Procrastination is an art in which I claim formidable expertise. I am seldom unable to find new ways of putting off until tomorrow what I’m desperate to accomplish today, and never at a loss to justify the joys of doing so: important tasks cannot be rushed; ideas come when they come; I need to be on top form, which I’m not at the moment; a break will give me new energy; I am delaying out of perfectionism, not sloth.
What I hadn’t realized until one day in early 2006 was that avoiding the task in hand could also have life-changing consequences. Instead of reading up on the latest scandals of the US president or seeing what ex-girlfriends were up to, I googled Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
I entered the name ‘Theodor Liedtke’ followed by ‘Berlin’ and hit return. Up popped the record of my great-uncle, including details of his last addresses. This was Theo’s permanent memorial in a faraway land that he had never visited. I marvelled at the survival of so much information on a salesman in a vanished department store whose remains had probably billowed from an incinerator into a scattered grave in the sky.
Then I stumbled across something completely unexpected. In a section of Theo’s memorial marked ‘Personal Testimonies’, I found a witness statement by Theodor Liedtke’s ‘grandson’, Klaus Meltzer – as well as his address in Cologne.
Grandson? Theo had definitely been childless, according to Ernst, Emmy, my mother, Ursel, and Ilse. No member of my family had ever seen him with a woman, never mind come across evidence of offspring.
It was a stunning discovery. Not just to find this as yet unknown close relative, but, even more poignantly, to have a fresh connection to Theo and so to Ernst – whose living realities had so far depended entirely on the testimony of the three sisters.
Within minutes, I am speaking to Herr Meltzer. I hear a drawled ‘Hallo, Klaus hier’ as the phone is answered, and I get to the point right away. ‘Hello Klaus . . . Herr Meltzer. I’m calling from London. My name is Simon May. It’s about Theodor Liedtke. I am his great-nephew and I think you are . . .’
At first I hear nothing but sobbing and aborted attempts to speak. Nobody has ever called him about Theo before, he eventually stammers. The name hasn’t come up in the thirty-five years since Klaus’s mother died. She was, he says, Theo’s daughter.
I want to be sure, though, that we are talking about the same person. Does Meltzer’s information about Theo’s life – when he was born, his education, his occupation, the Berlin neighbourhood where he lived, when he died, where he died – match what I have heard from my mother and Ilse and Ursel? The answer is, almost entirely, yes.
Then I ask him the obvious question: who was his mother’s mother? His voice freezes. ‘Yes,’ he says enigmatically. ‘That would be a question!’ he mumbles. I ask again, more casually. ‘Yes,’ he answers again. ‘Are there any clues?’ I finally venture. ‘None at all,’ he replies. His mother always refused to talk about that subject. She died when Meltzer was twenty-eight years old, in 1971, and never spoke about her own mother.
All she said was that she, Ellen, lived with her parents in Berlin until her mother died in 1933, when she was fourteen. The death was accidental: her mother had been hanging curtains in their living room when she fell off a ladder and suffered a fatal concussion. After the tragedy, Ellen continued to live with Theo until the end of 1936, when he sent her to ‘finishing schools’ in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria and then in Montreux in Switzerland. Soon after returning, she met Herr Meltzer’s father – and the rest was history.
That’s it. There are no photos of Theo’s alleged wife or lover; no letters; no stories of family holidays, of this woman’s interests, or of her background; no clues to her name or when she was born. Some years after Ellen died, Meltzer’s paternal aunt divulged a couple of other fragments about the mysterious woman. One was that the real reason she died wasn’t concussion from falling off a ladder while hanging up curtains, but rather an infection that she had caught from Ellen, who had been wracked by guilt her whole life for, as she saw it, killing her mother. The aunt also told Meltzer that Ellen’s mother had been raised a Protestant, though she was almost certainly of Jewish descent.
One thing was sure: Ellen never mentioned the apartment in the Bavarian Quarter where Theo, according to my mother, lived a bachelor life with his mother and Hedwig Kuss.