No Life Without You E-Book

Franklin Felsenstein

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The letters and journals of Ernst Moritz and Vera Hirsch Felsenstein, two German Jewish refugees caught in the tumultuous years leading to the Second World War, form the core of this book. Abridged in English from the original German, the correspondence and diaries have been expertly compiled and annotated by their only son who preserves his parents’ love story in their own words. Their letters, written from Germany, England, Russia, and Palestine capture their desperate efforts to save themselves and their family, friends and businesses from the fascist tyranny. The book begins by contextualizing the early lives of Moritz and Vera.


Because the letters are written to each other almost daily, they are incredibly immediate. Most centrally, the letters recount an astonishing love story, sensual in its intimate detail, and full of dramatic pathos in revealing the anxieties of being apart as the Nazi threat unfolds and broadens. It is told through the voices of two exceptionally articulate letter writers.


This volume offers insights into the moral and psychological dilemmas faced by German Jews as a targeted community. It affords a unique appreciation of the impact of historical and socio-political upheavals on the lives of a persecuted minority.


A scholarly introduction by Rachel Pistol draws out the main themes raised by this correspondence, observing its relevance to contemporary debates about migration and political authority.

Leseprobe

NO LIFE WITHOUT YOU

No Life Without You

Refugee Love Letters from the 1930s

Based on the Correspondence of Ernst Moritz (“Mope”) Felsenstein and Vera Hirsch Felsenstein, 1936-1939

Compiled and Edited by Franklin Felsenstein with an Introduction by Rachel Pistol

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

©2024 Franklin Felsenstein (ed.)

©2024 Rachel Pistol (Introduction)

This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Franklin Felsenstein (ed.), No Life Without You: Refugee Love Letters from the 1930s. Based on the Correspondence of Ernst Moritz (“Mope”) Felsenstein and Vera Hirsch Felsenstein, 1936-1939 (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024), https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0334

Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.

Further details about CC BY-NC licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web

Any digital material and resources associated with this volume will be available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0334#resources

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-945-3

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80064-946-0

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-947-7

ISBN Digital eBook (EPUB): 978-1-80064-948-4

ISBN HTML: 978-1-80064-951-4

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0334

Front cover original images provided by Franklin Felsenstein.

Cover design by Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal.

Contents

About the Editors

Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgements

Refugees: A Contextual Introduction

Rachel Pistol

PART 1: THEN

One: Familien Hirsch

Two: Mainly Mope

Three: Victoriaschule

Four: “And so What?”

Five: Heising

Six: Of Books and Arts (1): Max Schwimmer

Seven: Of Books and Arts (2): Thomas Mann

Eight: “I Will Give Up Medicine!!!!!”

Nine: Under the Swastika

Ten: “Did I Do the Right Thing?”

Eleven: Zionism

Twelve: Gretel

Thirteen: Marks and Mitja

PART 2: NOW

Fourteen: “I Stole a Kiss From You at the Train Station”

Fifteen: Mope in Palestine

Sixteen: Palestine or Vera?

Seventeen: Dover

Eighteen: “Happy and Sad at the Same Time”

Nineteen: Letters From a Wretched Coffee House Sitter

Twenty: “More of a Stranger Here Now”

Twenty-one: “The Letter Writing Last Guest”

Twenty-two: “Human Beings Are Good!”

Twenty-three: “Every Turn of the Wheel”

Twenty-four: “I Will Come to London Directly”

Twenty-five: “The Alpha and Omega of My Life”

Twenty-six: “This Ever so Long Time of Insatiable Longing”

Twenty-seven: “10,108 White Foxes”

Twenty-eight: Visas, Visas, Visas

Twenty-nine: “Today, for the First Time in My Life, I Wished I Were a Man!”

Thirty: “The Little Fruit That Fell From the Tree”

Thirty-one: “No Life Without You”

Thirty-two: Afterword

Glossary of Names

Select Bibliography

Index

For Theo Felsenstein and for another generation with perhaps different ideasto our own

About the Editors

Franklin Felsenstein (aka Frank Felsenstein) is the only son of Maurice (“Mope”) and Vera Felsenstein. He is the Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Ball State University in Indiana. Before that, he was Reader in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Leeds in England. He has also held appointments at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, Vanderbilt University, Yeshiva College, and Drew University. His publications include Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture (1995), English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World (1999), and (with James J. Connolly) What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (2015). He has edited works by Tobias Smollett (Travels through France and Italy), Peter Aram (A Practical Treatise of Flowers), and John Thelwall (Incle and Yarico). He and his family moved to the United States in 1998. He and his wife now live in Chicago.

Rachel Pistol, author of the Contextual Introduction to this book, is a historian, author, and leading authority on World War II refugees from Nazi oppression and internment during the Second World War. She joined the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London in 2018 to work on the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), where she is part of the Project Management Board. Rachel is the National Coordinator of the UK Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI-UK), for which she is based at the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. She is also Historical Advisor to World Jewish Relief, formerly the Central British Fund, the charity which helped German and Austrian refugees escape to the UK including the Kindertransport and Kitchener Camp rescues.

Preface and Acknowledgements

There are near to a thousand refugee letters penned between my parents, Mope (pronounced “Mō-peh”) and Vera, from January 1936 when they first met through to the latter end of August 1939, when they were reunited at the start of the Second World War. Their love letters are intimate and sensual but constantly inflected by fears brought about by the evaporation of their civil liberties under the Nazis. Even when no longer in Germany, the long arm of the fascist dictatorship continued to compromise their lives. In editing such a vast correspondence for publication, abridgment has been both inevitable and necessary. The present selection represents less than one third of the total correspondence. My aim has been to preserve the day-by-day immediacy of the letters while also omitting details that would only be of peripheral interest to the general reader.

The correspondence is partitioned by the occasions when Vera and Mope were together during which communication did not depend on the exchange of letters. When apart from one another, their letters are the life blood of their relationship. Indeed, reading into my parents’ papers so many years later is not quite as good as being able to speak with them in person but it is easily the next best thing. The cadences of their voices are still remarkably fresh and captured by the moment in their letters. Their journey as refugees can be seen as an endeavor to return from turmoil and major disruption to the relative normalcy of everyday life. The integrity of their love for each other and their desire to be together are the primary forces that ultimately saved them both. As we shall discover, not everyone in their respective families was to be so fortunate.

Because Vera’s letters to Mope from when he was still in Leipzig were lost to the Nazis, it is not until June 1937 that we can hear her voice through the correspondence. From much earlier in her life and intermittently during this period, she kept a copious private journal. The survival of the journal is of extreme good fortune since it allows us a two-way window into the intimacies of their developing relationship. Ten months after they first met, a telling journal entry, dated 24 November 1936, reads: “I have not written anything in here for an eternity, because, whenever I have time to write, I write to my friend and lover.” If we have less of her side of the story during the first eighteen months of their relationship, it is because she was devoting her energy into writing to him. In the absence of her early letters, I have been able to integrate into the correspondence extracts from her journals, allowing us to overhear her side of the story. As will be evident, there are details in these journals that were almost surely accorded a different emphasis in her lost letters. Even after we reach the point when we have both sides of the correspondence, there is still plenty that remains revealing in her journal entries, and I have incorporated portions from them as necessary.

The present book consists of thirty-two episodic chapters. It is divided into two main parts, which I have delineated as “Then” and “Now.” The shorter “Then” (chs. 1-13) section concentrates on their lives before they met. By targeted burrowing into a variety of sources, I have recreated their voices even from before they knew each other. These sources include Vera’s journals which long precede meeting Mope, her letters to her own mother who remained in Frankfurt for just short of a year following Vera’s departure for England in May 1933, and an incomplete memoir of her childhood that she penned during the 1980s. For Mope, I have drawn from the brief curriculum vitae that he typed in the 1950s at the behest of German restitution authorities and on recollection of stories of his early life that he related to me at various times. These stories remain sufficiently vivid to have prompted me to expound them as closely as I can. In the chapter on his engagement with Zionism, I have been able to draw from a polemical piece that he wrote for the Leipziger Jüdische Zeitung in 1922 and from family papers. Throughout, I have also transferred recollections of their individual early lives that appear in their joint correspondence into the “Then” section. That is particularly the case in reconstructing Mope’s awkward reminiscence of his father who died in 1934. My own visits to Leipzig during the 1970s and 1980s, when still under Communism, and, far more recently, to Frankfurt have also enhanced my knowledge of my parents’ early lives. Although not included here, a personal account of the visit to Frankfurt in 2017, published by The Times of Israel, may be accessed at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/truncated-memories-berlin-and-frankfurt-in-the-afterlives-of-two-jewish-refugee-women. I have also drawn upon the privately printed Felsenstein Family Chronicle, created to coincide with a family reunion in Jerusalem in 2000. Some readers may feel that I have too amply interjected my own voice as the guide through the first part and in the short “Afterword” to the book. I have done so with the purpose of unraveling their story as best as the deficiencies and imperfections of latter-day memory will allow. My parents’ story has required framing within a broader context, which positions me, as their only son, in a unique place to supply that. However, readers less interested in their background story and keen to turn directly to their letters and journals may elect to go straight to the “Now” section.

I have named the second part of this book “Now” (chs. 14-31) since my parents’ letters and journals from 1936 through 1939 are written in the immediacy of the moment. The precariousness of their situation is anchored by the integrity of their relationship. Each of the chapters begins with a brief contextual overview, but I have resisted inserting my own voice beyond these preambles. Where necessary, however, I have added concise footnotes to accompany the letters. As they corresponded on a daily basis and would often pick up on the same topic, I have silently elided into individual letters details that occur in more than one. My principal criterion here has been to allow my parents to tell their own story in their own voices with minimal editorial intrusion. The brief “Afterword” (ch. 32) traces my parents’ subsequent lives. A biographical who’s who and glossary of terms is annexed at the end of the volume.

Looking back, it is already more years than I am prepared to count since I started thinking about editing the present volume. Both my parents saw a value in preserving family papers, and it was only after they were no longer alive that their letters to each other, unsorted but largely intact, came into my possession. At the time, I was teaching at the University of Leeds in England. Remembering that my father had spent much of the two years between 1937 and 1939 in the Soviet Union, and that the university library’s Brotherton Collection contained an expanding Anglo-Russian Archive, I arranged through Richard Davies, its accomplished archivist, for the correspondence and related papers to be deposited there on a long-term loan. Shortly after the deposit, the library deputed two of its archivists, Holger Igel and Chris Butcher, to sequence the letters. They did a fine job.

When my family moved to the United States, I retrieved the letters and brought them and other related family papers with me, fearing that, if they were left in England, I would miss out on researching them more closely. In 2002, I began teaching at Ball State University. To my gratitude, the director of archives, Mr. John Straw, and the university librarian, Dr Arthur Häfner, saw a virtue in depositing the papers on a similar loan at the Bracken Library. A chance conversation with Mr. Martin Schwartz (1917-2017), a Muncie resident and long-time benefactor to the university, turned into the generous offer from the Helen and Martin Schwartz Foundation to fund translation of the letters and relevant journals into English. Among the German-speaking students capable of undertaking the translation, Hiltrud Johnting stood out for her complete fluency in the two languages. It was only as Hiltrud was completing the immense task of translating the surviving letters and journals that it became evident that they embodied a compelling story. They breathe into us the essence of what it was to be Jewish exiles in the 1930s. Unless otherwise stated, the papers and related documents, including photographs, remain in the hands of my family which retains copyright over them. Sadly, Hiltrud Johnting, a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic, is not alive to see the publication of this volume.

The everyday exigencies of teaching and research obliged me to hold off until achieving emeritus status before concentrating on the final editing of the present correspondence. Consequently, my indebtedness to those who have helped me along the way begins well before the present time. As well as those already mentioned, I should like to offer my warmest thanks to those who have both informed, encouraged or aided me at various stages in working on this volume. They include Kathryn Powell, the late James Ruebel, Warwick Gould, Raphael Homburger, Angelika Rieber, Gretchen Gerzina, Audrey Rosney, Michael Maggiotto, Michael Szajewski, George Moschytz, Lisa Herzberg, Michael and Prue Thorner, Alan Warner, Jonathan Hendrix and Adam Douglas of the Ball State University Computing Services, and Mimi-Ray and Colin Watts. I have also benefited from consultation with the Wiener Holocaust Library in London and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Without the valuable feedback from Stephen Ro’i, Renata Levy, Ted Wolner, and Jill Leukhardt, who read and commented on its final drafts, this book would be much less rounded. At Open Book Publishers, I have received nothing but encouragement and skillful advice from its Director, Dr. Alessandra Tosi, and from Lucy Barnes, its adroit Senior Editor. I should also like to express my special thanks to the highly resourceful and creative team at OBP that includes Anja Pritchard (proof reading), Jeevanot Kaur Nagpal (cover designer), Cameron Craig (book production), and Laura Rodríguez Pupo (dissemination, promotion and marketing). The historical introduction by Dr. Rachel Pistol is a masterly addition to the book, and I am deeply indebted to her for carving out the time to provide a valuable backdrop to my parents’ story.

Very late in the day, in November 2023, a few months before this book’s appearance, my only sibling, Mimi-Ray, passed away. I believe that she would have been thrilled to hold in her hands a volume that gives such an intimate picture of our parents during what will have been – with the possible exception of bringing us up – the most challenging time of their lives. Unhappily that was not to be. The strange coincidence of life cycle events is once again evidenced by the birth later in the same month of Theo, our parents’ first great grandchild. In compiling this book, my most personal thanks are to my wife Carole, and to our children, Kenny and Joanna, who have witnessed its advent almost from its inception.

Refugees: A Contextual Introduction

Rachel Pistol

©2024 Rachel Pistol, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0334.00

Discourse regarding refugees is an ever-present part of society and is multifaceted, invariably emotive, and always highly political. Sometimes the humanitarian side wins, focusing on welcoming beleaguered strangers into a country and providing hope for the future. Other times economic migrants become the focus, especially when they claim refugee status, and this is used as an excuse to whip up xenophobic hysteria against all foreigners. There is, of course, a fine line between fleeing poverty and seeking asylum because of persecution. Conflicts, natural disasters, and political, religious and ethnic persecution force people to flee from their homes and their native country into the unenviable position of attempting to find a generous nation who will take pity on their plight. Often the hardest part of this process is the stripping of identity, the loss of all that is familiar, the loss of autonomy, the ability to be self-sufficient, and the loss of dignity caused by displacement.

Terminology is important; particularly when individuals are described as economic migrants as opposed to refugees, allowing governments to pander to xenophobia. Additionally, economic migrants masquerading as refugees provide governments with the excuse to treat all refugees with suspicion. The need to consider the individual beyond the collective identity of race, gender, religion, politics, or nationality is essential if one is to respond with compassion; it is easy to become apathetic or hostile about a particular people or group when considering them en masse, but much harder to treat an individual with the same lack of empathy when you know their particular circumstances. The course of history demonstrates how the tide of popular opinion can ebb and flow very quickly between sympathy and xenophobia. Consequently, it is imperative to keep telling refugee stories, giving a voice to those unfortunate enough to suffer persecution and the loss of all they love, whilst reminding the modern reader of the humanity of these individuals and of all the similarities they share with the reader.

There are many differences between the refugee situation of the 1930s and that of the modern day, particularly as there was no international agreement regarding the offering of asylum in the 1930s. In July 1938, in response to the growing refugee crisis due to Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and Austria, a conference was held in Evian-les-Bains, France at which delegates from thirty-two countries and representatives from aid organizations discussed possible solutions. Sadly, the only thing the delegates agreed on was that they feared an influx of foreigners would create unacceptable economic hardship for their citizens, and therefore, although everyone present decried the treatment of Jews within Germany, only the Dominican Republic was willing to open its doors to more refugees. The conference did, however, result in the creation of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (ICR), which was designed to continue considering international responses to refugees from Germany and Austria and expanded in 1943 to cover all European refugees, although it never truly achieved its goals. In 1947, the role of the ICR was taken over the by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), who assumed responsibility for the legal protection and resettlement of refugees until 1952, when it was succeeded by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The biggest change came in the creation of the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which remains the central tenet of international refugee protection to this day. It has been updated since 1951, removing the geographic barriers to provide universal coverage, but the basic principles of the agreement still provide for the needs of refugees globally. According to the Refugee Convention, a refugee is a person who is unwilling or unable to return to their country of origin for fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, or politics. There are also protections for refugees including that none should be forcibly returned to a country where they fear for their lives.

In the 1930s, Britain did take many more refugees than planned and proportionately more than many other countries despite its obligation being moral rather than legal. However, in recent years there has been a backlash against admitting migrants to Great Britain, and successive Home Secretaries under the Conservative Party have created a hostile environment for immigration. It has become popular to label all asylum seekers as ‘illegal immigrants’, even though it is not illegal to seek asylum if it is done in a country that has signed the 1951 Convention, which includes Great Britain. While the world’s population has increased around three-and-a-half-fold since 1940, the number of refugees has increased more than tenfold in the same period. This means there are many more millions of refugees globally in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth, which brings huge challenges in terms of dealing with the number of those seeking permanent residency in countries not of their birth. Only around a quarter of those emigrating to Britain are considered by the government to be refugees or asylum seekers, making it all the more important to ensure these individuals can be correctly identified and protected.

The protagonists of this story, Vera and Mope, had not expected to become refugees when they grew up in Germany. Vera was born in 1910, the second daughter of an assimilated Jewish family who lived in a large apartment in Frankfurt. By contrast, Mope was born in 1899 in Leipzig, one of seven children in an Orthodox family who lived only a short walk from the local synagogue. Vera was only a young child during the First World War, whereas by 1917 Mope was old enough to serve in the German army in France and Belgium. Almost 100,000 Jewish men served in the German military during World War I, fighting for the Fatherland despite experiencing anti-Semitism in the trenches. Around 18,000 of these men received an Iron Cross for their bravery in combat and were lauded as heroes. A special version of the Iron Cross, known as the Honour Cross, was created by President Hindenburg and bestowed on many veterans of the First World War from 1934, and these were still being awarded to Jews even after Adolf Hitler had become chancellor. Initially these medals provided some protection against persecution for those who had been awarded them, but little could anyone have imagined how worthless these medals would become in the years that followed.

Hitler’s rise to power can be directly linked to the outcome of the First World War. The harsh and punitive reparations inflicted on Germany by the victors of World War I had a crippling effect on the German nation, leading to economically disastrous hyperinflation, with which the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party) justified their anti-Semitic policies by blaming Jewish bankers for the country’s financial woes. However, before the Nazis took control, Vera and Mope lived through the 1920s in Germany, from the lows of hyperinflation to the highs of flourishing German culture under the Weimar Republic. The uncertainty and unpredictability of 1922-3, when German currency was completely devalued and thousands of Germans lost their life savings, or were bankrupted, formed the foundation for the rise of radical politics and the ultimate challenge to German democracy. Food riots and despair were a part of everyday life until a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced in 1924. Vera’s relationship with her father was permanently affected as he all but lost the family fortune during this time, whereas Mope’s father managed to successfully navigate the crisis and not suffer any major financial setbacks. No German was immune from the effects of this crisis, no matter their religious, social, or economic status, and although property and landowners were much less affected, the psychological effects of the crash were long-lasting.

Despite the economic disaster that Germany experienced in 1923, the Weimar Republic also fostered a German Renaissance where intellectual and cultural life flourished. The Bauhaus movement, in existence from 1919 to 1933, focused on crafts and the fine arts; the movement promoted artistry and function whilst emphasising the importance of mass production. These were the years of luminary scientists such as Max Plank and Albert Einstein; German philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger studied in Germany at this time; jazz and cabaret clubs were popular, the German cinema and film industry flourished, and new forms of modernist art were explored. Despite the privations that had been inflicted on Germany because of its defeat in 1918, the 1920s seemed full of possibilities. Creativity in all its forms was encouraged. This was the backdrop to Vera and Mope’s formative years, when they developed their interests and education. Life was not perfect, and the association of the Weimar Republic with decadence and immorality caused concern for some, but no one could have anticipated the severity of the backlash that was to be unleashed in the 1930s.

1933 marked the turning point for not only Germany, but also Vera and Mope. As soon as Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg, the clock was ticking down for Jews and other minority groups in Germany and beyond. By the early 1930s the German government was seen as weak, ineffectual, unable to govern or meet the needs of the nation in response to the crippling effects of the Great Depression. Dissatisfaction caused growth in political parties at both ends of the political spectrum – from the Communists on the left to the NSDAP on the right. The Nazis had come to national attention a decade before when, in November 1923, they attempted to overthrow the Bavarian government in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. This armed insurrection by Hitler and hundreds of stormtroopers was inspired by Mussolini’s seizure of political power after the March on Rome in 1922; Hitler thought that perhaps he could achieve similar results by harnessing the discontent caused by the Weimar Republic’s mishandling of the German economy. His plan backfired and led to his arrest, imprisonment, and the banning of the Nazi party. However, despite being tried for high treason, Hitler was sentenced to a mere five years in prison, and then served less than nine months in a relatively comfortable jail, which suggested that some of those in authority sympathised with his political goals. The trial was a great opportunity for spreading Nazi propaganda and gave Hitler a national platform, something previously not available to him. Hitler also made the most of his time in prison to write Mein Kampf, fully exploring Nazi anti-Semitic policies, racist views and aggressive foreign policy in the desire to create Lebensraum, extra living space for Germans through annexing parts of eastern Europe. Mein Kampf was not an instant bestseller, but the more recognition Hitler and the Nazis gained, the more copies were sold. The failed putsch also marked a change in Nazi policy, with an emphasis on seeking power through more legitimate methods. The years 1924 to 1929 were marked by a growth in the numbers who joined the Nazi party but a decreasing representation of the party in the Reichstag (German Parliament). It was not until the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression that the Nazis started to see an increase in their political power. During the elections in 1930, the Nazi Party managed to attract eighteen percent of the vote, riding on a platform promising to fix the economy, create jobs, regain territory lost in the First World War, and unify the country. Hitler was campaigning on the idea of returning Germany to being a great nation. Building on the foundation of the 1930 election, the Nazi Party increased their percentage of the vote to thirty-seven percent in 1932, making it almost impossible to govern Germany without their cooperation. Hitler’s appointment as chancellor did not automatically lead to dictatorship, but the position enabled him to manipulate the democratic process until, in August 1934, Hindenburg died and German democracy died with him as Hitler declared himself Führer.

It certainly cannot be said that Hitler was not clear in his manifesto as to exactly what he would do if and when he gained power. Hitler could not have been more explicit regarding his grotesque beliefs, but many people were willing to overlook the more unsavoury aspects of Nazism because they liked the sound of policies such as creating jobs, blaming others for Germany’s ills, restoring Germany’s economic fortunes and being led by a ‘strong’ leader. It is always easier to blame others for misfortune and this is a frequent rallying cry of political parties at both extremities of the political spectrum. Hitler was unashamed of lying and manipulating reality in order to orchestrate events to his benefit; one such example being the arson attack that destroyed the Reichstag and was blamed on the Communists, enabling Hitler to declare a state of emergency and suspend civil liberties. Another was using the assassination of Ernst von Rath in November 1938, a minor German diplomat posted to the German embassy in Paris, as an excuse for the outright assault on the Jewish population in the November pogrom otherwise known as Kristallnacht. The lenient treatment Hitler had been given at his trial and subsequent imprisonment did little to punish him for his treasonable acts, instead it inspired a culture of celebrity and intrigue around him. This should serve as a warning to all, that when an individual craving power is willing to manipulate the system, lie, and commit treason as a means of gaining power, power is the last thing they should be given. Here there are many similarities that can be drawn between the 1930s and the modern day. Once again, society is willing to accept an individual for some of their policies but willing to ignore the same individual’s incitements to violence and an excessive thirst for power.

Hitler was appointed chancellor as a way of offering a concession to the far right in the expectation that his excesses could be controlled by the president and other political parties. However, once the door had been opened to the Nazis, they were not going to settle for anything less than total control. After the staged fire at the Reichstag building, the Nazi leadership passed the Law against the Founding of New Parties on 14 July 1933. All political parties and trade unions were dissolved or disbanded and their members harassed or arrested, precipitating significant emigration of these political refugees in the second half of 1933. Those who remained in Germany hoped conditions would improve and that Hitler’s reign would be short-lived; however, conditions gradually deteriorated for Jews who began to be squeezed out of public life. The 1935 Nuremburg Race Laws were the first in a series of laws that sought to exclude Jews, Roma, people of colour and their descendants from an Aryan society. The Nazis wanted to create a society of white, non-Jewish people of northern European descent, typically with blonde hair and blue eyes; attributes the Nazis considered to be superior to all other races. By defining groups by racial, religious and ethnic characteristics, the Nazis created a tier of lower-class citizens, their legal and human rights stripped away, as well as actively encouraging acts of degradation, verbal abuse and violence towards those considered non-Aryan. Jews were stripped of their jobs in the civil service, medical and legal professions, which affected Vera during her medical training as she experienced the Nazification of former friends and ultimately the university system itself. Forced out of her studies, Vera had a series of tough decisions to make which ultimately led her to Britain in the hope of completing her studies there. There was opposition in Britain during the 1930s by professional bodies such as the British Medical Association (BMA) to the immigration of doctors, the British Dental Association (BDA) to dentists, and by other professions and industries in which it was felt that immigration would pose a threat to British employment, such as the retail industry. Like so many others, Vera was forced to abandon her dreams and find an alternative living in order to have the best chance of helping other family members find refuge in England.

After the Nuremburg Laws were enacted, the need for escape became apparent to many, though it was clear that leaving Germany would be challenging given the apprehension in so many countries towards the prospect of an influx of foreigners. The United States of America, for example, had strict immigration laws which they were unwilling to relax for those fleeing Germany, and other countries grew increasingly concerned about accepting refugees. Britain was not always considered to be welcoming – Germans were still aware of the way their compatriots had been treated at the end of the First World War, when they had been banished from the country because of the intensity of anti-German feeling – and immigration rules remained tight. Therefore, Britain was not usually the first choice of emigration for Jews and other refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. In the earliest waves of emigration, individuals often fled to countries bordering Germany, and sadly, those who escaped to Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium and The Netherlands were often swept up in the Nazi occupation of these countries in 1940. Vera and Mope themselves found themselves traveling away from Germany, and members of both of their families were dispersed across a wide geographic area, as was often common for those with the means and contacts to escape the deteriorating conditions at home.

There had been a growth in Zionism through the early years of the twentieth century and Mope’s writings provide an important contemporary insight into the ideological attraction of the movement before the need for such a homeland became such a pressing priority. The growth of anti-Semitism in Germany after the First World War and the subsequent persecution of Jews made Zionist organisations particularly popular during the 1920s and 1930s, and Mope was no exception to the allure of such politics. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the 1923 Mandate of Palestine gave hope to the Zionist cause, although emigration to Palestine was not guaranteed. Many Jews tried to emigrate to British Mandated Palestine during the 1930s but it was not always possible, as the British government sought to limit the numbers arriving in Palestine to avoid aggravating political tensions with the pre-existing Arab population. Consequently, schemes were set up in Britain to train individuals with agricultural skills, which were greatly needed in Palestine. Agricultural training visas were generally available for entry to Britain provided a space was available on a suitable programme. Jewish charitable organisations such as the Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF), under the directorship of Otto Schiff, set these schemes up from 1933 onwards with a view that the refugees, once trained, could gain entry to Palestine as experienced agricultural workers.

The letters of Vera and Mope revolve around Britain as a place of refuge; a place of hope but also of hope deferred. Upon the Nazi accession of power in Germany, leaders of the British Jewish community met with Members of Parliament to create the CBF. Like Mope, they too believed that the most effective way to provide security for German Jews was to help them to emigrate to Palestine. However, it soon became apparent it would be necessary to direct efforts at training individuals in Britain with the hope that further emigration could be organised at a later date. Refugees only arrived in Britain in relatively small numbers from 1933 to 1937. In 1938, two events changed the situation significantly: firstly the Anschlusson 12-13 March when Germany was welcomed into Austria and the two countries were declared as one, and secondly, the November pogrom, Kristallnacht, on 9 November and 10 November 1938, where Jewish shops and homes were destroyed, synagogues defiled and set on fire, and hundreds of deaths caused through injuries sustained in vicious attacks on the Jewish population. The significant deterioration of conditions within Germany and Austria hugely increased the numbers seeking to escape Nazi persecution. As part of the November pogrom, some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Not yet extermination camps, these camps were incredibly hostile environments where harsh interrogations were undertaken and brutal punishments were meted out for the smallest of offenses, resulting in many deaths. Most of those arrested at this time were released after a few weeks or months provided they relinquished their claim on property in Germany and promised to emigrate. The CBF was an essential part of this emigration plan, creating multiple rescue schemes including the one that helped almost 4,000 of these men and some of their families to leave Germany and be accepted to Britain through the Kitchener Refugee Camp near Sandwich in Kent. Other schemes included placing individuals in domestic service, as maids or as gardeners in British households, where there was a shortage of British workers willing to carry out menial roles. The CBF was not the only charity to assist refugees from Nazi oppression during the 1930s and 1940s – the Quakers and the Church of England, for example, also helped many refugees – but the CBF was the largest and it encompassed a myriad of smaller charities who focused on assisting specific groups. Perhaps the most well-known of the refugee rescue schemes organised under their auspices was the Kindertransport. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, when it became clear within Germany and beyond that Jews were in extreme danger, the British government agreed that an uncapped number of children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia would be given visas to come temporarily to the UK, provided each child was guaranteed not to become a charge on the British taxpayer. Guarantors, foster homes and other accommodation was found for almost 10,000 minors by the outbreak of war, although more would have followed had hostilities not intervened. The anguish of parents and the desperation they must have felt to send their children into the arms of strangers can only be imagined. Mope’s sister, Ketty, in Hamburg was desperate enough to use this method of escape for her four children, with no guarantee of their ever being reunited. The Kindertransportis lauded as a golden example of British charity to refugees and of humanitarianism for the thousands of lives saved, but consideration should also be given to the great emotional costs and sacrifices involved.

Vera and Mope’s letters traverse this challenging and ever evolving time in Europe. Fascism and Communism in ideology and practice had taken – or were taking – hold in many countries including Spain, Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy. In response to the rise of the Nazi Party, many Jews had sought solace in Communism, and nothing could have been a bigger shock than the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, which saw many Jews who had fled Germany for safety in Russia returned to Germany in a terrible betrayal. Mope’s work as a furrier took him across Europe, which undoubtedly helped spare his life. His travels for business took him across country boundaries and his experiences of Russia between the years of 1937 and 1939 make for a fascinating personal insight into Russian business practices and culture. Thankfully both Vera and Mope’s stories had a happy ending, but it was a particularly close call for Mope, and we now know around six million others were not so lucky. What could be more intimate than sharing the journey of two lovers through their most personal correspondence, combining matters of the heart with the complex politics and realities of the world they inhabited?

The Nazis and their Fascist regime did not spring up overnight. The road to concentration and death camps was paved with thousands of small steps of dehumanisation, as highlighted in this moving collection of letters. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Jews made up less than one percent of the German population yet were scapegoated and blamed for almost all of the ills in society. The barbaric persecution of the Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. The Führer did not impose his will on a completely reluctant people and although not everyone supported Hitler and his thugs, many embraced the Nazi ideology and the feelings of superiority it brought with it. Blaming others serves as a convenient distraction from more serious issues that are harder to resolve in society, and it is much easier to blame someone than to take responsibility. If Mope and Vera’s story teaches us anything it is the human cost of such terrifying politics. The slogan ‘Never Again’ is often used today in the context of preventing another genocide such as the Holocaust. Every time a politician incites hatred of a people or group and is cheered for such comments, a fundamental step against the concept of ‘Never Again’ has been taken. Nobody chooses to be a refugee, to uproot their lives as a result of persecution and travel to a country where they are often mistrusted and misunderstood, but those who have suffered remind us of how fragile society is, and how careful we must be to protect not only our rights, but the rights of our neighbour, no matter what his or her nationality, religion, skin colour or ethnic background might be.

PART 1: THEN

One: Familien Hirsch

©2024 Franklin Felsenstein, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0334.01

Fig. 1 Photograph of VH (rubber stamped on verso, 6 July 1930).

Vera Lotte Hirsch (Felsenstein) “Lilongo”

Born Frankfurt, January 23, 1910

Died London, September 18, 1992

In her adult life, even into her final years, my mother was always more than sensitive about disclosing how old she was. Were she to find me posting her age, particularly at the very beginning of this book, she would make idle threats to do away with me, or at the very least–so she would half-jokingly declare––have me incarcerated without remission in the Tower of London. She would swear me to secrecy, insisting that I was never to reveal to the world one of life’s most guarded secrets! She would consider that to be a complete and utter invasion of privacy. It at once begs the question whether publishing my mother’s intimate letters and journals, alongside those of my father, is a further breach of confidentiality and an egregious step. It may come as a surprise that my mother would not have thought so.

Memorably, Leo Tolstoy began Anna Karenina with the line that “all happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I grew up in a very happy family–as well as my parents I did have a younger sister–in suburban London. In their interaction with their children, I cannot think of a single time when my mother and father opened any kind of sustained discussion of the events that had so deeply affected the early years of their relationship. Rather, it was important for them to bring us up resembling those Tolstoyan happy families, in other words as normally as possible, with almost no sense of the trauma that had beset them only a few years before. In outline, I only knew that my parents had escaped Germany and that several of their close relatives had perished. In the England in which I grew up during the late 1940s and 1950s adults constantly spoke to their children about the experience of the war but about the Holocaust they were silent.

In everyday conversation, my parents’ intonation revealed that London was not their place of birth as it was for me. Both of them spoke correct, if accented, English. That was more evident with my father who had been taught Latin as a living language, in accordance with the practice at his gymnasium or high school in Leipzig. I was quietly amused when he would pronounce “Cicero” as “Kikero” or when he would enunciate a word like “victim” as “wictim.” Such occasional oddities apart, Mope spoke at least six different languages, most of them well.

The greatest linguistic compliment that my mother ever received was when a Marks & Spencer shop girl who had heard her, their personnel manager, speak with an accented English asked her without a trace of mockery whether she too hailed from the northern industrial city of Sunderland. She would often repeat that story, in jest adopting Sunderland rather than Frankfurt as her hometown! Because they wished to distance themselves from the country of their birth, at home my parents would never converse with us in German. The only time when we might hear them speaking that other language between themselves would be when they did not want us to understand what they were saying. And, in postwar England it would have marked them out as “the enemy” if they had gone around “spraching” in German.

During her nineteen years of widowhood, following Mope’s death through lung cancer in 1973, Vera often found respite from her loss in re-reading the letters he had penned to her when she was in England, and he in Nazi Germany, and later, in the Soviet Union. The letters–all handwritten and occasionally typed in German––were stashed into two leather valises that she preserved on the floor of a built-in wardrobe in the main bedroom of her flat in northwest London. Every so often, when visiting her, I would find Vera perched on her bed, poring over a random selection of Mope’s letters. Her bitter-sweet pleasure was in re-reading these letters, and recalling their immediacy and circumstances. She had already become inured to separation during the times when he had been abroad but by this time, so many years later, natural attrition had made that separation permanent. Reading his daily letters was her way of inviting Mope to communicate to her from beyond the grave, and for her to continue to experience the endurance of his love.

After the death of Vera, their correspondence came to me, and, given my ignorance of German, I arranged for its translation into English. Reading it, I was transfixed, appreciating that I had inherited a personal conduit through which my parents had unknowingly found a way to communicate with me after they were no longer there. Given that Vera had done everything to preserve their correspondence, I felt there was nothing preternatural or even voyeuristic about their doing that. In fact, she had more than once indicated to me a desire to have Mope’s letters published, and I found her own writings no less compelling. Delving into their lives and inner thought processes was enriching to my own. Here was material that refused to remain silent. I was impelled to find out more.

Because her own letters and journals stretched back to well before she knew my father, it was easier to trace my mother’s early life.

Fig. 2 Photograph of the Hirsch family (hand dated 4 May 1913).

Vera was the younger of the two girls of Hermann and Alice Hirsch. There is already tragedy in speaking about her sister. Gretel was Vera’s senior by about nine years. At her delivery, an over-zealous obstetrician had clamped his forceps too tightly on to her cranium, and had irreversibly damaged her brain. Vera would describe her sister as looking perfectly normal but mentally severely impaired. Nowadays, her condition would probably be diagnosed, correctly or otherwise, as acute autism. It was only when Gretel tried to speak that you became aware of the gravity of her disability.

Fig. 3 Photograph of Alice Hirsch, née Ettlinger (undated but late 1890s); probably shot in Frankfurt.

An illustrative story is of Vera’s first visit to the elegant Frankfurt Opera House, within easy walking distance of their home, when she herself will have been no more than ten years old. My grandmother was able to reserve a prime box alongside one of the balconies for the performance, and it was agreed to take Gretel too. The excitement for a young girl of Vera’s age was palpable, especially so when the evening of the opera arrived. Exquisitely attired and made up for the occasion, they were ushered to their seats. Everything began accordingly, and Vera was absorbed in the beauty of the music and the novelty of the experience. However, at the height of the performance, in the middle of one of the most emotive arias, Gretel stood up and began screaming at the top of her voice, wildly gesticulating with her hands in the direction of the soprano singer. The attention of the audience was at once diverted to their box, and Gretel in company with her family had to be escorted out of the theatre. At her tender age, all that Vera could feel was complete mortification at the disturbance rather than sorrow for her sister. Given her condition, Gretel was to be institutionalized for much of her life to the extent that Vera often spoke of herself as an only child. Perhaps because my mother found it embarrassing to talk about her, I don’t think I even knew that she had once had a sister until I was into my teens. It has to be said that attitudes to disability have progressed over the past hundred years.

Following her experience with Gretel, it took the advocacy, over several years, of the family doctor to persuade Alice that she should try for a second child. The real closeness of the relationship that was to develop between Alice and her younger daughter may be attributed to these circumstances. All through her journals, Vera is gushing in praise of her mother.

VERA

My life is good, and undeservedly so, and I am so lucky to have such an angel for a mother. Isn’t it the happiest feeling to have that one person who loves you infinitely, admires you and worships you? If only I could pay her back somehow, even a little, but I am so self-centered.

My mother is goodness personified with an intuitive intelligence, capable, artistic–she paints very well. She is very musical and has a good and trained voice. Apart from German, she speaks a very good English,