Weeds Don't Perish E-Book

Hanna Braun

• Herausgeber: Garnet Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 334

Beschreibung

This is the story of a life lived to the full. Hanna Braun was born in 1927 to a Jewish family living in Germany. The family immigrated to Palestine in 1937, shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany and the onset of Jewish persecution there. During this course of events she was separated from her beloved father, who was forced to flee the country and made for Switzerland to escape the Gestapo. Her grandmother later died in the Terezin ghetto. Once in Palestine, Hanna's uncle became a fierce Zionist, and would convert Hanna's mother to Zionism as well. Hanna - a teenager at the time - also turned to Zionism, although she was initially unaware of what exactly this meant. Over the years, Hanna made many Arab friends in Palestine, and gradually began to question her allegiances. She witnessed the formation of the state of Israel, and was there when the atrocities of Deir Yassin happened; an incident that made her hate Zionism forever. These events, and many others explored in Weeds Don't Perish, helped to shape Hanna's perception, and transformed her into an active human rights activist; unable to witness injustice without speaking out. The book is often controversial and Hanna, not being endowed with the gift of great diplomacy, makes many enemies as well as friends along the way. Throughout, Hanna manages to retain her zest for life and her sense of humour, and delights in describing her years teaching English and Dance to her students in Zimbabwe. Her curiosity and enthusiasm for meeting new people and experiencing new things is infectious, and the reader cannot help but be swept up in the story. Hanna also endures many setbacks and painful experiences in her personal life but, like the proverbial weed, she has never given up and refuses to be beaten. Instead, she continues to this day to fight passionately for causes close to her heart - human rights and equality for all.

Leseprobe

WEEDS DON’T PERISH

Memoirs of a Defiant Old Woman

HANNA BRAUN

Weeds Don’t PerishMemoirs of a Defiant Old Woman

Published by Garnet Publishing Limited 8 Southern Court South Street Reading RG1 4QS UK

www.garnetpublishing.co.ukwww.twitter.com/Garnetpubwww.facebook.com/Garnetpubwww.garnetpub.wordpress.com

Copyright © Hanna Braun, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-85964-314-3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Samantha BardenJacket design by Haleh Darabi

To my daughters and my late mother

Weeds Don’t Perish – a common German saying

Contents

Acknowledgements

Part One 1927–1958: Early Childhood and Emigration to Palestine

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Part Two 1958–1981: The Grim Years and Good Years

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Part Three 1982–1989: Semi-Retirement and Intensive Political Activity

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Part Four 1989–2009: This Was My Homeland

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Afterword

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Khaled Batrawi, the first person to urge me to write my memoirs,

Diane Langford, a good friend who selflessly spent a great deal of time helping me with editing and encouraged me repeatedly on the many occasions when I was about to give up,

my grandson Nico, who helped with typing and again with the proof reading,

Eve Segal, another friend who did some of the initial editing,

Yardena Cohen, my Dance teacher in Haifa, who introduced me to Middle Eastern rhythms and movements,

Kieran Nugent Sutton, who did a lot of the typing for me with patience and good humour,

Dr. Nadia Taysir Dabbagh, who did so much for me beyond the call of duty while I was in hospital,

and last but not least,

Gaby Forrell, without whose technical skills and unstinting help this book would never have seen the light of day.

PART ONE 1927–1958

EARLY CHILDHOOD AND EMIGRATION TO PALESTINE

Chapter One

It was mid-October when we arrived in Haifa on a beautiful, cloudless and hot day. There was the glittering bay with sparkling white houses, interspersed with dark green cypress trees climbing up to Mount Carmel. The sea was a deep turquoise and it all seemed like a fairy tale scene to me.

I remember little of the actual disembarkation; it seemed at the time that from standing on deck and gazing at the beautiful sight in front of us, we were magically transported to the quayside and were standing amidst a gaggle of relatives, most of them strangers to Mother and me.

“You are lucky, we’ve just had a really fierce Khamseen for eight days and it only stopped last night.”

“A what?”

“Khamseen, you know.”

We didn’t, of course. Seeing the blank expression on our faces, he continued:

“It’s the hot dry desert wind that blows periodically from the Sahara.”

The word is Arabic for fifty (Khamisheem in Hebrew), as this was the number of days Palestine was afflicted by it annually. It has long since been translated into the Hebrew as Sharav to hide any notion that our languages are so very similar, not to mention that the local populace knew a great deal more about weather and geographical conditions than we did.

Aunts warned my Mother never to buy anything from Arabs and never to employ them.

It was the first time anyone had mentioned Arabs in my presence.

“Who are Arabs?” I ventured childishly.

An uncle pointed out the dockworkers, sturdy men in wide black Salwar pants.

“See those dockworkers? They’re Arabs to a man. Dirty lot!”

Given the heat and type of work they were engaged in, it was hard to imagine how else they would look. I didn’t recognise racism until years later.

When Mother replied that this was hardly the way to live with them in peace, our new relatives regarded her with a mixture of consternation and pity: she wasn’t a proper Zionist at all!

At the time this was certainly true. For Mother, like many other North German Jews, Zionism was something for East European Jews who had trouble making ends meet. I still remember her musing aloud after a visit to Arthur Ruppin, a distant relation from Germany who had become an early Zionist living in Jerusalem and who had achieved considerable fame: “I don’t know why he became a Zionist. Such a good family!”

Years later Mother was persuaded to Zionism, albeit a much more benign version advocated by Prof. Martin Buber, who believed in a bi-national state rather than a Jewish one. He wrote extensively on this vision, but came to be regarded widely as an unrealistic eccentric and the bi-national idea was soon side-lined prior to being forgotten altogether.

In Palestine, the slogan of the time was “Hebrew work for Hebrew workers” – a boycott on any Arab produce or employment. Among other reasons given for the boycott of Arab goods and labour was the one that Arabs were not unionised. However, it was never mentioned that they were not accepted in the Histadruth, the most powerful trade union, expressly formed to cater for the needs and aspirations of Hebrew workers. Yet we claimed to be Socialists. Palestinians in Israel still face shoddy, third-class treatment in most forms of education and employment.

On that calm and sun-drenched day in 1937, though, what I remember best is the beauty of the surroundings, the marvellous clear light and, above all, the cheerfulness and excitement around me: everything and everybody was a great deal noisier than I had ever seen in my ten years! I loved it all and became instantly converted to my new homeland, deciding initially in quite a childish way that I wanted no further truck with Europe. This first instinctive rejection of that continent – admittedly, I knew nothing about any other Mediterranean countries – and my deliberate adoption of all things non-European has stayed with me throughout the years, although I acquired quite a few British and other European friends over time.

Why did we emigrate to Palestine? Certainly not because of Zionist ideals: particularly not on my Mother’s part. However, Uncle Julius had two siblings who had become early Zionists, still a rarity at the time amongst West European Jews. His family had come from a far more traditional background in Transylvania. Two of his siblings and their respective families had settled in Palestine around 1925. Their enthusiastic persuasion prevailed, not least after Julius explored the possibilities of finding a livelihood and was guaranteed secure employment with the British Mandatory Authorities as a specialist in electrical engineering. He had been working for Siemens.

We immigrated to Palestine four years after Hitler came to power. There was an increasing exodus from Germany and we followed in 1937. Most of our circle of friends and acquaintances left for other European countries, including Britain, or for the USA. I fear the majority of my relatives were too short sighted to move at all, finding the idea of leaving Germany unimaginable until it was too late. Most of them perished in concentration camps.

The journey to Palestine was a wonderful experience: Omi, my grandmother, as well as Uncle Paul and Auntie Rechi, Mother’s sister, came with us on the train to Trieste, where we stayed for two days prior to boarding the Galilea, an Italian ship bound for Haifa.

It was twilight when we set sail and there were Uncle, Auntie and Omi, the latter in tears, on the quay. It was the last time I was to see her.

Omi had paid for us to travel first class and our en suite cabin was beautiful. The sea on the first evening was quite rough, although it didn’t bother me.

I remember, after dinner, searching the deck to find someone seasick. People who are afflicted in this way tend to lie on deckchairs in the fresh air, so I had been told. The deck was deserted, but eventually I came across a woman lying on a deckchair. She looked pale and wan, although in the dim light it was hard to tell.

“Excuse me,” I said politely, “are you seasick?”

“Yes I am,” she replied feebly, whereupon I sat next to her and proceeded to question my poor victim about what this disease actually felt like. I didn’t get far, however, before Mother got hold of me and dragged me away. To be on the safe side, she dosed both of us with some anti-seasickness tablets Uncle Paul had given her, before we went to bed.

The next day there was urgent knocking on our cabin door. The steward asked loudly whether we were all right. It was 1.30pm. Mother had mistakenly used sleeping tablets, also courtesy of Uncle Paul. But from then onwards the trip was pure pleasure. The sea became calm, the sky cloudless and the four and a half days passed almost too quickly. Early on the fifth morning Mother woke me and we climbed onto the deck, where many others were assembling. We could just see the outline of land ahead, but after a while a mountain seemed to rise out of the sea: Mount Carmel.

Chapter Two

My birth certificate gave my name as Lieselott Johanna Fraenkel, born in the prosperous section of Charlottenburg in Berlin, on 25th May 1927, to Dr. Med. Manfred Fraenkel and his wife, Sella Selma Fraenkel. Lilo, a diminutive version of Lieselott, became my name throughout my early childhood until the great watershed when we emigrated and my much-loved father was ousted by the one man I had always resented.

It was a happy, innocent childhood, in which I was surrounded by the love of Mother, Pappi, grandparents and other adoring relations, not forgetting Deta, my nanny, whose name Marta I couldn’t pronounce as a toddler. Deta was a devout Catholic, who sometimes took me and one of her former charges, Peter Rachwalsky, along to church on Sundays, but one day we hurt her feelings when we complained about the stench the man was sprinkling (incense) and she stopped taking us.

I wonder whether Peter was aware that he was Jewish. I certainly wasn’t. Christmas with the tree and presents on Christmas Eve, the carols I sang to the accompaniment of Mother’s piano playing were lovely, with mounting excitement and expectations until the little bell summoned me to come to the drawing room, where a large beautiful Christmas tree had been erected with presents underneath. So was Christmas day with the great meal, Easter and searching for Easter eggs and last but not least St. Nicolas Eve, 6th December, when I would hang out my stocking the previous evening to find it filled with sweets the next morning. According to tradition, only well-behaved children received these. The ones who didn’t make the grade were supposed to find twigs and sticks in their stockings. Speaking to a young German woman some years ago on holiday in Greece, I asserted that surely no child ever received these, but she replied that she did one year.

I was a very agile child and relished almost all forms of gymnastics as well as eurhythmics, something I enjoyed throughout my life and, with the addition of dance and choreography, these have given me much pleasure as well as keeping me nimble far beyond my age. I was so confident in my physical abilities that more than once I made a bit of a fool of myself. During a visit to my grandparents, I was allowed to come along to a eurhythmics class for children aged seven to eight. At the time, I was four years old. Halfway through the lesson, the teacher announced: “Today we are going to try and do a handstand. Is there anyone who can already do it?”

My hand shot up immediately: “I can!”

But, despite trying again and again, I didn’t quite manage. Eventually the teacher said, “Well, maybe another time.”

“But I could do it when I was young”, I insisted and was furious when parents seated round the walls burst out laughing. I was convinced they were laughing because they thought I was lying.

There was a similar occurrence on one of my summer holiday visits to Homburg. The baker’s daughter, twenty at the time, had come on her adult size bike to take orders for bread and other pastries. While I was waiting with her by the window in one of the front rooms, I kept looking at her bike.

“Do you like my bike?” she asked.

“Yes, very much.”

“Can you ride a bike?” was her next question.

I had never been on a bike, but since I was an ace on the scooter, I was sure there couldn’t be that much difference.

“Yes, I can,” I told her.

“Would you like to have a go?”

Of course I did. I wheeled the bike to the street and mounted it. I was far too small to sit on it, so I rode it standing upright. The street was on a decline and all went smoothly until I reached the end. Stopping and turning the bike round was a problem, but I managed it by dismounting. I hadn’t counted on the incline on the way back: I was swerving madly and two ladies crossing the road told me off angrily. But that was nothing compared to the trouble I got into when Omi, who was visiting, spotted me from a window facing the street.

After a terrible scolding from her, Auntie Rechi and Uncle Paul, the silver lining appeared in the shape of a children’s bike. I had to promise to ride it only in their large garden and always managed to fall off it by the gooseberry bushes.

I could also be a bit of a daredevil.

It was a sunny spring Sunday in 1932, shortly after Omi had moved to Berlin. It seemed a pity to stay indoors. Our help had the day off, Pappi had to go out and Mother and Omi were busy in the kitchen.

“I can go by myself.” I announced. Mother and Omi were concerned.

In a capital like Berlin crossing a road by myself was a strict no–no.

“But if I just walk round the block I needn’t cross any roads.”

“Promise you’ll only walk round the block.”

I promised faithfully. When I already had my coat on, the glimmer of an idea was germinating.

“I’ll take my little handbag too.”

I knew I had some money in it.

“What for?” asked Mother.

“I just want to look more grown up,” I responded. I walked around the block twice to reassure Mother and Omi, who were keeping an eye on me. After that, I continued to walk along our street, Kantstrasse. I knew that if I got as far as Joachimsthalerstrasse and turned left, there was my favourite snack bar.

Once I got to it, I put my coins in the automatic sandwich slot and chose my favourite: an Italian salad and sausage sandwich. With this in my hand, I went to the drinks counter and stood on my tiptoes to reach it.

“One lemonade, please.”

The serving attendant frowned: “Who are you with?”

“I’m on my own. Here is the money.”

She grumbled about these modern times, but served me. By the time I had finished, I felt that it was rather late and decided to take the tram that had a stop just outside our house. The conductor also frowned.

“Are you going just on your own?” he asked.

“Yes, Here is the fare.”

He shook his head in disapproval. When we reached my stop, I looked up and saw Mother and Omi in tears on the balcony. That didn’t bode well. I waved gaily to them while crossing the road. It turned out that they had been about to call the police. What was most frightening for them was seeing me cross the road without watching the traffic. It was a long time before I was allowed to go out on my own.

In 1990, after the wall fell, I revisited Berlin with my younger daughter Yael and we retraced the route I had taken all those years ago. I had crossed seven busy streets!

Occasionally we would visit my grandparents in Stettin (now Szczecin). The train journey was always exciting, and at the station at Eberswalde, halfway to Stettin, platform vendors offered ‘Eberswalder Spritzkuchen’, a local pastry speciality. I always received one. Opa, my grandfather, was a lovely and gentle man, who presented me with a rocking horse for my third birthday despite all the rest of the family insisting that rocking horses were only for boys.

Opa died in 1931, mercifully before the rise of Hitler. He was such a German patriot through and through that the advent of a national socialist anti-Semitic regime coming to power would have broken his heart. Although Opa still celebrated the Passover ceremony, albeit all in German, to the last toast, “next year in Jerusalem”, he invariably added devoutly, “God forbid!”

My memory of his death and funeral is very hazy. I was deemed too young to be told about death and on the day of the funeral was sent off with a strange nanny. But I had overheard something about death and a funeral. So when we came across Pappi, who had just arrived in Stettin dressed in top hat and tails, I asked eagerly: “Are you going to the funeral?”

“Yes my darling, I am,” said Pappi, “but it’s nothing to worry about.” Instead of being worried, I was very impressed and boasted to anyone on our way, “my grandpa is dead!”

A year later, Omi, Opa’s widow, sold her home in Stettin and moved to a newly built apartment on the top floor of our luxurious block of flats. As I was her only grandchild, she spoiled me endlessly and was always there for me when I wanted to play cards or snakes and ladders. She also always let me win, which was fine to start with, but a little irritating as I grew older.

My first day of school came after the Easter holidays in 1933, at the end of which I, along with all German school children, received a large Schultuete (school cone) filled with edible goodies – eat your heart out, Laurie Lee, we did get the present! These cones came in all sizes and I was convinced that mine was the largest. I still have the photo with me in a tartan dress with a white button-on collar, a white beret and a satchel on my back, holding the large cone. There were no uniforms as such, but tartan dresses were a popular school garb.

This was also the day I became aware of being a Jew. Mother had told me the previous evening to say: “Jewish” when asked about my religion, but it meant little to me at the time. For a long time, being Jewish didn’t impinge much on my consciousness. I continued to go ice-skating with my classmates on an ice-rink not far from us, which served as a tennis ground in the summer. Music blared out from the little hut to which we retreated from time to time to warm ourselves by the enormous stove and sometimes to eat freshly roasted chestnuts.

The usual music was the Cuckoo Waltz to which we raced, executed figures of eight and played catch. My first hesitant steps on ice skates had come much earlier, at the age of four or so, on the Lietzensee, a lake not too remote from our area.

Not long after I started school, my right ear came into prominence and has played sometimes a minor and at other times a major role throughout my life. It started with an earache and a fever, which refused to decline despite eardrops and other medications. After an endless week of increasing pain, I ended up in hospital. I remember little about the otitis media operation, but after waking, spent a pleasant fortnight there, where I had a room to myself shared by Pappi, who had his bed opposite mine and slept there every night. The nurses were nuns and the whole experience was enjoyable, without me realising how dangerous otitis media was at that time, resulting in death if not caught before the infection spread to the brain.

By the time I started school I read fluently, despite efforts of family and friends not to teach me, lest I got bored at school. I would go round pestering people, asking them to tell me this or that letter in a book or a newspaper until I had managed to piece it all together. Probably because I was an only child, I read voraciously and remained an avid reader until late middle age, when I started slowing down. These days, it takes me almost a month to complete reading a book, probably thanks to my glaucoma, and I find it hard to imagine that I devoured four or five books a week.

One notable book I read almost through was the One Thousand and One Nights. It was part of our extensive library of classics, mainly but by no means exclusively of German literature. My parents innocently assumed that it consisted of tales like the story of Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor and so on. I soon discovered that there were tales of a very different sort in it. In fact the bulk of the tales weren’t meant for children at all. A great deal of it went over my head. At the age of eight or nine, I didn’t fully understand the allegories, but I knew there was something forbidden and arousing that fascinated me.

Many years later I discovered that European parents generally have no problems with what has become The Arabian Nights with the naughty bits edited out; Arabic speaking parents generally wouldn’t dream of letting their youngsters read the original. I still remember the two – or was it three? – handsome volumes, sumptuous in green leather with gold leaf decorations.

I’m standing in my bed, sleepy and bewildered, with Pappi, my beloved daddy, holding and hugging me. It was summer 1933 and as always, I was spending the long summer holidays with Auntie Rechi, Mother’s sister, and her husband, Uncle Paul, in their lovely villa in Southern Germany, Bad Homburg vor der Hoehe, near Frankfurt. It was a pretty spa resort, to which many people came to take the waters from a number of wells with supposedly curative powers. They certainly tasted vile.

“I’m going away for a while,” he tells me, “but not to worry, my darling, we’ll be together again soon.”

A kiss, another hug and he’s gone. I’m too sleepy to worry about anything, although I wonder why he woke me up in the first place. Soon I’m fast asleep again. I didn’t meet him again for almost 28 years, when I went to visit him in Munich.

Years after he vanished from my life, I found out from Mother that in 1933 the Gestapo had come to arrest him. He had become the physician of the Communist party for totally unfathomable reasons. He had never been a communist or a socialist. He had always been completely apolitical. Pappi had to charm the two Gestapo men with his best cognac, his medals from WWI and his ability to talk himself out of a tight corner. Initially the men phoned headquarters to say there had to be some mistake, but were told that this was indeed the wanted man and that he should be brought in immediately. After some more good cognac and charm, they left in the early morning without him. He took the next fast train going to Switzerland, but broke off his flight in Frankfurt to take a slow suburban train to Homburg to bid me farewell. Pappi died a few months after my visit in 1961 and eventually all the correspondence between him, Mother and myself, along with some photos, were sent to me in Birmingham, where I was then living with my husband and daughters. He had kept every letter and photograph through all the years, a testimony of the unconditional love between him and me.

During my second school year, Renate, one of my classmates, tried to persuade me to join the BDM (Bund Deutscher Maedchen), the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth. I explained repeatedly that I couldn’t join because I was Jewish, but Renate didn’t think this was a problem. Their group leader was so nice, she was sure to accept me. But when Renate told me that anyone who joined the BDM (eintreten) could never resign or step outside (austreten) I was horrified and found this an insurmountable problem. In German austreten is used for resigning from a group or a political party, but it was also the way to ask to be excused to go to the toilet during a lesson.

“Renate, how can you?” I asked her. “I could never manage that!”

I came home quite shocked and told my mother that anyone joining the BDM could never go to the toilet again!

Not long after Pappi left, Uncle Julius came to the forefront of my existence. There were various aunts and uncles visiting us or staying for a while as guests. At that time, any male family friend or relative was termed uncle, the female equivalent being an auntie. Uncle Julius, however, was a permanent fixture. He occupied the room that had been Pappi’s study and consulting room. He was the only uncle to correct or criticise me repeatedly and to tell me what to do, so I resented him. Shortly after he moved into our apartment, he set up a desk in my spacious nursery. Although it faced the wall, even his back was an unwelcome and oppressive presence.

Chapter Three

When I was eight years old, there was a repeat otitis media performance, although without Pappi, who was already in Romania. I clearly remember the daily visits of the doctor, an acquaintance of Mother’s from Stettin, and his eventual decision that I had to be taken to hospital immediately.

It was on a Sunday and I remember Julius holding me in his trembling arms in the reception area of the hospital. In this hospital, I shared a room with some other children. Initially, I couldn’t hear at all after the operation and for some days I didn’t quite understand the deeply worried faces of Mother, Julius and Omi as they tried in vain to communicate with me. Eventually, I regained the hearing in my left ear, which became very sharp to compensate for my nearly total deafness in its right counterpart. Thus the lack of hearing in one ear didn’t seem to be an obstacle, let alone a disability, for many years. It was during my stay in this hospital that Julius gave me two lovely books of collected cartoons named Father and Son by E.O. Plauen.

They are still with me, almost falling to pieces by now and, with captions translated initially into Hebrew, then into English, have given great pleasure to numerous friends and to my daughters as well as grandsons. They have even come in handy as an aid for teaching ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), which I did for some years after my retirement from full time work. The inscription in the first book, dated November 1935, reads “To dear little Lilo: laugh yourself back to health. Your uncle Julius.”

Poor Julius, at least he tried that time.

Very often when I had school friends coming to play, he remained in the room. Nothing was said, but the unease of my friends and of me was palpable. He didn’t approve of us climbing onto the shelves, but we compensated once he was gone. After Julius left in 1936, my then closest friend, Inge Guttman, used to come round, often with her slightly older brother and his friend and we would play ships. The shelves, which we could easily reach via the swing, served as gangways, whereas the top of the wardrobe was the captain’s deck.

Inge’s brother Bubi and his friend were always the captain and his first lieutenant and Inge and I just had to follow their orders, but even so, it was great fun.

My swing, which hung from the door of my nursery, had been a great love of mine from early childhood until quite late in life. It had a seat and a bar as well, from which I could soon hang upside down.

When I did this at college in Dundee, aged thirty-six, the other students became quite anxious: “Be careful, Mrs Braun!”

“Don’t worry, I’m fine,” and to prove my point I swung backwards and forward still hanging from my knees. I used to swing and still do occasionally, although surreptitiously, in my eighties, whenever an opportunity presents itself.

In the corridor adjacent to my door stood a very tall chest, on its top a large gramophone. I used to swing very high, then on the backward swing haul myself onto the chest and play the old 78 records my parents had acquired: a strange mix of world, light classical and some classical music. Initially, I played them all through out of curiosity, but later I had my favourites, first among them the second movement of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. It was beautiful, even majestic, but left me wondering what the other movements were like. Why did we have only this part? Mother was uncertain as well. She even seemed unsure how we came into its possession in the first place.

Then there were some folksongs, two of the Volga Boatmen, the second of which has been appropiated by the ABBA group (Now the Carnival is over). I loved them both. Johann Strauss was likewise represented and I found the rhythm of the repetitive Oom-pah-pah quite irritating. Years later, when I listened to the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz, I found the waltz in the third movement surely the most beautiful one in the world!

Julius, of course, disapproved both of my daring jump onto the chest as well as of overplaying the records, which were still of the winding up variety. Periodically, the gramophone would start winding down, the music dying by sliding lower and slower. You had to hurry to rewind it.

One typical incident with Julius occurred when a classmate came to visit. She was Jutta Ruge, the daughter of a painter, whose Mother continued to bring her even after German Aryans were forbidden to associate with Jews. On this occasion, Jutta and I were drawing pictures. Mine was a house. When I started colouring it, Julius interfered:

“Do you see the windows on the opposite side? They aren’t white. From a distance windows always appear dark.”

Aged eight, I didn’t quite comprehend this, so I chose the next darker colour to white, which I thought was yellow. When Julius saw my yellow windows, he was deeply offended and claimed that I had done this just to spite him and hurt him. I didn’t yet realise that he was a master of emotional blackmail.

The incident left me bewildered and resentful. It also made me believe that I was useless at art and I remained mediocre at best until my last school year in Germany in 1937, when our teacher, Herr Terne, drew a beautiful vase full of flowers for us to copy. I liked the vase and the flowers so much that my skills were miraculously restored and the likeness I drew and coloured was remarkably true to the picture on the board. Herr Terne wouldn’t believe at first that this was my own handiwork and was only persuaded by all the girls around me who insisted no one had helped me. From that time onwards, my small talent for drawing developed at great speed. I found it irresistible to doodle or draw on every blank bit of paper, much to Julius’s annoyance.

Another cause for reproach was my left-handedness. I was made to write with my right hand at school and for a while, as a young woman, was ambidextrous. However, I continued to eat and sew with my left hand and do so until this day, except when eating Indian, African and Middle-Eastern food, when it is obligatory to use the right hand. Equally unacceptable was my left-handedness at sewing, although not at school. There it didn’t matter, since the needlework teacher, an early Nazi, put all the Jewish girls in one corner and refused to teach us. But at home, Mother nagged me for ages saying that my efforts at hemming or any other stitches looked awkward. Stubbornly, I persevered, but decided that I was no good at sewing, until years later we were taught some Middle-Eastern, particularly Yemeni, style of embroidery. I was enchanted by it and promptly embroidered the borders of any plain clothes I had in the Yemeni style. That didn’t earn my Mother’s approval either. She felt it didn’t belong on European blouses and dresses.

Chapter Four

Another feature of the time, probably starting around 1934, was our annual attendance at the Temple, as the rather improbable synagogue in Charlottenburg was called. All prayers and sermons were in German. There was mixed seating, an organ and even a mixed choir. After the ceremony of Atonement Day (Yom Kippur) flower sellers used to wait as people came out and the men would buy bunches of violets for their womenfolk. The rabbi presiding over all this expressed his opinion, after visiting Palestine in 1935, that although the country was beautiful you couldn’t really live there: too many Jews. He eventually made it to Palestine, but was not recognised by the rabbinical authorities there. I doubt he could read any Hebrew. He ended up the as the owner of a bridge club in Tel Aviv.

When I re-visited Berlin in 1990 with Yael, my younger daughter, the Temple still bore the remnants of the original Greco–Roman style with a facade of columns and colonnades in front of it. It has become the Jewish Cultural Centre of Berlin, sadly now guarded by policemen.

At school in Berlin, the real blow for me came when we were separated from the rest of the girls – by our own classmates and former friends. During break one day in 1936, Ingrid Bremer, in whose flat I had previously played and had been most impressed by her room, which was an attic on to which we climbed by a ladder, suddenly decided there were too many of us to participate in the game of catch we were about to play. Ingrid was something of a leader and when she told us to form a line from which she would count out every alternate girl, we did so unsuspectingly. But she didn’t count out every second girl: after just a few, it became glaringly obvious she was deselecting the Jewish girls. We were left in a confused and dismayed huddle. Many of our friends were now on the other side, whereas I, for one, didn’t like some of the Jewish girls at all.

From then onwards, I became more aware of the increasing restrictions we faced. I could no longer take piano lessons from my teacher, the father of one of my classmates, because he wasn’t Jewish. We couldn’t go to cinemas, to the beloved ice-rink or even the swimming pool. Eventually, at Easter 1937, Jews were excluded from state schools altogether and I attended a very modern and progressive co-educational Jewish school for one term, until the summer holidays. Mother was quite an exception among our circle of friends and acquaintances: she had decided from the start that a state education would be healthier, a rarity amongst our circle and to my mind revealing some very progressive thinking.

As to the ‘creeping’ anti-Semitism, there were some exceptions. In the last year, 1936–1937, after Julius had left for Palestine, Mother let Pappi’s former study to an opera singer and his wife for some months. He arranged tickets for us to see Hansel and Gretel, in which he appeared as the father. It was a great event! I still remember most of the music!

In the summer of 1937 in Bad Homburg, I went off straight to the swimming pool as usual. A sign at the entrance read “Jews unwelcome.” I turned away and started walking, but the manager, Herr Link, who had taught me to swim when I was just seven years old and had a warm welcome for me every summer, called after me repeatedly. I pretended not to hear and carried on. I knew he was going to let me in, but somehow wasn’t able to accept his generosity. Maybe the reason, albeit unarticulated and not even understood, was that I didn’t want generosity or exceptions. I wanted to be able to go because it should have been my right.

There were other Germans who tried to be decent despite the odds. Frau Hagen, who used to clean and do some cooking on a daily basis after non-Jewish employees were not permitted to live on their employer’s premises, had to leave us altogether in 1936. I can still see her on the opposite side of the street, red birdcage with Hansi, our canary, in her hand and tears streaming down her face.

And then there were the removal men who came to pack our belongings into two large containers.

This was in early autumn 1937, while I was in Homburg and Mother told me about it later. At lunchtime, the foreman said to her, “we’re off for a break now, so, if there is anything you want to add, just do it, we need not know.” It was strictly forbidden to take out any money from Germany and Mother was very worried that this might be a trap. However, when the customs officer came for the final inspection, the foreman told him, “It’s all right, we’ve packed everything ourselves.”

During our last year in Germany, Mother tried on numerous occasions to explain to me that Julius was my real father and that my name was to be Freund not Fraenkel. I was remarkably obtuse and didn’t take any of this in. With hindsight, I had developed a mental block because I could not bring myself to accept that the one man I heartily disliked was supposed to be my real father. One instance stands out in my memory from that period: there was a children’s party in the communal park of Bad Homburg in summer 1937. I came first of the girls in a competition for eating whipped-cream-filled meringues with our hands firmly held behind our backs. Both the boy who won and I had to give our names and recite or sing something prior to receiving a prize. When Mother came to visit and I told her proudly about this event she asked,

“And what name did you give?”

Surprised, I answered, “Lieselott Fraenkel, why?”

“Oh, it’s just that Fraenkel is such a Jewish name,” replied Mother quickly after a short pause.