The discovery
In October 2008, we made a remarkable discovery. Rummaging about in the attic, our son Jeremy opened an old suitcase which had been there for over ten years, ever since I cleared my aunt Grete’s house in Sheffield, following her move into a nursing home. In the suitcase were several items of photographic equipment including an old camera, glass photographic plates and negatives. Always interested in old objects, he pulled them out to examine them further and saw underneath a package, wrapped in brown paper, on which was written, in Grete’s hand, ‘Read some of these, 18/5/53’. Removing the brown paper we found a further wrapping, pale blue this time, on which was written in pencil: ‘Briefe von Marie Bader, entweder vernichten oder durch Edmund Benisch, New York, Bay Shore, 81 Brook Aven. an Maries Kinder senden. Benisch ist Cousin von Marie.’ (‘Letters from Marie Bader, either to be destroyed or sent through Edmund Benisch in New York, Bay Shore, 81 Brook Avenue, to Marie’s daughters. Benisch is Marie’s cousin.’)1 Inside the blue package was a collection of 154 letters, roughly two-thirds typed, the rest handwritten, all but two from Marie Bader to Ernst Löwy, the remaining two from Ernst to Marie.
Marie Bader was my maternal grandmother, mother of Grete, born in 1909, and of my mother Edith, who was born in 1911. Marie was born in 1886 in Zebau in Bohemia (Czech: Cebiv), then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her parents were Moritz and Louise Rosenberger and she had a younger sister, Irene. In her twelfth year the family moved to Karlsbad (Czech: Karlovy Vary). On Christmas Day 1906 she married Emil Bader, a man eleven years her senior, who came from Znaim in Moravia (Czech: Znojmo). Marie and Emil set up home in Karlsbad, a Bohemian spa town which lay in the heart of a region populated mostly by ethnic Germans, known as Sudetenland, an area which was to take on great significance later.
Emil was a wholesaler of groceries, supplying shops in villages and small towns across northern Bohemia. He had been helped in establishing his business by his more practical and business-like friend Gustav Lípa, who later became Irene’s husband and was to become far more successful in business than Emil. During the First World War Emil was enlisted in the Austrian army. While he was in a supply rather than a combat role, what he witnessed at the Italian front marked him deeply for the rest of his life. After the war, in independent Czechoslovakia, he had less interest in or energy for his business and it fell to Marie to manage the business through the postwar depression in order to ensure an income for the family.
An energetic and enterprising woman, Marie recognized that there was a market for convenience pudding mixes and baking powders, such as those already developed by the German company Dr Oetker. With Emil she set up their own business, EBE Karlsbader Nährmittelindustrie (Karlbad Foodstuff Industry), producing baking powder, pudding powders, bicarbonate of soda, vanilla sugar, packs of spices for pumpernickel and various flavourings. She also produced little recipe books suggesting ways of using her products.
1936
The business thrived, but in 1936 came a time of crisis for Marie. In January her elder daughter, Grete, had a breakdown, following the collapse of her marriage to Otto Reichl and subsequent divorce. Grete and Otto had been living in Berlin where Otto, also a Czech citizen, worked at the Pergamon Museum. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Otto, like other Jews in public service, was dismissed and he and Grete returned to Czechoslovakia where Otto vainly sought work. The lack of work was doubtless a contributory factor in the collapse of the marriage but whatever the reason, its ending had a serious effect on Grete who, following her breakdown, was admitted for some months to a psychiatric institution.
In May 1936, before Grete had fully recovered, her father Emil died of liver cancer. It was a devastating time for Marie. Her marriage to Emil had been a happy one, despite the strain of keeping their business going after his return from the war. Now Marie was suddenly on her own, with an ailing daughter to support.
At this point precious support appears to have been offered by her cousin, Ernst Löwy, a friend from childhood and six years older. Ernst and his wife Theresa, known as Thesa, also lived in Karlsbad. He and Thesa had a daughter, Hella, who was married to a Greek Jew, Salvator Cougno,2 whom she had met when studying in Leipzig, and they were now living in Thessaloniki. The Bader and Löwy couples met regularly in Karlsbad, where Ernst practised as an architect.
When Emil died, Marie wanted to accompany his body, contrary to custom, to the place where it was to be ritually prepared for burial, but she was discouraged from doing so. It appears that Ernst intervened on her behalf giving rise to gossip in the community. Whatever the explanation, this intervention led to a rift between Marie and the Löwys and there followed a period of over three years during which she had no dealings with Ernst and Thesa. It is possible that Thesa was jealous, or even that she sensed an unconscious attraction between Marie and Ernst, referred to more than once in the letters. A shared train journey to Leipzig, which was such a happy memory for Marie, gains retrospectively a new significance.
The next three years, 1936–39, were hard. Marie had lost her husband, her daughter was ill, the business under severe strain, contact with the Löwys broken and, meanwhile, the clouds of National Socialism were gathering. Sudeten Germans were openly showing their sympathy for Nazism which had taken hold in neighbouring Germany and the anti-semitic Sudeten German Heimatfront (later Party), formed in 1933, was agitating aggressively for their claimed grievances to be put right. Karlsbad had a very large ethnic German population and Marie, like other Jews, must have been acutely aware of being caught between the Germans, whose language and culture they shared, and the Czech majority in the Czechoslovak state, led by President Tomáš G. Masaryk and his successor Edvard Beneš, who were known to be friends of the Jews.
With Hitler enjoying absolute power only a few miles away, the Sudeten Germans, under their leader, Konrad Henlein, were becoming increasingly menacing. Marie’s assistant, Ernst Müller, was a Sudeten German. He knew how the EBE Karlsbader business was run, he knew the recipes and the client base. He would have seen that the writing on the wall was not favourable to the Jews in the Sudetenland and must have anticipated the rich pickings for Germans once they had achieved their dream of being part of Germany and once the Jews had been expelled. Impatiently anticipating that moment, he set up his own company, ‘Müller’s Karlsbader’ in 1937, stealing, according to Marie, her recipes, her staff and her clients, and taking over the trade name ‘Karlsbader’, as Marie writes bitterly in March 1942.
Expulsion
In March 1938 Hitler marched into a receptive Austria and annexed it to the German Reich, increasing the insecurity felt by Jews in the Sudetenland, now surrounded on three sides by the Nazi regime. Following this success, Hitler turned his attention to Bohemia and Moravia. In October 1938, following the Munich Agreement which had given him the green light to do so, Hitler sent his troops into the Sudetenland, immediately incorporating it into the Reich. Marie, together with her mother Louise Rosenberger (referred to as Mutti in these letters) and her older daughter Grete, had to leave Karlsbad and move to Prague, where Edith was already working. They were among more than 20,000 Jews who were forced to flee the Nazi annexation. Marie had three months to liquidate her business, the proceeds of which provided her with sufficient to live independently in Prague. They encountered a hostile Czech environment in Prague, opposing the influx of a large number of German-speaking refugees from the borderlands into the rump state. Politically and economically broken, the Czechs first of all looked after the ethnically Czech population and slowly excluded the Jews, especially those of German culture, from society. It took more than two years before Marie officially received a residence permit in Prague (see the letters of 9 January and 11 February 1941).
Marie and Grete rented a flat in the northern suburb of Bubeneč, while her mother Louise went to live with her other daughter Irene and son in law Gustav Lípa in their smart flat in Pařížská, in the quarter of central Prague where a large number of Jews lived. From 1 April 1939 Marie rented the flat at Terezínská 24 (Theresienstädtergasse), in the suburb of Karlín, from which these letters were written.
On 15 March 1939, German troops and tanks entered Prague, and those parts of Bohemia and Moravia not already absorbed into Germany by the annexation of the Sudetenland were declared a protectorate of the Reich.
Jews were now in even greater peril. Marie’s younger daughter Edith married my father Franz Sternschuss3 in October 1938, perhaps sooner than they might otherwise have done, realizing that if they had to leave Czechoslovakia, it would be better to do so as a married couple. In April 1939 they received permission to leave the country but not yet to enter Britain. They first went to Milan in Italy. Edith had secured a post in domestic service in England (this was one of only two categories of work for which women refugees could get entry and work permits, the other being nursing) and was able to go ahead, after a few weeks, to her live-in job in Sheffield. Franz, on the other hand, could only enter Britain if he had a sponsor. Such sponsorship was slow to come through and he was stuck in Milan, waiting for his visa. But theirs is another story. Grete secured a position as adult escort on a Kindertransport. With a British visa she left Prague by train on 11 May, arriving at Harwich on 13 May. Unusually, she was allowed to make the single journey out of occupied Czechoslovakia and did not have to return, which other Kindertransport escorts were required to do.
England was not the only country for which Marie’s daughters sought visas. Honduras and Panama were among those which issued permits but the cost of visas and of travel was high and there were rumours that visas were not always honoured once the refugees had landed. For Marie’s generation it was even harder to have to choose whether to leave. In earlier letters to Grete and Edith written in 1939–40 she still talks of possible ways to emigrate and even in her letters to Ernst she mentions learning Spanish and gives Ernst the address of the Spanish consul in Prague. Nothing came of this. There was also Mutti, soon to turn eighty, who had only a slim hope to be able to emigrate. Had Marie and Irene decided to emigrate, they would have left their old and frail mother to her fate in the hands of strangers. This was a decision that only a few desperate people were willing to take.
The Thessaloniki connection
Ernst and his wife Thesa had also fled Karlsbad for Prague after the Munich Agreement, but on 14 March 1939, following weeks of rumour and speculation about Germany’s intentions and the day before Hitler’s troops marched into Prague, they set off for Greece to join Hella and Salvator and their children Erika and Heinz in Thessaloniki, where Salvator ran a photographic studio.
Thessaloniki had a very large Jewish population, numbering more than 50,000 in 1939. The Jews of Thessaloniki were Sephardi and many were descended from the community which had been expelled from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. Their language was Ladino, a Romance language derived from old Spanish and heavily influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic and other languages of the Levant. Their food traditions, whilst conforming to Jewish laws, differed from central European Jewish cooking. (Hella later told Bea Lewkowicz, who was researching into the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, that Salvator’s family did not approve of the marriage as she was an Ashkenazi Jew.) For Ernst and Thesa this move was an upheaval and required considerable cultural as well as linguistic adaptation. It is clear from the letters, written after Thesa’s death, that Ernst missed the familiar dishes from Bohemia, as Hella was now cooking in the style of the community she had married into. Ernst’s nostalgia for central European cuisine is a recurrent, if minor, theme in the letters.
Renewed contact and the awakening of love
Thesa Löwy died just before Christmas 1939. For over three years Marie and Ernst had not been in touch, but Ernst wanted Marie to know. He asked his brother Emil, who was still in Prague, to tell her the news. Marie wrote a letter of condolence and it seems to have been that letter which initiated this intense correspondence and which unleashed the suppressed and hitherto unacknowledged love between the two of them. Marie also wrote to her daughters in Britain to tell them the news of Thesa’s passing, hinting tantalizingly at the causes of the rupture in their relations and suggesting that they too write to Ernst: ‘Now, I want you to write a nice little letter to Uncle Ernst …. You do know that Th[esa] died. He is very sad. He wrote to me that she always spoke about us and [he] explained all sorts of things. Apparently she suffered a lot at the time from the break she initiated. Since knowing how ill the poor creature has been for a long time, I now understand and have completely forgiven her the injustice she did me. I am so sorry for her, and for him too, because it was a very good marriage. I beg you to send him your condolences.’
For whatever reason, whether it was climate, food, the paucity of German speakers or sharing their daughter and son-in-law’s home, Ernst and Thesa regretted moving to Thessaloniki and would have liked to return to Czechoslovakia (or rather, to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia). After Thesa’s death there was tension between Ernst and his daughter and on various occasions Marie found herself advising him on how to deal with the situation. It is not clear how much Hella knew about her father’s love for Marie. With so many letters coming from Prague, sometimes twice a week, she may have suspected something but Ernst had not put her fully in the picture.
Marie and Ernst were both reluctant to let their families too much into their love and for Marie this caused her to reflect on her relationship with both her mother and her sister with whom she had been very close up until this point. Now she felt keenly how precious her independence was just at a time when Jews were being restricted to an ever narrower area of the city and when eviction was, for Marie, a constant worry. The tensions in the family are tangible.
Life in Prague under the Nazis
Although Marie was careful in writing about conditions in Prague, reading between the lines one nevertheless detects the slow strangulation of the Jewish community. For example, on 13 September 1941 she wrote ‘I am afraid I will soon not have a typewriter.’ What she did not say is that she had received a form from the Kultusgemeinde (the Jewish Community in Prague, which played a central role in executing Nazi decrees) on which she had to declare whether she owned a typewriter and that she had handed in this form that very day, stating she had a Continental 340, in average condition, and that it was currently in her possession. This followed an order by the Reichsprotektor (head of German administration) that Jews had to hand in their typewriters and bicycles. In silent confirmation of this, the letter she wrote on 1 November is handwritten, as are all subsequent letters.
Typewriters and bicycles were not the only possessions which Jews had to give up. Ski equipment, musical instruments, fur coats, warm clothing and radios were all confiscated. Access to certain public places and entertainments was banned – not just swimming pools (August 1939), theatres and cinemas (February 1940), and parks, (May 1940), but even stretches of the banks of the river Vltava (September 1941) – and access to public transport severely restricted (by stages, from September 1940 onwards, see letter of 22–23 January 1942). More and more items in the shops could no longer be sold to Jews: trivial or inexplicable items such as apples, onions, garlic, fruit and nuts, whether fresh or preserved (hence Ernst’s offer to send her nuts and raisins), shaving soap (and even pork!), and from February 1941 shopping hours for Jews were restricted to between 3 and 5 p.m.
For Marie the complaints of the Prague Jews at the deprivations they faced paled in comparison with what the refugees from the Sudetenland had already suffered and she was distressed by the selfishness revealed in many people. On the other hand, she commented on the kindness of many ethnic Czechs with whom, coming as she did from the Sudetenland, she had hitherto had relatively little contact. Marie’s ability to communicate in Czech, even if she was not fluent, was crucial (letter of 25 July 1941). The situation was more difficult for the Jews who spoke only German, a language already resented by the Czech population before the war. These sentiments further increased when German became the language of the occupier.
Determination to go to Greece
A major theme in the letters is Marie’s longing to join Ernst in Greece, in fact an unrealizable dream. Livia Rothkirchen writes ‘The outbreak of the war put an end to free emigration from the Protectorate and made it difficult, if not virtually impossible, for individuals to leave.’i It is unclear whether Jews in one occupied territory would have been allowed to travel to another occupied territory. She would have needed an entry permit for Greece before she could apply for an exit permit from the Protectorate, and then a transit visa for Yugoslavia. The changing military situation after the outbreak of the Greek–Italian war and later the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece further complicated the plans. Marie spent much time and energy trying to assemble the necessary documentation. Official information was obscure, contradictory and endlessly frustrating. Against all the odds, Marie engaged in a hopeless battle with bureaucracy, constantly struggling to believe in a future with Ernst.
On several occasions she wrote about a possible proxy marriage, which would then have given her the necessary marriage certificate to strengthen her application to join Ernst. Again, documents are required, sometimes needing to be translated into German (such as Thesa’s Greek death certificate) and then notarized by a lawyer.
Stoutly independent, Marie’s one worry, if she could get to Greece, was that she would have no resources to contribute to her upkeep. From her replies to Ernst it is possible to infer that he too found his dependence on his daughter and son-in-law irksome and there is even a suggestion that he felt his son-in-law, Salvator, resented the cost of his upkeep, although Ernst had money and occasionally found work.
The Cougnos owned a vineyard a few kilometres outside Thessaloniki where Ernst spent some time working. Perhaps to avoid a life of dependency, Marie fantasized about the two of them living a simple life there with a goat, chickens, even a little pig, and growing vegetables and fruit.
Her dreams reveal how much Marie missed being able to walk in the countryside and enjoy nature. Cooped up in Prague and banned from parks by the edict of 17 May 1940, one of the few places where she could walk was the Jewish cemetery. Recalling the walks her family and Ernst’s used to make together, she yearned to be able to do this again with him.
Managing the censor
Each letter bears, in pencil, a number applied by the German censor and, up until the occupation of Greece, a few of the earlier ones carry the stamp of the Greek censor as well. Marie was conscious of the fact that her letters were being read by a stranger and she skirted around issues about which she might not be able to write. Prohibitions on Jews attending theatres, concerts, walking in parks, travelling or shopping at certain times are not explicitly mentioned. Again, one must read between the lines, as for example when, unconvincingly, she told Ernst she was no longer interested in going to the theatre or when, in March 1942, she wrote that they did not miss fruit. Grete and Edith become the nameless ‘friends’ who live in ‘Chicago’, rather than Sheffield.
On several occasions she urged caution because of the censor and when topical events, such as a disturbance referred to in August 1941, cannot be explained, she suggested Ernst obtain copies of the Prague German language newspaper Der Neue Tag to read about developments.
Sometimes Marie wrote so cryptically that the censor, having just obliterated three lines of her letter, told her ‘Write unambiguously!’ or, on another occasion, wrote ‘Please be brief!’ As Marie was the sender of the letters, the censor’s comments could only reach her if Ernst passed them on to her. With a playfulness bordering on cheek she commiserated with the censor who would have had to cope with six sides of her handwriting if she were without her typewriter. This humouring not only shows Marie’s non-confrontational character but that she instinctively understood the value of appealing to the censor’s human feelings, when the whole thrust of the Nazi regime was to dehumanize its operatives as well as its subjects. Marie reminded the censor that he, too, was allowed to be human.
Being aware that some letters might be withheld by the censor – as some in fact were – Marie advised Ernst to keep copies of his letters to her as she did of hers to him. Some letters only got through with a page or two missing, a sentence obliterated, or, in one case, a section cut out with a sharp blade. Another letter was returned to her because it was too long.
Strict censorship allowed only soothing messages to get through and Marie was cautious when she wrote of deportations to occupied Poland, which began in the second half of October 1941, shortly after the arrival of SS General Reinhard Heydrich as Acting Reichsprotektor. However, the fact that she believed, and wished Ernst to believe, that people were being sent away to work, shows how well German propaganda was working as this was the illusion the Nazis were deliberately fostering. Maybe she already subconsciously realized the gravity of the situation, but did not want to admit it or trouble Ernst with her concerns. This possibly helped most of her letters to get through, the majority intact. It is only towards the end, when deportations were in full swing, that an increasing number of letters have pages missing.
The severely controlled correspondence with people who had been sent to Łódź (renamed Litzmannstadt by the Germans) in October 1941 and the sending of food parcels helped maintain the idea that people would be able to earn a living. Marie believed she would be able to offer useful skills. Only once, in the letter written on the eve of reporting for deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto (Terezín in Czech), did she momentarily wonder whether she might be wrong in her belief, but then hastily ruled that out.
This brings us to another theme in the letters which may have met with the censor’s approval: Marie’s firm intention not to break the law. Repeatedly she stated her intention to stick by the rules imposed by the Nazi occupiers, whatever they might be, and when the order to wear the Star of David was issued, she professed unresisting compliance. The letters must therefore be read with a clear awareness of the presence of the censor and perhaps a certain admiration for the propitiating comments addressed directly to him and for Marie’s determination to express her love despite the unwelcome eavesdropper.
How developments affect Marie’s writing
One thing which strikes one forcibly in reading the letters is the change in tone, mood and subject matter, often quite abrupt, within one and the same letter. The more one becomes aware of this the more one realizes how significant the shifts are. I think there are three main explanations.
The first is a wish not to let personal anxieties become a worry which Marie will not be able to dispel until a subsequent letter (and with the fear of letters getting lost or being confiscated by the censor, the content of each needed to be as complete as possible, to avoid misunderstandings and to cover every aspect of their epistolary conversation). There may possibly also be an element of diverting or disarming the censor. The second explanation is her reaction to the grim events occurring in the Protectorate, to which she can often only allude with caution. A third contributory factor to the tone of the letters is the tension evident when letters and cards are not getting through, particularly in the spring of 1941, after the German invasion of northern Greece on 6 April and entry into Thessaloniki on 9 April, of which there is no mention.
On the emotional level, then, the tone can shift from a discussion of the problem of obtaining documents to a joke, a bit of playfulness, or a puzzle. Anxious advice on how Ernst should care for himself turns to tender dreams of their future, uncaring of the censor’s intrusive eye.
As regards the background events and developments, the most extreme moment comes in the autumn of 1941, following Heydrich’s arrival in Prague on 27 September. Two days later he ordered the immediate closure of all synagogues, putting an end to Marie’s hope (letter of 15 September 1941) of celebrating New Year there. She told Ernst that she would have to begin wearing the ‘emblem’, (compulsory from 19 September). Typically, after a momentary lapse, when she confessed to feeling alone and miserable, she composed herself and imagined the two of them together, with her teasing and ‘pestering’ him.
On 10 October Heydrich convened a meeting with top Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, in Prague Castle, to discuss ‘the solution to the Jewish problem’. The decisions taken by this conference were immediately announced at a meeting with Protectorate journalists. Marie, having evidently heard the news, postponed saying anything about the 1,050 people (in fact 1,000) to be deported from Prague until well into the letter she wrote that evening. It was a letter of warning, both about her likely future and about his. Admitting that she had been fearing such an event for some time she did what she could to reassure him. On 15 October she wrote two letters. The first is missing from the collection and one must presume it never arrived. In the second letter she said at the beginning ‘I am all right so far and am now much calmer and more composed.’ Perhaps she meant that in her first letter she may have sounded agitated and said too much in it for the censor’s liking and that is possibly why it never arrived at its destination. In the second letter she hinted at things she could not tell Ernst explicitly but again tried to reassure him, while on the 18th she wrote that two transports had left, one to Łódź, the other to Minsk (in reality again to Łódź), with a third leaving that day.
Marie likened the fear of the summons to the fear of the plumpsack man in a traditional children’s game where none of the participants, arranged in a circle, can know who will be his next victim. This recurring reference to a children’s game becomes a cover for a much deeper anxiety, to avoid the censor’s attentions and perhaps also as a subconscious device to diminish her fear.
It is surprising how much she was actually able to tell Ernst, but the true terror and fear in the community and indeed within the whole population (there had been many executions after Heydrich’s arrival) can only be guessed at. When one thinks how desperate life must have been one can only admire Marie’s efforts to divert Ernst with talk of other things. On 27 October she mentioned the possibility of suicide (but only after talking it over with him) but by the next day she was re-reading his letters and imagining herself in another world once more.
This period was clearly a terrifying one for everyone and the fact that there was no escape was becoming increasingly self-evident. It was now clearly not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’, but again she began to adapt to the inevitable and responded to Ernst’s obvious distress by telling him (18 December 1941) to cheer up and suggesting that those who look to the future rather than the past find it easier to adapt to changing circumstances. The shift of the deportation destination from occupied Poland to Theresienstadt led to the hope that from now on the deportees would be able to stay in the Protectorate. Yet Marie soon realized that trains were leaving the Bohemian ghetto for further east (letter of 12 March 1942).
In January 1942, the postponed Wannsee Conference took place, in which plans for the destruction of European Jewry were finalized, while in Marie’s own life the departure of her sister and brother-in-law demanded further adjustments. It requires little imagination to guess what the atmosphere in Prague was like, but both Marie’s words of comfort to Ernst and her description of her activities with those organizing help for the destitute, give an idea of how she was able to confront practically the prospects ahead. Knowing, with the benefit of hindsight, the nature of the trap closing around her and her fellow Jews, we are given an insight into ways of coping with increasing powerlessness and dehumanization.
She continued to write to Ernst with considerable frankness, despite the prying, even potentially prurient, eye of the censor, expressing her love in all openness and describing a dream she had shortly before her own departure which is incredibly moving. In her dream she and Ernst receive a call from her daughters and agree to go and join them, transforming the preparations for Theresienstadt into a perfect reunion with her dearest ones. This dream, too, had to pass the censor: mercifully these last two letters were allowed to reach Ernst in their entirety.
Marie reported for deportation on 21 April. The night before, she wrote two letters, one to Ernst – the last in this collection – and one to her daughters, which reached them after the war.
Ernst did not start to save Marie’s letters until October 1940, more than nine months after she had written her letter of condolence which broke the silence that had existed between them since 1936. It must have been around this time that their mutual love was recognized and declared because, on 7 October 1941, she wrote ‘It will soon be a year, my sweet, since we declared ourselves.’ Thereafter he seems to have saved every letter he received – some never reached him. At some time after receiving Marie’s last letter on 26 April 1942 – perhaps anticipating his own deportation – he bundled them up and indicated that they should either be sent to Marie’s daughters or else be destroyed.
When they reached Sheffield is not known, but neither Grete nor my mother ever spoke of their existence. Indeed, I consider it doubtful that Edith ever read any of them: she would, I believe, have found it too painful and perhaps also an unwarranted intrusion. Is reading what are unashamedly love letters an intrusion? It may be, but they reveal so much about my grandmother’s character, her liveliness, her strength, determination and independence that they deserve to be treasured by those of us who come after. The fact that Ernst wanted them to be sent to her daughters suggests that he wanted the story of their love to be known by her children so that something would live on after them, and possibly that he also wanted Grete and Edith to know how their mother had lived the last two years of her life, bravely enduring hardship while sustained by the hope of a happier future.
Kate Ottevanger
2019
Marie Bader’s letters and the Holocaust in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
Marie Bader’s letters, compiled in this volume, provide Holocaust scholars and the general public with a unique collection of documents on the life of the Jewish community in Prague during the German occupation. A leading scholar on the history of Bohemian Jewry recently noted that we still lack an up-to-date synthesis of the Holocaust in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in a single volume. The historiography in English is even less developed. The last major work in English on the subject was published in 2005 and it was predominantly based on research conducted before the opening of east European archives after the Changes of late 1989. Since then scholars have published a number of studies on the development of Czech and German anti-Jewish policies in the Protectorate, on Czech anti-semitic movements and their press, as well as on the emigration of the Jews from the Protectorate before 1941 and the history of the Theresienstadt ghetto. One of the key topics that still awaits an author is the social history of the Jews in the Protectorate. This edition of private letters presents a key source that future historians will have to consult.
I joined the publication team relatively late, long after Kate Ottevanger had translated Marie’s letters from German into English. Kate did so with love for her grandmother, whose fate she had to follow until the bitter end. I helped with the explanatory notes, shared my opinion on the parts of the letters we should publish, and contributed to the introduction and epilogue. We have been able to explain most of the indirect references Marie makes in her letters. Nevertheless, we sometimes had to admit that nobody apart from Marie and Ernst would ever understand the meaning of her words. The fact that we could read only one side of the conversation – Ernst’s letters to Marie did not survive – complicated our endeavour. Furthermore, Ernst began to save Marie’s letters only after October 1940 and it is evident that not every letter Marie sent after that date was delivered. Marie kept Ernst’s letters when she stayed in Prague, but burnt them shortly before her deportation, thus silencing one side of the conversation forever. Only two letters sent by Ernst survived and we include them in this book.
The edition consists of selected and abbreviated letters. In our editing, we were guided by two aims: first, we wanted to give space to the personal story of Marie and Ernst, to this love affair that, under the hardship of the war, blossomed between two old friends, distant cousins, separated by frontlines and about a thousand miles. Second, we intended to allow readers insights into the daily life of the Jews in Prague under the German occupation from the time of the gradual segregation until the large-scale deportations to the Łódź Ghetto and Theresienstadt.
The story is both deeply personal and more general. Marie felt alone in Prague. Her daughters escaped in time to Britain, and her relationship with Irene and Gustav, her sister and brother-in-law, became tense. Direct contact with Edith and Grete stopped soon after Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939.
Marie’s circle of old friends from Karlsbad could not replace the close bonds of family. Conversation with Ernst by means of letters became part of her daily routine, and she spent evenings alone in her room composing long letters to her old friend and now lover. For fear that the correspondence would be withheld, many of the letters discuss mundane matters but, interwoven with the chit-chat, questions of far deeper significance, offering insight into the current situation, are touched on or only hinted at. The letters reveal a whole network of people who communicated within Nazi Germany, as well as from the Nazi-held territories to countries overseas. To send letters to Ernst, Marie used the help of her cousin Eman (Edmund Benisch) in the United States and her friends in Vienna. She also communicated with people in other towns and cities, and remained in touch even with those deported from Vienna to eastern Poland in early 1941. These extensive communication networks and the role they played during the Holocaust are another topic that still awaits its historian. Pieces of information soon spread in the community, especially at the time when the Nazi anti-Jewish policies became more intensive. Marie’s letters show that the community was relatively well informed about the destinations of the deportation trains, though unconfirmed rumours were common. Marie seemed to have good contacts at the Jewish Community in Prague (Kultusgemeinde), especially with Abraham Fixler, who worked as a permanent liaison officer at the Nazi Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (the Central Office for Jewish Emigration) in the Prague district of Střešovice. That is why she knew about the prepared deportations from Prague and the provinces, as well as about pauses between transports.
Marie’s letters display the coping mechanism of the Jews in the gradually shrinking public space and limited social life of German-occupied Prague. Together with memoirs, a genre still being published to a considerable extent today, the letters complement other published primary sources, including letters sent by Paula Czerner to the United States between 1939 and 1941, the letters of Henriette Pollatschek from the same period, and the private diaries of Peter Ginz, Eva Mändl (Mándlová) and Jiří Münzer. At the same time, Marie’s correspondence offers a particular perspective, which is largely absent in the other publicly available sources. It surprised me how Marie, while keeping in mind the censor’s ever-watchful eye, expressed her opinions quite openly. The letters are full of detail about Marie’s life and daily routine, including her social life, reactions to the introduction of anti-Jewish laws and later a description of the Jews’ concerns about their fate after the arrival of the acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, and the preparation for deportation to the east. The fact that Thessaloniki, where Ernst lived, was under the German occupation from April 1941 and Marie did not therefore have to send the letters to an enemy country could be one factor contributing to the openness. This became crucial after December 1941, when Germany declared war on the United States and Czerner and Pollatschek could no longer send long letters across the Atlantic. Marie remained in contact with Ernst until April 1942, when she was deported from Prague. The detailed description of the events between September 1941 and April 1942 makes the edition a crucial source for our current understanding of Jewish life in the Protectorate at the time of the deportations.
It is clear that Marie’s fate by no means represents the typical Jewish experience in the Protectorate, if anything like that even existed. She was an outsider from several perspectives. She was a widow in a patriarchal society, who until the deportation kept her private room in an apartment building where Jews as well as non-Jews lived. This was at a time when several Jewish families had to share one flat and parts of Prague became off-limits to the Jews. She was a refugee, who had come to Prague shortly before the Munich Agreement of late September 1938, after which her hometown of Karlsbad became part of the Reich, and she only narrowly escaped the violence unleashed by the Nazi sympathizers during Kristallnacht in November 1938. As a refugee, Marie experienced being uprooted long before the Czech Jews in Prague faced a similar fate. Last, she was a Jewish woman who had identified with German culture even after the German state completely excluded the Jews and when the Czechs rejected any manifestation of the occupiers’ culture, including public communication in German. In her letters, Marie is not critical of the Czech population, but she was clearly unable to establish any social contact with local Czechs or even Czech Jews. Her social circle consisted of her acquaintances from Karlsbad, who found refuge in Prague, and her sister’s family and friends. Marie lived in a community apart from Czech society, though she quickly became aware of the changed situation and tried to perfect her spoken Czech. She was a strong woman, and managed to cope with all the challenges of life in the Protectorate facing a Jewish woman of German culture who was accustomed to a comfortable life, and only rarely doubted her strength and abilities. Her will to overcome all obstacles and even help fellow Jews in Prague contrasts with the mental collapse of those who were unable to cope with the challenges, including Gustav, Irene and Mutti. Marie’s letters attest to the Jews’ ability and ingenuity when facing the genocidal regime of Nazi Germany.
Jan Láníček
2019
Editors’ note
The edition contains only selected letters Marie Bader sent to Ernst Löwy between October 1940 and April 1942. The editors shortened the letters to avoid repetitions and left out details not essential for the main story and for the history of the Holocaust. For fluidity of reading there is no indication of omissions.
1Edmund Benisch is referred to by the familiar name of Eman in Marie’s letters.
2Erika and Heinz, Ernst’s grandchildren, use the more recent transliteration of Kounio in their books.
3Franz’s parents Hede and Rudolf Sternschuss appear frequently in Marie’s letters. Hede, Rudolf’s second wife, was a non-Jewish German and thus not only a protection for her Jewish husband (whom she refused to divorce) but also able to offer some help to her stepson’s in-law family during the war. This she, and later her mother and sister, did courageously.