During the icy cold winter of 1945–46 Lilly had no coal for heating, and moved in with her parents. She spent most of her time there writing in her “book of tears.” Weeping as she wrote, she copied all of the letters and poems that Jaguar and Aimée had written to each other. She bartered the fifty pairs of silk stockings Felice had given her for bread. Her older children were sent to Oldenburg as part of the British “Operation Stork,” where they were fed and given warm shelter. Only Albrecht remained with her.
“Mutti, Aunt Felice is coming back for sure,” he would say in an effort to comfort Lilly. But Aimée was inconsolable.
In the first years after the war Lilly’s sons rarely saw their mother when she wasn’t crying, or carrying on about how it would be when Felice returned and they would emigrate to America. Lilly went about her household chores perfunctorily, becoming more and more deeply depressed. She often would lie in the living room for hours, reading or writing in her diary, only unwillingly allowing the children to disturb her. They had to knock before entering her room. She took refuge in the synagogue.
Bernd Wust:
Mutti imposed herself, that has to be said. She established contact with some Jewish people or other in Schmargendorf, and joined the Jewish Community. They tolerated her, but blocked any serious efforts on her part to convert.
After the war we were registered at school as Jewish. Mutti explained to us that this was something special, and dragged us to the synagogue on Joachimstaler Strasse. That’s how I came to celebrate Sukkoth and other such things. It was interesting. To me it was church, a Jewish church that was called a synagogue. We stayed home from school on Jewish holidays, that was worth it. And no one felt comfortable asking about it. “Why weren’t you here yesterday?” the teacher asked me. “Oh, I didn’t know,” he said, and then apologized deeply. I knew he was a Nazi. I was listed in the class register as being “Mosaic.” And I was beaten up for being a Muslim.
I never developed a relationship to Judaism; where would it have come from? I only knew a little more about it than the others did, and I simply know more about the history. I have a colleague at work who, in the language of the Nazi era, is a “half-Jew,” and there’s a bond between us. That’s what it all came to.
The war broke out in Palestine while I was in school. So in class they expected me to stand up for the Jews, that was clear. And they were always at me about the Arabian Legion. The teachers were the same ones as before, of course. I was immediately assigned the role of outsider. In 1945 I went to the Walther Rathenau School. Everyone came from different grade schools, but we all knew each other, we were all from the same neighborhood. So then everybody knew: He’s a Jew. There weren’t supposed to be any Jews anymore. After all, we had learned as children that they were subhuman and should be exterminated, and all of a sudden there was one left, one they knew personally. In that sense I was pretty interesting, they all stared at me.
And for Eberhard it was a decisive factor. I see it this way: In puberty young people want to show off. If you can find a field in which you’re different from the others, then that’s the direction you take. And Eberhard always enjoyed being different. The way I explain it to myself is, Mutti laid the groundwork at home, and at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, when he was trying to adjust, that was what suited him. By the time he graduated, it was all settled.
Eberhard Wust:
I was interested in ancient languages, that was something romantic to me. At the high school for humanities I attended, we started with Latin in the fifth grade, at nine years of age, that is. Three years later Greek was added. After that I said to myself, there are other ancient languages, Hebrew, for example. It must have been 1951–52 when Mutti said to me: We don’t have any money as it is, go see the rabbi. So I went to the police station and asked where Rabbi Levinson lived. Were they surprised! And he sent me to an old man who gave religious and Hebrew instruction. I started with him, but he didn’t have a teaching method and didn’t really know that much Hebrew. But he always took me with him to synagogue, and became a kind of substitute father to me. Well, I studied with him, and joined a Jewish youth group through the synagogue, and then a Jewish student group. In 1958 the World Union of Jewish Students held a conference in Jerusalem, and because I could already speak Hebrew so well I was the representative from Germany. That was my first trip to Israel. And here in Germany I attached myself to anyone who spoke Hebrew. You can’t learn a language without talking to people. At school I took notes in Hebrew, which irritated the teacher because he couldn’t read them. There were two girls I was friends with; they were a little older than I, and the three of us always sat together and studied Hebrew. We’d read the weekly passage from the Pentateuch and several passages from the Mishnah.
Mutti was happy, of course, that I was interested, and supported me in it. And to that extent. . . . But it has little to do with Germany’s past; I couldn’t make a direct connection between the two. Up to this day, ninety percent of who I am consists of this interest in ancient languages. I was pretty much of a late bloomer, politically speaking. At fourteen I was still a dreamy kid and basically was still that way at eighteen. At home, at any rate, we were always taught that anything German was bad. In that sense we really enjoyed an anti-German education. My mother was constantly cursing the damned Nazis, and all Germans were Nazis. Which bothered my older brother, because to a certain extent he is proud of his father, not because he was a soldier, but the only pictures of him from that time show him in uniform. Bernd has those. I myself don’t have any pictures of my father. It doesn’t interest me; I have no connection to him.
On January 26, 1946, Dr. Louis Grünberger wrote to Lilly from Berlin that his daughter, “Puppe,” still had not written concerning whether or not she had encountered Felice in Bergen-Belsen. He advised her not to give up hope: “One can always be hopeful where young people are concerned. Two young ladies from Breslau who were in concentration camps arrived here six and two weeks ago, respectively. One had come almost from Asia, the other had been in the Caucasus Mountains.”
Finally, on June 5, Hanne-Lore Grünberger wrote from Neustadt-Aisch: “ . . . and I regret to have to tell you once again that I never met your friend anywhere along the way. Nor did my inquiries to other concentration camp comrades amount to anything. Unfortunately, she probably shared the fate of millions of concentration camp comrades.”
During 1946 and 1947 Aimée continued to hope and to search. On February 14, 1948, Jaguar was declared legally dead by the municipal court of Berlin-Charlottenburg. The date of her death was set as December 31, 1944. Their women friends dissociated themselves from Lilly. And the material support Lilly had hoped for failed to appear.