemption order, we were already sitting in the sealed freight car, and the train slowly rolled away to the Hell of Oswieczin.

Another letter will follow in two or three weeks. Best regards and kisses from your faithful Arnold

————

THERE WERE FIVE POST-WAR
letters in the box, all from Arnold. There must have been more letters, but only these five were in the box when I opened it. I translated the first four quite quickly, but for a long time, the fifth letter lay untouched. Somehow, I continued to put off translating that last letter for a very long time, as if fearing to end my connection to family and to a past that had become my daily companion.

F
IFTH
L
ETTER

Sept. 11, 1945

My Dear Ones,

I received your letter dated August 1 on August 25, in about three weeks, which represents a very rapid delivery. Its contents moved me deeply, and I thank you very much for your kind words.

Dear Gretl, I did not know that you could write such nice letters. I can instinctively tell from them that your words come from the heart and that they are sincerely intended.

Your concern for my inner as well as my bodily well-being is touching and in every way reassuring for me. Even if, thank God, I have recovered enough so that I am once again standing on my own two feet, even if I’ve been provided with adequate food and clothing, it is still a precious source of comfort to me and to my still raw inner wounds to know that I have total support from people who are close to me through the bonds of blood, who believe in me and will never abandon me.

I was deeply touched when I read of the profound impression that my factual reports had made upon you.

The awareness of all the horror that we had become accustomed to with the passage of years has suddenly descended upon you. Only now does that awareness step out of the shadows of the unconscious into the harsh light of reality. However, you can now take consolation from the fact that all this belongs to a gruesome but at least a vanquished past. Although we shudder to remember this past with all its horrendous experiences, its feelings and its nightmare visions, we are nonetheless trying to the best of our ability to obliterate them totally from our memory, the quicker the better. The future will make all this seem to be an evil spectre from the past, a grisly hallucination of wretchedness as we follow the eternal rule of life with its irresistibly powerful vitality that turns us always toward the future.

What is impossible to forget, however, what cannot be extinguished from our thoughts and our hearts, is the awareness and
the longing for all those dear ones who stood so close to us, those who were ripped away by that gruesome time and were swept into the abyss. They were torn away from our side with no regard for the fact that our hearts bleed and will bleed so long as we shall live.

I thank you very much for your well-intended invitation to come to you, but this is out of the question. My place is here in the homeland. I have my job here, and numerous attachments, as well as my memories. Furthermore, I no longer feel young enough to start a whole new life. These days, I usually follow the path of least resistance.

I am sorry to have to report to you that of the eleven packages you sent, only the five for which I had previously acknowledged receipt have thus far arrived. Since then, there has been a long pause.

Dear Gretl, I will gladly give you the requested measurements, but I notice that I am well supplied in the suit department and that I even have enough underwear thanks to Otto’s help. Besides, I have learned to wear underwear somewhat longer than used to be the custom.

On the other hand, I would be very grateful if you could get me some warm, knitted things for the winter: sweaters, vests and the like, shawls, gloves, and above all, spats. I will hardly be able to get these things here since there is not even wool to be worked yet, let alone wares made from wool.

With food, things are not so bad today. As a worker, I get a supplemental ration card and an additional one on medical orders as a repatriate (former prisoner). Of course, it is not a matter of kilos but of decagrams, and certain things like meat, fat, fruit, and sweets are still very scarce.

About my reports, I would still like to tell you the following. I have already sent you four reports in three letters, and I have reached all the way to the end of Theresienstadt and to the transport to Auschwitz. Now, however, my strength fails me, or rather my ability to render in graphic form those events and experiences.
Words seem too weak and too petty to depict all that I lived to see and to witness. My thoughts entangle themselves. I would like to express everything simultaneously, and of course, that is impossible. I must therefore now put a period at the end of my sentence, or perhaps a pause. Maybe the time will come when I can depict everything in peace.

About the demise of your mother, dear Gretl, sadly I cannot provide the exact details that you have requested. My memory has unfortunately suffered a lot, and sometimes, the memories do not surface until months later. I only know that dear Mama Resl felt mentally better in Theresienstadt. She showed promise of a complete recovery of her mind, but her body broke down as was the case with all of the elderly, and her weakened state hastened her martyrdom.

The description of your life and of the building up of the farm was of unusual interest, although I hope and expect that you, dear Edi will still write to me in much greater detail about it.

Now, I want to tell you that Otto flew to Paris on August 3. He has since written that because of the inflationary prices there, he is not even thinking about reopening the factory. For now, he has gone to England for two or three weeks.

Before that, he went to Strobnitz for the third time, and using the shipping agent Fröstl who now lives in Number 62, he personally shipped out the best pieces of your furniture to my half-empty apartment. The big buffet, three large chests, your table and sofa now grace my new apartment where I reside with Mama Schick, and where the furniture constantly reminds me of my dear brother Edi and his good wife Gretl.

Now, be well, my precious and dear ones. Write soon and often and lots.

Hugs and kisses from your faithful Arnold.

For your birthday, dear Edi, my sincerest and very best wishes.

O
NCE AGAIN, ABRUPTLY, THE LE TTERS ENDED.

What happened to Arnold? Why were there no more letters from him in the box? True, he had declined my father’s invitation to resettle with us in Canada, but why was there no more correspondence? I was nine in 1945, old enough to have remembered the arrival of further letters.

Otto immigrated to Canada a short time after the war, and he lived with us in Hamilton for some months. Then, he entered a business partnership with Ludwig, purchasing a small clothing store with him on Boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal. Unfortunately, the partnership came to a sad end and created bad blood between Otto and my father. The years of working side by side with Ludwig on the farm had led my father to respect his brother-in-law deeply. My father probably sided with Ludwig, and the resulting rupture between the two brothers never quite healed. In 1991, thirty-three years after my father’s death, we were notified of Otto’s death.

The mystery of Arnold could not be easily solved. Rightly or wrongly, I had put aside the post-war letters, unwilling to experience again the
emotions that ripped through me when I first read them. Above all, I had not wanted my mother to re-experience the grief of her own dreadful loss.

And then, my mother’s health declined. She did not linger long. On September 30,1999, as we sat stroking her hands—her beloved granddaughter on one side, I on the other—her breathing became ever more shallow until it stopped.

There was no one left to ask.

————

MONTHS LATER, IN THE
spring of 2000, my friend Rick phoned me from Toronto.
“What are you doing in September? How about meeting me in Prague for a ‘roots’ trip?”
It was the second time that, unknowingly, Rick was to change the course of my life.

The first time had been in November 1992, on a lazy Sunday morning as we sipped coffee in my kitchen in Vancouver. Rick and I share so much history. His mother Mimi was once my Aunt Anny’s best friend. When Mimi and Robert bought their first house, it was just a few streets away from our home in Hamilton. I was twelve years old when Rick was born, and proud that Mimi and Robert trusted me as his first babysitter.

As adults, Rick and I have always been able to talk. Somewhere along the line, he began referring to me as his older sister, an honorific title that means much to me. As an only child, I have always yearned for siblings and for an extended family. Anny and Ludwig were all that I had. Unfortunately, Anny and my mother continued to play the game of good sister/bad sister that they had learned as children, thereby making my closeness to Anny an issue of divided loyalties. On the farm, there had always been jealousy and dissension between the two women, with my father and Ludwig alternately playing the role of peacemaker. When my father and then Ludwig died, my mother began to clutch me ever tighter while allowing the unresolved rivalry with her sister to fester.

Rick does have his brother Fred, and their family dynamics are very different. Their father Robert was born in Prague, and he was only seventeen in 1939 when his well-to-do parents heard that there was a Gestapo official
who accepted bribes. Unwilling to risk arrest themselves, Robert’s parents sent their only son on a mission to Gestapo headquarters. Riding in the back of the family’s chauffeur-driven Daimler, Robert held in his lap a briefcase stuffed with Czech Kronen. The rumour had been correct, and he returned with exit visas in the now empty briefcase.

Robert never quite forgave his parents for making him the guinea pig. Family tensions were only exacerbated when Robert dropped out of university to marry Mimi, a struggling immigrant some ten years his senior. Neither her intelligence nor her charm could ever thaw the ice of her in-laws.

Now, Rick struggled to understand his father just as I was striving to connect with my mother. At some level, they were unreachable. As we refilled our coffee cups, Rick wondered aloud whether our general sense of disconnection with the world might have something to do with our backgrounds. Despite having many friends, neither of us feels that we belong. We are always on the outside looking in, and we are both prone to a real but nameless discomfort.

Still, I was taken aback by Rick’s question:
“Helen, do you think that what our parents experienced in Europe has affected us?”

In retrospect, Rick’s question seems naïve. What is astounding, however, is that neither of us had ever asked ourselves that question. Our parents’ silence about certain years of their life had been so total and their reluctance to talk about the past so manifest that it simply had not occurred to either of us that we’d been shaped by matters of which we knew very little.

Rick’s question reminded me of an announcement in a Jewish newspaper passed to me by a neighbour. She had said,
“I know that you’re not religious, but sometimes this paper has interesting articles.”
And indeed, the words
Second Generation Holocaust Survivor
had caught my eye.

It was a concept I’d never thought about. In my world, there were “survivors,” but I had seen no reason to draw a line connecting these emaciated-looking people with haunted eyes and tattooed numbers on their arms to my parents. Indeed, both Mimi and my mother had always insisted that because we came to Canada, we had escaped “it,” as the Holocaust was called in the early post-war years before it was given a
name. Indeed, I never heard either my parents or Mimi use any word but “it” for the experience of Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and all the other concentration camps.

Still, at a gut level, I felt that much had been passed on to us, if only in the form of unspoken fears, nameless enemies, and shadowy threats to our very existence. I searched through the pile of papers in the recycling box and found the notice about the conference to begin Sunday at 11 a.m. It was now 10:30.

In a flash, Rick and I had our coats on, were out the door and across town just as the keynote speaker was introduced. Her name, Helen Epstein, with its echoing tones of my pre-marital Helen Waldstein, spoke to me. So did her words and those of many workshop participants we met that afternoon. We spoke of our common experiences: the larger than life shadows cast by the silence imposed upon the past; the importance of being a
good
child who does not upset parents by asking, let alone doing the wrong thing; the need from an early age to parent our parents, and protect them in a world whose language and customs they never quite mastered.

One of the people I met that afternoon was a rather unprepossessing chap with the crumbs of lunch still clinging to his greyish beard. He introduced himself as Yitzhak, a rabbi who was starting a local group of “second generation survivors.” So much had resonated for me at the conference that I agreed to attend at least one meeting. And so began my journey of return.

————

YITZHAK WAS THEN RABBI
of a small Jewish community in Vancouver called Or Shalom. He explained that the Hebrew words are typically translated as “the light of peace” but that the word
Shalom
also means wholeness. Perhaps peace and wholeness are the same, for as I began to integrate the bits of my life into a coherent whole, I felt wrapped in a greater peace than I had ever known.