The Blogs: A “Schindler" Survivor - My Mother's Love | Robert Don

I was raised with overbearing affection by mother that I felt growing up – no one could have loved me more. She was always there for me for many things, including coming to my ballgames, and walking me to and from school, being too afraid of kids in my school who bullied me for being a fat little kid before and after class. I couldn’t also stay home alone or with a babysitter until I was 14. How much I needed to always be with my mother, even coming with her to adult social functions in synagogues or events which Holocaust survivor organizations planned. I even slept in her bed, often afraid to sleep alone until I was 11, or 12. But was it really what I needed – her smothering affection that forced me to feel insecure when I was older and sometimes even today, often not convinced that I’ve been able to stand on my own.

The overbearing protection of my mother that I felt later in life only left me that enabled. It wasn’t healthy. Growing up, I always considered myself very lazy, both physically and mentally. I never exercised much, didn’t study hard and worked part-time in high school for my father delivering cars for his automobile delivery business. It was just a mindless, cush job and I didn’t want to do much else. I blamed my mother for how I perceived myself, being incredibly lethargic. She never pushed me to have ambition and want to excel in life. I wasn’t encouraged to study, work hard, aspire to my stand on my own – really not even to have to think for myself. I was raised to be that dependent on her, so I would never leave her. How could she be alone after everything that happened to her in the Holocaust, living in a concentration camp when she was 15 without her parents and six brothers and sisters, who were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. My father also left her when she was pregnant with me for a German woman. I felt later in life that the overreaching affection, which let me feel that protected growing up was also manipulation. It let her lens of undeserved, bitter hatred for my stepmother penetrate as far in me as her.

I guess it’s pretty shocking understanding how much I needed my mother growing up that I left home when I was 18. But I didn’t have another choice. It was for my for my own survival, realizing that I couldn’t live with my mother anymore, let alone my brother who probably needed to be institutionalized for his spiraling mental disability after his nervous breakdown a few years earlier.

As I’ve told in the memoir I’ve written – “In The Midst of Darkness,” my mother’s trauma due to the Holocaust had finally reached an impasse and often left her delusional. The trauma my brother and I inherited from our mother also eventually left my brother mentally disabled. I left home knowing that what was destroying her might take with me her, or the fate of my brother probably would be my own if I stayed. But unrelenting guilt followed me. I often felt that I had abandoned my mother in her condition, when I left, especially knowing how much she protected growing up. What I needed to realize is that what she’d done was more for her than me.

Betrayal also haunted me when I left home and began to develop a relationship with my stepmother. She was my mother’s bitter enemy for a lifetime. The guilt and betrayal never left me until standing next to my stepmother, while visiting my mother lying in bed five weeks before she died. When my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, my stepmother put aside over two decades of hatred between them and became her primary caretaker. The childhood trauma that often defined me, I’d finally overcame after something my mother not I did. It let me reconcile everything I couldn’t move past when I left home.

Its pretty well known for Holocaust survivors, that overprotection of their children is common, hearing the stories of how the Nazi’s separated families, murdered children and any others that couldn’t work before everyone else. But I would never forget, her overprotection growing up was also that she didn’t want me to leave her. How could she be alone after the loss of that many family members and a husband who left her being pregnant, that she loved too much. What that abandonment alone must have done, after everything else that happened to her. Maybe not longer after they were married, she even knew that my father never loved her.

But I wished that I would never have blamed my mother as much as I did, despite how often as I grew up would know that her affection had ruined me more than it saved me. After everything she’d went through, I’m not certain anyone else would have been able to act any differently.