I knew that our former German housemaid, Edith, should be getting out of our
house in London in her free time, going to English classes, making friends
with people in a similar situation. But my mother did nothing to help her,
and Edith seemed to lack the willpower to do anything on her own behalf.
I thought about talking to my mother about it, but knew it was worse than
hopeless. So I, too, did nothing. Or, rather, I would go to the kitchen as
soon as I got back from school to listen to Edith’s woes.
By now, these were quite explicit. She was all alone in the world, and I was
her only friend. If only I would hurry up and get married, then she could
come and work for me.
She was stuck in the past. At 16, I had no intention of getting married in the
near future; and, when I did, there would certainly be no live-in housemaid.
The woman - my mother - whom she had worked for in Germany before the war no
longer existed, and she had come to England in search of a memory, possibly
idealised with time.
But, to be fair to her, Edith had not begun her quest for a new beginning
after the war by getting in touch with my mother. She had first left Berlin
as an illegal immigrant to Palestine.
If there was one bit of news that dominated the headlines that spring and
summer [of 1948], it was the creation of Israel. I knew very little about
it, and cared less, but the bits I saw on cinema newsreels looked very
upbeat, full of sunshine and hope.
So what went wrong? Why did Edith leave after going to all the trouble of
getting there? Her answer shocked me. “Because”, she said, staring out of
the kitchen window, “everybody hates everybody else.”
I do not know what I expected, but not this. It was unlike Edith to be so
bitterly judgmental. And it ran contrary to everything that the new Israel
was supposed to stand for, to all the smiling faces I had seen on the
newsreels.
Edith’s situation in 1945 was odd. On the one hand, she owed her life to the
kindness of Germans, many of them initially strangers, who took risks on her
behalf in Berlin. On the other, it was hardly possible to forget that it was
Germans, her fellow countrymen, who had organised and carried out the
Holocaust.
First, Edith went to see one or two people who had been kind to her in the
past, but it was awkward. They seemed pleased to see her, and accepted any
little gifts she might bring - biscuits, or sweets for the children -
readily enough. But the old camaraderie was no longer there. She even sensed
a hint of embarrassment, perhaps because of who she was. The allies had made
sure that every German citizen knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what had
been done to the Jews in their name.
Edith felt lonely as never before, abandoned. She had nobody, no relative of
any sort. And both age and temperament made it unlikely that she would find
herself a marriage partner. She now had a neat little flat, overlooking an
empty field near the airport, but she found the solitude oppressive. She
cried quite a bit, without really knowing why.
She went twice a week to look at the lists of survivors and of the dead. She
would look at the faces of others studying the lists, but recognise nobody;
only the reflection of her own blank misery. Who was she looking for,
anyway? Even if she did find someone, would it matter, either to them or to
her?
Nevertheless, she kept coming back. Because there was nothing else to do.
Because she did not belong anywhere else, except among those anxious faces -
other illegals who had now resurfaced, looking for information. And then she
met someone she knew, Elsa Cohen; they had been in an orphanage together as
children.
“Elsa had trained as a pioneer for Palestine quite early on, learning about
agriculture,” said Edith. “I knew that, but I didn’t know she had actually
managed to get out there before the war. Now she was back, to recruit
survivors for a new life in what would soon become Israel, the Jewish nation
state. “ ‘Our moment has come,’ Elsa said, gripping my arm. She certainly
looked well on it: sunburnt and fit, like an athlete.”
If Elsa was jubilant, Edith had never been so depressed. She had survived the
war, the deportations, the relentless bombing of Berlin - but for what?
Nobody loved her, nobody wanted her, no one was looking through those lists
in the hope of finding her named as a survivor.
And so, perhaps inevitably, Edith was putty in Elsa’s hands. She saw a vision,
the possibility of a new beginning in a new land where she truly would
belong. She was told about the kibbutz movement, where she would be part of
a community and would never need to feel alone again. A Jew among Jews, one
big family, sharing all things in common.
In 1948, I was still an innocent as far as Israel was concerned. It was not a
topic that was ever discussed within the family. Even the annual arrival of
a box of grapefruit at Christmas did not lead anywhere. Yes, said my father,
he had an aunt called Eva in Palestine, and left it at that. He never talked
about her, her immediate family or when they had left for Palestine.
So it was as an almost complete ignoramus that I asked Edith why she had not
been happy there. All I had seen were happy, smiling faces, youthful and
healthy, rather like Boy Scouts in their khaki shorts, enjoying fresh air
and sunlight as they started a new life. There were plenty of newsreel
stories of happy camp survivors reaching the Promised Land, but no negative
publicity. I had never met anyone who had actually been to that part of the
world, let alone gone there only to leave.
I thought Edith might have been homesick, or that she had found the heat and
mosquitoes too much for her. I knew that the living conditions were quite
rough, but I did not think, after what she had been through in Berlin, that
primitive conditions - even having to sleep under canvas - would have put
her off.
To this day, I remember what she told me, word for word: “Everyone hates
everyone else.”
I was stunned, and it took me quite a while to understand what she was talking
about.
Edith had found herself on a kibbutz. She was supposed to learn Hebrew, but
found it hard. Quite a few of the other new arrivals spoke other languages
among themselves, but not German, not ever. She did not like taking pot
shots at Arabs, which she was expected to do from time to time.
She was even more upset when she heard stories of British soldiers getting
murdered by the Irgun, Menachem Begin’s resistance movement. Quite early on,
she began to feel that other members of the kibbutz did not like her, made
spiteful remarks about her, often gave her the most unpleasant tasks.
Finally, someone enlightened her.
It was because she came from Germany. She was a yekke.
Poor Edith. She had come to Palestine to be among her fellow Jews, this global
family, and found herself ostra-cised because she came from Germany. The
word yekke is supposed to originate from the German word for
jacket: jacke. Myth has it that German Jews who arrived in Palestine
in the 1930s were so posh that they even dressed in town clothes when
working in the fields. Underlying the epithet is resentment against a group
who considered themselves socially superior and were not true Zionists,
merely “Hitler Zionists” - people who had come to save their own skins, not
out of deep Zionist conviction.
“To be honest,” Edith told me, “I was frightened at the idea of starting life
all over again, on my own, in a strange country. But what Elsa told me about
life on a kibbutz made it all sound quite different. Wonderful.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve seen the newsreels . . . I think it’s a great idea,
sharing everything.”
I was shocked by the outburst that followed.
“It’s all lies,” she shouted. “They didn’t want us, any of us, didn’t matter
where we came from, what we had been through. On the contrary, it was
precisely because of what had happened to us that they wanted nothing to do
with us.
“They even discussed building a second dining hall so they wouldn’t have
to eat with us, the sabonim. That’s what they called us: sabonim,
nothing but bars of soap. Because the Germans are supposed to have made soap
out of Jewish corpses.”
I was shocked into silence. It seemed beyond belief, such a level of
hostility, such cruel contempt. Perhaps she had misunderstood? Edith shook
her head. I had never seen her look so grim.
“In a way, I wish they had put us in a different dining room. As
it was, the sabras, the old-timers, always kept themselves to
themselves, joking in Hebrew. They would glance across at us from time to
time, so it was obvious they were talking about us.”
“‘Us’? So you weren’t quite alone.” “Yes and no. There was a woman from one of
the camps who had lost her husband and two children. She didn’t last long:
hanged herself in the kitchen one night.
“And I got quite friendly with a young woman called Marianne, from Breslau,
who had been in a labour camp and had nowhere to go now that Breslau was
part of Poland. We got quite friendly, told each other things in German when
we had a moment to ourselves, which wasn’t all that often.
“But the rest of the newcomers were Ostjuden, who spoke Yiddish among
themselves. They stole things, did hardly any work and were particularly
nasty to Marianne, because she came from a bit of Poland that had been
German. They said she wasn’t a real Jew, because she didn’t keep the sabbath.
“Poor Marianne, she got very upset – showed the number tattooed on
her arm and said, ‘What’s that, then?’ I think she was homesick, not just
for her family, all dead now, but for the town where she grew up, knowing
she could never go back. ‘All the streets have Polish names now,’ she said.
We’d talk together at night, in a whisper, so nobody could hear us speaking
German.”
Edith was visibly upset, so I kept quiet for a while. But, I began timidly, I
thought the whole point of Israel was to provide a fresh start for Nazi
victims – a homeland for those with nowhere to go. Edith shook her head.
“They despised us,” she stammered, searching for words. “Treated us as though
we were scarcely human. Human dust, they called us. I was actually told,
more than once, that I had only myself to blame for everything that had
happened to me during the war. I should have left Europe, answered the call
of Zion, long ago. You brought it on yourselves, we were told –
degenerates, the lot of you. Servile shopkeepers, traders, alienated from
the land that was yours to claim.
“Some of them even claimed that Hitler had been sent as a punishment. There
were remarks about our physique: pale, unhealthy, not fit for the work
needed, either to plough the soil or defend it against the enemy. Goebbels
had been right to portray us the way he did . . . ”
Her voice petered out. For the first time since her arrival, I looked up to
see her crying.
What Edith told me about the newly created state of Israel left me puzzled and
incredulous. It was such a sweeping, all-embracing condemnation. I do not
know what I expected, if anything. Really, I was just curious. Now, here was
a real, live Jew who had not only been there but had left it, bitterly
disappointed.
I knew, and knew that Edith must have known, that German Jews had always
looked down on Ostjuden, the Polish Jews who had flocked to Germany in the
years before 1933 because it was regarded as the land of culture and
economic opportunity. In 1948, I had known this for quite some time, because
my Aunt Margot had brought disgrace on the family by marrying a Pole, who
unfortunately lived up to the stereotype. He had bad table manners, as
expected, and also cheated on his wife in a number of ways (not expected).
Edith also knew about the Polish Jews, if only because the Nazis started
deporting them in 1938 and indigenous German Jews did not always waste much
sympathy on them. They were not infrequently blamed for the rise of
antisemitism.
Perhaps Edith assumed that, after Auschwitz, all such divisions between Jew
and Jew would be forgotten. That is what we all assumed. Wrongly, as it
turned out. The idea that suffering necessarily improves people is a myth.
Take my mother, for example.
When she went underground in Berlin during the war, Edith took one day at a
time, and it gave her an odd sort of strength. But she was the wrong sort of
Jew for the Promised Land. Being a yekke, snobbish and superior, was
bad enough; being a victim was infinitely worse.
Israel was no place for Edith. They did not want her, and she did not like
what she found. And so, since the future had nothing to offer, Edith wrote
to my mother, taking refuge in the past, and asked to join us in England.
I last saw Edith in a ward of the Samaritan Free Hospital for Women and
Children. A redbrick, late-Victorian building, it stands on the Marylebone
Road, in central London, and has long since closed. Nobody gives it a second
glance as they drive past. Only I have cause to remember the building, even
though I was there only once. Perhaps just because I never went back a
second time.
Edith was homeless yet again, and was waiting, yet again, for someone to help
her to make a decision. Who that would be, I did not know. It would be
someone with authority to sign forms, help her to find work, sort out her
legal status as required, perhaps send her back to Germany.
My mother and Edith had parted company without explanation or acrimony. There
was a mutual, unspoken understanding between them that things had not worked
out, and the fact that Edith needed to have an operation simplified matters.
Edith would go into hospital and not return.
I was the only person to visit her in what was a rather gloomy ward. As so
often, she was alone in the room, the other beds empty. There were no
flowers on the locker, no sign of other visitors apart from me. She had had
some sort of gynaecological surgery: nothing life-threatening, but common
enough for women with the onset of middle age.
I am trying to remember if I brought her a bunch of flowers. I hope I did,
since I never saw her again. Perhaps I asked her to keep in touch, but I
have no memory of doing so. Come to think of it, I never even knew her
surname.
Now that I have attempted to tell her story the lack of a satisfactory ending
troubles me profoundly. The word that springs to mind is verschollen,
which so often appears beside the names of Jews who died in the Holocaust.
Disappeared, missing, lost. But not forgotten.
Extracted from Journey to Nowhere by Eva Figes, published by Granta Books
at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49, including postage and packing,
from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Breaking the silence surrounding my grandparents’ fate
It wasn’t until she reached the age of 65 that the novelist Eva Figes suddenly
found herself weeping over the death of her grandparents. They had stayed
behind in Germany when Figes and her parents fled to England in 1939; and
for the next three years their existence was never mentioned.
Silence was “an unspoken rule” in their respectable middle-class Jewish
household. Figes, who was just six when the family arrived here, vividly
recalls having gone “berserk” when it was time to bid her grandparents
goodbye - and then being discouraged from ever asking about them again. On
the rare occasions that she did, she was met with lies or evasions.
At the age of 10 she discovered their fate during a row over a pink cardigan
that her mother was trying to make her wear. Figes had announced that she
hated pink. “My parents have been deported and you make a fuss over a pink
cardigan!” her mother suddenly spat out. Only much later did Figes realise
that silence was a common response to the horrors of the Holocaust; that,
indeed, the killing of the Jews was perceived as a side issue to the war for
two decades.
Her mother’s silence, however, may also have been fuelled by her evident
hatred of Eva, which eventually became mutual. “I retreated from her and we
would glare at each other,” says Figes. Fortunately she did feel loved by
her father, although when she left university with an English degree and the
intention of becoming a writer, he told her she was mad.
Figes went on to become a successful author, and in 1970 published Patriarchal
Attitudes, which is considered a feminist classic. The book was inspired by
the way she was treated by society after her second husband walked out on
her. In the 1960s it had been hard even to find a solicitor prepared to help
her extract maintenance of £2.50 a week for their two children.
“It made me extremely angry,” she says. “There was such hypocrisy - the way
society’s ethics were based around the family but it was clearly prepared to
let [us] go to rack and ruin. I had two small children, no job, no money and
no help at all. There was no question of getting a mortgage – because I was
a woman.”
Curiously, her mother found Patriarchal Attitudes “interesting”, and Figes
recognises now that her mother had always been “obviously unhappy”. In the
last years of her life she refused to see her daughter, though she regularly
accepted flowers from her. Why send them? Figes sighs. “You only have one
mother, and you want to be loved by her.” Kathy Brewis
