My Slipping Ego

When Indy has a piece of cheese, she almost always tells me not to do toots and make it stinky. Correspondingly, when I toot in her vicinity, the first thing she says is, “I don’t want any cheese now.” This is just something that she started saying, and I have no idea where it came from; most likely a previous toot-and-cheese-combination experience of which I am unaware.

I started my new job last week as a home care worker for Holocaust survivors, living here in Brooklyn. The first client to which I was assigned is a lady in her seventies whose husband died sometime in the previous year. She misses him greatly but she is mentally and physically healthy and independent. She is teaching me to cook and I am enjoying it immensely. She never wastes anything. She knows all kinds of tricks, like rubbing the mixers with flour to get every last bit of batter off, or pulling the sheets tightly from opposite corners; an easy way to achieve an ironed look. I make coleslaw now.

She tells me about her experiences during the war and they are of course, horrific. It’s certainly an experience to hear it first hand and to look her in the eyes when she tells me what went on. When the war started, she was three, her brother was an infant, and her sister was five. They came from Poland. They had traveled from their town in Poland to a town nearby, with a large synagogue. The Nazis gathered up all the Jews in that town and imprisoned them in the synagogue. Then they set it on fire. My client was in that synagogue with her mother. Being a mother, I think about what that must have been like to be in that place with your three children; helpless to save them from such a terrible death. Though they did not die that day. They survived because a high ranking Nazi ordered the people to be let out because it was, “too early in the war for that kind of thing.” She and her family were lucky to be by an exit. She said many had already died, or been terribly burned.

They were in hiding for a year after that in Poland. Then they escaped to Russia, where they didn’t fare much better. She said the Russians hated the Jews too. She told me a story about her family sharing their meal with a mother and child who were starving. She said she finished her portion and was still very hungry, and began to complain to her grandmother that she shouldn’t be giving away their food to strangers when her own granddaughter was still hungry. She said her grandmother gave her a pinch she will never forget and said, “You’re not hungry enough to let them starve.” Her uncle, who did not escape the camps was forced to fill in a mass grave into which his brother had been thrown, alive.

I have two other clients so far. I have another woman who was nineteen when they took her to the camps in Czechoslovakia. She and her three siblings all managed to stay alive. They in turn, saved their mother who also survived, though she lost her father. I played scrabble with her the other day, and she kicked my ass so badly, it was embarrassing. I should have known I was in trouble when she handed me a cheat sheet with two and three letter words before the game began.

The male client I have talks around the subject of the Holocaust. He talks about speaking six languages including German and Russian, but when asked how he learned them, he just says, “in the war.” It makes me wonder what he experienced, but I won’t push him to share anything. He is distrusting and glib, though he smiles when he talks about his wife. When I asked him if he goes everyday to visit her at the hospital, he said, “She’s the only wife I’ve got.”

Five-Axis Diagnosis for Virginia Woolf

Axis I   296.54    Bipolar Disorder I, Severe with Psychotic Features, Mood Incongruent

Axis II               None

Axis III Insomnia, Use of Chloral as a Sedative

Axis IV             WWII, House in London Destroyed, Fear of Nazi Invasion with Jewish                                 Husband, Oppression as a Woman, History of Sexual Abuse from Family

Axis V              GAF= 31-40

Why didn’t I pick somebody simpler like Eddy Izzard? Transvestic Fetishism, done. Easy. Why do I make things difficult for myself?