(Author: Dorothy Kowen, Vol. 64, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2009)
My mother, the daughter of a rabbi in Germany, had escaped from Nazi Germany to Rhodesia and had married a Lithuanian Jew.
My mother and father did not communicate much, so the telephone became my mother’s intimate friend. She would speak ad nauseum to Minny, Sylvia or Hilda about the latest bridge conventions and her children.
One still Sunday evening, the night hung like a dark blanket pierced by the brilliance of a round African moon. Suddenly, the shrill sound of the telephone rent the air. I was relieved by the intrusion into that too still night.
My mother lifted the receiver.
“Hello, hello, Thea! Is that you? How are you? Ach, this line is not very clear. Yes I’m fine. Salisbury is not Oldenberg – not as cultured, but I like it here. Tell me about yourself…”
I had not heard mention of any Thea before. I listened to my mother’s voice from the adjoining bathroom. There was something different about this call. Usually, my mother would habitually become so excited over a phone call that she would gush. The following morning, there would be light spittle in the telephone cradle, a glistening testimony of the conversation of the previous night.
But this time, her voice sounded tight, as though somebody had put a fist around her throat. There was a harsh tonality in her voice that I had never heard before.
“Ja, Thea. So you have two sons… I have a son and three daughters. We must speak again. Let me write down your number. OK, we must terminate… I mean end… this conversation – Thea, this call is costing you too much. Auf wiedersehen. Thank you for calling”.
The phone crashed unceremoniously onto the cradle.
“Mom, who was that?”
“Never mind”, she said in her heavy German accent.
“No, I want to know. Was it somebody from Germany?”
“It’s better forgotten”.
“No, don’t tell me … let me guess. Was she at school with you and then her parents stopped you visiting because you were Jewish?”
“No. Her parents were always warm and accepting. She was my best friend… but I must cut her out. I must pretend Nazi Germany did not exist…You do understand, don’t you?” I did not.
Then there was her cousin, Hans Trixer, a magician of international repute. When I was about five or six, I thought he was so good looking and distinguished. He had thinning grey hair and a broad toothy smile, but his eyes – his eyes were sad and distant, like the eyes in pictures by the old masters.
I hated my birthday parties. I hated the smocked dresses and straw hats my mother made me wear. I did not like the children who came to celebrate my parties. I thought birthdays were sad. I had not asked to be born, and now I was supposed to be happy.
Uncle Hans did not enjoy my birthday parties either. He also did not come willingly. He was invited as the magician.
When he arrived in Rhodesia as a refugee from Nazi Germany, my Granny insisted that he perform magic tricks for the children at my parties. My Granny, Annie de Haas, had been a rebbetzin in Germany. No one said ‘No’ to her.
Rabbits popped out from Hans Trixer’s sleeves, cakes appeared out of burning newspaper. We children watched the cakes, but he just watched the flames with a detached fascination. While he watched the flames, I watched him mesmerized. The children shrieked and clapped, egged on by my Granny.
“How did you do it? How did you do that trick, Hans Trixer?” hollered one of the children, jumping into his arms. He disentangled himself with distaste from the clinging child as though he were peeling off some sticky brown toffee. Clearly he did not like her, nor any of the other children for that matter.
Hans Trixer was not his real name. My mother told me that when he was five years old, he was given a magic set, a gift she thought far too sophisticated for a child of that age. She thought his parents, Walter and Gerde, spoiled him. Walter Elsbach, of Dortmund, Germany, was my Granny’s brother.
When he was not entertaining children at my parties, Hans ran Keayes Jewellers in Salisbury and made jewellery. I still have some of the pieces he gave me.
Years later, we learned his story. At the age of fourteen, this spoilt only child had worked in the kitchens at Auschwitz. The Gestapo heard about his talents as a magician and forced him to perform before his tormentors. The penalty for failure to please was the gas chamber, the reward for success a slice of bread. He survived because of his magic, unlike his parents, his uncle (who had been brutally killed in a police station) and his friends.
After the war, Hans advertised in the paper trying to find family. My uncle, Joe de Haas, saw his name and went to Holland to find him. Uncle Joe and my father, Jack Lessem, brought Hans and his new wife Shelley out to Salisbury and found him a job. Many years later, my 16-year-old daughter Danielle went on the March of the Living to visit the death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau. She returned no longer a child, but the grown daughter of a second generation Holocaust survivor. Soon afterwards, she went for a walk with “Uncle Hans” on Cape Town’s Clifton Beach. After a long stroll, they watched the waves pounding on the beach. For hours he did not speak.
Danielle hoped he would ask her about her experiences. She hoped he would speak about the unspeakable. But he remained silent.
So many questions: What was going through his mind when my Granny insisted that he do a command performance for an audience of spoiled children who did not know or care about the numbers etched into his skin under his long sleeves? The numbers he hid. Even on the hottest summer days he would not wear a short sleeved shirt. What else was he hiding?
When the children yelled for more, what was he thinking? Was he reliving the pleasure he had given the Gestapo when he performed his magic for them? Was he hearing the laughter of the children of the off-duty Gestapo officers, who ruled the camp with such brutality? Did he envy the happiness in my friends’ faces, the happiness of the “normal childhood” that had eluded him because of the atrocities of Nazi Germany? Why was he determined to have no children of his own?
And still more questions. Did he know that in my eyes, he was special and talented? But how did he see himself? Did he see himself just as a trickster, who had tricked the Gestapo into sparing his life? After the war, in another world, when he became famous for his tricks, did he ask himself who he might have become had he not been born in Nazi Germany? Did he get pleasure when he was made president of the Magic Circle of Los Angeles and when some of his card tricks, still named after him, entered into the magicians’ repertoire? Even then, he ignored the praise. “When you steal one trick, they call it plagiarism”, he would say, “When you steal many, they call it research”. In the dark nights of his soul, did he ever ask himself why his magic wand had spared only him and not his loved ones?
My mother did not have the vitality of her cousin Hans. She wore her suffering like a cloak around her all the time. She felt that my brother, sisters and I had an idyllic childhood. After all, she had grown up in Nazi Germany, suffering humiliations at the hands of the Nazis. Many of her friends had died in the camps.
“I am feeling depressed”, I once confided to her. “Depressed?” she said, “What do you know about depression? Did you grow up in Nazi Germany?”
That was very much it. Living in Salisbury, we were not entitled to feel too much pain. Her suffering in Germany was so monumental that our suffering paled into insignificance.
I was discouraged from being too ambitious – life ended the same way for everyone. In my mother’s words, “life was short and beshissen like a baby’s napkin”. Everything should be ‘downspilled’, not ‘upspilled’. When a friend of mine told her she thought I was intelligent, my mother retorted, “Ja, in ze kingdom of ze blind, ze one-eyed is king”.
Like Hans, she would not accept or give praise. We were taught not to be too enthusiastic about anything, or anybody for that matter. I would return from school with a new friend. When she had left, I would say to my mother, “Isn’t she wonderful?” My mother would reply, “Ja, but somesing, somewhere…”
There was always “something, somewhere” for her to disapprove. She would look at all my friend with a jaundiced eye – projecting the darkness of Nazism onto the still unwritten narrative of their lives.
Another of her sayings, one I only appreciated once I entered adulthood, was: “Don’t envy people who seem to have a better life style than you. Life is lived in the valleys, not on the mountains. You only go up to the mountain to breathe.”
My mother played a great deal of bridge. Her bridge allowed her to enter another world, a more regulated one, one over which she had some control. We children used to say that she “bridged over troubled waters.” When she was playing bridge, she hated to be interrupted – especially if we were “upspilling our pain.” When I was a teenager, I wrote this poem:
I must have been seven, or was it eight?
When I returned home from a party late. A motorcyclist who did not see me
Had knocked me to the ground.
When I came round
I ran home to blurt out my story.
My mother involved in a game of bridge Welcomed me with the warmth of a fridge, “Has blood been spilled?” she said. “Is someone perhaps dead?
“Go straight to your bedroom.
Don’t speak of doom and gloom.
You have a cut and a graze, Nothing time will not erase.”
Her scars, you see, would always last. She was a victim of the Holocaust.
The author hereby thanks Gwynne Schrire for her encouragement and assistance with this article.
Dorothy Kowen is a teacher of French language and classical literature and the author of a number of fictional works, including Bobba’s little lies, A Gift of Gold (also translated into French and anthologized in a French textbook) and Nyama’s Journey. The above article is an extract from The Rabbi’s Daughter, a novel in progress.
