Let Me Go (15 page)

Men of honor . . . lovers of nature, of hearth and home, of animals . . . The stock Nazi self-portrait, kitsch at its most loathsome.

I look at Eva. She is very pale. I try to stay calm. I scour my mind for the least aggressive reply. "Excuse me," I say unemphatically, "but calling the SS 'men of honor' frankly seems excessive to me."

My mother's reaction is sudden and sharp. "If you say that about the men, then that means there were no women of honor. And what would that make me? Do you really see me as a criminal, like the military tribunal? Is that how you see your mother, tell me now? It's about time we started saying what we meant!"

She's beside herself.

I wait a few seconds before replying and try not to raise my voice. "How do you think I see a mother who was a guard at Birkenau?"

She doesn't hesitate for a moment. "Well, my daughter, like it or not, I have never regretted being a member of the Waffen-SS, is that clear?"

Oh, that's clear, Mother, I never doubted it for a moment.

"And you should know this, too," she goes on proudly, "that I was the one who put myself forward to be assigned to one of those camps—and do you want to know why? Because I believed in it. I believed in Germany's mission: to free Europe from that. . . from that repugnant race."

Get up, go: That should be my reply. And instead I ask once again, as I did before, "Didn't you even feel sorry for mothers with newborn babies at their breasts, when they went into the gas chambers? Didn't you even feel sorry for the children?"

I should have understood that there was nothing left to say. So what do I want? Why am I asking the same questions over and over again?"

She looks uncertain for a moment. She fixes her eyes in the distance. Her breathing becomes irregular, as though she's climbing a steep flight of stairs. Then she calms down, raises her eyes, stares at me. Everything in her has changed: her expression, her gaze, her voice. Everything is new to me.

"All right," she says slowly. "Now tell me the answer you want me to give."

She's wrong-footed me again. "I don't understand."

She has a strange look in her eye.

"Didn't you ask me a question? Well, tell me what answer you want me to give." She is more calm and lucid than I have ever seen her before. There's a mocking note in her voice, mixed with a kind of almost affectionate condescension.

I'm really confused. I have a sense that all of a sudden, thanks to some trick that she's slipped past me, she's assumed the upper hand.

"So?" she says, pressing me in that same slightly mocking tone. "Don't you know what to say? Don't you know what answer you want me to give to your nasty, wicked, malicious question?"

She assumes an indulgent air and shakes her head. "My poor
Mausi,
I've left you speechless."

Is it possible that at the very last minute she's going to grant me a hint of benevolence, a scrap of warmth?

My head is spinning slightly. I'm not even sure that I can remember my "nasty, wicked, malicious question." Nonetheless, I reply like an automaton: "I want you to answer sincerely, that's all."

To hell with the question. I'm exhausted. I wish I were back in my taxi already, on my way back to the hotel, and then going to dinner with Eva in a restaurant in the city center. I have a craving for Viennese cooking, for dark beer.

"Fine," says my mother. "So you want the truth, unadorned. Are you sure?"

"Yes."

She joins her hands together, takes a deep breath, and relaxes the furrows on her broad white brow.

"I'd really rather be able to tell you something else, but since it's the truth you're after . . . well, then you shall have it."

All of a sudden I feel an impulse to bring everything to a halt, to ask her to be quiet, to go. But I suppress it.

"As far as I was concerned, what was right for the government was right for me," she begins in a firm voice, "and I had no right to any kind of personal thoughts, opinions, or feelings. Rather I had the duty to obey, without argument, orders from above, and if those orders meant the gassing of millions of Jews, then I was willing to collaborate. Which is why, believe me, I could not allow myself even the slightest weakness over mothers or children. When I saw the littlest ones going into the bunker, all I could think was: There's a few less Jewish brats; there are some kids who will never become repellent adult Jews."

She comes to a halt, battles against the incipient tremor in her jaw, then decides to ignore it and continues. At that moment she is very strong.

She looks at me, clearly and directly. "I was convinced of the Tightness of the Final Solution, and so I carried out my tasks with great commitment and conviction. Consequently, I was treated as a criminal, but even during my detention I never stopped feeling proud and worthy to have belonged to the Germany of our great Führer. . . . Did you know I read Kant in Birkenau?"

Her eyes gleam. She's going to take her errors with her to the grave, I think with a shudder.

"The world didn't understand," she adds, her voice still hoarse with grievance, "and in the end they all joined forces to destroy us."

She looks at me with an expression of apparently genuine regret.

"If you hoped I was going to change my mind, I'm sorry to have to disappoint you. I'm staying the way I was."

And she concludes: "I've told the truth, the whole truth. The truth you wanted."

The truth I wanted . . .

A DENSE SILENCE has fallen in the room. My mother seems lost in that far-off other place. Has she been truly sincere, or has she said what she thought I wanted to hear—something that would help me to hate her definitively, to free myself from her once and for all?

She lifts her head and studies me through half-closed eyes, as though trying to bring me into focus. A twisted ambiguous smile plays on her lips. It lasts only a moment, then she turns toward the window and starts playing with the hem of her jacket. The movements gradually become slow and mechanical, until she is motionless, with a piece of material wrapped around a finger. She has slipped away. And I realize that if, until yesterday, her absence was a presence that obsessed me, now her presence is an irrevocable absence. I feel anxiety and an irrational tenderness. She is my mother; in spite of it all, she's my mother. Should I be ashamed if, every now and again, instinct, my instinct as a daughter, gets the better of morality, of history, of justice and humanity?

Eva brushes my arm; she gives me a sympathetic smile. She nods helplessly toward my mother. I understand that she shares my feelings. A moment later Fräulein Inge comes back in.

"They're waiting for you in the dining room," she tells my mother in a briskly professional voice. "Shall we go?"

My mother seems to be waking from a brief sleep.

"I'm not coming!" she announces, immediately becoming noisy and belligerent. "I'm not eating today. I have to talk to my daughter again."

"Visiting hours are over," Fräulein Inge insists, "and it's time for you to come to lunch."

"I said I wasn't going to!"

My mother gets to her feet, her face contorted. "You go to lunch if you're so fond of it and leave me alone with my daughter!"

"I really think it's time for you to say good-bye to your guests," Fräulein Inge replies very firmly. "Give me your hand like a good girl."

But my mother yells, "I just want my daughter's hand! I don't want anyone else's hand!" And with a swift unruly gesture she hides her left hand in her armpit, like a stubborn, capricious child.

Fraulein Inge gently detaches that rebellious hand and grips it in her own. My mother yells furiously, "She's hurting me! Help, she's hurting me!"

She struggles and manages to break away, then dashes toward me. "You hold me. You hold me!" she begs, gripping my hand. And she smiles trustingly.

I feel a mixture of embarrassment and pain—and an instinctive sense of protectiveness.

"Don't go," she pleads, "don't go." And her cold and bony fingers spasmodically clutch at my own.

"I'm alone, no one ever comes to see me here," she stammers.

Once again Fräulein Inge reminds her: "Doesn't Frau Freihorst come three times a week to keep you company?"

My mother pushes out her lower lip. "I don't care. I just want my daughter."

Fraulein Inge shakes her head and says nothing. She gestures to me to leave the room with my mother. I obey, tired and confused.

The corridor is filled with the usual lunchtime sounds: a rattle of plates, a hubbub of voices, the service staff pushing carts full of glasses, cutlery, and food.

Fraulein Inge walks ahead of us toward the door of the dining room. We're about to walk in when all of a sudden my mother wrests her hand from mine and, making a sudden lunge, hurls her arms around my neck.

"Don't leave me," she sobs, "don't go!"

Silence falls all around. The only sound is my mother weeping beneath the vaults. Everyone is looking at us in consternation.

Now my mother presses her head against my chest and groans. "Stay with me. Stay with me . . ."

Fraulein Inge tries to free me from the grip of those frail and scrawny arms which reveal, in that wild embrace, an unexpected strength. My mother's sobs are becoming louder and louder; she struggles, then all of a sudden she starts kissing me everywhere. She kisses the sleeves of my jacket, my buttons, my pearls, my lapel with the brooch I bought in Venice one foggy day. She kisses the palms of my hands . . . it's terrible.

It's as though a veil were being torn. Now the whole of our story is here. The failed story of a mother and a daughter. A non-story.

Let me go, Mother.

Finally, Fräulein Inge manages to separate us. She puts her hands sympathetically on my mother's shoulders.

"Now you have to be sensible and say good-bye to your guests."

Eva whispers to me, "Tell her we'll be back in the afternoon."

I comply. "Now you go to lunch, and I'll be back in the afternoon."

In my mother's eyes, still wet with tears, there is a flash of joy. "Are you serious?"

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"Yes." I'm ashamed.

Then my mother frees herself with an irritated jerk from the hands of Fräulein Inge and solemnly announces: "I'm going to eat because my daughter has promised she'll be back in the afternoon. And I believe my daughter because she is a woman of her word. My daughter doesn't tell lies. My daughter isn't one of those people who promise to do something and then don't do it. She is sincere. She is my daughter, and I believe her."

For another few minutes she studies me with painful intensity, and then with a gentleness of which I wouldn't have thought her capable, she asks, "Will you give me another kiss,
Mausi?"

I feel a sharp pain in my heart, searing as a wound.

And I kiss her. I lean forward and kiss my mother's icy cheek. The more I lean over, the more she seems to shrink. I want to call her
Mutti,
but the word stays imprisoned in the pit of my stomach. I search for an affectionate gesture. I clumsily clasp one of her shoulders. I may have hurt her, but she smiles contentedly.

A relentless feeling of unreality. Once again I wonder who it is that I'm looking at.

Were you really an inflexible Nazi, Mother, or did you say all those horrendous things to help me to hate you?

I look at her trusting eyes, reflected in mine, and think: No, I don't hate her. It's just that I don't love her.

"It's time to go," Fräulein Inge repeats, calmly but firmly.

My mother meekly obeys.

"See you later." She smiles. "See you later, my daughter." And she sets off toward the dining room, toward the hubbub of voices. I watch her as she goes. At the last moment, before passing through the doorway, she turns around and blows me a kiss on her fingertips. Once again she has a strange expression on her face. And once again I feel that she is irrevocably remote from me.

I lose myself in my thoughts, and when I reemerge, my mother isn't there. I have a cold, empty feeling. I stare at the double door of the dining room; perhaps I move as though to head in that direction because Eva holds me back by one arm.

"We've got to go," she whispers to me.

I nod and think: I've lost.

I've lost again.

"If you like, we can speak on the phone," Fräulein Inge suggests.

I gratefully accept, and she hands me a piece of paper with her home phone number.

"You can even call late in the evening," she says amicably.

"I'll call you from the hotel," I reply, touched.

"She's in good hands," she assures me with a smile of farewell.

My cousin leads me arm in arm along the corridor, toward the stairs. My throat is tight. I can barely breathe.

"It's over," Eva whispers affectionately. And I let myself go and start crying.

At the porter's lodge, we ask them to call us a taxi. I am unsteady on my feet. There's that violent sense of unreality again.

What has happened?

I raise my face—the mild rain refreshes my forehead.

"It's over," my cousin repeats. "It's all over. Relax."

An iron sky lies heavy over the tops of the old plane trees; the air is damp and clammy.

The taxi stops outside the gate.

Before getting in, Eva turns and asks me, "Do you think you'll be coming back?"

2. Eugen Kogon,
Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Konzentrationzlager
(1946). Munich: Kindler Verlag.

3. Ibid.

The visit chronicled in this book took place in 1998. It was the last time Helga Schneider would see her mother, who died in 2001.