Life's a Scream

by Ingrid Pitt

  At the very end, Steffanie was with her and she called me. I was sitting on Tonio’s lap, crying. I ran to my mother’s room and Steffanie and I held her in our arms as she died. She seemed to be very peaceful and was not in any pain.

  Matka was gone. She was the strongest person I’ve ever met. She taught me so much: particularly about love being the only thing worth living for. She always supported me and understood completely that I gave my life and future to my child and to Tonio. She never cared about my career or our lack of money and material goods. She just wanted us to love one another and to see the three of us happy. And at the end of her life she made me promise that Tonio and I would be together always.

  Things got really hard after Mama died. Not only did we suffer the grief of bereavement, we were virtually on the breadline. I was delighted when work came along as it not only provided much needed funds but distracted me from our problems.

  Hanna’s War, Menahem Golan’s film about Hanna Szenesch, a Hungarian freedom fighter who was arrested on her first assignment, was a gruelling story but I was glad to be part of it. Peter Weir was going to direct it but in the end he couldn’t stand Menahem’s insistence on changes to the script and he told him to direct it himself.

  It was an interesting experience going to Hungary. Luckily I had no scenes to do which would give me nightmares. The problems with the production were incredible. I don’t know whether it was because of the language difficulty or plain inefficiency. Two thousand extras were waiting at the railway station to be loaded on Eichmann’s train for deportation. They waited and waited. The train arrived at nine in the morning instead of two o’clock at night. The next day the extras waited again. This time the train was spot on time but didn’t stop. It went on and on like this. I had to admire Otto Plaschkes, the line producer, for keeping his cool. Menahem totally lost his. He kept yelling at me. I too lost my cool: ‘What are you, a bloody Nazi? Only Nazis ever shouted at me like that.’

  He was fantastic after that – he never shouted again.

  Whenever I wasn’t working on a film or on stage, I was bashing out treatments and synopses by the trunk-loads – and that’s where most of them stayed. At one time Tone and I had fifty-four projects on the go at the same time. One was the script based on my mother’s life and experiences that I had written fifteen years earlier at the Hilton when I did Eagles. Johnny Hough loved the story but said that to get it financed he needed a book. We set up a meeting with Methuen, a deal was struck, and I started writing.

  When Katarina was published, it too sold out its first print run. I worked day after day with John Hough, sending books to producers and directors, and received some wonderful replies, especially from Alan Parker. It looked good for a while but then he decided to do The Commitments. Then Sophie’s Choice came out and that was the end for Katarina for the time being.

  Although jobs came in for me we still suffered dire financial problems. We seemed to be paying for everything – recces, budgets, costume design, travelling expenses – and the only money dribbling in was from half a dozen books we had written. When we found another potential investor we did a business plan, budgets, had several meetings with lawyers and accountants, and at last it looked as if things were going our way. With the mortgage company breathing down our necks because we had missed payments, arrangements were made to pick up the first cheque.

  I was due at our investor’s apartment at three o’clock. I turned up on time and was asked by his secretary to wait. When she returned, she told me that her boss couldn’t see me.

  ‘But this has all been arranged,’ I insisted.

  The woman looked unhappy. Reluctantly she took out a letter and gave it to me. It said that our potential investor had, after due consideration, decided not to go ahead with our deal. After all the meetings we had had to thrash out an equitable arrangement I could not believe he would renege at this late date. I demanded to see him. His secretary confessed that it was impossible: he was drunk and insensible. I sat down and fought against the feeling that I should lie on the floor and scream and cry.

  Yet even as I issued the threats to sue our ‘investor’ I knew it was pointless. I had no idea what I would tell the mortgage company. I thanked the secretary, who called a taxi to take me home. All the way I thought how incredibly happy we had been, Tone, Steffanie, Matka and me: a family. Our problems were just part of life. You know you’re alive when you have challenges to contend with.

  Tonio opened the front door. He knew instantly what had happened. He took me in his arms and said it didn’t matter.

  It was time for a reassessment. We had to do something positive. I rang the lawyer acting for the mortgage company and told him they could come and take my house. This was Tuesday and I set Friday as the date when we would leave.

  We started packing at once. Now it was decided that we would go, I wanted to get it over with. Our departure turned into a three-day party. All my friends came, loaded down with cartons, bubble-wrap and champagne to help me sort out and pack our belongings. One of them, Dinah Earle, offered her barn to house my accumulated junk and others offered lodgings. Nasrine Grayson, my beautiful Iranian friend, a civil engineer by profession, roamed the house making sure we left nothing of value behind. Susie Weaver, an old motor-racing friend, organised boxes and made meticulous lists of what was in them. Pat Lasky miraculously cooked with next to nothing, conjuring up meals, feeding more than a dozen, and we all sat at the long kitchen table Tonio had made out of the back door in our big farmhouse kitchen, munching and laughing and remembering glorious dinner parties we’d had.

  As I looked into the garden for the last time, at the trees I had planted with my mother, I suddenly remembered the urn with her ashes buried under the big willow at the end of the plot. Now we were going, I couldn’t leave her behind. I dug up the little box and took her ashes to scatter on the River Thames. She loved that river and she would have liked being one with it.

  We lived at Dinah’s farmhouse in West Sussex for a month and then another friend, John Woods, invited us to stay with him in Hurley, on the Thames. All the time Tone and I worked hard writing.

  One night we were invited to dinner at Nasrine Grayson’s in Sheen. We passed the most delightful little cottage in her road which had a ‘For Rent’ sign out front. It had everything: wisteria growing up the front, a tiny Romeo and Juliet balcony, big bay window, conservatory and a little garden. Again Tom Pendry, my MP friend, came into bat and furnished a guarantee so that we could move in at once. I worked like a berserker to make the place perfect. I loved it to death. It was the prettiest home I’d ever had.

  One evening in the bath in our new cottage, I felt a round hard lump in my breast. I ran to Tonio screaming, shedding water everywhere, and he felt it too. We rushed to the doctor the next morning. The GP was on holiday and her stand-in suggested I should wait for two weeks until she got back. I thought he was mad. We tore off to the hospital but they wouldn’t look at me without a referral from my GP so we had to wait two weeks for her to return and send us to Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton. I saw five doctors who looked like brand-new housemen but not one surgeon. All of them said I shouldn’t worry, it was just a pimple. I tried to convince myself that they must be right.

  The ‘pimple’ did not disappear and for three months I continued to go back until I finally saw the man who, I reckon, saved my life, Doctor Stephen Andrews. After examining my ‘pimple’ he insisted I see the surgeon at once. I told him I’d been trying for months to see a surgeon but no one would let me. Doctor Andrews rushed out and came back in no time with a surgeon, who examined my breast and whipped me into theatre. They did a biopsy at once, which showed that the ‘pimple’ was malignant.

  When I heard the verdict I threw myself screaming and sobbing into Tonio’s arms. He held me, quietly caressed my hair, my head, my face, just as my father had always done.

  Hot fury rose through my whole being and engulfed my mind. I started swearing like the worst fishwi
fe on earth, shouting at Tonio, screaming that the Nazis didn’t get me and a bunch of fucking cancer cells wouldn’t either. I hadn’t died in Stutthof and I wasn’t going to die now. I would fight – like I’d seen my Matka fight. In my mind the cancer was a living thing, like the Nazis, and I would face it as I had faced my childhood enemy and survive. I was not going to bloody die. I went into hospital and they cut out the cancer: two and half centimetres of it.

  I think it was worse for me to have my breast under the knife than my womb. After all – you can’t see the womb. I’m mad about breasts, especially mine. Then I thought of the day we were to breathe the gas at Stutthof. Fear would never be like that again . . .

  After the operation I was referred to Charing Cross Hospital and was assigned to Professor Coombs, the resident oncologist, who explained that becoming a gym junkie and doing my regular weights exercises every day since my first cancer operation had helped me survive the months of misdiagnosis. Hard exercise apparently lowers the oestrogen level in the body which cancer cells feed on. Nevertheless, if it hadn’t been for Doctor Andrews’s rapid and decisive action it would have been too late to operate and the cancer would have spread into the lymph nodes and the bone. Doctor Andrews is now a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, specialising in cancers. I don’t know how I can ever thank him for what he did for me.

  Each day I had to undergo radiotherapy. My therapist was an angel. Joana Lukawska, from Poland, in the end took away my fear of the massive radium machine. I was terrified of it. Every time I was put into it, I would shake all over and couldn’t control it. I’d have a massive attack and be unable to breathe. Joana kept telling me to love the machine because it would make me well. She would say that she was watching me all the time, nothing would go wrong, she would be right there. Without her, and her incredible patience, I might not have been able to complete my course of daily sessions for eight weeks. She told me how few people actually do. That is stupid but then they don’t all have Joana to look after them. She is now in her final year of qualifying as a doctor.

  I had to go back into Charing Cross Hospital for corrective surgery. By the third time I was thoroughly sick of it. To keep my mind off the knife, I concentrated on a convention being held in Nottingham which I intended to go to no matter what. The advertising had been big on my being there. The medical staff told me I would be out in plenty of time but a week before the event I was still in hospital. Tonio wanted to cancel but I told him I would be out by the weekend. On Tuesday I informed him I would definitely be home on Wednesday. On Wednesday I promised I would be ready on Thursday. On Thursday I swore that the doctor said I could go but I had to wait for something or other. We planned that Tone would pick me up on the Friday and we would leave immediately for Nottingham. Unfortunately the doctor still didn’t want to release me as I had a catheter discharging into a bottle.

  When Tonio arrived I grabbed the overnight bag I had packed and hustled him out of the hospital before a nurse might apprise him of the situation. I wasn’t being butch, I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t condemned to be sick for the rest of my life. I tied the bottle to a belt I had put round my waist and it dangled against my shins, hidden under a kaftan I had kept at the back of my wardrobe since my trip to Cairo.

  Half-way up the Ml I began to worry if my bolshie act wasn’t going to turn out badly. The bottle wasn’t getting any fuller. I checked the needle but it seemed all right. As soon as we booked into our hotel I had to tell Tone that I had a problem. He looked as if he had been whacked with a mallet.

  At the local hospital I explained my predicament. They checked the catheter and changed the almost full plastic bottle for an empty, heavy glass one, but it remained dry. We were scheduled to dine that evening with our hosts, David and Pat Cutts. I didn’t want to think about my catheter so ignored Tonio’s pleas to spend a quiet night in our room. It was less easy to ignore the glass bottle. Every time I moved it clinked against the chair or the table. I managed to get through the meal with a lot of hilarity to cover up my clanking bottle and had a great night worrying whether or not my catheter was sucking.

  The next morning the bottle was still empty and I was beginning to feel scared about what I had done. Nevertheless I had a great day, hugging and embracing friends and fans, my bottle banging into their shins. What must they have thought I was hitting them with? We left about six o’clock. When I confessed to Tonio that I was worried about the catheter he wanted to take me straight to Nottingham hospital but I chose to return to Charing Cross to confess my sins.

  It was nearly midnight when we got there. Typically nobody wanted to see me, but I tracked down a Sister to her lair and persuaded her to look at my catheter. I didn’t have a problem. The reason my bottle had remained dry was that the incision had stopped leaking. I was allowed home to my own bed.

  While all this running to the hospital was going on, the owner of my dream cottage decided to return from South Africa and to sell it. Moving again was the last thing I needed in the middle of this medical trauma but it worked out well because I found, through a local property paper, an apartment overlooking Richmond Park. When I came out of hospital that’s were I recuperated. From every window there is a wonderful view of all the trees. It’s high up and airy with picture windows and gardens all around. I lay in my sumptuous bed, looked out at the trees and the sky, watching the herons race past my window like the old Spitfires, and I thought how lucky I was. I love it here. Tonio likes it wherever I am; as long as we are together he doesn’t mind where he is. I had to go back into hospital for more operations but I was no longer frightened. I saw it as part of getting well. I would pump myself up every day into a positive frame of mind. I’m in the clear now. I love every day. But then I always have done. The sun or the rain, cold or stifling heat. I love the moon and the stars, the dark nights with the wind blowing around the house, telling tales of goblins and gnomes and demons and elves rushing through the park – just like that Polish forest, lifetimes ago.

  Through the good times and the bad times in my life I have learned that however much hatred and however many obstacles one meets, with iron in the spine one can make it.

  I’m lucky. I have a daughter and a man who both love me to distraction. All is well with love like that pouring into your soul . . .

  Epilogue

  Without doubt my entire life was overshadowed by my childhood and the tormenting acts of violence and hate I had to witness. Although I was a child and got the impression that what was happening around me and to me was normal, to be surrounded by barbed wire and watch towers, men pointing guns at you all the time, to live with constant fear, cruelty, beatings, screaming, shooting, endless mental and physical torture and death, and to be called a non-person during your formative years, leaves a scar. And throughout my life I have been aware of that scar, sometimes minimally, sometimes powerfully.

  People ask me if I blame my father for the suffering we had to endure. He could have put aside his beliefs in right and wrong, and become a hero of fascism, been part of the killing machine. I’m proud of him for not taking the easy way out, for understanding the consequences of his actions, for not becoming part of the national hate, a quiescent part of the assassination machine. His courage was limitless. If it had killed us all, he still could not have chosen any other way. For my father there was never a possibility of compromise. And he willingly paid the price for his convictions.

  My mother’s obsession with saving my life at any cost gave her a superhuman strength, which I have tried to live up to all my life. Eventually I did not believe any longer that I was part of the Untermenschen, the non-persons, who don’t deserve to live. I survived the hell, but hardly anyone else did: ninety-eight per cent of all deportees died. Surviving doesn’t make one special – but it does make one extraordinarily lucky.

  Although I have appeared on the stage, on television and in films, and have had several books published, I believe that my most important achievement was to bri
ng into this world an extraordinary human being who will carry on what my mother taught us about love and inner strength – about the destruction hate breeds; about happiness; contentment and not blaming others when things don’t work out. She taught us not to lead a useless life, to strive to become a better person, to live with love in one’s heart . . . to be happy.