1. My maternal grandparents and their three daughters on holiday in the Swiss Alps in the mid-1920s. L. to r.: Ilse, Emmy, Marianne, Ursel, and Ernst Liedtke.
2. A room in my grandparents’ Berlin apartment at Blumeshof 12.
3. Ernst’s certificate of his exit from Judaism in 1910.
4. Ernst’s certificate of baptism, from the same year.
5. Ernst and his brother Theo sailing from Bremen to New York on board the Kaiser Wilhelm II in1909.
6. L. to r.: Marianne, Ursel, Ilse. Berlin, 1917.
7. Ernst and Emmy on the North Sea island of Helgoland in 1926.
8. The Liedtkes’ boat on the Wannsee. Ernst in the peaked cap, Emmy next to him and Ilse to the left of the gangplank.
9. The final page of Marianne’s concert and theatre notebook, which begins in 1924, when she was ten, and ends abruptly in April 1933, after Ernst’s dismissal, with performances by Wilhelm Furtwängler and the quartet of her violin teacher, Max Rostal.
10. Ilse.
11. Ursel.
12. Marianne.
13. The three sisters as teenagers.
14. Marianne and Ursel playing violin and accordion with canine audience.
15. Ursel (r.) and probably Katta Sterna (l.) in a Berlin cabaret.
16. Tea on the Liedtkes’ boat. L. to r.: unidentified, Ursel, Emmy, Ernst, Marianne.
17. Ilse and her boyfriend, Harald Böhmelt, at the Trichter dance hall on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, late 1930s. L. to r.: Peter Franke, Werner Finck, unidentified, Erich Kästner, Harald Böhmelt, Ilse, unidentified.
18. Ellen Liedtke (nickname ‘Schneckelchen’), putative daughter of Theo Liedtke, and her fiancé, Walter Meltzer (‘Schnuckelchen’), in 1939.
19. Walter Meltzer (bottom middle) with comrades in Nuremberg during the 1933 Nazi Party rally.
20. Ursel (r. standing) with Maria ‘Baby’ von Alvensleben (r. seated), probably Lexi von Alvensleben (middle seated), and their mother, Countess Alexandra von Alvensleben (l. seated), at the yacht club Klub am Rupenhorn, Berlin, 1931.
21. My mother, Marianne, with violin.
22. Marianne playing in a wartime concert at the National Gallery in London. On the reverse of the photo she writes: ‘The concert was moved to the basement as a bomb had just fallen upstairs.’
23. A Czech Trio programme from 1941. The Trio was sponsored by the Czech government-in-exile in the UK and provided my mother’s first legitimate earnings as a refugee.
24. Ursel’s letter of thanks, dated 17 July 1941, to SS officer Hans Hinkel, one of Joseph Goebbels’s senior officials, who was key to her achieving Aryan status.
25. The resident’s cards on Ursel in Bremen City Hall, 1931–43. Directly underneath an entry recording her recent marriage to Franziskus an official writes: ‘Gestapo enquired on 21.10.43’(r.). On the other card (above), she is listed as having two Jewish grandparents, despite having been accepted as an Aryan two years previously.
26. A letter of 17 September 1943 from Count Franziskus von Plettenberg’s military commander permitting him to marry Ursel and enclosing his medical certificates and proof of Aryan origin.
27. The bombed idyll of Blumeshof 12 (r. foreground) in 1945.
28. The ruins of Ilse’s studio at Budapesterstrasse 43, Berlin, in 1945. Behind it the destroyed Hotel Eden, famous for its 5 p.m. jazz teas, which had been frequented by Marlene Dietrich, Otto Dix, Bertolt Brecht, and the young Billy Wilder.
29. Ilse’s temporary studio in 1945, with her portraits of US soldiers. On the reverse of the photo she writes: ‘On the walls a gallery of handsome men.’
30. The temporary graves of Geri and Eva, Ilse’s neighbours, shot in their home by Soviet forces and buried by her, Berlin, 1945.
31. My father, Walter May, in London in 1958.
32. My mother, Marianne, my brother, Marius (r.), and me (l.) in 1959/1960.
