A Stranger in the Family

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Just disconnected bits. The remark about feeling fear “all the time”. A remark about her religion, which was almost an accusation that I could hold on to mine whereas someone who’d gone through the persecution and murder of the Jews could not.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Oh, it was probably in one of the long intervals on Coronation Day as we stood along the parade route with nothing very much happening – yes, I’m sure that’s when it was. I mentioned what the radio said was going on behind the scenes, and I commented priggishly that it was a central part of the religious meaning of the Coronation. And she said: “Oh, I’ve given up all that.” I asked what she meant by “all that” and she said: “Religion and all that. You can’t have a faith, and certainly not a belief in the Jews as the chosen race, if you’ve lived through the Holocaust and lost all the people you loved.” And I said: “I suppose not,” and thought how feeble and inadequate it sounded.’

  ‘Did the conversation go any further?’

  ‘I felt it had to, so in another of the intervals I asked her when her mother died and how she knew. She said: “The occupying powers were very good at getting out information. She is believed to have died in Dachau.” “And did your father – did you lose him too?” I asked, never sure how these things were best put. She replied: “I don’t know. As good as.”’

  ‘And was that all she ever said about her father?’

  Binkie was silent for a time.

  ‘I don’t know … There was a time, much later … This was a time, you understand, when we were much closer. Not sexually, because we neither of us wanted that. We were friends in the fullest and loveliest sense, and that was enough. This must have been … oh … early Seventies. We were in Vienna for the opera, and she’d told me earlier that her father had been there for a time, but had slipped away after the outbreak of war, to Italy. How she knew that, I don’t know. But in one of the intervals of the opera – it was Fidelio – she said, almost apropos of nothing: “One has to beware of charm. It’s the most dangerous thing. And it’s not just handsome, amusing people who have it. There are hideous, misshapen, outrageously twisted people, and they have charm, and – bang! – they bring disaster.” I just murmured: “You’re right,” and left it at that.’

  ‘But you connected the comment with her father? Was this because he’d been in Austria before the German takeover?’

  ‘Not just that. But I’d never had the idea that Hilda had memories of her father. Now it seemed as though she had. Or – this is just a way-out guess – had met him during that holiday we took in Austria in 1971.’

  ‘By appointment, so to speak?’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  ‘What would give you that impression?’

  Binkie thought hard, trying to be careful, precise in her thought.

  ‘Usually when we went away on holiday we did most things together. It just happened like that, naturally. I had my interest in religion, Hilda had her interest in Nazism and the war, and her family background. But this time we did less together. Hilda would say she had something “on”, and I accepted that without question.’

  ‘She could have been conducting research,’ said Kit.

  ‘Yes, I thought of that – but why not tell me, discuss it with me, bring me in on it? And I don’t think she’d have found it easy. The Austrians were very cagey at that time about their past. Their complicity with the Nazis was a well-kept secret, at least until recently.’

  ‘You didn’t see her together with a man of the right age to be her father, then?’ asked Kit.

  ‘No … Or I don’t think so … I did one day see someone ahead of me with someone who could have been Hilda, and I sped up. We were all on the Schulerstrasse. And then I suddenly thought: “What am I doing? What business is it of mine if she doesn’t want to make it my business?” And I felt cheap.’

  ‘You just saw the back of this man?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all.’

  ‘How old would her father have been then?’

  ‘Hilda was born in 1931 and he could have been say twenty then – or fifty, come to that. If it was twenty he would have been around sixty when I saw them – if it was them. And he’d be ninety or a hundred now.’

  There was silence as Kit thought. It was Binkie who broke it.

  ‘We’re into the realm of wild conjecture now. Are we allowed to stay in it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s just that if we don’t discuss it now, we might never. It’s one thing chatting over tea and cakes, quite another to put your impressions, and your conjectures from them, down on paper.’

  ‘Of course, you’re right. What does your conjecture spring from?’

  ‘Nothing. An impression. It concerns the Greenspan marriage.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kit. ‘Not much of a marriage by all accounts. At least, by the late Thirties they hardly ever saw each other – is that right?’

  ‘Yes. But that may have been the fate of a lot of marriages at that time. If one half of the marriage – usually the husband – was a likely target for arrest, interrogation, torture, execution, then he might well keep away from his family.’

  ‘Is that the impression you got from Hilda?’

  ‘No, it’s not. From the little Hilda said, my impression is that her mother didn’t talk about the marriage and her husband unless she was forced to. When she did talk it was probably very guarded, maybe even ambiguous. She certainly didn’t try to arouse in the little girl admiration or devotion for the absent parent. I think Hilda may have felt her mother was unjust: that there was suspicion and even hatred between the pair, and it was not all Walter Greenspan’s fault.’

  ‘Right. Anything more?’

  ‘I toyed with the idea that there might not have been a marriage at all. At most a liaison, maybe just a love affair, brief, and leaving an undercurrent of recrimination.’

  ‘Remember there were two offspring, five years apart.’

  ‘True. A liaison, then, on and off, but enduring.’

  ‘Can’t you dredge your memory and come up with some of the things that made you guess there was no marriage?’

  ‘I suppose I could try … The fact that Frau Greenspan made no attempt to get her husband out of the country. And I had the impression that she made hardly any attempt to leave with the children herself. I thought it was probably made clear to her early on that there was no question of her getting special treatment if she was not a married woman.’

  ‘That sounds possible,’ said Kit. ‘The sort of proviso that politicians made at that time to secure Church approval.’

  ‘And think of the dilemma that would face the poor mother: the only way she could save her children would be to get rid of them – separate them entirely from herself. And the children would probably not understand, particularly if their illegitimacy was kept generally secret.’

  ‘Which it surely would have been, in that time and place,’ said Kit. He sighed. ‘If only Hilda was still alive.’

  ‘Yes. I think that every day of my life. For purely selfish reasons, I’m afraid. But if she had lived she would have been able to tell us everything – or at least everything a child might understand.’

  ‘It may be that a child in those times, that place, didn’t have very long to enjoy unclouded childhood,’ said Kit.

  ‘I suppose a specimen of her writing wouldn’t help,’ said Binkie without much hope in her voice.

  ‘It might,’ said Kit, though he couldn’t think of any ways it could. ‘Do you have letters, then?’

  ‘Not letters, no. We were almost always together, you see. And if we hadn’t been I don’t suppose I’d have kept her letters, or she mine. Two boring bank cashiers … No, it’s a diary.’ She saw Kit’s face lighting up with anticipation, but she immediately damped it down. ‘Not for the years in Frankfurt. I hoped for that and would have read it if it had been.’

  ‘How did you come to have it?’

  ‘I was executor of Hilda’s will.
I’d done everything else – the money to an Anglo-Jewish Society, the furniture and books to Shelter and so on. The remainder to me. She knew you would have enough from your parents. We’d discussed it in advance, and I’d practically written the will. When I found the diary I took it and wondered what to do with it. Jürgen was dead by that time and I knew Genevieve was ill – she’d written me such a nice, brave letter. I suppose eventually I would have offered it to you, but the truth is I forgot it. It’s all about life with the Philipsons, you see. Not very interesting, and not at all useful.’

  She got up. Kit admired the precision and elegance of her steps as she went out of the room – what an asset she must have been to the atmosphere at Coutts’! Soon she came back with a cheaply bound exercise book: the cover was almost khaki, and the pages were that grubby brown that spoke of wartime and restrictions, at least until recently, when that same brownness of cheap paper began to affect books again. She put it into his hand.

  ‘There. Take it. It’s yours. If you have any questions ring me or come again. I may know more about the Philipsons than you do, unless Jürgen talked about them a lot to you.’

  ‘He didn’t. Very seldom, but always admiring and grateful. He’d have been taught to be that by Hilda as a child. I met the Philipsons a few times when they were very old and I was very young. What impressions there are remaining are of very kind, amiable people.’

  He got up to go.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Binkie.

  ‘I need it,’ said Kit. But being a young man he added: ‘But sometimes that’s when it comes along.’

  Kit sat in his small, utilitarian hotel bedroom – he had no desire to minister to the monstrous greed of most London hoteliers – and looked at the diary he had been given. He had glanced at the first page on the Underground. It had started in the middle of a sentence: ‘… before we had been made to sit on our own. After that none of the children talked to me. It is so different here. Full of shortages and what we call “make-do-and-mend”, but all the children talk, and are happy usually, and ask about Germany, and Jews, and my family. I can’t tell them much. I try to forget.’

  His heart had sunk immediately. He didn’t see himself getting much information from a child who was living in England and trying to forget. In any case her early years must have schooled her in not writing about the things most interesting to her, for fear of their coming into the hands of Hitler’s hirelings.

  And as he read the first pages his hunch that nothing would be found about Hilda and Jürgen’s earlier years in Germany was confirmed. It was all about school: Miss Lucas’s kindness, Miss Campbell-Jeffries’ strictness, the fact that she was second in class in English (this was marked with an exclamation mark). Kit paid tribute to her diligence and flair: the school was in Hampstead – the competition would have been fierce.

  Periodically there was an odd remark about the Philipsons: ‘Auntie May understanding as ever’; ‘Uncle Theo and Jürgen played cricket, and the latter picked it up very quickly’; ‘A wonderful birthday cake – where does Auntie get the stuff? I asked her. She smiled and didn’t say.’ All the remarks were affectionate and spoke of the Philipsons’ skill in earning the children’s trust and love.

  It was ten pages into the diary when there came a note on the entry for January 1st: ‘New Year 1943. War going better.’ Kit had decided two pages earlier that that was where Binkie had given up the diary. The dust on the later pages was more pervasive than that on the earlier first five or six pages (three or four entries per page). So Hilda by then would have been about twelve or thirteen. A very accomplished and thinking twelve or thirteen, but that was natural in the circumstances. So was the feeling of greater freedom in the writing. Freedom was working its liberating spell.

  ‘May no longer feels she has to walk me to school,’ ran an entry on March 4th. ‘I’m pleased – she has enough calls on her time, and she is not young. Not like Mutti – though Mutti never seemed young. The cares she bore had worn her down. Every time May has stood in the doorway now to see me off, I have been reminded of my last sight of Mutti. We had had to say goodbye in a mucky old field near to the Frankfurt railway station. Parents were not allowed on the platform. I suppose the officials were afraid that so many grieving parents seeing their children off to a foreign country that welcomed them might rouse a general sympathy for the parents and children in their plight. I don’t think! I never remember arousing the least sympathy in people who knew us but were not Jews – however tragic the things that happened to me were.

  ‘So I remembered stopping with Jürgen at the door into the station and, turning round, being just close enough to see the tears streaming down our mother’s face. She tried to wipe them quickly away.

  ‘I contrast this with May and her happy wave and proud smile. This is what living in a democracy means: safety. She still takes Jürgen to school, of course: he is only seven, but his primary school is only two streets away and he could easily go on his own if he needed to. But May is too conscientious to fail him, as my dear mother would never have failed us.

  ‘If only she had not told me …’

  There was nothing more than that, nothing to explain the remark. No doubt the young Hilda knew she would not need reminders of what it was.

  The diary entries ran from November 1942 to March 1944. Entries became scrappier as time went by, and Kit suspected that Hilda was feeling more and more at home in her new country, had fewer and fewer memories (almost none of them good ones) of her former homeland. The only good memory was her mother – comparisons of her and May, a few words each, memories of her tenderness towards Jürgen, who was a shy child. One that was a little longer came in April 1943.

  ‘24th. Today it is three years since we heard from our mother. I said nothing to Jürgen. He has almost no memories of her. There was a letter, of course. But I could not … the truth is I could not think of it as a letter from her. Reading it in 1940 I could not hear her voice or feel the tenderness of her embrace. It was so completely lacking in any reminder of her that I decided it must have been a simple copy of a standard letter that all Jewish parents had to write out. I say “all Jewish parents” and I mean “in the camp”, because I am convinced Mutti has been arrested or interned. I described the letter to Magda Cohen, the only other Kindertransport child at Heathside School. She said she had had one similar, but had thrown it away. She thought to keep it would be a sort of victory for Hitler and his gang. I saw her point, but I could never have thrown mine away. It did have one reminder of her: her lovely round handwriting.’

  There was another entry that caught Kit’s eye on that first reading of Hilda’s diary. The date was July 11th 1943, and Hilda went into capitals to announce the news:

  ENGLISH AND US TROOPS INVADE ITALY.

  ‘Yes! It’s true. They have landed in Sicily and are going to push their way up the country, ridding it for all time of Germans. I am so happy! I would pray to my God if I knew which one He is, and if I knew whether I believed at all. I hope that big creep Mussolini is quaking in his boots.’

  At this point Hilda left a few lines of space, perhaps to fill in any later news if any should be made public. Nothing apparently was. On the line under the space Hilda had written: ‘I wish my mother had never told me those things about our father.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Only Connect

  ‘Binkie?’

  ‘Yes. Hello Kit.’

  ‘You have a good ear for voices. I wouldn’t be so complimentary about your reading of manuscripts.’

  ‘Oh Lord – did I miss something? I’m so sorry, Kit—’

  ‘Don’t be. It gave me the joy of discovering something for myself. You didn’t exactly miss anything. It’s just that you gave up too early.’

  ‘Did I? It was some time in 1942 or early the next year. I thought she was never going to go back to pre-war days.’

  ‘She does, though – mostly in isolated sentences. I think she was emotionally liberated to dig up memories
by the preparations for the Allied invasion of Europe, starting in southern Italy. It actually happened in July 1943. Probably if you expected a German invasion of your sanctuary you would suppress memories of that country, or at least be careful about writing them down. But then came the hope that the war would soon be over – though it wasn’t – and that Germany would be defeated, as it was. And with that hope came a slight loosening of all the inhibitions about writing down things from her Frankfurt past. Just phrases, you understand, odd sentences.’

  ‘For example?’ came Binkie’s voice, eagerly.

  ‘“I wish my mother had never told me those things about our father.”’

  There was silence, and then: ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘Yes. Does that chime in with anything she ever said to you?’

  ‘Not at all. I told you, or I implied: she said very little. It’s a difficult sentence to interpret, isn’t it? Is she talking about her father as a family man? As a husband and father? Or is she talking about him as a social or political animal – a Jew, an opponent of the regime, a plotter?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Kit, thinking that Binkie could make a more informed guess than he could. ‘The context doesn’t give any clues – there’s a blank left after the invasion of Sicily, then that. Is there anyone she would be most likely to talk to about her father? A Jew perhaps – a Jewish girl, or even a boyfriend?’

  ‘No …’ said Binkie. ‘Or rather, what I really mean is, I don’t know. For example, I thought last night, not being able to get off to sleep, about another friend of Hilda’s – one whom I never met, though Hilda talked about her now and then. She called her Nora, but I think her name must have been Leonora – or perhaps Leonore with an “e”, as Hilda was really Hilde with an “e”.’

  ‘She was German?’

  ‘Austrian. She worked in the embassy in a slightly odd capacity because she wasn’t your usual embassy staff member, part of the diplomatic service. She was Austrian by birth, a British resident long ago naturalised, and she acted as some kind of liaison or advisor to Austrian residents in Britain.’