The Woman I Wanted to Be (2 page)

Philippe says he realized that I loved him the day I transcribed all the words from a Beatles record while I was at boarding school in England, and sent them to him. There were no computers then, no Internet, no iTunes, just a doting sister with pen and paper, listening to the lyrics and transcribing them. We’re still extremely close, and he is still
my baby brother, whom I always try to impress and tease. Philippe is a successful businessman in Brussels, has two amazing daughters, Sarah and Kelly, and his wife, Greta, launched and runs DVF Belgium. Philippe and I talk on the phone every weekend and whenever I miss my parents, I call him.

I don’t think my mother was half as hard on him as she’d been with me. He was a boy, after all, and we are much softer and less demanding toward boys in our family. It was I she related to, the daughter she was determined would survive whatever life threw at her. As I grew older, I understood. Independence and freedom were key to her because she had lost both. Self-reliance had kept her alive.

M
y mother was twenty and engaged to my father in 1944 when the Nazi SS arrested her on May 17 for working in the Belgian Resistance. She was living in a “safe house” and her job was to go around Brussels on her bicycle to deliver documents and fake papers to those who needed them. Immediately after her arrest, she was thrown onto a crowded truck, which took her and many other suspected saboteurs to a prison in Malines, Flanders, a city twenty-five kilometers from Brussels. To avoid being tortured into giving information about others in the resistance, she said she knew nothing and that she was hiding in the safe house because she was Jewish. The woman who was interrogating her advised her not to say she was Jewish. She ignored it and was deported on the twenty-fifth transport, which left Malines on May 19, 1944. She was sent to Auschwitz and given prisoner number 5199.

My mother often told me how she’d written her parents a note on a scrap of paper and dropped it from the truck onto the street. She hoped but had no idea whether anyone ever picked it up and delivered it. It wasn’t until after her death that I found out that the message had
been delivered. I’d loaned the house she’d owned on Harbour Island in the Bahamas to my first cousin Salvator. Salvator left me a thick envelope full of family photographs, in the midst of which was a sealed envelope marked “Lily, 1944.” Inside was a piece of torn paper with faint handwriting. I stared at it until I finally made out the words:

Dear Mommy and Daddy,

I am writing to tell you that your little Lily is leaving. Where, she does not know, but God is everywhere isn’t he? So she will never be alone or unhappy.

I want you both to be courageous, and not forget that you have to be in good health for my wedding. I am counting more than ever in having a beautiful ceremony.

I want you to know that I am leaving with a smile, I promise. I love you very very much and will soon kiss you more than ever.

Your little daughter,

Lily

I couldn’t breathe. Could I be holding the actual note my mother had told me she had written to her parents on that truck, using a burnt match for a pencil? On the other side of the note was a plea for anybody finding the piece of paper to please deliver it to her parents’ address. Somebody had found it and delivered it to her parents and my aunt Juliette, Salvator’s mother, had kept it in a sealed envelope all these years!

I was in shock; I’d only half-believed her story of the note. All these stories about her arrest and deportation seemed surreal, more like a movie script, and yet they were true. She had always told me that
she was more worried about her parents than herself. I held the proof in my shaky hands.

I walked out of the house in a daze and across the beach into the clear blue water. “This explains who I am,” I said out loud to myself. “I am the daughter of a woman who went to the concentration camps with a smile.”

The sayings she had drummed into me as a child and which had sometimes annoyed me took on whole new meanings. She had often illustrated one of her favorites—“you never really know what is good for you; what may seem the absolute worst thing to happen to you can, in fact, be the best”—by her story of the inhuman train ride to Auschwitz and her arrival.

No food. No water. No air. No toilet. Four days jammed in a cattle car. An “older woman” in her forties who spoke a little German comforted my mother and gave her a sense of protection. My mother made sure never to leave her side, especially when they arrived at Auschwitz and were unloaded onto a ramp. Women with children were immediately separated from the rest and sent toward long, low buildings while the others were forced into a long line. At the head of the line, a soldier directed the prisoners into two groups. Looking on, from the top of the ramp, was an officer in white.

When it came her turn, the older woman was directed to the group being formed on the left and my mother quickly followed her. The soldier did not stop her, but the white-coated officer, who had not interfered until then, did. Striding down the ramp, he walked directly to my mother, yanked her away from her friend, and threw her into the group on the right. My mother always said that she’d never felt such sheer hatred for anyone as she felt for that man.

That man was Dr. Josef Mengele, she found out later, the notorious Angel of Death, who killed or mutilated many, many prisoners in
medical experiments, especially children and twins. Why did he go through the trouble of saving her? Did she remind him of someone he cared about? However evil or not his intentions were, he saved her life. The group the older woman was assigned to went directly to the gas chamber. The group my mother was thrust into did not.

I always use that story when I want to console anyone, just as my mother told it so often to me: You never know how something that seems the worst thing turns out to be the best.

After that, she was determined to survive, no matter the horror. Even when the unmistakable smell of the smoke coming from the camp crematorium seemed unbearable and her fellow prisoners would say “We’re all going to die,” my mother would insist: “No, we’re not. We’re going to live.” Fear was not an option.

Nearly one million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, many in the gas chamber. Others were executed, or killed in Dr. Mengele’s experiments, or died from starvation and exhaustion from slave labor. My mother was fortunate, if anyone could have been considered fortunate in those unimaginably cruel surroundings. She was put to work on the twelve-hour night shift in the nearby weapons factory making bullets; so long as she worked she was useful and was kept alive. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, and naturally slender. She had never eaten much and could exist, albeit barely, on the miniscule rations of bread and watery soup she and other prisoners were given. Heavier prisoners, radically deprived of anything close to the amount of food they were used to, she told me, were the first to succumb to starvation.

If ever I think I’m too lazy to do a necessary chore, if I hesitate to go out because of the cold or complain about having to wait in line, I remember my mother. I envision her being marched out of Auschwitz with sixty thousand others in the winter of 1945, just nine days
before the Soviet troops reached the camp. The SS hastily executed thousands of inmates and marched the others fifty kilometers through the snow to a train depot where they were stuffed into freight cars and sent to Ravensbrück in the north, and from there force-marched again to their new camps, in my mother’s case to Neustadt-Glewe in Germany. Some fifteen thousand prisoners died on that Death March, of exposure, exhaustion, illness, or being shot by the SS for falling or lagging behind.

In what can only be described as a miracle, my tiny mother survived it all. She was one of the 1,244 who survived the camps out of the 25,631 Belgian Jews who were deported. Her will and spirit to live were her defiance of the evil she had endured, a declaration of her future. When Neustadt-Glewe was liberated a few months later by the Russians, followed closely by the Americans, my mother’s weight was barely the weight of her bones.

She was hospitalized at an American base and wasn’t expected to live. She defied the odds again. When she was stable enough to return home to Belgium she had to fill out a form, as did all survivors returning to their countries. I found that form. It had her name and date of birth on it and a question: “in what condition” she was returning from her thirteen months in captivity. Her astonishing answer was, in impeccable handwriting: “en très bonne santé” (“in very good health”).

M
y father, Leon Halfin, was very different from my mother. Where she was strict and somewhat distant, he was relaxed and affectionate. In his eyes I could do no wrong and he loved me unconditionally. As a child I loved him much more than my demanding mother, though maybe I respected her a little more. When I needed to get up to go to
the bathroom in the middle of the night, I would call for my father and that made him laugh. “Why do you call me and not your mother?” he’d ask. And I would reply: “Because I don’t want to disturb her.”

My father never scolded me. He simply adored me and I adored him. I was as affectionate toward him as he was to me. I loved to sit on his lap, covering him with kisses and drinking all of his after-dinner lemon tea. To my father I was the most beautiful thing in the world and I felt entitled to his love and devotion.

M
y father and I looked alike and we had the same kind of relentless energy. He loved American cars, and when I was nine or ten he would often take me for a drive in his beautiful, sky-blue and navy American Chevrolet Impala convertible, a bicolor combination that was very popular in the late fifties. In that era, before seat belts were common, I would kneel on the front seat instead of sitting, because I thought that that would make people think I was a grown-up. I always, always wanted to be older than my age. I never wanted to be a little girl. I wanted to be a woman, a sophisticated woman, a glamorous woman. I wanted to be important.

My father, unknowingly, hastened that wish. When he came to say good night to me and kiss me in my bed, he was often cautioned by my mother. “Be careful, don’t wake up her senses,” she’d say. My father used to think my mother’s warning was hysterically funny. How could he, a man, wake up the senses of a little girl? Looking back now, however, no matter how funny he thought it was, he did wake up my senses. My father made me feel like a woman, so my mother was clever actually to say that.

The feelings were not sexual. It was the awareness that he was a man and that my relationship with him was therefore different from
one I’d have with a woman. How lucky I was that this first man in my life loved me uncritically, unguardedly, without judging. I did not have to work for his love, I did not have to please him; his approval required no effort. That made an important impact on my life, and though I didn’t know it then, I now know it has made my relationships with men much easier. What I owe my father, and what I am so thankful for, is how comfortable I always feel with men. He gave me confidence.

That first love and affection marks the way I presume men feel toward me. I simply take their fondness for granted, neither expecting nor looking for it. The biggest gift my father gave me was not to be needy. I had so much love from him that I didn’t really need any more. In fact, I sometimes had to push it away because his display of affection in front of people embarrassed me.

My father was a successful businessman, a distributor of General Electric electronic tubes and semiconductors. He did well, so we lived very comfortably.

My parents were a striking couple. My father was very good-looking with high cheekbones and a mischievous smile. My mother had an elegant build and beautiful legs. She dressed very well and had a lot of allure. She was very much the boss of the house and I always saw her as the brains of the family. As much as I adored my father it was to her I went for advice.

She was not a traditional housewife, and only on Sundays, the housekeeper’s day off, did I occasionally see her in the kitchen. She would make a delicious grilled chicken with crispy potatoes and my father would bring pastries for dessert. My favorite petit gâteau was called a Merveilleux and was made of meringue, chocolate, and whipped cream. We were, after all, in Belgium, the land of chocolate. In fact, most of what my mother did at home was to instruct everyone else, but she did it very well. Our apartment was beautifully decorated,
full of antiques she had collected. I have a clear memory of her looking for and finally finding the Empire chandelier she so desired. It now illuminates my Mayfair shop in London.

Since my mother died, my father having died six years before, I have searched for clues in my parents’ lives as to what formed them and why I am who I am. That quest has taken me to Eastern Europe and the city of Kishinev, then the capital of Bessarabia, now the capital of Moldova, where my father was born in 1912, and to Salonika, Greece, where my mother was born in 1922.

Both my parents’ families were in the textile business. My father’s father, a wealthy Russian merchant whose relatives included many intellectuals and artists—one relative, Lewis Milestone, directed the 1930 Academy Award–winning war film
All Quiet on the Western Front
—owned several fabric stores in Kishinev. My mother’s father, Moshe Nahmias, a Sephardic Jew (a Jew of Spanish origin), moved his family from Salonika to Brussels when my mother was seven and ran La Maison Dorée, the large department store owned by his brother-in-law, Simon Haim. My maternal grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt Line, was married to the wealthy Simon Haim and had urged her sister to join her in Brussels with her family. So, although I had never made the connection before, I do indeed have a legacy of the fashion and retail business from both sides of my family.

There is nothing I could find in my mother’s childhood that would give her the unimaginable strength to survive the death camps. As far as I could tell, she had a pleasant, uneventful young life in Brussels, rather spoiled as the youngest of three girls in the family. The only challenge for her and her two older sisters, who had gone to an Italian school in Greece, was to become more fluent in French when they moved to Brussels so they could do well at school. My maternal grandparents, who spoke Ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jews,
at home, changed the birthdates of the girls when the family arrived in Brussels, passing them off as two years younger so they would have more time to adapt, learn French, and be successful at school. My mother went to the Lycée Dachsbeck, the same school I went to years later, and we even had the same kindergarten teacher and the same headmistress, Mademoiselle Gilette. I found out recently that Mlle. Gilette had ignored the racial laws of the Nazi occupation and allowed my mother to graduate from high school. It is probably why she chose me to blow out the candles on the cake at the school’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1952; I was the daughter of an alumna who went to the death camps and survived.