So far all the letters were from 1938. But then I drew an equally thin but larger sheet of writing paper out of its envelope; it was dated 10 January 1947:
Dear Frau Ella,
I received your letter of the 14 September at the end of November. I beg you not to be angry that I’m only answering it today … Your dear mother wrote the following words: in spite of everything my faith in God remains unshakeable. These words accompanied me through the long years of persecution and bombing, when more than once our life hung by a silken thread, and gave me the strength to bear it all and come through.
Ella was my grandmother; this letter had been posted in Berlin to her Jerusalem address. But who was the sender, Charlotte Tuch? This was not a name I had ever heard mentioned before. And what relationship did she bear to my great-grandmother that she should be aware of her innermost thoughts before she died?
‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to keep these,’ I half asked, half told my cousin as I returned the bundle to its off-white bag. I did not realise then the depth of the journey on which they would lead me.
I took the bag back with me to London, where we were all absorbed in caring for my father during his final days. I remember asking him about his aunt Sophie shortly before he entered that domain in which it was no longer possible to elicit the kind of information which is dependent on a practical and sequential awareness of the affairs of this world. ‘She came to visit us in Palestine in 1937,’ he said. ‘We told her not to go back to Europe but she wouldn’t listen. Her husband was a Czech nationalist; he believed they would be able to fight the Germans off. They were very wealthy in Czechoslovakia. “It isn’t safe there; stay here with us,” we told her. She wouldn’t hear of it.’
That was the last time I was able to ask my father about such matters, or about anything else.
It was the following year, on the night of the fast of Tishah Be’Av, next to the light of the memorial candle and in the presence of the list of names of the martyred members of the family, which my father had enjoined me to place there, that I began to organise and file the papers I had found in that trunk. Now at last I could begin to study them.
9 November 1938
With reference to our telephone conversation we politely wish to inform you that, due to the small number of certificates made available by the Mandate Government, it will not be possible for the foreseeable future – at least according to current schedules – for you to obtain a Pensioner’s Certificate to emigrate to Palestine.
We ask you to take due note of this information and remain, respectfully, yours
I’ve tried to imagine to myself the morning when my great- grandmother, Regina Freimann, received that letter. She would probably have been alone when the post was delivered. Glancing through it, she would at once have noticed the sender’s address on the envelope and realised with a quiver of anxiety that this was the notification for which she had so urgently been waiting. All the family, but most especially her son Alfred, who had done so much to encourage her to submit the application, would be concerned to know the outcome.
The letter would have reached her at her relatively new address on the Güntzelstrasse in the Berlin district of Wilmersdorf; it was not long before then that she’d had to leave her previous home in the beautiful Oranienburgerstrasse, a few houses down from the magnificent synagogue which, with its gold cupola, dominated the street. Probably that gracious flat had come with the position; as Rav and Av Bet Din, rabbi and head of the rabbinical court, her husband Jacob Freimann would have been looked after well by the community. But some months after his death his widow would have had to vacate the home they had shared together for close to ten productive but challenging years since they had come here from Poznań in 1928. To be selected to lead the rabbinical court in Berlin, a city with a large and influential Jewish community of over a hundred thousand souls, was a crowning mark of honour for a man whose Jewish legal and religious decisions were respected throughout Europe and beyond. No one could then have predicted how swiftly and insidiously National Socialism was gaining strength or how soon the fragile Weimar Republic would collapse.
Letter to Regina Freimann from the Palästina Treuhand-Stelle.
The letter was sent from the offices of the Palästina Treuhand-Stelle der Juden in Deutschland, G.m.b.H (The Palestine Trust Company on behalf of the Jews of Germany Ltd). All applications for visas to Palestine had to be directed through its offices and were handled by its staff. They were expert not only in the intricacies of trying to leave Germany, but in the demands and conditions of the British Government which had effectively been ruling Palestine since 1918 under a United Nations mandate, due to expire in 1948. Beneath the stamp of the Palästina Treuhand-Stelle was an indecipherable signature, which only added to the bureaucratic impersonality of the message.
It was not an auspicious date on which to receive such news; the letter must have arrived in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938). Now referred to in Germany as the Reichspogromnacht so as to avoid using the National Socialist expression, to most Jews this vicious and violent explosion will always be known as Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass), the date on which the true intent of the Nazi regime and its grip over the German and Austrian populations was revealed with a naked and grasping brutality which shattered irreparably the notion that life for the Jews could ever return to normal. Among the synagogues burnt down, Jewish premises destroyed and shops smashed and looted were the offices of the Palästina Treuhand-Stelle itself on the Meineckerstrasse. ‘In Berlin, 5, then 15 synagogues burn down. Now popular anger rages … It should be given free reign,’ Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda who was largely responsible for instigating the violence, recorded in his diary.1 The outburst, he explained, was simply the outpouring of the kochende Volksseele, a spontaneous expression of boiling popular feeling. He himself had given personal orders that the main Berlin synagogue on the Fasanenstrasse was to be destroyed. That night and over the following days tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and many murdered. It must have been a terrifying moment in which to learn that the key document on the obtaining of which one’s chief hopes of leaving Germany rested was not to be forthcoming.
I have held that letter in my hand and stared at it many times. For my great-grandmother, it amounted to a death warrant. This was not, of course, literally the case. But the rejection of her application by the Mandate authorities at that critical time led her to make practical decisions which, while perfectly rational and probably the best choices she could have made in the circumstances known to her at the time, would prove with hindsight to have sealed her fate. Three days later, at a meeting chaired by Hermann Göring, Reinhard Heydrich, then head of the Security Police and subsequently directly responsible for the policies which led to Regina’s murder, suggested that an agency be created under Nazi leadership to put into effect a nationwide policy to remove the Jews from the Reich. The chain of offices he created, with branches in Vienna and later in Prague with Adolf Eichmann at their head, would in fact lock the door against any chance of escape and rob hundreds of thousands of their possessions, hopes and lives. On the same day a fine of a billion marks was imposed on the Jewish community as punishment for the damage they had ‘caused’ on Kristallnacht.
In the event though, Regina was not at home in Berlin on the morning of 10 November. She was in fact in Frankfurt, helping her son Ernst and his wife Eva, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy with their fifth child.
When eventually Regina did open the letter she must have felt profoundly alone with the bad news. To whom could she turn? Whom could she phone to share the contents of that