The Woman I Wanted to Be Read Free

You never know how something that seems the worst thing turns out to be the best.
    After that, she was determined to survive, no matter the horror. Even when the unmistakable smell of the smoke coming from the camp crematorium seemed unbearable and her fellow prisoners would say “We’re all going to die,” my mother would insist: “No, we’re not. We’re going to live.” Fear was not an option.
    Nearly one million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, many in the gas chamber. Others were executed, or killed in Dr. Mengele’s experiments, or died from starvation and exhaustion from slave labor. My mother was fortunate, if anyone could have been considered fortunate in those unimaginably cruel surroundings. She was put to work on the twelve-hour night shift in the nearby weapons factory making bullets; so long as she worked she was useful and was kept alive. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, and naturally slender. She had never eaten much and could exist, albeit barely, on the miniscule rations of bread and watery soup she and other prisoners were given. Heavier prisoners, radically deprived of anything close to the amount of food they were used to, she told me, were the first to succumb to starvation.
    If ever I think I’m too lazy to do a necessary chore, if I hesitate to go out because of the cold or complain about having to wait in line, I remember my mother. I envision her being marched out of Auschwitz with sixty thousand others in the winter of 1945, just nine daysbefore the Soviet troops reached the camp. The SS hastily executed thousands of inmates and marched the others fifty kilometers through the snow to a train depot where they were stuffed into freight cars and sent to Ravensbrück in the north, and from there force-marched again to their new camps, in my mother’s case to Neustadt-Glewe in Germany. Some fifteen thousand prisoners died on that Death March, of exposure, exhaustion, illness, or being shot by the SS for falling or lagging behind.
    In what can only be described as a miracle, my tiny mother survived it all. She was one of the 1,244 who survived the camps out of the 25,631 Belgian Jews who were deported. Her will and spirit to live were her defiance of the evil she had endured, a declaration of her future. When Neustadt-Glewe was liberated a few months later by the Russians, followed closely by the Americans, my mother’s weight was barely the weight of her bones.
    She was hospitalized at an American base and wasn’t expected to live. She defied the odds again. When she was stable enough to return home to Belgium she had to fill out a form, as did all survivors returning to their countries. I found that form. It had her name and date of birth on it and a question: “in what condition” she was returning from her thirteen months in captivity. Her astonishing answer was, in impeccable handwriting: “en très bonne santé” (“in very good health”).
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    M y father, Leon Halfin, was very different from my mother. Where she was strict and somewhat distant, he was relaxed and affectionate. In his eyes I could do no wrong and he loved me unconditionally. As a child I loved him much more than my demanding mother, though maybe I respected her a little more. When I needed to get up to go tothe bathroom in the middle of the night, I would call for my father and that made him laugh. “Why do you call me and not your mother?” he’d ask. And I would reply: “Because I don’t want to disturb her.”
    My father never scolded me. He simply adored me and I adored him. I was as affectionate toward him as he was to me. I loved to sit on his lap, covering him with kisses and drinking all of his after-dinner lemon tea. To my father I was the most beautiful thing in the world and I felt entitled to his love and devotion.
    M y father and I looked alike and we had the same kind of relentless energy. He loved American cars, and when I was nine or ten he would often take me for a drive in his beautiful,