Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,93
do not believe in god, so it isn’t the Jewish religion that I grieve but the culture embedded in it.
Or maybe it is the other way around.
Either way, when I think of the human potential stolen, of the millions of little lights snuffed out, I can’t help but wish for a kind of redemption. I can’t help but wish that the living, at least, would embrace what was taken from the dead.
Not that I am one to talk.
But then again, since Marta wasn’t Jewish, I feel myself not especially welcome. Judaism is passed down on the mother’s side, so I don’t officially count.
I would, of course, have been Jewish enough for Hitler. I assume that is part of the reason my mother left the Bauers when Pavel got her pregnant. Or perhaps the Bauers sent her away themselves. There was Anneliese to think about. Still, I grieve the Jewish half of myself I grew up not knowing, and I try in my own way to honour it. I have a Star of David that belonged to my father, Pavel—my mother passed it on to me before her death. I wear it under my sweater, next to my heart. I even keep the Sabbath in a manner of speaking. Joseph—Pepik—refused to join me: he said it felt unnatural. So I would eat by myself, fumble my way through the blessings over the bread and wine. I still do this most Friday nights. I could seek out other people, but I have no real desire. It’s the time of the week I feel most acutely alone. And I feel a kind of perverse enjoyment in it.
I did, as I’ve said, once have a lover—a woman, yes—but that was so long ago now.
The list of those lost grows.
“Was I right about your baby sister? She was killed?” I asked Pepik that day when I first visited his home. We had gone out into the small fenced-in yard. The clouds were low and grey. “Your full sister,” I clarified.
He turned his face towards me. “Why do you ask me?”
“I thought you might have done some research.”
And it turned out he had. In the week since I’d delivered the letters he’d put the other pieces in place.
“Yes, you were right,” he said. “Theresienstadt. Auschwitz.” The rubber tip of his cane was sinking into the dark earth. “I thought it was you. The baby in my photo.”
I told him again that it couldn’t have been. The date on the back of the photo said 1937, and I didn’t come along until several years later. Until Pepik had already been sent away to Scotland. So the baby in the picture was a second sibling he’d never known.
It was also hard at first to make him believe that Marta wasn’t his mother. I pointed repeatedly at Anneliese: he spent a long time looking at her face.
Yes, he said, he did remember something. Yes, there was a flicker.
But when he looked at Marta, her hand on his young shoulder, the word mother flashed across his mind.
I can see what he was thinking. In the photo, Anneliese is holding herself slightly apart and her eyes are to the side, as though something else has caught her attention, something slightly fearsome that is moving towards her. Marta is the one who is leaning into Pepik, whose gaze is cast down in his direction. If I had to pick the mother of the pair I would pick Marta too. There’s a tenderness to her, a warmth that makes me know I was lucky to be her child, even for the short time we lived together on this earth. There was also a particular naïveté about her, something close to childlike. She didn’t know what was coming.
My mother, Marta, died in a DP camp in 1946. She had nobody left to help her. She got sick, and she perished.
What did you expect? A happy ending?
Sometimes I am envious of the Kindertransport children I study, who often have no memory of their childhoods. This oblivion seems to have passed me by. There are things from my childhood I remember in near-perfect detail, from the years both before and after my mother’s death. Things that haven’t helped me live a happy life. Oh no, quite the opposite has been true.
Meeting Pepik was a bit of goodness, though. We had a small window of time in which to enjoy the gift we’d found. We’d been alone all our lives, and suddenly we each had family. When