Lilly Nahmias Halfin, By Tatiana von Furstenberg

I watched her heal. My 4 foot 11-inch grandmother. She was broken from the years she spent in Auschwitz- Birkenau, and Ravensbruck; the violent inhumanity and horror that was inflicted on her by mankind, day after day. The unbelievable betrayal by human beings on this twenty-one-year-old innocent girl. The forced tattoos would have been enough to traumatize her; she who until that moment had been able to relax in a previously unviolated body. And that was just day one... of fourteen months. I knew her as pristine, composed, bright-eyed, even peppy. Her cracks had been squeezed together by the gummy glue of other’s expectations.

My darling grandmother who I watched break apart, crack up when she could no longer hold it together. She hid underneath the table, lunging at anyone who came close. That’s how petrified she was of people. Her boyfriend had taken her to Germany for the weekend, to a hotel where he was doing business. And, that’s where she cracked. Was it being surrounded by the language once again, after 34 years of not hearing it? Or, was it the smell of nearby pastures and geraniums in the air? Or, the piercing blue eyes all around her? Whatever it was, it was enough to turn her mind upside down, and the look in her deep dark brown Jewish eyes was forever changed. She sat in the corner of a mental hospital, and eventually in the corner of our living room for a long and frightening year.

Here she was, the woman who had raised me for all of my eight years, and who had never left my side. She was here in body, but she was no longer here. She lost her words. She lost herself. She had literally been scared out of her mind. But, the faint and faded pilot light of her powerful spirit wasn’t completely dead. And, with time, a lot of time and safety, and by witnessing our patient love, she began to trust. She began to believe that not only were we not going to hurt her, but that we knew her even with no words. We knew to respect that she did not want to be approached. And so, we loved her through the power of our hearts from across the room. And, she started to meet our eyes and believe in us.

There was no rush, we would wait for her to thaw out and love her even if she never did. A few years later, it was she who broke it off with her domineering Swiss-German boyfriend, whom her subconscious had selected to resolve her trauma with, by reliving it. But, this time on her terms, thereby repairing it. They were driving home from dinner one night, and he remarked how peculiar it was that there were now three lines, not one or two, down the middle of the road. He was drunk, and she was defenseless again, sitting in his passenger seat. She left that relationship the very next day, and never looked back.

She was not defenseless, she was empowered to leave. And, she did. Lily had survived the war, she was not going to be killed in a senseless drunk driving accident at the hands of a large blue-eyed man. And, years later, when she felt wholly satisfied that she had triumphed over her final challenge, which was to meet and love a child of mine, she let herself go on that same victorious note. It was on her terms that she allowed herself to succumb to the dreaded death that had haunted her; the corpses that she witnessed plagued her psyche so vividly that she slept with the lights on all of her life.

My grandmother was my protector from day one. It was she who first noticed that my legs were stiffened by a birth defect, and it was she who translated all of my Richard Scary word books into French so that I would learn a language that we could speak together. She called me her Oxygen and said I gave her a reason to breathe, a reason to be. And we sang and joked and cultivated ideas together and learned. We nourished each other with everything that matters in this life. So when I became pregnant with my daughter, she made a promise to herself and to me, that she would meet my child. Even though the flesh was already decomposing from her frail, yet fluid-filled limbs as her organs failed, neither she nor I ever doubted that she would make it.

And my mother didn’t either, pushing anyone out of the way who suggested that it was a bad idea to travel with a dying woman from Belgium to Los Angeles less than a week after she rose from a self-induced coma, where I believe she gathered her strength. She met my daughter in the hospital. She stood up out of her wheelchair, and her deep dark brown eyes met my daughter’s deep dark brown eyes, and she knew it was finally okay for her to go. I would not be alone anymore. She had done her job. My grandmother passed seven days later, glowing with the pride of her final victory. I write this so many years later, with huge long-awaited tears falling down my cheeks. And my heart feels open again.

I put my grief on ice for too long, like her, I held it together with the gummy glue of duty and expectation. I was a brand new mother when I lost one of my parents, my grandmother. I had just put my daughter down in her cradle for the first time since coming home from the hospital when my mother brought my grandmother by for one last time before she took her home to Belgium. We knew it was our last time, and the enormity of that was not lost on either of us. I nearly stopped breathing when I watched her walk bravely out the door, and away from me forever. But, for the sake of giving my daughter the fresh start of an unburdened life, I kept my grief at bay by not feeling it. Until now, until today, until this story. In everlasting love and gratitude for us, Lily and Tatiana.