AUNTIE TALI

AUNTIE TALI

Right there on the railroad platform, she collapsed in front of me. The arriving medics proclaimed her dead.  I was 16 and she had been 66.  Our lives had overlapped for a short time, but her influence lingered.

Natalie was my father’s aunt and substitute mother. We called her Auntie Tali. She had always been a spinster with interesting ideas. Once she made me a salad of stinging nettles. When I complained that they scratched my throat she reprimanded me, “Papperlapap- nonsense don’t be such a wimp, it’s healthy.” As a teacher she believed in educational excellence and academic rigor. She had taught me how to read when my laissez faire mother had paid little attention to my schoolwork.

Auntie Tali and Hans in 1947 trying to put together their lives again. Tali is rail thin, having sent a share of her bread coupons to Hans.

But she was also the one who had sent the boy my father once was to an elite Nazi boarding school for exceptionally gifted children. She always liked a good deal. Free tuition with sports facilities, like sailing on the nearby lake, paragliding and golf, all included, looked like one. But her favorite nephew was going to pay for it for the remainder of his life, burdened with an education that had been inhuman.  When he returned from the war, 18 years old, wounded and broken, she matter-of-factly nursed him back to health and kicked him back out into the world to belatedly complete his education and take a PhD.

Not once did I hear my father question her disastrous decision to send him to that fateful school.  But when he married my mother, he chose a girl who did not even have a high school diploma. Auntie Tali never forgave him.