Passage to the past

The Berlin Shadow: Escaping the Ghosts of the Kindertransport

Author: Jonathan Lichtenstein

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 306

Price: Rs 599

The Holocaust is a reminder of the toll that politically legitimised xenophobia can extract from society, even one as vibrant and technologically advanced as Germany. Numbing recollections of relentless cruelty within a state-sponsored infrastructure of work and death camps dedicated to annihilating Europe’s Jews have created a grim cultural legacy in museums, films, books and plays. But there are many who suffered the Holocaust at one remove, whose experiences largely remain outside this cultural matrix. This poignant and luminously written book is the story of one of those victims.

Playwright Jonathan Lichtenstein’s father Hans, was one of several thousand child refugees on the famous Kindertransport, or children’s transport, a rescue effort organised by the British government for Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Like many of his Kindertransport compatriots, Hans had nothing to return to after the war. He grew up in Britain, became a doctor, joined the SAS and parachuted into Malaya during the communist insurgency, plying his trade in the most primitive of jungle conditions. He settled in rural Wales and started a family.

Hans never alluded to his childhood, but it lurked like a shadowy presence over his family, manifesting itself in a complex personality, bordering on a disorder. His inner demons appeared in unsettling habits — in his reckless driving during family holidays, for instance, or in the bracing disregard for his children’s near life-threatening illnesses (despite being a respected and talented doctor), mounting insomnia and, inevitably, in the scratchy relationship with his son.

“During my early childhood, my father never talked directly about his experience of being a child, nor anything about his German roots. It seemed almost as though he had never been a child,” Mr Lichtenstein writes.  All the son had to go on was fragmentary history. “It was left to my mother to tell me one day … when I was eight years old, that my father had, a few weeks after his twelfth birthday, left Berlin on his own, carrying a small suitcase. More than that she did not know herself —my father had never explained the full details to her either.”

Growing up, Mr Lichtenstein had hoped to trace his father’s passage on the Kindertransport but as he writes, “the fragility of our awkward and distant relationship made the arrangement of such a journey impossible.”

Then, a debilitating illness “had begun to temper his fitful spirits” and made him agree to a journey “to confront the event that has dominated his life”.  And so begins this moving voyage of remembrance. Mr Lichtenstein deploys the playwright’s craft in a part-dialogue-part narrative style, teasing out his father’s story as they traverse the geography of his childhood.

The irascible Hans likes to stick to the facts, but even those spare details reveal a bleak story, heightened by the gentle humour and empathy with which the son tells it. As they awkwardly share a narrow cabin in the ship crossing the Channel, he asks his father about the American family with whom he stayed when he first arrived. They returned to the US after a few weeks, leaving him on his own, his father says.

“How strange. Who were they?”

“I have absolutely no idea”… I got sent to Hastings and lived there on my own in a flat.”

Later Hans was collected and taken to boarding school. “Someone paid for me. I don’t know who, I never did find out. No one would tell me. … I assumed it was the American family.”

“Someone paid your fees?

Yes

All the way through your schooling?

Yes

Amazing

Luck”
 

For Hans, luck was everything. His grandfather, a decorated World War I veteran, took his life after he was beaten up in his own home. His father committed suicide after his shop was destroyed during Kristallnacht, the term for the destruction of Jewish shops, businesses and religious institutions on November 9-10, 1938, and his neighbours shunned him (a photograph of the shop after it was attacked still exists).

Most of his family died after Kristallnacht, yet Hans considered himself lucky. His mother was spared the camps because his grandmother lied and claimed her daughter was the illegitimate child of a German Christian with whom she had had an affair (gallantly backed up by the man himself). That made his mother a Mischling (hybrid), acceptable under Nazi racial laws. A committed communist, she settled in East Germany, where Hans visited her just twice. His sister survived because, blonde and blue-eyed, she could pass as “Aryan”.

Hans visits his father’s grave, which he had never seen before, his old home and, with incredible luck, discovers his father’s shop, under scaffolding in readiness for demolition. But this is more than a moving account of one troubled man’s search to come to terms with his past or a son’s reconciliation with his father. It reprises the gratuitous consequences of violent, exclusionary politics. Indians today could do no worse than read this beautiful memoir.