MY MOTHER HAD MANY different names. Zosia was her birth name, but that became anglicised to Sophie by her New Zealand friends. My father called her Stara, Polish for old or more colloquially ‘old girl’. I called her ‘Ma’ when I was small and ‘Zaza’ later in life, because that’s what my kids called her. In the fifteen years before she died, that was shortened to ‘Z’. Records kept by others remember her as a number—72154. It was tattooed on her left forearm, the seven written in the European style with a stroke across it. I have always written my sevens the same way. She answered to all those names but never to the number.
Zaza was born on 3 May 1929, the only child of Hilary Minc and Cecilia Kronenblum. She remembered growing up in a large modern apartment in the Polish town of Katowice, not so far from the border with Germany. Hers was a very wealthy family and before the war they lived a beautiful life.
Hilary worked for Cecilia’s father, who owned a large iron foundry, Fabryke Odelwow Zelaznych-I-Kaklady Mechaniczne S. Kronenblum, in nearby Konskie. There they manufactured the ovens that were so popular in many Polish homes at the time. My mother remembered Hilary as a devoted father who spent a lot of time with her in the parks and cafes, where he always read her stories.
As for her mother Cecilia, Zaza remembered her as a beautiful woman with flaming auburn hair, quite like my daughter’s now. Always surrounded by friends, she loved the high life, parties, balls, and riding horses. She was 26 when her daughter was born and not terribly motherly, something my mother resented at the time but later, given what happened, she was pleased that Cecilia had the chance to have such fun.
Zaza arrived in New Zealand on board a Catalina on the overnight flight from Sydney, landing softly on the water at Evans Bay. It was the last leg of a very long journey from Tel Aviv where she and my father married three months before; he was forty, she was 22. Returning to the country that adopted him after the end of the war, ever the romantic, Dad was there with flowers to meet her.
Despite their devotion to each other, life in New Zealand was not easy for his young bride. She had lived a life no one should experience. She spoke with a thick Polish accent, had little English, and everywhere she went, people stared at her. Z was different. She had a tattoo on her arm, she ate different food, she dressed differently, and she missed the life she had had in Tel Aviv.
Like her mother, Zaza was beautiful, and loved people and a good party. In company she was gracious and funny. People flocked to her. Ironically, it was these very differences that attracted people to her. Wherever she went she became the centre of attention but behind all of that was a past that would always haunt her and an ever-present anxiety about what might happen in the future.
In Poland, soon after the war, she was told not to try to have children, but she did. All the way through her pregnancies, first with my brother Les and then with me, she was afraid that her babies would die in utero or be deformed. Twice, her joy at giving birth to a normal child was tinged with the guilt that only survivors know. ‘How can I be so lucky? Why did I survive? What did I do? Did I collaborate? Give in? Turn someone in? Take someone’s place?’ This was how she thought.
I knew we were different too. Different like the Hiltons, the Weiss family, Marisha and Manek, Wizcek and Lala, and the rest of the madcap Wellington Jewish community from eastern Europe, who were defined by their experiences of the war and their displacement to this far corner of the world.
Yes, I was like them but I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be a normal kid like the ones at school with their bird cutter hair, shaved sides and fluffy top knots, and jam sandwiches for lunch. For a few years at primary school, I was embarrassed to bring my friends home to meet my mother because of the way she spoke and because I was scared that she might offer them an ox tongue sandwich, a bowl of sauerkraut or a Polish sausage. I was young and just trying to fit in. I had no idea of what my mother had really suffered. I think that was the way my parents wanted it too—them and us just fitting in. My parents never spoke Polish, German or Hebrew around us, always English. We were called David and Leslie. Mum was happy to be called Sophie, and my father even allowed some of his acquaintances to call him Tony!
Especially at the beginning, they worked hard to leave the past behind them. It became a foreign country where they no longer went.
My early memories of my father were of him at our kitchen table, with pen and paper, later with an old typewriter and always with wads of documents and notes. Later, I understood that this was my dad-the-lawyer making a claim against the German government for compensation for my mother’s suffering and losses during the war. Each letter, carefully composed in German, some occasionally in English, was copied on carbon paper and then stored in chronological order. Every month, sometimes more frequently, a reply would arrive addressed to Mrs Zosia Galler, PO Box 1538, Wellington, New Zealand, and then the cycle would repeat.
This correspondence recorded my father’s interviews with my mother, a reluctant participant at first, detailing the individual horrors that befell her and her family during those dreadful years. Witnessing the execution of her father, the transport to Auschwitz, the terrible stories from that journey, my mother and Cecilia’s first encounter with the ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele, and much more.
Each claim required verification so my mother was regularly required to speak to officials from the German embassy, to see a psychiatrist, to remember things that no nine year old could possibly remember. The process was gruelling and it was prolonged, but it was, in the end at least, a bit therapeutic. Perhaps without knowing it, in doing what he did, I am convinced my father saved my mother’s sanity. Dragged into these conversations, she was at last able to speak about some of those ghastly experiences, releasing a bit of the pain.
This correspondence, at first with the German government directly, then through a lawyer in Wiesbaden, started in 1954 and concluded in 1965. Finally my mother was awarded a pension for life, a monthly sum paid in Deutsche Marks. My father explained this injection of foreign funds as something that afforded us a new car every time the ashtrays were full. My mother was a chain smoker so there were a lot of them.
While I knew what Dad was doing all those evenings at the kitchen table, the Holocaust and Auschwitz were just words to me. I had no idea of what they really meant until years later. I must have been a teenager near the end of my high school years and at home with my parents one evening we watched a television series about the Second World War that showed the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
I have no idea whether my mother knew what was coming but as the images of death and horror were playing on the television screen, she let out a cry that I will never forget. She then began to sob in a way that shocked me like nothing since. Dad turned the television off and tried to comfort her but nothing worked. She cried and cried and then fell mute with a look of complete exhaustion on her face. Soon after, our GP arrived, rolled up her sleeve and gave her an injection and Dad put her to bed. I was stunned by all of this, my mother’s grief, my father’s immersion in what was happening to Mum, and how oblivious they both were to the presence of me and my brother.
In the ghetto, then in the camp my mother was in a state of constant starvation and suffered from recurrent bouts of disease, especially dysentery and typhoid. Still a child, she learned to be tough and not display any signs of weakness because if you did you would never be seen again. Such a fate befell her mother, the beautiful Cecilia. Exhausted and fading away, she developed frostbite in her foot. As infection took hold, she became even weaker and, despite help from her ten-year-old daughter, collapsed at the morning roll call. She was beaten with a lash but could still not stand. Cecilia was then bundled up and taken to the ‘hospital’ where her foot was amputated without anaesthetic. She died soon after. In her memoir, Zaza remembered that she never cried after the death of her mother. In fact, she said she felt a sense of relief because from then on she only had to look out for herself. Perhaps that’s why, towards the end of her life, it was her mother whom she wanted to remember and talk about.
There was so much more like that, endless acts of indescribable cruelty, occasional acts of kindness, but in that place it was survival of the fittest and my mother learned how to survive. When the war was over and after the United Nations Refugee Association moved her from an orphanage in Poland to Palestine, she slipped into a new life. She did this again when she arrived in New Zealand, but wherever she went she could not escape the physical and emotional impact of what she had lived through. To my knowledge, Zaza never had a breakdown like that again. However, her traumatic past never left her in peace and continued to play out in different ways, even coming back to haunt her in the hours before her death.
My mother always kept the bedroom lights on at night and she slept badly. When she did manage to sleep, it was always accompanied by the same set of nightmares. Nothing seemed to make them go away, not even the sleeping pills; initially one, then two, then more. Instead, she learned to live with the nightmares as she did with many of the other torments she suffered.
For years I encouraged her to seek help from a psychologist but she always refused. In the end she did what she always did—she adapted to the situation she found herself in, almost as though she could live her new life in parallel with the torments of the past put temporarily aside.
A proud and elegant woman, a few years after I was born my mother began to gain weight. She grew increasingly tired and constantly complained that she was cold. When she combed her hair tufts would come away from her scalp. The same seemed to be happening to her eyebrows, which were thinning progressively and almost disappearing at their ends. When she looked in the mirror, her face was fat. With all of this came an intellectual lethargy that my father thought was depression. Talking to him later, he recalled one doctor suggesting she go into a mental hospital for ECT, but Dad refused. He knew there was another cause for what was happening to her and he eventually found it in the rooms of a well-known physician in Wellington. As soon as he saw her he knew immediately. My mother had the classic appearance of someone suffering from a lack of the thyroid hormone thyroxine—the thinning hair, the loss of the lateral part of the eyebrows, the dull waxy skin, the history of cold intolerance, and the weight gain. She was a textbook case. There is a German word, schadenfreude, which describes much about doctors—in essence it means getting pleasure from someone else’s misfortune. My bet is that the physician concerned will have taken almost as much pleasure in seeing such a textbook case of hypothyroidism as he would have in curing it.
Being the thorough physician that he was, he would have done a series of other investigations to determine why her thyroid gland had ceased to function. He would also have checked whether she had become pre-diabetic and had a high level of cholesterol in her blood. He started her off on replacement therapy pills that she took for the rest of her life.
Over the following week, the cloud lifted and my mother began to emerge. A month later, she started to look like she used to. Her hair was back, her eyebrows had grown and she was returning to her normal weight. It was a miracle and my dad was over the moon.
A few years later, when I was about seven, I came home from school one day to find my mother collapsed on the kitchen floor surrounded by blood. I rang my dad and he phoned our GP. A refugee like them, he suggested giving Mum bread to eat. An odd response but even then I knew he was more interested in golf than he was in medicine. Soon after, an ambulance arrived and Mum was rushed to hospital. That night she had emergency surgery for what turned out to be a bleeding ulcer that had eroded into a big vessel in the lining of her stomach.
During the operation, known as a Billroth I procedure, the surgeon removed the lower part of her stomach where the ulcer was, joining the remnant directly to the first part of the small bowel. From then on, Mum was only able to eat very small amounts at any sitting. She also began to suffer from a burning pain caused by the reflux of stomach acid into the oesophagus, a condition that most likely caused the cancer that killed her so many years later.
Her beauty restored, and well recovered from her operation, Zaza continued her adaptation to life in New Zealand. She was a terrible cook but still loved to entertain. Most Sundays we had people to lunch.
On one occasion, one of Mum’s girlfriends came with her new husband, a German baron! Other friends, Manek and Marisa, were there too. Things were going well. Mum cooked meatballs and sauerkraut. The adults were drinking wine and the conversation was flowing until my mother asked a few questions of the baron, obviously a wealthy and successful man. It turned out he was part of the famous Krupps family, now having moved their interests from munitions into coffee machines and the like.
‘Ahhhh, Krupps. I used to work for them,’ my mother said.
‘Where?’ asked the baron.
‘Auschwitz,’ my mother replied with a snarl.
Things at the table went quiet for a while, then to put people at ease Mum told a story from the time when she arrived in Palestine after the war.
She recalled how surprised she was that most of the cars were Mercedes Benz. When she asked why, after all the terrible things the Germans had done to the Jews, her friend held up his arms and shrugged in the way that only we Jews can and said, ‘Because they are very good cars.’
Years later I owned a fabulous pumpkin-coloured Mercedes 280SE. I loved it and so did my mother!
After those early encounters with medical services, Zaza spent the rest of her life avoiding doctors apart from the time spent with me and my brother, the best intensive care doctor in New Zealand. But as proud of us as she was, we had little influence over her in matters medical. Her smoking was a case in point. This was something she started in Auschwitz and continued until only a day or two before she died. She was convinced that smoking had helped keep her alive then and that she would be immune from its harmful effects now. In many ways she was a fatalist. When we talked about why she had survived, she simply attributed it to luck and that seemed to be the philosophy that guided her later in life. What will be will be, that’s what she believed, and that’s how she lived.
Although my parents loved life in New Zealand, there were a few occasions when they were made to feel unwelcome and sometimes afraid. One of those was after the publication of an interview with my mother where she spoke about her experiences in the war. Soon after that our car was daubed with a swastika and my mother received phone calls threatening her life. This was terrifying and put her on edge for years, effectively stopping her from engaging in any public discourse about her past for a very long time, and denying her those opportunities to steadily heal the scars of the past.
My partner Ema and my mother had a very special relationship in the way that only women can. They adored each other and confided in each other, so if ever my mother was to tell her story to anyone, it would be to Ema.
Overcoming her reluctance, my mother finally agreed to record her story to ensure that her children and grandchildren and those who come after them have a record not only of her experiences, but of the lives and the fates of her parents and grandparents. Those conversations took place over several weeks and were recorded then subsequently transcribed. Together with the correspondence between my father and the German government, they formed the basis for As It Was, my mother’s memoir, published privately in 2005.
Two years before she died, she agreed to record a video interview that is now shown to school parties and visitors to Wellington’s Holocaust Centre. Soon after doing this she began to receive letters of thanks and bunches of flowers from members of the various school parties who visited the centre. These were a fabulous surprise for my mother and reinforced how right she was to finally share her story.
In January 1945, as Soviet forces closed in on occupied Poland, those prisoners at Auschwitz that could walk were rounded up and marched north towards the labour camps in Germany in what is now known as the ‘Death March’. Those who could not walk were executed. It was a brutal affair, months on foot, in the bitter cold with little food.
After just weeks, of the 3600 that left Auschwitz, only 800 were still alive—and then only just. Almost at the point of complete exhaustion, recognising that time was running out, a girl of a similar age who had befriended my mother helped her escape.
Years later, on the day of my father’s funeral, my mother received a letter from a friend in Sydney. Enclosed with it was a short article from one of the Australian papers written by a woman who was looking for the girl that escaped with her from the Death March. Our Sydney friends thought that this could be Zosia. They were right.
The timing of this letter was bizarre. It was both deeply disturbing as well as potentially wonderful news. A few weeks later, when she was able, my mother replied but didn’t receive a response for several months. When it came it was a relatively formal response written on behalf of the woman to inform us that she was now in psychiatric care following the suicide of her son, who also had trained as a doctor. Weeks later, the response to my mother’s reply was to inform her that her Death March companion was also now dead, she too having committed suicide.
Much has been written about the psychological fate of survivors and how the suffering of one generation impacts on the next. Until then I had studiously avoided thinking about that because it was too hard for me. Instead, I remained in a state of denial, consumed by my own life, unwilling and unable to confront the horror of what happened to my mother. In the end, I was helped to do that by spending much more time with her, and by Ema, who did what I could never have done—record my mother’s story.
Because of work commitments, between 2003 and 2010, I spent every second week with my mother in Wellington. Over that time I got to know and understand her better. As a mature adult, it was not an experience I would have expected, but it turned into an interesting and fabulous time for both of us.
We had a lot of fun apart from a few too many phone calls from her wondering where I was. What time would I be home? Was I all right? What did I want for dinner? We enjoyed each other’s company.
She was an extraordinary role model in so many ways. Having suffered so much, you might think that my mother would be full of hatred and bitterness, especially toward the Germans. She wasn’t.
Although she could never forgive them for what happened, and despite the tyranny of memories replayed every night when she slept, somehow she turned what could have been a deeply destructive force into one for good. She was generous and she was kind. She loved people and hearing their stories, and she was a friend you could confide in. Her circle included mainly women of her age, but also friends of mine. They loved her and she loved them. She was open-minded, smart and, if bothered, politically savvy too. Unlike so many of her generation, she was not easily fooled by a false smile and the superficial promises of inarticulate politicians. Unusually, my mother seemed to become more liberal as she got older.
But by the end of my stint with her, she was beginning to lose weight, eat less and smoke more. Her friends cajoled her, convinced that she didn’t eat at all when she was alone. Thankfully that was a rare event because the house was always full of people. She loved the company but at the same time the constant round of visitors started to exhaust her.
Over the next year she managed surprisingly well. She took several road trips with friends and spent time in the warmth somewhere north of Brisbane. We were so used to her chewing Quick-Eze and swallowing her usual pills that maybe we were a bit slow to notice the increasing discomfort she was feeling in her upper abdomen. When we did, we suggested that it might be a good time to see a doctor. When she immediately agreed, we knew something was seriously wrong.
Mum didn’t like going to doctors and hadn’t seen one in years. She hardly ever had her thyroid hormone levels measured and learned with help from her doctor sons how to adjust her dose according to how she felt. It was always obvious to me when her levels were too high, because her anxiety levels would go through the roof and her heart would race.
My mother used to say, ‘Doctors, why would I go see them, they’ll just tell me I’ve got cancer.’ What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, that’s what she thought. Although she said it as a joke, it wasn’t. It was her fear and anxiety speaking, the same fear and anxiety that had plagued her her entire life.
In mid-February 2012, my mother finally went to see the doctor she vowed never to see. To add insult to injury, he referred her to another one, a gastroenterologist. He asked her lots of questions and then examined her thoroughly. His fears were ours. My mother’s history of weight loss, reflux and now quite severe pain in her upper abdomen whenever she ate were ominous signs that would be consistent with a cancer of the oesophagus or stomach.
The next day she went in for an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy, a simple procedure performed under light sedation, where a narrow tube with a camera on its end is passed into the mouth and down through the oesophagus into the stomach and then into the first part of the duodenum. As he did this the cause of her pain and weight loss became obvious—a large, ugly area at the junction of the upper stomach and lower oesophagus, most likely a cancer. He took biopsies, withdrew the scope, and waited for my mother to wake up.
She couldn’t remember exactly what the doctor told her after the procedure, but my mother was clear that he was worried about something and that we needed to wait for the results of the biopsies.
In the meantime, we did our best to stay measured and take things bit by bit. At first glance you would have thought that nothing had changed. Mum smoked. She had her usual few glasses of wine in the evening and, when we were with her, she even ate quite well. Maybe, just maybe, she would be okay?
Sadly, that turned out to be wishful thinking. Sometimes when you see someone every day you don’t always notice small changes in how they look or behave. You want to see what you want to see. That was me until that moment when the results finally arrived—adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus.
Mum wasn’t surprised, it was what she had expected. This was her fate. Suddenly, she looked frail and thin, her skin looked more sallow, her hair seemed to have lost its lustre and she had a worried look on her face.
Later that night, we shared a few glasses of wine and joked. ‘What a bugger,’ I said, ‘you were right all along about those doctors.’
She laughed and I laughed—but neither of us really thought it was that funny.
The next day, my brother Les came down from Auckland and that evening the three of us, my mother and her two sons, the intensive care specialists, sat together around the kitchen table for the conversation we all needed to have.
In many ways it was like any other family gathering. There was wine, a plate of my mother’s divine chicken and spinach crepes, and a big salad on the table; but this was going to be a different evening. Zaza seemed to have prepared herself for this judging by the look on her face. It was one I had seen before—a look of steely determination, a sign of her readiness to confront what lay ahead.
We began to talk. Carcinoma of the oesophagus is usually a highly lethal disease with a five-year survival of about 10 per cent. Putting that another way, if we were to take 100 patients with the disease, after five years of treatment about ninety would have died and ten might still be alive. Could she be one of the ten? That was one of the first things we talked about.
Blood tests and a CT scan to stage the tumour might help answer that, but whatever they showed, the treatment options—surgery or chemotherapy—would be brutal and likely destroy the quality of what time she had left or, at worst, would hasten her death.
Zaza was pulling faces. She knew the score. She was 82 and already frail. She was clear that surgery and other aggressive and likely futile treatments to extend her life were things that she didn’t want and, in my heart, I already knew this was going to be the ultimate test of ‘less is more’.
I have had hundreds of meetings with individuals and families facing difficult decisions. They have taught me how to behave, how to listen, and how to gently engage complete strangers in conversations about living and dying, about loss and grief, and most importantly about what matters to them at the end.
There is no turning the clock back and pretending nothing has changed, so when life is turned on its head, as it was for my mother, our only option was to do what we could to make the most of the situation we were in. To say that I have enjoyed those conversations is probably not the best way to describe how I feel when they have gone well. It’s more a feeling of having done the right thing, to reach a point where my patients and their families understand their position and feel empowered to make the most of it. These were the thoughts filling my head as we talked with Mum.
Sitting there at the kitchen table, it was as though she could read my mind. Before we could specifically ask, she began to talk about the things that really mattered to her. She wanted to know how much time she had left. We said that no one could be sure but probably no more than a few months. She asked whether she would be in a lot of pain as the tumour progressed. We weren’t sure of that either but promised that if she had pain, we would manage that with expert help and make sure she was comfortable. Finally, we got to the hardest thing for her to ask—for our time and our company, for her not to be alone when she needed us. You might think that’s strange but it’s not.
Years before, when my father was becoming increasingly unwell in the months before his death, he steadily prepared my mother for a life without him. Up to that point, he had managed everything in his quiet and caring way, apart of course from their social lives. He did all the odd jobs and practical things that we take for granted but without which the ship would sink—the bills, the finances and investments, the driving, and so much more.
Two months before he died, after 37 driving lessons, my mother finally got her first driver’s licence. Dad even bought her a small car—a Daihatsu Charade, which she crashed on her first outing. Repaired, it sat in her garage for the next 22 years, driven only by my brother and me when we came to town. After Mum died we gave it to her gardener.
Looking back, what Dad was doing was obvious, but silly self-indulgent me, I didn’t get it. He had slowly helped Zaza become comfortable with making decisions that she had never had to make before, at the same time as teaching her a set of principles to help when he was gone. One of those was to live within her means, Dad’s shorthand for not spending the capital and learning to live off the interest—an analogy that extended beyond sound financial management to her not living in her children’s pockets and consciously allowing them to live their own lives. That was the reason why Mum was so reluctant to ask for our time.
There we were, the three of us, at the end of the evening, full of crepes and wine, happy that we had found our way together. It was clear—we would make the best of the time that Mum had left. There would be no interventions to stop what we couldn’t stop. Instead, our efforts would be focused on keeping Zaza at home, ensuring her comfort, and for us to be with her when she needed us.
The next day that was put to the test with the arrival of an invitation to visit the surgical outpatient clinic at the nearby hospital the following week. Prior to attending the appointment, Mum was required to have several panels of blood tests and a CT scan of her chest and abdomen.
The surgical clinic was in one of those typically dilapidated old buildings that used to be part of an old hospital now rebuilt. We arrived on time to a near-empty waiting room manned by a smiling receptionist. It’s fair to say that, despite being clear about our position and what we wanted, Mum and I were both incredibly nervous, but about what it’s hard to say now.
After twenty minutes or so, we were shown into the consultant surgeon’s rooms. He was a young and handsome man, born in India and trained in the UK and New Zealand. In front of him, he had a set of notes and letters. He was apologetic because they didn’t seem to contain the results of the blood tests and the CT scan that he had ordered. We tried to put him at ease, telling him that we hadn’t thought those necessary. However, before we had the chance to explain why, he became irritated and cross. It was then that my mother spoke up, explaining what she understood about her condition and why she had decided not to proceed with the tests. As she spoke, we saw the surgeon lighten up, his head nodding as my mother explained her position. I knew immediately that he would be feeling the same sense of relief as I so often have in the past when speaking with patients who knew what they wanted, especially when you knew they were right. This young man was off the hook, no smoke and mirrors here. I sat back and listened to them talk about life, about death and even about reincarnation! It was very moving.
Having got that out of the way, the two of us then went to see the GP that Mum never really saw. He was thrilled to finally meet my mother and genuinely distressed by what she was going through. Through him, we made contact with the local hospice and with their help documented my mother’s wishes with the ambulance service and the local hospital. We also put in place an alert that should the paramedics be called to treat my mother in the event of an emergency, they would immediately contact the hospice nurses and those nurses would then call me. What an incredibly smart move that turned out to be.
Over the next two months, life for me returned to normal. Zaza did well too, living on her own as she had been for so long, but now with a small group of her closest friends looking after her. They spoke with her each morning, rang her regularly, and took her out on jaunts and shopping trips. They were a terrific group of women who knew what my mother wanted and, importantly, they also had the key to Mum’s house.
Zaza and I spoke on the phone at least twice a day, and my brother and I took turns to visit her every week. Each time she looked more frail, but remained as engaging and hospitable as ever. Wine glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, she would roll her eyes and repeat her only complaint, ‘Who said old age was golden?’
We spoke about all sorts of things, and from time to time we even talked about her dying—it was not an easy topic to discuss. I had mistakenly thought that because Mum had seen so much death in her life that she was not afraid of dying herself. I was wrong. Auschwitz was no hospice. There death was never peaceful. It was not the final act of a life well lived. There it was a process of torment, of loss and grief, feelings of hopelessness and immense suffering. There men, women and children were dragged from their lives and slaughtered.
It finally dawned on me: it was not death itself that terrified my mother, it was the process of dying. She was a ‘survivor’ and it seemed now there was no surviving this. As simple as that might sound, this was a light-bulb moment for both of us, because I felt confident that we could control that process with medications to protect her from what she feared.
One afternoon, not long after my last visit, she didn’t answer the phone when I rang. I waited for another five minutes and rang again. I tried to suppress the anxiety welling up in me, telling myself that she was probably out with her friends. Finally, I rang one of them, Barbara. She had seen Zaza that morning and said she was tired but otherwise well, and wondered if she might be sleeping. Mum never slept through a phone call and before I could ask, Barbara offered to call by the house and ring me back.
I don’t know what it was but I was convinced that something bad had happened so I quickly packed a bag. When Barbara rang back, all that was confirmed. Mum had fallen down her stairs. She was covered in blood and barely conscious. The ambulance was on its way.
As I arrived at the airport in Auckland, one of the hospice nurses rang to tell me more. Most likely she’d had a stroke, causing her to fall, because Mum had difficulty speaking and wasn’t moving her right arm and leg. She also seemed to be in pain, the nurse thought from broken ribs and the wounds on her arms and legs, where the skin had sheared away.
Hospice nurses are special. They are smart, experienced, compassionate and kind, but they are also deeply practical too. I told them that I was only an hour away and asked their advice. ‘You know what my mother wanted, between us, can we be true to that?’
When I finally arrived at Zaza’s place, she was already upstairs in bed, carried there by burly men from the local fire brigade. She would have enjoyed that. Two nurses were washing and dressing her wounds. The nurses had given her a small dose of morphine and she appeared comfortable. Her facial droop obvious, Mum gave me a sideways glance of recognition but didn’t speak.
After a couple hours, when they were done, we formulated the first of our many plans. We started with what we were going to do tonight, or to be more accurate, what I was going to do that first night to look after Mum.
It was only later, when I was alone with her, that the enormity of what I had taken on hit me. It wasn’t that together we didn’t know what to do; we did. What I felt was a mix of terror at the overwhelming sense of responsibility and commitment to do this for my mother but, at the same time, knowing that it was something I really wanted to do for her as well as for me.
Over the next few days, we got into a groove. It started with a visit from a lovely palliative care specialist who I immediately warmed to. He came with the same two hospice nurses and spoke directly to Mum. She acknowledged him with a few mumbled words. We talked about the services they offered, how we would manage pain and any side effects of the medications. He told us about the equipment we could borrow to get Zaza out of bed, to the loo and into a chair. We also found out about other community resources that would send people to come and wash and bathe my mother every day.
Later that day, Ema came down from Auckland. A few days later, my brother arrived too, and then his wife. Quite quickly, as a family, we formulated a roster to give each of us time to spend with Mum and also time for breaks. As terrible as the situation was, we warmed to our task. We were together as a family and as a result became closer than we ever had been before.
I was staggered at how well Mum did. It wasn’t long before she was able to speak more coherently and, with a lot of help, get into a chair to spend a few hours in the sun overlooking her small garden. She smoked and drank wine left-handed now. In her dark glasses, she looked every bit the ageing movie star. This was a special time that I will always treasure.
Those terrific days went on for just over a week before she began to fade. Like a bubble floating higher and higher then steadily dropping toward earth, Mum became increasingly tired and less able to do things for herself. No more trips to the chair at the bedroom window. We held the cigarettes and wine glass to her mouth now, her physical strength ebbing away fast. She was on a concoction of medicines too—one to keep her comfortable, another to ward off nausea, a third to help with her breathing.
Never her strongest suit, Zaza first stopped eating. Next, she stopped drinking, showing no interest in her evening glass of wine. Then her speech became harder to understand except, of course, when it came to knowing when she wanted another cigarette.
Before too long she drifted into a steady sleep, snoring quietly when she was flat on her back. She had a presence, my mother, powerful in life and now, so close to death, still there. Days passed and nothing changed until that terrible Friday morning of 8 June.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, she sat up in bed with a look of abject terror on her face, crying and screaming just like she had in front of the television so many years ago. Here we were, sixty years later and thousands of miles away at the edge of the world, and still the horror of her childhood came back to haunt her one last time. I was there with Ema and Les. We were distraught and did all we could to comfort her, Ema cradling Mum’s head in her arms, her doctor sons hopelessly out of their depth, all of us just wanting to get her to sleep.
At this point, Mum’s medications were being steadily injected under her skin but the doses were small and, we realised at that time, totally inadequate for what she was suffering now. We responded by increasing her dose but it was another twenty minutes before she finally drifted back to sleep, this time with a more peaceful look on her face. Later that night, she quietly stopped breathing, a smile on her face, in her own home, free at last.
Desperately sad, but at the same time relieved, we sat with her not quite knowing what to do. I called Jo, a close friend steeped in Jewish tradition. She came by and we did what Jews do when someone dies. I can hardly remember what it was now but it didn’t take long and when we were done, the three of us felt a lot better. Jo left and we hit the whiskey.
The next day Zaza left in a black car, to return home two days later for the last time. She looked good, like she was asleep, so different from what I saw when I visited my father in a funeral home so many years before. There he had a look on his face that I had never seen before; it upset me enormously then and still does today.
To the surprise of many, my mother’s funeral did not take place in a synagogue—‘I never go to a synagogue now, why would I want to go to one when I’m dead?’ she used to say. Instead it was at St Andrew’s, an inner-city church on the Terrace in Wellington, a fine place known for its tolerance. It was a moving and fabulous affair, followed by a good party in the Wellesley Club, where she had celebrated her eightieth birthday.
For the next few weekends, Ema and I flew down to Wellington to do what most children do when their parents die—go through their affairs and possessions. We started in the pantry with its bowing shelves, loaded with cans of the mundane and the exotic, most well past their use-by dates. There was enough there to feed an army or withstand a long siege. This hoarding was another manifestation of my mother’s post-holocaust mindset. There were cupboards full of photographs of us as kids, friends of my parents now long dead, Mum and Dad on holiday. There were drawers full of trinkets and costume jewellery acquired throughout the entire period of my parents’ marriage. There were also rooms full of clothes to be gone through. We packed bag after bag; most went to the Salvation Army, some terrific things to the Hospice shop, but most went to the local landfill. Mum would not have minded that. Her early childhood was spent in relative opulence before all that was lost and, after much suffering, found again in the long loving relationship she had with my father. By then, material things meant little to her; it was human contact and the warmth of her friendships that mattered.
In accordance with my mother’s wishes she was cremated, not buried, as she should have been according to Jewish lore—but about this she had always been resolute. She wanted to go the same way as her mother, whose body was burnt in the ovens of Auschwitz.
Two years later Les, Ema and I made the journey south and finally did what we promised to do—interred her ashes in my father’s grave at the cemetery she hated to visit, at Makara, near the sea on the south coast of their city.
I feel lucky and I feel privileged to have had the chance to spend so much time with my mother, my best ever patient; to look after her when she fell ill, to understand what mattered to her and, in the end, to be with her when she needed me. Now a few years down the line, I still miss her terribly but looking back on our relationship, I have no regrets. Maybe that’s as good as it gets.