And it was not all abstract theology. Wishing to become more familiar with both Jewish prayer and ritual, Susi attended a number of synagogue services. Rabbi Jeffrey Cohen of Stanmore Synagogue devoted his whole Seder service during the spring of 1989 to her story, aware of its symbolic power. 'It did not feel at all strange to me,' Susi noted in her diary, proud, as a practising Christian, to have been able to accommodate this transition. Nor did the Jewish tradition of lighting a memorial candle, in this instance on the anniversary of her mother's death, strike her as out of place. On the contrary, this kind of ceremony was where religions met and was an appropriate way to remember and honour Rosa Bechhöfer.
Yet for all her initial enthusiasm Susi soon realized that she would have difficulty in embracing Judaism in its entirety. There was no disputing that she was being welcomed into the fold, but at times the invitation to acknowledge her Jewishness felt distinctly proprietorial, and she recoiled at what seemed like a claim being made on her soul. There was also the hard fact that, living in Rugby - a town Jerry Bechhofer had characterized as not exactly a thriving centre of Jewish life - she could not suddenly become Jewish in a practical, everyday sense. No local framework existed of the kind that bound together the American Bechhofers, and indeed the orthodox-Jewish culture as exists in England remained alien to her. For this reason she would henceforth adopt a pragmatic approach: taking pride in being born Jewish while in daily life remaining a practising Christian. Her Christian roots, she decided, tugged too strongly at her soul to allow her to return the commitment the Jewish community would without doubt require of her.
Maybe it is because Frederick Stocken's own roots have had less time to establish themselves; or maybe he has a more open mind than his mother. Whatever the case, he soon found himself taking a long, hard look at Judaism from both a theological and a philosophical perspective. At first this came as a surprise to Susi, because her son had never been enthusiastic about her quest and had denied any interest in her family's Jewishness or even the fate of her mother. In time, though, this changed. Free of the pressure of his studies, he began to reflect on how his mother's discoveries might impinge upon him. The simple fact was, if she was a Jewess, then he must be a Jew.
Nowadays Frederick can admit that being Jewish means a lot to him. But, like Susi, he stresses that he remains Christian and therefore goes to an Anglican church. At the same time his faith has not prevented him from wanting to find out all he can about the Judaism. Indeed being Jewish has served to deepen his understanding of Christian experience. To illustrate this, Frederick cites Thomas Cranmer's 'Evening Prayer' of 1552, which begins with the Priest saying: 'O Lord, open Thou our lips', to which the congregation responds: 'And our mouth shall shed forth thy praise.' On discovering that those same words also start one of the Jewish services, albeit in Hebrew, he realized that Cranmer had borrowed from something the Jews had been saying for five thousand years.
Frederick sees his mother as more interested in the blood link that her Jewishness entails than in such questions of faith and tradition. By contrast, for him the most pressing question is: how do you cope when you straddle two major world religions?
In truth, Susi has struggled to bridge this gap and embrace the Jewish faith. But in an area less complex than the matters of the soul she is the first to admit that she is authentically Jewish. For her features are unmistakably both Semitic and East European, as Jerry Bechhofer was quick to point out after seeing a photograph of her before her visit.
When your letter arrived with the striking picture of a young woman I said to my wife: 'How did she get this picture of her mother?' And then I realized it is not a photo of Tante Rosei but of you. You look exactly like your mother as I remember her. You have what is called in German a 'Mishpocho-face'. The word 'Mishpocho' is of course a Hebrew word. It means FAMILY. What a wonderful thing!
Susi's reunion with the Bechhofers and reaffirmation of her Jewishness had its repercussions not just on her immediate family but, inevitably, on her foster parents too. As Irene Mann pointed out:
I can understand that she is happy to meet the Bechhofers, but she forgets that they left both the twins and their own mother to fend for themselves. That does rather annoy me. And if anyone might be thinking of pointing the finger at either my husband or me for not having sufficiently nurtured their Jewish heritage, then let them be reminded that they also happened to be half Aryan too.
Susi does not try to conceal the non-Jewish side of her parentage, what she sees as her German roots. Even before she began her search she had always felt at home in that country and had an immediate emotional response to hearing the German language. But if being both German and Jewish is hard enough, how much more problematic for an Englishwoman brought up in a strict branch of the Christian faith.
My Germanness seems to irritate some people. But I don't apologize for it all. Germany did carry out the Holocaust. Not all Germans were responsible for that though. And I certainly wasn't. So I don't feel that I need to reject my German roots at all. I was denied being a German for many years, just as I was denied my Jewish roots. Now this has been given back to me. In fact I feel rather privileged in that I can now choose how much of the culture I wish to take on board and assimilate.
Susi's friendship with Brigitte Hald, a key figure in her quest, remains strong. 'It's wonderful to have this bond,' says Brigitte. 'I'm so grateful, as a German living in the period immediately after the Holocaust, to have been able to help someone who was so dreadfully damaged by the Nazi regime.'
And Alan Stocken, of course, has stood by his wife through it all. Even when his surname was given its marching orders he accepted it as another part of the complex pattern of adjustment and integration that Susi had started and had to complete. She could not have hoped for a more understanding partner. As far as Alan is concerned, it doesn't matter if Susi is German and Jewish, or Christian and English. He is in no doubt that for Susi the most important outcome of her quest has been the discovery of an identity of which she had long been deprived. For him, it has been enough to see his wife emerge from those difficult years with a new sense of direction.
On 25 February 1989 thirty lone twins gathered at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in London. For all but one of them, it was the first time they had knowingly met another lone twin. The participants were divided into three groups: those who had lost a twin at or around their time of birth; those whose twin had died in childhood; and those who had lost a twin in adult life. It was an opportunity for the survivors to examine together the profound and unique sense of loss caused by the death of a twin, and to find ways of coping more easily with the pain.
Those attending the meeting that day formed the Lone Twin Network, an organization in which Susi is now actively involved. She joined because for many years she had steadfastly refused to examine the crushing pain caused by the death of Lotte/Eunice, a denial bound up with her attempt to survive by distancing herself from distressing feelings. Like Susi's former identity, that pretence has fallen away. Even so, she is the first to acknowledge that, having started so late, her mourning of her sister is far from over.
Four months later another group of people assembled in London for a special celebration: the fiftieth anniversary of the Kindertransport. People had flown in from all over the world to attend, among them a good number of VIPs. Bertha Leverton had worked herself up into a fine state of anxiety, having scarcely slept in the forty-eight hours preceding the opening of the reunion. Nevertheless she summoned up the energy warmly to welcome those who, as children, had shared the same frightening experience half a century earlier. 'Hello, Kinder,' she called out from the podium, and at once the hall was filled with a sense of togetherness.
Yet for Susi the experience was somewhat different:
Even there I was like a lost soul. Because it appeared to me as if everybody else at least had their Jewishness to fall back on. And there was me, with my very English and Christian upbringing. They all seemed to kno
w who they were, whereas I had only just begun to find out about my identity. The cantor sang beautifully in Hebrew, remembering our parents and loved ones whom we had left behind. There was hardly a dry eye between us.
Religion proved to be the one area where Grace might be said to have reasserted herself, because eventually, for all her dalliance with Judaism, Susi decided that:
I can't sit on the fence any longer. I loved the truths taught to me as a child, both at Clarendon and at home: that there was a person called Jesus, who simply loved me enough to go to the cross. I now feel the need to return to these beliefs, Jewish though I am. Because the church is one of the few places where I can and do experience a sense of belonging. It has become clear to me that God is the only answer. How can I accept anything other than the message of the Gospel?
One viewer who wrote to the BBC some time after its screening of Sally George's documentary was of special significance to Susi, as clearly Susi was to her. She was very old and apologized for waiting so long before putting pen to paper. Her name was Miss Grace Weston. Almost forty years had passed since the two Graces had last been in touch. Miss Weston had not been at all surprised to learn from the film that Grace Elizabeth Mann, her former pupil at Clarendon School, was now Susi Bechhöfer. For it was she who had first drawn the fact to the attention of the teenage schoolgirl. Now, so many years after sowing the seeds of a momentous quest in young Grace's mind, she offered some timely and heartfelt advice. 'Just remember all your foster parents did for you,' she urged, mercifully oblivious of what Susi had suffered at the hands of her foster father, 'and thank them any time you have an opportunity. Leave the rest to God, Susi, and with His help try not to be bitter.'
Inevitably, there continued to be many times when Susi felt great bitterness, for she had been abused and her whole life overshadowed by a stifling possessiveness against which she felt powerless. When, all these years later, she had finally discovered that her mother had ended her days in Auschwitz, she felt as if she had been violated all over again.
It often sent a shiver down Susi's spine to think that she had escaped from the horrors of the Holocaust by a hair's breadth, and she was haunted by the thought of those children from the Antonienheim who were never to join a Kindertransport. Most haunting of all was the image of Rosa being herded into the gas chamber and, amid a struggling mass of defenceless humanity, being overcome by noxious fumes. And Rosa Bechhöfer was but one of two million to die in that hell.
In Susi's mind there persisted an indissoluble link between her mother's fate and her own. For had her mother not been abused too, in the vilest imaginable way? And she herself had wanted to lash out, to inflict harm, to exact revenge on the Reverend Mann whenever and wherever an opportunity arose. Yet here was Miss Weston, well-intentioned but ignorant of the facts, like so many others before her, urging her to be grateful. Let the Reverend be grateful, Susi seethed: grateful that he had never been reported to the police.
True, it helped to confront her father as she eventually did, yet it could not at one stroke exorcise all the years of anger. Susi had a lot more pain to go through - for anger is always painful - before she achieved the radical shift in perspective that she had by now realized was unavoidable. The key lay in taking power over her own life:
I came to the conclusion that I no longer wished to remain a victim for ever. I also realized that I had to take a measure of responsibility for my own behaviour too; that it's just not good enough to attribute anything and everything that might not have worked out in your life to another person. I think because of all the other things that were going on in the home, though, it has taken a long time to appreciate that his was also the hand that fed and clothed me, and that opening their door to us twins was an extraordinarily noble thing to do. It's all too easy to look the other way when confronted with suffering. But the Manns chose not to. I have also been helped in this process of reconciliation by my adoptive father's unambiguous acknowledgement of what he did to me. And I have come to sense his very real sorrow and shame. So I have finally been able and willing to offer the hand of peace and forgiveness. And as I did so I wondered why I had wasted so many years being angry with him, hurting myself in the process too. Why had I not done this a long time before?
'We went into a lot of detail when we met recently,' explained the Reverend Mann, 'as a result of which she said two very significant things. Firstly that she wanted to put the past behind us. And, more important still, I finally heard the words that I had been hoping to hear for a good many years, "I forgive you." My heart gave one huge leap.'
After so many painful years - years of denial, of anger, of rebuffing contact - Susi had at last acquired the strength to extend the hand of forgiveness, and to understand its value. And yet making her peace with the man who had brought her suffering along with the stability she now acknowledged, had by no means been the most significant achievement for Susi.
The most important piece of the whole jigsaw was to have found out the truth about my mother, and in so doing about myself. Even though what I found was more horrific than anything I had ever imagined. In my life that remains I will always have her in my heart. So how can I feel anything other than delight that I went on that voyage of discovery? Because at least now I know who I am.
RESOURCES
For further information about the author see
www.jeremyjosephs.com
For further information about Simba Books see
www.simbabooks.com
Rosa's Child Page 15