“Love is the only thing that you get more of when you give it away” is the last sentence of chapter 64 of “My Mother’s Secret” by J. L. Witterick. The 2013 novel “based on a true Holocaust story,” as the subhead reads, oozes that sentiment throughout its 208 pages. While countless nonfiction and fiction books focus readers’ attention on one of modernity’s most heinous crimes against humanity, “My Mother’s Secret” gives more attention to a heartening story.
The chapters are short, yet Witterick’s storytelling is beautiful in its simplicity. She begins chapters with strong, clear sentences, such as: “You never get used to the fear,” or “Every day is night, so I dream of seeing the sun.”
The novel gives voice first to Helena, living with her brother, Damian, and her Polish mother, Franciszka, who has left her Ukrainian, Nazi-sympathizing husband because she recognizes the cruelty that is building in 1930s Germany. They are living in a tiny, two-bedroom home among Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews in Franciszka’s hometown of Sokal, Poland. When the story opens, Franciszka raises vegetables and chickens to sell, while Helena lands a secretarial job and Damian works in an oil refinery.
After the Nazis invade Poland in 1939, the terrible treatment of Jews and their forced roundup into ghettos motivates Franciszka to allow her home to become a hiding place. Two Jewish brothers and their wives, who escape the ghetto when they understand that an upcoming train trip will mean death, hide in Franciszka’s pigsty; a Jewish doctor with his wife and son cram themselves in her makeshift cellar under the kitchen floorboards; and, a defecting, pacifist German soldier forces his tall frame into her narrow attic.
Cleverly, the pigs’ noises cover any coughs and sneezes coming from the pigsty. To truly throw off the Nazis from the fact that anyone could possibly be hiding in her cellar, located right beneath her dining table, Franciszka invites a few Nazis to dinner and feeds them her exceptional homemade sauerkraut, which they say is better than any they have ever tasted.
Eventually, one of the German soldiers, Vilheim, who sneaks away to enjoy more of the sauerkraut and visit with Franciszka because she reminds him of his oma (grandma), reveals to her that he cannot carry out his duties. When he asks her to hide him, so he does not have to kill Jews or Russian soldiers, he says, she simply “puts her finger to her lips … Then she gives me a warm hug while saying in a soft voice, ‘I will help you.’”
After Damian is killed working in an underground effort to sneak supplies to Jews hiding in a nearby forest, it is up to Franciszka, with her daughter’s knowledge, to become what the Jews eventually deemed “righteous among the nations,” an honorific used to describe people who risked their own lives to save others.
Even though Helena falls in love with her German employer, Casmir, she cannot reveal to him her mother’s brazen deeds.
The book ends with the character of Helena reflecting on her mother, who risked everything, even her daughter’s life, to give strangers a chance at living their lives. “After my mother passed away, some people asked me, ‘Why? Why do you think she hid the Jews?’ The honest answer is, ‘I don’t know …’ We did not think of ourselves as extraordinary. All we knew was that we needed to be strong to see it through, and thankfully we did.”
But it is a quote before the epilogue that gives readers something to chew on: “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” It is a quote by American journalist Sydney J. Harris, who died in the 1980s. His words echo those quoted at the novel’s opening, “To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all,” written by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
The words also echo the distinctly famous ones of German pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, before he was executed by firing squad at a German concentration camp on April 9, 1945, said, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
