Truth or Lie?
The lie was bad but better
I always thought the top of my mother’s body was a tad lopsided but as a young girl, I’d not really seen very many naked women. Given our meager financial means, there were no country club weekends of swimming pool visits. My mother was very well endowed — quite bosomy to be precise, but her left breast didn’t match the right one at all. She was immodest around me and when she took her evening baths, she loved to have me sit on the toilet seat and tell me stories about her life in Romania before the war.
When she got out of the tub, I tried not to look but it was almost impossible not to notice that one nipple and part the breast was missing. “Mom, what happened to your breast?” I asked periodically. Sometimes she pretended not to hear me. Other times, she told me she had fallen or had a horrible accident.
I was going through puberty, sprouting my very own breasts and, naturally, developing a much greater awareness of my own bodily traits as well as those of women in general. But I also became increasingly persistent about asking my mother to tell me the details of why she looked deformed.
“I was in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp and the camp was on a river. A group of us were unloading crates of food from a barge and the S.S. guards caught me stealing food.” Her explanation to me when I was older never varied. “So they beat me viciously but Dorothea Bintz, the most sadistic female S.S. guard of all, got me right across my breast with one of those pry bars, the kind with the hook used to pry open wooden crates. She hit me so hard, it severed my nipple and part of that breast. It was horrible but I lived.”
My mother died far too young, no doubt, from the long-term consequences of what she’d been exposed to during the Holocaust. Her brutal truths and all the answers to so many questions I never thought to ask, were buried with her. During the week I was to turn the same age Mom had been when she died, I visited my brother in California. Four years older than I, he’d always been her confidant and always, I had envied their special relationship.
On the evening of my birthday, my brother and I sat on the patio, enjoying a glass of wine and the early evening calm. Suddenly, he turned to face me and asked, “You know about Mom, right?”
“I know a lot about her but what, exactly, about Mom are you referring to?” I said, snippier than I’d intended.
“That she was experimented on in the camps, that’s what! It’s the reason she was missing part of her left breast.”
I let out a gasp, startling myself. “Are you sure? How come I never, ever heard anything about that?” I asked him.
“Did it ever dawn on you that maybe she didn’t want you to know.” He said. “She might have been trying to protect you from knowing about all the incredibly horrible things she’d experienced. Why else do you think she was so deformed?”
“She told me why.”
“Okay, I’m curious. What did she actually tell you happened to her?” He asked.
“That she was beaten by that sadistic S.S. guard, Dorothea Bintz. She caught mom stealing food when the women inmates were unloading a supply barge and hit mom with a pry bar that got her right across the breast.”
“You realize Mom lied to you, right?” he asked.
I suddenly felt so sick to my stomach that for a few moments, I was certain I’d vomit. But I also felt not only shocked but also devastated that our mother had confided these things to my brother but not to me. But those feelings were morphing into anger. I was furious she had lied to me for so many years and felt compelled to share my new feelings with him.
He remained quiet for a few minutes, enveloped by a calmness with which I was unfamiliar. “Look, I have three children and you have two, right?” He began. “So let me ask you what would you have told your kids if you had endured such inhumanity, such unbelievable atrocities as did Mom? Do you think, for one second, you would have told them the truth?” He asked.
“Never! Not in a million years!” She said. “But then why tell me a horrible story about a beating?”
“Obviously, Mom thought it was a matter of degrees of inhumanity and horror. Maybe to her, a beating didn’t come across as a totally unexpected or inhuman consequence of being caught stealing when she was a prisoner. But being experimented on and mutilated, to her thinking, was in an entirely different category.”
I contemplated his explanation about her possible reasoning for a long moment. I was becoming aware of a different feeling emerging in me: a new understanding.
