“Yes, your mother was always fascinated by my story”, said Greta. I was taken aback. This wasn’t at all what I had expected.

I sat with her for a while, but all I managed to learn was that she was a retired teacher. You know how these things are, scores of people milling through the apartment, everyone wanting to make themselves known to you, to shake your hand, to wish you long life…

Mum had been telling me about Greta for as long as I could remember, but this was the first time I had actually met her. She had come for a condolence visit during the Shiva, the seven days of mourning that followed Mum’s death.

Mum had told me that they had grown up together, that they had been the best of friends. At the time, Greta was being brought up by well-to-do Jews with no children of their own. From the stories Mum had told me, it was clear that she had been terribly upset when Greta had left forever. This was after the war, when they were both fourteen.

For Greta was to be reunited with the parents she could barely remember, and who spoke a language she could now hardly understand. They were to live in poverty and hardship in a transition camp, one of the infamous Ma’abarot, in that new State of Israel. The Ma’abarot were, in effect, refugee camps, though no one ever actually called them that. Most of them were just sprawling tent camps: hot and dusty in summer, wet and muddy in winter. Sometimes two or three families shared a tent. The lucky ones got ramshackle wooden huts.

The camps were home, often for many years while permanent housing was being constructed, to many hundreds of thousands of immigrants. They were an uneasy mix: on the one hand, whole communities of Jews who had left their homes in Arab countries, where they no longer felt safe; and on the other, the remnants of European Jewry, human shells, veterans of Hell on Earth, left homeless after the war.

Greta’s parents were of the latter kind.

She had been sent to England from Germany as a small child on one of the last trains out, along with hundreds of other children, as part of a project called the Kindertransport. Greta was no doubt one of the few of these children whose parents had survived the war.

That was all I remembered from Mum’s stories. I knew nothing about this woman sitting beside me, but she was the only person around who had known Mum as a child, the only one who knew the answers I needed.

I was dismayed by her cynicism. What was she saying? That Mum had been attracted to her as a curiosity? How could that be? I had always been under the impression that theirs had been a close friendship; that her ‘story’, as she called it, had been only in the background of their relationship, before the harsh reality of her life had taken her away.
On the other hand, it explained to me why they had not become friends again, once Mum had followed her to Israel, twenty-five years later. I think that was what Mum had been hoping for at the time, to relieve that old pain of their parting, to reach some sort of closure.

I had to share with Greta something that Mum had kept repeating to me in her last few weeks, a painful childhood memory of hers that I needed to understand. I knew this would be my only ever opportunity to hear a frank opinion from someone who had known her as a child. And Greta had known her only as a child, so her view of Mum was not influenced by the person she had later become. I found her reflections about Mum valuable and soothing, and I was grateful.

I’m sorry now that I didn’t ask Greta about herself and about her ‘story’ – though she hadn’t seemed inclined to talk about it in any case. At the time it was Mum I needed to hear about. There was no room for anything else. All the same, in the end I was left with a hollow feeling of yet another little loss; of one more certainty that had turned out to be false.