Afterword: Reading messages of love, fear and hope

Discovering my grandmother’s letters to Ernst drew me not only suddenly and deeply into the world she was living in during the last year and a half of her life but also into her character. When I had read and translated them, and then re-read them, I felt I had a whole new understanding of a person of whom I had only had a partial and insubstantial picture. Having lived with and digested them for a while, I made more and more connections with my memories of my mother, and revisited both notes I had written after her death and also letters from Marie to my mother and aunt, together with other letters written by relatives and friends to them during 1939–40 which I had read several years ago. Slowly a bigger, clearer picture emerged, loose ends began to be tied up, impressions confirmed.

I looked back at some pages I wrote in the spring of 2008 which started with the sentence ‘I went to sleep last night haunted by the voices of the dead’. It had been just over a year since my mother, Edith, had died at the ripe age of 96, safe in the knowledge of the love of her children and grandchildren and even her great-grandchildren, who had been such a welcome late joy to one who had always loved children dearly. But for a time her slow dying was filled with terrible hallucinations, that the residents in the rest home to which she had moved were being stealthily ‘marched off’, with the connivance of the carers to whom she was now entrusted. When I tried to reason with her, she said lovingly and protectively that I was too trusting and must not be naïve. All this was spoken in German, a language we had never used together but which was the logical one to use as she returned in her mind to almost seventy years earlier when her world, and that of her family and friends, fell apart in Czechoslovakia, a ‘far away country’, according to Chamberlain, whose inhabitants were ‘a people of whom we know nothing’. As she drew nearer to death she began to call urgently for ‘Mutti’, a heartrending call for those of us who knew how, ever since the end of the war, she had struggled to deal with the guilt of leaving her ‘Mutti’, as well as her grandmother, aunt and uncle behind in Prague, when she and her newly married husband and her sister Grete were able, quite late, to escape and get to England. Here they had taken refuge – the word ‘refugee’ was an early word in my vocabulary – and eventually, when the facts of the Holocaust became clear, decided to settle (my mother and father with greater adaptability than my aunt, for whom ‘home’ always remained the stolen ideal).

But the wounds of forced uprooting go deeper than reason can penetrate. Before his death in 1999, my father, despite his determination to resist nostalgia, once remarked that his life up to his departure from Prague had been the most vital and meaningful part of his existence, a statement that could have been hurtful to us, his family, if we had not understood just what he had had to leave behind, not in a spirit of adventure but with reluctance impelled by an ever-growing fear.

Exile brings with it different feelings: gratitude and resentment, curiosity about the new and yearning for things abandoned, fear, loss of identity, confusion as to how to order one’s sense of values, those of the new world and those of the one left behind. Each exiled person must work through these often conflicting emotions and experiences anew and I was always conscious that in the three adults closest to me – my mother, my father and my aunt – there were differences. My father, determined to deal rationally with the new situation, decreed that only English would be spoken (a language that they still had to master, but which they soon spoke and wrote very well). He also decreed that his children would not be told they were Jewish, so that it was not until I was twelve, in 1954, that I found this out quite by accident and my world was turned completely upside down. It had the same effect on my younger sister, Helen when she was told. To my mother the revelation of the truth was an enormous relief: she had always disliked the deception and I now realize how disloyal she must have felt to her mother at not letting her own children know how her mother’s life had ended. She at once told me all she could, as gently as possible, and gave me a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank¸ which had recently been published. Of course, I identified utterly with Anne Frank and perhaps it was then that I got my first insight into the idea of chance. It was clear to me that ‘if’ I had been born a little earlier, ‘if’ my parents had not escaped or ‘if’ England had been occupied, our fates would have been what Anne Frank’s became. Those ‘ifs’ could so easily have been fulfilled that the distance between possibility and reality seemed to me almost non-existent and I began to live in my mother’s skin and, through her, in my grandmother’s, as the people closest to me, and then to try to comprehend the vastness of the suffering. It was an extraordinary awakening and one which brought me yet closer to my mother.

Yet with the knowledge came the frustration at all that which could not be known. Perhaps that was why, a year after my mother’s death, I found myself looking through old letters and discovering how, in later life, time plays extraordinary tricks. For the first time I understood how close my arrival in this world was to my parents’ flight from Czechoslovakia – only three years – and how the anxiety they were living in at that time was at its height. Never in my childish self-absorption would I have guessed what was going on in my parents’ minds. I do have a very early memory of my mother talking to a fellow refugee, from Vienna, and of the word ‘schrecklich’ (‘terrible’) occurring so often that I asked what it meant, but that is my only remembered glimpse into the blackness. My parents’ friendship with various people with that familiar accent I had not consciously recognized as Austrian German, the arrival, shortly after the end of the war, of a wonderful magical parcel from Czechoslovakia, my paternal grandparents’ arrival in Britain in 1947, even the shortening of our family name and that process of ‘naturalization’ (which I confused with ‘nationalization’), none of these gave me a hint of the horrors my parents had so very recently escaped. By the time I found out about our Jewish identity the war years seemed – and were for me – a lifetime away. Yet there I was, in 2008, revisiting through their letters people now long dead, some of whom I had known as a child: wonderful ‘uncle’ Harry Bramwell and his wife Flo, who, in their small council house in Sheffield, generously offered hospitality to my parents, aunts and uncle; and my beloved godmother, ‘auntie’ Maud, whom I loved so much that I would practise dealing with death by trying to face losing her. She and her husband Arthur befriended my parents early on, corresponded briefly with my grandmother Marie, and did all they could to be substitute parents to my parents. Then there were also those letters from my grandmother to my mother and aunt, which my aunt had kept in various bundles around her house and which, after her move into a care home, my mother and I had cleared out and stored away after a cursory reading of some of them. My mother had not wanted to keep them and told me to have them. I wonder now whether she was handing down to me a memory, at one remove, that was too painful for her to revive.

There were letters, also, from Eman, the distant relative in America that my mother had mentioned and whose widow, Louise, sent me my treasured doll at the end of the war. The early letters from Eman and his wife discussed ways in which my family might emigrate to the USA. Eman, despite his lack of money, was eager to do all he could to help the daughters of his cousin Marie, whom he remembered with great affection from the days before his own emigration early in the century. He tried to explain the hardship they might at first face, in view of the unemployment then current in the United States, but encouraged them to feel all would be possible for young people not too proud to try their hand at anything. In later letters, until America’s entry into the war, he was the transmitter of news between my grandmother and her daughters, doing his best to reassure both sides.

Intriguingly, there is one letter from Eman addressed directly to my grandmother, giving news of Edith and Grete in a circuitous way designed to escape the censor’s notice, and an envelope to Ernst Löwy in the spring of 1941 (after Greece was occupied and when, as the letters from Marie to Ernst would in due course show, direct communication between Prague and Greece was interrupted). All of these were fascinating, conveying the sense of a simple, good-hearted man, full of compassion, so that I felt a touch of real grief when I came across a letter from his wife saying that Eman had died in June 1942, unable to bear the sadness around him any longer. In my grandmother’s letters to Ernst, which I had yet to discover, Eman is frequently referred to, often with a touch of exasperation because he sends summarized versions of Edith’s and Grete’s letters rather than forwarding them. Poor Eman was only doing the best he could and at least my grandmother could know her daughters were safe and were coping. But my grandmother’s exasperation is understandable, however unreasonable.

A further two letters addressed to my grandmother were, mysteriously, amongst the papers I was exploring, and at the time, though they were curious, they did not have the significance they were to acquire later. Still, I read them with interest: the first, from a friend Ella, who was the sister of Marie’s good friend Olga (the Olga Löwenstein who is mentioned frequently and lovingly in Marie’s letters to Ernst) is written in June 1939 from the Philippines and describes her long sea journey and her first impressions of the very un-European country she finds herself in. She comments interestingly not only on the difficult climate but also on the customs and attitudes – for example how, from her perspective, children are brought up to be little dictators. There were also letters from Ella to Grete, completing the picture. She herself was desperately worried about her two sisters, Olga in Prague and Anne Riemer in Vienna, and felt guilty at her own safety.

The other letter to Marie whose presence is unexplained (I guess this correspondence must have been entrusted to my Sternschuss grandparents, though I am unsure why) is dated December 1941 and is from an old friend, Else Auerbach, whose children are in England. She herself is in Hilversum, Holland – by this time also an occupied country, from which she appears to be able to write relatively freely to occupied Czechoslovakia – and she tells of a nephew of hers who recently died in a camp in France, Gurs. She also congratulates Marie on her intention to marry Ernst Löwy – again the mention – and says she fully understands and is glad. Both these letters were to gain additional weight and interest when I finally, in October 2008, came to read Marie’s letters to Ernst, Ella’s because she was the sister of Olga and Else’s because Marie mentions receiving a letter from her and I immediately recognized her as an old family friend from Berlin and the letter as the one in my possession. I even remembered as a small child visiting her children in London. I am unsure whether she herself escaped or not, although I imagine it is unlikely.

Here, though, were two more very sincere writers expressing themselves freely and most interestingly, giving a sense of the network of friendships and relationships which was under such ominous threat, and the way people were dealing with it. I had no idea how the letters of Marie would bring a final touch of life to them (like Giuseppe to Pinocchio!) but already I felt myself surrounded by people who, as I said at the start, were ‘voices of the dead’, whose presence was vivid.

There were also three letters, from a Tante Rosa Kessler, of whose existence I knew nothing. She was the widowed sister of my maternal grandfather, Emil Bader, and lived in Brno. She comes alive through these letters, the first written to congratulate Marie on my aunt’s birth in 1909, the second to my aunt to help her recover her Czech nationality through assembling the necessary documents, and the third was a letter of commiseration to Marie following my grandfather’s death. In due course Rosa was also deported and perished, along with her two sons, Fredy and Walter. In my grandmother’s letters, Fredy visits her unexpectedly at her flat and causes Marie great delight.

There were cards from Onkel Friedrich, the first cellist in the Vienna Philharmonic and member of the then famous Rosé Quartet. He was a cousin of my grandmother’s and they were very fond of each other. Once again, my own memories just touched that world: I have a clear recollection of going with my mother to visit Onkel Friedrich and Tante Käthe in their upstairs flat in London. I was touched to read, in letters my mother wrote to my aunt during a period when my mother was in London in 1940, how they took care of my mother and took her to concerts, a rare treat in a grim world. One of Friedrich’s cards describes how he had just met Arnold Rosé, who had recently learnt of his daughter Alma’s death in Auschwitz and who was inconsolable.

There was a further group of letters which, to my shame, I must admit to not having understood in all their reality. These were letters which my aunt Grete had photocopied for me in the 1980s in order to give me some understanding of what had happened. Why I did not truly enter into their spirit at the time is a complex issue, to do with a certain sentimentality and nostalgia which my mother always disliked in my aunt and which no doubt affected me. Now, however, immersing myself in an increasingly real and complex world, I had a new understanding. There was a touching letter from Johanna, a loyal maid in my grandmother’s house in Karlsbad, discussing how to save some of the contents of the house after my grandmother’s forced departure. There was another from Salvator Cougno (Kounio) explaining briefly that he, his wife Hella (my mother’s third cousin) and their two children Erika and Heinz had all miraculously survived Auschwitz. And there were several from my father’s stepmother, Hede Sternschuss, whose German nationality and non-Jewish background saved her and my Jewish grandfather from death. These latter were written immediately after the war, in hesitant but correct English, and brought the first news of what might have happened to Marie and her family, and of how they had managed up until their deportation. Kindly, Hede assured my mother and aunt that their mother had been only too glad that they were safe in England and had understood how they could not write. She spoke, too, of the happiness Marie had had in the prospect of marrying Ernst Löwy after the war.

All these people – those I had known and those I had not – spoke with their own clear voices, sure in their own identity, speaking as if only yesterday about events which happened so very many years ago. And suddenly my maternal grandmother seemed very close, very alive, in the letters she wrote between May 1939 and the spring of 1940, as she comforted, encouraged and upbraided her daughters in their new land. She would have been younger when she wrote those letters than I was when I read them, and her children younger than my own, and again I was filled with that strange wonder at chance which ordains that we live in this period rather than that, our lives directed by one set of external events rather than another.

Now that my curiosity and empathy had been aroused I began, at last, to look in more detail at the many letters and papers my aunt had left, becoming more adept at reading my grandmother’s handwriting in particular and a little later I made another note in my unintentional diary. I had just discovered a letter written exclusively to my aunt on 17 January 1940, the same date as one written to all three (including my father), but mainly to my mother, sending greetings for her approaching twenty-ninth birthday. This second letter had moved me very much when I first read it, as it shows just how much my grandmother treasured my mother:

When I look back over time, from the first day of your life to the hour when you left me, every memory I have of you, thank God and thanks to you, is beautiful, every memory connected to you is of years and days of great happiness and highest hopes.

It had been a little shocking, then, to read something of an implied threat in the next passage where Marie warns her daughters never even to consider going and settling in different countries but to stick together, otherwise she will not come and live with either of them. In a postscript she apologizes for her typing errors due to her high emotional state and one senses clearly how passionately she feels on this issue, that she can risk spoiling her beautiful and, as it turned out, last birthday greeting in this way. The newly discovered letter to my aunt also sheds light on my grandmother’s state of mind as well as on her character. My aunt had asked to have a separate letter sent to her alone and had evidently complained of the way her brother-in-law had treated her. In her reply, her mother, while assuring her that she was fundamentally a good person, tries to get her to accept that she also has faults which a near relative may be right to point out and that she herself is relieved that her daughters have some male protection in that strange new land. She then goes on to speak of my mother’s birthday, asking Grete to buy Edith a few flowers on her behalf and put them on the birthday table next to her photo, but it is the next sentence which, for me, is almost unbearably moving, confirming what she wrote to my mother in her birthday letter, but also what is to come out in the letters to Ernst: her deep admiration for both her husband Emil and her daughter Edith, whom she sees as similarly good.

You are right in your judgement, she is indescribably good, like her father. I knew their wonderful qualities and knew that everyone is made happier by their presence and this makes it all the harder to live without them. But I know, too, the disadvantages their goodness brings; they always need, as one might say, a good spirit to surround them and where is that now possible?

There is such poignancy in this grieving for the loss of her dead husband and her distant daughters that the penultimate paragraph of the letter – after various pieces of news – ordering that they must make their plans for their future together (‘Just imagine a future with no-one that belongs to you in the big wide world’) can be seen only as the continuing great, if helpless, love of an anxious mother.

Reading these two letters consecutively, so differently put together yet conveying the same two fundamental messages, was like catching a glimpse of my grandmother’s character: how diplomatic she could be with her fragile older daughter (after her divorce in 1936, my aunt had suffered a nervous breakdown), tempering tough advice with praise, sending amusing details about the dog my aunt had loved, etc., yet how passionately she felt that a family should hold together, whatever the cost. All this would recur and be discussed in many different ways in the as yet undiscovered letters Marie was to write to Ernst, but for now the insights these two complementary letters offered were deeply moving and more than I would ever have imagined possible.

I was left feeling very sad that I had not been able to comfort my mother, at her end, with her mother’s words. She seemed still to be begging forgiveness.

The next entry in my notes comes when I had finally finished translating my grandmother’s letters to my mother and aunt, written between May 1939 and the spring of 1940. Continuing my browsing amongst my aunt’s collection, I had found a series of letters written by my mother to her sister in the spring of 1940, while Edith was in London doing a course in stenotyping. What struck me so forcibly in these letters was the way Edith, the ‘little one’, as she is always referred to by her mother and aunt, took on the role of adviser and comforter, with gentle admonitions here and there, the role, in fact, of her mother. As the person who loved Grete and understood her need to be encouraged but also to be reminded to be self-disciplined, she assumed her mother’s guiding role. Reading these letters in conjunction with Marie’s, the continuity is striking, with the difference that Marie’s letters, while forceful, are written with a certain helplessness at not being able to be on hand, while Edith’s are written as the younger sister whose authority comes only from the fact that she is continuing to speak in place of their mother. The fact that Grete kept these letters shows that she did not resent or reject them. Edith’s voice is very mature, although from the letters from her mother one can see that she herself was living in fear: she is constantly being exhorted not to be so ‘bang’ (afraid). Edith is on the lookout for opportunities for Grete, who is not happy in her domestic jobs. She frequently reminds Grete how to treat people with respect and tact, not keeping them waiting, not being longwinded, etc. She herself has met a number of fellow refugees in London and, after a year of constantly meeting new people and new situations, is realizing what comfort familiar faces can bring. Life is still full of all sorts of possibilities – different jobs in Britain, a move to the US, where Eman and three brothers of her grandmother, Grunzi, are living, even the remote possibility of helping their family leave Prague by going first to Italy or Yugoslavia (the only way of escape now open) but which she cannot work out how to explain in a censored letter.

When, in April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, Edith encouraged Grete to keep her nerve and to accept that one cannot live sheltered from the realities of events. Like a fellow Czech refugee who has volunteered to go and fight in France, everyone must contribute to the fight against this evil in whatever way they can.

These letters were written just as the last of the ones from Marie were reaching Edith and Grete. One new theme crops up in both groups: on 29 January 1940 Marie mentions that Thesa, Ernst’s wife, had died in Thessaloniki in December, and in mid-February she says she has sent a letter of condolence, since Ernst had asked that she be informed. She asks Edith and Grete also to write to Ernst and his daughter Hella, and in March, on receiving a nice reply from Ernst, repeats her request, saying that Ernst sounds very unhappy and that he had written a letter which had ‘cleared a lot up’. One might almost imagine that in this letter (8 March) her mood begins to change. Edith, for her part, has evidently heeded her mother’s request, as she tells Grete in a letter of 2 May that she will forward to her the reply she has received from Ernst.

These mentions of Ernst Löwy were interesting, since I had known for a long time that my grandmother was intending to remarry at the end of the war and that her future husband, Ernst, was a distant relative. Of his daughter Hella I knew a little more, since my aunt remained in contact with her for many years, but Ernst was as yet but a name, about whom one could only guess.

Apart from this tantalizing glimpse, in my grandmother’s letters and those of my mother, the most interesting thing for me, reading them one after the other, was to understand the world Edith and Grete had moved into, which Marie could only imagine, and to sense the continuity of care Edith was trying to offer her sister in her mother’s place. It was an odd sensation because my mother’s voice was at once the one I have always known – brave and encouraging in the face of difficulties – and different, written, after all, in another language: she is already the mother I knew, yet not yet a mother. It felt like a strange, knowing yet not quite knowing, hiatus, emphasized by her use of German, natural to my mother, as it was to her mother, but not to be used by the mother she was to become. It felt as if I was reading an overlapping moment between two worlds, like two overlapping pieces of material stitched together so that they are one, the one before the first row of stitching being the old, lost world, the one where the materials overlap is the strange moment of transition and uncertainty, the future undecided, languages as yet mingled – the one into which I arrived – and beyond the second stitched line is the new piece of cloth, the land of England.

That night, after puzzling over what memory does and does not retain, I suddenly heard in my head, quite clearly, my mother saying ‘Mach’ die Augen zu’ (close your eyes). Was that an echo of bed times when my disobedient mother broke the ban on German to tell her little girl to sleep, something I cannot consciously remember but which gives sense to the feeling of familiarity which the soft Austrian German has for me and joins those two worlds together?

And then, in October 2008 came the amazing, totally unsuspected, discovery that was Grete’s posthumous gift to us – though one, I believe, she had pushed so far to the back of her mind that she had forgotten it totally. The discovery of the bundle of letters in an old suitcase has already been described in the introduction. As I read the inscription on the package, the significant names Marie Bader and Edmund Benisch, jumped out, as did the sinister word ‘vernichten’ (destroy). Marie’s physical being had been ‘vernichtet’, but something from the person she was had not and was inside that packet. Within the faded blue packaging was an enormous bundle of letters – over 150 – some typewritten, the later ones handwritten. It was the last one that I read first and it almost made my heart stand still: it was a letter of farewell to Ernst Löwy written on 20 April 1942, the evening before my grandmother had to report for ‘emigration’ (the euphemism used by the German authorities for deportation) to Theresienstadt, the same evening when she wrote her beautiful last letter to her daughters. This latter was well known to us, as it had been kept until after the war by the Sternschuss parents and had always been very precious. In it she had written of her belief that she would see Edith and Grete again in the autumn, but then, into her encouragement, comes the admission that things might possibly not turn out well and the unspoken recognition that this could be her last chance to give them guidelines for their lives. One senses the underlying emotion, yet the tone is calm and comforting and full of a love which will always be there, whether or not she survives to give it.

That last letter to Ernst is much longer and concentrates on plans for when they will meet again and on how to maintain some kind of contact in the meanwhile. It is full of confidence and courage; only once does Marie briefly falter, wondering whether she could be wrong in what she thinks awaits her. She immediately dismisses such an idea and ends her letter with an expression of love which is quite heart-breaking and which showed me at once how passionately my grandmother was in love with Ernst.

It isn’t hard to imagine the thrill and expectation with which I then began to read the letters from the beginning: a whole unknown world – the Prague of the Nazi occupation – and an only partially known grandmother were suddenly discovered in the immediacy of the letters – letters which I soon realized were extremely frank, despite the censor.

Slowly it became clear that the earliest preserved letters – October 1940 – dated from the first open declaration of love. That may be why Ernst included two of his own. As a result, a brief conversation opens the collection. The mystery of how, and even why, their love blossomed is gradually revealed in small morsels, but at first reading I could not know how much would be understandable to me as an outsider. In fact, by the end, with the help of a few facts already known to us, much has been explained, almost as in a constructed novel. There is even a sort of dramatic tension in the halting of the letters in the spring of 1941 (coinciding with the German invasion of Greece) which deprives Marie of the strength which love has given her, until she finds a way to at least lessen the deprivation by re-reading old letters and answering them in depth. Tension builds again in October–November 1941, after the arrival of Heydrich, and is never absent from then on and this time their love is put to a different, more imminent test, which makes the last three letters – the one with the beautiful reconciling dream of Marie and Ernst together with Grete and Edith, the one discussing religion and the final farewell – an unutterably beautiful and poignant climax to the correspondence. Could an author have plotted it more sensitively? One almost feels not. And yet none of this is planned, it simply responds to the course of events. Marie’s ‘dreams’ do add a delightful touch of mischief and playfulness and the final dream, where all her preparations for Theresienstadt had led to the wonderful reunion both with Ernst and with her daughters, was, for me, immensely moving. I had been conscious throughout of the paucity of references to Edith and Grete, but on re-reading the letters – and on reading once more Marie’s letters of 1939–40 to her daughters – I understand just how difficult it was for her to cope with their near silence over almost two years.

That she never stopped loving them and yearning unspeakably for them shows up now and again when she allows herself a moment of recollection. One such moment is in a letter to Ernst written on 3 September 1941 where the pain of memory is so great that she has to break off. In her mind she is clear how these two loves – the maternal and the passionate – will work out in the future: she must let her daughters live their own lives, but she now has a love-filled one of her own to live and this letter allows for a blending of these two loves, the one echoing the other but each in its rightful place. When she speaks of Grete, there is often great anxiety: the last letters she had received in 1939–40 had been disturbing. Grete was constantly changing jobs and was clearly quite unable to adapt to her new humble role as refugee and supplicant. In addition, Marie was worried that Grete’s former husband, Otto Reichl, who had also fled to England, might try to persuade her to return to him and precipitate another crisis or breakdown. There are a number of references to Otto in Marie’s letters to Ernst, and one, too, to an unexpected and, for Marie, thoroughly unpleasant encounter she has with his mother, whom Marie blames in great part for the breakdown of the marriage. These worries weigh heavily on Marie but she recognizes that there is now nothing she can do and that she has to trust her daughters.

Re-reading Marie’s letters to her daughters, I realized just how much protection and advice she was accustomed to offering Grete and how desperate she must have felt at now being at a distance and out of touch. These two reasons – the inability to help and the terrible yearning – are why, it seems to me, she refers so rarely to Grete and Edith. Her strength and her will to live are all poured into the miraculous love which has just revealed itself so that, despite the distance, despite the censor and despite the apparent hopelessness of the world around, a vivid life is built up between her and Ernst, in which feelings, memories and minute details of existence are shared and contact is as near physical as a distance of nearly 800 miles and a mountain of impossible bureaucratic paperwork can allow.

As I read the letters I became aware of a terrible rift that had occurred between Marie and Ernst and Thesa Löwy round about the time of my grandfather Emil’s death in 1936. By the end of the letters it is still not quite clear how this rift came about but it seems possible to surmise. My guess is that Ernst offered help when Emil died, supporting Marie in her wish to accompany her husband when his body was taken away by the burial society. The two couples had always been friends (Marie recalls how she loved to listen to Emil and Ernst discussing things) but Thesa was known to be very jealous of Ernst and may perhaps have been suspicious of his support for Marie, perhaps even sensing the unadmitted attraction of which Ernst seems to have been partially aware. Words were had and Marie, in her grief, must have said more, and been more unforgiving, than she should have, so that she was left to grieve not only her husband but the loss of a precious friendship at a time when the clouds of Nazism were gathering. There is a picture from as early as 1934 of Emil reading a copy of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. He holds the front page towards the camera. The headline reads ‘Jewish Murder Plan against Gentile Humanity Revealed’ and is flanked by a vicious cartoon. Emil’s last months were anxious ones, and for Marie at his death, a very difficult time began. She had to help her older daughter recover from her breakdown and at the same time keep the business going in an increasingly hostile environment. It was almost a relief, she says in one letter to Ernst, to find herself hounded out by the invasion of the Sudetenland, and to lose her home and her business. Ernst and Thesa had meanwhile fled to Thessaloniki to their daughter Hella, without any reconciliation, but it was Ernst’s wish that Marie be made aware of Thesa’s death on 24 December 1939.

The glimpses Marie’s reminiscences give of her and Ernst’s shared past – memories of childhood and of the significant journey they shared to Leipzig – were fascinating for me, my first images of her as something other than my mother’s mother. That she could love Ernst so passionately did not in any way negate the love she had for her ‘Emmerl’: they were simply two quite different loves, two different lives she might have lived. She is so honest about her love of Emil and how, despite the difficult times that they had lived through during and after the First World War, her family life with him was what had made life worth living, that one can only be glad that she had recaptured her zest for life in her love of Ernst. That love had deep roots revealed almost like in a Marivaux play, where the lovers can say at last ‘Je vois clair’, and those deep, unsuspected roots meant that they knew each other extremely well and could fill in, in their imaginations, the laughter, the voices, the facial expressions which distance prevented in actuality.

All this was only slowly revealed as I read the letters and began to know, for the first time, my unknown grandmother with an unexpected intimacy. I learnt, too, that the relationship between Marie and her sister, Irene, which in family lore had always been extremely close, suffered some strain at this time of fear and helplessness. Marie and Irene had made a pact long ago, when Irene realized she could not have children, to ‘share’ Marie’s children, making all the major decisions together and discussing all the little daily details of life. When at one point Grete, and later Edith, needed to be accommodated in Prague, it was with Irene and Gustav, the wealthy aunt and uncle, that they stayed. That this arrangement was not quite as idyllic as it may sound I already knew from my mother. Gentle though she was, inwardly she sometimes bridled at the rather stifling extra parenting of aunt and uncle and on one occasion, when they disapproved of university friends she was associating with, she told them to ‘get down off their moneybags’. I was amazed when my mother told me this story, but reading Marie’s letters I can see exact echoes of this dislike of the material and the emphasis on possessions and class. My grandmother talks of how she likes the simple people of Prague and later, more critically, blames her sister and brother-in-law for their reluctance to leave their wealth behind in order to escape. When Marie refuses to share her new love with Irene – unlike the sharing of her children – Irene is hurt and cannot understand Marie’s secrecy. Reading the letters, I could understand it all too well and thought how alike she and her gentle but determined daughter ‘Edithl’ were.

What an unsuspected wonder this reading of the letters was for a granddaughter who had never been able to know her grandmother. Now I not only knew her but could understand her thinking, her nature and what she transmitted to my mother. The letters had literally turned my life inside out and for months the world they described became almost more real than the world around me. I believe my mother must have refused to read them. Grete, according to a note she wrote on the inner packaging, read only a few. I, the granddaughter, knew no such scruples, but I understand well how they could not bring themselves to relive the guilt they felt at having abandoned Marie. What they did not know, and what Ernst had wanted them to know, was what extraordinary happiness she had found in the midst of all the fear and misery.

As I drew nearer to the end I read more and more slowly, knowing the dreadful end and longing to keep my vivid, courageous grandmother alive just a little longer. But when the last letter was finally read I began to wonder how Ernst had coped with Marie’s silence. If there were any postcards they have not survived and there is no indication that Ernst had any further communication from Marie: she was sent to Izbica, the ante-chamber to the death camps, only three days after arriving in Theresienstadt. Sadly, it is unlikely that she would have been reunited with Irene and Gustav and able to hand over to them her parcels of food.

It was then that we discovered that Ernst’s two grandchildren, Erika and Heinz, had each written a memoir of their time in Auschwitz, and from Erika’s book we learnt of Ernst’s dignified but fateful decision to join them.

The trail did not end there but led me, via Erika’s daughter (another Theresa) to a most emotional and precious meeting in 2009 with Erika, her husband Rolly and her brother Heinz, in Thessaloniki. Erika and Rolly lived just above the former vineyard which features so often in the letters and in Marie’s dreams for the future. At the bottom of the hill, far in the distance, the setting sun shone golden on the Aegean Sea, a sight I will never forget and one I wish Ernst and Marie, who loved nature and beauty so much, could have enjoyed together. We, the grandchildren, drank to their health and felt an uncanny bond. Erika at first felt that she could not intrude in her grandfather’s love life. She had loved him dearly (and he her, as the letters show) and at first asked just to be told a few things. But gradually, as we wrote to each other, she began to feel that this miraculous flower of love deserved to be preserved.

Today, the survivors of the Holocaust are a small and dwindling number and sadly, in December 2010, I had news that Erika had died. I am so glad to have met one of the very last persons alive to have known Ernst and to have established an emotional bond with her. I never knew my grandmother but reading these letters has brought her alive for me and meeting Erika has completed the circle.

And so the discoveries were finally complete. Translating the letters brought a different kind of contact. In attempting to capture the immediacy and the varying tones of the letters, I had to try to avoid ponderousness and sentimentality and I am not at all sure I have succeeded. If not, I have not been true to Marie: her language was so very natural, as close to the spoken word as she could make it, and I wanted to make her come alive. Family lore had a lovely little story about the young Marie: that she kept noticing a gentleman who was clearly interested in her but who didn’t have the daring to approach her. So she popped into a greengrocer’s and bought a bag of plums, tore a small hole in the bag and let a few fruits drop out one by one as she walked along until my future grandfather, Emil, finally found the excuse and the courage to pick them up and offer them back to her. That is the same person who addresses Herr Censor almost cheekily, begging him to be patient just this once, or explaining to Ernst that she must be brief so as not to make demands on Herr Censor. When one realizes the fear that reigned in Prague at that time, the brave optimism implied in addressing the censor as a fellow human being goes some way to explaining how Marie was able to keep her self-respect despite ‘der hässliche gelbe Fleck’ (the hateful yellow spot – meaning the Star of David) and other humiliations. Her feelings for Ernst gave her the courage to retain her own humanity and to believe that, through work and co-operation with others, she would survive the hard present. How she dealt with the final hopelessness I dare not imagine.

Whilst the discoveries were now complete, my understanding of Marie’s letters to Edith and Grete between their departure in the spring of 1939 and the spring of 1940 would be greatly enhanced by what I had read in the letters to Ernst. It is only gradually that I have come to realize how much the different sets of letters, from Marie to Edith and Grete in 1939–40, from Edith to Grete in the spring of 1940 and from Marie to Ernst between 1940 and 1942, as well as various ones from Eman and other people added to and explained each other.

I now gave attention, too, to letters to Edith and Grete from Irene, Gustav and Grunzi (although the latter are completely illegible to me and I mention them purely to indicate that she too wrote frequently to her granddaughters), which were amongst the letters which my aunt Grete had kept. Reading Marie’s and Irene’s letters side by side, I could feel the great love and hopes both had for the younger generation and found touching the little updates each gave on the state of the other. But I could also sense how Marie had insights and advice that she, as the mother, was best able to give. That Edith, at any rate, felt this is clear from a letter from Marie early in 1940 where, responding to a comment of Edith’s, she tells her ‘I can well understand, little one, how you feel a bit irritated by Auntie … ’. It shows that Edith and Marie had their own private understanding and that Marie could empathize with a certain annoyance at Irene’s constant prompting and questioning in her letters to her nieces. It is an irritation which Marie herself is to experience and analyse with great pain and guilt in the course of her correspondence with Ernst.

Elsewhere (December 1939) Marie describes to her daughters how Irene awaits her nieces’ letters and how she carries them around ‘like a cat her little kittens’: the deep affection for her sister and the moments of irritation are two strings which tug at Marie’s heart increasingly as her love for Ernst grows. But whatever the differences between them – and more and more, in the letters to Ernst, the Lípas’ collapse in the face of their desperate situation contrasts with Marie’s determination to believe in a happy future – when Irene and Gustav are deported, Marie’s thoughts and love are all with them and when it is her turn to go she leaves for Theresienstadt armed with treats to cheer them up.

Having read the letters to Ernst, these small indications in Marie’s letters to her daughters of differences and potential friction with Irene became easy to understand, a self-evident part of the relationship. Similarly Gustav’s and Grunzi’s low spirits and Irene’s edginess, all mentioned in passing in these earlier letters, become, with the pressures of the occupation, increasingly oppressive and difficult to handle and Marie is clearly relieved to be able to discuss them with Ernst, as he, in his turn, reveals his own uneasy relations with his daughter and son-in-law.

The re-reading of Marie’s letters to her daughters confirms for me what I had sensed to be the reason she so rarely mentions them in the letters to Ernst. She yearns for them so much and is so frustrated at not being able to hear from them and write to them, that she does not dare to let her thoughts dwell consciously on them if she is to keep her optimism. Comments such as those she made in letters just after the outbreak of war show just how much she is having to discipline her longing:

One must just live from one day to the next and accept that we must just put up with our destiny. Let’s thank God for what we have been able to enjoy together, your presence will always surround me and be in me

and

Next week is [Jewish] New Year. These are serious and hard times, so I don’t want to get emotional and will suppress all my memories [of past years] because the present is quite enough to think about. Life without my children is no life at all, a mere vegetating.

Her frustration at not being able to help her daughters is equally obvious: she is very worried at how afraid Edith is feeling and at how she is allowing herself to be overworked. With Grete the worries are different and she has advice to offer on how Grete must take care to hold her tongue and not answer back, etc., but in one letter she is in utter despair that Grete is once again without a job and she clearly longs to be able to tell her a few home truths face to face. By the next letter, characteristically, she has picked herself up and tries to be more constructive. This pattern of near despair followed up by a summoning of forces is one I recognized from the letters to Ernst. By the time of the first preserved letters to Ernst, all direct written contact with her daughters has been lost and she has no way to advise and support them and must, as she says, leave them to care for themselves.

The letters to Edith and Grete were of renewed interest in another way also. Knowing from the letters to Ernst the full power of the restrictions which would gradually be imposed and the way Marie would deal with them, it was interesting to see how she coped with the early ones. (In fact, some were imposed even before Edith and Grete’s departure, such as the requirement for exit visas, so they may well have been alert to hints of more.) She mentions them in such a way that it is clear that entry to certain places are, or imminently will be, prohibited, for example swimming pools, theatres, cafés and parks (officially banned in mid-August 1939). As in the letters to Ernst, she uses the oblique formula ‘ … we can’t and we don’t wish to go out any more.’

However, she describes beautiful walks she has made in Prague which make her love Prague and its citizens, who are kind and helpful, so that she feels she has lived there for ever. On one occasion in June 1939 she made a chance discovery which brought her great happiness when, on the anniversary of her husband Emil’s death she came across the grave of Franz’s mother, Ada Sternschuss, in the beautiful tree-lined New Jewish Cemetery in Olšany (Praha-Žižkov). Here is one small satisfying detail linking the two sets of letters from Marie. In September 1941, she writes to Ernst that Ada’s grave is a place she always visits when walking in the cemetery: ‘That is where I always make my prayers’. Jewish cemeteries have become one of the few spaces still open to Jews to walk in.

A number of references to people become clearer as a result of reading the two sets of letters in conjunction with each other. There are, for instance, references to Grete’s good friend Käthe Brock-Strauss, and her family’s escape, leaving their little son Hansi temporarily with his grandmother, Frau Isa Strauss, who is mentioned in the letters to Ernst. Marie’s admiration for Käthe and for her mother Isa, who had already founded an important clinic which bore her name, helps build a continuous picture: it is with Isa Strauss that Marie hopes to work when they are deported together to Theresienstadt (as she tells Ernst in her letter of 18 April 1942). Her admiration then is undiminished and gives her the strength also to contribute in whatever way she can to relieving people’s misery.

Mention of a mysterious American woman, Henriette Eisenberg, whose address Marie gives to Ernst before her deportation, became more intriguing when I realized from the letters to Edith and Grete that this same woman was evidently travelling repeatedly from Prague to London, apparently involved with the Kindertransports. A letter from Irene, admonishing Grete for not being grateful to Henriette (‘If it hadn’t been for her you would surely still be where you were’) implies that it was through Henriette that Grete got the job of accompanying children to England in May 1939 and in this way was able to make her escape. Thus another apparently meaningless name, overlooked in a first reading, began to take form, and again one is aware of the continuity of the world Marie inhabits, despite closing walls and diminishing information. An enquiry about Frau Eisenberg via the journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees in 2013 elicited a response from Laura Selo who, as Hannelore Gumpel, and with her two sisters, was on the transport which Frau Eisenberg led from Prague on 31 May and who remembers her enthusiasm for her task. This particular transport is referred to in Irene’s letter to Grete of 22/05/39.

And so, in numerous ways, both in factual details such as a description of her flat and in insights into other people’s personalities and my grandmother’s reactions, the two sets of letters together build a single, many-faceted world. On the emotional level, one recognizes the varying tones of advice, encouragement, etc., common to both, and the levels of feeling, from joy in a beautiful walk to moments close to despair.

Marie, Mitzimarie, the girl, the young mother and wife, the widowed mother and finally the mature woman in love and as full of emotion as a young girl falling headlong in love for the very first time, against the deadly serious background of occupied Prague and the threatening unknown beyond: that is the grandmother I belatedly came to know, when I was already a grandmother and when her two daughters were already dead. Now I know for myself the joys of being a grandmother and wish she could have experienced them too (I was born only three months after her deportation from Prague but she knew nothing of my impending arrival). Yet my sister Helen and I have, almost a lifetime later, been given a quite extraordinary and utterly unexpected chance to know our grandmother almost at first hand. She can now live on in that continuum of the generations of which Hitler failed to rob her, not vernichtet, not vanished and unknown.

This must be what her Ernst wished to give to her children and her children’s children, ensuring that that brave spirit was not entirely erased, and ensuring at the same time his own immortality, that beloved grandfather of Erika and Heinz.

Long ago I had my own reconciling dream about my grandmother’s death. I was standing in the doorway to a large, low room and opposite, under a large window, stood a great bed with two figures in it: my mother and my grandmother. My mother was stroking her mother and, as I watched, Marie turned and curled up to Edith and very gently and peacefully died in her arms. It is strange, the power that vivid dreams have to appear to carry a grain of truth. I fear this one carried no actual truth but for years it brought some unjustified comfort.

Today a different comfort has been given with the discovery of Marie’s letters to Ernst. I have puzzled long and hard over why and how he left Marie’s letters and can come up with only one conclusion: that he feared, after almost a year’s silence, that Marie was already dead and, being very uncertain of his own future, believed it right that something of the beauty of their last eighteen months should be offered to Marie’s daughters. For that, and for my aunt Grete’s inability ever to throw anything away, we, their descendants must be grateful indeed.

Kate Ottevanger