Exodus: A memoir (13 page)

Another employee helped me with the initial translation. There were pages of testimony about her experiences during the war, which had been collected by international police. It was delivered woodenly, but, although that could have been the translator’s work, it seemed somehow to be my grandmother’s voice. I could almost hear her saying those words out loud. The testimony had been taken in German, the documents said. Had she indeed spoken a rudimentary German, or was that Yiddish they were referring to? I had never heard her speak a word of German.

She had been one of two hundred Hungarian women, chosen for their ability to perform skilled labor, culled from Auschwitz and taken to various munitions factories throughout Germany, where they were forced to fashion weapons for the Nazi army. They had to have known that they were aiding the war effort, I assumed. Later, I would learn from online research that a memorial had been erected for those two hundred women in the small town in Germany where they had worked, at the site of the former Phillips-Valvo factory where the munitions had been produced. The memorial was erected out of sensitivity to those women who
had been forced into the particular cruelty of manufacturing the agents of their own destruction. Much like feeding chicken to a chicken, I thought. I tried to imagine my grandmother producing guns, bombs, or grenades. My grandmother, who could whip a meringue so fine that it hovered over the bowl. Had her fingers shaped cold metal? Had they been blackened with powder? Try as I might, I couldn’t envision it.

There was also a list of places and dates in her file; they were penciled on yellowing paper and difficult to decipher, but they turned out to be a detailed itinerary of her time in Sweden. I asked the clerk to show me where the places were on a map. His finger swiped haphazardly from region to region, north, south, east, west, back and forth, as he scrolled down the list in chronological order.

“How could she have moved around this much?” I asked.

He shrugged. “They went where there was room for them.”

I knew I didn’t have time to make it to all the places on the list. Some of them were a day’s ride away. But I rented a car and headed to the lake region in Central Sweden, where spas and resorts traditionally used by Sweden’s upper class for a restorative cure had been converted into temporary refugee camps after the war. These were the places she would have recovered in. Afterward, she worked as a farmhand and then as a seamstress, first in a small-town factory, then in a big city.

Sweden’s lake region consisted of deserted roads of pebble and dirt and an endless horizon of tall, spindly pines with raw trunks the color of cocoa powder. Loka Brunn, a famous old spa town now restored to its former glory, was deathly quiet. There was a small museum there, designed to explain the town’s role during World Wars I and II, but although it was open, there were no
visitors or employees in any of the hushed rooms I peered into. This was the region that supplied Loka, the sparkling mineral water available in every café and market in Sweden, but where the production process took place I could not fathom.

I took a dip in the clear, still lake at the edge of town, even though it was barely sixty degrees out, and the sun hovered somewhere behind the towering pines. Two small gray birds skimmed the water for fish. I watched their legs blur like those of roadrunners on the surface of the water and wished I knew what kind of birds they were. Perhaps they had been here sixty-odd years ago, and she had smiled at the sound of their high-pitched trills. I was glad to be here now, alone in the quiet, looking at a scene my grandmother had gazed at all those years ago. It was nice to know that she had been somewhere beautiful, that it hadn’t all been ugliness. It was some consolation, I supposed, that she had ended up here, instead of going back to Hungary and getting stuck behind the iron curtain.

Back in Stockholm, I ordered porridge in Café Giffi in Södermalm and noticed all the familiar pastries of my childhood behind the glass display case. My grandmother had made those, but who had taught her how? They were certainly not traditional Hungarian confections, and couldn’t have been passed down from her mother, as she’d claimed. The round lacy cookies I remembered were called Tosca flan here. They were sandwiched together with pastry cream, not dipped in chocolate as she had done.

“Are you Jewish?” the white-haired Chinese man who owned the café asked as he brought me my porridge. I had this panicked thought that someone had informed him I might be coming, which I immediately dismissed as ridiculous.

“Yes,” I answered in a cautious tone.

“Are you American?” he asked, with even more enthusiasm this time.

“Yes,” I said again.

“You look just like Woody Allen!”

I look like a cantankerous old man—great.

“You should meet Leon,” he urged. “My best customer. Comes in every day. Also Jewish.”

“Sure,” I said, thinking that Jews must be a rare thing around here if he thinks we need to stick together.

Leon was eighty-six, exactly the same age as my grandmother. He had come to Sweden as a refugee from Berlin when he was eight years old, before the war. He was very hard of hearing and incredibly lecherous. He’d never been married, he said, but he now regretted it. He didn’t like feminists.

“Do you remember the survivors,” I asked, trying to steer the conversation away from his obsolete political views. “When they came here after the war?”

“They kept to themselves, mostly because they scared everyone else. They had these swollen bellies, you know.”

“Because of the shock of sudden nutrition?”

“I suppose. They ate a lot. They were hungry all the time. They were all trying to compulsively put on weight.”

The photograph of my grandmother that I had found in her file had shocked me. I could barely recognize her, with her swollen face, her hollow, unseeing expression.

“Did they seem sad?” I asked.

“Sad? No!” he said with great certainty. “If anything, they seemed very strong.”

I left the café after that, wanting that sentence to define my
conversation with him. Of course she had seemed strong. It wasn’t the depressives who survived the horrors of war; it was the stoic and valiant who made it through. Of course she wouldn’t have spent much time lamenting her losses. She threw herself into skilled work, made plans for the future. She wanted to replace the family she had lost by marrying and having many children. I suppose it made sense that she would choose for a husband someone familiar, someone who spoke her native languages and came from her region, when she had lost everything else familiar in her life.

I had pieced together from her file that the Hungarian government wouldn’t give her an identity document after the war. She had appealed over and over to the embassy in Stockholm. It was only after Swedish diplomatic interference that she finally received a piece of paper stating she had been born in Hungary but was not a citizen. This had proved enough to apply for an alien’s passport, which had then allowed her application for U.S. citizenship to finally be approved, after three tries.

It provoked me deeply, seeing evidence of her travails in this arena. It was unimaginable that someone who had just survived hell should have to be consumed for three years with the maddening process of begging for a home in any country that would take her. She had even considered emigrating to Cuba under the condition that she would only perform agricultural labor. It was written into an agreement she signed with the Cuban government. She had stated, over and over, her intention to emigrate to Palestine! She, who had ultimately married into a fervently anti-Zionist community.

“Everyone was a Zionist then,” Leon had told me.

What I couldn’t understand was, what happened to that strength
that she had so bravely displayed then, completely on her own, in a mad world still reeling from chaos? I never knew her to speak her mind or advocate for her needs. Was this what ultimately marked one as a survivor—the drive to subsume one’s identity under the heavier mantle of martyrdom for the sake of the dead?

Ed had asked me to look back in one of our sessions. I didn’t know what he meant at first, but he said to close my eyes and it would come. I did so with some skepticism.

“What do you see?” he asked after a few moments.

“I see a mourning dove,” I said, surprised that the image had popped into my mind. “It’s sitting in a window grate.” That’s odd, I thought. How did it squeeze through the grate?

“What’s inside the window?”

“Nothing. There’s just a lace curtain and it’s pulled shut across the window.” Those beautiful floor-length drapes had hung across the entire wall like curtains on a stage.

“Try to see if you can push the curtain aside and look behind it.”

Out of nowhere a breeze came and blew through the open window, lifting the curtain slightly. As it briefly fluttered aside, I did not see what I expected to, which was myself as a child, contemplating the view as I often did at that window. Instead I caught a momentary glimpse of fire and torment; a Goyaesque collage of burning bodies, flailing babies, limbs contorted in pain, mouths open in wide grimaces. I recoiled, and the curtain closed again.

“That’s not my past I’m seeing,” I said. “I don’t even know what I’m looking at. It’s like they’re living through me.”

A few years ago in New Orleans, a tall, brown-skinned man, half Cherokee, half something else, had approached me on the street. “You’ve got dead people all around you,” he’d said to me, his face stern and serious.

“What?” I’d said, thinking he was joking.

“Dead people. Everywhere. They’re following you. Probably your ancestors. That’s what they’re telling me.”

“No, you’re making a mistake,” I told him, laughing nervously. “They can’t be my ancestors. My family disowned me. I’m cut off from my community. I doubt my ancestors haven’t caught on.”

“You’re the one who’s mistaken,” he said, glaring, the tone of his voice impatient. “They know it all. But they’re still there, and they want you to know. Don’t neglect them.”

I had looked around then, at the quiet street, darkening in the early evening. Which ancestors? What were they like? How could I get to know them?

In Hungary, I’d asked myself who I could hope to be if I didn’t first know the person my grandmother had hoped to become. Now I wondered if I could have inherited her pain somehow, the burden she carried but refused to speak about, those gruesome deaths she related so woodenly to the police officers who took her testimony—as if it were normal, as if everyone lost every living relative in such a way. Was this why her story seemed embedded
into my own sense of self, why I felt compelled to know her dreams through mine?

I had searched all my life for a magic of my own, an answer to my grandmother’s inextinguishable essence. I had sought the location of my iron, unbending will, the source of my irreducible strength. In myself, I found only fallibility and fear, but what I now realized I had inherited from my grandmother was the knowledge that home is an internal space you could carry inside you, that it could never be violated, even if your whole world was turned upside down.

My grandmother had unwittingly taught me that to be a whole person, you did not need the certainty of blood relations or confirmed origins; you needed only your convictions. She showed me, through her own story of heroic survival, that I did not need family to survive. Even today, she still models a true independence for me, the kind that renders you free even in the smallest prison, where your mind is a series of doors that open out. Even when ugliness abounded and it felt like the hate of the world was directed at her, she demonstrated that the integrity of the self could never be compromised.