by Trudi Kanter
I told Mr. Woolfe, “I can only accept a fifty-fifty partnership with equal voting rights, and I know that is impossible. I don’t have the money to buy half of the shares.”
We had a meeting at Finchley Road: Walter, me, Mr. and Mrs. Woolfe, Mr. Woolfe’s brother, and their lawyer. After that, there were more meetings, with more lawyers. It was decided that I would buy a one pound share that would hold fifty percent of the voting rights and thirty percent of the profits.
Six months later, Mr. Woolfe voluntarily raised my share of the profits to fifty percent, and we became joint managing directors.
“You know, Mrs. Ehrlich,” he said, “if you had brought your hats round to Finchley Road, this would never have happened.”
* * *
In 1944, De Havilland wrote to the Home Office recommending Walter’s immediate naturalization. The application was backed up by a letter from Mica Products:
16 November 1944
Sir,
We are supporting Mr. Ehrlich’s application for naturalization in the strongest possible way.
We have known Mr. Ehrlich for a period of four years, during which time he has been invaluable to this firm. He has worked wholeheartedly for the benefit of this nation in its war to defeat its enemies, and has played a very valuable part in at least one instance. In the production of Mosquito airplanes, a stage was reached where small components were causing worry to Messrs. de Havilland, and after endeavoring to get firms of much larger standing than ours to overcome this difficulty, it was left to our Mr. Ehrlich to discover a method whereby this component part could be used with safety in this extremely important aircraft. It was due entirely to Mr. Ehrlich’s endeavors that this was brought about, and since, not only was he able to provide a method, but he followed this up by developing production of this component sufficiently to satisfy the very urgent need of the aircraft industry as a whole for this particular component.
Mr. Ehrlich is constantly introducing new ideas and new lines of thought in the production of our insulating components, and his abilities, we are sure, will stand this nation in good stead in the postwar years, where his inventive mind, together with his ability to put into practice his theories, will enable this firm to produce components of vital need in replacing the damaged electrical systems throughout the world, and he will be useful in our endeavors to expand our export trade, which HM Government have outlined already is going to be our lifeline in the future economic world.
Walter and I were among the first aliens to become naturalized British subjects. And because we thought “Ehrlich” was a difficult name for English tongues, and that it marked us out as foreigners, we changed our surname to “Ellis.” I thought “Trudi Ellis” sounded right.
9
I hear him coming up in the lift. Walter looks tired. He sits down, looks past me. I go to get his slippers. When I come back, he is standing at the window, tears running down his face.
“Walter, what is it?”
“It’s Curlow. He’s dead.”
I see Curlow standing in front of his bombed-out factory, arms outstretched, calling to his men, “Who is with me?” I am sitting opposite him in the Chinese restaurant as he bangs the table. He shouts, “Trudi, is it me or that damned letter?” We have never had a conversation since that row, but I know that he cared. And we had no family. We were refugees. Curlow’s friendship was precious.
* * *
Churchill had warned us in a radio broadcast to expect new forms of attack from the enemy. In 1944, Hitler’s new weapons, the V-1s and V-2s, terrorized us. In April 1945, the Allies entered Buchenwald and Belsen. What they found there was enough to destroy all faith in human nature. The newspapers described the British soldiers, sick with disgust and fury. My mother’s sister and brother were still in Vienna when my parents left. We never found out what had happened to them. Mother and Father spent hours poring over the newspaper reports. My mother would ask me to translate the horrifying headlines and stories, and cry with her head buried in my father’s shoulder.
* * *
On 7 May, the German Supreme Command surrendered unconditionally at Reims. The war in Europe was over. Eight May was declared VE Day. Walter and I followed the crowds along the streets of London. People wore red, white, and blue rosettes and paper crowns. We were at the very center of the rejoicing. At three o’clock, we heard Churchill broadcast to the nation from loudspeakers. We all sang “God Save the King.”
The relief is overwhelming. Day and night, for years, we have lived in fear—of bombs, and of the Gestapo, its shadow stretching across the sea. Escaping our persecutors was like climbing a mountain, arriving at the top with bleeding hands. Now it is over.
Epilogue
(London, 1960)
Walter is told to sit upright in bed, to take hot baths. He is in pain across his chest and down his right arm.
“An inflammation of the nerves caused by an arthritic condition in the neck,” says the neurologist.
I tell him that Walter has a slight temperature. He takes his blood pressure, arranges a blood test, and we are dismissed.
Walter can walk only very slowly. He has to go to bed. After three days, the hospital telephones to say that there is an infection in the blood. The doctor gives him a powerful penicillin injection.
I wake up during the night; Walter is sitting up.
“What’s the matter, darling?” I ask.
“Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry. I . . .” He can’t finish the sentence.
I turn the light on. He is unconscious. I telephone the doctor. I pour some brandy down his throat. He swallows.
“Walter, darling. Hold on. The doctor is on his way. Hold on, please!”
And no one can tell me that he didn’t hear. He tried, he really did.
The doctor arrives in minutes, pajamas under his suit. He closes my husband’s eyes. Inside me, I am still screaming.
“Human error,” the doctors said.
* * *
I scatter roses over Walter’s grave, a blanket of red roses. I pray. The sky is blue. The sun is shining. I feel his nearness. I remember Vienna. Walter stands on the glass roof. We sit in a nightclub by candlelight. We drink champagne in a restaurant.
WALTER ELLIS
12 JANUARY 1904–6 APRIL 1960
MOURNED BY HIS WIFE GERTRUD,
HIS RELATIVES, HIS FRIENDS
AND ALL WHO HAD THE PRIVILEGE
OF KNOWING HIM
Auf Wiedersehen, my love.
* * *
Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler was first published in 1984. Trudi Kanter was born in Austria and moved across Europe as she tried to escape the Nazis. She managed to do so, finally settling in England with her husband, Walter. She died in 1992.
* * *
Virago Editor Ursula Doyle was the first person to rediscover Trudi Kanter’s story. Here, in an article Doyle wrote for Publishers Weekly, she recalls the experience of finding and falling in love with Trudi’s story.
“It was only three years ago, when I took a job at Virago . . . that I realized I had an opportunity to bring Trudi’s story to a wider readership.”
“Seduction and Serendipity”
A self-published memoir discovered on the shelf of a used bookstore gets a second life thirty years later
By URSULA DOYLE
In 1987, when I was an undergraduate, I was browsing in a bookshop in Cambridge, England, when a book (one copy, spine out, on a shelf in the back of the store) caught my eye: Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler by Trudi Kanter. It was a self-published memoir, which, unusually for such a thing, had made its way into a mainstream bookshop—I can only imagine that the title had caught the buyer’s attention, as it had mine.
I bought the book and read it, and it lodged in my mind: this true story of a young hat designer in Vienna in the 1930s. Trudi Kanter evoked that now-vanished world with incredible vividness; she had been a young, good-looking, independent woman who loved doing all the things that young women do: d
ancing, reading, visiting friends, flirting, falling in love. She saw no reason why her life would ever change. But of course it did—drastically.
I think almost anyone who has read an account of living in a country occupied by the Nazis tries to imagine finding themselves in that unimaginable situation. But before reading Kanter’s book, most of the memoirs I had read about the experience of Europe’s Jews before and during WWII came from places which to me, in 1987, felt far, far away—Poland, the U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia—concealed behind the Iron Curtain, home to terrifying athletes and elderly waxwork leaders standing on balconies saluting never-ending parades of tanks. Vienna was different: it felt nearby, like Paris, or Rome. Reading Trudi’s book brought the events of WWII much, much closer to home.
Trudi’s life up until the arrival of the Germans in 1938 had been charmed. But she realized long before many of her contemporaries that the fact that her father was Jewish put her in danger. Trudi lied, bribed, coaxed, harassed, and bullied her way through every channel she could think of, official, unofficial, and criminal, to get herself and her fiancé, Walter, out of the country. Once they were safe in London, she worked every avenue all over again to get her parents out.
In 1989, after graduating from university, I got a job at Granta, the literary magazine, as the editor’s assistant. I stayed there for seven years and became the deputy editor; I then went to work at Picador, until 2008. It was only three years ago, when I took a job at Virago, which alongside a thriving frontlist, publishes books by women that have fallen out of print over the years, that I realized I had an opportunity to bring Trudi’s story to a wider readership. The book had accompanied me throughout the slightly itinerant life many of us live during our twenties. It had been in and out of cardboard boxes and lent to friends; I had reread it several times. There it sat on my shelf with its 1980s cover, and occasionally I would think what a shame it was that Trudi’s story wasn’t more widely known. And in those intervening years, the world had changed; it was now possible to consult resources online to find out what had happened to her, and whether there were any surviving relatives who might hold copyright in her memoir.
I managed to establish that Trudi was born in 1905 and died in 1990; that she and Walter registered with the Jewish Refugee Council when they arrived in London in 1938; that there were census records of them at an address in St. John’s Wood in the 1960s. But she was an only child who had no children, and Walter’s family had all died in the Terezin concentration camp.
My colleagues fell in love with Trudi, whose personality blazes through the pages of her book, and so in the end, we decided to go ahead and publish, including in our new edition an appeal for any further information regarding Trudi’s estate (nobody has come forward yet). Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler was selected by Waterstones for its book club, which ensured front-of-store display in its branches. Trudi was born a writer. Her descriptions of her life in prewar Vienna—the wonderful food, the ever-changing fashions, the glorious music, the lush gardens, the romantic cafés—are almost unbearably vivid: unbearable because one thinks of her sitting down in London in her late seventies to remember it all.
And Trudi either did not know or, I prefer to think, did not care how she came across at various points: haughty, treacherous, disloyal, or mendacious, why did it matter? Her memoir is a story of love and hatred, of civilization and barbarism, of home and exile, and above all, of the heroism of a completely ordinary, extraordinary woman. And it’s back on the shelves to enchant readers the way it enchanted me.
© Publishers Weekly, September 7, 2012. Reprinted with Permission. For more information, please visit www.publishersweekly.com.
A Scribner
Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler: A True Love Story includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
In London, in 1984, Trudi Kanter’s remarkable memoir was published by N. Spearman. Largely unread, it went out of print until it was rediscovered by a British editor in 2011, and now, for the first time, it is available to readers everywhere. In 1938 Trudi Miller, stunningly beautiful, chic, and charismatic, was a hat designer for the best-dressed women in Vienna. She frequented cafés. She had suitors. She flew to Paris to see the latest fashions. And she fell deeply in love with Walter Ehrlich, a charming and romantic businessman. But as Hitler’s tanks roll into Austria, the world this young Jewish couple knows and loves collapses, leaving them desperate to find a way to survive.
Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler is an enchanting true story that moves from Vienna to Prague to blitzed London, as Trudi seeks safety for her and Walter amid the horror engulfing Europe. In prose that cuts straight to the bone, Trudi Kanter has shared her indelible story. Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler is destined to become a World War II classic.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1.The subtitle of this memoir is A True Love Story. How much of Kanter’s tale is a love story, and how much a war story? How did the experience of war bring Trudi and Walter closer together?
2.When Trudi tried to convince Walter to flee Vienna in 1938, he responded, “You know that you always put your head down and charge at the wall, whereas I need to think carefully before I make a decision” (p. 36). How did the differences in Trudi and Walter’s decision-making affect their chances of survival?
3.Describing the anti-Semitic mobs in 1938 Vienna, Trudi wrote, “This is the truth about what happened, but I feel some reluctance to write it down” (p. 45). Why did Trudi hesitate to describe the realities of Nazi Vienna? Do you think she portrayed the people of Vienna fairly? Why or why not?
4.Consider the role that jealousy played in Trudi and Walter’s relationship. When did Trudi worry about losing Walter to other women? Did her fears seem justified? Why or why not?
5.Discuss Trudi’s relationship with her ex-husband, Pepi. How did they manage to remain close after the end of their marriage? In what ways did Trudi have trouble letting Pepi go?
6.Consider the gender roles in Trudi and Walter’s relationship. How did Walter handle Trudi’s success as a designer? How did Trudi deal with Walter’s slow career start in London? In what ways were Trudi and Walter ahead of their time, in terms of gender and the workplace?
7.During their first weeks in London, Trudi observed in frustration, “No one will let us forget that we are foreigners! . . . It’s a dirty word!” (p. 162). Discuss how Trudi and Walter were treated in London. What kinds of discrimination did they face?
8.Trudi wrote, “Now that I am married to Walter, I have come to realize that there can’t be red roses every day. A good marriage means having someone to talk to at night, someone you can fight with and fuss over. Someone you can trust” (p. 205). Discuss Trudi and Walter’s transition from daily roses to everyday trust. What did Trudi gain and lose when she married Walter?
9.When Trudi fought off Mr. Curlow’s romantic advances, she discovered, “Even in my smart clothes, with my sophisticated maquillage, my two marriages and all my recent experiences, I am still an immature girl” (p. 235). Did you think of Trudi as an “immature girl” or an experienced woman when you read her memoir? Explain your answer.
10.Discuss how the war affected Trudi’s relationship with her parents.
11.Consider the ups and downs of Trudi’s career as a hat designer. How did she manage to advance in her career, even as a new immigrant to London? Which of her designs sounded the most innovative?
12.“This was the time when a feather and a sequin was a hat” (p. 25). Discuss the changing hat fashions during the years Trudi described in her memoir. Which fashions sounded the most alluring? Which could you picture women wearing today?
13.When Mr. Curlow’s factory was bombed, he said to his workers, “We’ll build it all up again, everything as it was. . . . Brick by brick, floors and ceilings, water and electricity. All of it! Who is with me?” (p. 238). How did Walter react to Mr. Curlow’s determination to rebuild? How did Mr. Curlow’s statement capture the spirit of wartime England?
14.The end of the memoir briefly describes the end of Walter’s life. What was particularly tragic about Walter’s death in 1960? Do you think this memoir of love and war was difficult for Trudi to write? Why or why not?
15.Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler was originally published in England in 1984 but went largely unread. Why do you think today’s readers might be especially interested in Trudi’s story? How are her struggles and adventures relevant to readers today?
Enhance Your Book Club
1.Ask members of your book club to wear their favorite hats to your meeting! From retro cloches to modern sun hats, compare your favorite pieces of stylish and practical headwear.
2.Browse an online exhibit of wartime Vienna—including photographs, personal histories, artifacts and maps—at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=
10005452.
3.Read all about the history of women’s hat fashions, from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century: http://vintagefashionguild.org/fashion-history/the-his
tory-of-womens-hats/.
4.Treat your book club to a taste of Vienna! Bake a batch of decadent Sachertorte, a traditional café dessert, and serve it at your book club meeting. Find a recipe here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sacher