SIMON WEISZ’s memoir of intergenerational Holocaust trauma takes its title from a twist in the story of his Hungarian-Jewish mother, Ildikó.
Having survived stays in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, a period of slave labour in Berlin, and then a retreating death march from the city, Ildikó escaped (together with her sister and a friend). Making their way to the Elbe, they found shelter from Allied troops. The latter put them up in a villa last used by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS — and so architect of both their suffering and their families’ murder.
In need of new clothing, they repurposed the curtains from the french windows in the villa’s main reception room, converted into dresses for them by a seamstress in the village.
Weisz learnt the story in 1982, having found a photo of the three women so attired in an album kept in a drawer, usually left locked, at his parents’ home in England. The locked drawer is something of a metaphor for Ildikó’s own psyche and persona. Painful memories are repressed, and truths about Jewish identity are concealed from friends, acquaintances, and even her own son.
The results are predictably disastrous. As a child, Weisz is frequently woken by the noise of his mother screaming in the night. The mix of trauma and repression engenders a volatility terrifying to a child.
Superficially, Ildikó finds relief in surrendering decisions about her life to a kindly but dominating husband. The loss of personal agency had to be compensated for somehow, however. It is sought in replicating the pattern of control in her own relations with Simon. In time, he is able to recognise that this parent’s tendency to smothering imprints on him and ultimately destroys his first true romantic partnership.
Secrecy is a key theme in the book. Weisz’s own Jewishness is kept hidden from him until his 18th birthday. In fact, the family have him baptised as an Anglican in infancy. His mother visibly glows with pride when he is selected to read a lesson at his prep school’s carol service.
Uncomfortably, he recalls while at school the “feeling of priggish superiority as we filed into school assembly each morning, passing the five Jewish boys who stayed outside as we launched into ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’”. It is genuinely a mystery to him why, later, at his public school, he is kicked and pummelled to the floor by an older boy shouting “Filthy Jew, go home!”
Hiding truths about himself, however, also becomes essential for Weisz as he discovers his own homosexuality in the prejudiced context of England in the 1960s and ’70s.
At times, he seems himself to be keeping secrets from us. Some appear to be a toying with the reader intended to replicate his own experience of piecing together a story from fragments. The name of his home city is never stated, but over time emerges as Newcastle. Poignantly, having encountered him as an only child throughout, we learn only in an afterword that he has a sister who has asked to be written out of the story.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.
Himmler’s Curtains: A memoir of loss and concealment
Simon Weisz
Hutchinson Heinemann £22
(978-1-5291-5484-9)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80