HOW ON EARTH did I get into this? What was I thinking of? My three-year-old son is looking at me intently and asking: “But why did Hitler put Granny in jail?” I change the subject from one I should never have raised in the first place, and hope he’ll just forget. A year later he suddenly turns around to his two-year-old brother and says: “Aron, once upon a time, when Granny was a young girl, Hitler put her in jail.”
I can’t remember when I was first told that Hitler had put Mum in jail. There was no big moment, no showdown. I just think I’ve always known. It’s there, a part of my family story and a little part of who I am, I suppose. But being the son of a concentration camp survivor has never been more than a little part. My mother wouldn’t want it to be. She would consider that her failure, a victory for Hitler.
I’ve been thinking about all this — about being my mother’s son, about our family story — because last month my mother, Mirjam Wiener, went back to Berlin, the city of her birth, to take tea and biscuits with the daughter of one of the most famous figures in the Third Reich.
Hilde Schramm is the daughter, the favourite daughter, of Albert Speer, Hitler’s right-hand man. Her father was once arguably the second most powerful person in Nazi Germany and at Nuremberg he was sentenced to 20 years in Spandau prison. Many considered him fortunate not to be hanged. That’s Hilde’s family story, the story she has the misfortune to have to live with.
Tomorrow night at 8pm, Radio 4 will broadcast a documentary, It’s My Story, featuring the encounter.
When I was a boy, it was the tale of the scooter that made the biggest impact on me. You see, my mother had been given a beautiful blue scooter for her eighth birthday. “It wasn’t like the ones you see now,” she says. “It had thick wheels and a big running board. It was my pride and joy.”
It was 1941, the Wiener family lived in Amsterdam, and the Jews were not allowed on buses or trams. “It became the family Rolls-Royce. We took it everywhere.” But by 1943 the Nazis were clearing the city of Jews area by area and on June 20 the turn came of my mother’s family to be forced out on the street and taken to the cattle trucks. “As we stood there, I managed to whisper to one of my neighbourhood friends that she should take my scooter. I was pleased to have done that. But, of course, I never saw it again.”
I always found that story terribly moving. I still do.
The cattle trucks took my mother, her two sisters and my grandmother to Westerbork Concentration Camp. My grandfather, Alfred Wiener, had earlier made it to London, but visas for the family had come too late.
“Westerbork,” says my mother “was terribly crowded, but although the food was poor we were not starving. I used to cry all the time, which was all my poor mother needed.” And every Tuesday there was a transport to Auschwitz. “I was only ten years old, but even I knew these transports were something terrible. As a grown woman on a trip to Poland I was asked if I would like to visit Auschwitz. I was startled to think that it had a physical location. It’s as if someone said to you ‘let’s go and visit Hell, it’s only ten minutes away, fifth exit off the motorway’.” In the end, as was inevitable, members of my mother’s family found themselves listed for the Tuesday transport. First her aunt, uncle and cousin were taken away. And the next week the Wieners themselves were slated. But somehow, and my mother is not sure how, their names were taken off the list. Instead they were transported to Bergen-Belsen.
“Belsen was bleak and what I remember most is that it was terribly cold. That and the starvation diet. And the counting. The Germans were forever counting us. Preferably in the middle of the night. Preferably involving beatings.
“My elder sister had to work. But I spent a lot of the day sitting around as we were too weak to do anything else. Whenever we could, we went to the back of the camp with our spoons and tried to scrape the remains from the empty food barrels, which, even when they were full, had only contained watered-down turnips.”
The girls used to spend time, too, watching the next-door camp section through the wire, even though this was strictly forbidden. Occasionally, they saw people they knew. One day, for example, they saw through the camp wires a family who were members of their local Amsterdam synagogue and whose daughters went to the same school and played in the same streets. My mother’s sister recorded in her diary that she had seen the arrival in Belsen of her friend Margot and her sister Anne Frank.
The Frank girls died in Belsen. My mother and her sisters were more fortunate. Thanks to false Paraguayan passports that their father had obtained for them, in January 1945 the family were part of a prisoner exchange. It was incredibly rare, a piece of amazing luck, but then survivor stories almost always involve some stroke of luck.
The family was marched past the camp doctor and then told they were to be given a shower. “I didn’t fully understand why until later, but people were terrified. We stripped our clothes off, walked into the shower room and waited. Then water came out. It was hot water, too, the first time we’d felt that. Later we were given soup. It had actual pieces of potato in it. That, a child remembers.”
On January 25, 1945, having survived a long train journey in which many families were thrown into the snow to reduce numbers, the Wiener girls arrived in Switzerland. That night, starved to death, having seen her little girls to safety, my grandmother died.
So it was that, after a struggle to get visas, my mother and her two sisters, motherless and alone, passed through Ellis Island and entered the United States.
In those early weeks they were looked after by a New York Quaker family, the Days. My mother remembers their kindness. She has always talked about them with great affection. She also remembers the music. “The girls in the family played lovely music. We hadn’t heard any for years. There was a blonde angel playing the harp. I thought I’d gone to Heaven.”
It is with the Days that Hilde Speer, now Schramm, enters the picture. Brought up as the daughter of one of Hitler’s favourites, in 1943, as my mother was being rounded up, Hilde was attending Hitler’s birthday party, an innocent six-year-old girl, holding the Führer’s hand. They lived in Berchtesgaden, the dictator’s headquarters, and occasionally Hitler would drop in for tea.
By 1952 Hilde was the daughter of a criminal, a tortured man who spent the rest of his life claiming (almost certainly falsely, although he was not a direct participant) that he had not known of Hitler’s Final Solution.
When, in that year, Hilde won a scholarship to study in America her visa was at first turned down, but eventually she was admitted to the US. And the family who offered her hospitality were the Days.
It is this coincidence, revealed in Gita Sereny’s brilliant biography of Albert Speer, that gave David Perry, a documentary producer, the idea of bringing my mother and Hilde together. And so the two met, the Holocaust victim and the Nazi’s daughter, on a bitterly cold December afternoon in Berlin. The venue was Hilde’s flat in the southern part of the city. Actually, it is less a flat than rooms in a commune, where Hilde now lives with friends. It was a distinctly bohemian setting.
When David Perry had originally approached Hilde she had been concerned about meeting a camp survivor live on radio. She was worried, she said, about it turning into a media stunt. To reassure her, Perry offered a private encounter, with recording the next day if all went well.
The two women greeted each other with a handshake, but there was no mistaking a slightly fraught atmosphere. Everyone was wary. Both were nervous, uncertain of what was to come. “There couId have been great unpleasantness and recrimination, if she had been different, or I had been,” my mother says.
Over tea, seated at a small round table, small talk was exchanged — about Berlin, about their respective children, about their siblings. By the time they left the atmosphere was much warmer. Hilde sent Perry a message — she was willing to go ahead.
And so the next day they met again, this time with the tape recorder running.
What then took place was a remarkable conversation. Not because of raw emotion and tense confrontation, but precisely the opposite. Here were two people who had thought very hard about their experiences and what they meant and had managed, extraordinarily, to overcome them. They met, despite everything, determined to be friendly.
They started, of course, by discussing the Days, but they quickly moved on to other matters. They talked of Hilde’s charitable foundation. Hilde has spent much of her life, as part of a successful career in left-wing politics, encouraging Germans to think about the origins of their property. Were their paintings, houses and furniture stolen from Jews? She has sold her father’s paintings, which she feared had been acquired cheaply, to finance charitable work among Jewish women. As she told my mother: “It is not much one can do.”
For her part, my mother talked of how important it was to her not to visit her own trauma upon her children. She has done that partly by being willing to talk to us, openly and without obvious emotion, about what she saw and experienced. I know from talking to the children of other Holocaust survivors how rare and valuable that is. Its rarity owes something to the fact that survivors were almost encouraged to bottle up how they felt. “After the camp we just carried on as if nothing had happened,” my mother explains. “It was expected and we rose to it. These sort of experiences were not talked about in any detail. Later, when you were born, remembering was a conscious act.”
When the two parted it was with another handshake, but a warmer one this time. A couple of weeks later I received an e-mail from Hilde: “Please give my regards to your mother. It was a great pleasure for me to meet her.”
There was, however, one topic the two women did not talk about — Albert Speer himself. Afterwards, I ask my mother why.
“I thought Hilde came across as a very sensitive and fine person,” she replies. “And she has obviously been much affected by her paternity. My opinion of her father is very low indeed. But it’s not her fault. She is a victim too. I did not want to confront her. He was her father. Her letters are addressed to lieber Papa. He was her Daddy.”
She pauses and says: “Perhaps you will think I’m a coward.”
Well, no Mum, I don’t. I think your entire attitude is the height of courage. I’m grateful for it every day, because of the way it has enabled me to live my life.
I write both this and these last couple of paragraphs with a slight degree of trepidation. A few years ago I helped a journalist friend with a restaurant review by tasting the chicken soup in a kosher restaurant. I commented that my mother’s was the best I’d tasted. I was embarrassed to find this appearing as a knowing joke about Jewish boys and their mothers.
So I’m a little nervous to admit that after hearing a tape of the programme I rang up my mother and told her that I agreed with something David Perry said to me: “Daniel, you have quite a mother.” Listen to the programme; I think you’ll agree.
Incidentally, I was right about the chicken soup, too.
It’s My Story, Radio 4, tomorrow, 8pm.
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
