Rosh Hashanah 2009 - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

JEWISH AFFAIRS ROSH HASHANAH 2009before his tormentors. The penalty for failure toplease was the gas chamber, the reward for successa slice of bread. He survived because of his magic,unlike his parents, his uncle (who had been brutallykilled in a police station) and his friends.After the war, Hans advertised in the paper tryingto find family. My uncle, Joe de Haas, saw his nameand went to Holland to find him. Uncle Joe and myfather, Jack Lessem, brought Hans and his new wifeShelley out to Salisbury and found him a job.Many years later, my 16-year-old daughterDanielle went on the March of the Living to visit thedeath camps at Auschwitz and Dachau. She returnedno longer a child, but the grown daughter of a secondgeneration Holocaust survivor. Soon afterwards, shewent for a walk with “Uncle Hans” on Cape Town’sClifton Beach. After a long stroll, they watched thewaves pounding on the beach. For hours he did notspeak.Danielle hoped he would ask her about herexperiences. She hoped he would speak about theunspeakable. But he remained silent.So many questions: What was going through hismind when my Granny insisted that he do a commandperformance for an audience of spoiled children whodid not know or care about the numbers etched intohis skin under his long sleeves? The numbers he hid.Even on the hottest summer days he would not weara short sleeved shirt. What else was he hiding?When the children yelled for more, what was hethinking? Was he reliving the pleasure he had giventhe Gestapo when he performed his magic for them?Was he hearing the laughter of the children of the offdutyGestapo officers, who ruled the camp with suchbrutality? Did he envy the happiness in my friends’faces, the happiness of the “normal childhood” thathad eluded him because of the atrocities of NaziGermany? Why was he determined to have nochildren of his own?And still more questions. Did he know that in myeyes, he was special and talented? But how did he seehimself? Did he see himself just as a trickster, whohad tricked the Gestapo into sparing his life? Afterthe war, in another world, when he became famousfor his tricks, did he ask himself who he might havebecome had he not been born in Nazi Germany? Didhe get pleasure when he was made president of theMagic Circle of Los Angeles and when some of hiscard tricks, still named after him, entered into themagicians’ repertoire? Even then, he ignored thepraise. “When you steal one trick, they call itplagiarism”, he would say, “When you steal many,they call it research”. In the dark nights of his soul,did he ever ask himself why his magic wand hadspared only him and not his loved ones?My mother did not have the vitality of her cousinHans. She wore her suffering like a cloak around herall the time. She felt that my brother, sisters and I hadan idyllic childhood. After all, she had grown up inNazi Germany, suffering humiliations at the handsof the Nazis. Many of her friends had died in thecamps.“I am feeling depressed”, I once confided to her.“Depressed?” she said, “What do you knowabout depression? Did you grow up in NaziGermany?”That was very much it. Living in Salisbury, wewere not entitled to feel too much pain. Her sufferingin Germany was so monumental that our sufferingpaled into insignificance.I was discouraged from being too ambitious – lifeended the same way for everyone. In my mother’swords, “life was short and beshissen like a baby’snapkin”. Everything should be ‘downspilled’, not‘upspilled’. When a friend of mine told her shethought I was intelligent, my mother retorted, “Ja, inze kingdom of ze blind, ze one-eyed is king”.Like Hans, she would not accept or give praise.We were taught not to be too enthusiastic aboutanything, or anybody for that matter. I would returnfrom school with a new friend. When she had left, Iwould say to my mother, “Isn’t she wonderful?” Mymother would reply, “Ja, but somesing,somewhere…”There was always “something, somewhere” forher to disapprove. She would look at all my friendwith a jaundiced eye – projecting the darkness ofNazism onto the still unwritten narrative of theirlives.Another of her sayings, one I only appreciatedonce I entered adulthood, was:“Don’t envy people who seem to have a betterlife style than you. Life is lived in the valleys, not onthe mountains. You only go up to the mountain tobreathe.”My mother played a great deal of bridge. Herbridge allowed her to enter another world, a moreregulated one, one over which she had some control.We children used to say that she “bridged overtroubled waters.” When she was playing bridge, shehated to be interrupted - especially if we were“upspilling our pain.”When I was a teenager, I wrote this poem:I must have been seven, or was it eight?When I returned home from a party late.A motorcyclist who did not see meHad knocked me to the ground.When I came roundI ran home to blurt out my story.My mother involved in a game of bridgeWelcomed me with the warmth of a fridge,“Has blood been spilled?” she said.“Is someone perhaps dead?“Go straight to your bedroom.Don’t speak of doom and gloom.You have a cut and a graze,Nothing time will not erase.”Her scars, you see, would always last.She was a victim of the Holocaust.The author hereby thanks Gwynne Schrire forher encouragement and assistance with this article.35