by Merilyn Moos
Once safely back in London, Lotte started an insistent and fruitless search for information about Brian, even travelling down to the French side of the Pyrenees, in what one assumes was the hope of news from the other side of the border (Brian had been based in Barcelona, not that far from France.) Siegi aided her fulsomely in the following years, writing letters and contacting useful people.
But not all was well between her and Siegi. Thanks to the MI5 interest in them, we know that they started to live separately soon after Siegi got to London. The MI5 transcript of Lotte’s interrogation in Holloway includes reference to a letter from Siegi offering an explanation for Lotte’s going off to the USSR and Brian by saying that he was not in a fit state to have an emotional relationship with Lotte after what he had been through in his escape from Berlin. He was providing her with a ‘get-out-of-jail’ card.
The murder of their comrades who had escaped from Germany to the USSR was a recurrent and bitter issue for my parents. My mother told a story about Ernst Busch, after I had mistakenly tried to give them, as a Christmas present, a record of Spanish Civil war songs, a present I had felt naively proud of. They refused it point blank. ‘You keep it,’ they said. Busch, whose music appears on the record, my mother explained, had refused to support German exile comrades persecuted by the GPU. Maybe she was referring to her own case, maybe the record was unbearable because of its association with Spain and Brian.
Even after her ‘escape’ from the USSR, Lotte was still restless and after a couple of trips to France, took off for the USA in early 1939, in the hope, apparently, of getting settled there with proper jobs. She resumed studying at Swarthmore College and again appears to have done outstandingly well. She made some effort to find a way of getting Siegi over but some of her letters to Siegi from the US are ill-tempered and impatient and do not unambiguously lend themselves to the interpretation that she wanted them to get back together. Her parents’ letters to their daughter after the November 1938 pogrom had become far darker and started to implore her to get them out of Germany. This might have been an additional motive for Lotte’s journey to the US. She puts her parents down on the long long list for emigration from Germany to the US, though there is no evidence that she tried especially hard on their account.
In New York, she fatefully visited Krivitsky, who, unknown to her, was a former Soviet intelligence agent who had started to also work for the British/US. From articles of his that she had read, Lotte thought he knew what had happened to Brian. What she inadvertently set off was a process which would end with her in Holloway Prison as Krivitsky saw her as a probable spy who needed to be watched.
War clouds were looming and Lotte told me (improbably) that she caught the last boat out of the US. When I asked her why she didn’t stay, she replied that she didn’t have the stomach to make a new life all over again and, she added, wanted to get back to Siegi. But was that last statement for my benefit?
Lotte and Siegi got back together at the end of the 1930s. They continued to live essentially at different addresses till Siegi moved to Oxford in late 1938 and Lotte returned from the USA mid-1939 and moved in with him there.
Lotte did not have an easy time of it when back in the UK. I suspect the reality of Nazism was beginning to strike her very hard. Her sister, Annamarie, ‘disappeared’ around 1939 from her mental hospital (and as I only discovered months ago, unknown to my mother or their parents, one of the first killed in the T4 euthanasia programme in July 1940). Lotte’s parents started to send her, for the first time, desperate letters that they wanted to get out of Germany. (Why had they waited so long? My guess is that it was only when they received a completely false letter that Annamarie had died from natural causes that they felt they could leave Germany. It is however also possible that a combination of their age – late in their 60s/early 70’s, had combined with a belief that ‘it would all blow over’ to keep them from seriously considering exile.)
In 1940, Lotte was arrested as a possible spy - though she protested, probably with feigned naivety, that she did not know whom she was being accused of spying for, the USSR or Germany, and was in Holloway prison for about 6 months, then sent to the Isle of Man. Again, Siegi campaigned tirelessly for her. Soon after she was released, she fell terribly ill and almost died, saved by a German refugee doctor, working at the Maudsley hospital, Oxford, with access to some of the very first and very scarce penicillin.
After her release, like Siegi, she wrote many stories and contributed regularly for Die Zeitung, a British government backed paper for distribution in Germany. Her stories received lavish praise and she was asked for more. She wrote about this: ‘Instead of clearing up, I tried to give shape to the visions the night had left behind, A few stores appeared, were even broadcast. ‘Let’s have more’, I was told, ‘when the spirit moves you.’ But the spirit is a squeamish fellow-it feeds on tears.’
At the end of the war, Lotte and Siegi were to spend the next years in a desperate and too often heart-breaking search for their German families and comrades. Lotte’s father had managed to get a letter to her about her mother’s ‘natural’ death. But Lotte was always convinced her mother had been murdered. In a conversation in 2003 which I recorded, I asked my mother how her mother had died. She tells me her mother died in a concentration camp. She held tightly onto my hand and I had felt like scum. I had then asked about her father but all she said was: ‘I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.’
I later established through the kindness of the Berlin Synagogue Research Centre that her mother had died naturally - though what that means given her daughter, Annamarie, Lotte’s eldest sister, had already been murdered, supposedly dying naturally in Poland, in practice gassed up the road in Brandenburg, is another matter. Louise died in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, which has a far from clean record in this period, so Lotte had good grounds to insist to me, choking on her words, that her mother had been murdered.
Lotte believed she had found her father. She had been receiving the heart-breaking short messages from her father, Samuel, through the Red Cross until 1942. This is a story which still makes me weep. As soon as the war was over, a mere three years later, Lotte started to make persistent enquiries through various organisations, such as the Red Cross but they could not find her father. She did not even know for sure whether he was still at the old address in Charlottenburg. Then she receives news her father was alive. She writes him a rapturous letter: ‘Today we got the most wonderful news from the World Jewish Congress and got your address in Berlin. We dare hardly believe it…The best news first. We have a delightful little daughter, Merilyn…Merilyn’s first word shall be ‘Opi’ [grandfather].’ She was right not to believe it. Under a month after sending her letter, in August 1946, Lotte received a letter from the Jewish Community, Berlin. ‘I am deeply sorry to give you news…that I must conclude that there is nobody with your father’s name [alive]. My deepest regrets.’ My mother never tried to find out where and when her father had died. It was left to me years later to trace him and acquire the ‘death certificate’: Died in Theriesenstadt.
It is impossible to know what effect so many violent deaths had on Lotte: her sister, Brian, her father (and her mother, as far as she was concerned). And too many uncertainties: she will have suspected Brian was dead, but will never have known. I suspect Lotte never recovered. Certainly she told me she wished she too had died. She carried with her, I suggest, for the rest of her life an inability to come to terms with what had happened to those whom she had loved which made loving those left alive more difficult.
But Lotte and Siegi made good friends in Oxford, in particular with the Worswicks. When I asked her in her dying years, whether she had enjoyed Oxford, which had previously suggested, she gave a resounding ‘No’. Maybe, Oxford was forever associated for her with knowing too much about too many murders.
The battle for Stalingrad, as my parents saw it, made it safe for them to have a baby. A few years later, Lotte and Siegi moved to Durham and my mother ceased to
have an - independent - significant impact on my father’s life. While my father had a variety of academic and quasi-political activities outside the home, my mother had none. I think she found Durham hellish. My mother continued to write voluminously and indeed had a play put on in the West End (see main text). This is the period of my childhood and adolescence - my experience of my mother was of somebody whom I categorised as ‘depressed’ when I was still very young, but this was a child’s view and has to be interpreted as such. She certainly did not want to leave the home for long periods of time and spent most days in my parents’ bedroom. What effect this had on Siegi, I do not know.
The combination of her experiences under Stalinism, her escape from Germany, the murder of her family and her impris-onment/internment here had left my mother with a strong tendency towards paranoia. But she did not just suspect the world beyond her family, she also suspected me. Although I had learnt very young the importance of not crossing my mother, she was almost permanently suspicious that I was acting in a manner she disapproved of or, as I grew older, deliberately to oppose her. She used silence to show her displeasure, a silence she could maintain for days and, the older I became, the longer her silences were maintained. I do not remember one ‘heart-to-heart’ at any point between her and me. Although she always prepared three meals a day, even if at unpredictable times, and ensured I was properly dressed, my memory of my childhood is of deep loneliness and insecurity. She was never able to show much emotion. Maybe she would have found mothering less difficult if she had not been so emotionally bruised, but mothering did not come easily to her. I never saw her cry, not even when Siegi died. It was as if she had cried herself dry. In the very last years of her life, as I grew braver and started to know enough to ask her the right questions, and as she started to guard her mental edges and her memories less effectively, I did finally persuade her to talk a bit to me. Maybe, I pushed her into talking. Maybe, that wasn’t right, but at least it meant I found out a little of my mother’s life.
It is impossible to be clear about the effect on my father of Lotte’s experiences. But what seems likely is that her dreadful experiences in Moscow will have alerted him much earlier than most, to how far the USSR had strayed from its socialist path Brian’s disappearance in the USSR will have sealed his misgivings. More clear-headed than my mother, he will have suspected, long before she would have wanted to recognise this as a possibility, that Brian had been killed. Siegi would not have forgiven such excesses. Of course the small Trotskyist groupings in the UK, whose literature I suspect he will have followed avidly, were already debating what the character of the USSR had become but my guess is that Siegi always suspected Trotskyism for being too critical of the USSR, and probably too sectarian.
What the personal impact of Lotte’s dalliance with Brian was can only be guessed at. Again, this is touched on in the main text. Siegi had followed Lotte to London, but his relationship with Lotte deteriorated to the point they rapidly stopped living together and did not do so again for about five years. What were the implications of his ‘taking her back’ (for this is how I see the scenario in 1938/39)? Did this bind her forever to him or/and leave their relationship profoundly out of kilter? With hindsight, it would appear to me that not all was well between them when I was a child.
But in the last years of their lives together, before Siegi’s death in 1988, they seemed to me to be getting on better than I had seen before. The fear around the Cold War were fading away. They were living in London, both highly active in the poetry scene around Centreprise, a local and radical Hackney community centre, and with a group of much younger men and women around them and admiring them. Lotte had at least three books of wonderful if somewhat cerebral poems published, almost all decrying injustice. It was a happy joint ending to such troubled lives.
But Lotte did not cope well with the remaining twenty years of living without Siegi and became increasingly remote from reality. In the end, I decided she had to go into a care home though this was certainly not what she wanted. After a series of misadventures, which would have killed most people her age, she lived her last years in a Jewish care home and died on the 3rd January 2008, a couple of days after I had sung her the Internationale and Lotte, by now, almost completely unresponsive, raised her fist in salute.
End-notes
205. David Perman: Stranger in a Borrowed Land: Lotte Moos and her writing (Grendel Publishing, 2012)
206. My thanks to Barry McLoughlin for giving me a copy of these notes.
207. A ‘bobineuse’ is somebody (usually a female ‘somebody’) who winds the wool yarn around a spool. It is apparently difficult work unless very experienced as the yarn regularly breaks.
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