My Mother Was A Sex Slave For The Waffen-SS

I'm old now, everyone involved is dead or probably dead, so at last I can tell this story. When I was thirteen I found three spiral notebooks my mother was hiding in a never-used cabinet in our basement. The cabinet sat in the shadows behind the furnace, and what drew me to it was the oddness of the cobwebs back there in the dimness-- several well-developed cobwebs up high but none down low.

The two doors at the bottom opened without a sound, revealing six fat tomato sauce cans neatly stacked as concealment. Behind them were the notebooks.

All through my childhood I explored the shadowy nooks and rarely visited regions of people's houses. I'd go to my grandmother's house and spend hours, alone or with a cousin or two, crawling through her huge pantry, stepping lightly through the attic, and examining every corner of the garage accessible to a six-year-old. The object was to find something I wanted to examine. It could be anything from a potato to a steel power drill.

My mother was writing a book about her life in Warsaw during the early years of WWII, when she was 22. The Nazi officers kept her on the top floor of the Polonia Palace Hotel, in what read like luxury to me. There was an elevator to the roof and she was allowed to use it. She sunbathed up there in the late spring and all through the summer of 1939. There was an outdoor shower and she had terrycloth robes.

I was thirteen and at the stage of life when you're getting good at arguing with your parents about their ideas. My mother had just told me I had to stay in my room for an entire weekend, and in an angry instant I said "You were a whore." I said it loud enough for my Dad to hear. He was on the living room sofa reading Time magazine.

The truth was, I wasn't thinking of her as a whore at all. I was reading through her secret spiral notebooks and she had become an enriched mother to me, with dimensions I had never glimpsed. I admired her handwriting for its tight, graceful precision. I paused over every phrase, every imagined picture. I was immersed in the best of ways, and at thirteen it was most like being deep inside a great comic book.

My parents separated within days, were divorced within months, and I never saw her again. I have no idea what the rest of her life turned out to be. She was 39 years old and still very beautiful when she stepped into the airport limousine and rode away.

What did I know? I was thirteen and angry about being sent to my room.

Soon my Dad remarried and eventually he fathered two more children, both girls.

During the two years following the divorce, as the immensity of what I'd done slowly revealed itself to me, I became someone who could never have spoken those four words, no matter what the circumstance.

My Dad said only one thing about it. It was always the same, word for word. He said, "Our marriage began with too may lies." That was it. Never anything else. He was Cavalier. And he never suggested, in any way, not once, that he thought I'd done anything wrong.

I've checked each year to see if Mother's book came out, and now I can Google it in many languages. "Marlene Gleeman 1939 Warsaw Prisoner Nazi" is one of many I use. She'd be 90 now. Maybe it was a novel and not a memoir. Maybe she's dead and it's packed in a box somewhere. Maybe she never wrote another word after she left.

These days I watch television, usually news, movies, or animal shows. I have a girlfriend, and since my retirement three years ago we have committed a string of crimes. So far, we've been able to elude the law.