Chris Hedges: ‘You Have a Mother’

[marmar]

from truthdig:


‘You Have a Mother’

Posted on Jan 18, 2015
By Chris Hedges


BROOKLYN, N.Y—Lola Mozes’ childhood came to an end in the fall of 1939 at a small bridge in Poland. She was 9—seated in a horse-drawn wagon, her back propped against her family’s silver Sabbath candelabra, which was wrapped in a blanket—when she saw the aftermath of a German bomb attack. The sight of human bodies, along with eviscerated horses gasping in pain and struggling to rise despite their gaping wounds, reduced her to tears and panic. Her mother, Helena Rewitz, born Schwimer, who would hover over her daughter like a guardian angel later in a Jewish ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, took the terrified child into her arms.

I sat with Lola Mozes at her dining room table in Brooklyn on Friday. Short and petite, with curly black hair and white gold hoop earrings, she had a soft, infectious laugh, an impish sense of humor and fine facial lines that she inherited from her father and mother. Her charm and warmth were girlish and slightly coquettish.

“I am the great pretender,” she said, smiling. “It is always there, what I went through. I am tormented by it. It keeps repeating and repeating itself in my head.”

Lola grew up living next to her family’s small grocery in Katowice, a city in southwestern Poland. The language at home was German. She learned Polish in school. Her parents, especially when they wanted to talk privately, spoke Yiddish. Her parents and older brother celebrated the Sabbath and went to synagogue on religious holidays but lived as secular Jews. Her father, Emil, who sang arias as he bathed in the mornings, dressed in imported German suits and spats when he left the house. They lived in a working-class section of the city. Catholic children in the neighborhood taunted her as a “Christ killer” and once pushed her brother Oskar off a tram and beat him. But nothing prepared the family for what was to come. A dark future was only hinted at when the parents, their faces knotted in consternation, listened to Adolf Hitler on the radio.

.......(snip).......

I did not write this story to say that Germans are bad and Jews are good. The line between good and evil runs through all hearts. It is, sadly, as easy to become an executioner as a victim. This is the most sobering lesson of war. And it is something the greatest writers on the Holocaust, such as Primo Levi, understood. There were, after all, Jüdische Ghetto-Polizei, Jewish Kapos, Judenräte, Sonderkommandos and Blockälteste whose contributions to the organization of the ghettos and the death camps kept the crematoriums functioning. The prisoners who lowered themselves to the moral squalor of the SS were soon lost. I did not write this piece to say that virtue or goodness triumphed after the Holocaust. The Nazi extermination of 12 million people, including 6 million Jews, was a colossal, tragic and absurd waste of human life. I wrote this piece to say that the fierce and protective love of a mother and a father is stronger than hate. It can overcome evil. After the war Lola met a young German man in Spain. “He could have been a soldier,” she said. He asked Lola about her wartime experience. She told him. She kissed him on the cheek in saying goodbye. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/you_have_a_mother_20150118

[BlancheSplanchnik]

1. very GOOD READ.

Thank you.

Kick, Rec. Save.

[navarth]

2. Hedges is one of the few on my good list. Thanks for the post, marmar. nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Thank you, marmar. rec.

[Octafish]

4. ''(Father) never came back.''

“There were 200 people singing Shema Yisrael, including my father and brother, going to death,” she said. “I did not at the time connect the shooting with my father and brother and cousins. The shots became steady and constant. My mother held me tight.”

Read and witness, DUers.

[grasswire]

5. lest we forget......

...lest we forget.

[KingCharlemagne]

6. Thanks for posting. Food for serious thought. - nt

[Frosty1]

7. Powerful writing

OMG I am speechless.

Thank you for sharing!