How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  Our hosts were visibly bemused. This was the 1970s, when Britain was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’. The streets were piled high with garbage. A punctual train was as rare as a black swan. Squalid and amateurish schools were the despair of the country’s own ‘chattering classes’. Drunken football hooligans were not exactly advertising the refinement of British manners. The economy was in meltdown. Entrepreneurs claimed to be giving up or fleeing, as the top rate of taxation somehow rose towards 100 per cent. The whole society seemed to be locked in class war, with the middle class despising the working class, and trade unionists and business bosses at each other’s throats, while aristocrats, disdainful of lower orders when they even noticed them, were living in deep complacency on their inherited assets. Inner cities were regularly on fire and some group or other was always taking ‘industrial action’ – in other words, going on strike. Bizarrely, England, at least, seemed to be revelling resignedly in this misery and in the orgies of complaining that it spawned – the only nation, it has been said, capable of feeling Schadenfreude toward itself; though, being England, it could always muddle through decline and chaos, so that everything would eventually turn out all right.

  None of these realities deterred my mother from her main point: anyone in their right mind would move to Britain, whether in the 1930s or now, in the 1970s. Hitler almost seemed irrelevant to the question of why she or her teacher had ended up in London.

  But we were all talking at cross-purposes. Our hosts had, I think, so little suspected any Jewish presence in their midst that they appeared to be asking quite another question. Was it not unpatriotic to emigrate? Let alone to Britain, towards which I sensed intense contempt in those days, despite residual admiration for such glories as the Beatles and parliamentary democracy. Disloyalty was what really concerned them. A German stays with their country when it is in crisis.

  But in our family, to borrow a quip from the former Soviet Union, even the past couldn’t be predicted.

  22.

  Czech mates

  Whatever my mother’s declared reason for leaving Germany happened to be, once she had abandoned her invalid passport at the German Embassy in London she was stateless – but by no means homeless. Where Ursel had adopted the Alvenslebens and their aristocratic network as a surrogate family, my mother now had hers in the dense and intense world of London’s German-speaking Jewish émigré community – a community of scientists, insurance brokers, traders, bankers, architects, artists, historians and doctors, bonded not just by exile but, above all, by music.

  Here, her shifting identities – German, Catholic, student, refugee, Jew – gained another: in 1939 she was adopted as an honorary Czech. Her adopter was the Czech government then in exile in London, led by Edvard Beneš, who had been President of Czechoslovakia until Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, and Jan Masaryk, who became foreign minister of the exiled government after many years as ambassador to London.

  Masaryk had a substantial budget for promoting Czech culture in the UK and was set on supporting a piano, violin, and cello trio, the Czech Trio, which had been founded in Prague in 1933, but had lost its original violinist on moving to London. Its pianist was Walter Süsskind, a native of Prague who would later become director of the Aspen Festival in the United States; its cellist was Karel Horschitz, who was urgently persuaded to change his surname to the less scatological-sounding ‘Horitz’; and its new violinist was my mother, Marianne Liedtke.

  The problem was that my mother not only wasn’t Czech, but had an unmistakably Germanic name – not ideal at a time when Czechoslovakia had recently been overrun by her native country.

  But a family as deft as ours at juggling its identities could surely rise to this challenge. She at once cabled Emmy for help. Had an ancestor passed through the area and perhaps stayed there for a few years? Or, even better, married a Czech and produced a traceable child or two? Emmy had always been good at pulling ‘forgotten’ origins out of the hat – and, when necessary, at forgetting them again. Nor did she disappoint this time. A faint memory of local forebears quickly assumed sharp contours, birth and death certificates were excavated from dusty cellars, and my mother was able to report to Masaryk that she had a maternal great-grandfather, Leopold Wilhelm Dütschke, who had been born in 1829 near Lissa, a small town in Bohemia, which had then been German but was now Czech.

  Admittedly Dütschke had no known affinity with Czech culture – in fact, the rise of the Czech national movement had caused him to flee his birthplace and settle in Hamburg, where he died long before his home town became part of the newly formed Czechoslovakia. But, for the purposes of membership in the Czech Trio, he seemed to offer real credentials. My mother therefore resolved to change her name from Liedtke to Dütschke.

  Masaryk was unimpressed. A connection to Czech lands was useless if her new name was as brazenly German as Dütschke. Dütschke was even worse than Liedtke – it seemed to be formed out of the word Deutsch. The name sounded like an invasion.

  He hit on a simpler solution: ‘Marianne Liedtke’ should morph into ‘Maria Lidka’. Lidka was the stuff of folk idyll: the name of countless Czech women and of the country’s major chocolate brand. And Maria . . . well, one thought of fresh-faced girls skipping down Bohemian country paths on their way to Sunday Mass.

  It was a sweetheart deal. The trio was a runaway success, performing all over Britain and, most memorably, in the National Gallery’s wartime concerts, as well as marking Czechoslovak national holidays, especially Independence Day. Though its programmes often showcased the German classics, they were peppered with enough Czech music to look as though Dvorak were being seasoned with Beethoven rather than the other way around. And my mother, to whom Czech music had been almost wholly alien until not long before, was now hailed as playing it as only a native can: ‘Czech music played by Czechs’ ran a headline in the London Star in March 1940. ‘Bohemian music, with its strong and immediate appeal, played authentically in the national manner’, wrote The Times in the same month. ‘They graduated from the Masterschool of the Bohemians with Smetana and Dvorak on their daily syllabus’, boasted the Czech Trio’s publicity flyer of its young players.

  But my mother didn’t just get another identity with which to navigate her life. Thanks to the Czech Trio, she finally gained a legitimate income. She could now rent a one-room apartment, rather than living in a series of damp bedsits and teaching rich but untalented amateurs in return for enough cash for a day’s food and a bus ticket home.

  23.

  Grandmother Martha May

  My mother owed her income to the Czech Trio, but I owe my existence to it.

  After one of its concerts in 1940, an ebulliently warm-hearted woman with blazing red hair and a kind of shuffling gait that seems typically central European – benign, cultured, strong, stubborn, cozy, and a little resigned all at once – visits my mother in her dressing room and makes an offer:

  ‘I am a concert pianist; I was trained in Kassel and Cologne; and I’d be happy for you to try out, with me at the piano, any new music you’re learning,’ the stranger announces, smiling broadly at her accomplishment.

  My mother is suspicious. These sorts of offers are usually made by people who are either lonely or nursing the illusion that they are unrecognized virtuosi whose time is imminent. ‘Where have you performed? What sorts of concerts have you given?’ she asks.

  ‘I haven’t played in public for some time, but I am a professional,’ the redhead replies. ‘I used to play all over Europe and in South Africa.’

  Then she makes the crucial offer: ‘I am also an excellent cook.’

  This succeeds in grabbing my mother’s attention. The Czech Trio has transformed her finances and she is now able to rent a tiny apartment, but she is hardly rich. Her feet are frostbitten from two winters living in an unheated room, which she rented from a Mrs Etheridge, a Welsh woman who lived with her forty-year-old bachelor son and had never left the shores of Britain. My mother hasn’t been ab
le to afford even the stoves that give out ten minutes of vague warmth in return for dropping a coin into a meter. Her friend and admirer, Felix Vandyl, a fellow violinist and a refugee from Warsaw, has developed a technique for lowering the necessary coin tied to a piece of string into his heater and then retrieving it once it has triggered the switch; and he inhabits what sounds like a tropical boudoir, even when a gale is blowing through his leaking windows. My mother should come and see for herself, he insists. She does, aware that his motives might extend beyond altruism or pride in his costless thermostatic device. But she never masters the technique. Your hand has to be absolutely steady or the coin will slip out of its string, and this is hard even for a violinist with a controlled bow arm.

  ‘I also have two charming sons,’ the woman adds. ‘Edward is a doctor and Walter a banker.’

  But this hardly interests my mother. She has more than enough suitors to keep her busy.

  What my grandmother, Martha Grünthal-May, fails to tell her future daughter-in-law is that Edward, her elder son, is a formidable amateur cellist whose own musical evenings are filled with young professionals as well as more seasoned performers. Though he is a doctor, with an uncanny talent for diagnosis, his greatest passion is chamber music.

  Even better, my mother discovers, he is a talented cook and master shopper who manages to procure imposing cuts of beef and lamb at a time when butchers have little more than patches of meat embedded in hillocks of gristle and fat. And he loves gadgetry of every kind: gramophones, drills, motorbikes, fast cars. Fearful that Hitler will try to invade Britain, he has acquired a motorboat that he is sure can cross the choppy North Sea and treacherous Baltic waters to safety in Sweden and, if the Nazis march there too, proceed onwards to Australia. How his tiny craft could make it across U-boat-infested waters while warships are being sunk or huddling nervously in convoys is unclear. But, in the meantime, the boat offers a delightful way of entertaining women on weekend dates from which, once underway, they cannot easily make their excuses.

  Within a few months my mother has all but moved into Edward’s house. Thanks to him and Martha, she has graduated from semi-starvation to gastronomic paradise in one easy step.

  24.

  Saved by arrest

  By late 1943, my mother had a lot more to thank Eddy for than the delicacies that he continued to secure as food became ever scarcer and rationing ever tighter.

  German refugees like her, still designated by the British authorities as enemy aliens, were under strict curfew; but she had forgotten to keep track of the time as she and Eddy and two of her fellow Rostal students, Norbert Brainin and Hans (soon to be Peter) Schidlof, played a Beethoven quartet, and then, at his insistence, one by Schubert, before he served an unmissable dinner. As they started the desert, she realized that it was already after curfew time. The prospect that this might force her to stay the night delighted Eddy; but she knew what that was likely to mean and decided to risk the walk home, leaving the other two to sleep over.

  Hurrying through darkened streets – streetlights were turned off to make it more difficult for German bombers to locate their targets – she ran straight into the law.

  ‘And who are you, miss?’ the policeman asked, confident that he had caught a sex worker on the way back from a client. ‘Your papers, please.’

  But he hardly needed to see papers. The accent said it all. My mother was arrested on the spot, taken to a police station, and locked in a cell for the night. After questioning the next morning, she was released on bail, guaranteed by Eddy, and told to report to a magistrates’ court a fortnight later.

  ‘Why were you out so late when you say you know the rules?’ the magistrate demanded as she stood in the dock in a borrowed dress and wide-brimmed hat. From his condescending tone my mother was sure the court assumed that she had been engaged in the sex industry – and, worse, earning money, which was usually illegal as an enemy alien.

  ‘I was playing quartets.’

  ‘Playing quartets?’ the magistrate enquired, convinced she had quickly incriminated herself. ‘How, pray, do proceedings unfold when one is “playing quartets”?’ He clearly supposed that the playing in question involved some act of group sex, involving two couples or perhaps three sex workers and a client.

  My mother looked confused. ‘You know,’ she stammered, ‘string quartets: Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart . . .’

  The gallery broke into laughter. Beethoven! That was an original excuse, and certainly more imaginative than the usual run of self-justifying lies.

  ‘Case dismissed!’ the magistrate proclaimed, after further enquiries about what actually happened when one played string quartets.

  As my mother was about to leave, the policeman who had detained her appeared out of nowhere. Expecting an apology, she stopped to smile at him, mumbling that she had never been in a court before, though her father had practised family law in one of Berlin’s oldest. Instead, he asked if she would like to go to the cinema with him one evening.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she shot back, contemptuous of the officer’s nerve to ask for a date after inflicting on her that cold, lonely night in custody, fearful of the punishment that breaking the curfew might bring.

  In fact, she owed the good cop serious gratitude. On returning home the morning after her incarceration, she found that a German rocket had scored a direct hit on her boarding house, leaving a pile of rubble, a giant crater, and a vestige of facade. Neighbours said that it had struck at about 2 a.m. Eddy’s dinner and her arrest had saved her life.

  PART III

  Newly Created Worlds

  1945–1990

  25.

  C & A to the rescue

  It was a Sunday in Amsterdam, just after the Allied liberation of the Netherlands. Ursel was heavily pregnant and still living alone in her attic. Where, she worried, should she go if she went into labour? And to whom could she safely turn for help?

  She was terrified that, as a German, a harmless question could end in a lynching or even a shot to the head. Franziskus had disappeared while out looking for food, and might have been arrested and killed by Wehrmacht soldiers then still prowling the city, or perhaps by Allied forces. The locals, consumed with hatred for their former German masters, wouldn’t know that she was a non-Aryan who had been on the run from the Gestapo; that her husband had deserted the German army; and that they had both been in hiding with the help of Dutch underground operatives. It was best to remain invisible.

  Surely, she thought to herself, the one person who could definitely be trusted was a Catholic priest in the confessional, bound by his vow of confidentiality. It would be safest to ask for help in a whisper through the grille of the darkened cabinet, after she had divulged her sins.

  She was not disappointed. The priest on duty was eager to help. His voice seemed unthreatening and his profile gentle. Could she please wait at the back of the church until he had heard the other penitents? He would come to her as soon as he was finished.

  But she panicked. The priest could be an informant. The secrecy of the confessional might not be absolute. After all, it was said that priests had the right to breach it in case of confessions of murder. Weren’t the Germans responsible for countless murders in the Netherlands? There would be no point telling him about Franziskus’s desertion in the hope of attracting sympathy; now that the war was lost, lots of Germans were probably making up stories about deserting or being Jewish.

  She fled to her attic and shut herself away.

  Forced to look for food again after a few days, she crept out of the house – and bumped straight into the priest.

  ‘Why did you vanish?’ he asked.

  ‘I really didn’t want to bother you,’ Ursel lied.

  ‘But I have help to hand. Two of my parishioners, two sisters, will take care of the birth for you. I spoke to them immediately after I saw you and they’d be delighted to get you to the best clinic.’

  The two parishioners were members of the Brenninkme
ijer family, the owners of the C & A retail chain, and the hospital room for which they paid was like a five-star hotel. Ursel gave birth to her first child, a daughter, in even more luxurious surroundings than she had known in her youth. The baby was swaddled in the finest silks and cottons. While Europe hungered, Ursel had never had it so good.

  26.

  Locked in the attic

  In 1946, my mother returned home. During the war she had heard nothing from Ilse and Emmy after their messages, sent through the Red Cross, dried up in the summer of 1942. Attempts to contact her family in Berlin immediately following the capitulation went unanswered. The last time she had seen her mother was in 1939, when Emmy paid a flying visit to London to attend her debut violin recital at the Wigmore Hall on Friday 13 January, accompanied by Gerald Moore; and she hadn’t seen Ilse for even longer, though she knew from the final Red Cross telegram that she had given birth to a son.

  She was steeling herself for the possibility that her mother and sister might be dead when, one afternoon soon after the German surrender, a fellow refugee and close friend called Esther Mendelsohn, daughter of a Berlin architect who had known Ernst and Emmy, took her to visit her new boyfriend, John Burton.