How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  Nobody knows why the Gestapo comes in late 1942. Hedwig guesses that their downstairs neighbours have informed the police that they can hear the footsteps of two people in the apartment above and, seeing only one person come and go, are sure that Hedwig must be sheltering someone.

  Theo is taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just north of Berlin, where, Hedwig reports, he dies a few weeks later, after being forced to undertake hard labour. He is not a man to survive such circumstances, and so, for his captors, he is dispensable. Maybe, she hears, he died from exhaustion or disease, or maybe by lethal injection, or with a single shot to the back of the head.

  Extraordinarily, she finds out about the hard labour by visiting Sachsenhausen with a food parcel. She thinks it is the sort of prison where you can drop books, groceries, and fresh clothes for inmates. That the priority of a concentration camp is not to punish its Jews but to destroy them isn’t a reality in which she is prepared to acquiesce.

  And that is the last that anyone hears of Theodor Liedtke, until Ilse finds the parcel from Sachsenhausen, neatly wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string, on her doormat, addressed to her. Inside, she finds a pile of folded clothes, some books, a squashed hat and a Judenpass. In a separate envelope is a list of the contents, stamped, and signed off with a ‘Heil Hitler!’

  Except for his Judenpass, which Ilse hides in a drawer with her most private papers, Theo’s remaining chattels will not survive the American occupation of her house after the war. He has left nothing behind in the world except the identity that the Nazis had foisted on him.

  Or so we all believed.

  40.

  The blessings of procrastination

  Procrastination is an art in which I claim formidable expertise. I am seldom unable to find new ways of putting off until tomorrow what I’m desperate to accomplish today, and never at a loss to justify the joys of doing so: important tasks cannot be rushed; ideas come when they come; I need to be on top form, which I’m not at the moment; a break will give me new energy; I am delaying out of perfectionism, not sloth.

  What I hadn’t realized until one day in early 2006 was that avoiding the task in hand could also have life-changing consequences. Instead of reading up on the latest scandals of the US president or seeing what ex-girlfriends were up to, I googled Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

  I entered the name ‘Theodor Liedtke’ followed by ‘Berlin’ and hit return. Up popped the record of my great-uncle, including details of his last addresses. This was Theo’s permanent memorial in a faraway land that he had never visited. I marvelled at the survival of so much information on a salesman in a vanished department store whose remains had probably billowed from an incinerator into a scattered grave in the sky.

  Then I stumbled across something completely unexpected. In a section of Theo’s memorial marked ‘Personal Testimonies’, I found a witness statement by Theodor Liedtke’s ‘grandson’, Klaus Meltzer – as well as his address in Cologne.

  Grandson? Theo had definitely been childless, according to Ernst, Emmy, my mother, Ursel, and Ilse. No member of my family had ever seen him with a woman, never mind come across evidence of offspring.

  It was a stunning discovery. Not just to find this as yet unknown close relative, but, even more poignantly, to have a fresh connection to Theo and so to Ernst – whose living realities had so far depended entirely on the testimony of the three sisters.

  Within minutes, I am speaking to Herr Meltzer. I hear a drawled ‘Hallo, Klaus hier’ as the phone is answered, and I get to the point right away. ‘Hello Klaus . . . Herr Meltzer. I’m calling from London. My name is Simon May. It’s about Theodor Liedtke. I am his great-nephew and I think you are . . .’

  At first I hear nothing but sobbing and aborted attempts to speak. Nobody has ever called him about Theo before, he eventually stammers. The name hasn’t come up in the thirty-five years since Klaus’s mother died. She was, he says, Theo’s daughter.

  I want to be sure, though, that we are talking about the same person. Does Meltzer’s information about Theo’s life – when he was born, his education, his occupation, the Berlin neighbourhood where he lived, when he died, where he died – match what I have heard from my mother and Ilse and Ursel? The answer is, almost entirely, yes.

  Then I ask him the obvious question: who was his mother’s mother? His voice freezes. ‘Yes,’ he says enigmatically. ‘That would be a question!’ he mumbles. I ask again, more casually. ‘Yes,’ he answers again. ‘Are there any clues?’ I finally venture. ‘None at all,’ he replies. His mother always refused to talk about that subject. She died when Meltzer was twenty-eight years old, in 1971, and never spoke about her own mother.

  All she said was that she, Ellen, lived with her parents in Berlin until her mother died in 1933, when she was fourteen. The death was accidental: her mother had been hanging curtains in their living room when she fell off a ladder and suffered a fatal concussion. After the tragedy, Ellen continued to live with Theo until the end of 1936, when he sent her to ‘finishing schools’ in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria and then in Montreux in Switzerland. Soon after returning, she met Herr Meltzer’s father – and the rest was history.

  That’s it. There are no photos of Theo’s alleged wife or lover; no letters; no stories of family holidays, of this woman’s interests, or of her background; no clues to her name or when she was born. Some years after Ellen died, Meltzer’s paternal aunt divulged a couple of other fragments about the mysterious woman. One was that the real reason she died wasn’t concussion from falling off a ladder while hanging up curtains, but rather an infection that she had caught from Ellen, who had been wracked by guilt her whole life for, as she saw it, killing her mother. The aunt also told Meltzer that Ellen’s mother had been raised a Protestant, though she was almost certainly of Jewish descent.

  One thing was sure: Ellen never mentioned the apartment in the Bavarian Quarter where Theo, according to my mother, lived a bachelor life with his mother and Hedwig Kuss.

  41.

  Did Great-uncle Theo have another life?

  If Theo was living a double life, he was making a tremendous fist of it. Ernst, Emmy, Ilse, Ursel, and my mother as little suspected Ellen’s existence as she did theirs. My mother and Ursel were visiting Theo at his mother’s apartment on Saturday afternoons for tea and cake in exactly the years when he was supposedly living with Ellen and her mother: from around 1924 – when Ellen was five, my mother ten, and Ursel twelve – well into the 1930s. So where was Theo really living?

  Buried among my mother’s memories of those Saturday afternoon teas were two clues. One was Hedwig’s excitement whenever Theo arrived back at the apartment he shared with his mother. ‘Hedwig was devoted to Theo, she adored him,’ my mother used to say, ‘and, when he got home and rang the bell down at street level, she would always cry excitedly, “Der Herr kommt, der Herr kommt!”’ – sir is coming, sir is coming! – ‘and then she would throw open the front door as he was still a floor or two beneath them, and stand ready to take his coat and hat and sit him down for tea and cake.’

  If he had merely been returning from the shops or from a morning at work, Hedwig’s excitement each time he arrived back might have been a little overwrought. Perhaps on those Saturday afternoons he, too, was a visitor at his mother’s flat?

  But there was a second clue that Theo might have had a secret life outside his mother’s apartment. Family lore had it that, though he had never been known to have a girlfriend, he had long been in love with Emmy’s aunt, confusingly named Emma, who had adopted Emmy and Helmut after their father’s death left their mother, Adele, on her own. This meant that Theo was reputedly in love with his brother’s wife’s aunt.

  She couldn’t have been the mother of Theo’s child; she would have been around sixty when Ellen was born. But her husband Arthur Rosenthal had died five years earlier, in 1914, and as a rich and childless widow she might have become Ellen’s sponsor or even adoptive mother. Som
eone with means must have been behind Ellen’s affluent upbringing. Theo’s salary as a salesman at Tietz’s department store would hardly have financed the villa where Ellen was raised. Most Berliners, including well-off people like Ernst and Emmy, lived in rented apartments. To own a large house with a dozen rooms was the preserve of the rich. Nor would he have been able to afford her private education in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and then the finishing school in Montreux. And, of course, the same Tante Emma had sent her own niece and adopted daughter, my grandmother Emmy, to a finishing school in Montreux.

  The oddest thing of all was that Theo, Meltzer said, had transferred ownership of the villa into Ellen’s name in 1938 or 1939 – precisely when Jewish property began to be systematically expropriated and when J. Eichenberg AG, the textile business in which Ernst and Emmy had invested, back in 1924, was Aryanized. What point could Theo have seen in transferring the villa from his name into his daughter’s: from one person stripped of property rights to another?

  It was this question that took me to Cologne in April 2006 to meet my newly discovered cousin and, through him, to delve into the enigma of Theo’s life before the war. I would soon find myself in murkier historical waters than any I had yet encountered in my immediate family.

  42.

  The Nazi and the Jewish woman

  In 1937, a few months after returning from her Swiss finishing school, Klaus’s mother met a young Nazi Party member called Walter Meltzer at a tea dance in Bavaria. Ellen, then eighteen, was coquettish, quick-witted, and Jewish. Walter, twenty-two, was a fervent Nazi, committed to Hitler, and hungry for war. He had been chairman of the National Socialist Oberschülerbund at his Berlin high school and had jubilantly hoisted the Swastika onto the school’s roof on the day of Hitler’s ascent to power in January 1933. His burning ambition was to join the SS. Theirs was the rapturous attraction of strangers.

  Klaus was proud of his tumultuous conception. When I first met him, he was in his mid-sixties, dressed in sneakers, baggy trousers and a frayed T-shirt, with wisps of white hair and a beret that adhered to the right side of his head as if defying gravity. He spoke slowly, tortuously seeking his words; then seemed unsure whether they were the ones he really wanted.

  ‘We Jews are complicated people, aren’t we?’ he said, gesturing at the wooden wall behind him in his tiny living room in a predominantly Turkish neighbourhood of Cologne. On a shelf there was a menorah and a copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew. On the wall adjacent to it hung a kippa and a framed certificate of his father’s promotion to the rank of captain, signed by Hermann Göring, supreme commander of the Luftwaffe. On the floor stood a small leather box which contained his father’s award of the German Cross in Gold, also signed by Göring, a congratulatory note from Field Marshal Albert von Kesselring, one of Hitler’s top generals, and photographs of Walter with clusters of bright-eyed SS men. At the bottom of the box were the leather flying gloves that had been recovered from Walter’s body after a Luftwaffe plane that he was test piloting mysteriously crashed. They were thick and shiny, as if new. I made to touch them, but recoiled.

  ‘My father was an honest patriot,’ Klaus said in a voice that was at once defiant and anguished. ‘His first love was Hitler, his second my mother!’

  Klaus’s parrot, Gregor, an attention-seeking bird with an enervatingly persistent shriek, seemed to echo the word ‘Hitler’. The parrot was named after one of Klaus’s heroes, a former communist politician from East Germany called Gregor Gysi, who became a member of the Bundestag after German reunification.

  ‘Did your father stop loving Hitler?’

  ‘No, never.’

  He paused, and I thought he was going to start crying. ‘Maybe he did after he saw the atrocities. But that was only in late 1942. Before that, he had been a pilot in France, then in Africa. He was usually in the air. So he didn’t always see what was happening on the ground. And he didn’t go to the worst places of Nazi mass murder, like Poland and Russia.’

  ‘What happened in 1942?’

  ‘He was on his way back to Germany from a mission, I think it was in the Balkans. The last part of the journey was by land, through Croatia. What he saw there broke him. The corpses hanging from trees. The children lying dead in ditches. He was so nauseated that he ordered his driver to stop the car, jumped out, and threw up in the gutter. Those few days in Croatia placed the whole Nazi dream in question for him. He still loved the Luftwaffe. He still loved his comrades. But perhaps he started having doubts about Hitler. He was broken.’

  ‘And your mother? Where was she while he was in Africa?’

  ‘She was in Berlin. She looked after the villa until Theo was deported in 1942. Thanks to Walter, Theo managed to transfer it safely into her name three years previously. My father took a risk for her. You have to leave him that.’

  So maybe that was why Theo’s villa wasn’t forcibly sold after Jews were no longer allowed to own property. Perhaps he had also claimed that Ellen’s mother wasn’t Jewish.

  ‘Quite apart from the Aryanization of property after 1938,’ Klaus continued, ‘it was just as well that my grandfather gave the villa to my mother. You see, he was arrested soon afterwards for theft; and as an indicted criminal he would have had an even harder time selling it for a decent price.’

  Arrested? Theft? An indicted criminal? This was an even more bizarre dimension to my great-uncle Theo’s mysterious life.

  As soon as I was back at my hotel, I telephoned my mother to ask if she had heard any rumours about her uncle’s indictment for theft, but she dismissed the whole story as quite impossible. ‘It’s total nonsense,’ she said. ‘They are making this up or confusing their facts.’

  ‘So what happened to Theo’s house?’ I asked Klaus.

  ‘After the war, my mother sold it. Not for the money, but because she wanted to get away from the memories.’

  It seemed possible for a Nazi like Walter Meltzer to protect a Jewish woman in this way – just as, perhaps, Harald Böhmelt had protected Ilse. Ellen hadn’t only kept the house; like Ilse, she remained unharassed for the whole war.

  I asked Meltzer how his father’s parents had reacted to their son falling in love with a Jewish girl.

  ‘They treated her like a little princess. Especially my grandfather, Christoph: he had a crush on her, no doubt about it. She was so petite and flirtatious, and she had this contagious laugh that charmed men.’ Walter’s father, it seemed, enthusiastically supported his son’s match with this lively young woman. He even went to see a friend in a ministry about getting her declared an Aryan, but was told that this would be impossible.

  ‘And Walter’s mother?’

  ‘She knew that her husband liked Ellen and she was an obedient wife. But she loathed Jews and didn’t want her for Walter.’

  In the case of Else Meltzer, Klaus’s grandmother, some jealousy of her husband’s affection for the little princess might also have been at work. So, too, might resentment of Ellen’s better education – especially those finishing schools which, she rightly suspected, made Ellen look down on her new family, with their homespun nationalism, love of military marches, and brash ditties in praise of Hitler.

  The Jewish thing can’t have been an absolute sticking point for Walter’s mother because she adored Theo. She doted on him; warmed to his gentlemanly bearing and shy nature; worried that he was undernourished; and insisted that he visit as regularly as possible, until, for the sake of his daughter, he no longer appeared in public with her – and soon after that no longer left his home.

  ‘So, did they protect Theo?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did they discuss his precarious situation?’

  ‘No, that was never mentioned.’

  It seemed that Theo would sit there for hours in ‘his’ chair, sipping tea, eating Frau Meltzer’s cakes, or participating in a family dinner, yellow star affixed to his jacket and Judenpass in his pocket, while the portrait of the Führer stared down from the wall and the bookshelves groaned unde
r the weight of Nazi literature. The words ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ arose only when Ellen left. Then Frau Meltzer, Klaus said, would be unable to contain her revulsion at Theo’s daughter. ‘Keep your hands off this dirty Jewess!’ she would snarl at her husband, though never at her son. ‘You are bringing misfortune on us all.’ But Christoph would hear nothing of it and quietly reminded her that Ellen gave their son so much happiness. Besides, couldn’t one love the Führer and enthusiastically support one’s son’s decision to marry a Jewish woman?

  Walter had suffered a terrible blow shortly after meeting Ellen. His application to join the SS was turned down. The reason given, so Klaus recalled his mother telling him, was his physique: at 172 centimetres – about five foot eight – he was too short. In addition, he might have had too many fillings in his teeth. With Ellen’s help, Walter attempted to appeal the decision, but all he got was another rejection. He had a good body, they said, with excellent stamina; his loyalty to the Führer and his esteem for the lofty calling of the SS were not in doubt; but, at 172 centimetres and with all the fillings, he didn’t make the grade.

  Ellen helped him through the depression that followed the rejections, but Else Meltzer pinned the blame entirely on her. Her son’s inadequate height had nothing to do with it, she said. Ellen was a spoilt girl from a big villa, who had ruined her son’s discipline and resolve. The SS interviewers had seen him and smelled the degeneration, and that was the work of the Jewish virus.

  But Ellen was too besotted with Walter to worry about an anti-Semitic future mother-in-law heckling from the sidelines. She assured him, Klaus said, that the SS selection panel were bureaucrats who couldn’t recognize superlative manhood; and she predicted – accurately, it would turn out – that the highest commanders of the Reich would recognize what she had known all along. Inspired by her support, he dedicated a photo to her, showing him heaving away at a construction site with a group of other young Nazis, and on the back of it he scribbled: