ANYONE watching us during
those breezy Spring days would have assumed my husband and I were regular
beachcombers - heads bowed, bodies curved to the earth as we stalked the
Suffolk shore searched intently for white pebbles of roughly the same shape and
size.
"I need three for each
mother," I reminded him as our eyes scanned the multi-coloured flints,
shale and fragments of amber on the shore near Southwold. Our frequent
pilgrimages to the beach became a kind of meditation – a chance to focus on the
minutiae and forget the bigger story that crowded my head night and day and even
gave my husband bad dreams.
"Do you have enough?"
he asked the day we spread our horde across our kitchen table a few miles away and
turned them reverentially in our hands. Mentally counting them and totting up their
final resting places, I told him we still needed a few more. Once we had sufficient,
they were placed in a soft cloth bag and packed in the bottom of my suitcase before
we journeyed east across Europe.
Having selected the first
three pebbles for something I wanted to do the second day of our tour, I found
them a strangely comforting presence in my jacket pocket. My fingers
closed tightly around them as the sheer scale of Auschwitz-II Birkenau
robbed me of my breath. The ancient stones felt warm and smooth to the touch as
I followed in the faltering footsteps of so many hapless souls disgorged into
that camp's dark heart.
After endless hours of
wandering and staring I finally found the right place for them – a parade
ground at the remote building known as 'The Sauna' where the three young Jewish mothers-to be had been stripped and shaved before being inspected
by Dr Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death’. At a simple memorial on the edge of
that forbidding site, I laid my three pebbles side-by-side in the gesture I’d
only recently discovered was traditional to the Jewish faith. Their pale
purity seemed stark against the polished black granite.
I selected the next three
pebbles for the town of Freiberg in Saxony in the former Eastern Bloc. They
were not to be laid in its beautiful square or even at the steps of the
slave labour factory where the mothers had been incarcerated for seven months as
they hid their pregnancies from their SS guards. Instead, I laid them at the
base of a harsh Communist-era granite headstone in the middle of a largely
unnoticed cemetery. It marked the deaths of nine women like 'my’ mothers who
sadly didn't survive the hard labour, starvation diet, or constant threat of murder,
injury or infection during one of the bitterest winters in Europe's
history.
A little known town in the
Czech Republic named Horní Bříza was where I placed the next three stones. Knowing
how its brave inhabitants rallied to bake bread and make soup for my mothers
and one thousand others on their interminable train journey south, I placed the
pebbles on the sculpted memorial taking pride of place in the town’s cemetery
for those who’d died in those wretched wagons.
At Mauthausen concentration
camp overlooking the River Danube in Austria – the mothers’ final destination
after all they’d been through – I placed three pebbles at the foot of the
formidable granite gates that had seemed to them to represent the open mouth of
Hell. By then two of the women had been delivered of malnourished
3lb babies that they’d hidden so long from their tormentors, and the third
gave birth in the shadow of those gates. None believed they’d survive more than
a few days spent in one of the worst of the camps, which had the nickname of The
Bonegrinder. Had the Nazis not run out of gas, none would have.
My next cluster of stones
was laid in a tree-lined cemetery in Bratislava in the Slovak Republic, whose name
translates to Lark Valley. They were placed on the grave of Priska, my first
mother, whose baby Hana had somehow survived even though her father and most of
her family had perished. Priska not only made it through the war but lived
until the age of ninety, surviving long enough to see her daughter thrive and present
her with a beloved grandson.
I crossed the Atlantic to
place the next three pebbles on a grave in Nashville, Tennessee - the resting
place of Rachel, my second mother, who gave birth to Mark in an open coal wagon
on that hellish train journey to Mauthausen. A father and grandfather, he accompanied
me to pay our respects to her tireless eighty-four years of life, which only
really began again when she moved to the United States.
The grave of Anka, the last
of my mothers to give birth (to baby Eva at the gates) was the most difficult
to find and in a moment of panic as the sun went down over the Czech
countryside I thought we never would. Then we came upon it - an enchanted
Jewish cemetery at the end of a grassy path in the middle of a copse where her
ninety-six years on this earth were commemorated. I thought then that those
three white stones laid there would be my last.
A few months later, however,
I found myself standing with Eva, Hana and Mark at the Chicago headstone of a
former American soldier named Albert Kosiek, who as a young sergeant had defied
orders in May 1945 to liberate thousands of men and women from Mauthausen,
including my mothers and babies, thereby saving their lives.
In my pocket were three
final pebbles, scooped from the Southwold beach in the weeks before I flew to
Illinois. In what seemed a fitting gesture and as two of Sgt Kosiek’s sons
watched with glistening eyes, I handed the pale stones to the three children their
father had saved and allowed my own tears to fall as they stepped forward and
placed one for each of their mothers on the simple granite marker. It had taken
them seventy years and me less than two but our journey was finally complete.
Born Survivors: Three young mothers and their
extraordinary story of courage, defiance and survival by Wendy Holden, is being published in in 21
countries and translated into 16 languages. It is now available in the UK in paperback.
