Given how old I was feeling on my 42nd birthday, it was probably a mistake spending the day sorting through my son Emmet’s baby clothes, three bags full or, as he once sang the nursery rhyme, three bag fool. I was a three-bag fool all right, crying from the outset of this unavoidable rite of maternal passage.
The sentimental favorites were still scented with the perfumed paper that once lined his bureau drawers. There was a soft hat embroidered with a heart, his first gift, which was impossibly small and strangely alien to this first-time mother. Oh, it occurred to me, this thinglet inside will need clothes. There was another hat, a jaunty cobalt blue and yellow number, that Emmet wore on a walk one day in autumn, the glorious season of his birth. A fire-red leaf dropped into his carriage, alit on the blue hat, and created an effortless, sublime work of art. I’ve kept it for the memory of that moment. And then there is a little green sweater, the most precious item of all.
On the second day of Emmet’s life, the day we learned that he had irreversible brain damage, four doctors crowded my hospital room, covering their lack of a prognosis with a numbing display of gray films showing the inside of my son’s head. All I heard was that he might never ride a bicycle. After dropping this bombshell, they urged my husband and me to go out for a walk, to physically remove ourselves from the place that suddenly had become hell.
I wobbled down to the lobby where tables full of hand-knit sweaters were on sale to support the hospital. A miniature green sweater with Venetian glass buttons caught my eye. I picked it up and put it down repeatedly. What need was there for an expensive sweater when everything was on hold? Then something fierce and ancient bloomed in me. Bikes or no bikes, my son would have a good life, with leaf-green cardigans and all the kisses he could stand. No matter what. It was the one thing that I could control in an unpredictable world. Two days after giving birth, I had become a mother.
These memories tumble back at the sight of the infant clothes encased in Auschwitz, Block 5. They are delicately embroidered and smocked. The deported mothers, after all, had been told to take along their best things in their suitcases, which, like the fathers of their children, were wrested from them upon arrival at the concentration camp. The fragility and size of the outfits lacerates the heart, but my mourning wells up from understanding that these mothers lost something far more precious to them than their own lives, if that can be imagined. They lost their maternal right to protect their beloved sons and daughters, many of them babies still in their first clothes. Words are helpless to describe what they must have suffered.