I was at the Courtauld Gallery in London last month to see a Frank Auerbach exhibition: 26 large-scale charcoal portrait heads drawn many years ago. One of them was a drawing so like my mother that I was stopped in my tracks. Astonished and taken by surprise, I suddenly found myself in tears.
For a moment, I was certain it was her, but it turned out to be someone else, Helen Gillespie, a subject whom Auerbach drew and painted over several years.
Auerbach worked on each portrait with great energy over a series of months. Maybe it was that which gave this particular drawing such gravitas in how it depicted the stern look on Helen Gillespie’s face, which was without doubt the same stern look my mother, Zofia Galler (née Minc) would sometimes fall into when alone or in deep thought.
A look that was shaped by my mother’s past, the trauma she suffered throughout her childhood and adolescence in the ghetto at Katowice, in Poland, from her years in Auschwitz and the death march that followed – the total annihilation of her family and home and, of course, by how those experiences continued to affect her. Naïvely, I asked whether there was a reproduction of this drawing for sale. There wasn’t, so I bought the postcard and took a photo.
It wasn’t just me so surprised by the likeness. Ema, my partner, was with me and similarly gobsmacked. My son and daughter, who saw my photo, came back immediately, “OMG it’s Zaza.”
It’s remarkable just how quickly I was disarmed, memories of her racing back to me. Standing there in that room, I could have been in her kitchen. I could see her so clearly, hear her voice and recognise the characteristic smell of her perfume and cigarettes.
For years, as a child growing up in Wellington, I knew nothing of my mother’s past, which, of course, would have partly explained why she was not like the mothers of my school friends.
She had no idea about all those practical things they seemed so good at – making school lunches, cooking, laundry, sewing and so much more.
Despite our fridge and pantry shelves bulging with food, packets of this and that, cans of everything, my mother didn’t really cook or like cooking. Most of what we ate was quite European and bought in or pre-prepared by places like the Dixon St Deli – schnitzels, potato salads or strange vegetables. Or we ate takeaways; Chinese food, usually.
Mum really didn’t eat much, preferring the company of a cigarette and glass of wine with soda water, or a spritzer, as she called it – water with her wine, like the old Greek gods. Her lack of appetite, and interest in food more generally, was attributed to her losing a large part of her stomach in an emergency operation to treat a bleeding gastric ulcer, one of many afflictions she carried throughout her life.
She filled our sandwiches with horseradish, sometimes on its own, sometimes accompanied by cuts of ox tongue, and others with sauerkraut.
The laundry was done by the Victoria Launderette on Molesworth St, then a small place on a corner now adjacent to the onramp to the motorway – opposite where the Chinese restaurant that supplied so many of our dinners once existed. All our stuff went there and came back washed, ironed and folded neatly, my father’s white shirts like new, each folded over cardboard and packed into plastic bags.
The ghetto, Auschwitz and the murder of her family were poor preparation for life as a housewife and mother in New Zealand, but all of that was compensated for by the love and loyalty she had for my father, my elder brother and me.
She was smart and did not tolerate fools, nor did she let her feelings go unnoticed; she usually did this politely, though sometimes not so. I remember a formal dinner we hosted for one of Mum’s close friends who had recently married a much older man – a German baron, as it turned out. As we ate, my mother asked the baron about his past, her interest obvious to us but not to him. He was a rich man and part of the big and wealthy Krupps family. “Krupps,” my mother said, “I used to work for them.”
“Really, where?” the baron asked. “Auschwitz,” was my mother’s reply.
The room became silent, perhaps just the sound of the baron quietly choking, before my mother quickly changed the subject and the mood lifted.
My mother was beautiful and glamorous – a solitary person who took solace in the company of others. People were drawn to her; some knew of her past, others noticed the number 72154 tattooed on her left forearm. For her part, she was welcoming. If someone was truly interested in becoming her friend, she would generally respond in kind – and once a friend, always a friend.
I remember the first time I took Ema home to meet her. She was especially nervous because, unbeknown to me, a mutual friend who knew my mother had described her as a ferocious fat Jewish woman, someone to be wary of!
Imagine Ema’s surprise when my mother, small and divine, was so thrilled to meet her. She threw her arms around Ema, squeezed her cheek and gave her the warmest hug. They became lifelong friends in a way unique to women, as though they connected on a level others weren’t party to. It was that friendship that finally unlocked the detail of my mother’s story, previously known only by my father. That story was recorded over several days’ conversation between the two of them, transcribed, edited and eventually published in a memoir, As It Was. No one else could have done that.
My mother loved a good party, staying up late talking, smoking, drinking and dancing. Our house was often full of people, many from Eastern Europe, playing poker around square tables covered in green baize, poker chips, ashtrays and wine glasses.
Like many of her friends with a similar experience, we had nothing German in the house. My parents didn’t make a big deal of it or speak about it; that’s just the way it was.
Imagine how nervous I was when I came home from medical school to confess that I had a German girlfriend, Cornelia from Heidelberg. My mother looked at my father, he looked at her, then she said, “Darling, all we want is for you to be happy,” and, perhaps more than anything else, that was her sentiment to the end.
Years later, I had another confession to make. I had bought a second-hand, pumpkin-coloured Mercedes 280SE. Again I was surprised by her response: “When [UN Relief and Rehabilitation Admistration] plucked me out of an orphanage in Poland and took me to Haifa in 1947, all the cars were Mercedes Benz.” Why, I asked, after what the Germans did to us? “Because they are very good cars!”
Did my mother ever come to terms with the horrors she experienced? She certainly learnt to push aside much of that to engage in life with a genuine warmth for her friends and a deep, unshakable love for her family, but night after night, the light always on, she struggled to sleep, tormented by the same nightmares.
As time wore on, the years of abuse, neglect and reliance on cigarettes began to catch up with her; she became frail. Despite that, she remained sharp as a tack and never lost her sense of humour. As her death approached, we spoke about things she would miss. “Pork crackling,” she said with a smile, and a moment later added, “You, too, of course!”
On her death certificate we described her as a socialite. Her funeral was at St Andrew’s on The Terrace, not a synagogue. “I never went when I was alive, so why would I want to go when I’m dead,” she’d said.
My mother was cremated, not buried, preferring to go up in smoke like so many of her family and fellow Jews did. She was not perfect – whose mother can ever be? – but I adored her and I always will.
Dr David Galler is author of Things That Matter.
