In 1946, my mother returned home. During the war she had heard nothing from Ilse and Emmy after their messages, sent through the Red Cross, dried up in the summer of 1942. Attempts to contact her family in Berlin immediately following the capitulation went unanswered. The last time she had seen her mother was in 1939, when Emmy paid a flying visit to London to attend her debut violin recital at the Wigmore Hall on Friday 13 January, accompanied by Gerald Moore; and she hadn’t seen Ilse for even longer, though she knew from the final Red Cross telegram that she had given birth to a son.
She was steeling herself for the possibility that her mother and sister might be dead when, one afternoon soon after the German surrender, a fellow refugee and close friend called Esther Mendelsohn, daughter of a Berlin architect who had known Ernst and Emmy, took her to visit her new boyfriend, John Burton.
They were sipping tea in John’s apartment when the phone rang. It was his sister from Berlin, who was married to a German and had spent the whole war there. John, normally a model of reserve, became intensely animated when he heard her voice, and my mother picked up snatches of a story about hiding with her children in the Black Forest, while her husband had ended up in a concentration camp. She caught one or two names – Adam, Fritz – though they meant nothing to her. ‘Lexi’ came up too.
And then the voice said: ‘By the way, a friend of mine here is looking for her sister in London. Can you help?’ ‘London is a city of millions,’ John riposted in his teasingly superior manner. ‘I’ll do what I can, but obviously we’ll be searching for a needle in a haystack.’ ‘She’s a violinist and her name is Marianne Liedtke,’ came the reply. ‘Do you know any musicians there?’ ‘Oh, well, that will be easy,’ John interrupted, with deliberate understatement, puffing languidly on his pipe. ‘Now, let me think.’ (I knew him well and he would have relished drawing out a coincidence like this.) ‘Actually, Chris, she’s sitting right here. Why don’t you have a word?’
The woman on the phone, John’s sister, was Christabel Bielenberg, who had hidden the ‘submarines’ with Ilse during the war and had begged her to find a refuge for the Jew who ended up with the Rosenthals. As Christabel was the only English-born person in Berlin whom Ilse knew, she had asked her to see if she might track down her youngest sister, who, she hoped, was still alive and traceable.
Early the following year, with the help of John’s formidable connections, my mother secured a place on an RAF bomber that was flying from a small airfield outside London into Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, supplying the occupying troops in the British sector of Berlin. The rattling turboprop had no passenger seating other than on the corrugated metal floor. A few proper seats up front were reserved for officers or sensitive equipment. The vibration and the din were continuous, but conditions on this, my mother’s first ever flight, were smooth – until soon after entering German airspace, when clear skies turned foggy and the pilot announced that they would have to descend immediately into Hannover. It would be impossible to make it to Berlin that day.
After a night spent in a hangar, fog hung heavy over the airfield and the pilot warned that it might be at least another day before they could fly. Travelling by ground was still extremely difficult: there were few buses and trains, and permits were required to move from one occupation zone to the next. The trickiest to pass through was the Soviet zone that encircled Berlin, so it quickly occurred to my mother to abandon the trip and instead to go and visit Ursel, who she knew was at the Plettenberg family castle, which, like Hannover, was within the British zone.
As soon as she arrived, it was plain to her that country life was no idyll for her sister. Ursel relished the acceptance and warmth that her new family showed her, but found the isolation hard. She was fascinated by the tales of emotional brutality that seeped in from surrounding villages – isolated childhoods, icy mothers, cruel fathers, and the violence of self-denial, where perdition could be glimpsed in a box of stale chocolates; but she longed for poetry too. She seldom shrank from stirring pots and enjoyed the buzz of local rumour – such as about the bride in a hamlet some kilometres away who was astounded to discover on her wedding night that her husband could arouse himself only by leaping naked out of a large wooden wardrobe, smelling mustily of old oak, into their bed, preferably illuminated by a shaft of moonlight. But she was also oppressed by the claustrophobia of these lives.
When my mother saw her sister marooned here, devoid of the concerts, theatre, and dance that Ursel craved, she decided, as she generally decided in any unfamiliar situation, to make music. She would play violin sonatas in the castle. A professional pianist, Herr Kraus, was duly located, the white piano was heaved from a corner of the large living room, and the concert was about to begin.
‘Where is the audience?’ my mother asks Franziskus.
‘What audience?’
‘Well, where is everyone? You said this house is full of Germans who fled the communist takeover in Prussia and Pomerania.’
‘Oh, I’ve locked them in the attic,’ Franziskus answers matter-of-factly. ‘They are tone deaf, and not one of them has even heard of Beethoven.’
‘Release them immediately!’ my mother orders, thoroughly enjoying Franziskus’s mischievous style. ‘Or I’m not playing. You’re crazy, Franziskus. It must be horrible up there!’
A parade of forlorn figures soon slides awkwardly into the drawing room. One huddled behind the other, in single file, they move with wary steps, saying nothing.
‘We will be playing sonatas,’ my mother announces when they are seated. ‘Brahms and Beethoven, each in four movements,’ she adds.
Everyone looks bemused.
‘You know Beethoven, I am sure!’ she says, wondering now whether Franziskus might not have been exaggerating.
An elderly gentleman tries to clear himself and his relations of the charges of cultural philistinism that Franziskus had seemingly levelled at them.
‘Yes, we know who Beethoven is,’ he says, slightly peeved. ‘I . . . we . . . just didn’t know he wrote anything for the violin.’