StoryWorth Mother’s Day Stories: A Mother’s Strength, Determination and Love
By Renee Herskowitz, shared with permission
One of the clearest and earliest memories of my childhood involve my mother singing songs or reading poetry to me at bedtime. There is nothing unusual about this, except that the songs she sang and the poetry she recited were not nursery rhymes or children’s songs, but arias from operas and poetry by Schiller, Goethe and Heinrich Heine. She loved opera and poetry with a passion. It was she who was frequently called upon to recite poetry at school assemblies, and for visiting dignitaries. She was fortunate to pass her childhood in Vienna at a time when it was still possible for a little Jewish girl to be asked to recite German poetry in public.
Her love of opera was all-consuming. Throughout her teens and early twenties she would go to the opera four or five times a week, standing room only, since she couldn’t afford to pay the price of admission. After a while the ushers recognized her, and led her to an empty seat. I owe my own love of literature and music to these early influences, and I am grateful to her for these gifts.
Ima’s outstanding traits were her strength, determination, and optimism. When my sister fell seriously ill at the age of eighteen months, she took her from doctor to doctor only to be told that nothing could be done. She discovered that only one doctor in Vienna might be able to help, but he was an unapproachable “Doctor’s doctor” who would not take on private patients, but only acted as a consultant. My mother, with her baby in her arms, stormed into his office, bypassing the secretary and nurse. When the great doctor asked her what right she had to barge into his office, she replied: “the right of a mother to save her child’s life.” This sounds melodramatic, but those were her exact words, and the great Professor Knopfelmacher took her on as a patient, and cured my sister. One of the saddest days of Ima’s life was the day she heard that Professor Knopfelmacher, only a few days after Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, committed suicide in his inner office while S.S. men waited outside to arrest him.
It was right after the Anschluss of March 1938 that my mother showed her true mettle and her amazing foresight. While many Viennese Jews succumbed to total despair, often leading to suicide, my parents acted decisively. My father wrote a letter to his brother in Palestine, asking him to send us affidavits so that we could leave Austria. My mother realized that if we were going to survive economically in Palestine, she’d better learn a useful trade, and learn it fast. Her former life as a well-to-do Hausfrau with servants and months in the country was over, and there was no time for self-pity or a backward glance. So she immediately enrolled in a sewing and pattern-making course, and in a short while became an accomplished dressmaker. When it became too dangerous for my father to deal with his customers in the outlying provinces, my mother dyed her hair blond to appear more aryan, and went in his stead.
On one occasion she actually saved my father’s life. My parents knew that the Gestapo might come to arrest my father, so my mother suggested that before my father came up to our apartment, he should look at the bedroom windowsill. If he saw a flower pot on the sill it meant that the Nazis were upstairs waiting for him, and he should stay away. One day a group of S.S. men came to the apartment to arrest him. My mother asked if it was alright for her to continue dusting, and when they told her gruffly to go on with her work, she nonchalantly dusted the window sill and placed the flower pot on the sill. My father saw the flower pot and stayed away until the danger passed.
Her clear thinking and ability not to panic also saved us on the way to Palestine. We went from Vienna to Trieste by train, where we were supposed to get on a boat going to Haifa. At the Trieste train station, however, we heard over the loudspeaker that Mussolini was in town, and he had decreed that no Jew was allowed to be on the street — anyone caught would face immediate arrest. While pandemonium broke out at that news, my mother calmly telephoned the shipping line and discovered that the ship would stop in Venice before heading out to sea, so we took the train to Venice and boarded the ship there. In Venice, while walking to the ship we were stoned by young Italians, who assumed that anybody leaving Italy must be a Jew fleeing from the Nazis, so my father covered me and my younger sister with his heavy coat as we ran to the ship.
The most important gift my mother gave to my sister and me was a complete sense of security — a belief that she was always there to protect us and keep us from harm. We, after all, were wrenched from our secure and and peaceful childhood existence at a very tender age, torn away from our grandparents, aunts uncles and friends, and were transported to a foreign country where we did not know the language, and where we were greeted every Friday evening by a hail of bullets from our neighbors, who believed that Jews would not fight back on the Sabbath. All this should have made us terribly insecure and fearful, but we escaped these fears because of my mother, who was like a rock. While lying on the floor to escape the bullets, and later during World War II when the Germans were poised only miles from Palestine in Egypt to the south, and in Syria to the north — we knew that Ima was there to protect us.
Yet she managed to instill this sense of security in us without smothering us with overprotectiveness. She knew the importance of self-reliance, and she was able to let go, when necessary. When at the age of fourteen I wanted to go to high school but the nearest school from Nahariya was in Haifa, fifty miles away, she found a family on the Carmel with whom I boarded six days each week, coming home only on Friday evenings for the Sabbath. This was during the period of terrorist activities by the Irgun against the British, and on several occasions the bus was detained because of curfews imposed by the British, so my parents had no way of knowing whether I was safe or not. Despite these fears, my mother allowed me to continue my education in Haifa, although these frequent terrorist incidents, the endless skirmishes with the British and the Arabs, and Ima’s strong desire to be reunited with her father and sisters, convinced my parents to move the family to New York.
In New York, she immediately started to work in her sister’s factory of children’s pinafores, and after a short while when her sister became ill, she found herself in charge of a large factory employing close to one hundred people. Once again, she learned a new profession from scratch — from the designing, cutting, sewing, to the selling of the garment. Some of the largest chain stores in America, including Murphy, J.C. Penney and Sears were her customers, and long after her retirement she would get calls from buyers begging her to produce again, even on a small scale, her beautiful “Little Highness” dresses.
- Renee Herskowitz
