There were also cracks in my heart where feelings so deep and raw managed to flood through. The birth of my daughter was one of those times. When I held her in my arms and saw my reflection in her blue eyes, I felt a more overwhelming sense of emotion than I’d ever felt before. I traced each one of her features in their newborn perfection, and saw my father’s high forehead, my small narrow chin, and my mother’s smile. And I saw for the first time how, despite the isolation of our own lives, we are always connected to our ancestors; our bodies hold the memories of those who came before us, whether it is in the features we inherit or a disposition that is etched into our soul. As I grew older, I realized how little control we really have over what we are given in this world. And I no longer battled with my demons. I just grew to accept that they were a part of me. Like an ache in my bones that I try to shake every day that I awaken, an internal fight within myself not to look back, but to focus on each new day.
I named my daughter Elisa, to honor the memory of my mother. I dressed her in beautiful clothes and gave her a sketchbook when she was barely five. When I watched her clutch the colored pencils for the first time, I knew she had inherited her talent from my family. She knew not just how to replicate what she saw before her but to see beyond it, beyond the surface. To see beneath the line. My own hands were damaged from the years of deprivations, the cold, and the conditions in Auschwitz. But sometimes, for the sake of instruction, I would clutch the stem of a pencil or the handle of a paintbrush and push through the pain in order to illustrate a concept to my ever-eager daughter.
I never told my daughter when she was young the details of my life before she came into this world. She simply knew that she was named after my mother.
But the smoke of Auschwitz I did not speak of. That blackness, the mental scars—the reason for the pain in my hands—I kept a secret. Like a slip of mourning hidden beneath my clothes, sewn to my skin. I wore it every day. But I revealed it to no one.
Not even my painting did I share. Some nights when Carl and Elisa were fast asleep, I would walk into my bedroom closet, turn on the light, and close the door. There, in the corner, behind my sewing box, my plastic containers of shoes and slippers, I kept my treasured painting. It pained me that I kept it among such pedestrian things, that I had not the courage to display it or tell my family about its existence. But it was like a raw wound that I kept hidden, but nursed secretly at night. On the evenings when I could not sleep, when my nightmares got the best of me, I would pull it out from its cardboard tubing and stare at the faces of Rita and her newborn son. I would hear Carl’s breathing, imagine my sweet daughter sleeping next door, and I would finally allow myself to cry.
CHAPTER 57
LENKA
I gave birth to only one child. A daughter. Carl and I tried for years for another baby, but it was as if my body couldn’t produce more than one offspring. Every stretch of vein, every bit of bone, was pulled from me to make that perfect one.
Elisa grew up strong and tall. She had her father’s American limbs. She ran fast like a colt, her amber legs stretching in mighty leaps. When I saw her on the playground as a little girl racing against the boys, I remember gasping for breath. Who was this child who could leap faster then a gazelle, who tore out her tight braids because she loved the sensation of the wind in her hair? She was mine, but she was so wild and free.
I loved that about my daughter. I loved that she was fearless, that she had passion in her heart, that she thrilled to the sun on her face and rushed to the shoreline, just so she could feel the lapping of water at her toes.
I would be the one who secretly worried. I never told her how each night I had to fight the anxiety that raced through my head, the worry that something awful might befall my child.
I would wrestle the thoughts in my head like they were lions inside me. I would fight with myself not to let the blackness of my past seep into any part of Elisa’s life. She would have a pure, golden life without shadow, I swore. I swore it up and down.
My daughter was five when she first asked about my tattoo. I will never forget the near weightlessness of her finger tracing the numbers on my arm.
“What are those numbers for?” she asked, almost mesmerized.
I had dreaded this day since her birth. What would I tell her? How could I spare her the details of my past? There was no way on earth I’d allow a single image of my nightmare to sneak into her beautiful, angelic head.
And so, that afternoon, as Elisa sat in my lap, her finger against my skin, her head against my breast, I lied to my daughter for the first time.
“When I was little, I always got lost,” I told her. “This was my ID number in case the police needed to know where to return me.”
She seemed to accept this for a while. It was when she became a teenager that she learned about the Holocaust and figured out what those numbers really meant.
“Mom, were you in Auschwitz?” I remember her asking the summer she turned thirteen.
“Yes,” I answered her, my voice cracking. Please. Please, I prayed, my heart thundering in my chest. Please don’t ask me anymore. I don’t want to tell you. Leave that part of me alone.
I could see her eyebrows rise as my own body stiffened, and knew she had recognized the fear crossing my face.
She looked at me with those ice-blue eyes of hers. My eyes. And in them I saw not only sadness, but also my daughter’s capacity for compassion.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” she said, and came over and wrapped her long arms around me, then rocked my head against the thinness of her chest.
And she knew enough not to ask me anything more.
Although I never uttered another word about Auschwitz to my family, I still dreamed of it. If you have lived through such a hell, it never leaves you. Like the smell of the crematorium that is forever in the back of my nose, my dreams of Auschwitz are always at the back of my mind, despite all the efforts I’ve made to push them away.
How many times did I dream of the last time I saw my mother, my father, my sister? Every one of their faces appeared to me like apparitions over the years. But it was the dream where I am in Auschwitz with my daughter, Elisa, that was always the worst. That one, when it came, tortured me for days at a time.
The dreams changed as Elisa changed. When she became a teenager, my daughter grew lazy like her American friends. How many times did I ask her to clean her room, pick up her clothes, or help me peel a bowl full of vegetables before her father came home from work? But Elisa never tolerated such tedium. It was all about meeting her friends or boys.
And in those years, my dreams always began with the selection process at Terezín. She is standing next to me, my beautiful daughter. And in my dream I am begging the SS officer to send her to the right with me. I tell him: “Please! She is a good worker!” I beg him to send her to the line that I am in. But always in the dream he is prying our hands apart. He sends my daughter to the left. And I awaken, my nightgown wet with perspiration and Carl comforting me, whispering that it was only a terrible dream.
It was always in those moments, when my husband held me, that I knew that I was lucky to have found him. Those hands on my shoulders never lost their warmth during all the years of our marriage. They were always the hands of the young soldier who found me in the DP camp. Who brought me a blanket and a warm meal. Who told me in broken German that he was Jewish, too.
Every night as I went to bed, I looked at the black-and-white photograph of him in his army uniform. His thick head of hair, his dark brown eyes full of the compassion he had since that first day. This is how I filled the canvas of our marriage. I filled it with gratitude. For no matter what else happened, I would always think of Carl as the one who saved me.
He Americanized my name to “Lanie,” and gave me a good life with a healthy daughter. She learned the highly prized craft of art restoration and became a mother herself to my beautiful Eleanor. Eleanor, who inherited her swanlike grace from my mother and made heads turn whenever she
walked into a room. She took to languages the way a duck takes to water. At her graduation from Amherst, she took home nearly every prize.
When Carl fell ill, I finally became the caretaker in our marriage. I held his head when he needed to vomit, and I made him only soft food when his stomach couldn’t digest anything else. When the chemo claimed his thick white hair, I told him he was still my handsome soldier. I held his brown-spotted hand to my lips and kissed it every morning and every night. Sometimes I’d even place it in the center of my half-buttoned nightgown so he could feel the beating of my heart. I could see the end of the painting of my marriage, and I was racing to fill it with just a few strokes more.
I will tell you, though I am a deeply private person, that our last moment together was perhaps our most beautiful. That final night after he had been tucked into bed. I had given him his pain medicine and was getting ready to take a bath.
“Come here,” he managed to whisper. “Come next to me, before the medicine clouds my head.”
I believe those who have the luxury to die in their own bed can often sense when the end is near. And this was the case with Carl. His breathing suddenly became labored, his skin took an unearthly pallor. But in his eyes, there was a fierceness—a determination to use every ounce of his powers to see me clearly for the last time.
I took his hand in mine. “Put the music on, Lanie,” he whispered. I stood up and went to the old phonograph and put on his favorite record by Glenn Miller. Then I returned to sit next to him, slipping my old wrinkled hand in his.
With all his strength, my Carl gently raised his arm as if he were about to lead me in a dance. He swayed his elbow and my arm followed his lead. He smiled through the cloud of medication.
“Lanie,” he said. “You know, I have always loved you.”
“I know,” I told him, and squeezed his hand so hard, I feared I might have hurt him.
“Fifty-two years . . .” His voice was now barely a whisper, but he was smiling at me with those dark brown eyes.
And then it was as if my old heart finally tore open. I could feel the shell that I had so carefully maintained for all those years come undone. And the words, the feelings inside, seeped out like sap from an old, forgotten tree.
It was there, in our bedroom with the old faded curtains and the furniture we had bought so many years before, that I told him how much I loved him, too. I told him how for fifty-two years I had been blessed to spend my life with a man who held me, protected me, and gave me a daughter who was strong and wise. I told him how his love had turned a woman who only wanted to die after the war into someone who had a full and beautiful life.
“Tell me again, Lanie,” he whispered. “Tell me again.”
And so I told him again.
And again.
My words like a kaddish for the man who was not my first love. But a love all the same.
I told him until he was finally gone.
Dear Eleanor,
It is hard for me to believe that tomorrow you will be getting married. I feel I have lived so many lives in my eighty-one years. But one thing I am sure of is that the days on which you and your mother were born were the two happiest days of my life. On the day I first saw you, the sight of your red hair, your white skin, I was struck speechless—I could not help but think of my mother, your great-grandmother, and my beloved sister. How wonderful for this color hair to reappear in the family after all these years. You remind me so much of my mother. You have her lithe frame, and that long neck that turns like a sunflower up toward the light. You have no idea how this makes me feel, to see her in you. To see her live through the blood in your veins, the sparkle in your eyes.
I pray you will understand the wedding gift I am giving you and Jason. I have carried it with me for over fifty-five years. I made it for a dear friend, who is no longer here. I made it in honor of her child, who she was only able to hold in her arms for a few short hours. This painting was done with my heart, my blood, every part of me wanting to make something to keep this moment alive for my friend.
It was buried through the war under a dirt floor, hidden there by a man who risked his life to hide hundreds of paintings that were done by men and women like me who needed to record their experiences in Terezín.
I returned to Terezín after the war and dug it up myself. My hands worked quickly, as my spade dug through the earth to find the tin canister in which it was rolled. I eventually found my buried painting and wept with joy that it was still there. My friend, you see, was now with her child and her husband in whatever heaven there is. But the drawing remains as a testament to their lives, cut short but filled with love nonetheless.
I have waited until now to share it. I have not wanted to burden your mother’s life or yours with stories of what I endured during the war. But this painting should no longer be hidden in my closet. It has spent its life in darkness. It deserves to be seen by eyes other than my own.
Eleanor, I am giving you this painting not as a sign of morbidity, but because I want you to be its guardian. I want you to know the story behind it. To see it as a symbol not just of defiance, but of eternal love.
I placed the note on the canvas and rolled the painting up.
CHAPTER 58
JOSEF
I dress myself the day of my grandson’s rehearsal dinner with a careful reverence. I had laid out my clothes the night before. The navyblue suit, and the white shirt that I sent to the laundry the week before. I think of Amalia on this day, how happy she would be to see our grandson with his beautiful bride. It will be a grand wedding. The bride’s family is sparing no expense for their only child, a girl who looks so familiar to me, I can hardly say why.
I shave my face slowly, below my neck and the line of my slackening jaw. The mirror is merciless. My once-black hair, and my eyebrows, are as white as cotton. Somewhere deep beneath the lines, and beneath my paunch, there is a young man remembering the day he got married. His bride waiting for him under a white lace veil, a trembling body that would receive his gentle hand. I have so much love for my grandson. To see him getting married is a gift I never thought I’d live long enough to receive.
I pull on my undershirt, slip my arms through my shirtsleeves, and button myself carefully so as not to miss a single hole. I dab a little pomade on my hands and smooth out my few remaining curls.
Isaac arrives at four o’clock. The salt-and-pepper hair he had at Amalia’s funeral has now turned completely white. He comes into my room and stands behind me, both of our reflections cast in the mirror above Amalia’s old vanity. I can see his eyes fall to the porcelain tray that still holds her silver-plated brush, her pot of cold cream, and a tall green bottle of Jean Naté that she never felt she had the occasion to open.
He is not carrying his violin case, and somehow the sight of him without the leather case, the bow tucked inside, is soothing to me. I marvel at the sight of his two unencumbered arms, dangling like a schoolboy’s from the dark sleeves of his suit, his gray eyes sparkling like two silver moons.
Jakob has come out of his room and greets us in the hallway. My fifty-year-old son surprises me with a smile.
“Isaac,” he says, nodding a friendly hello. “Dad,” he says. I see him clasping his hands to steady his nerves. “You look great.”
I smile at him. He looks handsome in his suit, the first sprouts of gray hair around his ears remind me of my own. His eyes remind me of Amalia’s.
“What a night,” Jakob says as the three of us walk out under the canopy of my building. The doorman whistles for a cab. The moon is shining over the skyline. The air smells of autumn. Crisp as apples. Sweet as maple sugar.
The three of us slide onto the cab’s blue vinyl seats and fold our hands in our laps on the way to my grandson’s wedding rehearsal.
I look out the window as we drive across town, through the channels of a jewel-lit Central Park, and think I have lived to be eighty-five years old, to see my grandson on his wedding day. I am a very lucky man.
br /> EPILOGUE
At a table in the back of the restaurant, long fingers of moonlight strike an aging couple. The bride-to-be and the future groom are dancing.
Her sleeve is now pulled upward. It is not the six blue numbers that have made the old man weep, it is the small brown birthmark on the flesh just above them. He trembles as his old finger reaches to touch it, that small raisin shape he had kissed a lifetime ago.
“Lenka . . .” He says her name again. He can barely get the word out of his mouth. It has been stuck there for sixty years.
She looks at him with eyes that have seen too many ghosts to believe he is who she thinks he might be.
“I am Lanie Gottlieb,” she protests weakly.
She touches her throat, encircled in a seed-pearl necklace that once belonged to an elegant redheaded woman in Prague. She glances over to her American granddaughter, her eyes filling with tears.
He is about to apologize, to say that he must be mistaken. That for years he thought he has seen her face in the subway, the bus, in a woman on line in the grocery. Now he fears he has finally lost his sanity.
She pulls down her sleeve and looks directly into his eyes. She studies him as a painter might study a canvas that she had long abandoned. In her mind, she colors his white hair black, and traces the arch of his brow.
“I am sorry,” she finally says with a shaking voice and tears in her eyes. “I have not been called Lenka in nearly sixty years.” She is covering her mouth, and underneath a fan of white fingers, she whispers his name: “Josef.”