Carol Bergman

Preface: A Journey Begins

My journey began in earnest. At the time, my mother was seventy-seven and I was forty-five. After a lifetime of silence on the subject of the Holocaust, I insisted that before it was too late, my mother and I should attempt recording an oral history. After many months of procrastination, she finally agreed.

We met on a Sunday in her home, just the two of us sitting at the kitchen table. The house was quiet; my stepfather was out playing golf. "No more excuses," I began, gently.

At first, my mother kept asking whether I was certain the tape recorder was working properly, or if I had noticed the new bird feeder outside the window, but she soon forgot where she was and told one story after another about her years as a child and young adult in Vienna. One of these stories was about Fritzi Burger, my mother's second cousin. Fritzi was a champion figure skater and, by the age of sixteen or so, was very well known throughout Europe. Later, she went on to become a silver medalist in the 1928 and 1932 Olympics finishing second behind her perennial arch-rival, Sonja Henie.

Everyone in Vienna followed Fritzi's career avidly, as they did all sports celebrities. But my mother had a special interest in Fritzi. They were only two years apart in age and they were related. My mother had pleasant memories of going ice skating with Fritzi at the Wien Eislaufverein, a famous outdoor rink, still in existence, in the center of the city. My mother skated mostly on weekends, sometimes with her mother- my grandmother, Nanette- who was a very fine ice dancer herself, and then, as she got older, with her friends. Fritzi was often there, too, though she also trained at a rink on the other side of the city.

It was an event when Fritzi turned up at the Eislaufverein and my mother took advantage of it. The two girls held hands and skated round and round the rink together. Others must have looked on enviously. Many commented that Fritzi and my mother looked like sisters, which tickled my mother--an only child-- even more.

My mother's description of Fritzi made her seem much older and more worldly than any of the other young people in the family. Perhaps this was because Fritzi was a celebrity and my mother looked up to her. In truth, my mother only knew Fritzi from afar; they were never intimates and saw each other only occasionally at the ice rink or at family gatherings.

"Whatever happened to Fritzi?" I asked. What I meant was, had she survived the war or been killed in a camp? My mother didn't know and was reluctant to hypothesize. Fritzi existed unscathed in the remote and innocent past, untarnished by Hitler's genocide or the agony of the Diaspora. So, too, did many other members of my mother's family. It seemed important to my mother to keep them there. But my questions-- unrelenting, like those of a persistent child--forced her to move on, beyond the innocent past, through the darkness of the Nazi era, and into the present time. That was, after all what we had agreed to do together, however difficult.

"Tell me what you do know," I suggested. "And we'll go on from there."

But my mother had difficulty moving on. Instead, she continued reminiscing, almost obsessively, about Fritzi. She remembered that Fritzi's father had been a twin and that he and his brother, Fritzi's uncle, were often Fritzi's chaperones at competitions. She couldn't remember Fritzi's mother at all, or picture her, or recall her name, although she thought it might be Sadie Feldmahr. Feldmahr was my grandmother Nanette's maiden name. She remembered Fritzi's engagement to a German bob sledder, an engagement that was abruptly and mysteriously terminated. And she recalled that Fritzi was already married by her early twenties, to a Japanese man, perhaps a diplomat, my mother thought.

Fritzi had ended her skating career sometime after the 1932 Olympics. She'd gone to live in London, returning to Vienna with a baby boy just before Hitler's annexation of Austria in the spring of 1938. My mother has visual memories of kimonos on display either in Fritzi's home or the home of another relative. They were wonderfully exotic, as was Fritzi and her handsome, Japanese husband. There, Fritzi's history, and the thread of my mother's memory, is broken.

My mother made no attempt to reconnect with Fritzi after the war; why should she when they had never been close. Now she was thinking about her again. It was odd, wasn't it, she said, that she didn't know what had happened to Fritzi. Yet when I asked if she'd like to search for her, she was surprisingly lukewarm to the idea. She didn't know how she would feel if we found her, she explained, or what she would say to her if they ever spoke again.

I turned off the tape recorder and offered to make some tea. Fritzi's ghost hovered, resonating with loss and pain.

"I have a sense of something unspoken here," I said. "Something about Fritzi you know but cannot say, or something you know but cannot articulate."

I could see my mother's face, which has always been unusually supple and expressive, become a scowl.

"I don't know why you are so interested in Fritzi," she said impatiently. "She's not worth it."

"Her story sounds interesting to me," I said, puzzled by the abrupt shift in my mother's mood. Just moments before she couldn't stop talking about Fritzi.

"There's a lot about Vienna you don't understand," she said.

"Isn't that why we're having this conversation?," I asked.

"There's a lot that's not worth knowing," she said.
"Everything is worth knowing," I argued. "Even if it hurts."

My tenacity alarmed my mother. In the past, like other children of survivors, I had felt protective of my mother and accepted her evasions without question; now I was no longer willing to do so.

"I'm going to search for Fritzi," I told her, "because I have to. I think she'll lead us where we need to go."