If Theo was living a double life, he was making a tremendous fist of it. Ernst, Emmy, Ilse, Ursel, and my mother as little suspected Ellen’s existence as she did theirs. My mother and Ursel were visiting Theo at his mother’s apartment on Saturday afternoons for tea and cake in exactly the years when he was supposedly living with Ellen and her mother: from around 1924 – when Ellen was five, my mother ten, and Ursel twelve – well into the 1930s. So where was Theo really living?
Buried among my mother’s memories of those Saturday afternoon teas were two clues. One was Hedwig’s excitement whenever Theo arrived back at the apartment he shared with his mother. ‘Hedwig was devoted to Theo, she adored him,’ my mother used to say, ‘and, when he got home and rang the bell down at street level, she would always cry excitedly, “Der Herr kommt, der Herr kommt!”’ – sir is coming, sir is coming! – ‘and then she would throw open the front door as he was still a floor or two beneath them, and stand ready to take his coat and hat and sit him down for tea and cake.’
If he had merely been returning from the shops or from a morning at work, Hedwig’s excitement each time he arrived back might have been a little overwrought. Perhaps on those Saturday afternoons he, too, was a visitor at his mother’s flat?
But there was a second clue that Theo might have had a secret life outside his mother’s apartment. Family lore had it that, though he had never been known to have a girlfriend, he had long been in love with Emmy’s aunt, confusingly named Emma, who had adopted Emmy and Helmut after their father’s death left their mother, Adele, on her own. This meant that Theo was reputedly in love with his brother’s wife’s aunt.
She couldn’t have been the mother of Theo’s child; she would have been around sixty when Ellen was born. But her husband Arthur Rosenthal had died five years earlier, in 1914, and as a rich and childless widow she might have become Ellen’s sponsor or even adoptive mother. Someone with means must have been behind Ellen’s affluent upbringing. Theo’s salary as a salesman at Tietz’s department store would hardly have financed the villa where Ellen was raised. Most Berliners, including well-off people like Ernst and Emmy, lived in rented apartments. To own a large house with a dozen rooms was the preserve of the rich. Nor would he have been able to afford her private education in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and then the finishing school in Montreux. And, of course, the same Tante Emma had sent her own niece and adopted daughter, my grandmother Emmy, to a finishing school in Montreux.
The oddest thing of all was that Theo, Meltzer said, had transferred ownership of the villa into Ellen’s name in 1938 or 1939 – precisely when Jewish property began to be systematically expropriated and when J. Eichenberg AG, the textile business in which Ernst and Emmy had invested, back in 1924, was Aryanized. What point could Theo have seen in transferring the villa from his name into his daughter’s: from one person stripped of property rights to another?
It was this question that took me to Cologne in April 2006 to meet my newly discovered cousin and, through him, to delve into the enigma of Theo’s life before the war. I would soon find myself in murkier historical waters than any I had yet encountered in my immediate family.