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Gerta (Chason) Bagriansky

Gerta (Chason) Bagriansky

08/08/1908

Article written by Rosian Zerner

The sunflowers in her Newton garden were far taller than the woman who watered them. Yet Gerta was the giant who was not dwarfed by them and knew how to nurture the robust flowers to their place of greatest strength. That same woman who had reinvented her life in the USA and enjoyed sowing new seeds is now 100 years old. That woman was and is my mother.

I am writing to validate her life and to thank her for mine - so intertwined, so full of lessons, regrets, confrontations and finally closure. I am writing to affirm her birthday when it seems like there is nobody else left to do so. I am the daughter who is now her mother and sister, and all that she has left at her side. I am the one who has conversations with her in a world of fantasy where all the languages she once knew cannot express words. She is emotionally and physically dependent on others.

It was not always that way.

In Europe, the Holocaust had shaped her life into a place of despair and sorrow, of fear and trauma that exploded at unexpected times and put me in a state of being on constant guard. It created and left scars that enveloped the family in clouds and burst into our lifestyle and consciousness. My father, Paul, and I knew the Holocaust; we were there separately and together. Mom endured. She overcame. She contributed. Most of all she again survived to be the last in her circle of contemporaries.

Gerta Chason was born in Germany, the middle daughter of a family where education, refinement and Zionism were paramount. She studied and lived in Berlin, Copenhagen and then in Paris before being caught up in the horrors of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

She was beautiful, intelligent, talented and an independent thinker. In Berlin she would dress up as a man to attend the operas of Kurt Weil because it was unbecoming for a lady to do so. She ran away from home to study piano in Paris. She would have become a concert pianist, a teacher of piano if only she had been given a chance, if only the Holocaust had not happened. However, her studies served us well after WWII, when she provided for us as the Konzertmeister of the Lithuanian Opera in Kaunas. Paul, her husband (and my dad) was in another city, Vilnius, rebuilding his life. We were the proof that miracles happen. We were one of the few intact families whose life was spared in a country with one of the highest proportion of Jews killed in Europe. Over 90% of the Jews of Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis.

In the Kovno Ghetto, she was resourceful. She found the weeds for our soups and the potatoes

which she peeled with her frozen, delicate musician hands. She was the one who made placards showing that we were a work brigade; that saved our lives during the Grosse Aktion, when over 10,000 Jews were killed. She spearheaded our escapes from the ghetto - first mine, then my father's. Finally, she also escaped to join my father in the Vilna Ghetto where she refused for some time to wear the yellow star. Her intuition also saved her and my father's life when she would not board the train that eventually led to the killing fields of Panerai.

When my father escaped to the woods and became a partisan, mother left and went into hiding. Her fluent French, her blue eyes and fair complexion served her well. And occasionally, she even risked visiting me at my hiding places, once bringing me a most precious gift, a beautiful doll she had made herself - my only wartime toy.

And then the occupying Nazis were gone. We regrouped and it was time to escape again. She found false passports, lodging. She supported my father through the crossings to Poland, to Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where we landed in a prison. She helped him at the Arsulinen Kloster in Graz,Austria where he was the head of the Jewish section of our DP camp, and helped me write poetry. We never made it to Palestine where her parents had lived since 1935. Instead we lived in Italy for 6 years before coming to the USA.

Living in Milano was not easy at first. We slept on the stone floors at the newly established Jewish community at Via Unione, and were at the mercy of those who would feed us. There was never enough, and she gave me up again to a children's place in Selvino and then Avigliano that could provide for me - a Hachshara style training camp for the Haganah in Israel.

Soon however, my father's ingenuity and pre-war business contacts brought us again to a place where a chauffeur would drive us and a cook and housekeeper would allow mother to return to her privileged pre-war lifestyle. I returned. She enrolled me as one of the first foreigners accepted to the La Scala School of Ballet. My brother, Joachim, was born. She made our home a place filled with friends singing along to her piano or accordion accompaniment, and there were guests for dinner and again laughter in our lives. She loved vacations at the Riviera and hot springs and mountains, and lived life to the fullest. And then the Korean War made my father decide to leave it all behind and come to the USA. In his wisdom, he said that if a war was ever fought on American soil, it would be the last war of our planet.

And so it came to be that mother grew sunflowers in Newton, MA. And that was not all that grew in her garden, overflowing with vegetables and flowers. Once I counted over 300 plants in the house. Newton was the home of her cousins who had been here since the 19th century and extended family became a novelty I had not previously experienced. The grandchildren were born, and then the great grandchildren. The continuity of family life was again taken for granted.

In her home, she now invited friends to play four-handed on two pianos and to partake of four course meals she now cooked herself. Her legendary birthday parties convened friends from near and far who looked forward to these reunions in her garden or mine. The USA was good to us and Mom only sometimes realized that her many complaints about life here could not compare to the wartime life she had left behind. She preferred to forget that and not to talk about the Holocaust. She pushed away most of my attempts to touch upon those memories, but she did agree to give an interview for Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and her life story is also on a VHS cassette on the Newton Library shelf.

Age seemed irrelevant to her. Many of her friends were my age and she did not see a physician until her 80's - about the same time that she stopped driving when brakes failed, and a truck demolished her car. She walked away unscathed! And yet, she still traveled by herself to Israel, to Taipei and continued her constant entertaining. Not until after my father's death did I notice the tiredness, the onslaught of time upon her body. They had been in a symbiotic relationship that endured through mountains and valleys. Yes, endured. She was totally devoted to him and yet they pounded into each other all the traumas etched in their cells and the wish that it had been otherwise. They understood each other - and then he was gone. So were many of her friends and relatives. And then her health declined, but not her imperious ways. As long as there was someone there to listen, she would share her wisdom, until she could no longer speak the truth or understand it, and then the words themselves failed her.

And yet her face lights up as she greets me when I visit and when she looks at new spring flowers in the nursing home. No matter what, a sunset can have much, much beauty before waning, and the eyes that behold it can reflect it.

Rosian (left) with Gerta (right)