The Gift

The close of the Nazi death camps was a beginning rather than an end for  those who  survived.  Told through the eyes of a child of Holocaust survivors, The Gift  lets us  feel the pain and the courage that reaches into the decades beyond the war. Compelling and insightful. A memorable read.

-- Barb Lundy, poet

Every time I read this memoir (and I have read it several times)  I am awed by its beauty and insight. Every time I read this memoir I increase my own insights about how I can live my own life more fully. 

--Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

The Gift: A Journey of Liberation

by

Ita Willen

SMASHWORDS EDITION

******

PUBLISHED BY:

The Wessex Collective on Smashwords

The Gift: a Journey of Liberation

copyright 2005 by Ita Willen

Cover design by Loy Whitman

Smashwords Edition

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We have art in order not to die of the truth

–Nietzsche

*****

Table of Contents

Prologue

Winter

Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

Epilogue: Passover

a note about the writer

Prologue

I would love to tell you everything. How it feels to be surrounded by an immense family of ghosts, grandparents who never made it past their forties, uncles and aunts younger than I am now, faces with eyes that shine out of single saved photographs. Nothing is left. Not a trace remains, not a single object, not a single grave.

I think about my Polish Grandmother, an Orthodox Jewess in her mid-forties. Some of her sons stayed in Poland, some escaped to Russia, one returned to die with her. Those who never left held by families with small children, apartments, furniture. The mother of many children. What was it like for her? What went through her mind as she saw herself stripped of everything: her home, her possessions, her family, her clothes and her hair, her life? I’m named after her. I can see her entering the gas chamber, naked. Echoes bounce off the walls. Children are screaming. There must be a thousand people in here. All of them naked. All of them about to die. What is she thinking?

She is only one of my ghosts. I have many. Too many to carry around. I would like to put them down but I don’t know where. I can’t forget them because every time I see my Father, there they are. There is his mother, younger than himself, with a turn-of-the-century hairdo and soft features. In the only photograph left of her the design on the bodice of her dress is geometric, intersecting triangles like a large Star of David around her neck. She wears it like a mantle, like a yoke. She is still young. She has many sons. She ls about to see into the heart of a terrible vision, Biblical in proportion, devastating as the Apocalypse.

Then, my Father’s father. He’s there too. A religious man. A disciplinarian. Bearded. Stern. Blue-eyed. In his fifties? Maybe forty-five? His hobby was memorizing calendars. He could tell you on which day any holiday would fall one hundred years into the past or future. What do you suppose went through his mind when he saw the camps? To him religion was the law, a form of discipline where if you did x and y, z would follow. Z turned out to be deathcamps, crematoriums, the ghastly living dead zombies surrounded by Darth Vaders, barbed wire, vicious dogs, men without mercy. Z turned out to be a swastika.

If I could, I would tell you everything. How it was to grow up in a house of mourning. But I don’t know if words can convey the inner workings of a heart. I don’t think I can tell you anything, even if I try. To tell the truth, I don’t want to tell you anything. It’s not worth the effort. And you don’t want to hear it either. That’s the beauty of it . You don’t want to hear it and I don’t want to tell it. It’s like the moment before being confronted with some awful truth.

Why am I taking up this subject now anyway? I’ve always hated it. Always tried to escape from it. Wished I were anyone but who I am. Now I see that even these ghosts are beautiful, noble and silent as beacons in the night. They are just there. Something happened. Something of enormous, biblical, Cecil B. deMille proportions. A cast of millions. One of the major events of mankind, awesome in its capacity to engender questions. A lot of people think, well, this is what they get for being Capitalists, Communists, killing Christ. No doubt they’re right. Let’s not mince words. Let’s take everything into account.

In my mind, next to my Grandfather and Grandmother stands an ancient person. One of their parents who lived with them. But was it a father or a mother, and whose father or mother I don’t know. Just a tiny ancient person. Then the sons, many sons and a single daughter. Except for one, whose story I know, the uncles are vague ghosts to me. They have no faces. There are no pictures. They are young men, in their twenties, the younger ones single, the older married with children of their own. Their wives are mists, I can scarcely see them. A few small children are patches of light.

Among them stands my Father, among his brothers, his older sister at the end, one parent at each shoulder. My Father with blue eyes . His hand reaches out of the nimbus of ghosts and clasps the hand of a dark Russian girl with a face like a Byzantine icon. Hers is a family of ghosts too. I know my Russian Grandmother very well, but only because of my Mother’s ability to portray her. She appears as a straight, beautiful woman with wavy black hair and milky skin, sharp-featured and clear-eyed. Her passions were opera and fine clothes. Her tragedy was that she married an idealist. Beside her is a little boy, my once living Russian uncle. At her feet are several dead children of various ages. My Russian Grandfather towers over them, dark as a gypsy, with a mustache. He died of TB in a makeshift hospital during the war. He once appeared to me in a dream. We met in my garden next to the cherry tree. He was consoling me, but said nothing.

I spend a lot of time in my garden. It’s immense. At the top are strawberries. There are many fruit trees. It is a young garden created from a barren field. At first it lay in total sun. I planted a lot of corn and watched the clouds pass, feeling like a Navajo. Now the trees have grown, creating almost total shade. This suburb is out so far it’s almost country. At the end of our block the prairie begins. Miles of rolling green hills under a wide blue sky. To the west the mountains, purple in summer, pink in winter, are visible from all my windows.

Looking at me you’d never know that at the center of my mind millions of naked people are whirling into an inferno. In the center of my mind is a Black Hole. Looking at me you might wonder where I’m from, but you’d never guess. Listening to me you hear no accent, nothing unusual said. Seeing me you see anything but what I am. I like the anonymity. I’ve come to like having a secret. You keep your secret, I’ll keep mine.

It would have all been so much easier if I had actually been able to escape. I changed my name and face. I had education and mobility. How was it I couldn’t escape? I must have put a million miles between myself and all this. Why couldn’t I get away? What claim do all these people have on me? Why are they always there, in front of me, next to me, these ghosts none of whom has ever said a single word to me, not even in a dream?

I often dream of a Kafkaesque city. It resembles Manhattan. It could pass for a Polish or Russian city. It’s a nineteenth-century city. It could be anywhere. It has strange little pockets of ethnic groups and a river which has become wider in recent dreams. The river has steep banks and at the water’s edge a kind of grassy park where swimmers rest and weird boats are tied up. I wander around old sections which look like Kathmandu, narrow streets with tiny shops filled with amazing things. The overall city is grey and sometimes ominous. There is something medieval about it. But I have never found any of my relatives there. I’ve never met anyone I know. But sometimes my Husband is with me, helping me look for someone. It’s Rose. I’m always looking for Rose.

Part of it may be that Rose is the only person I would try to look up if I were in Manhattan. I lived in her building and we were friends. She was ten years older. Jewish. She reminded me of something. Despair.

Actually Rose was not the embodiment of only despair but also of mystery and mysticism. She had a Tarot deck, practiced Tai Chi and dabbled in Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Her prized possession was a copy of Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, which I was always trying to borrow and which she would never lend me. In my dreams I’m always looking for Rose in a grey medieval city.

I can see her there in her dark apartment overlooking the silver and orange ribbon of river gliding past all her windows. She is there, surrounded by about a hundred dim rooms, lit by the faint blue glow of silent televisions. Oriental rugs and animal skins on the beds and floors. She is always alone. She looks like a gypsy with her small dark frame, hooked nose and glazed black eyes, her sweeping floor-length tunics, deep red, purple, black. All her clothing the color of bruises. She is waiting, dark, frail, childless, for her wayward husband to return. Occasionally he does, to do some work in his cutting room, hung from floor to ceiling with ribbons of film.

In my film of Rose the river-lit windows are like separate frames. Her pale face glows sadly in the maze of dark rooms, having found no trace of the miraculous. She has the doomed world-weariness of the Wandering Jew…but she has not seen into the inferno. That’s her whole problem. If she had seen into it she would have done something with her life. She would have been conscious of being alive.

In my medieval dream city I sometimes find the right building, massive as the Great Wall of China, grey as a prison, but with many windows overlooking the hill of a park.

My own windows in Manhattan showed a bit of tree-covered slope as well. Off to the right was what seemed to be a park in summer, with a high ornate iron fence and many trees. When the leaves fell in autumn I saw it was a graveyard. My windows faced east and this graveyard was to the south. The windows of my dream building all face north, and I can never find her name on any of the mailboxes.

That my Husband appears beside me is fitting because he is the only person who knows about my black hole. He has his own. We are linked to each other by this tunnel. He is not really helping me because he doesn’t know Manhattan and has never met Rose. But he keeps me company and protects me, though I am not afraid. I am leading him, wanting to show him some treasures of the city, and I’m frustrated because I can’t remember the way and everything looks so different. Even my own building is barely recognizable. Maybe the problem is that I’m looking for a Manhattan building in Lodz or Prague.

We have never found Rose, nor anyone we know, and even within the dream I have the vague feeling that this is not the right city. Even so, she is there, somewhere. Of that I’m always certain.

Recurring dreams of a place may at first seem like disconnected dreams of different places. But if you are observant you will find that these are merely different sections of the same place. The light will always be the same. Mine is a very large city. The light is always the same kind of grey, violet, and dusky blue like the palette of a Remedios Varo painting. I am usually intensely interested in the contents of some strange little shop selling amulets, weird jewelry, ancient artifacts. There is a restaurant area that looks like Sanaa, not just medieval but Middle Eastern. I never buy anything, never eat anything, never find anyone I know. I can’t imagine why I spend so much time there. The image of mystic, sorrowful Rose in one of its rooms like a glowing icon in a tomb is always with me. If you must know, she reminds me of my Mother. Or Myself.

If I could describe any of Varo’s paintings this place would come clearly to your mind. Her palette is blue and grey and she has these mythical round cities. Through them sail angels without wings, pale pure creatures on boats blown by wind or riding strange bicycles. They are all surreally silent . You can tell that they never have and never will say anything.

For me, the main image is a