Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss Read online

  I will look her straight in the eye and, fooling neither of us, will say, “I don’t believe I had any.”

  There is an African belief that if you allow the name of one who has hurt your family into your body, it poisons your soul. All my life, I have refused to let German into my body, letting the language fall away instead of picking it up. I know I am cutting off the culture that would have been part mine under normal circumstances, had there been no war, no Nazis, no Communists. Not only Kafka and Rilke but Goethe and Heine and Schiller and Brecht. I’ve tried several times to learn German, but cannot properly read a line of poetry, sing a phrase of Mozart or Bach.

  My mother spoke excellent German. She hired Germans in America (after she had vetted them for wartime innocence) as housekeepers and seamstresses. She even bought some German products, although she never understood why anyone would buy a Mercedes when they could buy a Jaguar. “I have no grudge against the younger generation,” she used to say, “but every German my age makes me nervous. I hate to shake their hands unless I know exactly where they were and what they were doing during the war. I don’t hate them. But if they disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, I wouldn’t care one bit. It just wouldn’t affect me at all.”

  I am riding in the dining car of the Inter-city Express, eating but not tasting the German food, tuning in the flat German landscape and tuning it out—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. My mechanisms of defense are so much a part of my being that I don’t always recognize when they’ve come into play. I’ve always been handy in a crisis: an accident, fire, mugging. I waste no time on emotional reaction; I numb out, shut down. Now on this train to Berlin, I’m wondering why I taste nothing and have no reactions to note in my notebook. Is traveling to Germany a crisis?

  What were your fantasies before coming?

  I was unable to imagine coming to Berlin. Or maybe I refused to imagine. How could I imagine the encounters I will actually have in Berlin: the long taxi ride in the Mercedes, for example, with the African driver fluent in German and English, married to a German woman for twenty five years, with two children who have never seen Nigeria. He likes to chat with Americans because, he will say, Americans, unlike Germans, are curious about people unlike themselves.

  The Mercedes will roll down the broad avenues laid out for tanks rather than automobiles as I wonder whether cars run more smoothly here. My driver will point out the historic sights—the Brandenburg gate and the remnant of the Berlin Wall that used to be Checkpoint Charlie—and I will open my ears but shield my heart as he tells me: “I find myself thinking about the Jews. An auslander is attacked here every day. I have been attacked. I have been insulted. Sometimes passengers refuse to pay. But none of what happens to me compares to what happens to the Turks. Last week they chased a Turkish man until he ran into a glass door, and, when he fell down all bloody, they trampled him nearly to death. Now the man is blind. What will happen to his family? How will they live? The police do nothing. There are protests from the Left—candlelight marches, letters to the newspapers—but always too late. The damage is done.

  “I have lived here more than half my life. Each time there is another attack on a foreigner, I remember the Jews. Am I experiencing what the Jews experienced in the thirties? Am I not seeing the writing on the wall? I have a house in Nigeria. I am only waiting to see if democracy will hold. But what will my wife do in Africa? What will my children do? Then I ask myself: What will happen today? Will I have waited too long?”

  The Russian taxi driver who has waited for me in his Mercedes behind the police barricades at the Jewish Community Center will tell me that Germany is the best place in the world. The smarter Russian Jewish emigrants skip Israel and come straight to Berlin. “In Israel I worked fifteen hours a day to make the same money I make here in eight. Is it normal to have to work fifteen hours a day to live? Is it normal to live in a state of war? The Germans don’t like Jews. You know they wish we weren’t here. But they don’t shoot Jews. It’s not allowed anymore. They are cold but correct.”

  I have had neither of these conversations yet, but after an hour in the dining car of the Inter-city Express, I decide to ignore Germany. I had wanted to measure out the territory, experience the hours, but find I am experiencing nothing but boredom. I push away my plate and take out my letter of invitation to Berlin—which, somehow, I have not bothered to reread since it first came. I notice that its directions match neither the information on my train ticket nor the minute-by-minute itinerary of the Inter-city Express.

  There are four train stations in Berlin, each with its distinct time of arrival. Ostbahnhof, the one printed on my ticket, does not correspond to Zoo, my destination in the letter. A German travel agency issued the ticket. Do they make mistakes? I recheck the stations and times of arrival. Two names, two stations. Someone made a mistake.

  Did you have any fantasies?

  No, I had a plan: It will be dark when I arrive in Berlin; I will get off at the first station, run the length of the platform to see if there’s someone there from the Jewish Community of Berlin, hop back on and get off at the next station. I have no German money; all the banks will be closed. If there is no one to meet me, I will go to the police, identify myself as a Jew, and say I need help.

  In other countries I am an American; in Germany I am a Jew. Jews were once numerous, now they are extinct. Jews are news. The police will see it in their interest to shelter me much as they would shelter a rare tiger or kangaroo. I have three minutes to get off the train at Ostbahnhof, run down the platform looking for a representative from the Jewish Community, then get back on the train and ride to Zoo. No point worrying. If there is no one to meet me, I will turn myself in.

  What were your fantasies?

  Okay. I am stepping up to the podium to read from my new book and I dissolve into the frame from the movie, Nashville, when the woman singer is shot dead by a bullet from the audience, but this time it’s a neo-Nazi skinhead who has slipped in with the philo-Semites.

  Or: I am stepping up to the podium, it becomes an auction block and I am open to inspection, curious people examining my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my breasts, my legs.

  The Inter-city Express pulls into Ostbahnhof. I feel spooked by the sign, by the empty platform. I leap off the train with my suitcase on wheels and run the length of it. No one is waiting. I hop back onto the train. I will turn myself in to the police. I reread the itinerary. We are exactly on time.

  Why have you not come to Germany before? an interviewer will ask, and I will blurt without thinking, “Why would I want to see concentration camps?”

  My answer is true. It comes from the deepest part of me, the place from which I answer to my name. Of course I know that Berlin is filled with museums and parks and concert halls and interesting people like my interviewer, and I am embarrassed by my answer because not so long ago I was a reporter much like her: serious, well-prepared, professional. She is dismayed by my answer. She tells me she’d like to be normal; she’d like for Germany to be normal. But it isn’t. Every time she travels, she sees the way people react when she says she’s German. English people, French people, the Danes, the Dutch, the Czechs. Sometimes she passes for English or Dutch. Do I think that to be German will ever be normal?

  I let her question hang in the air between us. It will stay with me long after I leave Europe and return to the United States. What is normal? What is that state of ordinariness we both wish for? Does it—did it ever—exist? Multicultural, transsexual, cross-disciplinary, postmodern have exploded the idea of normal. Psychology with its dysfunctional people, families, societies have made it obsolete. When I think about it, I give up on normal. But in that place where I think of Germany as a collection of concentration camps I am startled to discover that I also believe in a normal that is defined as “not Auschwitz.”

  But all these conversations have not yet taken place. As the Inter-city Express pulls slowly into Zoo, I peer out the window. The platform is empty. On a weekday n
ight in spring? Isn’t this a metropolis? Shouldn’t there be crowds? I see a short, round woman with a shawl over her shoulders and a scarf over her hair who looks like she might be a character in a story by Shalom Aleichem. Is she waiting for me? I blink a few times to check if the woman I am seeing is really there. Then I take a breath and ready my suitcase for a dignified descent from the train. I am here. I have arrived in Berlin.

  Born in Prague in 1947 and raised in New York City, HELEN EPSTEIN is a former journalist and journalism professor and the author of five books, including Children of the Holocaust, Music Talks, Joe Papp, and Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, recently published in Czech, Dutch, and German. She guest lectures at universities, libraries, synagogues, and churches, and is affiliated with Harvard University’s Center for European Studies and Brandeis University’s Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women. She is married and the mother of two boys.

  Chapter 2: My Life in Music by Patinka Kopec

  Dedicated to

  Magda Hoff Kopec

  Vladamir Kopec

  My parents

  Jay E. Selman, M.D.

  Jeremy L. Selman

  Ari M. Selman

  My family

  My teachers

  My students

  Those who are not with us.

  Patty Kopec is a master musician whose work celebrates life in its clarity and passion. Her story of becoming a musician and her attempt to fill her family’s life with music will leave no reader unmoved. –MW

  I cannot remember a day without music...but it was not always that way.

  My love for music came from my parents. As a teacher of highly gifted violin and viola students, I feel that I am passing on a special tradition and love of music to future generations. Clearly, Hitler, war, deprivation, and re-beginning our lives three times could not stifle the music and spirit of my family.

  My story begins before World War II. My mother came from a comfortable family in Nitra, Czechoslovakia, where her father was in the moving business. My mother studied piano, voice, painting, and sewing as well as attending a girl’s school. Her parents had planned for her to attend the Vienna Conservatory to study piano. However, when she was fifteen years old the Nazis prohibited Jews from attending all schools, so she was tutored at home and then had to go into hiding. Her plans to pursue an advanced education in music were not to happen. Instead, she studied practical skills, including sewing, hat making, and fabric weaving. At about seventeen years of age she had to enter a rural sanatorium to avoid deportation to the camps, a fate that befell most of her Jewish girlfriends.

  My father’s family came from Simovany, Czechoslovakia, where my grandfather managed an estate. My father was a gypsy violinist at heart. More than once his father had to confiscate his violin when he found my father serenading young women at nearby taverns. Finally, my father realized that he would have to take school seriously. He entered a Jesuit gymnasium, a special school that was very strict. While attending the gymnasium, his parents, brothers, and sister moved to America. He remained in Czechoslovakia, living with an uncle who was a physician. His influence had a profound impact on my father, who decided to study medicine at Charles University. The Nazi invasion of Prague in 1938 interrupted my father’s medical studies. Because of his great concern about the future, he changed from medicine to pharmacy, which he could complete more quickly.

  Early in the war my mother’s only apparent means of surviving was to be married. Her sister’s husband had a close friend who was my father-to-be. Music would bring them together, as they would play for themselves and others. My uncle asked my father if he would marry my mother to save her when she was seventeen years old, because single girls were among the first to be transported. In 1942 they were able to marry. My father worked as a pharmacist while he was still in school.

  Despite being married, my mother still had to hide every Thursday when the roundups for transport occurred. From 1942 until 1944 they lived in Trnava, Czechoslovakia. Because my mother’s father was in the moving business, he somehow was able to have the family piano sent to their apartment in Trnava. As conditions worsened, they went into hiding from August 1944 until April 1945. The nine months they were in hiding were impossible to describe. Every few weeks someone seemed to find them, so they were always running to new hiding places. Conditions were terrible, especially during the winter. They could take almost nothing with them as they moved among the nine hiding places where they stayed. For several months they lived underneath a chicken coop, coming out only briefly at night. There was no music during this time.

  Prague was liberated in May 1945, ending the war for them.

  After the war my father worked at a pharmacy in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. I was born there in 1947. Shortly thereafter we moved to Prague. My mother recalled that I first spoke about music at that age. My parents often made music in the evening, my father playing the violin and my mother, the piano. I often fell asleep listening to their performances. My mother recalled that after one of these recitals, I asked, “When Daddy is not here, may I have his violin?” These early performances sparked my interest in music.

  In 1949 the Communists took over Czechoslovakia, confiscating much of the pharmacy my parents had developed. Unable to live under those conditions, my father chose to emigrate. My maternal grandparents had lost all their relatives in the Holocaust. Since all my father’s family had immigrated to America before the war, he wanted to join them there. However, he could not obtain visas for my mother’s family. The only option was to move to Israel, where everyone was welcome.

  Shortly after my second birthday, we immigrated to Israel after a brief stay in Italy. There, my father began to work in a new pharmacy. By this time Hebrew became my third language after Czechoslovakian and German. Music again became an important part of my parents’ lives. My grandparents lived with us in Petach Tikvah. Since my parents could not afford a piano, my mother learned to play the accordion, on which she accompanied my father. After progressive nudging, my parents started my violin lessons when I was six years old. I soon showed talent. Being on stage came easily. Another early memory of those years in Israel was the occasional trip to Ramat Gan to hear operas, often on a school night. My parents always exposed me to music. My mother and grandmother also painted together and often included me, giving me a broader appreciation of the arts.

  In Israel I vaguely remember seeing people with numbers tattooed on their arms, but my mother said that they were the result of having been in the war. I do not recall World War II or the Holocaust being discussed at home or even at school. We talked about the War of Independence and the danger from the nearby Arab countries. Everyone seemed focused on building the State of Israel.

  In 1956 my father went to visit his family in America; he had not seen them for eighteen years. Shortly after returning home, the Sinai war broke out. He went to the front with his army unit. By a strange turn of fate a friend asked him to join him in a different jeep. A mine destroyed the one in which he had been riding. After the war my father vowed to leave Israel for America because he had experienced too much war and suffering and did not want his children to face such a future.

  Gathering my mother and brother, my father moved us to America, where he started over yet again when I was eleven years old. Leaving my grandparents in Israel was especially difficult for my mother. En route to America I organized musicales and a talent show for all the children on board the ship. I also performed at these events.

  From bright, sunny Israel, where I had many friends and was in the top of my class, we moved to a tiny basement apartment in a gentile community. I could not understand why my mother seemed so uncomfortable in the new setting. Not only the cramped, cold, and dark surroundings, but also the absence of Jews in our neighborhood upset her. It was then that she began to talk to me about her experiences in the war and the places where she had hidden. Early on in the war, her father was slapped across the
face by a German officer and lost some of his vision because of a damaged retina that could not be repaired. She felt especially vulnerable because of this episode and her own significant visual problems, including a detached retina. She also began to speak about family and friends she had lost and how she met my father.

  My father spoke very little English, yet he persevered, eventually finding a job as an assistant pharmacist. To the dismay of his parents, he spent $15 of his $60 weekly salary for my violin lessons.

  Living in a gentile neighborhood, my mother was very concerned about discrimination, so she warned me not to mention that I was from Israel. This seemed to cause her real fear and concern, which I could not understand at the time. Only then did I begin to ask questions about where we had come from and what had happened in Europe. I spoke no English and did not even know the alphabet when I arrived in New York. Going to school was very difficult initially. Although the teachers reached out, I had to communicate by drawing and painting pictures. However, at almost every Friday assembly I would perform on the violin. Those activities helped build my confidence and made me feel needed. Gradually I began to learn English and make friends, but I have never forgotten that initial isolation and sense of strangeness.

  The first summer after arriving in New York I went to a special summer program at Mary Wood, near Tanglewood, Massachusetts. I had the opportunity to play for Richard Bergen, the former concertmaster of the Boston Symphony. He recognized my talent immediately and insisted that I apply to Juilliard. Within a year I auditioned for the pre-college program at The Juilliard School in New York, playing the Monti Czards, a wild gypsy piece, instead of the usual classical audition repertoire. Dorothy DeLay chose me to study with her. Despite my language problems, my playing revealed a spirit, talent, and intensity for music that she readily felt. Every Saturday I would travel from Queens to New York City to attend The Juilliard Preparatory Program and to study with Ms. DeLay. She became more than a teacher, and has been a mentor, guide, and close friend ever since. My mother trusted her to guide my musical career and emotional development as an American teenager. During the summers I attended Meadowmount, a special music camp in upstate New York, run by Ivan Galamian, where Ms. DeLay also taught. There I met many talented teens who were deeply committed to music. Future stars such as Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman attended the same camp. There was an unspoken but shared feeling of having been immigrants. However, we never talked about the war or the Holocaust.