I.
My mother, Gela Baser, was born in 1924 in the Polish village of Raków, near Lodz. When the Nazis came, in September 1939, she was 15. After countless regulations and humiliations, all Jews were ordered to congregate in the town square. My mother’s family – mother, father and five children, relatives, friends -- instead escaped to the forest. They hid there for some time in a group of around 20.
Among the group hiding in the forest were a girl and her boyfriend. The girl became pregnant and, when it came time to give birth, she needed a warm, safe place, not the woods. A man from the town was found who had a room they could use – for a steep price. When the time came, the young woman and her boyfriend carefully went into town to the room where she would give birth. The man betrayed them. The girl was murdered. Her boyfriend was badly wounded, but he was able to eventually sneak away back to the woods.
As soon as he was better, my mother said, the young man went back into the town and managed to kill the man who betrayed them, knowing that he himself would immediately be killed, which he was.
Eventually, the entire group in the woods, except for my mother and one sister, was discovered by local louts who first robbed and then murdered their former neighbors. Neighbors. People they knew. After many months of hiding, my mother and her sister got fake papers and, managing to get recruited as Polish slave laborers, were shipped off to Germany.
The chance of their true identity being discovered in Germany was less than in Poland, where any slip of the tongue, or a familiar face, could give them away.
In Germany, my mother had to remember never to say her real name, or betray any sign that she was not a Polish Catholic. She learned not to speak at all, even in her sleep.
II.
After the war, she went to live in Brussels as a displaced person. She met and married my father, an American Jewish soldier, and came to live in Southern California. In the small town of Santa Barbara, where my father was born and where they settled, my mother carefully constructed a new identity. She was a quiet, sweet young woman who never, ever spoke about her past. She was shy about her accent and her difficulty in writing English.
In the beginning, when people asked what had happened during the war, she told them something of her experiences. But the response was invariably, “That can’t be true!” So she simply stopped talking. Because she never referenced her past and there were no other survivors in the town, she managed to suppress that part of herself for more than 20 years, until one day it finally had to come out.
Five years after the war, she gave birth to me in a clean and modern Southern California 1950s hospital. She was put to sleep for the birth. She was told not to breastfeed because her milk was “sour.” Or at least, that’s what she told me.
III.
Then, around 1995, she began to talk. She would tell me episodes, like the one about the pregnant girl and her boyfrind, endless terrible stories, as we took long walks together. She would suddenly turn to me and blurt out a terrifying story, and then get back to walking and admiring the scenery. She told her story, or stories, to Steven Spielberg’s documentation crew for many hours. A cousin recorded her on videotape. I made an installation that broke her into five images, talking about those years on five monitors. And she began to speak at a local college, although it was terribly painful for her. Her eloquence was unbelievable, especially for a woman who left school in the eighth grade. She wrote her story down, but never did anything with it.
And in 2008, my vibrant, healthy mother had a stroke that robbed her of her language and her balance. No matter how many hours she spends at her laptop, practicing on speech therapy software over and over again, her vocabulary is limited to a dozen words. She cannot speak or write. My peaceable father, who promised he would kill anyone who ever would harm her, to this day protects her, both of them halt and lame but with tremendous dignity intact.
As you can imagine, I wish I could hear my mother tell a story, even a horrific one with my ears and soul screaming for mercy. I wish she could tell me, but she can’t.
