I owe an immense debt to the late novelist Aharon Appelfeld and to the philosopher A. C. Grayling for repeatedly urging me to persist with this project. Without their encouragement, my many years of discussion with, in particular, my mother and my two aunts – all three of whom I had bombarded, since my childhood, with questions about their lives and those of their parents, uncles, and grandparents – might never have made their way from my memories and scattered notes into print.
I am hugely grateful to friends and colleagues who kindly read the manuscript, in whole or part, at various stages of its writing, in particular Lydia Goehr, A. C. Grayling, Tim Judah, Anthony McCarten, Tom McCarthy, Hella Pick, Martin Ruehl, and Rosie Whitehouse.
I extend very special thanks to Daniel Wildmann, Director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London, who devoted innumerable hours and his formidable expertise to vetting my treatment of German-Jewish history, and from whom I have learned so much; and to Bill Swainson, who advised me extensively as a freelance editor, and under whose guidance the text went through several iterations.
Invaluable research assistance and expert advice was provided, at different times, by Boris Behnen, Ulrike Ehret, Julia Hörath, John Owen, Hester Vaizey, and Kim Wünschmann, and I want to record my gratitude to each of them. Kim and Julia discovered files in German archives of which I might otherwise have remained ignorant. In addition to his superb research, Boris kindly obtained the necessary permissions to reproduce and publish documents from those archives. Thank you to all their staff, especially at the Bundesarchiv, the German federal archive.
Renata de Jara and Elke Stahlke, the client–lawyer dream team, who spearheaded the restitution of a building and business in Berlin that had been Aryanized in 1939, and in which my grandparents had had a stake, kindly checked and approved the relevant chapters.
I thank Anita Lasker-Wallfisch for inviting me to join her on a four-day visit to Auschwitz in 2017, as well as for many discussions and reminiscences in her kitchen over takeout Thai dinners and her delicious home-made soups. Of the close-knit German-speaking Jewish circle in London in which I was raised, she is the last surviving member, and in particular the last to have known both my parents since before I was born. She is someone to whom I feel a deep bond of gratitude.
Finally, huge thanks are due to my wonderful agent, Caroline Michel, for championing this project, as well as to Tim Binding and Laurie Robertson and the whole team at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop. I extend equally huge thanks to my magnificent – and patient – commissioning editor, Georgina Morley, at Picador, with whom it has been a tremendous pleasure and privilege to work. I am indebted to Marissa Constantinou for her painstaking work and all her support; to Chloe May (no relation) for skilfully and meticulously guiding the text through to publication; and to Nick Humphrey, who brilliantly, and with necessary brutality, excised surplus verbiage, further proof that slimming and toning can be good for the health of an organism.
Most finally, I should like to thank Lord Byron’s Manfred for his encouragement –
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth
– but even more so W. B. Yeats:
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.