Free Let Me Go by Helga Schneider Page A

camp."
    I look at you, Mother, and I feel a terrible lacerating rift within me: between the instinctive attraction for my own blood and the irrevocable rejection of what you have been, of what you still are.
    THAT'S ENOUGH, I tell myself, you've come here to see her one last time, to try to ensure that it ends well. I try to smile at her, but my lips are set in a rigid grimace, hard as concrete. The demon returns to drive me onward. Why not give in to it?
    What was the food like for the guards in Birkenau?
    While she was acting the incorruptible SS woman, my brother and I were suffering from the most terrible hunger. After 1944, food supplies for the ordinary German population had almost entirely dried up. They ate bread made with rapeseed; they ground tree-bark and acorns to make flour—which gave you a terrible stomachache—or gulped down terrifying soups made of nettles.
    "Were you short of food?" I ask. Eva casts me a disappointed glance, and my mother cackles. The question seems to amuse her.
    "We had everything," she boasts, "the comrades made sure we wanted for nothing: real coffee, salami, butter, Polish vodka, cigarettes, scented soap. We had silk stockings and real champagne, although only at Christmas."
    Your comrades, Mother. After more than half a century, you still talk of them with such a sense of solidarity, with such undying deference.
    "I was an absolute bookworm, for example," she continues animatedly, "and the comrades, when they came back from Berlin, always brought me something interesting to read." She straightens herself up proudly. "I wasn't one of those who read only popular newspapers like some of my comrades, no, I read important books, you know? And that reading helped me to relax before going to sleep. After all, I was a human being, wasn't I?"
    I can't contain myself: "How could you go to sleep knowing that thousands of corpses were burning only a few yards away?"
    I don't need to look at Eva to feel her sad eyes upon me. But it's done now.
    My mother, in turn, replies almost contemptuously.
    "I never suffered from insomnia in Birkenau. And anyway I've already told you, I'd been strictly trained. I couldn't permit myself to . . . " But then a strange thing happens: Her jaw begins to tremble. It's a grotesque, piteous spectacle.
    She presses her lips together tightly in an attempt to stop the trembling, but rather than diminishing, it grows; it becomes uncontrollable; it alters her features. Now her face is both helpless and contorted with rage.
    "The ones who were burned were just scum," she announces contemptuously. "Germany had to get rid of every last Stilck, every last member of that wretched race."
    "And did you support that?"
    "What? Did I support the Final Solution? Why do you think I was there? For a holiday?"
    She laughs, but her jaw is still trembling.
    "Didn't you even feel sony for the children?" I ask. I don't dare meet Eva's eye.
    "And why should I have?" she replies promptly. "A Jewish child would have become a Jewish adult, and Germany had to free itself of that loathsome race—how many times do I have to repeat that?"
    I take a deep breath.
    "But you were a mother," I object, "you had two children. While the children were being driven into the gas chambers, didn't you ever think about us?"
    "What's that got to do with it?"
    "I mean . . . didn't it ever occur to you that if we'd been Jewish children we'd have faced the same fate?"
    "My children were Aryan!" she exclaims, outraged. "The Aryans had nothing to fear. My children were perfect, and no one would have touched a hair on their heads!"
    Are you really sure about that? Do you really think that we Aryan children had a comfortable place in Hitler's greater Germany? When, for example, in February 1943, Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels announced the imposition of severe emergency restrictions, do you think that Aryan children would have been exempted?
    As for not touching a hair on our heads, fine, they didn't send us