Talking to My Mother
I remember one of the last conversations my mom and I had about the war. I had come to visit her in Arizona where she and I made retired.
She was 83 years old and dying of all the things she was dying from, and we were sitting in her living room in the evening, and she was telling me about the war, her life in the slave labor camps.
This time, she was telling me about what it was like just before liberation.
She was telling me what the German soldiers were doing to the girls in the camps. One terrible thing after another.
And I looked up from the notes I was taking and saw that she was about to tell me something so terrible that it would just about be the worst thing I’ve ever heard, the last flash and stroke of lightning, and I said, “Mom, I don’t want to hear it.”
And she said, “I’m going to tell you. You want to know what it was like, and I’m going to tell you.”
And I said, “Please don’t tell me.”
And she said, “I’m going to tell you,” and I said, “If you do, I’ll leave and not come back. I’ll stand up and leave and you won’t see me again.”
And she said, “Okay, you’re 58 years old and still a baby, so I won’t tell you.”
