With Pip and Frank, we had 92 per cent of the heirs on side. The Chileans, who accounted for a further 7 per cent, were still at war with their national bureaucracy over certifying the paperwork, but at least we knew where they were. There was one missing piece: the heir to Adelheid Gerschlowitz.
So what had happened to Adelheid? The hunt started, as it often did, with an enquiry to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial. Did they have her on their lists? No, they replied; the only murdered Gerschlowitzs from Berlin were a Jenny, a Flora, and a Nathan, and none of these names rang bells with Renata.
A couple of weeks after Renata received the reply from Yad Vashem, she happened to be in Berlin, and decided to visit the grave of her grandfather, Gustav Wertheim, who was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Weissensee. As she was about to leave, she thought she’d ask an official at the front desk if he knew how you could discover where your German-Jewish ancestors were buried, if all you had was a name and place of birth. Was there such a database?
‘Adelheid Gerschlowitz?’ He tapped into a computer. ‘She’s buried right here!’
Renata was stunned. ‘So how can we find out more about her?’
‘Speak to that young fellow in the next room,’ the official replied. ‘He’s researching the fate of Berlin Jews in the thirties.’
The young man thought this must be a set-up. ‘But I’ve researched the Gerschlowitz family!’ he said. ‘It was a few months ago now, but I’ll get you all the information I have.’
Adelheid, he reported, had been deported to Theresienstadt, survived the camp, and died in Berlin in 1956.
Died in Berlin? That would make the search for an heir so much easier. There must be a whole post-war paper trail on her in this city of files. For a start, if she had been imprisoned in a Nazi camp and then lived in Berlin after the war, she would surely have received some sort of pension from the German government. The bureaucracy that dealt with pensions for Nazi victims was the Entschädigungsbehörde, the Restitution Authority, the obvious next port of call.
Renata thanked the young man and was about to head for the Restitution Authority when he called after her: ‘Wait a minute! Adelheid had a daughter called Flora, who was born on 26 June 1893 and was also deported to Theresienstadt. You have an heir!’
He read on; then paused. ‘I’m sorry – she was murdered. Her mother survived, but Flora died within a few months.’
This matched the information on a Flora that Renata had received from Yad Vashem; that Flora must have been Adelheid’s daughter.
After the usual weeks assembling the necessary papers, Renata tracked down a three-inch file into which the Restitution Authority had compressed Adelheid’s life, where she discovered that there was a sole heir: Dr Werner Asch, Adelheid’s nephew.
Further enquiries revealed that he had married a woman called Dagmar, who had given birth to a daughter, Judith, born in Berlin in 1961.
So Judith Asch was the heir to Adelheid’s 1 per cent and she might be in Berlin, right under Renata’s nose. The hunt for Eichenberg’s heirs would end, as it had begun, in the improbable setting of the city from which the original owners had long ago been expelled. Finding her would just be a matter of searching the telephone directory.
But it wasn’t as simple as that. There was no Judith Asch with that date of birth registered in Berlin. Renata then tried the maternity wards of hospitals in Berlin: had any of them delivered a baby with that name on that day? No luck. What about baptismal registries, both Catholic and Protestant? Dagmar wasn’t Jewish and might have raised Judith as a Christian, but there too Renata drew a blank.
A breakthrough came with a search that Renata placed at Berlin’s Interior Ministry for all birth certificates marked ‘Judith Asch’. Four months later, Judith’s birth certificate was located. But Renata could have no access to it, they said, as she wasn’t a direct family member. Not that a birth certificate would have shed any light on where she was living over three decades later.
Renata pleaded with the official at the local registry of births and deaths. Judith Asch, she told him, probably had no near relatives and this concerned an inheritance from which she would benefit. He shrugged understandingly, but the rules were the rules. As she was about to leave, exhausted at this dismal end to years of searching for heirs, he said, ‘By the way, Frau de Jara, why don’t you try enquiring at this other office?’ And he slipped her a piece of paper directing her to the registry of Berlin residents.
Renata had left Germany too young to know that when you move into a new lodging there the first thing you must do is register at an office like this. If only she had asked Stahlke, she would have gone here immediately. And it duly took this office just ten minutes to resolve the mystery: Judith Asch had a new name. She was now Judith Bieling.
Renata ran to a public telephone across the road – she didn’t yet have a mobile phone – and grabbed the Berlin directory. There it was: ‘Bieling, Judith’! She left a message saying that if she was the former Judith Asch, daughter of Dr Werner Asch, and great-niece of Adelheid Gerschlowitz, then she should call this stranger from Florida for some good news.
That evening, Judith was amazed to learn that, if she successfully laid siege to a chain of bureaucracies, she would become an heiress.
But why Bieling?
The answer was easy, Judith told me over coffee in Berlin in 2008: Bieling was the maiden name of Judith’s mother, Dagmar. When Judith was about to begin junior school, Dagmar wanted her daughter to think of herself as a Bieling and not as an Asch. The reason for this, she later told Judith, was compassionate: Judith’s classmates might insert an ‘r’ after the ‘A’ in Asch, and so make her an ‘Arsch’ – an arse, a backside – and Dagmar wanted to spare her the taunting and the humiliation.
For Judith, Eichenberg wasn’t just about the discovery of some money. It had given her a global family of which she was now part. By 2008, she had already spent Thanksgiving with Renata in Florida and New Year’s with Renata’s children in California. She and I had met and felt a bond through a common inheritance that was a surprise to us both. The community of heirs was her real windfall.