Let Me Go Read online

  She laughs, but her jaw is still trembling.

  "Didn't you even feel sony for the children?" I ask. I don't dare meet Eva's eye.

  "And why should I have?" she replies promptly. "A Jewish child would have become a Jewish adult, and Germany had to free itself of that loathsome race—how many times do I have to repeat that?"

  I take a deep breath.

  "But you were a mother," I object, "you had two children. While the children were being driven into the gas chambers, didn't you ever think about us?"

  "What's that got to do with it?"

  "I mean . . . didn't it ever occur to you that if we'd been Jewish children we'd have faced the same fate?"

  "My children were Aryan!" she exclaims, outraged. "The Aryans had nothing to fear. My children were perfect, and no one would have touched a hair on their heads!"

  Are you really sure about that? Do you really think that we Aryan children had a comfortable place in Hitler's greater Germany? When, for example, in February 1943, Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels announced the imposition of severe emergency restrictions, do you think that Aryan children would have been exempted?

  As for not touching a hair on our heads, fine, they didn't send us into the gas chambers, but they did starve us appallingly: At night we dreamed of potatoes. And I had to confront all that without you. Because you weren't there; you had delegated your role as a mother to others so that you could follow your own path.

  Even in 1971 when I came to see you in Vienna with my son, not for a minute did you try to recover the time we had lost or reestablish any kind of relationship with me: You tried to get me to wear your SS uniform.

  And today, once again, I haven't had so much as a spark of genuine maternal warmth from you.

  I look at you and I remember the slender diary that my paternal grandmother gave me shortly before she died. My father had placed it in her hands, and she wanted to give it to me. From those pages I understood that Papa had never forgotten you, even though you had broken his heart. He had never forgotten you, in spite of pretty young Ursula, the girl "of good family" whom he had married the second time around.

  And I have never managed to erase you from my life either.

  "NO ONE WOULD have touched a hair on your heads." We're still on that topic.

  "During the war, didn't you ever wonder what had become of your children?" I've had that question inside me for so long. As I ask it, I notice with relief that her jaw is no longer trembling.

  She looks at me vacantly.

  "The war . . ." she repeats dreamily. "In Birkenau I didn't even notice it. I had so many things to do."

  She pushes back her hair.

  "But then the Russians came." Her face becomes animated again. "It was in January . . . yes, it was cold."

  The memory comes into focus. "The Russians arrived and treated us like criminals." Her voice is stung with outrage. "They threatened us with guns and forced us to take off our uniform jackets."

  She automatically makes the gesture of taking off her jacket.

  "They wanted to see the inside of our arms," she goes on, "to check if we had tattoos showing our blood group."

  Her teeth squeak strangely as she laughs.

  "The SS women didn't have the tattoo, you see?" She pulls back the sleeve of her jacket and reveals her arm. "You see, no tattoo." What I see is her wrinkled and alarmingly white skin.

  "But we put on the uniform," she repeats, growing more and more tearful, more and more senile, "we guards had SS uniforms. One comrade tried to be clever and said to the Russians, pointing at her uniform, 'Odolzhat! Odolzhat!' She wanted them to think she'd borrowed it. But the Russians beat her, shouting 'Lguna!'Liar, that's what they said."

  She wipes away a tear. "We were separated, men from women. We were sad. The men shouted 'Heil Hitler' from their truck, and the Russians beat them with their rifle butts, but some of them shouted 'Heil Hitler!' anyway, putting their lives at risk."

  I'M DISTRACTED. My thoughts return to the victims, to all the stories I know, the stories I've read or been told. I also think, Mother, that it's only by hating you that I could finally tear myself away from you. But I can't. I can't get that far.

  I've got to get back to her. She's noticed my detachment, and she's demanding attention.

  "Why have you stopped talking?" she asks sulkily.

  I feel tired and disappointed. By now I'm close to resignation. She's gone. I've seen her for the last time. I can start to bring this meeting to an end. I look at the clock.

  "I still have so many questions to ask you," I say prudently, "but I can see it's getting late. Soon you'll have to go to lunch and we—"

  "Ask, ask away," she says quickly, with a hint of anxiety.

  "Let's talk about your health," I suggest. "What do they do to you here? Do they give you any kind of treatment?"

  "Just ask about Birkenau," she pleads. "Because that's what you're interested in, isn't it?"

  Her expression is knowing and alert once again. Another of those astonishingly sudden changes of hers.

  Nonetheless, I try to keep to the direction I've set myself.

  "Talk to me about you," I insist. "So, do they give you any treatment? What do they give you?"

  "I imagine Fräulein Inge will already have told you what they give me," she cuts me short. "Pills and syrups, that's what. And I'm not actually convinced that they do any good. They want to improve my memory, but what good is it to me?" And she adds astutely, "Everything I want to remember I always find in the usual place, and the rest doesn't interest me."

  There's a moment of silence, and then she gives me an encouraging smile. "So? Don't you want to know more about Birkenau?"

  Now that she's pressing me, I realize that I've run out of questions. But I do feel a faint sense of anxiety at the thought of our imminent separation.

  "What are you thinking about?" she asks solicitously, almost sweetly. She leans forward and grips my hands again.

  But I don't want to make her the gift of my confusion and fall back on one of those stories that have recently crowded into my mind. It was told to me by the protagonist himself.

  "I was thinking about someone I know . . ."

  "Who?" This time she's the one who looks me straight in the eyes, and I'm forced to avert my gaze.

  "A friend," I reply.

  "Why were you thinking about him?"

  "He was deported to Auschwitz at the age of eighteen; he was castrated." And I quickly free my hands from hers.

  She draws back with a puff of irritation. "Castrated in Auschwitz?" she asks, scornful and incredulous. "He's been telling you a pack of lies."

  This time I explode. "They exposed his reproductive organs to X-rays for twenty minutes, giving him very severe burns, and then they removed his testicles to dissect them and examine them under a microscope. Are you going to deny that they experimented with the sterilization of human beings in Auschwitz?"

  "It's a lie!" she insists. And clarifies: "Some things were only done in Ravensbrück."

  "And what about Mengele?" I remind her. "Doesn't that name mean anything to you?"

  "Mengele?" she echoes, as though shifting the word from one side of her mouth to the other. "Never heard of him."

  I feel as if I'm being provoked, played for a fool.

  "And Meyer, Kaschub, Langben, Heyde, Renno, Brandt—do those names mean nothing either?"

  Her mouth is thin and hard. "Never heard of them. I don't know who you're talking about."

  She frowns and folds her arms. "And anyway I don't want to talk to you anymore; you've annoyed me now."

  She gets to her feet, apparently in a terrible mood all of a sudden. She takes a few steps through the room. She walks upright, apparently quite steady on her feet. She walks over to an ornamental plant and starts picking off red berries and popping them slowly between her fingers.

  "Say something nice to her," Eva hisses to me, "you must leave her in a balanced state of mind."

  S
he's right. But while I'm searching for something conciliatory to say, I hear her muttering. "You've never once called me Mutti." She wipes her hands with a handkerchief and repeats, "You say you're my daughter and you've never once called me Muttil"

  She comes over to me and asks in a hurt and doleful voice, "Am I not your mother?" And with a certain mischief she starts pinching my cheek as though I were a little girl. I nod mechanically, and she starts shrieking, "Then you have to call me Muttii Everyone else's children call their mothers Mutti, and you have to call me Mutti too. I want you to."

  She crosses her arms over her chest and assumes a domineering expression. I feel helpless, caught off guard. I can't call her Mutti. I can't do it.

  "I'm waiting," she insists, in the intransigent voice of someone who is sure of her rights. I could reply that everyone else's children have probably had a lifetime to get used to calling their mothers Mutti, but I'm afraid of annoying her.

  "I can't say it," I decide to admit.

  "You can't call me Mutti?" she scoffs.

  "I'm not used to it," I answer, shrugging my shoulders.

  "I want you to call your mother Muttii" she insists. It comes across as capricious, nothing more than that. "If you don't, I'm going to leave here and I'm not even going to come back to say good-bye to you," she says vindictively, in a defiant tone.

  "I can't do it," I say curtly, irritated and dismayed. But she starts playing a new role. She hides her face in her hands and starts sniveling.

  "I don't understand why you came here to humiliate me . . . to humiliate an old mother who asks only to be called Mutti." And she weeps and sobs and coughs: We're back in the world of melodrama. My inner demon starts to goad me again.

  "Blackmail her," it suggests to me. "Tell her you'll call her Mutti only if she's more open with you."

  There's no way out.

  "Perhaps your friends' children call their mothers Mutti because there are no lies between them." I listen to my voice and don't recognize it; it sounds like someone else's voice.

  "I never tell lies!" my mother insists resentfully.

  "That's not true," I contradict her. "You said you'd never heard Mengele's name mentioned before."

  She gives a twisted smile. "Well, maybe I forgot."

  "Fine," I answer slyly, "but that's enough. Stop telling lies. It's absurd to have lies between a mother and daughter, don't you think?"

  She falls silent and stares at me with the candor of a child. She nods. Finally a sly little smile flickers across her face.

  "If I tell you the truth, will you call me Mutti?"

  I smile to myself.

  "Fine," I reply. And without delay I return to the subject closest to my heart.

  "I told you about that friend of mine who was castrated in Auschwitz. . . ."

  She lowers her eyes and shakes her head.

  "Did you know they were doing . . . those things in Auschwitz?"

  I hear my cousin sigh, but once again I pay no attention.

  "Of course!" my mother erupts impatiently. "Of course I knew; I was in the Waffen-SS, and we all knew what was going on."

  "Did you personally know any of those doctors in Auschwitz who performed sterilization exp—?"

  "Brack," she interrupts. "I knew Dr. Brack quite well."

  There, I think to myself, at last.

  "Really? And did you ever talk about what he was doing . . . for the good of humanity?" I ask, using her own words.

  "Yes," she agrees, "once. There was a party—a wedding, in fact. A colleague of mine had got married to an SS comrade—we were celebrating that—and he, Brack, was a bit overexcited, and then . . ."

  She fixes me with a sly look. "First you have to call me Mutti, and then I'll tell you what Brack said."

  "Fine," I give in, but it takes a great effort to frame the word "Mutti."

  My mother stares at me: She's waiting. Why is this so important after half a century? It can't be anything but a senile whim; she wants to be on a par with her companions.

  Mutti. But she doesn't deserve it. She's never shown the slightest trace of maternal love, and she's sitting there stiffly, arrogantly, waiting arrogantly for my "Mutti"—her trophy. But I remember our pact, and what I stand to get in return.

  I make a huge effort. "Mutti," I manage to say.

  She rejoices, clapping her hands. "Again, again!"

  "Mutti."

  She collapses into floods of tears—too high-pitched, too shrill. Perhaps she realizes that she can't move me to tears. Then she calms down, settles back into her armchair, arranges her face into a stubborn mask, and mutters, "I don't want to talk about that horrible man Brack. And anyway there were things he didn't talk about. He didn't talk about what he was doing in the scientific experiment block . . . It was a secret, you know? A state secret."

  Lying, opportunistic, fanatical, disloyal: That is how her file describes her.

  IN HIS BOOK DER SS-STMT, Eugen Kogon includes a report from SS Oberführer Victor Brack addressed to Heinrich Himmler, about the preliminary experiments into the sterilization of human beings:

  The following result may be considered secure and scientifically founded:

  With a view to the permanent sterilization of individuals, it is possible to apply doses of X-rays high enough to produce a castration with all the related consequences. The high dose of X-rays destroys the internal secretion of the ovaries or testicles. . . . But as it is not possible to screen the surrounding tissue with lead, we must accept the inconvenient fact that these organs will be damaged, with the consequent apparition of so-called "after-effects" of the X-rays. In case of excessive intensity of radiation, over the following days or weeks burns will appear on the areas of skin affected by the rays.

  Because the intention was to proceed with the sterilization of the subjects without their knowledge, Dr. Brack made a suggestion:

  One practical method might, for example, be to summon the individuals to a counter in front of which they would have to remain for about three minutes to answer questions or fill in forms. The clerk behind the counter would be able to switch on the radiological apparatus in such a way as to activate both the X-ray tubes, given that the radiation has to come from both sides. In this way, with a dual-tube apparatus, it would be possible to sterilise between 150 and 200 people a day, and with 20 such sets of between 3,000 and 4,000 . . . . The fact that those affected will discover, after a period of weeks or months, that they have become sterile is of no importance.

  If you, Reichsführer, were to opt for this solution, in the interests of maintaining the equipment, Reichsleiter Bouler would be willing to place at your disposal all the staff and doctors necessary for the implementation of the project.

  "Now you're angry," my mother observes. She tilts her head and gives me a rueful smile.

  "And anyway I didn't know that man Brack very well," she admits weakly.

  She has deceived me and she knows it. I feel cold inside.

  "When you were little, you were so pretty," she says, trying to get around me, "so pretty that my friends insisted that I have your photograph published in a race journal."

  Her friends . . . I struggle to concentrate again.

  "What year are you referring to?"

  "What year?" she repeats. She makes a gesture as though to wave a wisp of fog away from her eyes.

  "Were you still . . . with Papa?" I ask cautiously.

  "With Stefan?" She shrugs.

  At any rate, those "friends" must have been only hers. A vivid memory returns.

  * * *

  A SUMMERHOUSE IN Kremmen, a little village not far from Berlin. Stone foundations, the rest built of wood. Summer furniture: wicker and pale pine.

  The windows are open; from the village square, lined with old horse chestnuts, comes the sound of bells.

  You reach the house through a little front garden, but everything happens at the rear of the house. In the courtyard, among the lime trees, the neighbors' goose beats its wings as it runs a
fter my brother, Peter, trying to peck him.

  A little gate made of twisted interlocking planks leads into a garden whose colors, sounds, and perfumes I can still clearly remember: the jasmines, the elders, whose berries could be used to make a strange wine-colored soup, the dog roses that made a fine sweet jam.

  And the cheerful song of the larks, the swallows under the eaves, and two storks on the roof of a nearby barn. I still hadn't realized that we were at war.

  The scene takes place in the sitting room. It is evening; the sun is still low; the soil in the garden gives off a damp, pleasant odor.

  We have guests. My mother is laughing a lot. Apart from her I remember another woman and three men. The guests are all in uniform, including the woman.

  Then my mother picks up Peter, who is kicking his legs and squealing. She wants him to give each of the guests a kiss on the cheek, but he begs to differ. Each time she brings him to a guest, he tosses his curly head in another direction. He's being naughty and has no intention of kissing strangers.

  My mother starts to get cross, and her voice hardens. "Little nuisance!" But he's fed up and delivers a punch to the stomach of a uniformed man rather than kiss his sandpapery cheek. The recipient lets out a little shriek of amusement. My mother, disappointed, puts the little rebel back on the ground, whereupon he starts crawling on his hands and knees through the sitting room making funny childish sounds. I see him as though he were right before me, blithe and lively.

  I don't see any good coming of this and try to sneak off, but my mother catches me. It's my turn. The same bit of playacting. I feel a cramp in my stomach. I don't like kissing strangers either. But she has her eagle eye on me, and I resign myself to distributing my kisses, however reluctantly. But then I come to a man I dislike. I have disliked him since the moment I first saw him. He is tall and has scary eyes. His eyes are very pale, like Siamese cats' eyes. They seem to emit shards of glass.

  Here I am in front of him. The man bends down, gives me an icy smile, and stretches forward to receive that stupid kiss. But it's too much for me—I bite him on the chin.

  He starts back, clutching his chin. Yelling, my mother grabs me and shakes me. I don't cry, but I hate everyone.

  A quarter of an hour later. There's no one left in the sitting room. Peter has found the dustpan and is cheerfully stamping on it. Then he sits down on it as though it were a sled. I squat on the ground and watch him. He's a real little devil.