Elaine Wolf - Camp

Its form was a story, one I’d hungered to hear. Each day, a snippet of her life. She talked until her eyes closed, and I panicked she was gone. Strange, how I used to pray for her death. Now I clung to her life.

Sometimes after a few minutes, my mother would open her eyes and talk again. And sometimes she would wait for me to ask what she was thinking about. It was hard to ask anything at first. All those years of not questioning, a habit tough to break. But we were different now. My mother wanted me to ask, and she needed to keep talking.

“I’m thinking about when I was young,” she whispered. I saw my mother in the word pictures she finally drew for me, with her accent that didn’t bother me anymore. Through her stories, I met my mother’s family. Two brothers: one who never got out of Germany and one, Walter, who made it to Paris, then Auschwitz. They were older than she was, my mother told me. They called her a pest. But when her brothers studied English in school and ran around the house yelling “all right, all right, all right,” her father said they were the pesky ones.

My mother smiled when she spoke of her father, a language professor, I found out. He talked to my mother mostly in French. He took her—just her, not her brothers—to his office in the city. Through my mother’s eyes, I saw the University of Bonn, the big building where her father worked. Polished doorknobs. Shiny floors. “It’s strange, what I remember,” my mother said, as I pulled my chair closer, anxious to catch every word.

“Tell me what happened, Mom.” She worked at another smile. A smile for her memories. A smile now, I believed, for me.

I sat on the edge of the chair and waited, desperate for another story, another glimpse. Slivers and fragments. Pieces of my mother’s life. I gobbled them and wanted more. And the more she talked, the more I recalled the clues, those random scraps I’d discarded through the years.

Her own mother died when she was only five, my mother said. I remembered: My father had told me when I’d asked about my grandparents. But I hadn’t heard the rest of the story, how my mother’s father remarried a couple of years later. How after the stepmother had her own son, she nearly ignored my mother and her brothers.

“My best friend was Elsa,” my mother whispered one day as I placed a blanket over her, leaning in for her words. “She lived next door. She wasn’t Jewish. Her mother baked spicy little cookies with sugar powder on them. Pfeffernüsse . Little cookie balls. Elsa’s mother baked them at Christmas.”

I wanted more about Elsa—a scene I could see. But it wasn’t Elsa my mother wanted to talk about. It was Elsa’s older brother, Otto. Funny, smart, and handsome, my mother told me. A popular boy. Everyone liked him. “When I was a teenager,” she said, “just a little older than you are, Otto began calling on me. We went for walks. Sometimes we went to the city, to a café.” My mother paused for a moment, perhaps replaying a memory. “We had a good time,” she went on. “Otto made me laugh.”

My mother laughing. A sound I had never heard. “Was Otto your boyfriend?” I asked, choking on the words, though I didn’t imagine my mother would mind that question now. How different from the mother who had raised me. Yet though we weren’t the same people, asking her about a boyfriend sent a tingle through me. But still, I wanted to know. I wanted to see her as a teenager. Was she pretty then, I wondered. As pretty as she was in the photos I had found? And popular? And smart?

“Yes, Otto was my boyfriend,” she answered without bitterness or anger. So it was Otto, I knew, whose picture I had studied. That third photo: the man who reminded me of Uncle Ed. “But we had a hard time,” my mother told me. “First with Elsa, and then with… with everything that happened.”

“What?” I pulled the chair right up to the sofa, and for the very first time, I reached for my mother’s hand.

It took days for her to tell me the whole story. At first, she said, the biggest problem was Elsa. Elsa was jealous. She didn’t like my mother spending so much time with her brother. But that was nothing compared with what happened later. “Elsa stopped saying hello when we passed in the street,” my mother said, “like she didn’t even recognize me. And her parents told Otto he had to stop seeing me. No more mixing with Jews, they said. Verboten .”

The next year my mother met Kurt. Kurt Jonas, she told me. His family owned a clothing store in Bonn. And despite the depression that hit Germany hard, Kurt’s family stayed in business.

“Another boyfriend? Did you love him, Mom? Like you loved Otto?”

“Yes.” My mother sighed. “It was different. But yes, I loved him very much. And my father was so happy when Kurt asked me to marry him. A Jewish boy from a good family—educated, successful.” She stopped for a moment to catch her breath. “In those days, we had to believe our lives in Germany would get better, even though most of us knew things were getting worse. And what could be better than getting married?”

I faked surprise at her having been married to someone other than my father. But it didn’t matter. My mother didn’t see my reaction as she talked about Kurt. And I couldn’t say that I already knew. I couldn’t tell her Robin had shared her secrets. I couldn’t admit I had broken into her metal box. I didn’t think I was ready to talk about Charlie.

My mother and Kurt had a good marriage, she said, though things in Germany did get worse, much worse. Her father urged them to leave the country. He wanted the whole family to go. But his wife wouldn’t hear of it. “This is our home,” the stepmother said. “We’re all Germans, after all. This Hitler business will end soon.”

My mother took a shallow breath. Then very slowly: “Amy, there’s something else. Something you should know.”

I curled my fingers around the edge of my seat, squeezed the dark green velveteen fabric. I knew what she was about to tell me. I leaned forward to catch every word.

“Kurt and I had a baby. Anna.” Tears filled her whispered words. “I’m sorry I never told you. But I… I couldn’t talk about her.” I pulled closer and took my mother’s hand again.

Anna was only two, she said, when Kurt tried to get documents for the three of them to go to France. My mother’s brother Walter was already in Paris. He rented a room there from an artist who needed income more than studio space. If my mother could get to Paris, she figured, she’d be able to stay with Walter for a little while, just long enough to find a job and an apartment. Her command of French, along with a bribe, would get her working papers. But there would be no working papers for Kurt, my mother told me. Not for a German Jewish businessman who didn’t speak French. Yet for my mother, there was a chance of a job and temporary lodging. Her brother’s landlady might let her in, she believed, if unencumbered by a husband and child.

Kurt pleaded for the three of them to go together.

“But think about Anna,” my mother said. “At least here she still has a place to sleep. Where would the three of us go in France without jobs, without a place to stay? If I go alone to Paris, Walter will be able to help me.”

My mother was scared to go by herself. Terrified, she told me. And leaving Anna was the hardest thing she ever did. But it was Anna she was thinking of when she begged Kurt to let her go first. “Anna’s just a baby. She needs food and a bed. A hungry, crying child will only bring attention. But if I go ahead, I can find us a safe place to live. And then you’ll bring Anna.”

It was Otto who got my mother out. Otto—a good man, she said. He hadn’t forgotten her, even after she married Kurt.