Free Let Me Go by Helga Schneider

were survivors, which is why, Sperrstunde or no, they were forever in search of something, mostly food.
    Once the catastrophe was over, the women of Berlin— I can bear witness to them above all—got busy clearing the streets of rubble and consoling and encouraging those returning, drained and exhausted, from Hitler's war.
    SHE HAS DOZED OFF. She has leaned her head against the back of the armchair and gone to sleep like that, without having shown any sign of tiredness.
    I look at her, my old mother, whom I'm seeing for the second time in half a century, and in spite of it all I can't help feeling an impulse of tenderness.
    She sleeps motionlessly, her breath barely perceptible, looking unbearably defenseless and forlorn. A new thought pierces me, followed by an attack of anxiety. One day she will go to sleep like this, silent and vulnerable, never to reawaken, and I will be far away. Perhaps someone will inform me by telegram, by the time she's already underground. I feel a pang. She's still my mother, and when she goes, a part of me will go with her. But which part? I can't find an answer to that.
    "Look at her—she's like a child," Eva whispers to me.
    "Yes," I murmur in reply, "a little shadow."
    "You mustn't torment her," my cousin adds, "I don't know what got into you."
    "I don't know either. She provokes me somehow. She irritates me, and at the same time I'm moved by her. I'm so confused."
    At that moment my mother wakes up, looks around with frightened eyes, and when she sees me mumbles with relief, "Ah, you're still here." She yawns. "What were we talking about?"
    I avoid reminding her about the inmate she sent to the brothel in Buchenwald, and say, "Why don't you tell me something about yourself? How do you spend your days, for example?"
    She runs a hand over her forehead.
    "I stopped doing it in Birkenau," she announces, as hough to justify herself for something she mentioned earlier.
    "Stopped doing what in Birkenau?" I can't help asking, despite my good intentions a moment before.
    "Tying women to tables."
    She angles her head, but I have time to see her eyes: Are they really misted with tears—or is it just my determi-lation to grasp at the merest hint of regret?
    She leans forward once again and grips my hands before I can do anything to stop her.
    "You mustn't think I was acting on my own initiative," she says quickly, revealing a hint of concern. Her hands, so cold and bony, fill me with a sense of unease.
    "What are you talking about?" Her proximity disturbs me. I free myself from her grip with an almost hysterical gesture. I feel relieved, while she stares at her hands as though someone had just taken away something she was holding.
    "I'm talking . . . about Birkenau," she replies slowly and uncertainly.
    "You said you weren't acting on your own initiative," I suggest.
    "Oh, yes! That's it . . . . I mean . . . the fact that I treated them strictly."
    "Who?"
    "The prisoners on my block. I couldn't treat them with kid gloves, could I?" She smiles, in search of agreement.
    I nod mechanically.
    "I had orders to treat them with extreme harshness," she crows, "and I made them spit blood."
    The mask she was wearing a moment before slips from her face; all concern vanishes.
    "I'm talking about those idlers who worked in the munitions factories—you know the ones? They were always tired and difficult, and at night they whined for the children they had lost along the way."
    She adds with enthusiasm, "I put a rocket under them!" And she immediately continues as though explaining a technical term. "It's military slang. That's what they used to say. Putting a rocket under someone meant working them to death."
    She stares at me, her expression as it was before.
    "They needed discipline, you know? Those Jewish whores had to understand where they were and above all why. And there was only one way of doing that—discipline, harsh and inflexible discipline. That's the secret if you want to maintain control of a