The Box with the Sunflower Clasp E-Book

Rachel Meller

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 485

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai. Far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life - a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis. 1930s Shanghai is a metropolis where the old rules do not apply - a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife, and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigrés; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman can find love. Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. Rachel Meller writes with elegance and insight as she examines what it means to survive, and what the legacy of displacement and war might mean for the generation that comes afterwards.

Leseprobe

Published in the UK in 2023 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-178578-981-6

eBook: 978-178578-983-0

Text copyright © 2023 Rachel Meller

The right of Rachel Meller to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

Map copyright - © Himesh Alles, in Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue on the Eve of the Second World War by Taras Grescoe. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India.

Printed and bound in the UK

For Ilse and LisbethAnd in memory of Claudia, 1947–2022

Contents

Abbreviated Family Trees

Map

Author’s Note

Prologue: Sisters and Silence

Chapter 1Vienna, June 1937: Thwarted Ambition

Chapter 2Vienna, March 1938: A World Falls Apart

Chapter 3Vienna and Prague, May to August 1938: A Flippant Remark

Chapter 4Berlin, June 1938: An Unheeded Warning

Chapter 5Vienna, November 1938 to May 1939: Fire and Compassion

Chapter 6Buchenwald, June 1938 to July 1939: ‘Only the Birds are Singing’

Chapter 7Vienna, July 1939 to January 1940: A Miraculous Phone Call

Chapter 8Bruno the ‘bookman’

Chapter 9February 1940: Exotic Harbours and Flying Fish

Chapter 108 March 1940: A Shocking Reunion

Chapter 11The mid-1930s: Shanghai Millionaire

Chapter 128 March 1940: The Journey to Weihaiwei Road

Chapter 13Shanghai 1940: The Bookshop on Bubbling Well Road

Chapter 14March 1940: A Couch for a Bed

Chapter 15Spring 1940: Lingerie Shops and Corpses

Chapter 16Little Vienna’s Ingenuity: Soap, Bratwurst and Strudel

Chapter 17Summer 1940: The Black and Gold Marbled Lobby

Chapter 18Autumn 1940: Looking for Apricots

Chapter 19Winter 1940: The Destroyer of Dreams

Chapter 20Spring 1941: Coffee at Yang Terrace

Chapter 218 December 1941: The World Shifts Overnight

Chapter 2216 December 1941: A Birthday in Darkness

Chapter 23February 1942: Bread with Burnt-Sugar Caramel

Chapter 24February 1943: The Ghetto

Chapter 25Summer 1943: A Body in the Yangtze

Chapter 26‘The King of the Jews’

Chapter 27Spring 1944: A Lifeline Split Twice

Chapter 28August 1944: Birds, Flowers and Good Luck Symbols

Chapter 29Autumn to Winter 1944: Cake, Coffee and Air Raids

Chapter 30December 1944: A Cruel Winter

Chapter 31Spring 1945: ‘Mein Bruder, Mein Bruder!’

Chapter 3217 July 1945: The Animals Sensed it First

Chapter 33August 1945: ‘Hiroshima Melted’

Chapter 34September 1945: A New World Order

Chapter 35Winter 1947: A Ticket to Freedom

Chapter 361948 to 1956: San Francisco and London: The New Lion Bookshop

Chapter 37Love, Art and Family: Here, There, Then and Now

Epilogue: Shedding Tears in Shanghai

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Abbreviated Family Trees

‘Shanghai is like the emperor’s ugly daughter; she never has to worry about finding suitors.’

– Popular Chinese saying

‘This ugly daughter “revelled in her bastard status. Half Oriental, half Occidental; half land, half water; neither a colony nor wholly belonging to China; inhabited by every nation in the world but ruled by none, the emperor’s ugly daughter was an anomaly among cities.”’

– Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, 1842–1949

‘I had no idea what Shanghai was. You could have told me I was going to Mars or Jupiter …’

‘We thought it was a desert. We didn’t know anything. To get out of the country, that was all.’

– Jewish refugees describing their knowledge of the city that was to become their haven during the Second World War.

Author’s Note

Shanghai is a city whose character has been moulded by a succession of foreigners. Over the centuries, as traders and invaders made their mark on this vibrant metropolis, the names of her roads, districts and waterways have been changed repeatedly to reflect the language and interests of the then ruling powers. What was once Avenue Edward VII or Édouard VII became the Great Shanghai Road under Japanese occupation, and then – for a few years after the Second World War – Zhongzheng Road, after the Chinese name for Chiang Kai-shek. Bubbling Well Road became the more prosaic Nanjing Road (West), or Nanjing Lu, and Moulmein Road is now Maoming Road North.

In this account of life in Shanghai during the Second World War, I have used the names current at the time: that is, those on maps of the late 1930s and 1940s, before the Communist era.

Not every detail can ever be known about an individual’s life, and my aunt was perhaps less knowable than many. I have occasionally had to guess how she may have acted or reacted to events happening around her. However, these speculations have always been based on extensive research of the experiences of other people at that time, and on the nature of the woman I knew. I have not invented any conversation between the characters, instead citing interviews published in Steve Hochstadt’s book Exodus to Shanghai and elsewhere. I have tried to represent the facts of my aunt’s life as accurately as possible. Ultimately, only she knew the truth behind them.

Prologue: Sisters and Silence

‘What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.’

– Nicolas Abraham,‘Notes on the Phantom’

To my great sadness, I have no memory at all of my mother’s voice. By the time I was three months old, Ilse had taken her own life.

At some level, my mother’s death is always with me. Knowing so little about her means the least expected of triggers can conjure up tears. Like the moment a character in a soap opera heard a message that his dead mother recorded years earlier. It made me realise with a jolt that I have no idea of the sound of Ilse’s laughter, or her weeping.

I was too young to remember anything of the events immediately after my mother’s death in October 1953. I was born in Southwest London five weeks after the Coronation, and given the middle name of Elizabeth. Back then, the treatments for postnatal depression were electroconvulsive therapy and barbiturates. Years later I was shocked to learn that Ilse’s hospital bed was surrounded by policemen, waiting to arrest her should she survive: until 1961 suicide was a criminal act. But the drugs she had been prescribed for this poorly understood condition proved effective when she made her fateful decision, and the need for her prosecution never arose. Meanwhile, my father Josef’s loss was temporarily doubled; I was removed from what remained of the family and taken into care. In one blow, my father had lost not only his wife, but also his three-month-old baby. This was a sadness he and I would never discuss.

The state-run nursery to which I was taken was probably perfectly pleasant, but part of me imagines that I was incarcerated in a Dickensian orphanage. The fact I developed a chest infection there reinforces that fantasy. Despite this, my early experiences never crushed the optimistic side of my nature. Nor can I say that I grew up unhappy. Nearly all childhood photographs show me beaming – before the onset of the usual teenage moodiness. This was not so for my elder sister, who appeared serious, her brows furrowed. This is hardly surprising: Claudia was six years old when we lost our mother. After Ilse died, and my sister was left with just our father, she simply asked him: when would she get a new mother?

We were lucky: the answer turned out to be very soon. Josef could retrieve me from state care only if he found someone to help look after us. My father, a young refugee from Vienna’s Nazis, was reeling, numb with grief and barely able to think. How could he get his family back, and continue his work as an architect for Hammersmith Council, when he could barely boil an egg? His father, Opa, as we called our grandfather, saw a small ad pinned up at the premises of a local Jewish organisation. It had been placed by a woman seeking a domestic position. He arranged a meeting between his son, a shell-shocked widower, and the prospective ‘help’, to see if she might assist him with cooking and childcare.

Ruth was a refugee from Saarbrücken in Germany, at 33 a year older than our father. She had been working as a maid in the home of a demanding family in Golders Green. Seeing the broodingly handsome man and his two dark-haired little daughters, she accepted the challenge of taking us on. Her role quickly changed. On New Year’s Day 1954, little more than three months after Ilse’s death, Ruth and Josef were married. In my judgemental youth, I viewed this as taking place with indecent haste; I am much wiser and more understanding now of my father’s pragmatic decision to remarry so soon.

I knew no other mother but Ruth. With the arrival of this kind and practical woman, a new, more capable family unit was born. By 1956 so was my half-sister, Sonia. Ruth showed all her daughters equal love, concern and affection – a superhuman feat I would not appreciate until much later. She never merited that dark label of fairy tales, ‘stepmother’.

But I always knew someone was missing. My ‘real’ mother, Ilse.

We all long to understand our roots, where we come from. How that which we inherit from our past – through both our genes and our environment – makes us the person we are. As we grow older, this desire seems to strengthen. But our ties to the past are easily snapped. Political persecution can uproot our ancestors, displacing them from their home and all that’s familiar. The death of a parent – especially one whose life is never spoken of – steals at least half our connection to our roots. My mother’s death was a tragedy that remained shrouded in silence, barely mentioned after I first learnt of it.

I was three years old when Ruth took me gently aside for a serious talk. She sat me on her lap and explained that she was not my ‘real’ mother. My father stood silently by, pipe in hand, leaning against the living room wall, while she imparted the unbelievable truth. I told her not to be silly; I refused to accept her ridiculous words. Of course I loved her not one jot less that day. Only as a teenager did I come to resent her existence and curse my luck at having a stepmother. I would storm away from each row to fling myself on my bed and shed hot tears in my candlewick bedspread. At night I would weep for my ‘real’ mother (who would have understood me so much better than this one). But once the turmoil brought on by surging hormones had passed, so did my unjust anger towards Ruth. In truth she understood me better than anyone ever has.

Although she never met her predecessor, Ruth must have talked to my father about Ilse. But it felt wrong to quiz her about the woman she had replaced, and so I almost never did. I deliberately avoided the subject with my father. My feelings towards him were simpler than those towards Ruth: I adored him. When I was little, he entertained me with funny faces and stories, and immortalised me in an affectionate nonsense rhyme that still gives me pleasure:

Rachel Elizabeth is a fine child

Although there are times when she talks a bit wild –

Ly-lora, ly-lora, this is a queer rhyme

But still I do love her at any old time.

I loved to curl up in my father’s soft corduroy lap, inhaling the scent of Balkan Sobranie pipe tobacco and Brylcreem as I snuggled in close. Years later I learnt something that made me love him yet more. On Ilse’s death, childless friends of the family, a genteel English couple named Lola and Jim, asked to adopt me. My father refused their kind offer. This revelation overwhelmed me with joy: he had wanted to keep me! I wish I could have thanked him, but by then he too was gone.

I could not mention Ilse’s name to my father. The man was damaged, too fragile for such questions. A barrage of losses – of his homeland, his hoped-for career as a writer and his first love – took its toll. I was around ten when his first heart attack struck. From that day on, we had to tiptoe around him, avoiding any kind of upset. Doors must never be slammed; all conflict or argument was forbidden. So how could I ask him about Ilse? I dared not upset the man lying upstairs in bed, the invalid whose new-grown beard contained shocking streaks of pure white, despite being only in his forties. By then I had started experiencing tugs of guilt about being the cause of my mother’s premature death. I could not risk triggering my father’s as well.

That left Claudia. Some sisters have a bond closer than that of best friends. But for children, six years is a vast gap to bridge, and she and I would not connect until our twenties. Even then, Claudia offered few insights or memories of our mother, rarely mentioning her name. She had begun to shield herself from more damage by developing a tough skin. This appeared overlaid – on topics concerning her inner feelings – with a thick cloak of silence.

And that was how, oh so gradually, Ilse transformed into a mythical figure, a hazy idol wreathed in mystery. I would gaze at an album I had compiled of photos of her, memorising her gleaming hair and sparkling eyes, to try to keep her alive. I still glance every day at one I have framed, in which she’s laughing and carefree, a vein standing out on her forehead. It proves my troubled birth mother had, at least once, experienced real joy.

But someone else was still alive who had been close to my mother, who had grown up alongside her for sixteen years. This was Ilse’s younger sister, Lisbeth. Like my parents, Lisbeth had escaped Vienna and survived the Second World War. I knew little more than this of our aunt’s story, apart from rumours of a mysterious accident – some said, self-inflicted – which occurred in her youth, and that she had spent the war years in China. She now lived in San Francisco. But this geographical separation proved less problematic than my inability to close the emotional distance between myself and my aunt. She was languid and slow, in both movement and speech; cool and inexpressive. On my visits over the years to her home, despite my efforts, I learnt nothing of her past, or of my mother. I suspected the two sisters had never been close.

Ilse smiling, c. 1952.

Then Lisbeth’s own death changed everything.

On one of my visits to her home, I admired a large cabinet of East Asian origin. It stood nearly five feet high, since it rested upon a carved wooden base with lion’s paw feet. I knew the Chinese-style cupboard was no antique – Lisbeth told me she and her husband had bought it in California in the 1950s. Yet I loved its ebony lacquered wood, painted with swirling flowers and strange hornbills in thick layers of apricot, bronze, cream and duck-egg blue.

Lisbeth’s Chinese cabinet.

My silent aunt must have listened to me more closely than I had realised, or than she had ever let on. For she bequeathed me the Chinese cabinet. And more than that.

When I opened its glossy twin doors, I found something deep inside. Pushed to the back of the top shelf was a rectangular package, wrapped in layers of dry, yellowing newspaper. I reached in and drew out the object, which was much heavier than I expected. Beneath the newspaper I found a dark-brown wooden box, etched with deep carvings. Men and women, their hair in topknots, were depicted within Chinese landscapes full of shell-like blossoms, bamboos and pagodas. The lid showed a man reading to two adults from a scroll, while two children clung to his robes, one looking away, more interested in the scenery than the scholar. Other figures around the side played among tall spiky plants with unfamiliar fruits. At the front, a round metal clasp, engraved with a large sunflower, had two loops for a pin to slide through. The closure had no pin. I gingerly opened the box.

Lisbeth’s box

Inside was a set of envelopes and faux-leather wallets, filled with photographs, letters, and official-looking documents: marriage and death certificates, passports, and records of vaccinations and visas acquired. Picture postcards showed people and country scenes. Most of the items dated from the mid-1930s, with the last from the early 1950s. As Lisbeth had been born in 1922, the collection covered her early teens to her thirties. Flimsy yellowing sheets bore Chinese characters handwritten in red pencil. A few sepia postcards looked much older than the rest. Could the date on that incredibly faint postmark over the Deutsches Reich stamp really be 1919?

Sifting through the box, I found a set of pale-blue airmail letters addressed to Lisbeth. All were sent from England to San Francisco in the early 1950s. Half a dozen were in a rounded, childlike hand, in distinctive green ink. As I recognised the writing, my throat tightened. These were letters from Ilse, my mother, to her sister. In the later ones she was no longer using German, but writing in imperfect English. I swallowed with difficulty as I read. My mother was giving Lisbeth news of Claudia, now six years old; then effusive thanks for the gifts of clothes her sister had sent to England. When I picked up the last letter, I stared at the date. The writing blurred after I made it out: May 1953. Two months before I was born, and five months before Ilse’s death, at the age of just 35.

Ilse’s last letter to Lisbeth, May 1953.

As I refocused on the pale-blue paper, the box’s significance dawned on me as if a blind had been snapped open to the sun. With neither notice nor explanation, my aunt had left me a collection of items she had treasured for decades. During her lifetime, this woman, the only close female relative in our small scattered family apart from her mother – our grandmother – was always reticent. An enigma, unwilling – or unable – to speak of her feelings, or her past. Her gift made me look at her anew. Were the contents of this box her way of telling me her story at last?

Lisbeth’s box with the sunflower clasp would lie untouched in a corner for years, vanishing beneath the cloak of familiarity. The routine of everyday life took over, the focus on two adolescent sons and a challenging career taking priority over the past. Until one day I found myself drawn back to the box while I had been contemplating my Viennese roots. I lifted the clasp as if for the very first time, and looked at the contents anew. I resolved to study every single item inside, something I had never yet done. I would use them to reconnect with, and discover, my family’s past. The voices of my mother and her sister had been silent for too long. The time had come to make them speak, and to listen to their story.

1

Vienna, June 1937: Thwarted Ambition

Lisbeth and Ilse grew up cocooned in middle-class ease, living with their parents, Arnold and Edith Epstein, in one of Vienna’s elegant apartment buildings on a street named Am Tabor. This lay in Leopoldstadt, the city’s second district, whose famous Ferris wheel still towers over the Austrian capital’s amusement park, the Prater.

The girls drank heisse Schokolade at Kohlmarkt’s Demel café, where my aunt developed her lifelong love of thickly whipped cream. Their vivacious and attractive mother was an excellent cook: her fruit-filled dumplings married sweetness and sharpness to perfection. In the summer the family stayed in a welcoming Pension outside the city.* The air was fragrant with the smell of hay, and filled with the sound of birdsong and clanking cowbells. Lisbeth loved the sweet yellow butter that accompanied their crisp breakfast rolls and jam.

The sisters lacked nothing, except perhaps closeness to one another. I had long ago picked up this sense of their separation, but have no knowledge of its source. What united them was their love for their parents, and a shared passion for dancing. As small girls, they were taken for portraits at studios run by Michael Sohn in Heinestrasse, and Weitzmann’s in Praterstrasse. Ilse had been blessed with the family’s good looks; by her side, Lisbeth appeared plain, with her heavy jaw and straight, severely cut dark hair. Perhaps the four-year age gap kept the girls distant, or was it their contrasting natures: the older, pretty one lively and impulsive, the younger more measured? I doubt they had many friends in common.

Lisbeth and Ilse in an early studio portrait taken at Michael Sohn Photowerkstätte, c. 1925.

When I first looked at what lay in Lisbeth’s box, I knew very little about Vienna. A visit there with my family when I was ten had left just one clear memory, more worldly than spiritual. It was of the melting flavours of chocolate, sharp cherries and whipped cream in my first slice of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte – Black Forest gateau: a combination so wonderful that even my father’s undisguised gloom at revisiting his birthplace could not ruin the moment. Nor did I know about the district where my aunt and mother had grown up. Their address – Wien II, Am Tabor 22 – came from a picture postcard sent to Lisbeth, kept safe all those years inside her wooden box. The date mark was illegible, but it was signed by a Judith Benedikt who was sending beste grüsse* to my aunt. The picture on the front of the postcard showed a Gothic-looking guest house in the mountain resort of Spital am Semmering.

One morning as I sat at my desk, the sun shining in through the Velux attic window, the postcard with the Austrian guest house on seemed to demand my attention. The address on the front prompted me to type ‘Am Tabor’ and ‘Vienna’ into Google. Up popped a link to a documentary called Vienna – City of Dreams, presented by an American art historian named Joseph Leo Koerner. Like me, he was a Jew with Viennese roots.

The film confirmed what I knew of the stately capital, heavy with baroque eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, and rich in composers, psychoanalysts and writers. But then, to my amazement, Koerner mentioned Am Tabor, where his parents had lived. At one end of the road was the great Nord Bahn,* significant as the arrival point of nineteenth-century migrants flocking to Vienna from all over Europe. Many were poorly-off Jews from Galicia, Bohemia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire in search of work or a better life for their families. And many were fleeing antisemitism. They would stream down Am Tabor from the Nord Bahn to find lodgings. By settling here, in Vienna’s second district, the immigrants transformed Leopoldstadt into the city’s new Jewish quarter, the other side of the Donaukanal (Danube canal) from the medieval Judenplatz. That square had been purged of its Jewish residents by the bloody pogrom of the fifteenth century.

In my family’s time, most of Austria’s 200,000 Jews lived in the capital.1 In the early 1920s, Leopoldstadt was almost 40 per cent Jewish; ringed by the Donaukanal, the district’s nickname became Mazzesinsel – ‘Matzo Island’.*2 Years later, Leopoldstadt would be twinned with Brooklyn, and Tom Stoppard would write his searing play of that name. The Epsteins lived among a large community of assimilated and mostly secular Jews. Judaism meant little to them; synagogue was reserved for the highest of festivals. Lisbeth later wrote that the family ‘were not religious at all. [Her] mother fasted on Yom Kippur and went to Kol Nidrei’.* Like other Jews after the First World War, they felt tolerated, protected by their patriotism and loyalty to the vast Austro-Hungarian empire. Arnold had fought as an officer in the war, prepared to die for Franz Joseph, the benign emperor who had always supported the Jews. He and Edith saw themselves as Austrian citizens first, and Jews second. But their predominantly Catholic homeland disagreed.

Lisbeth was very young when she first experienced antisemitism, although she did not yet know the word itself. Despite both her mother and grandmother having been born in Vienna, she discovered that she would never be truly Austrian, not ‘one of them’. She was aged eight or so, and on a spa holiday with her family, when she was told by her mother not to talk to a particular man at the resort. The reason was, Edith told her daughter, that the man was a Nazi. Lisbeth asked: ‘What is a Nazi?’ and her mother said: ‘A person who hates Jews.’ With a question that my aunt later feared ‘brought the whole thing [the Holocaust] on’, the little girl asked: ‘How come he doesn’t kill us?’3 It was the start of the 1930s.

Antisemitism was never deep below Austria’s surface, and Franz Joseph – for whom Arnold would have died – would not reign for ever. As a character in Joseph Roth’s great political novel, The Radetzky March, mused after the funeral of the hero’s father, neither the old man nor the Emperor Franz Joseph could have outlived the dying empire.4

My grandfather grew up in Bohemia, (part of Austro-Hungary, and known as Czechoslovakia after the First World War). In 1884, the year of his birth, the town’s name was Saaz; today it is Žatec. It was famous for hops and beer production: his father, Adolf Epstein, traded hops.5

At 21 Arnold had come to Vienna to join the army as a reserve cadet. In his new city, he had lodgings in the four-storey red-brick barracks on the Obere Donaustrasse, overlooking the waters of the Donaukanal. Two years later, in 1907, he became a lieutenant officer of the reserve. By May 1918, aged 34, he would rise to the rank of Rittmeister, a commissioned cavalry officer. A photograph of my grandfather taken in March 1918 shows him in imperial uniform, his sleek dark hair immaculately cut above heavy-lidded eyes and a stylish moustache. Below his chiselled jaw, two silver stars adorn his high military collar.

Arnold Epstein in uniform, 1918, and Edith Beck as a young woman.

Edith Beck was a striking young woman. She lived with her parents, Julius and Paula, at 11 Taborstrasse, also in Leopoldstadt but a more prestigious street than Am Tabor. Julius Beck had done well as a professional photographer, and their apartment was in an elegant building. It was less than twenty minutes’ walk away from Arnold’s red-brick barracks.

I shall never know how my grandparents first met. Edith may well have caught her first sight of Arnold in his dashing military uniform. The young cavalryman regularly paraded with his comrades on horseback by the Donaukanal. Whether it was by the water, or at a Viennese ball, or at a Jewish social event, I can only imagine. But on 26 April 1914, three months before the start of the First World War, Arnold Epstein and Edith Beck were married. The ceremony took place beneath the blue, star-studded dome of Vienna’s grandest synagogue, the Stadttempel, where the wedding of Edith’s parents had also been held. Members of both families looked on as the couple exchanged rings, the women from their columned gallery, kept apart from the men. Arnold had just turned 30; his bride was ten years younger.

Paula and Julius Beck, and below with daughters, Edith and Alice (known as Lidzie); Arnold Epstein in his youth.

Within months of the wedding, Arnold was on active duty, fighting for his emperor. He took leave towards the end of 1917, coming home to Edith to celebrate the New Year. The couple’s first daughter was born in late September 1918; they called her Ilse. Six weeks later, the Great War ended, and the Austro-Hungarian empire was no more. Out of its humiliating defeat was born the tiny Republic of Austria. Vienna was now the capital of a much reduced nation, in both status and size. The Allies’ post-war treaty forbade the new republic from amassing an army of more than 30,000. It also granted minority rights to Austria’s Jews, as it did to other religious, ethnic or linguistic minorities in the new states born from the empire’s ashes.

Jews like the Epsteins and their neighbours felt safe, believing that the treaty’s policies might protect them. Furthermore, their city was now known as Red Vienna, having elected its first Social Democrat mayor in 1919. The previous mayor, Karl Lueger, had been a notorious antisemite, whose election was repeatedly opposed by Franz Joseph.6 The forward-looking capital attracted intellectuals, thinkers and left-wing sympathisers such as Freud, Schnitzler and Wittgenstein, as well as scientists and composers. Vienna seemingly tolerated its Jews; so much so that the writer Stefan Zweig declared it a place where Jews could be ‘free’ from all ‘confinement and prejudice’, a city where a Jew could live easily as a ‘European’.7

So it was with optimism that Arnold began his new life in February 1919. He left the army and set up a wholesale business at 27 Volkertstrasse, in the heart of Leopoldstadt. Advertised as Arnold Epstein & Co., Grosshandelmit Galanterieund Parfumeriewaren, it supplied perfumery items, gifts and ‘fancy goods’ to retailers in the city. Delivery, his advert declared, was ‘schnell; solid; billig’ – fast, reliable, cheap. By July 1921 the company sold directly to the public as well; that month he advertised for an assistant for his shop. The firm was registered in the name of Arnold and Edith Epstein, at their home on Am Tabor 22, Wien II. Full of hope for the future, the couple’s family grew. On 4 January 1922, their second daughter, Lisbeth, was born.

Lisbeth idolised her father. She felt safe in his arms. He was the only person who ever called her by her middle name, Erica. It was always their little secret, a token of their particular closeness. When not at school, she would visit the shop, admiring the samples on display. She would hold the delicate soaps to her nose, and raise the crystal bottles of perfume to the sunlight to see the rainbows inside. It is easy to imagine her marvelling at the amber Meerschaum pipes, fine leather gloves and porcelain knick-knacks set out on the shelves. I can picture her stroking the fine-bristled clothes brushes with shiny wooden handles as her father looks on, his lit cigarette close by. And I like to imagine her heart swelling as she turns to smile back at the man she would always call ‘Papa’.

The family galanterie business flourished. But things around them were changing. In 1933 Austria’s new chancellor was a fascist named Dollfuss. Originally a member of the right-wing Christian Social Party, that year he created an even more nationalist new Catholic-based party, the Fatherland Front. Dollfuss crushed all opposition – that is, anyone not committed to his dream of Austrian independence. This included both right- and left-wing parties; both were violently suppressed. He banned the Nazi Party in June 1933 as they wished for a union between Austria and Hitler’s Germany. Then, after a left-wing uprising in February 1934, he outlawed the Social Democrats.

The Nazis in Austria were not prepared to take this. In July 1934, a group of them entered the chancellery building and shot Dollfuss for opposing them. Half a million Austrians (out of a population of 6.5 million) attended the murdered Austrofascist leader’s burial. Kurt Schuschnigg, another fervent nationalist and anti-Nazi, but weaker than Dollfuss, replaced him as chancellor.

The Epsteins sensed the change in atmosphere, as did others in liberal-minded Vienna. With the Jewish-based Social Democrat Party banned, antisemitic feeling was flourishing unchecked, encouraged by German Nazis just over the border. But for left-leaning people, as well as for Jews, the culture felt unpleasant rather than threatening.8 And besides, around this time, the Epstein family was more concerned with a personal tragedy than with outside events.

In the summer of 1937, while still a schoolgirl, Lisbeth had the accident that almost killed her. I had grown up hearing rumours of a terrible fall that my aunt suffered as a teenaged girl. But like so much of Lisbeth’s past, no word of the story was ever spoken aloud. I finally discovered much more of what happened from a small faded envelope inside her carved wooden box.

The envelope contained a dozen or so picture postcards. Some were unused, others written and addressed to my aunt. Four had been sent to her in July 1937, when she was fifteen and a half. They were all addressed to the same destination: Wien IX, Allgemeines Krankenhaus, Unfallstation I, Zimmer 81. Lisbeth had been a patient in room 81 of Vienna’s general hospital, in the trauma surgery ward.

Postcard of Lisbeth’s hospital in Vienna, 1930s.

Some unwritten cards showed the Krankenhaus itself. White-clad nuns are tending white-gowned, smiling patients in spacious open wards; above each door hangs a large crucifix. At that time, 1937, the Catholic hospital still had to treat Vienna’s Jews, unlike such hospitals in neighbouring Germany. That country’s Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prevented Jewish patients from being admitted to municipal hospitals. In another card, the hospital’s Terrasse der Unfallstationhas a row of patients lined up in beds in the fresh air of a balcony outside the ward. Overhead awnings protect the occupants from the elements, with a surprisingly low wall lined with potted plants separating them from the concrete three storeys below. Had my aunt convalesced on that terrace, I asked myself?

More postcards of Vienna’s general hospital.

The used postcards expressed the writers’ wishes for Lisbeth’s speedy recovery. Two came from people whose names I did not recognise. Another was from Lisbeth’s grandfather, sent from a picturesque hunting lodge (Jagdhaus Reh-hof)in the forests of Upper Austria. ‘Grossvater’ wrote warmly to his granddaughter, telling her she would soon have her favourite raspberry roulade, and signing off with ‘heartfelt greetings’. The other, a view of an upmarket resort, Feld am See in the Austrian province of Kärnten, came from Lisbeth’s aunt Lidzie, Edith’s only sibling. A steepled church was reflected in a lake, framed by branches of blossom, with white-topped mountains in the distance. In tiny handwriting, Lidzie also sent ‘herzlichsteGrüsse’. She wrote of a great festival the following day, in which the whole town would dress up. But, she added, she would not be joining in.* Were Jews already not welcome? Below, a different hand had added a few words: I made out the name Herbert – Lidzie’s husband.

Postcards sent to Lisbeth in hospital by her grandfather and her aunt Lidzie.

Keen to find out more about my family’s life in Vienna, I contacted a researcher based in that city, Kerstin Timmerman. To my astonishment, her reply came with an email attachment containing 24 pages of detailed information about the Epstein family. This had come from records at the offices of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien* (IKG), as well as other national archives and databases. Like me, Kerstin had held little hope of anything emerging about a teenaged girl in Vienna in the 1930s. She had been surprised to be proven wrong.

Entering Lisbeth’s name into a news database revealed a report with a sensational headline. Although the article was printed in an indecipherable archaic Gothic font, I could see from Kerstin’s highlighting that its subject was my aunt.

Newspaper cutting mentioning Lisbeth Epstein (Source: Wiener Sporttagblatt, 2 June 1937, page 6, courtesy ANNO/Austrian National Library)

The report had appeared in Vienna’s Sporttagblatt, the sports edition of one of the city’s highest circulation dailies, the Neue Wiener Tagblatt. It was dated 2 June 1937. The story, in its Germanic dark typeface, was titled, ‘Eine lebensmüde Fünfzehnjährige’. Kerstin had translated this as: ‘A suicidal fifteen-year-old’.* The words at last confirmed the whispers I had heard about my aunt’s youthful trauma. In translation, the article read:

Yesterday the fifteen-year-old middle school student Lisbeth Epstein, who lives at Am Tabor 22, threw herself down the lift shaft from the fourth floor of the house at 10 Kohlmarkt and suffered life-threatening injuries. The reason for the fall remains unknown, but it is believed that the fifteen-year-old, because she was not allowed to take part in a dance event in the house, took this so to heart that she decided to jump.

Seeing those words in print sent a cold shock through my body. How could a fifteen-year-old feel so desperate? Could the pain have stemmed simply from her exclusion from the event? Was that all that mattered in her life? Was nothing – or no one – worth living for? How different this passionate young girl seemed from the impassive woman I knew. My heart ached for the teenager, unable to manage her desperation. And yet I found it hard to believe that this single frustration could have driven her to attempt suicide; that being forbidden to dance could evoke such a violent response.

Much later in my research, when more papers had been scanned into the Vienna archives, Kerstin sent me two reports published in a different newspaper, Die Stunde,* which explained my aunt’s actions more fully. The first, of 3 June, the day after her fall, gave more details:

During the night there has been no improvement in the state of health of the 15-year-old pupil Lisbeth Epstein who yesterday, due to thwarted ambition, jumped down an elevator shaft and received life-threatening injuries. The state of her health continues to be very serious.

In the meantime there have been investigations about the cause and the course of events of the tragic incident. Lisbeth Epstein, who is a pupil at the Realgymnasium in the Novaragasse, and in addition practises gymnastics and art dance with great ambition, was due tomorrow to participate in a dance performance, which had been planned by her dance teacher Frau Grete L in agreement with the director of the Realgymnasium. In the course of preparing this event, Lisbeth had been asked by the school director to request tickets from the dance teacher but it appears that she forgot to do so. In the meantime, the school director had been in communication with the dance teacher and had realised with great surprise that Lisbeth had not asked for the tickets. The dance teacher subsequently asked Lisbeth why she had not done as she had been told but received no satisfactory answer. Subsequently, the dance teacher told Lisbeth that she was excluded from the performance. In the following rehearsal, the dance teacher performed the part which Lisbeth Epstein had been due to dance.

The tragedy of Lisbeth Epstein (Source: Die Stunde, 3 June 1937, page 10, courtesy ANNO/Austrian National Library).

The article continued:

Due to these events, the girl was extremely depressed but she still hoped that Frau L would change her mind for the final performance. However, when Lisbeth heard after the rehearsal that her presence at the next rehearsal was no longer required, she rushed out into the corridor and burst into passionate tears. An employee in a business located in the same building I, Kohlmarkt 10, heard the sobbing and went out into the corridor where she tried to comfort the girl. However, the moment the girl saw this lady she hurled herself over the banister. For a few moments she clung on to an iron railing and two gentlemen who were just at this time on the fifth floor of the staircase called out to her saying ‘hang on for a moment, we will be able to pull you up very shortly’.

However, before the helpers reached the girl she suddenly released both hands and to the dismay of all witnesses fell into the depths. Her body broke through a big pane of glass, shattered one wall of the lift and became lodged so awkwardly at the back of the lift that she had to be freed by the fire service. The attending medical doctor of the fire brigade had to diagnose a fractured skull, many broken bones and several lacerations. The medical doctors of the emergency services are trying to save the life of the unhappy young girl.

These graphic details left me sickened. No wonder no one had ever described them to me. I found myself catching my breath at the thought of the two men so nearly stopping my aunt’s fall. Had she deliberately released her grip on the railing, or simply lost the strength to hold on?

My aunt’s injuries were so severe they needed weeks of care in the trauma surgery ward. It was only thanks to Edith’s pleading that the surgeons did not amputate her shattered leg straightaway. The following day Die Stunde explained:

As has been reported, the 15-year-old pupil Lisbeth Epstein was delivered to the emergency department. Due to thwarted ambition – she was not allowed to participate in a dance performance organised by a dance school in I, Kohlmarkt 10 – she had jumped into the lift shaft of the building. The girl, who had suffered a broken skull and breaks to her legs, was operated on and it looks as if the attempts of doctors to save her life have been successful. According to the latest news, it looks as if Lisbeth’s life might be saved. Also, the leg that was feared to require amputation can probably be preserved.

The tragedy of Lisbeth Epstein, (Source: Die Stunde, 4 June 1937, page 10, courtesy ANNO/Austrian National Library).

Lisbeth Epstein would never be able to forget her wilful act of self-destruction. From that day on, far from dancing again, even walking would prove difficult. Her left leg remained stiff and swollen throughout her life. Who knows how or when her psyche was broken? But her fall down the lift shaft marked one of a string of misfortunes, black as jet beads in a mourning necklace. That same autumn, another tragedy hit Lisbeth’s family.

This was the only family story my aunt ever shared with me. I remembered her telling it on one of my visits to San Francisco, speaking in her usual flat voice as we sat at the kitchen table. Her aunt Lidzie had contracted tuberculosis as a girl, and knew that she could never have children. When a hotelier named Herbert Reisenfeld fell in love with her, she warned him that her life would likely be short. Nevertheless, they married, and lived in wonderful places: on the Riviera, and in Lisbon and Madeira. Herbert swore he could never live without his beautiful bride, and that he would kill himself if she died before him. Lidzie begged him, should that happen, to wait for a year, by which time he would have recovered and found a new love. When Lidzie died, in autumn 1937, she was aged only 39. Her husband kept his promise to her, and waited exactly one year. The following day, Lisbeth’s uncle took his own life.

I felt icy fingers run over my skin as I recalled yet another thread of suicide running through our family tapestry. I shook my head to dispel the dark thought. All my life I had grown up wondering if I too had been affected in this way, a feeling that escalated to real dread as I approached the birth of my first son. Fortunately, his arrival seemed to cause me little more than the classic ‘three-day baby blues’. But I have never totally dispelled the fear that a fragment of this self-destructive tendency may still lurk deep down within me, like the Snow Queen’s splinter of ice.

The Epstein family could never have been the same after the fall that shattered Lisbeth’s leg and fractured her skull. How hard her parents must have worked to rehabilitate their younger daughter, both physically and emotionally. I shall never know how far they succeeded in pulling the family back together after so many tragedies. But by now, a more serious danger was brewing beyond their home in Am Tabor. External events were about to take over, threatening the stability of not just their city, but the whole of Austria itself.

Ilse’s visa to Portugal and reference letter from her uncle Herbert, hotelier at Atlantic Hotel in Madeira, September 1936. Herbert died the following year.

* A small hotel or boarding house, often on a farm.

* Best wishes.

* North Railway Station.

* Matzo is the Jewish unleavened biscuit for Passover.

* Kol Nidrei is the evening service before Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), Judaism’s holiest day of the year.

* Every summer, in the middle of July, the upmarket resort of Feld am See still holds a fish festival; this may have been the celebration that Lidzie mentioned in her postcard to Lisbeth.

* Jewish Community of Vienna.

* A more literal rendition of lebensmüde would be ‘tired of life’.

*The Hour.

2

Vienna, March 1938: A World Falls Apart

In March 1938, Lisbeth’s physical injuries were healing. But political events were about to turn her world upside down.

By the start of that year, relations between the Austrian and German chancellors were deteriorating. Austria’s Schuschnigg was set on his country’s independence from Germany, while Hitler’s goal was its annexation: it was the land of his birth. In February 1938, Hitler summoned Schuschnigg for talks. Instead he delivered a threatening ultimatum. He would invade the tiny republic unless Schuschnigg rehabilitated Austria’s Nazis and placed some in his cabinet. Schuschnigg agreed to Hitler’s demands and left. According to a contemporary writer, Schuschnigg had been deprived of the cigarettes to which he was chronically addicted for the many hours of the meeting with Hitler, and left in a state of nervous collapse.1 But on 9 March he declared a plebiscite in his country, to let the people decide if they wished to join Nazi Germany or not. The vote was to be held on 13 March.

Lisbeth’s family saw signs appear on all the streets around Am Tabor that read ‘SCHUSCHNIGG JA!’ or a big simple ‘NEIN’. The plebiscite’s wording was strongly biased towards ‘Ja’, Schuschnigg’s desired outcome of staying a separate nation. It asked: ‘Are you for a free, German, independent and social, Christian and united Austria, for peace and work, for the equality of all those who affirm themselves for the people and Fatherland?’ Hitler was not prepared to wait for the result. He mobilised his army for invasion and demanded the referendum be scrapped. Schuschnigg gave in, and on 11 March he resigned. He handed power to a Nazi supporter, enabling Hitler’s troops to march into Austria the next day.

How quickly public opinion changed! The Epsteins suddenly saw windows draped with swastika flags, and uniformed policemen openly displaying the banned swastika badge of the Nazis. Plebiscite posters were ripped down, replaced with new ones saying ‘ANSCHLUSS Ja!’ Youths in knee-length white socks – the illegal sign of allegiance to Hitler – gathered brazenly on street corners. On 12 March, those who would have said ‘Nein’ to Schuschnigg’s vote now ecstatically cheered the German forces, who marched in unopposed.

By that afternoon, spurred on by Austria’s enthusiastic reception, Hitler began his triumphant tour. Proudly wearing the brown uniform of his storm troopers, he stood ramrod-stiff in a shiny black car, saluting the crowds. They responded with extended right arms, fingers straight. Young girls in national dress flung flowers at the man they saw as their liberator; others wildly waved Nazi flags and yelled out ‘Sieg Heil!’ Older people wept unrestrainedly with joy.2 Mainly lower-middle-class Austrians, they welcomed their glorious future as part of a much richer nation, as the ‘newest bastion of the German Reich’.

This was how Hitler described Austria in his rallying speech at his parade’s climax in Vienna. In the Heldenplatz* on 14 March he declared: ‘As leader and chancellor of the German nation and Reich, I announce to German history now the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.’ Two hundred thousand Viennese applauded their new leader and the Anschluss. Lisbeth’s family was not among them. Inside their flat, they winced at the incessant, distorted blaring of loudspeakers and Teutonic chanting in the streets.3 People now openly shouted ‘Jews – perish!’, or even more bloodthirsty antisemitic jibes.

A few days after the Anschluss, when Jewish actresses had been made to clean the lavatories of the Josefstadt theatre, a nineteen-year-old girl was stopped by the Nazis on a street not far from her home. Barking out their order, they forced her to get down and scrub the pavement. With gritted teeth and burning cheeks, she knelt and complied; disobedience was too dangerous. Her name was Ilse Epstein.

That day Ilse resolved to follow her school friend, a Jewish girl who had already left Vienna for Paris. Back home in Am Tabor, she started packing her bag. She would not stay to be humiliated again. In a few weeks she would be gone.

I learnt of this episode through one of my aunt’s testimonies to a historian named Patricia Kalman.4 As I read it, my own cheeks burned. This was not simply in anger at my mother’s treatment. It felt so wrong to have stumbled upon such a significant personal event in the pages of an academic monograph. My ignorance of the life of the woman to whom I owed mine suddenly weighed heavily on me.

I shall always regret knowing so little about my birth mother. As I grew up, I gathered snippets of information about Ilse that gleamed like mother-of-pearl among pebbles. Black and white photographs showed her beauty: shining dark hair and a generous mouth. And she had green eyes, like mine. It was my grandmother, Edith, who told me this once when she looked at my eyes, so I can be confident of this fact at least.

I did speak to one other person who remembered my mother. It was 2011, and I was visiting the family friend who had wanted to adopt me on Ilse’s death. Still as elegant as I remembered her from my childhood, she was now a widow in her nineties: her hair, in its French roll, was silver rather than blonde. She was the only person still alive, apart from my sister Claudia, who had known my birth mother. I wanted a last chance to glean some memories. As we chatted, she told me how much my mother had loved dancing. I had never known that; no one else had ever thought to tell me before. As I put my coat on to leave, I saw her eyes light up. The coat was velour, in a shade of grass-green. Smiling warmly, she said: ‘Your mother had a green coat as well, you know.’ My heart swelled.

The rest of my knowledge about Ilse is based on shakier ground. Tiny glimpses of her nature trickled through from my sister or stepmother, in rare unguarded moments of openness. Yet now I can barely recall these; they were so few, and spread over so many years. But of one thing I am sure: Ilse was a tempestuous woman, whose moods changed by the minute. Late in her second pregnancy, Ilse had argued violently with someone; within hours of her tirade, I was born, three weeks earlier than expected. How must she have raged, then, at the Nazis’ orders that day after the Anschluss.

How do you remove a citizen’s right to exist? You make him or her ‘other’, less than human, a stain on your streets to be purged and forgotten like unwanted slogans.

In Germany, the Nazis had begun squeezing Jews out of society back in 1933. The first antisemitic legislation banned Jews from most professions. Two years later, Hitler’s loathing for non-Aryans was embodied in the Nuremberg Laws. Aimed initially at Jews, but later Roma and Black people as well, these were designed to keep the German race ‘pure’.5 By 1938, over four hundred laws had been passed, limiting every aspect of Jews’ lives. Within weeks of the Anschluss, these laws applied to the Epsteins as well, who were now Jews first, not Austrians. The family’s identity, like that of their business, could not be disguised. In January, it became illegal for German Jews to alter their names. By April, the ‘Decree against the Camouflage of Jewish Firms’ banned the changing of business names also. Jews had to catalogue their possessions, and report any property above 5,000 Reichsmarks.*

Ilse was getting ready to join her Jewish school friends in Paris, the girls all hoping to find work there. She had made all the arrangements soon after her brush with the Nazis. The family knew of others taking steps to avoid the tightening noose of antisemitism. They had neighbours whose menfolk spent each night in a different household, constantly moving to avoid arrest. Many Jews guessed what lay ahead, and took control of their leaving. A Viennese journalist, Moriz Scheyer, later wrote of ‘nine thousand suicides in the first five months’ after the Anschluss. He described a placard pinned to the door of one ‘well-respected Jewish family’ who had chosen this desperate way out. ‘Five Jews, who have killed themselves. Course of action highly recommended to others.’6 The notice had been put up by the Nazis.

Scheyer also described a ‘working-class woman, a nice, friendly-looking type, sitting opposite [him] in the tram … studying the … newspaper intently. Suddenly she turned to her companion and, with a sad shake of the head, said: “I really had no idea that the Jews were as bad as that.”’7

Lisbeth’s parents were angry at the readiness with which their country-men had embraced Nazism, and shocked at the acceptance of the racist lies appearing daily in newspapers. Above all, they feared for their future, and that of their troubled sixteen-year-old daughter. Less than a year had passed since her plunge down the lift shaft. Was an even worse danger approaching?

* Square of Heroes.

* Valued at around £30,000 today.

3

Vienna and Prague, May to August 1938: A Flippant Remark

Arnold could not hope to hold on to the family business. A month or so after the Anschluss, Lisbeth returned from school and was surprised to find her father at home. Stooped with defeat, he quietly told her how brown-shirted thugs had burst into his office on Volkertstrasse, demanding the papers to Arnold Epstein & Co. The firm had to be sold, for a pittance, to a more suitable, Nazi-approved proprietor: that is, an Aryan, not a Jew. On 24 May 1938, Germany’s Nuremberg Laws took force in Austria, stripping the Epsteins of their citizenship and making the family stateless.1

Lisbeth saw her father’s despair, and grew angry at how little Austria valued his loyalty. The man who had been ready to die fighting for his country in the First World War was now worth nothing. Meanwhile, at her Catholic school, Lisbeth was shocked by her classmates’ behaviour. Some turned away when she or other Jewish pupils approached; others spat insults in their faces. She wondered if they had harboured these feelings for years, suppressing them until now when they were actively encouraged; or if they were just thoughtless kids, trying to fit in with the zeitgeist. Either way, she hid her feelings.

One morning in May, Lisbeth watched her father put on his hat and leave the flat. He was off to join the queue snaking down Seitenstettengasse, a narrow, cobbled street in the old Jewish quarter. Here, inside the Stadttempel, was the only source of help for Vienna’s Jews. At number 4, above the heavy wooden door, a turquoise plaque with gold Hebrew lettering marked the offices of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien,the IKG. The organisation had been set up 90 years earlier by Franz Joseph, to provide his empire’s Jews with cultural support. Hitler’s government had commandeered the IKG, twisting its purposes to meet their ends.2 It was the only Jewish organisation that they allowed to function, renaming it the Juedische Gemeinde, using the less euphemistic word for Jewish than ‘Israelitische’. Ostensibly there to help Jews leave the country, in truth the organisation became a conduit between the Nazis and those they vowed to be rid of: it provided an invaluable source of Jewish names and addresses. And later, when voluntary migration proved too slow, the Gemeinde was forced to arrange its members’ deportation.

Arnold Epstein was going to the former IKG office to try to arrange his family’s escape from Austria. He returned home with a questionnaireheaded Katasterblatt angelegt – ‘Catastrophe Affairs’, which was issued by Austria’s Emigration Department. Lisbeth sat down beside him and watched as he began filling it out, in his immaculate, curlicue script.