- Auschwitz Revisited

A couple of years ago I had been invited to sing Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte in the city of Cracow in Poland. A beautiful old town, famous for its medieval square, and the old Jewish quarter which much later was the Ghetto closest to Oswiscem or, as the Germans who built a concentration camp there liked to call it: Auschwitz.

On arrival at the Cracow Philharmonic concert hall we, the soloists, receieved a warm welcome from the manager of the orchestra. As soon as we entered the concert hall he came up to me with a nervous smile on his face. Hmm, Miss Mok, do you realize we are very close to Oswiscem here? Auschwitz, he emphasized, with the smile still there. "Would you like to visit? It is very interesting". He was trying hard to be friendly. I thanked him politely for te offer, but said no, my entire family has been there already. Not that they lived to tell the world how interesting it was; they never came back.

When I was about four years old I went to kindergarten. We lived in a small village on the seashore and my school was in another village about six kilometers away. My schoolday lasted from nine till three with a lunch break. During that break most of my little classmates would go to their grandparents. While I munched my sandwiches in a silent tete a tete with the teacher I waited anxiously for them to return with their pockets full of sweets and coins. They would be holding hands with granny or grandpa at the entrance of the school, stuffed with extra good food and that aura around them of having been pampered in a familiar place that is not exactly home, but so close. Even at four or five years of age it left me with a vague sense of regret.

I said little about it , but once when my mother came to collect me in her old car crammed with other kids who had to go back to our village, I had to ask her why we could not go for a visit to my grandparents. My mother, who had survived the war by hiding from the Nazis in various houses and later, hidden underneath floors, was very ill when the Allies arrived. Oh , how she had enjoyed the sound of those big American bombers flying through the nights, as she lay there, critically ill. For her it meant freedom. Freedom to be put on a stretcher in a train that brought her straight to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where the doctors told her she would never really recover and could never have children. But my mother was a survivor and so my older sister and I were born. Years later when she was already in her forties and her health was still shaky.
My mother did tell me then, in the car, that my grandparents had died in the war. All of them? Yes. I didn't give up that easily my dream of an extended family that spoils you rotten and warm hands covered in liverspots to hold on to. So she had to tell me a mild version of a horrendous truth: my grandparents had been murdered by the Nazis. In a camp that was called Auschwitz.

I began to recognize that word as I grew up. It always seemed to create that same silence in our living room. A moment of intense pain. My father would sit in his study and write poems about his parents, his sister, his family. Book after book appeared. Sometimes he did not speak for days and moved around the house like a shadow. Small and bent, muttering to himself. It sounded like the incantations of pious Jews. I don't know what he said, but I do know that sitting at table with him surrounded by his beloved dead, crippled with unspeakable suffering, I developed a strong wish to be able to take him away from it all.

My mother had her own way of dealing with her losses. Her brothers had been shot. Her sister's Bulgarian husband had been shot in front of her eyes with their baby in his arms. She had gone insane and lived in an asylum close to us. At weekends my parents would go and collect her so she could have dinner with us and sleep a night over in a comfortable bed. She never spoke. She just sat there smoking, staring out of the window. She would knit doll's clothes for my sister and I. We were strangely fond of her, our only aunt.

Why did nobody cry, I remember thinking as an eight or nine year old. I never saw my parents cry or hear them curse 'the Germans'. My father and mother instructed us not to cultivate hatred. "Thirty three percent of the Germans voted against Hitler, remember that, children. "It was the Nazis who took them all, my uncles and aunts and cousins. It was the Nazis who took my mother's family homes and the cars and stole the money in Switzerland.
My mother was such a cheerful presence in our home, always remembering her luxurious youth, telling us about her parties, her clothes, her friends, her brothers and sisters. The stories invariably ended in death. We just lived with those dead.

One day a man came to the door with a document. I remember standing behind my father, curious as to what it was all about. My father signed the piece of paper and when he turned around he was crying. I immediately started to cry as well . "I had to sign it', he said. He had signed in favour of the execution of a war criminal. Both my parents were against capital punishment. That he cried because he signed the death penalty of a man who had betrayed my father's sister and sent her off to the camps, I will never, never forget. As I will never forget how slowly the horrors of the Nazi regime came to life in mine.

My parents had a friend called Lydia. I worshipped Lydia. She was beautiful and kind and she gave me one of her siamese cats. Sometimes she'd work as a model for a local fashion designer. 'Only long-sleeved stuff, dear", she'd joke to me. She brought me along to a fashion show once and I was speechless with admiration. She was sad afterwards when she took me home. "I miss my sister, you know". She sat in a chair in our living room, drank a lot of gin, and rubbed nervously at the concentration camp number on her arm. Then I understood why she could not wear the short sleeves. She got very drunk that night and I wanted to know why. Why did Lydia not get married and have children and where was her sister? That was when I first felt the great fear. When they told me how the Nazis had 'experimented' on Lydia and her sister. That she could never have children and that her sister had died on the "operation table".

There they were; my parents' friends, artists, musicians, many with numbers on their arms. They were laughing and joking and fighting and shrugging off the past. But both my sister and I were used to the phone calls deep in the night when suddenly a friend couldn't take it any more. The memories. Sometimes we never saw them again.

We hung onto life and all it had to offer. My father had been raised in the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, he always told me, he first became aware of his Jewishness one day when he took a walk with his sister through Amsterdam. My father was a blond, blue-eyed child, his older sister dark. A woman threw an apple to him from her window in a street. He broke it in two and handed half of it to his sister. "Now don't you go giving that Jewchild my apple," the woman shouted at him. My father looked around, saw no one else, stared at his sister, suddenly understood, and they ran away, giggling.

I like to imagine my grandfather Hyman as an intelligent, helpless man who couldn't succeed as a business man, no matter how hard he tried. All he really liked was books. My grandmother ran a strict household. Both turned out to be tremendously naïve. Even now the description of the way they packed for the camp, Auschwitz, causes me to wring my hands in despair. My neat grandmother folding handkerchiefs in her small case, my grandfather in his freshly pressed three piece suit. My father was with them when they left for the trains, begging them not to go. He knew what would happen to them. My grandfather looked at him in kindly dismay, surely his son, oy these artists, was exaggerating? What on earth could the Germans do to them? And he put on his hat while my grandmother checked for the last time if the house was clean. "We want it to be tidy, for when we come back," she said, and hugged my father.

He never told us much about his parents. We read his poems about home, we read his poems about the marks their fingers had left on the walls of the gas chamber. On the foundations of our lives.

Years later an old rabbi came with his wife to my dressing room before a concert. He hardly greeted me, and almost shouted at me: "I drove them, you know, I drove your grandparents to the train. We didn't have proper tires on our car anymore and they complained a bit about the lack of comfort". I stared at the old man, speechless, while he laughed a nervous laugh. My hand went to my throat, what was I going to sing for that night? I stood on stage and saw a different darkness while I clung on to my music. The way I had learned from my father's friend Mr Carvalho, who had had to play in the Auschwitz Orchestra. And still he would close his eyes in delight and lean back in his chair, the veins on his arm bulging through the number when he heard music, and would nod in approval when I told him that I was going to study music.

My mother sang the songs she'd heard her mother sing and threatened us in Russian, my grandmother's mother tongue, when we were disobedient. She did tell us stories about her war. But more about her parents' life, her mother's work for the suffragettes and how the Nazis had walked into their vast house one morning, looked around, and declared that the house was theirs now. Very soon after that event, my mother was an orphan, persecuted by men in the same kind of uniform Prince Harry Windsor likes to don for his fancy dress parties.

When I was older my parents allowed me to read through literature from the Second World War. I had to come to terms with the inexplicable cruelty of the Nazis some way or other. I had to deal with my nightmares. I couldn't.

I brought a pianist home and my father produced some scores that he had saved from the house where his sister Saar, apparently a gifted pianist, had been arrested. She was put on the same train to the East as Anne Frank. Years later Anne's father came to visit. He sat with my parents and told them about Saar's last days in the barracks. And again another shadow moved into the house. Saar had been living in Amsterdam with a German actor, member of the famous cabaret group 'die Pfeffermuhle' founded by Erika Mann the daughter of the German author Thomas Mann. A lot of German Jews had taken refuge in the city by then.

My aunt Saar's name is engraved on the marble wall of the Hollandse Schouwburg, a theatre where she was kept by the Nazis with a group of small children for about a month. She was thirty five when she died. She had been very close to my father who by then was already a well known writer. Together they moved in the bohemian circles of Amsterdam, together they befriended the famous Jewish author Joseph Roth, together they decided never to wear the yellow star on their coats, to identify themselves as Jews. She was betrayed by some neighbours. People who owned a Restaurant that is still thriving in Amsterdam. It is now run by their children and grandchildren. How often did we drive past that place and my father would always mutter "Informers". How I hated everybody who sat there, eating. But hatred was not what we were living for. My parents joined Amnesty and opened their doors to writers from Chile or Russia, South Africa, regimes that tortured and suppressed as the Nazis had done. Only never in such a thourough manner.We learned more about ways of oppression but also about other cultures and languages. Only then could I begin to admire the systematic order in which the Nazis had done their work. If one wants to shape the absurd into a system, theirs was the best method ever. No matter how we tried at home to read about it and analyse the events, no matter how we climbed the ladders to higher and more education, in the end we were left with nothing, the ones who should have lived had died the most horrible death.

My father grew old.He started breaking out in a sweat of fear, thinking back. Age hit him at the core of his inner feelings.He grew weak and sat down in front of us, crying,finally.On his sister's birthday he wanted to go to Auschwitz to raise a statue in her honour.I liked the idea,but I had to stop him from packing.How ironic. He continued to cry humming her favoured Yiddish songs.The spectacle was unbearable.The Nazis had got him after all.A few weeks later he died.I was gratefull .

I sat at my mother's deathbed for the last time. I had the feeling that I had to listen to her very carefully, because when she was gone ,there would be nobody left to tell the exact details.Of how they had hung her sister or how she had escaped from a razzia .Her last words were about my daughter . She smiled.

My daughter who lives with me in a hopefully safe Dublin and likes to walk a tiny bit on the wild side of life.Who tells me innocently that those youngsters who flirt with Nazitheories and Nazi symbols just think of it as a game.And then ,suddenly I see the familiar"jews go home" sprayed in bright letters on a wall in Temple Bar.And iron crosses tattooed on teenage wrists.Maybe this a game they should not learn to play.Can somebody tell them that?

My mother died .So it was just my sister and me drifting among the dead .I do think we always had that feeling. There was this suitcase that had been packed for us: move on .A nearly compulsive need to show that you can be good,the best rather ,at what you are doing.No wonder I liked to retreat in cemeteries when I was ten years old, just to take a break from it all.Move forwards,survive, no matter if things are miserable,they can always be worse. Laugh about it,laugh about yourself,or even better,amuse the world with your misfortunes.But make sure, very sure that nobody forgets what happened.

I started dismantling my parents house,took apart the bookcases and found a little scrap of paper with a couple of names on it.It was a tiny piece of the list of dead familymembers sent by the Red Cross after the war.A twelve year old , a twenty year old, people in the bloom of their life with the same name as me.Why had they kept it in a book? I will never know.

Like I never knew these people,my family, who went to visit Auschwitz.

Judith Mok