I am already one week in London, and my permission to remain in this country is soon expiring. I soon must return to Berlin if I find no school. You would oblige me very much if you let me know your decision soon.
Yours respectfully,
Rudolf Seidemann
P.S. Please deliver my best regard to Kurt. Thank you.
EMERGENCY COMMITTEE FOR THE
CARE OF GERMAN JEWISH CHILDREN
Rachel House, London W. 1
7th February 1936
RE: Kurt and Thomas Viehmann.
Dear Anthony High,
I was in Berlin over the New Year, and I’m afraid that the extraordinarily stringent financial restrictions operated by the German authorities are going to lead to some heartbreaking situations. Thousands of German refugees are going to find it virtually impossible to get help, or to leave the country. Life is made unbearable for them, so that they are driven to make arrangements to leave the country, and then it is made so difficult for them that they are unable to carry out their plans.
I saw Kurt and Thomas’s mother, and no one could be more full of gratitude than she is for you and Southwold, and what you are doing for her sons. Her only comfort in her current situation is to know that they, at least, are safe in England
But we don’t know what we can do about the school fees. When they sent their boys to England in 1934, they felt sure that they knew of a safe and permanent way to get money out of Germany to pay the boys’ fees, but they now realise that they were mistaken. Things have tightened up fiercely. They have tried every possible way to transfer money to England, but, of course, they have no relations outside Germany who could help them.
They thought, at one stage, of your finding English people who were going to travel for holidays in Germany, and who would need German currency for their stay. You could have given these tourists their address in Berlin, and a slip with your signature, and they would have given the money for the fees to these people, who would repay you in English money when they returned home. Just before this happened, the boys could have written home to tell their parents that friends were going to visit them from England to give them the latest news from school, informing them of their names, to act as a safeguard. I felt that this was really too dangerous a plan.
Another idea they had considered recently was to support a German child in need—chosen by a British charity in Berlin—and to arrange for an equivalent sum to be transferred via the charity to England to pay for the boys’ school fees: but this would not have been permitted, as I had to point out. Their final idea—and they really are desperately anxious to fulfil their commitment—is to have English children staying as their guests in Berlin for some time, if the children’s parents would agree, in exchange, to pay for the fees of Kurt and Thomas. I understand that when the boys returned home for the Christmas holidays, Kurt brought an English schoolfriend home with him, and they showed him all the sights of Berlin, and he had a very enjoyable time. Is there any possibility of this working?
If not, the Viehmanns will be quite unable to pay the boys’ school fees.
There are going to be many more similar cases, where children do not have relations outside Germany willing to pay for them. What can we do? The clearing systems are totally inadequate for the huge volume of finance which should be passing through for school fees. We have such limited resources, and so many cases on our books, that the Committee have decided that we cannot possibly accept any new cases under any circumstances for the payment of fees through the Exchange Clearing. We, therefore, will be unable to offer any financial assistance for Kurt and Thomas Viehmann, and have told Mr. and Mrs. Viehmann of the failure of their plans.
You might feel that the only possible answer is that the boys must be sent back into Germany, as you can hardly justify their staying on at your school, but I know that you will be fully aware of the effect of this news on Kurt and Thomas. I know what it is like for Jewish children in Berlin schools. I am so very sorry.
Yours sincerely,
Hannah Greif
DR. WILHELM VIEHMANN
Berlin-Charlottenburg 4
15th February 1936
Dear Mr. High,
I have heard the news from “Elternhilf a für die jüdische Jugend” about the news from the “Rachelhouse.” I do not want you to believe that our non-paying is deliberate. It is for us a matter of course and honour to pay the fees as soon as the German regulations will allow this. We do not know what to do. Yesterday I walked to see Mrs. Kirchner, who I know wrote to you about her two children, and said she was aided by the Clearing-House of “Elternhilfe” for paying her fees. I wished to discover how she had succeeded so well. But I was sad when her statements were vague, and found she was only pretending. Mrs. Kirchner is only on the waiting-list, just as I am. I do not blame her for what she said. She had been told that her son Alex’s turn had come (after eighteen months waiting) and then they announced to her that they were doing nothing for boys under fourteen.
I applied again to “Elternhilfe” for news of my position on the waiting-list for the Clearing-House for the money, and hope to hear a clear answer by next week. I hope that then we shall be able to transfer a sum of money to pay the money we owe you soon. It is difficult for us now to travel to England, since we have lost our German citizenship.
We are very gratefull for all you have done for our boys. You have given them back their bright childhood, and made it possible for them to build up their lives. Please trust us, Mr. High. We shall do all we can to pay the money. Please excuse the trouble we are obliged to arise. I ask if you will allow our boys to remain in your school. You understand I would not ask if I would not be obliged to do so. We have caused you so many worries and difficulties.
Thank you for all your help to Kurt and Thomas, and to us.
Affectionately yours,
Katherina Viehmann
Aliens Department Home Office, Whitehall
4th April 1936
With reference to your letter of the 26th March, I am directed by the Secretary of State to say that he regrets that he is not prepared to entertain an application for the grant of a certificate of naturalization to Kurt Erich Viehmann during his minority.
I am, sir,
Your obedient Servant,
J. Dickinson
Berlin- Charlottenburg 2
5th April 1938
Dear Mr. High,
Only today we got a letter from Lotte which rather afraid us. It is, we think, a little lonely for her by herself in the holidays. She seems to feel so lonely and homesick, and thinks she has no friends. She misses, also, her little dog. She seems to weep every night, and we worry about our dear daughter. She writes absolutely unhappy in the idea not to get through the examination! Lotte feels so anxious about the Mathematics. We hope that this is only a nervousness of hers. Were you satisfied with the results of her report-book? She tells us that the doctor told her she should swim and lead an active life, and not worry too much about herself.
Lotte tells us that no payment has reached you from my brother in Palestine. Please remember him if by mistake a payment should be late. I wrote to my brother with this sense, and he says it would only be on account of the difficulties in sending, but he is sure he will be able to manage it. If there are any questions of this kind, please, dear Mr. High, do not tell the child about them. Lotte feels very upset.
The 15th April is Lotte’s birthday. Would you kindly buy her a little chocolate? It is almost impossible for us to send it abroad. We want to help Lotte, but we feel so helpless.
Excuse, please, these problems,
Peter and Aline Goetzel
Berlin-Charlottenburg
15th June 1939
Dear Sir,
Mrs. Greif did write to Miss Matthias from England and tell me the acception of me and my big brother as pupils of your school next term at a fee of £55 p.a. which enable us to fulfil our one wish to continue with our learning and our music. My father will sen
d you the Form and Application for Admission. I only wish to thank you for your extreem kindness.
Yours very grateful,
Nickolaus Mittle
The photograph on the other side of Nickolaus Mittler’s first postcard was an aerial view of Berlin Cathedral. Corrie had never known that Berlin had had a cathedral.
A COLD wind was blowing down a broad street lined with balconied apartments. Most of the shutters were closed, and all the doors were locked.
He saw a lonely face at a window.
Inside a second-floor apartment, Nickolaus Mittler was slowly, patiently, writing at a table near the window, bent over, intent. Loose papers, postcards, books, and dictionaries were around him. The boy wrote and wrote, card after card, the pen-nib scratching in the silence of the room. Behind him, in the corner of the room, beside the window, her head turned towards it, a woman stood very still, as though listening for a sound outside in the street. In the hall, packed suitcases were lined against the wall. The suitcases were expensive, but the hall was empty of furniture and the walls were bare. A man and an older boy sat on the uncarpeted boards of the floor, beside the telephone. They were all wearing their best clothes.
Behind the four still, rapt figures, open doors led through to other doors, deeper inside, other rooms, other lives, just out of sight, closed doors opening deeper and deeper inside.
seven
DURING his early lessons with Lilli after her stroke, he had made use of his school atlas, giving her the names of places—Dresden, Berlin, Southwold, King’s Lynn, London—she had to find and point out to him. On page fourteen both parts of Germany were coloured the same pale orange colour, as though the country were whole and it was the time before the war.
Lilli’s finger poised in the air above the open atlas, moved down—Spandau, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Charlottenburg—and came firmly to rest upon Berlin.
Berlin, like Vienna to the south of it, was so enormous a city that it was not represented, even on the small-scale map of the school atlas, as a dot or a square, but as an irregular solid area of grey to show the extent of the built-up area. Charlottenburg, where the Viehmanns and Nickolaus Mittler lived, where so many of the Berlin letters and postcards came from, was a large western suburb of Berlin, a circle as large as any independent town at the edge of the vast unknown city.
HE HAD a picture in his mind of Germany in the early 1930s, before the bombs started falling, before all the millions of people were led away into the darkness, a picture made up from books he had read, films and television documentaries he had seen.
In the countryside lived girls called Heidi, with braided blonde hair, who stood on the mountainsides with their hands on their hips, smiling, in dazzlingly bright sunshine. They wore white blouses with big puffed sleeves, little white embroidered aprons, and lace-up bodices like the one that the Walt Disney version of Snow White wore. Unlike Snow White, they had big breasts. Every mountainside was crowded with big-breasted blonde girls with their hands on their hips, simpering at the camera. All the men were called Fritz and wore leather shorts, and little hats with feathers in them. They carried big ornate beer steins in their right hands, and sometimes they yodelled. Behind them were their brightly painted wooden houses, exact copies of the weather-houses and cuckoo clocks that were made inside them. Heidi and Fritz smiled and smiled in the bright sunshine, and tried to look like reality in the brightly coloured posters in the travel agencies all over the world. Their teeth were very white.
The mountains encircled the plain, and between the mountains and the plain were the forests, surrounding it on every side. The forests were very dark, and the trees were fir-trees, immensely tall. It was possible to see only a yard or so into the forest, into the blackness, and there was no grass. It would be terrifying to be lost in that darkness in which nothing grew. The mountains and the plain and the forest were the countryside. At the centre of the plain was the city. Long straight roads converged across the flat bleak plain towards the city. They were not tree-lined. Tree-lined roads were French.
Germany was the city, and the city was called Berlin.
The picture he had in his mind was in black and white. He could not imagine a colour picture of Germany in the 1930s.
“I am sure that he will like Berlin. It’s a city made for children.”
That was what Frau Wirth, the baker’s wife, had said to Emil’s mother, Frau Tischbein, bending over a basin as she had her hair washed.
“What a din the traffic made! Why, there were streets which are just as brightly lighted at night as during the day.”
The motor cars rushed past the tram honking and squealing, signalling right and left turns, swinging round corners, while other cars followed immediately behind them. How noisy the traffic was! And there were so many people on the pavement as well! And from every side street came delivery vans, tramcars, and double-decker buses! There were newspaper stands at every corner, and wonderful shop-windows filled with flowers and fruit, and others filled with books, gold watches, clothes, and silk underwear. And how very, very tall the buildings were.
So this was Berlin.
It had already grown dark. Electric signs flared up everywhere. The elevated railway thundered past. The underground railway rumbled and the noise from the trams and buses and cycles joined together in a wild concert. Dance music was being played in the Café Woerz. The cinemas in the Nollendorf Square began their last performance of the evening. And crowds of people pushed their way into them.
“Berlin is wonderful, of course,” Emil continued, “but I’m not so sure that I’d like to live here always. Just imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn’t found all of you, and were quite alone here. It scares me even to think of such a thing.”
AS FAR as the eye could see, the hundred thousand streets and squares of the immense sprawling baroque city stretched on and on to the horizon in every direction. It was a cold, bleak city, the third largest city on earth, a grey city of stone façades and neo-classical pillars and columns. Massive stone official buildings, bleak, formidable, on a larger-than-human scale, stretched down broad triumphal ways, their frontages inset with many balconies and steep-set small-paned windows, their surrounds encrusted with curly decorative scrolls and ornate shields, and the figures of gods and goddesses. Wires crossed from side to side of wide boulevards, suspending lamps and traffic-lights, and cables for trolleys. Tram-lines stretched away like curves left by skaters in ice, down streets traced with the slim graceful columns of lampposts, elaborate filigree metal curls, lamps suspended like pendants from their arched tops. Opera houses, theatres and concert halls, churches, and government buildings lined the main streets, raising domes, spires, and pillars high into a low sky from which rain was falling.
The great crowds spilled across the streets, beneath the trees and the domes and the spires. The streets were wide and bordered by trees, and the crowds thronged them at all hours of the day and night, spilled out of trolley-cars, strode briskly across the tram-lines, passed the packed terraces of outdoor cafés, filled the roads so that only the tops of cars showed, strolled through parks with formal gardens and playing fountains, sheltered from the rain under the trees as boys in sailor suits watched model yachts on rain-pocked ponds and nursemaids pushed high-wheeled prams. More and more poured out of Friedrichstrasse Station and the Zoological Gardens Station, their platforms jammed as crowds flooded out of the trains. The four million figures moved down Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse, across Potsdamer Platz and the Tiergarten; scurrying across vast squares under umbrellas as the rain streamed down; scuttling into shop doorways beneath striped awnings bearing Gothic script; hurrying past huge department stores (Wertheim, Tietz, Karstadt-Haus, KDW); past cylindrical advertising columns, and newspaper stands; rushing down wet flights of stone steps into the passages of the underground.
The women wore coats which reached to the middle of their calves, turban-like hats, seamed stockings, and thick fox furs round their necks. The emplo
yed men wore dark double-breasted suits with turn-ups, and no man was bareheaded: they all wore hats, with rims and dark bands. The thousands of unemployed men wore collarless shirts, and caps with large peaks, and moved restlessly amongst the crowds, gathering on street-corners, or sat with bowed heads around the edges of the bowls of the fountains. Their backs were turned on the naked marble figures at the centre of the basin, where the waters from the fountain trickled down into the cold marble. All the men were in an identical posture, their faces hidden, heads down and backs bowed, their elbows resting on their knees, and the palms of their hands pressed against their ears, staring down at the ground between their feet, looking as if they were shutting out the sounds and sights of everything around them, as if, by not noticing their surroundings, they would not be noticed themselves. Bent over, alone amidst others all the same, the bowed figures concentrated on the rain-darkened ground between their feet, their hands pressed against the sides of their heads as if shutting out some tremendous sound. Long queues stretched outside the shops, cinemas, and theatres.
Cars were square and sharp-edged, had running-boards, immense mudguards, their large headlamps prominent on either side of heavy radiator grilles. They were soft-topped and open-topped, and had spare wheels in the centre of their boots, seemingly too large, and out of proportion. They pushed slowly through the crowds. Motorcycles had side-cars, and bicycles were everywhere. Buses with outside stairs and single-decked trolley-cars moved jerkily between the pedestrians. There were many horses in the streets, and heavy cart-horses drew long carts laden with logs of wood and barrels of beer.
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