Himmler’s Curtains

For the first eighteen years of Simon Weisz’s life his parents were at pains to keep their past concealed from him. All he knew for sure was that they had grown up in Hungary and that they had arrived in Britain after the Second World War. It was only as he reached manhood that they started to confide their carefully guarded secrets to him: that they were Jewish, and that his mother had experienced the appalling horrors of Nazi persecution.

In conversations over the following decades, Simon’s mother gradually, often reluctantly, revealed more of her past: from the growing oppression her family had had to endure in the late 1930s, to her deportation first to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbrück, to the brutal death march she withstood from the ruins of Berlin in 1945. As he pieced her testimony together, Simon came to realise how the memories she had fought so hard to suppress continued to haunt her in the form of terrifying flashbacks and moments of extreme frustration and anger. And he started to understand how her concealed trauma had, in turn, shaped his own development and the course of his life.

Himmler’s Curtains is both a visceral account of a Holocaust survivor’s experiences, and an impressive study of the impact of suffering on two generations of a family. It also movingly reveals the high psychological price exacted by silence.