Seventy years ago, Mom smiled for this photo. She was in Sweden in the early Spring. This was one of her better smiles. Just months before, she was dying in Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Gangrene ate out her thigh. Her usefulness to her enslavers was gone. She was almost rotted enough for being thrown into the pit piled with other useless slaves.
The war ended and the Swedish Red Cross found her before the pile of dead slaves reached out for more dead company. Mom’s eyes, which were a luminescent pale blue turned hard barbed-wire-dark- blue grey. Yes, Mom was smiling for this photograph. No crinkle up of the mouth; no twinkle in her near blank stare but knowing her, I know it was a broad smile.
You see her fine sense of fashion? No more striped pajamas on her. Her slave labor was in sewing brassieres. Although it wasn’t a trade she had prior to the onset of her enslavement, it was what she was forced to do. She zoned into those brassieres for each stitch of life she could yet breathe in. And when she was released and I was a young woman, I was made those slave brassieres. I wore the clothing of her enslavement.
She stuck me so many times with pins while crafting the brassieres on my flesh. Maybe she meant to stick her enslavers. I don’t know. I know that my young breasts could have fit into any Playtex bra from the stores. My body was a normal weight for my height and age. But I became her voodoo doll. Mom made me my bras.
I hated those bras. But I didn’t hate Mom. My friends laughed at the macabre monstrosities of heavy fine cotton that I had to wear under my clothing. But I didn’t laugh at the bras.
I endured the shame of her enslavement with Mom. She was innocent. I was innocent. I was her voodoo doll. But she spelled no magic. She spelled pain. She stuck me in pain.
Happy Mother’s Day Mom. Your bras are all gone now. I threw them out as soon as I could tatter away from them. But I have never left your slavery. Stitched together as we were, I did not know how.