People Like Us

by Louise Fein

  It seems very self-indulgent to eat such a thing so soon after breakfast. Even though all the years of deprivation are long gone, there is an overwhelming urge to treat myself, just in case it is all taken away again.

  Besides, it will help to pass the time.

  ‘Thank you. You are most kind,’ I say.

  The waitress gives me a warm smile. The other customers don’t even look up. No one seems bothered by my German accent.

  But that’s silly of me. Why on earth would they? The war was half a century ago. The couple by the window are too young to know anything of it. Perhaps the man does, though. I stare at his profile as he reads, engrossed in something. I certainly still flinch if I hear a Russian accent. Try as I might, it isn’t possible to block all they subjected us to from my memory. People might wonder why I let those soldiers do what they did to me, why I never bothered to put up a fight. But it was survival. You did whatever you had to for a piece of bread.

  London is like a different planet. Foreign, full of wonder and terrifying, all at the same time. I’ve been locked behind the iron curtain for over forty years. Once the worst years were passed, we settled into a day-to-day life that was pleasant enough. As long as we had food, and a roof over our heads, that was enough. It lacked luxury, but it was certain, cohesive and everyone was the same. Here, life feels precarious and chaotic. I can imagine all this speed and freedom is exciting for the young, but for my generation, the crumbling socialist blocks are safe and familiar, like comfortable old shoes. Yesterday, I walked for miles around London, staring up at the shiny towers of metal and glass, the smart houses and shops full of stuff. So many big, expensive cars. So much noise and bustle. It’s frenetic. Bewildering.

  While I wait, I sip my coffee and will myself to eat the sweet pastry and its almond filling slowly. I take tiny bites to make it last longer, savouring each mouthful. I watch my own hands tremble at the thought of what is to come.

  I open my handbag and there, tucked between my purse and the folded, off-white square of Walter’s handkerchief, which, after all these years I still carry with me as though it is a lucky charm, is the envelope containing the response to that first letter I sent to England over a year ago. I needn’t take it out. I’ve memorised its contents. Instead, I find my lipstick and mirror. I reapply the pink sheen to my lips, snap the mirror shut and place both back in the bag.

  The café door swings open and the room fills with newcomers. An elderly woman with grey hair tightly wound into a bun on the top of her head comes in first. She is slight, with bright brown eyes and a long, narrow face. Instantly, I know it’s her. Anna.

  Tucked beneath her arm is a book, the colours of its textured cover in faded, geometric patterns. It’s as much as I can do not to cry out at the sight of it. I swallow down the lump in my throat.

  Behind her is a slightly built, middle-aged man. His face is open and pleasant, and his light brown hair is flecked with grey at the temples and cut short. He glances around and I catch the light blue eyes and high cheekbones. My heart skips.

  My son.

  I might have passed him on the street and not known he was mine. All those missed years. My throat tightens and my eyes well up. Will I ever know him now? Properly know him? Will he ever call me Mutti and come to me when he has a problem? Unlikely. A lifetime of memories have been stolen from me, but he is alive, and he looks well and happy. That is all a mother could ultimately want for her child.

  He meets my eyes and we gaze at each other. I can’t read his expression and, no doubt, he cannot read mine either. We are strangers, my Stanley and me. Everyone and everything here – the café, the clink of china cup against saucer, the smell of freshly ground coffee, the background chatter – fades away. It is just us.

  I have dreamed of the moment I would be reunited with my son for fifty-six years. That it is happening, right here, right now, is too vast to take in. I’m numb, almost, with the shock of it. We are really here, in the same country, standing in the same room. This man, searching my eyes, just a few short feet away. What can he think of me, a daughter of the Reich, who abandoned him as a baby. I’m shaking with fear and emotion. But then he dips his chin into a nod and smiles, warm and unjudging, and I feel a rush of gratitude.

  We will be okay, Stanley and me. It may take some time, but we will be okay.

  He stands to one side to enable a boy of around fifteen to come through the door, long-legged and already taller than his father, awkward in his own body and hiding behind a curtain of dark hair.

  My grandson?

  Now a girl, presumably the boy’s older sister. She glances around the café and her enormous blue eyes meet my gaze. My breath catches in my throat. The resemblance is extraordinary. She wears a big floppy jumper over ripped jeans and her long, dark curls bounce over her shoulders. It is as though I am looking at my seventeen-year-old self. Strange to think that, at her age, I had already given birth to Stanley.

  I wish there was one more figure to come through that door. But there are no more. I think of the letter in my handbag, the contents of which are imprinted in my mind. The unfamiliar hand begins:

  My dear Hetty,

  I am writing this hasty response to catch the next post, so you do not have to wait a moment longer for a reply to your wonderful letter. I shall send you another, longer, and more detailed in the next day or so. I send this with mixed emotions – firstly of joy to find you are indeed alive. Walter never gave up hope of trying to find you, after the war. He spent years making fruitless enquiries and only found dead ends and then communication with East Germany became almost impossible for an outsider. We feared you had not survived the war. To find out you are alive and well is indescribably wonderful.

  And so now for the bad news. I am so sorry to have to tell you that Walter passed away three years ago, very suddenly, of a heart attack. He was, as well you know, the best of men. During the war, he played his part in fighting the Nazis and suffice to say here that he was extremely brave. Later, he ran a successful hat business until his dying day. He diversified away from furs as the world rather turned away from such material, into the couture world of ladies’ hats! He was always charming and the ladies, of course, loved him. He was a good husband and we – Stanley, the cousins and our own children (we had three) – remain devastated to have lost a wonderful husband, father and uncle. I hate to have to tell you such sad news by letter, but, Stanley, your remarkable son, is alive and well. He is a successful lawyer, married and has two children of his own – teenagers now, one boy, one girl. I have been lucky to have been part of his life – he is a joy. It is inconceivable that you should not visit. We will make arrangements. Stanley has done well in life and we shall pay for your trip over. You are welcome to stay for as long as you like. I will write again soon.

  Yours, Anna.

  *

  Anna approaches my table and I stand. For a moment we stare at one another, blue eyes searching brown. There is no hint of hatred, only sadness. Understanding, perhaps. But there is something else too. A glimmer I can read because it is this which has kept me going through the darkest of times.

  Hope.

  And Anna, the woman I have never met until now, who has haunted my dreams for half a lifetime, comes forward and enfolds me in the warmest of embraces.

  A Note from the Author

  My father’s family were Ashkenazi Jews, originally from Brody, which is now in the Ukraine, but formerly in Galicia, a province in the north-east of the Austrian empire. During the nineteenth century, the Fein family business, in common with many other Jewish businesses at the time, traded hides and skins. They travelled back and forth from Brody to Leipzig, an important centre of European fur trading, for the fairs which had operated there since the Middle Ages.

  Changes to the laws in Saxony in the late 1830s paved the way for the establishment of Jewish settlements, and in March 1870, the Fein family officially became Saxon citizens, settling in Leipzig. The Feins fully integrated into German li
fe. Well-educated and ambitious, they built up a successful fur trading business (established in 1904) in the Brühl, at the heart of the Jewish fur-trading quarter, and owned property. All of this was ultimately to be stolen by the Nazis.

  My father became a Doctor of Law in 1931 and established his legal practice in the summer of 1932. On 30 June 1933, my father was banned from practising law in Germany because he was a Jew. He applied for positions all over Europe, but to no avail. Anti-Semitism was on the rise all across the continent. Having read Mein Kampf a few years earlier, my father was only too aware what danger a newly elected Hitler posed. Towards the end of 1933, he left Germany (his young wife, who was expecting their first child, following a few weeks later) on a temporary visa to enter England, a status that remained until he was finally granted citizenship in 1946. Until then, he had to apply annually to the Home Office to remain in the country. He was permitted to do so – without ever being interned – on the basis of providing evidence of the success of his business, and therefore his ability to support himself and his family financially.

  Unqualified to practise English law, he set up the London branch of the family business, which dealt mainly in rabbit skins for hat-making. Once in England, at home and beyond, he and his family spoke only English and adopted all things British. In 1943 he was given permission to serve in the Home Guard; was elected onto the Executive Committee of the Export Group in London, working closely with the Board of Trade, an honour for a refugee from enemy Germany; and even made a wartime broadcast on BBC radio on the varied uses of rabbit skins. My father embraced English life absolutely and completely, grateful to the country that had given him shelter and enabled him to create a successful business and home for his family. From him, I learned to value liberty and freedom as the most precious of ideals, and to appreciate the paragon of democracy that was England.

  During the remainder of the 1930s, other members of the Fein family left Germany and went to either London or New York, where another branch of the family business was established. Some left as late as 1938, following Kristallnacht, arrest, and a short time in Buchenwald Concentration Camp. One of my father’s uncles was so badly damaged by his three weeks of incarceration there that he died just a few years later. Other members of the family left it too late to leave and were eventually murdered at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.

  My father, who was sixty-one when I was born and died when I was seventeen, never talked about his life in Germany, or the experience of living under Nazi rule. He refused to buy German goods and never spoke German. As a child, by some sort of osmosis, I assumed a sense that my father’s Jewish background should be kept a secret, fearing that if someone found out, we would be in danger. Occasionally, I would lie awake at night and imagine being taken away and put in a camp. I planned escape routes and how we could save one another. I never admitted to anyone my father’s Jewish roots until only a few years ago.

  I cannot remember exactly when the idea of a novel inspired by my father’s past first came to me, but it fermented over a long period of time. I knew so little of his life in Leipzig that I felt instinctively it should be a work of fiction. Ideas mulled, characters came to me, and I began to read and research in earnest. The book, though inspired by what I learned about my father, is not about him. In writing this story, I hoped to show parallels between the early 1930s Germany in which he lived, and the Western world since the crash of 2008. Economic hardship of the 1920s led to the rise in nationalism and its extremist views and actions. New forms of mass media (radio and film) enabled the delivering of messages directly into homes and cinemas. All media, old and new, were used in highly effective propaganda across the nation. By these means, and by silencing voices of discontent, an entire population could be controlled and manipulated. Today, we potentially face a similar trajectory with rising nationalism, the fast-developing far right and far left sentiment, and extremism in many awful forms. Populist leaders stunning the world by winning elections. Brexit. Calls for closing borders and increasing racist sentiment. Anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head once more, including in once-centralist political parties. Ludicrous rumours of a Jewish conspiracy again circulating. People learning their news increasingly through the false bubbles of their social media networks.

  With all this happening around me, writing a book of fiction seemed – often, at the time – a ridiculous, self-indulgent game when there were so many more important things going on out there in the real world. But stories, fiction, have a power. A good book can reach out and pull a reader in to a world they know nothing about. It can emotionally engage in a way facts and news often cannot. Characters from a great book can live in the minds of the reader.

  My original plan had been to write the book from the Jewish experience. But the more I learnt, the more I wanted to understand the mindset of the Nazis. How could a people, a deeply civilised, democratic nation, become so unbelievably cruel; to de-humanise one another, and commit atrocities on such an unimaginable scale? The more I read, the more I realised that what I wanted to say could perhaps be more powerfully told if I were to climb inside the head of a Nazi. To tell the tale of someone young, who was fed a twisted ideology, taught hatred from day one. Someone who knew no other way. What could possibly change their outlook to become so against everything their family and the society around them believed?

  To research for the book, I read widely, including a large variety of texts, non-fiction and fiction, and accounts of those who lived through these times; contemporaneous letters and diaries, recordings of testimonials, as well as having the benefit of access to PHD theses and family papers. I also read Mein Kampf and visited Leipzig. In all of this I had a good deal of help from my sister Kathleen, with both research and translation. In Leipzig, I was able to interview some incredibly helpful people including Dr Thomas Töpfer, the then Director of the Schools Museum; Dr Andrea Lorz, a German historian specialising in the history of the Jews in Leipzig; and Dr Hubert Lang, a retired lawyer with a special interest in Jewish legal history in Leipzig, and the author of books on this subject. I explored the town extensively, including the area of Gohlis (which features in the book), where my father and his family lived. I was put in touch with a gentleman in London, Peter Held, who had travelled to England as a teenager on the Kindertransport, and who had lived in the same street as my father’s cousins in Leipzig. He remembered my father’s family well. He was ninety-four when I met with him in the summer of 2016. Sadly, he passed away only a few weeks later.

  Whilst talking about research, I’d like to mention that this book is a work of fiction, and that certain aspects of historical detail have been altered for the sake of the story. For example, certain people, speeches, locations and events are the product of my imagination, or the amalgamation or alteration of facts. One particular invention is the ‘Hausfrau School’. There were various Reich Bride Schools in existence at the time, offering courses in household management. In fact, there were various different courses aimed either at more working class wives-to-be, or others for middle class women or the ‘elite’ who were marrying members of the SS. The ‘Hausfrau School’ Hetty is threatened with is, in my imagination, more of a residential, finishing-school-type institution, hence I have differentiated it from what really existed by giving it a different name.

  Writing this book has been a journey on so many levels. I hope that, if I have done my job well, readers will experience a sense of this tumultuous period in history through the eyes of Hetty and Walter. I hope that readers will also mull on the precariousness of the freedoms and rights we take so much for granted in our own times. And above all, I want to show that the lessons of the past must never be forgotten.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe so many people, so much, for the existence of this book. Expressing my appreciation here seems a small and paltry return for the time, generosity and support I have received from so many. In time, I hope that I may somehow repay you all. This book is as much yours as it is mine. />
  Firstly, enormous thanks to my wonderful agent, Caroline Hardman, and all at Hardman & Swainson, for believing in this book and in me as an author. You have made all my dreams come true. To Liz Stein and the team at William Morrow, and to Hannah Smith and the team at Head of Zeus, for your enthusiasm and insightful expertise, and for helping to shape this book into its better self. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with all of you.

  To Dr Hubert Lang; Dr Andrea Lorz; Dr Thomas Töpfer at the Schulmuseum, Leipzig, my heartfelt thanks for your patience and careful answering of my many and varied questions. Your generosity of time and knowledge was invaluable. Also, to the late Peter Held, who, as a true gentleman in his nineties, welcomed me, a total stranger, with open arms and entertained my sister and I at a memorable and wonderful lunch. You so kindly dug into painful memories from a very long time ago. I am sad that you never got to see this project of mine come to fruition.

  To Russell Schechter, David Savill and Scott Bradfield, my MA tutors who helped me to write so much better and taught me the value of tough critiquing. Huge thanks also to my wonderful MA and writing group friends: Lara Dearman, Andy Howden, Jennifer Small, Magdalena Duke and Gwen Emmerson, for your insightful commentary; the camaraderie, friendship and ongoing support. You are all brilliant, and I’m not sure what I would have done without you. To all the generous, supportive and talented bunch that are the Savvy Writers Snug, what a wonderful group of colleagues and friends you are.

  Thanks to my early readers: Suzanne Miller, Karen Kelly, Brenda Fein, Julian Pike, Millie Pike, Josh Pike, Diane Pike, Jane Elliot, Shauna Bartlett, Shannon Monroe Ashton. Again, your comments and support have been invaluable. To the truly fabulous Stephanie Roundsmith of Cornerstones, who rescued me when I was ready to throw this manuscript in the bin. Without you, this book would not have seen the light of day. You helped so much, in so many ways, I owe you one enormous drink!