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THE MANNER OF my mother’s departure from German-occupied Vienna, three days after her first birthday and without the company of a parent, was obscure. I understood the reluctance to unlock the memory.
No one left alive knew the details, and the documents I could find offered few clues. There was the passport issued in my mother’s name in December 1938, three fading stamps and a few swastikas. One stamp was dated May 4, 1939, a permit that allowed the infant a single trip out of Austria, with a right of return. There was an exit stamp issued two and a half months later on July 22, in the Austrian town of Feldkirch, on the Swiss border, east of Zurich. An entry stamp, marked “Entrée,” was issued the next day, July 23, in France. The passport had a swastika on the cover, but no bright red J. The infant was not identified as Jude.
Rita remained in Vienna. That fact had always troubled my mother, raising questions as to the circumstances in which Rita had chosen—if she had a choice—not to accompany her only child to Paris. Necessity or choice? Necessity had its attractions.
Beyond the passport, the only other clue was the yellowing scrap of paper that waited patiently in Leon’s documents. No more than two inches square, it was folded in half with a few words written firmly in pencil on one side. “Miss E. M. Tilney, ‘Menuka,’ Bluebell Rd., Norwich, Angleterre.” No message, only a name and an address.
For two years, the yellow scrap hung above my desk. Occasionally, I looked at it, wondering where it was written, who wrote it, and what might have caused Miss Tilney to undertake so perilous a journey, if indeed she did. The information must have been important, because Leon kept the scrap for the rest of his life, six decades.
The Norwich address was a hundred miles to the northeast of London, beyond Cambridge, off the Norfolk Broads. I could find no house named Menuka, with its middle-class English connotation.
I started with census records and phone directories for Norwich for the early twentieth century, surprised to find no fewer than five women with the name E. M. Tilney. Two could be discounted on grounds of age: Edna M. Tilney would have been too young to travel to Vienna (born in 1924), and Edith M. Tilney too old (born in 1866). That left three names:
1. E. M. Tilney, born in 1915, from the nearby village of Blofield.
2. Elsie M. Tilney, born in 1893, aged seven in the 1901 national census, living at 95 Gloucester Street, Norwich, with her parents.
3. Edith M. V. Tilney, no date of birth, who married Mr. Hill in 1940.
The telephone directory listed an E. M. Tilney in Blofield. If it was the same person, she would now be ninety-five years old. I called the number over several days and eventually spoke to Desmond Tilney, who had a fine Norfolk accent. “My sister Elsie May died three years ago,” he said sadly. Did she make a trip to Vienna in 1939?
“Oh, I don’t know, never heard anything about that.” He would ask around. Two days later, he called, disappointed to report that his sister didn’t travel abroad before the war.
I moved on to Elsie M. Tilney, born in 1893. The 1901 national census recorded that she lived in a detached house with her parents, Albert (a stationer’s clerk) and Hannah, and four brothers and sisters. The name and birth date turned up two further hits on the Web. On January 1, 1960, a woman of the same name and age disembarked from the MV Stirling Castle (of the Union Castle line) at Southampton docks, having traveled from Durban, South Africa. The ship’s manifest identified Miss Tilney—middle name Maud—as a “Missionary” returning from Basutoland. Fourteen years later, in October 1974, a woman of the same name and age died in Dade County, Florida.
The information on this woman’s demise offers a zip code. For a fee of six dollars, I obtained five numbers and a city: 33134, Miami. A search for the name Tilney and that zip code turned up several Tilneys in the area, two of whom died in 1974. One was Frederick, the name of Elsie Maud Tilney’s younger brother, according to the 1901 national census. In the Miami white pages, I found several Tilneys in the same zip code area. The first I reached, a few days later, was Germaine Tilney.