Read Online After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster - Free Book Online

humiliation, she drove through the night in diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on the way. When the police pulled her over for speeding, she had rope and pepper spray, a BB gun, a two-pound drilling hammer, and pictures of bound women, making it clear she meant to kidnap and hurt her rival. How can reason even begin to understand such things? For that moment of vengeance she lost her whole life’s work and her honor.
    I wake up worried about this supposed memoir I am writing. I remember from before how things have to have abeginning, a middle and an end, but it doesn’t mean the same thing to me now. Better T. S. Eliot’s “In my end is my beginning.” Would he have been willing to say that if he had been an atheist? Perhaps imagining going back into soft earth and emerging as a colorful plant. Wasn’t there a legend about a woman who put her beloved’s head in a pot after he’d betrayed her and she’d beheaded him, and in the spring roses grew there red as blood?
    One thing is sure: everything circles back to Hannah. I started with her and I’ll finish with her. Maybe a double suicide of the sort the Japanese love, the couple dressed up in wedding kimonos launched together hand in hand off a cliff, their kimonos, exquisitely painted with spring flowers, billowing so they look like giant birds in the warm air. But my liking for that is purely aesthetic. I imagine one of us will die of a weak heart and the other will climb onto the bed and take the cooling body into her arms.
    I remind myself that death isn’t pretty. If I had ever been tempted to see it that way, Hannah would have cured me. For years she had the most terrible nightmares about the death camps. Her most persistent one was of Mengele coming into her barracks to select the people to gas or to be experimented on, fed poisons, or submerged in freezing water and then revived. She must have been a beautiful child, but with her face filthy, standing in her ragged camp uniform, she learned to disappear.
    â€œIt was so important not to be seen, Renzo,” she told me, “My life depended on it.”
    Even then she had a ferocious will to live. She stood looking down, her beautiful eyes hidden by dirty blond hair. Sometimes she would even rub dirt through her hair and over her skin—anything to dull the shine of her. When all her efforts to fade into the background didn’t work and she was selected, she ran away and hid with her sister. But in her nightmares the barracks
capo
grabs her by her dirty neck andhands her over to Mengele.
    There was a rumor among the women in her barracks that Mengele’s latest project was training dogs to rape young girls. Hannah wakes screaming from a horrible dream where they are coming with the dogs to get her. Or she dreams of a friend running against the electric fence, determined to die, and she is unable to help her. The girl had given Hannah a precious gift, a wooden spoon, after hers had been stolen. Such unselfishness was rare in the camps. But it kept them from feeling like animals.
    When such things have happened in real time, it is hard to “recover.” Veterans of our misguided wars remind us of that, should we be tempted to forget. Hannah still jumped at sudden noises, loud sounds. But just as my memories are all jumbled up, what was confused in her was the line between nightmare and our waking life. To know what was real. Could the reality that had been so painful coexist with gentleness and warm baths, scrambled eggs and kisses?
    Even after years of being here in the same house, Hannah would get lost when she went out for a walk. Our palazzo is on Vittorio Emanuele. In back, after a short section on Santo Spirito, is Via dei Banchi Nuovi, which goes into Via del Governo Vecchio then pauses at Pasquino’s statue—where Gina used to post her angry rhymes about the whorishness of Rome and Berlusconi. The statue makes its square eminently