Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  Now and then I flinch in my thoughts, it’s all still present, I think, all of it. It’s all festering inside me and around me, visible or invisible, audible or inaudible, as if I were a micro-organism, a spark of consciousness, a wheel that becomes a chain or bouncing ball, a field that blooms or disintegrates. I seem caught in the middle of an antagonism that Nazism and the resistance against it have created in the inhabitants of the region, an antagonism as absolute as pain. Only those who suffer this antagonism can feel it.

  IN Father’s night table drawer, next to his long unused clarinet, I find Mici’s blue songbook and stored underneath it, my grandmother’s stained, red camp notebook.

  Stunned, I sit down on the bed. The small legacy weighs heavy in my hand. The exuberant Mici wrote Slovenian songs, poems, and letters in verse to her lover and to her aunts Katrca, Urša, Leni, Malka, and Angela in her small notebook, turning language into an exhilarating rush of sound, an uninterrupted song. It’s the only thing left of her.

  I start reading Grandmother’s camp notebook, which I’d often held in my hands as a child.

  Memories of Grandmother’s room come flooding back, memories of the very particular milky light that transformed the incomprehensible things she was telling me into brief moments of intimacy that circled in the air like fine particles of dust and by the next night lay upon the objects in the room as if nothing had ever disturbed them.

  At first Grandmother wrote in a firm hand, her words are awkward, not intended to be written down, but to be spoken. Although she can barely write – her sentences are neither grammatically nor syntactically correct – she must have been convinced her story had to be set down.

  Je bilo u tork opoldne 12 Oktober je locitev od hise in od temalih Sinov Tonček in Zdravko. Toje bilo hudo zamene ker jas nisem kriva nic. It was midday on Tuesday, the 12th of October, the separation from my home and my two little boys, Tonček and Zdravko. It was hard for me because I’m not guilty, Grandmother writes.

  She was held in the Eisenkappel jail for two hours, then taken to Klagenfurt, and after three weeks, at six in the morning on November 2nd, from Klagenfurt to Maribor. It was wonderful, čudovito, she writes, how children spat at us on the street and screamed terrible things. In Maribor, they were given a dinner of potatoes and turnips.

  At three in the morning there was good coffee and good bread. We were allowed to take a slice of bread, a bit of soft cheese, and a spoonful of jam as provisions for the trip to Vienna. In Vienna, Ven, Grandmother writes, she had to sleep on a cement floor. The food was terrible, there was only potato soup, and no spoons, she had to fish out the pieces of potato with her fingers. After ten days, they went on to Prague, Prak, she writes, there they were plagued with bedbugs, the food was bad, there was no dinner, in the mornings just a bit of coffee, then on and on without food or water to Berlin. They were left for a night and a day with nothing to eat. It was good she was sick at the time, her throat hurt too much to swallow. Then they went on to Ravensbrück, there it was very strange, she writes, humans are not animals!

  She has no words to describe all the unhappy things to come, she writes. She needs only three small pages for one and a half years in the concentration camp, then she writes rajža, the journey, on April 28th and means the beginning of the odyssey that would bring her back to Lepena months later. On May 14th, Mirow, the first place name before Wesenberg and Rheinsberg, written in a feverish script that betrays her excitement. She writes phonetically the names of the places where she stops on her way home or simply passes through. The longer her trip home lasts, the more disjointed the names become. She notes them down in the moving cattle car, later in the train compartment. The places of survival seem bombed out, just as the cities Grandmother had talked about must have looked. August 15th, Dresden, Tresten, Grandmother writes. After a few, barely legible names, Bratislava appears, spelled correctly, then Budapest, on August 24th, Subotica, we have been in the best of moods, she writes. There was much meat to eat and a lot of schnapps, spent the 25th in the baths and danced and celebrated all weekend. Later she writes Belkad, meaning Belgrade, beautiful city, Grandmother declares, on August 30th, a sad morning in the Zagreb train station, then Vellenje and Slovenkrac for Slovenian Gradec, then Hrevelje for the Hrevelnik property in Lepena. She closes the account of her travels with the half sentence, at home was the fear yes or no, doma toje blo strah jabol ne.

  I place the photographs she left me on my desk. In her younger years, Grandmother’s feelings burst out impetuously. She looks into the camera with the self-assurance of a wealthy farmer’s daughter. The high spirits she controls with difficulty and her pride are almost tangible. In the 1920s, she wears bright-colored dresses and patterned shirts with collars completely trimmed with lace. After several miscarriages, she looks more serious and more plump. As a married woman, she wears dark dresses and cotton tights or an elegant suit with a leather bag, leather gloves and custom-made shoes on special occasions. In the summer, she tries to cover her thin hair with straw hats and to keep her severe face in the shadows, as she once told me. I was still proud, she’d said, but already aged from work, from the drudgery.

  After the war, the glow of Grandmother’s eyes is directed inward. Her smile looks tired, exhausted, never lively anymore. Her posture has lost its earlier confidence. The straw hats have been replaced by kerchiefs she ties precisely under her chin so the tips stick out stiffly from her neck. She is more than a little proud of her elegant scarves of gleaming viscose or silk. She has lost a great deal of weight and, since she is always cold, she wears a wool vest or a sweater under her clothes. On wedding pictures, with her angular face and her prominent, hooked nose amidst the happy group, she looks like a remnant of the past that refuses to fit in to the present. Her silhouette gives the impression that she has been expelled from life several times, but then was brought back after all and took up her life again, if not out of joy, then at least out of submissiveness, not from deep conviction, but from a sense of duty.

  At home, Grandmother wears a cotton scarf tied at the nape, old clothes, wool tights, and patterned skirts that she replaces with black satin skirts and more elegant blouses only on Sundays and holidays. Earlier, I used to think I had to represent something, but later I felt like I’d been crossed out, she says. The photographs show Father’s metamorphosis from a child to an adolescent. How his face changed after Grandmother’s arrest and the police interrogation, how the childish aspect withdrew and turned into something bitter, hard, and obstinate, how the wound took root in Father and occupied his body like a parasite.

  One day, I tell Tonči about Grandmother’s camp book and my aimless wandering through the family’s past. He is pleased to hear about it and brings me a file folder, mentioning that he believes Grandmother’s papers belong with me.

  Among the old bills and letters in the folder I find Grandmother’s report card from the year 1914 which notes that she was excused from 256 half-days of lessons and had 23 unexcused absences. How many days did she even go to school? I find the ruling of the Klagenfurt Civil Court from December 1947 on the restitution of property confiscated by the German Reich to the legal owners, to my grandfather Michael, and beneath it Grandmother’s Ravensbrück spoon and her Certificate of Residence, issued to her on the day of her forty-first birthday, September 6th, 1945, on her return from the concentration camp. There are also the letters from friends she had made in the camp, Grandmother’s request for a victim’s pension, the notification from the regional government of Carinthia informing her that the Carinthian Commission had denied her request on the grounds that the medical examination obtained could not establish damage to her health at the levels required to qualify; then Grandmother’s appeal in response to the communication, formulated by someone who knew how to write, listing the conditions she suffers as a result of her incarceration in the camp, nervous disorders, shortness of breath, painful swelling of the legs and joints, leaving her unable to work for days at a time, debilitating headaches, sev
ere menstrual cramps – she had already had to list all of these for the police department functionary who had drawn up the deposition, she notes, and I can imagine the situation in which Grandmother must describe her suffering to an indifferent official who doesn’t understand Slovenian; the response from the Ministry of Social Affairs in Vienna, late May, 1951, that she has been granted a victim’s pension; Grandmother’s letter of November 6th, 1951, addressed to the office of Carinthian regional government, inquiring why her victim’s pension is not being disbursed, a communication from November, 1953, addressed to the Carinthian regional government, asking why her officially awarded imprisonment compensation has not been paid, the answer from the Carinthian government that notice of compensation payment is effective beginning only in October 1953 and will not be sent to the National Ministry for Social Affairs for payment prior to that date, then, completely unexpectedly, the house blessing handwritten by my great-grandmother, a blessing so powerful it can protect those who dwell in the house from storms, from thunder and lightning, from hail and from fire, from curses, slander, and from the plague, but not from all the rest.

  The protective barrier I tried to build between me and my family breaks down once again. For a moment, I’m afraid of being overrun by the past, of being crushed beneath its weight. I decide to put all these fragments – memories and family stories, what is present and what is absent – into written form, to reinvent myself from memory, to write myself a body composed of air and intuition, of scents and odors, of voices and sounds, out of things past and dreamt, out of mere traces.

  I could recover what is irretrievable and establish that it has returned in a new form, that it has transformed itself and me. I could reassemble what has fallen or been torn apart to let what’s underneath shine through. I could surround what has been with an invisible body that seals and subjugates it.

  I DECIDE to go to Ravensbrück, to visit the camp I have so often crossed in my mind that I believe I know it. I want to walk through Grandmother’s story one last time in order to take my leave of this familiar place.

  On the day Grandmother was admitted to the concentration camp, I walk down the Street of Nations in Fürstenberg an der Havel, which leads to the camp.

  The autumn landscape around me is unwelcoming, it seems to belong to the past and yet it’s of the present, only of the present. I think how Grandmother’s eyes might have scanned this landscape on the evening of November 13th. Did she have time to look around at her journey’s destination, to take in the Brandenburgian, yellow-brown and gray autumn, the birch trees’ yellow leaves hanging from the branches like colorful pennants?

  After walking for a long time, the lake, Schwedtsee, flashes to my right, with its bare, motionless surface. The Kommandantur building suddenly appears before me.

  The first view through the camp gate, the emptiness, the central square cleared of barracks, the black gravel, the rust-red foliage, the clean camp streets, a single poplar-lined boulevard.

  The Appellplatz, the roll call square, looks smaller than I’d imagined, you can almost take it in with a single glance. As a child, when Grandmother would tell me about the camp, I pictured a large open space that extended to the horizon, a world of prisoners and dead bodies.

  I circle the empty, level area of the service buildings. The bathhouses for the admittance procedure, now a patch of grass, the prisoners’ kitchen, the Appellplatz, now covered with gravel, the place where the barracks stood, today just a lawn, blocks five to seven written on the plaque, block six, for political prisoners, a specter from Grandmother’s story, stood in the center, behind a linden tree that was not there then. The Jewish block, eleven, next to block twelve, in the foreground was the infirmary, behind it the industrial buildings, the sewing shop. Neither visible nor accessible is the Siemens compound for regular employment, the men’s camp, the tented area for those waiting for the gas chamber. What has been preserved is the brick-work trinity of death, the building containing the cells, now a museum, where Katrca’s verses are displayed above the names of the Yugoslavian women who died in Ravensbrück, the crematorium and field of graves, the gas chambers marked with a memorial stone.

  I could still hear Grandmother’s breathing when she spoke. Čudno, čudno, all that can happen to people, she said.

  In the archives, I find the list of the convoy that arrived the evening of November 13th, 1943, with my grandmother’s name and prisoner number, the names of her neighbors, of Paula Maloveršnik, of the farming families Pegrin and Kach, of Maria and Anna Rotter, of Polish women, Jewish women, a Czech woman. I find the list from November 30th, 1943, the day when Mici was brought to Ravensbrück. She was brought with 64 women via Leipzig in a special preventive detention convoy to Fürstenberg due to overcrowding of the Leipzig prison. With her were women from Ličkov, Dnipropetrovsk, Krowno, Krasnodar, Kursk, Glauchau, Karlsbad, Wurzen, Kaliningrad, Prague, Ebensee, Vienna, Pörtschach, from Ebriach, from Lepena, from Koprein and Waidisch, Magdalena Kölich, the woman from the Mozgan farm, Maria Paul and her daughter Amalia Paul, Johanna Grubelnik from Ebriach. I find Malka assigned to block sixteen with the Polish women.

  In Ravensbrück, the women from our valleys met women from all over Europe, from the Carinthian margins to a center of the war, where the lives of European women crossed, they were taken from remote Carinthia to a hot spot of death. What did the women from the valleys have in common with women from Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Jews from Italy, Romania, and Hungary, with women from France, Belgium, Russia and Ukraine, with Gypsies, with women from Croatia and Latvia, with Austrians and ethnic Germans in Eastern European countries, with women from Norway, Serbia, and Slovenia, from Holland and Denmark? What did they have to say to each other on leaving this place where they had grasped the magnitude of the war? I want to believe that the women of this camp had more in common than history written along national lines could ever dare conceive.

  I leave the grounds of the camp. No sense of relief sets in as the gate of the Kommandantur swings shut behind me, I give no sigh, feel no consolation. It is the place that was at work inside Grandmother. She lived in its magnetic field and used it as a point of orientation. It defined her and held her feelings in its sway. And now the phantom fades behind me, a vanishing apparition, a fragile surface disintegrating at the edges, underneath which history turns dark, in which Grandmother’s stories resound like echoes from a long lost time.

  The angel of history will have flown over me. His wings will have thrown a shadow over the camp. I couldn’t make out his horrified expression in the half-light, I just believed for a moment that I had heard the beat of wings, a gust of wind in his wings, in which are entangled the storms of what is to come.

  For a moment I feel like a child who has been running to escape time, time that advances behind me like a silent glacier, that slides inexorably over all that has been, that buries, that crushes and grinds up all that seems inalterable. With each step, I move further into the present, I bump into myself, I can hear my voice, a voice I recognize, a voice that has not surfaced from the Babel of sentences for a long time, a voice that was keeping hidden.

  The angel of oblivion must have forgotten to wipe the traces of the past from my memory. He led me through a sea in which vestiges and fragments were floating. He made my sentences collide against the drifting shards and debris, so they would be wounded, so they would become sharper. He finally removed the picture of the cherubs from above my bed. I will never meet this angel. He will remain formless. He will disappear into books. He will be a story.

  AFTER many years, Grandmother returns to me in a dream. I was not expecting her and I feel I have been caught red-handed. She sits on the forest path behind our house and has woven the wool she’d spun into funnel-shaped canopies that look like dendrites and she is using them to catch voices. She tells me a few voices have already fallen into her net. You just have to be patient and not give up hope. The woven funnels are bigger than she is. I go up to her. She signals with her
hand to let me know I shouldn’t make any noise. Not so loud, she says, or you can’t hear anything.

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