Simon Weisz’s mother had a privileged upbringing in Hungary. The daughter of a Jewish family, she wound up in Ravensbrück and then Auschwitz during the war. She was fortunate to survive and after the war, helped by the Allies, Ildiko found herself a house previously occupied by Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler. There, she and three fellow survivors make dresses from the curtains, literally turning horror into something beautiful.
Himmler’s Curtains is full of startling vignettes like this. It slips back and forth, between the author’s mother’s experiences during the Holocaust and her subsequent arrival in England, and his own complicated adolescence. As a child Weisz was packed off to boarding school. His father comes across as unfeeling; his mother as vain and disturbed. He came of age as a gay man during the Aids crisis in the late 1980s. The story is sometimes hard to follow but undoubtedly there is a lot to unpack.
Moreover it’s beautifully written, and was recently shortlisted for the Footnote x Counterpoints Writing Prize. Deservedly so: it’s both a vivid portrait both of Holocaust survival and of a marriage that probably never should have outlasted the honeymoon. It’s also rich with postwar period detail, from the mother’s monthly lunches with her friends to the way throughout family life unpleasantness was brushed under the carpet and feelings never aired. The trauma visited upon the second generation of survivors is abundantly clear.
Yet I also found this book profoundly unsettling. In the acknowledgements Weisz makes brief mention of his sister. Nothing unusual about that in a memoir – except that for the preceding 272 pages she is not referenced at all. Instead, the book presents Weisz as a lonely only child, the sole progeny of a marriage forged out of exile, tragedy, concealment and a desire to be authentically English.
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