Epilogue
My dear Walter,
I realize that this letter will come quite out of the blue, so I hope you are sitting down.
It has taken me almost five years of work to trace your whereabouts.
Well, two years of thinking about it, and not really knowing where to start, if I’m completely honest. It’s been a long story of false starts and dead ends, but I’m persistent if nothing else, and with the aid of, can you believe it, a Jewish charity in America, I’ve found you at last.
I thought long and hard whether to send this.
Whether to risk trying to find out what happened to you, my first love, and, of course, to my son, who I knew only for the first three weeks of his life.
Suffice to say, not an hour of any day in the last fifty-five years has gone by without thought of him.
I have lived the bulk of my life with a piece of my heart severed and, I have hoped, living a happy life in England.
After the war, life under the Soviets was indescribably hard.
Each day was a battle for survival. I wanted to try to find you, but as time went on it became impossible, and I also came to believe it would be for the best, for you and for Stanley, if I stayed out of your lives.
But I am getting older every day, and I do not want to go to my grave not knowing what happened to my son, and of course to you, dear Walter. And so, here I am.
There is no quick or easy way to sum up the last fifty-plus years.
For the most part, I suppose, one just gets on with the day-to-day business of living and working.
I try not to think of the war years, full as they were of terror and hardships and the communication restrictions.
I try not to think of the horrific years that followed, and the trauma rendered by our Russian occupiers.
This may be a conversation for another time.
But once that passed, and life became tolerable again, I did, you shall be pleased to know, go back to finish my education.
Unlike the Hitler years, the Communists did allow us women some modicum of equality of opportunity, even though it was more a question of necessity than a true vision or openness of spirit.
But it did mean that after some years, I was able to realize that dream of becoming a doctor.
Not quite the type I once envisaged. No, but one rather desperately required.
I became a doctor of psychotherapy, now retired.
I worked all my life with children, trying to put back together the pieces of broken minds, and in so doing, I suppose I went some way to nursing my own.
And one other thing I achieved, of lesser importance but no less meaningful.
I overcame my fear of water! I used to swim every day during the summer.
Each time I did, I thought of you, and how you would have been proud. It made me smile to think of it.
I never had any more children of my own.
My marriage to Tomas was short-lived and not a happy one.
He was sent to the front before the end of our first year together and did not see his twentieth birthday.
I had no interest in remarrying then. I focused first on survival, and second on my work.
But, much later in life, long after I’d given up on ever again finding personal happiness, I met Max, an older, uncomplicated man, with the gentlest of hearts.
We married and we were happy. He died twelve years ago.
And what of the others? Vati committed suicide when Berlin fell.
Mutti never stopped believing in the Nazi dream nor in the greatness of her husband.
Eventually, she died, too, of a broken heart.
I’m so grateful that Karl never saw the horrors that were to come.
I never knew what became of Hilda and little Sophie.
After the war, I moved away to a small town far from Leipzig.
And your family, Walter? I think of them often. I know they were all, in the end, sent to Buchenwald and from there, I suspect, on to Auschwitz or Theresienstadt. I cannot imagine the pain and suffering they must have gone through. It haunts me to this day.
But most of all I remember Erna and her parents, without whom I would not be sitting here today.
All three of them, beacons of goodness, perished in a camp.
One day in the autumn of 1942 I went to their flat, and they were gone.
The flat was turned upside down. There was no warning, and not a day goes by when I don’t think of my wonderful friend Erna, and her halo of auburn hair, destined to be forever young in my memory.
Nor shall I ever forget the day I had to send Stanley away.
I think of the thousands of other mothers who did the same, feeling their pain as they sent their own precious children into the unknown, desperately entrusting them to strangers.
And I think of the countless parents who were unable to save their children’s lives.
And never for one day will I forget what I once was, when I was one of the believers.
It was you, dear Walter, who first turned my head and made me see that people are people, regardless of anything else.
It was you who made me understand that we all have immense capacity for both good and evil.
That we must stand up and speak out against those who preach hate.
Every day that I live I wish the Nazis had never come to power, that the camps had never existed.
Every day I live with the shame and guilt of the part I once played and will do so until my dying day.
Walter, I hope this letter hasn’t come as too much of a shock.
I should dearly love to know my son, just a little.
If it is only to know he is alive and well.
I realize that it might be too much to ask of him, and you and your family, but I dream that one day I can meet him in person.
You may never, of course, have told him anything of his past, and if you would prefer for me to stay away, then of course I shall honor your wishes.
At present, I could not possibly afford a trip to England, so for now, I would be incredibly happy just to hear from you.
With love and best wishes,
Herta Roth (Heinrich)
London
Summer 1995
For the third time I check the address on the crumpled piece of paper in my hand, then look again at the number over the door of the café. This is definitely the right place.
I take a deep breath and push open the door.
A little bell jangles somewhere out the back as I enter the warm, coffee-scented room.
A couple sit holding hands in the corner next to the window.
The only other customer is an elderly man reading a newspaper, its pages spread all over the wooden table in front of him.
I read The Sunday Times in large letters on the discarded front cover.
I should have done that. Brought a newspaper.
It would have been something to do. Something to make me look less conspicuously alone. And good practice for my English.
I’m forty minutes early. But better this way than to be late. I’d been so afraid of getting lost, or something going wrong, I barely slept last night.
A young girl appears behind the counter. She looks at me expectantly.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“A black coffee, if you please.” I speak carefully, trying hard with my pronunciation.
“Sure. Anything else?” she asks.
There is a huge array of cakes and pastries arranged on display behind the glass counter. My mouth begins to salivate at the sight of them.
“And I’ll take one of those, too.” I smile at the waitress and point to a twisted pastry with blanched almonds on the top and something that looks deliciously sweet and creamy oozing from the middle. “And how much is the cost?” I hope I’m using the correct English grammar.
“Don’t worry. Take a seat and I’ll bring it all over. You can pay at the end, when you’ve finished.” She nods toward the tables.
It seems very self-indulgent to eat such a thing so soon after breakfast. Even though all the years of deprivation are long gone, there is an overwhelming urge to treat myself. Just in case it is all taken away again.
Besides. It will help to pass the time.
“Thank you. You are most kind,” I say.
The waitress gives me a warm smile. The other customers don’t even look up. No one seems bothered by my German accent.
But that’s silly of me. Why on earth would they be?
The war was half a century ago. The couple by the window are too young to know anything of it.
Perhaps the man did, though. I stare at his profile as he reads, engrossed in something.
I certainly still flinch if I hear a Russian accent.
Try as I might, it isn’t possible to block all they subjected us to from my memory.
People might wonder why I let those soldiers do what they did to me.
Why I never bothered to put up a fight. But it was survival.
You did whatever you had to for a piece of bread.
London is like a different planet. Foreign, full of wonder, and terrifying all at the same time.
I’ve been locked behind the Iron Curtain for over forty years.
Once the worst years were past, we settled into a day-to-day life that was pleasant enough.
As long as we had food, and a roof over our heads, that was enough.
It lacked luxury, but it was certain, cohesive, and everyone was the same.
Here, life feels precarious and chaotic.
I can imagine all this speed and freedom is exciting for the young, but for my generation, the crumbling socialist blocks are safe and familiar, like comfortable old shoes.
Yesterday, I walked for miles around London, staring up at the shiny towers of metal and glass, the smart houses and shops full of stuff .
So many big, expensive cars. So much noise and bustle. It’s frenetic. Bewildering.