Another difficult period started for Sabine. Divorced single women in the 1950s were regarded as second-class citizens, and with no money and two small children, these were lonely times. Around my eighth birthday, my mother received an invitation from a Dutch friend to come to Ibiza. It was then a relatively unknown island, visited mainly by a few artists, film stars, Mafia members in hiding, and people who sought an alternative lifestyle. There was no airport either there or on Mallorca, and the only way to reach the islands was by boat from Barcelona, an overnight trip.
We rented a small house and quickly made many friends of all nationalities. Life on Ibiza suited us so well that Sabine had thoughts of settling there permanently. My brother and I were very happy joining in the many trips around both Ibiza and Formentera, having picnics and barbecues on deserted beaches and searching for crabs on the rocks below our house.
But after a few months, I suddenly became very ill. The only (Spanish) “doctor” on the island had only spent a few years working in a hospital in Barcelona as a medical orderly. He gave me painkillers and promised he would come by in another week. He was on holiday in the meantime. But I deteriorated, and my mother became very worried. Our German neighbor, also a young woman recently divorced with two small children, had also come to Ibiza to recover from her divorce. To her dismay, the first person she met on the island was her ex-husband, who had also come for a holiday, with a colleague. Both the men were well-known urologists in Germany. Overcoming her reluctance, she asked them for help for me.
By that time, I was seriously ill with a kidney infection, and they insisted I should go to the hospital. But there was no hospital. The trip by boat to Barcelona would be too long and dangerous, and in any case ran only once a week. So, after some arm wrestling with the local pharmacy (as foreign doctors they were not allowed to prescribe medication), they managed to obtain some medicines and for a week came and gave me very painful injections twice a day. They were very charmed by my mother, and after I got better, they took her out a few times. How ironic that ten years after the war, my life was saved by two German doctors.
After this episode, however, my mother decided that the island was not a suitable place to bring up children. This was reinforced by the very poor education available there. To my brother’s and my intense disappointment, we left paradise and returned to Holland. I have never seen my mother so happy and carefree again since that time. Her “party girl” side came out again for a short while.
Despite having many boyfriends in the following years, she never wanted to share her life with any of them until she met Jan Blank in her mid-fifties. Their marriage lasted until his death (in 1998) twenty-three years later.
In 2009, while traveling around India for work, I received an urgent message from my brother. Our mother, by now in a care home, was suddenly deteriorating rapidly. I was only in my first week of a seven-week trip, and I had many appointments to fulfill in Varanasi, Kolkata, Kalimpong and Darjeeling. What to do? She had had these episodes before and had recovered. Peter advised me to wait and see. He would inform me every day whether her condition was stable or getting worse. After a few weeks, once I got to Darjeeling, an urgent message came to return home as soon as possible. It was a question of possibly hours now.
My hotel was owned by a very sweet Tibetan couple whom I had gotten to know well during my many visits with them. When I told them the reason for my sudden departure, they immediately offered to go to their local monastery and ask the monks to say puja (prayers) for my mother. Hours later, after having rebooked my train and flight and while packing my suitcase, I received another message from Peter. I was prepared for the worst, but instead was told that our mother had made a miraculous recovery and had been found wandering through the home’s corridors by the carers. When I told my Tibetan friends, they were delighted, but did not seem surprised. They told me that that afternoon, several hundred monks had indeed said puja for her, and they assured me this was the power of prayer. Since then, whenever I tell this story, many others also assure me of this power of prayer.
It may be so, but I think it was also my mother’s own strong will to live that played a role. She told me years before that as long as she kept walking, she could not die. When she started living in the care home, she did always walk along the corridors, endlessly. She was by no means a walker at any other time in her life, but perhaps towards the end of her life, the memories of those who fell or lay down during her time in the camps came back again.
Sabine recovered well and lived for another three years. She died fourteen years after the death of her second husband, in 2012.
I inherited her life story.