Sauci Bosner

Last Tuesday I visited Blaricum for the first time. My friend Denise and I have eaten lunch together two times in the year and a half that we know each other. I have been to her home once and spoken with her on numerous occasions in the course of getting to know each other. When we met again, her hair longer, mine shorter, she suggested that we drive to her birthplace. She wanted to show me the house in which she grew up, the school she attended, those frozen places in time which cast their shadows across her memories of growing up. Roots. Her roots.

It seemed more than appropriate to me, being that we worked together on the Steven Spielberg Visual History project, collecting testimonies from concentration camp survivors and people who were forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust. We communicated mostly by telepathy throughout the year we worked together, using faxes and phone calls when all else failed. Most of the times we created together were inspiring so I welcomed once again the opportunity to share a meal and take a walk along another branch of her life.

The goddess graced our plans with sunshine on that crispy leaf cracking autumn afternoon. While driving, Denise pointed out where she rode her bicycle, the Montessori school in Laren with its white washed arches and dilapidated outhouses, the overgrown hedges before her house, the vegetable store where I stopped to buy cabbage, onions, and carrots still covered with clumps of dried soil. We stopped for pumpkin soup and warm French bread at a little restaurant when I asked if this is where she and her family came to drink coffee… Denise laughed at my innocence. “Oh no…..no no no no! You don’t pay for coffee when you live five minutes away.” Post war Holland, essentially different from growing up in Irvington, lower middle class when going out for Chinese take-away on a Sunday evening was the escape from the drugery of t.v. dinners, pizza, Kentucky fried chicken…We did everything we could to escape the reality of poverty. Here in Holland, in het Gooi women read the LadyÕs Home Journal and decorated their homes “ American style” while we read Anne Frank’s diary and knew for certain that everyone in Holland ran around sticking his finger in dikes while wearing wooden shoes
After lunch, we decided to take a walk through the fields spotted with cows, horses and heather.

This triggered a memory of my visit to Bergen Belsen, a former concentration camp in Germany. I had just completed a four day training in past life echoes together with a German colleague Matthias in the city of Celle. The participants wanted to celebrate and invited us for a meal in a Chinese restaurant in town. It was crowded, always a good sign, and after ordering soup and noodles, I decided to ask the following question: Is there a concentration camp in the neighborhood? Now, you may think that this was a crazy question to pose in the middle of a Chinese restaurant, but it seemed very logical to me at the time. You see, every morning before we started our session of the day, I went for a short walk to get some fresh air and collect flowers and stones for the altar we were creating. There were train tracks running behind the house where we were staying and about the third morning I realized that it could very well be the case that traincars filled with Jews, gays, gypsies, communists had passed to their death by this very place where I was walking and doing my early morning stretches. So I just asked,” Excuse me….”

The woman sitting next to me stopped her chopsticks in mid air. “You mean Sauci, you donÕt know where you are? Bergen Belsen is about 20 kilometers from here! In fact, come with me outside now. I have to show you something.” She stood up and took my arm, pushing me in the direction of the front door. Once outside I looked above the pagoda entrance and saw a stained glass window with a six pointed star in it. “Sauci,” she whispered,” this building used to be a synagogue. Celle had one of the biggest Jewish communities in Germany. Look, here is a plaque. This building next to it is a museum. It says that at this place 30.000 Jews were deported to Bergen Belsen….Come quick, around the corner I think you can see another star…” At the back of the restaurant, when I looked carefully between the garbage bins and washlines, I could see the women’s entrance to the synagogue…I remember standing there, looking up at the stars in the sky, and just staring into space.

That German woman whose name I’ve long forgotten, took me the following morning to Bergen Belsen, to walk among the purple heather and wonder how long it takes for bones to dis-integrate…It was colder, the trees were covered in light frost and heavily laden gray clouds hovered low in the sky. I remember trying to walk cautiously between the stones placed in memory of those dead bodies, thrown recklessly one on top of the other, row after row. Mass graves, hundreds of them, and names, hundreds of them, engraved on stones. The only evidence that each name stood for a person. Someone who had lived and had been killed. I was searching for a place to say Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead which in actuality is an affirmation of life and does not mention the word death once. I needed to find the right spot to stand, to give testimony, to let the dead souls know that I was alive, to know if this had been a place where I had lived, a time when I had died.

Suddenly I stood still in my tracks. I felt a warmth on my face as I half spoke/sang those ancient words of mourning. Something happened, moved, inside and outside. I knew I was finished when a strange cool breeze lifted from my shoulders. I opened my eyes and saw my friends standing next to me, smiles on their faces. Only when we said our good-byes two hours later at the train station did they tell me the following story… As soon as my eyes were closed a golden ray of sunlight broke through the clouds and remained until the moment I finished my prayers.

I could have almost forgotten this story had it not been for the heather we crossed on our walk that Tuesday afternoon and the fact that Denise wanted to visit the graveside of her mother. It had been her wish to be cremated and the desire of her daughters to bury the urn with her ashes in a little cemetery close by. We decided to drive there before making our way back to Amsterdam. Denise explained that many Jewish people having non-Jewish partners moved to the Gooi after the war. This was new information for me. We started to walk through the cemetery, checking the dates and names chiseled into the various colored stones. Some people had miniature gardens, candles, or pictures on their graves. I had only seen this in Italian cemeteries before. So there we were, walking quietly through this graveyard, almost whispering, searching for familiar sounding names, heading towards a wide open field freshly plowed on one side, recently sprinkled green grass on the other side. An older woman was busy tending the graveside of a young child, placing handpainted pictures and potted plants with precision around its edges. As we approached the site where Denise’s mother was buried I told her of the Tibetan traditions concerning death rituals, one of them being the belief that the soul was finally free to follow its personal evolution after a period of approximately three years, often returning before that time to help loved ones get settled after their loss. Fate would have it that Denise’s mother had moved on two years and fifty one weeks before…

****To everything, turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn turn turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven.
A time to be born, a time to die.
A time to laugh, a time to cry.
A time to love, a time of hate
A time to forgive a time to forget
A time to refrain from judgement
To everything turn turn turn****

by Sauci Bosner