Unlike her two sisters, who refused to emigrate, my mother escaped the gathering inferno in good time. For her, though, as for my father, it was a hesitant and much-deferred departure. When you love a place as much as they loved Germany, leaving can be painful beyond imagination, even if you have been declared subhuman.
At first my mother merely ‘visited’ England for a few months at a time, from 1934, for lessons with her violin teacher, Max Rostal, who had reconstituted his Berlin classes in London – to where his own teacher and arch rival, Carl Flesch, would soon also relocate.
In their routines and methods, Rostal and Flesch might still have been at the Hochschule für Musik; except, my mother would quip, they now had to cope with the quirks of their new teaching facilities. Wind leaking insistently through the windows and sending their students’ instruments out of tune; rickety plumbing that often deteriorated further when repaired; caretakers who slept on the job and resented being asked to take care of anything. Not to mention the difficulty of finding their new addresses: 3 Smith Gardens might be located in Smith Square; number 42 might be adjacent to number 6; street names were often concealed by shrubbery, and in the case of some, like Strathray Gardens, where Rostal lived, defied pronunciation even after careful practice.
From 1934 until 1938 my mother split her time between Berlin and London for her lessons with Rostal, occasionally being refused entry by the British authorities at Dover and having to take the boat back to the continent to prepare a fresh application, but staying for longer periods each time – until, in the spring of 1938, her passport expired, and she went to the German Embassy in London to renew it.
‘Your birth papers!’ the refined-looking official barked at her from the other side of a wooden desk. Barking, my mother sensed, didn’t come naturally to him.
She presented him with her birth certificate.
‘Your parents’ birth certificates!’ he fired back.
‘I don’t have them.’
‘Their race?’ he demanded.
‘German.’
‘Don’t waste my time! Aryan or not?’
‘Don’t shout at a woman!’
‘What are you doing in England?’
‘I’m a music student.’
‘A student? Why does a German need to study in England? That is hardly necessary! Our education is far better than theirs!’
‘My teacher emigrated—’
‘And music! What do the English know about music? As we Germans say, they are “the land without music” . . . A nation of shopkeepers,’ he added, proud, as my mother recalled it, of quoting Napoleon’s alleged putdown.
‘I’m studying with a German.’
‘A German?’ His glance was vicious. ‘What sort of German, one can only ask. Besides, you seem to spend long periods here,’ he remarked, surveying the densely stamped visa pages. ‘Do you really need to be here just to study? And why do the British allow you to remain for so long if you are merely a student?’
My mother was sure he knew the answer: she could stay because of her Jewish parentage. The identity to which she confessed had been well rehearsed: to the British she was a Jewish refugee, to the Germans a non-Jewish student. Those identities had – so far – enabled her to move between the two countries.
‘I must inform you,’ the official said, after he had leafed through the visa pages, ‘that if you return to Germany without a valid passport, for which we will need the birth certificates of your parents and grandparents, you will be immediately transferred to a special camp.’ And he slapped the useless document onto his desk and fixed her with a stare of blank indifference.
My mother said nothing. When I asked her what she thought he’d meant by a ‘special camp’, she said she hadn’t bothered to ask him, but had merely slid the elapsed document towards him, and returned his contempt with a look of disdain.
As she used to say with a defiant chuckle: ‘I had finally left Germany. For good.’