This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
On the night of Kristallnacht in Berlin, my mother Joan, then four years old, was at home with her mother, Bella, and baby sister, Dina. Her seven-year-old brother, Herbert, was out shopping for a loaf of bread. If not for the kindness of a non-Jewish woman who hid him in her skirt folds, Herb might not have survived the attack. Weeks later, my mother and uncle were put on a Kindertransport train with other children they did not know and then transferred to a boat to escape the Nazis. All my mother remembers is being given flowers and chocolate and a kind older girl who took her hand.
I’ll never know, but perhaps the trauma of Kristallnacht helped my grandmother have the courage to send her children away to try to save them. Bella and baby Dina died at Auschwitz, taken on the very last transport to the camp. Mom’s father, Franz, died of illness and starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he had gone to find work. All my mother has left of them are a few sepia-colored photographs, two letters, and a postcard. Her brother Herbert, who lived outside Nashville for many years, recently passed away.
Other Kindertransport kids say my mother was lucky to have been sent to family, an aunt and uncle in Southport, England. But she had never met them. The uncle was strict, but the aunt was loving. They were elderly, though, and ten years later, when Mom was fourteen, she was separated again from the only family she knew, and sent to Aunt Charlotte in the United States. Charlotte was not as warm a woman as the English aunt. But the new uncle was far worse, abusing my mother for two years until he died of what was then inoperable coronary disease. This is perhaps the only time I have been happy about the timing of available medical interventions. I didn’t know this horrific fact about Mom’s journey until last summer, when she broke her hip and was heavily sedated. She didn’t mean to tell me.
She was mortified when she realized what she had relayed. When I asked her why she hadn’t told her aunt about the abuse, she said “We had nowhere else to go. No one who wanted us.” Can you imagine?
Mom went on to marry and have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She has had beautiful moments in her life and lots of love. But she is damaged in many irreparable ways. She has become somewhat paranoid and delusional. It is hard to parse what is just her personality, the result of her separation from her family at four and again at fourteen, the abuse once she reached the US, the stroke she had ten years ago, or the dementia that has set in.
This is not to say that Mom isn’t ever entertained or, for that matter, entertaining. Just this week, by accident, she purchased a pornographic movie on TV. I snorted when I received the email from the carrier asking if I’d enjoyed ‘Cage Girls Gone Wild.’
But feeling secure and trusting people comes hard to her. And, to some degree, those insecurities have been passed on to my brother and me, the next generation—intergenerational trauma… the gift that keeps on giving. Mom has never accepted my husband or my brother’s wife. They were and continue to be outsiders in her mind, a threat to the family she recreated for herself. At least, this is what a therapist told me years ago. Though I understand it psychologically, it has not been easy to deal with day-to-day… in real-time. She now says untrue and hurtful things about them both… out loud…loudly, in the presence of family and strangers. I cringe and find myself increasingly setting boundaries in the amount and frequency of time I spend with her and the time she spends with my children. It is indeed ironic and a sad thing for a woman who has only wanted the family she lost.
When news of the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel reached US news stations, Mom called me, terrified. "They're killing us again!"
We are in the fight of our lives, both Jew and non-Jew, American and non-American. A battle against Islamic fundamentalism. Of Anti-Americanism. Anti-Zionism. Anti-feminism. When will the world wake up?
I don’t have an answer for my mother, whose worst nightmares have come true. Whose short-term memory may be suffering, but whose long-term memory is intact, and whose Costco hearing aids, and the very patient Costco technicians allow her to hear the TV news, perhaps too well, again.
I try to console Mom with words about eventual peace in the Middle East that I’m not sure I believe. I want what will most likely be Mom’s last years to witness a growing acceptance of Israel and the Jewish people. Neither my mother, Israel, nor the Jewish people can ever be made whole or recover from the entirety of the suffering we have experienced in our history and the current trauma we are going through, but it’s enough already. DAYENU.
Do you hear me, God? DAYENU. Or do I need to suggest a visit to Costco?
Debra Green is the author of The Convention of Wives and Mahjong at Mara’s.
Instagram: @debragreenwriter
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
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