Such Good Girls (18 page)

From Amsterdam she was sent to Westerbork, the transit camp from which more than 100,000 Dutch Jews would ultimately be sent to their deaths.

When Ed managed to visit his grieving father and motherless younger brothers in the little house she’d rented, he saw how helpless they were and decided to join them. The owner of the cottage, a refined gentleman named Van Hamburg who lived with his family next door, kept inquiring after Mr. Lessing’s wife. Not yet knowing the truth about her absence, but fearing the worst, Ed’s father improvised that she’d broken her leg and was detained in Amsterdam. A month later, after they had received word that she’d been transported to Bergen-Belsen—almost certainly a death sentence—the landlord asked after her again. Ed’s father explained that she had become so depressed over her leg that she had been committed to an insane asylum. The landlord never caught on; in fact, he became quite fond of Ed’s father, once remarking to him that the war was a terrible thing. Ed’s father readily agreed. “Yes,” Van Hamburg said, “the Germans are terrible. Almost as bad as the Jews.”

The last winter of the war, 1944 to 1945, was the harshest, and the hardest on the Lessings, who had to beg, borrow, and even steal to stay alive. Spring brought some relief, but no end to the war was in sight. German V-1 flying bombs whistled overhead, and heavy gunfire in the area kept snapping off small tree branches that fell on the cottage roof. A farmer appeared at their door one day with a dead duck full of German shrapnel, and offered it to the Lessings. After some deft surgery to remove the metal fragments, they began to roast the bird. Unfortunately, while the duck cooked, the fighting came closer and closer, the ground trembling with exploding munitions. After making sure Ed’s two little brothers were safely in Van Hamburg’s bomb shelter, Ed and his father crawled to the cottage to wait for the duck to finish cooking, then crawled back on their bellies to the shelter with their best meal in months.

After three days in the shelter with the Van Hamburg family, the noise outside stopped. When the Lessings finally emerged, they glimpsed the most incredible sight: the Canadian Army coming toward them through the fields.

But the biggest miracle of all awaited them back in Delft later that spring, when a woman jumped out of an English army truck and asked Ed, “Do you know where the Lessings live?”

Ed stared wide-eyed at the frail woman. Was it possible that Ed had changed so much in the past year that his own mother didn’t recognize him? “Mother,” he cried. “It’s me, Eddie!”

The story she told was almost unbelievable. She had been fading away slowly in Bergen-Belsen, her inevitable death forestalled only by her good fortune in securing a night job in the camp’s kitchen. On December 5, 1944, pressed in between two other women in her barracks, she’d had a vivid dream. In it, she’d seen a copy of the Haagsche Courant, clearly dated “January 31, 1945.” She understood its significance: on that date, she would either be dead, or she would be free. There was no reason for optimism, but maybe the Americans or British would come. With the stub of a pencil, she inscribed the date on the wooden frame of her bunk.

Not long after the dream, her close friend and bunk mate told her one morning that she should walk over to the next barracks, where an SS man was set up at a desk to take information from inmates with foreign papers. Her friend knew that, upon Engeline Lessing’s arrest in Amsterdam, she had tried to convince the SS that she was American, providing the address in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where she and her husband and firstborn Ed actually had lived for a few years in the early 1930s. Her husband, Nathan, an accomplished cellist who had worked several cruises for the Holland-America Line, had hoped to catch on with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. When Nathan contracted tuberculosis all seemed lost, but he eventually recovered and found work in 1931 with other BSO musicians at a hotel in New Hampshire before the Depression closed off all further prospects and the family returned to the Netherlands.

“I was lying about being an American citizen and they knew it,” Engeline whispered to her fellow inmate.

“But you have nothing to lose,” her friend said. “Go.”

Engeline made her way to the next barracks, where, sure enough, an SS officer sat at a small table, over a list of names. When she approached, he asked for her name while barely looking up at her.

“Here you are,” he said, his finger pausing on the page. “Get yourself ready. You’ll be out of here in two days.”

Although Bergen-Belsen had begun as a camp for prisoners needed to exchange for German prisoners, Engeline didn’t believe the SS officer for a minute. They had lied many times before. She was there to die slowly from starvation or typhus, whichever won the race. But two days later, she found herself walking with 300 other prisoners to the train depot, where Red Cross nurses—they were visions in white, no more real to her than a dream—circulated among them with real coffee, real milk, and real sugar. When they boarded the train, all the window shades were drawn and they were told that looking out the window was punishable by death. Nonetheless, as the train traveled south through Germany, Engeline peeked from time to time, and what she saw filled her with joy: every city lay in ruins. Germany looked like a defeated nation.

Finally, in St. Gallen, Switzerland, her train met another train filled with German citizens who had been interned in Palestine as POWs. The exchange was officially completed, and the former inmates of Bergen-Belsen were led to a school building, where they were fed bread and sardines, and slept on straw spread out on the floor. Engeline dumped tins of sardine, oil and all, on her bread and savored her first real meal—if you could call it that—in months. Her debilitated system couldn’t handle the onslaught of calories, and she vomited it all up, as did many of the others.

In the morning, she awoke and stared out the window at the snow-covered Appenzell Alps, amazed that such natural beauty still existed in the same world as Bergen-Belsen, where she had left behind thousands dying of typhus. She and the three hundred other feeble, emaciated prisoners waited throughout the day for further instructions. When evening came, a man arrived to distribute copies of the St. Galler Tagblatt.

And there it was, as prophesied in her December dream: 31 Januar 1945.

The following day Engeline’s train moved on to Marseille, where she was given a choice between Palestine, emigration to America, or assignment to a United Nations rehabilitation camp in Europe. Since returning to Holland was not an option—it was still under Nazi control—she chose America and had already boarded the ship bound for New York when she changed her mind, reasoning that if she stayed in Europe, she’d have a chance to be reunited with her husband and children, if they had survived. She ended up in a rehabilitation camp in Algeria, from which, five months later, she made her way back to Delft, hitching a ride on a British army truck for the last leg of it.

The night after jumping off the army truck and being reunited with her family, she told them that they were going to America and that she, who was one of five children of poor Orthodox Jews, didn’t want to have anything to do with Jews, Germans, or Hollanders for the rest of her life. A year later, Ed and his father obtained visas to immigrate to the United States and establish themselves before sending for Ed’s mother and two younger brothers. The only snag for Ed was that he had just fallen in love two months earlier with the teenage Carla Heijmans, to whom a mutual friend had recently introduced him. Ed and Carla had gotten to know each other on Zionist outings, but their blossoming love affair—well, Ed was smitten while Carla was mostly confused—was cut short in June 1946, with promises by both parties to stay in touch and, they hoped, reunite before long.

Ed settled in Schenectady, New York, where he began working at the General Electric plant. For a year and a half, he deluged Carla with love letters—as a stranger in a strange land, he had plenty of time on his hands. Finally, in 1949, Carla’s mother obtained a visa to immigrate to America under the German quota (she had been born there), and Carla, as a minor, joined her on the journey. By then Ed had earned a New York State High School Equivalency Diploma and was working on electrocardiographs and gas analysis instrumentation for the Cambridge Instrument Company in Ossining, a town on the Hudson River north of New York City. By 1949, he and Carla were married.

By 1958, they had two children and a house in the New York City suburb of Dobbs Ferry. It looked just like the American dream, but it had been built on a foundation of disaster.

In 1989, Carla Lessing, the mother of two grown children and a social worker in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, heard about a lecture on child Holocaust survivors that was going to be delivered in Manhattan by a well-known Long Island psychoanalyst and author named Dr. Judith Kestenberg. A prominent researcher in the field of childhood trauma, Dr. Kestenberg’s family had been annihilated in Poland during the war. She now headed up Holocaust Survivor Studies, as well as the International Study of the Organized Persecution of Children, which she had started with her husband. She traveled the world with her associates, taping interviews with more than 1,500 child survivors of the Holocaust and their children. She had been born in Tarnov, Poland, in 1910, but like her Polish-born husband, she had immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s.

If anyone could speak to Carla Lessing’s experience as a hidden child during the war, she figured it was Dr. Kestenberg. Lessing had spent her adult life surrounded by Holocaust survivors. As often happened with children of survivors, Lessing’s children had gravitated, almost unconsciously, toward other children of survivors as friends. Lessing’s daughter became close with the daughter of a neighbor who was a Holocaust survivor, and her son’s closest friend was the son of a refugee of Nazi-occupied France.

The experience of hiding was with Carla always in one form or another. She had done, as she put it, “all the normal things”—school, college, graduate school—but she didn’t experience the world as a safe place. She lived on a steady diet of worst-case scenarios—especially involving her children. She awoke, startled, with heart palpitations, in the middle of the night. She saw that others enjoyed life so much more than she did; how could she allow herself joy when so many had suffered, had disappeared? She wasn’t sure she knew even how to express joy. She was in some ways still the girl obeying her grandparents’ warnings not to draw attention to herself, still the adolescent whose very life depended on suppressing emotions. She felt uncomfortable in any group. The years in hiding seemed to have killed in her the capacity to belong.

As a member of the “helping professions” whose job was to assist others, Carla knew she had yet to defeat, or maybe even confront, some of her own fears and anxieties. She had not lost any immediate family members during the war, and she had not even witnessed any Jews being beaten, tortured, shot, or hanged, but an aunt, uncle, three cousins, great-aunts, and many close friends had been murdered.

It was clear that the hidden children had come out of the war burdened by the very silence they had needed in order to survive. They had been the victims of one of history’s most malevolent hunts, but survival had left them in psychological pain, quietly excluded from the world around them. Worse, the vast majority had endured their misery alone, not able to broach it, even with loved ones, and had been made to feel unworthy of their own suffering.

In the decades that followed the war, Carla and Ed never talked about their experiences in hiding. They never discussed it with their children either. A detail might pop up in conversation here and there, but not whole narratives or chronologies. Not during the five years they spent in Israel in the early 1950s, when Carla cooked on a kibbutz and worked with infants and toddlers in their communal homes. Not during the years after they returned to America, when Ed got his design degree at Pratt Institute and Carla worked as a nursery school teacher in the Bronx and Dobbs Ferry, and earned her college degree and graduate degree in social work from Columbia University. Not when she spent ten years as a supervisor in a day treatment program for chronic mentally ill patients and another ten as a therapist and supervisor in an outpatient mental health clinic.

Carla and Ed treated their wartime experiences as detachable chapters, as easily uncoupled from their life stories as a boxcar. Even when they visited the van Geenens on visits to Holland over the years, the distant past—her mother would refer to it only as “the Hitler time”—was rarely part of the conversation.

The only time it regularly came up was in Ed’s psychotherapy, and then he wasn’t even aware of it. After twenty-three years of treatment, Ed Lessing said to his therapist in one of their last sessions, “You know something? The most important thing in my life I never talk to you about.”

His therapist said, “What was that, Ed?”

Ed said, “The Holocaust.”

“Ed,” the therapist said, “there hasn’t been a single session that you did not talk about it.”

The audience at Dr. Kestenberg’s lecture on Holocaust survivors was filled with mental health professionals, listening attentively as a panel of psychoanalysts talked about Kestenberg’s ongoing research into the effects of “genocidal persecution on the child’s psychic structure and on development throughout the life cycle.”

There was just one problem, as far as Lessing was concerned. Not once during the entire talk did Kestenberg mention Jewish children who had been hidden, rather than deported, during World War II. Kestenberg focused only on those children who had escaped extermination in the camps. What about the others? The children whose parents had given them up to Christian strangers, many of them too young to understand the reasons for this abandonment, who lived in terror, often without parental love at all, only to face further trauma at the end of the war, when they were “reunited” with devastated parents they didn’t know, and who couldn’t properly care for them? What about the children who watched the members of their family deported or murdered one by one? Or learned that their parents were dead, leaving them to be raised by their rescuers, by strangers, or after the war, by relatives who rejected them for not “being Jewish”? What about the hidden children who, as adults, didn’t know their given names or more than a scrap or two of information about their biological parents? Didn’t “genocidal persecution” also apply to them?