LITMIR.BIZ

       Jacob and Regina with Ernst and Eva on their wedding day.

      In April of the following year Jenny was born; Jenny in whose beautiful New York flat I sat so many times and, plugging in my computer, plied her with questions about the family; at whose table I went through so many folders of letters and uncovered the record of so much suffering, courage and hope.

      Soon after the Nazi accession to power, the Ministry of Employment removed Ernst from the list of doctors allowed to offer treatment under the national insurance scheme. On 1 September 1933 he was further banned from practising under private health insurance arrangements. He protested: as a recipient of the Iron Cross for his services to the German cause in the First World War he should surely have been exempted from such bans. He succeeded in having them lifted until the beginning of 1938, when not even having risked life and limb for the Fatherland could serve any longer as protection against the ferocity of the Nazis’ decrees.

      Life grew ever more threatening. In 1937 the Nazis held a vast rally in Frankfurt. Hitler visited the city on 31 March 1938, shortly after the Anschluss with Austria, and addressed cheering crowds from the balcony of the Römer building in the old city. Everywhere were posters declaring ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’ (‘The Jews are our misfortune’), the slogan penned by Heinrich von Treitschke in 1879 and popularised by Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic hate paper Der Stürmer. ‘One couldn’t react,’ my mother’s father, who was a rabbi in the same city, recalled. ‘Everywhere there were Nazis, watching.’

      As well as having plentiful concerns of their own, Ernst and Eva were worried about Regina. With the summer holidays approaching, Eva wrote to her mother-in-law:

      Frankfurt

      19 June 1938

      Dear Mama,

      Your letter arrived today. I hope you’re also looking after yourself and taking lots of walks. One needs to keep one’s nerves in good order, and you know that our beloved Papa, may his memory be for a blessing, set great store by this. One lives for others, as long as one lives, and one has no right to neglect oneself. Jenny very much wants to visit you in the holidays. I’m very concerned though that it’ll be too much for you. I want to hear from you often about how you are. I also haven’t heard if there are any travelling companions. I want to hear from you first. Perhaps you could send me an answer soon, as I might enrol her for the holiday games and that needs to be done soon. We had a long letter from Trude. Here one could never invite thirty-eight people over for coffee. Ernst will write you out a new calendar, or I will. It may go on Sunday. Gertrud Rosenbaum is with us today. She is on the way back from a Kindertransport. Otherwise I know of nothing new. The children are all, thank God, in good health and happy and looking good. Jenny can read a lot better now and I hope she’ll manage until the summer holidays. She’s not so defensive any more. What are you going to have for Shabbat? I’ve got a stuffed pike, just like you make it, even though it’s become a real treat. Many greetings and good Shabbes. Are you on your own or will you have visitors? Your Eva.

      Eva’s concern was touching. I had always thought of Regina as a strong woman, but Eva was clearly worried about her state of mind, reminding her that her late husband would have wanted her to look after herself and keep up her spirits by remembering that one has to go on living for the sake of other people. The domestic details suggested that the two women were very close and kept in frequent contact. In a small note, which had probably been tucked into the same envelope, Eva added: ‘Dear Mama! I just spoke about the thermos. If the flask isn’t completely full it doesn’t stay hot. Give it a try. Otherwise it needs to be exchanged. Greetings, Eva.’ Such gadgets were apparently new to her mother-in-law and her first attempt at using them to keep the water hot over the Sabbath, when it is forbidden to boil it back up, hadn’t been a success.

      Stuffed pike was obviously a special family tradition. My father used to tell me how his mother would prepare it for Shabbat; now I knew where the custom had come from. I once saw whole pike for sale at the local fishmongers, their sharp teeth distinguishing them from the other fish on the counter. I thought of buying one for my father, but he was already too ill to have been able to tell me the proper way of cooking it and finding a random recipe in a book wouldn’t have been the same, even if I had succeeded in producing something edible.

      The reference to the Kindertransport was especially interesting; evidently the term was current and children were being sent abroad in groups several months before the operation known as The Kindertransport par excellence, commenced, in which approximately ten thousand children were sent without their parents from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to find refuge in Britain.

      The reasons no Jew in Germany would have thirty-eight people for a celebration were sinister; who could trust, with that great a number of guests, even were a gathering of that size permitted, that no one would betray them? My mother’s father told of an anti-Nazi friend, a non-Jew, who held a modest birthday party. He was arrested immediately afterwards. Fortunate to return from the Gestapo, he promptly invited the same group of people and asked them bluntly who had given him away. They all denied having done so. The man’s son then emerged from the bathroom and declared that it had been he who had told on his father. In the Nazi Youth, he explained, we were ordered to inform on anything our parents said.

      By the autumn of 1938 Ernst and Eva had four children; Jenny was the eldest, followed by two boys, Hans and Alfred, and a little sister, Ruthie. When, on 10 November, the morning after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo came to arrest Ernst, a fifth child was expected at any time. It was to be a baby girl, stillborn while her father was in detention in Buchenwald. She was a breech presentation and specialist help was urgently needed. But, driven to despair by the hopelessness of his situation in Nazi Germany, the family obstetrician had committed suicide a few days earlier and, in Ernst’s forbearing words, ‘the young resident did not have much experience’.

      Ernst and Eva explored all avenues of escape.

      The Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938, brought a further 185,000 Jews under German rule. Very few countries were willing to offer shelter to the many tens of thousands desperate to flee the Reich. A conference was convened on the initiative of the President of the United States to consider how to respond to the refugee crisis. Representatives of thirty-two countries gathered in the French resort of Évian-les-Bains between 9 and 16 July. The event proved worse than a mere failure, the chief outcome being a propaganda victory for the Nazis. The British delegation argued that unemployment prevented the country from accepting further refugees; its sole concession was that British territories in East Africa agreed to admit a small number. France declared that it had reached the point of extreme saturation. The United States offered to fill those places which had not yet been taken up in its pre-existing

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