How to Be Human

by Ruby Wax

  For lunch, we went to one of those dark-wood-walled Alpine Hofmeister beerkellers; decor – very early Nazi. There were paintings on the walls of people (I kid you not) having oral sex with smiling angels looking down from above. You look at these while you’re eating schnitzel.

  You know how, when you get to certain places, nothing seems to make sense? This city is like that. Later, we walked by a toy shop and there was a window full of children’s teddy bears, but arranged in orgy positions.

  At the Hofmeister Keller I was introduced to Eleanor, a historian, who walked me around the corner and told me that this was where my father had been in prison. He had told me that, as a young man, he’d been in jail but led everyone in aerobics to keep them fit. Eleanor informed me that he was put in jail for being a Jew and that he hadn’t taught aerobics; the inmates were being tortured. The Nazis were making them all jump like rabbits; the older ones would fall over and the guards would beat and humiliate them. She said that, maybe because my father was young, he’d been able to keep up with the jumping. Then she handed me a postcard my mother had written to my father while he was in prison. My mother told him to be careful and brave because he hadn’t done anything wrong and that she cried each day, thinking about where he was. She wrote that as soon as he came out she would have ‘nice food’ for him. That almost killed me. I didn’t know she ever loved him, and the expression ‘nice food’ was so pure and innocent. There were other postcards from her that seemed to be about trivia – but they were in fact plans for him to escape, written in code.

  Eleanor showed me the original letter from the Gestapo informing my father that he would now be under their ‘protection’ – by ‘protection’, they meant they were going to send him to Dachau unless he left Vienna after prison. At this point, they just wanted the Jews out. The exterminations happened later. But, almost overnight, the Austrians turned into savages; people who were friends and neighbours started to beat up Jews in the streets and rob their homes. The police turned a blind eye, wearing their swastika armbands and allowing the massacre to rip. The German SS wrote to the Austrian citizens saying that they shouldn’t be so hard on the Jews, to hold back on the beatings, telling them that, if the Jews were going to be punished, it would be done according to German law. The world would soon find out what German law meant.

  Day 3: 30 June

  I was taken to the flat where my father and his mother lived in the thirties. It had impressively large rooms, high ceilings and overlooked the canal. Clearly, the job of ‘intestine merchant’ was a money-spinner. Maybe I forgot to mention it, but that was once my father’s job description and he took that talent with him to the US. (I always tried to glam it up, saying he was a fashion designer for hot dogs.) Anyway, there was definitely money in guts. In 1938, the Nazis knocked on the door and took him off to jail. When I was in the house, I looked out of the back window to see if he could have made an escape, but it was too high up. The historian I met there told me how my father had escaped to America.

  When he got out of jail, after the Gestapo kindly told him, for his ‘protection’, to leave Vienna immediately or go directly to Dachau, my father bought a plane ticket to Belgium. In 1938, the ticket cost the equivalent of £2,000 today. So where did he get all that money at a time when it was rare for even the rich to fly? No one knows. When he arrived in Belgium, they wouldn’t let him in until he could prove he had money in a Belgian bank to show that he could support himself. He did. How he managed to get money into a foreign bank is also a mystery. And the biggest jaw-dropper of all was that, with only two weeks to go before the Nazis took over Belgium and started rounding up the Jews, my father stowed away on a ship going to New York. This, the historian said, was a one-in-a-million shot. How did he get on the ship, and how did he get off, when it was impossible to get into America without proper papers and at a time when America was no longer allowing entry to Jews?

  It seems my father sold guts and had guts. I’m very proud, because it seems the rest of the family had the same chutzpah. His brother Martin and their mother got to Cuba and then America. His other brother, Karl, went to Martinique and then to the US. His sister went to London and then to the US. His father deserted the family when he was young, so no one knows what happened to him.

  Before my father left for Belgium, he quickly married my mother, who was twenty-four at the time. I have the photo. They looked like a couple straight out of a film. Another specialist took me to the synagogue where they married. The synagogue was no longer there, it was just an empty space between buildings, like a missing tooth. I learned something else I wasn’t aware of; my mother was in Austria for Kristallnacht. It’s usually translated as ‘The Night of Breaking Glass’, a night when the Nazis went wild, burning down thousands of Jewish homes and most of the synagogues. Luckily for her, shortly afterwards she received a letter from her distant relatives the Hambourgers and, a month after Kristallnacht, she set sail to Chicago. I’m pretty sure now what would have helped throw her over the edge was that, at such a young age, she was prematurely evacuated from this city of wall-to-wall splendour: museums, opera houses, theatres, cafés so ornately decorated it seems every building was sculpted out of whipped cream. She was blonde and blue-eyed, a serious babe with a highly educated brain; most probably an ‘it’ girl in Vienna.

  If my mother had just mentioned what had happened to her and how she felt, I would have understood and forgiven her for her hysterical fits of rage. Maybe she was trying to protect me. Maybe she was too traumatized. Or maybe she simply didn’t think I had the capacity for compassion.

  Day 4: 1 July

  In the morning, we stood outside the door where my mother’s aunt, Gabriele (her nickname was Ella), and her husband, Salomon, had lived. (I had no idea I had a great-aunt.) I was met by a historian called Doron, an expert on the Jewish community in Vienna in the thirties and forties. A sign on the door read ‘Dentist’. Doron told me that Ella and her husband had also been dentists and showed me letters addressing my mother as ‘Golden Bertal’ and sending a thousand kisses, thanking her for her affidavit from America (my mother had already escaped). Doron also told me that when a friend or a neighbour would come to a house and say they were going on a ‘long trip’, everyone knew what it meant. They meant they were going to commit suicide. No one tried to stop them. If they did commit suicide, the family who were left were punished.

  Ella’s last letter is dated 8 October and said that the situation is now life or death. Each day, a thousand people were rounded up from the neighbourhood and taken off in trucks and trains. It seems that, although my mother sent an affidavit sponsoring my great-aunt and -uncle, the laws were constantly changing and, by 23 October, Austria had been annexed and no one could leave. I asked Doron what he thought had happened.

  My great-aunt Ella and great-uncle Salomon were in their sixties when they were deported. Doron wouldn’t tell me what happened to Salomon and Ella but said I’d find out the next day; it was like a macabre cliff-hanger. After we filmed the scene, I wanted to switch my mind to something else, so I went online shopping and didn’t get offline until 4 a.m. I didn’t stop until I had purchased almost every shoe in a size thirty-eight from around the globe, even ones I didn’t want.

  Day 5: 2 July

  I was put on a train to somewhere; as usual, they wouldn’t tell me where. I kept losing my temper because the Wi-Fi didn’t work. In the back of my mind, I was disgusted at myself, imagining people on a similar train years ago, travelling to unimaginable horror, beating on the doors to get off. We got off in Prague. I was delirious with joy, as I had always wanted to go there. The streets were lined with colossal homes; three hundred years ago, each neighbour trying to out-turret, out-mosaic, out-Greek-statue the next. The multitude of churches also competed for how much bling could be crammed into a square inch. I couldn’t stop thinking that, if Jesus died for our sins, he shouldn’t have bothered. We were and still are sinners. And one of the proofs of how sinful we are is our habit
of overdosing churches with more wealth than could feed the world thrice over. I couldn’t stop thinking about that speech Hamlet does in the play about him. (I love this speech).

  What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty …! In form and moving how express and admirable! … And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.

  Day 6: 3 July

  The following day, the smile I had from seeing Prague was wiped right off my face when I arrived in the town of Theresienstadt, an hour away. I had told the director I wasn’t going to any camps, if camps turned out to be involved in my story. I was told this wasn’t a camp, it was a ghetto. When we got off at the train station a chill went down my spine when I realized that my great-aunt and great-uncle would also have disembarked here; these were the tracks that had brought them here. I was told they were marched two kilometres through the snow to the ghetto, with hardly any clothes on, and beaten as they walked. The ghetto now looks like a quaint village: multi-coloured houses and tree-lined, cobblestoned streets; a soundtrack of chirping birds.

  At the start, the Nazis allowed the Jews to put on their own entertainments in the ghetto – operas, plays, even a band that played ‘Ghetto swing’. The elderly were treated the worst because they were of no use so they were literally sardined into the attics with no windows or ventilation. And here’s what will give me nightmares for ever – I was told there were no toilets and diarrhoea was rampant. My relatives died early, which was lucky; Salomon after a week, Ella probably earlier.

  Day 7: 4 July

  A day travelling from Prague to Vienna and, again on the train, I couldn’t stop thinking about the tracks that had carried the Jewish cattle cars.

  Day 8: 5 July

  A day off filming. I visited my mother’s house, now a small food shop run by a Muslim. Oh, the irony. The new scapegoats.

  Day 9: 6 July

  Breakfast consisted of something fishy (I think it was fish, could have been beef cheeks) floating in kerosene, with an accompanying bowl of icing sugar. After this scrumptious meal, I was taken to a graveyard and given a map to find the graves of my grandfather and great-grandfather, Richard and Salomon. I don’t know why, but when I found where they were buried, some basic instinct made me start stroking the grave. It was a pitiful gesture to somehow get close to these people I hadn’t known existed. When the cemetery first opened, it was too far out of town and no one wanted their loved ones buried there. What did they do? They dug up the graves of Beethoven, Strauss and other celebrities of the day from their hallowed ground in the centre of Vienna and reburied them in this out-of-town graveyard. It then became ‘the’ place to be buried – the hottest ticket in town.

  I met Chaim, who leads tours through the graveyard. He walked me to an unmarked plot and told me it was where Ella’s sister, my other great-aunt, Olga, was buried. There was no tombstone to identify her. He explained that this was how they buried the penniless in those days. The social services brought them here, but the family had to buy the stone. It broke my heart to stand beside this unmarked rectangle of dirt. A question in the back of my mind was why didn’t her family get her a stone?

  In the afternoon, I met a historian, Sabine, who asked me to guess what had happened to Olga. I asked in a desperate voice if she had been an actress, which is what I was hoping. For some reason, I was convinced that someone in my family had been and I had high hopes that it was Olga (she looked a little like me in the photo). Sabine handed me a photocopy of a clipping from a Vienna newspaper and pointed to an article that said Olga was suffering from either ‘idiocy’, or madness, and had to be taken to an insane asylum. That was not the news I expected. I asked, in a tiny voice, ‘How long for?’ ‘Thirty years.’

  She brought out the original leather registration book, about three inches thick, which contained fastidious hand-written lists of inmates, the number of visitors and dates of death. One thing you can say about the Germans and Austrians, they know how to keep meticulous records. Olga died in 1938, of tuberculosis. My mother was nineteen when Olga died, so she must have been a witness to Olga’s ‘idiocy’, or madness. Back then, they didn’t have specific names for mental illnesses so they labelled chronic cases as ‘agitated’. She must have been highly ‘agitated’, if her stay lasted thirty years. I asked if she had been an actress before the ‘agitation’, thinking maybe the two didn’t cancel each other out. ‘No,’ I was told, ‘she was a seamstress.’ I still hoped she could have part-timed as an actress when she wasn’t seaming.

  From there, they took me to the ‘insane asylum’, Steinhof, where Olga had resided. We drove down a long drive surrounded by endless bucolic lawns, dotted with fountains and enormous leafy trees. There were about sixty palatial buildings, ‘agitated’ patients shuffling between them. Clearly, it was still open for business. The director of the show thought the asylum would upset me, but I felt like I was home. I’ve always loved institutions because I always feel safe with my people, and now I was surprised to discover they weren’t just my people, they were my family.

  The buildings were lined up in rows. The bottom row was for the ‘quiet’ inmates, the next for the ‘semi-agitated’ and the last, at the top of the hill, was for the ‘agitated’. This was where Olga must have lived. During her stay, there were up to five thousand patients living there.

  Sabine explained that the therapies offered in the days of not knowing anything and being totally ignorant were things like the lukewarm-water therapy. This is where the patient is left in a bath for days on end. (Obviously, it never worked, but everyone was very clean.) Another was sleep therapy. Simple and yet not safe. The patient was tranquilized, put to sleep, probably to ‘sleep off’ the mental illness.

  When the Nazis arrived in Austria with their Final Solution, they came to this asylum to experiment on the inmates. They considered the mad ‘lower than dogs’, so they didn’t hold back. They performed experimental surgery on the kids and tried new and effective ways of using gas on the adults. By this point, Sabine didn’t want to continue. Luckily, Olga died before all that happened.

  Day 10: 7 July

  We went to the Czech Republic, to a city called Brno. I’m going to give it nil points for charm. I went to a building that held the archives for the area. (I’m now so used to archives, I can start doing reviews, comparing the decor of the filing cabinets and their dust.) The archivist slid a very fat, weather-beaten journal under my nose, opened the book and pointed to the name Berta Goldmann, my great-great-aunt. My mother’s name is Berta so she must have been named after her. I asked, again in my desperate, sad voice, ‘Was she an actress?’ I was told to read out the name on the book cover (she gave me a translation). It read, ‘Brno Insane Asylum 1883–1902’. I thought, Is this kismet that I end up working in mental health, fighting the stigma of insanity, and now it appears my family tree is rife with it?

  It’s strange that I was so fascinated by mental illness, starting around age thirteen, when I had no idea that either my mother or I were ill. I still have a library book from Evanston High School on a shelf in London that should have been returned in the sixties called This is Mental Illness. I must owe over a million dollars in late fees. How did I know that someday I’d have to face not only my demons but most of my family’s?

  The archivist then produced another Viennese newspaper clipping stating that Berta Goldmann ‘sold all the furniture in her flat and left a note saying she was going to commit suicide’. They must have found her and taken her to the nearest asylum. It appears she was in for less time than her daughter, only seven months, and then she too died of tuberculosis.

  So, off we went to visit the Brno asylum, down a long drive leading to a magnificent neoclassical building, painted a soft yellow, surrounded by undulating emerald lawns and burbling fountains. It’s also, like Olga’s residence, a working mental institution, now holding about one thousand patients, but I was told by my director that we couldn’t film any of them so I took off t
o the cafeteria to mingle.

  Language is not a barrier when bonding with my fellow mentally ill people. A girl, Eva, with bipolar, and I became inseparable. She spoke enough English for me to understand that she was on a manic high; that’s why she was walking with ski poles: she was moving so fast she couldn’t keep up with herself. Everything is free here and the nursing staff seemed kind and attentive. How bizarre that, compared to the UK, where there are hardly any beds for mentally ill people who need help, here, they have thousands. The buildings are impressive. In the early 1900s, the Austrian government wanted to show the world how well they could care for their ‘insane’. That was before most of the population of Austria and Germany became more insane than anyone who ever walked these corridors.

  I actually felt relieved to know that Berta had ended up here after her suicide note was found. I don’t know why, but I felt proud of Berta and Olga. Olga had no tombstone, and no one knew where Berta was buried. I lay on the lawn and decided I would buy a tombstone for Olga and Berta and engrave the words, ‘They were great women. I’m very proud of them.’ I thought they were probably wonderful women and that, in the right circumstances, they could have been actresses. I just lay face down on the grass. I didn’t want to leave.

  Day 11: 8 July

  I woke feeling calmer than ever. My body and mind felt easy; not the usual tearing pressure to get up and accomplish something – anything – urgently. I could have saved myself a lot of agony by skipping trips to the therapist and going straight to genealogy.