Searching on

What started me thinking was a radio programme on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. A Daniel Mendelsohn was being interviewed about his awardwinning international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, regarding his consuming interest in the fate of his uncle’s family in Ukraine. Daniel never knew his uncle but for a photo – and I didn’t know my mother but for a passport and a death certificate. Daniel set out to find the fate of his uncle and family and who they were. And, at this late stage in my life, this sparked a similar question: What do I know of my mother? My mother died when I was 19 months old. The death certificate states that she died at the age of 34 of ‘retroperitoneal cellulitis’ – whatever that is – at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Newcastle, New South Wales. But I knew very little about her. My father Hans, a graduate from Munich and Bonn, left Willich in North Rhine-Westphalia for England in 1933 and, as the family story goes, met Grete Rosenthial, my mother-to-be, on a train in England. She was from Hildburghausen, Thuringia, on her way to employment as a housemaid and they got chatting. They connected again, through the AJR in London and in 1938 came to Australia, where they married and I was born. Hans applied to have his parents and in-laws follow them to Australia, but for three of them it was too late. His mother had died in Willich of liver cancer, his father in Theresienstadt, and my mother Grete’s father in Buchenwald. Grete’s mother, Mathilde, my grandmother, did get out to join us. After my mother’s death, for two years or so my father, with the help of Mathilde, struggled on, now working as an upholsterer, having had to train in something in England to support himself and her, my grandmother, totally bereft of family but me. The Jewish community in Newcastle, New South Wales was wonderful to my father – the support and friendship they gave is immeasurable. Through connections with the community, my father eventually remarried, to a girl from Sydney, and brought her into the home in Newcastle. But things didn’t go well between her and Mathilde and my grandmother knew she had to find a place of her own. She had very poor English and I was her translator. My Saturday morning visits to her left me in rather a torn state. My stepmother was raising me, resenting my connection to my grandmother, and I couldn’t rationalize the mess in my early teenage years. When I was 14 my grandmother passed away. Her husband had died in Buchenwald, their son, Siegfried Rosenthal, in the Battle of the Aisne in France in the First World War, and her daughter, my mother, in Newcastle. I was the only living relative of this part of the Rosenthal family. All I have of my mother is her ‘Alien’s Certificate of Registration’ – Grete Rosenthal, 47 Wentworth Road, Golders Green, London NW11 – with her photo and some needlework she must have done in her teens. No memory whatsoever of any conversations about her. When you are young you look forward – now I was looking back and all I could see was a passport and a death certificate. My father died in 1979 and, as I read so often in so many other cases, we had never spoken of ‘before’. Then, suddenly, after many years, a second cousin on my grandmother’s side living in New York contacted me with data about the family. We each had our family origins in Thuringia, at that time in East Germany, so obtaining information was near impossible and, of course, there was no internet. Time passes. Bits of information dribbled in. Then a reconnection after many years with a fraternal cousin – Joan living in Hale in the UK, a wonderful and warm contact. Visits to Australia, visits to England and now the wonders of Skype. In May 2009 Joan, surfing the net, saw there would be a Rosenthal Stolperstein placing in Hildburghausen in August 2009. I made immediate contact. Person A passed me to person B, who put me in touch with the contact in Hildburghausen, a Herr Bernd Ahnike – the genie in the bottle. No one could have done more for me. And it wasn’t easy: he speaks no English and my German had gone with my grandmother’s death. With the help of Joan as translator and Google translation, Bernd and I understood each other. There was no way I could get to Germany for August but, since my children would all be in Europe in December, why not tie a journey in with a visit to them in December? I’d taken the first small step. I arrived at Frankfurt railway station after a 23- hour flight from Australia, in the coldest December for 30 years, heading for Hildburghausen. Europe travels by rail! Three train changes to Hildburghausen with three minutes for one change and one minute for the next – and it worked! And there was Bernd at this tiny railway station to greet me and, somewhere from the subconscious, bits of my German came back – enough to make rough conversation. I thought I’d get to Hildburghausen, look around and acquire a feeling for how my mother had spent her early years. But Bernd had organised every day. First was a visit to my mother’s and grandparents’ home – a large building recently renovated now with a coffee and cake shop on the ground floor. I found it quite emotional to be inside the house my mother and grandparents had lived in. Bernd arranged a gathering of elders who had been around in my grandparents’ time and they had some insights and memories of the time. Each year Hildburghausen holds a Kristallnacht service for the Jews at a commemoration plinth where the last synagogue had stood. Last year they delayed it to coincide with my visit – a wonderful honour for my family. Each day of my four-day visit was filled. A visit to the beautifully kept old Jewish cemetery, a visit to the cenotaph that commemorates the soldiers from Hildburghausen who died in the Great War that includes my Uncle Siegfried’s name, long discussions with the help of my cousin Joan on the history of the Jews of the area, and a visit to the nearby town of Gleicherwiesen, which can trace its history of Jewish families back to the thirteenth century – and, after much soul-searching on my behalf, a visit to Buchenwald. Joan couldn’t find the courage to come with Bernd and me, but I can only say that this extremely sobering and puzzling grey visit was for me a mind-searing memory. Four full days walking in their footsteps. What did I learn of my mother’s early years? I learned to imagine their lives – but of her very little. There are no photos and no history that we can yet find. I’ve been inside the home. I’ve seen the schools and I’ve been treated with kindness and great respect and, as far as I can make out, sincere regret from the generation of German people who are my age. The local newspaper interviewed me and we are hopeful that the coverage this interview received will find more contacts and there is a glimmer of light. I will search on.