Broken Barriers

As the door opens, the daughter is struck by the sight of elderly people sitting in rows watching TV. She sees her mother looking towards her, waving her hands, calling her name and shouting “This is my daughter!”

Born in Warsaw in 1929, she experienced human cruelty, the disappearance of her family, deportations to concentration camps. All that culminated in a “death march” that she survived. Returning to “ordinary life,” still a young girl, she fell in love with a rich, handsome, educated man who offered her wonderful opportunities. She broke off with him, telling herself that his father was not a “real Jew” and now after the Holocaust she couldn’t allow herself to flee the Jewish fate. But she also feared that being in love might bring to the fore the emotions she had done her utmost to suppress. She gave little thought to such questions as what having a life of her own would mean, what narrative would guide her life, what she would do with the freedom to make choices.

A few years later, beginning again in Israel, the only place she could think of to live her life, she met a survivor who had also come “from there.” It was not love, just a mutual agreement to start a family, mainly to prove to the Nazis they had failed to annihilate all the Jews. The wedding ceremony was modest, attended by some friends and family. When, ten months later, she gave birth to her daughter, her wish to have something of her own came true; she may also have been hoping that having a child would ease the never-ending pain. She breast-fed her baby, but eight months later, she was surprised and disappointed to find herself pregnant again; nursing her infant had not protected her. She stopped abruptly and a month later, her daughter was toilet trained.

But to the mother’s surprise, the child, like all children, had an agenda of her own. She fled from the room when her mother showed her pictures of the death camps—the hills of ashes, the piles of shoes, the dead bodies. The mother talked about