AS I GREW OLDER, I FOUND my thoughts returning more often to the final days and years of the life of my grandmother Anna. Never a day went by when I didn’t think fondly of her. It was only after both my mother and my Uncle Freddy had been dead for more than ten and fifteen years respectively, that Freddy’s widow, Alice, told me in the early 1980s about something that had happened in London a few months after my father’s death in 1956.
“One day your mother’s doorbell rang,” she said. “When she answered it, she found an elderly Czech woman standing on the doorstep, clutching a letter. ‘I am looking for Hans Jaretzki,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Edelstein, and I knew his mother, Anna. She wrote me a letter in 1942, which I thought her family should have.’”
Puzzled and intrigued, my mother invited the woman in and took the letter from her, explaining that my father had died in March. She recognized her mother-in-law’s elegant writing immediately. As she told me the story, Alice gave me the letter, and as I sat reading it a hundred different emotions bubbled up from inside my heart, threatening to stifle me.
Anna had written:
Prague on a Saturday. Most honored and kind Mrs. Edelstein, I am writing these lines in anguish to express my eternal thank-you for what you, honored lady and you sir, have done for me. Tomorrow or Monday I will be taken to Theresienstadt. I cry and I cry bitterly. My heart is so weak that I can hardly walk. Hopefully this will not last much longer. I send my warmest greetings to your dear husband, and to you worthy Mrs. E my embrace in spirit.
Your most esteeming and happy, sad
Frau Jaretzki
It had taken fourteen years for news of Anna’s final days to reach the family, and three months longer than my father had been able to wait. If she was taken away in the summer of 1942, that would have coincided with the time that her letters and postcards stopped arriving. Maybe it was a mercy that my father never had to hear the details of what happened to his mother, that he was still able to cling to the faint hope that she might have been allowed to die in her own apartment with dignity and without suffering. Realizing that her visitor was entirely genuine in her mission, my mother started to ask her questions, and the answers must have rekindled all the fears and horrors that my mother remembered herself from that period, from living in a land where the authorities could do as they wished with you, including putting you to death on no more than a whim.
Mrs. Edelstein told my mother that the fateful day when Anna was “collected” by the soldiers was July 16, 1942, two days short of the anniversary of her grandfather August’s death ninety-nine years before. The words in her letter showed that she had known her days were numbered even before the SS came knocking on her door at the appointed time and bundled her down the stairs from the top-floor flat to the waiting truck outside.
“I learned later,” Mrs. Edelstein continued, “that the truck was driven to the outskirts of Prague, from where your mother-in-law and the other passengers were road-marched nearly thirty kilometers in the summer heat to their destination, Theresienstadt.”
Theresienstadt was a holding station that many thousands of Jews were taken to before they were sent on to Auschwitz and almost certain death. There they were stripped of their possessions and made to sign away any property they might own. In time, it became a scene of mass death like the other camps. My father had always hoped against hope that if his mother had been taken, she would have ended her days there in Theresienstadt and not been transported to Auschwitz, but Mrs. Edelstein did not know what had happened after Anna walked through those gates. She could not tell my mother whether Anna had made her final journey to the most infamous and horrifying death camp of all.
“As my husband Hans is no longer here,” my mother said when her visitor had finished telling her story, “please could you take this letter on to his brother, Freddy.”
Mrs. Edelstein agreed to take the letter to Uncle Freddy personally. Perhaps she felt she wanted to complete the mission herself after safeguarding the letter for so many years. I can only imagine how Uncle Freddy felt when reading it, because he and my mother must have made a pact at that time not to tell anyone else about the letter. It would become yet another secret in a family already burdened with too many, until the day when Alice finally told me of its existence.
As I took in the story that Alice was telling me, I was shocked to be confronted with the image of my old granny I remembered and loved so much waiting to be taken away by the Nazis. But at the same time, I wanted to know more about what happened to her after she wrote the letter, what her final days had been like, even though I suspected that whatever I found out would break my heart.
I still had my childhood autograph book with her little message to me:
When once you are a grandmamma, and sit in the rocking chair with Grandpapa and dream of your joyful childhood days, remember your Oma Annchen.
I wrote several times to the Czech authorities to try to find out the official version of what had happened to her, and in 1984 finally received a reply, nearly thirty years after my father had died not knowing what had happened to his mother and whether she had ended her days in Auschwitz. The communist authorities informed me that Anna was collected and taken to Theresienstadt on July 16, 1942 (five days after she had written the letter), and then, only a few weeks later, on August 12, she died there, apparently from typhus. They even provided me with the number of the transport she had been taken on and the plot number of her grave. It seemed her murder was a small cog in a giant and efficiently run machine. I now knew the ghastly truth about my granny’s end.
The moment I heard the truth, my thoughts went straight to my father and the many years that he had to endure not knowing whether his mother had ended her days in Auschwitz. Even though in our darkest moments we had all imagined Anna having to endure even worse suffering than the scenes that Mrs. Edelstein had described and the Czech authorities had confirmed, it was hard to have the facts finally made real, to have all hope that Anna had died a dignified and comfortable death removed forever.
Soon after Alice told me about the letter, one of my best friends, Hannah Miller, contacted her cousin who lived in Prague and told her the story. Armed with Anna’s address in the Praha 6 district, this cousin went off to visit the house, hardly expecting to meet any of the original family who lived there during Anna’s final days but hoping to find someone who might remember her. Hannah was an actress and broadcaster for the BBC World Service, and lived near Temple Fortune in North London. I would often go to her house, and we would read German books out loud together and discuss my progress with my researches. When Hannah had suggested contacting her cousin, I had accepted the offer gratefully. Now we waited for her to report back, which she did just a few days later.
“I called at the block and rang the bell at street level,” she told us. “A lady in her mid-fifties came down to open the door and incredibly then introduced herself as one of the ‘Barakova sisters,’ the daughters of the doctor whose flat it had been when Anna moved in. Both sisters remained unmarried, still living in the same block they had been brought up in as children. She then proceeded to give a vivid account of that fateful July day. ‘I remember Anna Jaretzki well,’ she said. ‘I remember seeing her being collected by the SS and put on a truck, it was a terrible day. That was the last time we saw her. She had to leave everything behind, only allowed to pack one small bag with her things.’”
So many people during those years, including children like these two girls, had been forced to watch so many horrifying things and had been powerless to do anything to stop them, leaving them with images that would doubtless haunt those children for the rest of their lives. The soldiers had ignored the fact that Anna could hardly walk because of the pain in her tired old joints.
“Some young Jews who had already been loaded into the back of the truck jumped out to help her up when they saw her struggling,” Hannah’s cousin told us, “only to be mocked by the soldiers for their efforts.”
To imagine my poor grandmother Anna struggling to get onto that truck, trying her hardest to do as she was ordered, is still painful for me, even today.
Having the scene painted so clearly for me at last made it all the more poignant knowing what had happened in Anna’s family one hundred years before and how it had come about that she should have ended her days in such a tragic way. The modest, gentle granddaughter of one of the greatest princes in all Europe had ended up dying anonymously in a crowded prison camp because her grandparents had been trying to protect her mother from danger by hiding her identity.