Rosemary Norman texts

I don't speak German. My mother was a German speaking immigrant who came to England by chance from Ventura, California, she said. But I was English, she said. I went to Paris and scattered her ashes in the famous cemetery of Père Lachaise. She adored Marcel Proust. My mother's father was a major in the Irish Fusiliers, when all Ireland was part of Britain. He married her mother in California, an Austrian who died young in the great epidemic of Spanish flu. Only one of my grandparents was born in England, but I seem to look English and sound English. My mother had an exciting time in the British Army, learning to shoot down German bombers, though her success rate was nil. Last summer I was in Hamburg. In a park close to the Altona Bahnhof I saw "Black Form", a sculpture put there to commemorate the millions of Jewish people killed by the Nazis. "But is it art ?" an unknown hand had sprayed in pink, in English, on the dark blocks. In white, the words "Fuck you" partly obscured the question. I sometimes find prejudices in myself that I don't recognise as my own. I told my mother, once, I thought they came from her. She said sorry. From early on her father took little part in her life. Her great-grandmother placed her in convent in Louisiana. Later my own father was an unwelcome stranger to me. The "Black Form" sculpture broods in my eyes. It disturbs my sense of space and my thinking. It doesn't help. It doesn't bring anyone back. It focuses a dark resentment and feeds fear and guilt within me. I am at once involved in the deaths of millions. I feel an edge of complicity graze against my hand. But it's time to move on. The train slides the monument away. Hey, lighten up ! Ventura's a great suburb of Los Angeles. Maybe it was called Buena Ventura before the gold rush. Before the gringos came. Forty years ago I travelled west from Krakow. When the train stopped, everyone looked at me, expecting me to get off. Oswiecim. The station name in Polish. Gently, the train restarted and left Auschwitz a place unseen. Would I have got off if I had known? What would I have done in Auschwitz? My mother was born in Ventura, California. There's no-one I know is living who could confirm that, or deny it. What would she have done if I had drowned as I almost did, off the coast of Italy when I was twenty-three ? The man who got help, then, and saved me, was a Yugoslav, on paper. But he knew, and told me, he was a Serb.