How to sum up a person’s life in mere words? That’s a tough one, especially when the recently departed is your own mother. That becomes even more challenging and fraught with emotional pitfalls when the parent in question is a Holocaust survivor, with the scar baggage that tends to go with that sort of personal timeline.
My mother, Ruth Davis (née Schiffmann), was born in Vienna on December 3, 1931. She died in Jerusalem on December 30, 2023. Yes, that’s a fresh wound made even rawer by the “poor” timing. Naturally, no loved one’s death can be said to be chronologically opportune. But had my mother lived a little longer and had her health been nearer to scratch for another month or so, I would have pushed her in a wheelchair from her apartment at the LA Mayer sheltered housing facility on Hanassi Street – where she had lived for eight and a half years – to the President’s Residence just a couple of hundred meters up the road. There, I would have joined her last Wednesday at the official March of the Living event, which this year focused on the Kindertransport. Without the latter endeavor, it is fair to say I would not have been around today to turn out these lines.
The ceremony was originally set for November 9, marking the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a horrendous event my mother remembered clearly from her childhood. However, like so many other social and cultural projects around the country, the ceremony was deferred in the wake of October 7; hence, President Isaac Herzog did not get to meet my mother.
The anguish of a Holocaust survivor's life
Even as the offspring of a Kindertransport survivor, it took me a long time to appreciate the depth of anguish with which my mother lived throughout her life. The Kindertransport was a rescue operation, primarily mounted by British Jews and Quakers, which led to the survival of close to 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Germany and Austria, with smaller numbers managing to flee Czechoslovakia and Poland. I think I became cognizant of my mother’s odyssey in my teen years but did not have the requisite maturity or even intellectual wherewithal to appreciate the irrevocable seismic upheaval that shattered the start to her life and, subsequently, put a very premature end to her childhood.
How could I have possibly grasped the emotional earthquake she experienced as, one morning in March 1938, she sensed the palpable tension as silence reigned over Vienna and the city’s Second District where the Schiffmann family lived, in a first floor apartment at 11 Hollandstrasse, with a communal bathroom located down the hallway. My mother told me she was initially gripped by fear but then became excited as she heard military music followed by the thunderous staccato marching of thousands of Nazi soldiers. The six-year-old instinctively ran to the window to see what all the commotion was about but was quickly pulled back into the living room by her terrified parents. I learned of this not through a history book account authored by some academic; this was my own mother telling me about a childhood event she witnessed with her own inquisitive and bewildered eyes. She also remembered Kristallnacht, the smell of burning, and concern for the welfare of her father, David Meir, who was hiding between the wooden beams in the attic of the apartment building.
Just one month later, together with her two older sisters, Ilse and Trudie (Gertrude), she walked to the Westbahnhof train station, accompanied by her mother, Rosa, and four-year-old brother, Michael. She recalled stopping en route at the home of some relatives, where they were given chocolate cake – the first time she had tasted such a treat – as they negotiated the five-kilometer route to the station, from where the three girls would leave for safety in the UK.
They may have escaped the murderous clutches of the Nazis, but as a seven-year-old, my mother could not appreciate her mother’s unfathomable courage in sending her children away to a different country, knowing she would probably never see them again. “I couldn’t understand why my mother was standing apart from me, on a different platform, and she didn’t come to hug me,” my mother told me some years ago. That sense of rejection was shared by many kinder for the remainder of their lives.
And while the children may have been physically saved, many had to cope with emotional torment in their new adoptive country. Some were housed in hostels and other institutions, while many were taken in by foster families. Some went to caring people, others were not so lucky and were exploited as little better than domestic help.
Sadly, my mother was one of the less fortunate ones and was cruelly mistreated by the family in Sunderland, in the northeast of England, who gave her a roof over her head. A couple of weeks ago another kind, Frida Chalk, a longtime resident of Kibbutz Lavi who was in the same class as my mother, told me she remembered her suddenly leaving for London at the age of 15. It was her second escape from emotionally trying circumstances.
My mother was so desperate to get away from her uncaring, actually abusive foster family, that she just stuffed a few basic belongings in a suitcase, leaving behind the letters her mother had sent her from war-torn Europe. They were written from Belgium, which my grandparents had managed to reach, separately. Rosa got out of Austria with Michael a few months after her husband – and where they lived under Nazi occupation for two years. They even had another child, Charlotte, whom my mother never met. My grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz in August 1942, after fleeing from Belgium. My grandmother, Michael, and Charlotte were murdered in that concentration camp in October of that year.
Eighty years on, in 2022, my mother, my siblings – Rachael, David, Rael, and Michael – and I paid for a Stein der Erinnerung (memory stone) to be installed in the sidewalk on Hollandstrasse, in front of the site where the Schiffmanns’ apartment building once stood. For some reason, the Austrian authorities’ Holocaust-related budget does not stretch to cover memorials to individuals murdered by the Nazis.
My mother also paid for the renewal of the headstone of her paternal great-grandmother Chaya Schiffmann, who died in 1922 and is buried in Vienna. Chaya was a cousin of world-renowned Vienna-born philosopher Martin Buber, who came to Palestine in 1938 and worked as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My mother used to joke about our yichus (distinguished ancestry).
MY PARENTS met in London in 1950 and were married in February 1951. Five years later, with my parents living in Leeds, I arrived – No. 3 out of an eventual five kids. The family moved to Manchester in 1963. Fast-forward a decade and a half, my parents made aliyah together with my 11-year-old youngest sibling Michael – named after our mother’s youngest brother – shortly after I moved here myself.
Aliyah, as is generally the case, brought with it a multitude of joys and challenges, and after over a quarter of a century of caring for the family, my mother took her first steps in the job market. Amazingly, she negotiated the transition from homemaker to office employee with seamless success, working for WIZO and the Israel Museum before taking up a position as English secretary for then-Knesset speaker Menachem Savidor. She also provided English-language services for several of Savidor’s successors – Shlomo Hillel, Dov Shilansky, and Shevach Weiss – before setting up her own English department.
That was back in the day when not many of our great leaders were particularly fluent in the nuances, let alone the grammar and syntax, of English. My mother would sometimes regale me with some flagrant linguistic faux pas or other she managed to head off at the pass before the writer made a fool of himself, and the country, by sending out a letter in Hebrish.
My mother was a survivor and a fighter. She also knew how to enjoy life. She always had fun on her biannual stays at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv – she used her Austrian pension to fund that particular luxury – and enjoyed basking in the sun on the beach across the road from the hotel. She claimed she had never had an appetite, and told me that Rosa once locked her in a bedroom until she agreed to eat her dinner. My mum was let out, but that didn’t mean she gave way on the vittles front. Still, whenever we went out to a café or restaurant, she tucked into her dish with gusto. Falafel was a particular gastronomic favorite.
Despite growing up parentless and without a close support group, or possibly because of that, my mother seemed to have a knack for forming close relationships that, at least in part, compensated for the lack of warmth extended to her in her childhood. In Leeds, she struck up a fast friendship with a concentration camp survivor named Hanni Shipper. And soon after the end of World War II, when my mother was under the weather, she was sent on a recuperative foray to the village of Perranporth in Cornwall to stay with a woman named Joan Tregonning. Joan was single and childless, and the friendship blossomed over the years. Joan took on something of a surrogate mother role, and over the next decade and a half my mother spent summers in Perranporth, later with my father, and then with us kids as the family grew.
My mother became a proud Jerusalemite and lived in the capital for over 45 years. On more than one occasion, she said she wished her father had lived to see her make aliyah and make her home in Jerusalem. David Meir, who was an Ostjude born in Bolszowce in Poland, now called Bilshivtsi and located in Ukraine, was an ardent Zionist. He made two attempts at settling in Palestine, the first time in 1920. However, on each occasion his stay here was cut short by serious ailments. On hearing of his son’s plan to come here, his hassidic father, who was of the opinion that Jews should await the arrival of the Messiah before setting up home in the Promised Land, warned him that he would disown him should he try to make good on his Zionist aspirations.
Indeed, when my grandfather returned, sick, to Vienna, his father summarily dismissed him and proclaimed he was no longer his son. Many years later, my maternal grandfather’s Polish-born cousin Israel Neeman, who lived in Tel Aviv and died at the age of 96, told me David Meir returned fire and told his irate father that it was fine by him and summarily changed his surname from Hollenberg to his mother’s maiden name of Schiffmann.
In that respect, my mother was definitely a chip off the old block. While she tended to cede to authority, she also knew how to stand her ground. When the manager of the sheltered housing home badgered her about getting herself a caregiver, my mother retorted that she’d seen how other tenants’ physical and mental health had rapidly deteriorated after they relinquished control of their own lives. Indeed, she largely managed on her own – with varying degrees of support from me, my wife, my siblings, and various grandchildren and great-grandchildren dotted around the world, who called her, religiously, every week and made frequent visits here – until three months before her death. She had been looking forward to her date with President Herzog, but it wasn’t to be.
Eighty-five years after the trauma of being “rejected” by her mother at the Westbahnhof station, my mother died, leaving close to 50 progeny and many admirers who called me after her death to extol her virtues and entertain me with some fun or enlightening anecdote.
A few years back, my mother – only half-jokingly – suggested we have her headstone engraved with the inscription “She tried her best.” She certainly did.