A journey to myself: The end of the journey.

It is one thing to be researching the past for a work of fiction, it is quite another thing to be searching it for one's own past. I sent my family name out into cyberspace, not sure what was going to come back. Not much did, to begin with. I found a reference to my father's business. I found a list of the books my mother had translated from German to English. Nothing significant.

I emailed the German Embassy to suggest that I was probably not going to be able to apply for restored citizenship after all as I was not in possession of the correct documentation. Privately I decided to give up. The Embassy's reply, when it came, was unexpected and heartening:

''Dear Ms Hedges,

if you are not in possession of the documents you can nevertheless apply according to Art. 116 and submit all documents or copies of documents you find. The application process is free of charge.

Best regards''

I resumed the search. And then someone on Facebook suggested I try Yad Vashem - the organisation that has painstakingly listed the names and last known details of every Jewish person who perished during the Holocaust. So I found their site online. I typed in the names of my paternal grandparents. I pressed send. And unbelievably, there they were on the database. Alma and Raphaele.

Their names were on pages of testimony from survivors, on a deportation list from Berlin, on a list of murdered Jews from Germany. The map accompanying their entries gave their final destination as Katowice, in Poland. The location of Auschwitz concentration camp. Under the heading: Fate, one word: murdered.

When I got over the shock of what I was looking at, I tried to recreate what I'd been told about them. It was so pitifully little. They were affluent members of their community. They were highly educated; they had read Goethe and Schiller. They had a maid called Kate who spoiled my father and his brother with sweets and cake.

I also knew that, despite the huge privations they were beginning to suffer, Alma made up a food parcel every fortnight to send to my father in England. Like all Jewish refugees, he was interned here for the duration of the war, meaning that he was forbidden to work and was dependent upon charity and meagre handouts from the state.

I thought about their final days together as the net closed upon the remaining Jewish population in Berlin. How two intellectual and cultured individuals were marched out of their comfortable family home, pushed into an over-crowded cattle truck, denied food and water and then, when they reached their destination, brutally separated from each other and summarily gassed, because the government of that time had decreed they weren't human beings any more.

And when I had stopped weeping, I thought about all the words we use to describe those other people, the ones that are not us: migrant, foreigner, immigrant, refugee. Jew, Arab, Muslim. Words that we think give us permission to hate. And I felt great sadness that nothing much has been learned.

So my journey to discover myself reaches its final stages. At the end of this month, I shall make an appointment with the German Embassy to present my documents. I hope that what I have discovered is enough to convince them to restore my family's citizenship and ensure that my descendants will forever be members of the European family to which they have a right to belong.

I will let you know their decision in due course.

UPDATE 

I heard back from the lovely UK German Embassy last night (23rd November)

Dear Carol,

 I hope this email finds you well.

I have today received an email from the Federal Office of Administration  stating that the processing of your application is just about to be completed!

However they need certified copies of the following documents:

-          your marriage certificate

-          your parents’ marriage certificate   

       We are making progress! The first document is not a problem. The second will involve some searching through the UK General Register Office. I have initiated the search.

 UPDATE 2

 Feb 2018. Halfway through radiotherapy (another story): THIS arrived:

Dear Carol,

Happy New Year!

I am delighted to inform you that ‘Bundesverwaltungsamt’ in Cologne has approved your application for naturalisation according to Art. 116 (2) Basic Law. I have just received your certificate of naturalisation, which needs to be handed out personally.

I can currently offer you dates throughout Jan/Feb/March/July for an appointment in the Embassy.

Meanwhile .....

 
Out locally campaigning for staying in the EU in the middle of radiotherapy

FINAL UPDATE

April 16th 2018: I am given my certificate of naturalization, my badge, and (later) a lot of prosecco!

My journey finally comes to an end.

I

A journey to myself ...ctd.

The 'welcome' that awaited my parents

To be honest, the fightback to preserve my identity post Brexit was going no further than a few rants on social media. And then last week I saw an article in the Guardian 'Family' supplement and everything changed. I did not know before reading it that I was entitled to apply for 'restored citizenship' thanks to a little known act passed at the end of WW2 which states:

 'Former German citizens who between 30th January 1933 and May 1946 were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial or religious grounds, and their descendants, shall, on application have their citizenship restored.' 
German Basic Law, Article 116, para 2

The phrase 'and their descendants' leaped out at me. The writer, also of Jewish descent, described how his feelings towards the nation who had destroyed his family had, over time, undergone a change. Like me, he had been favourably impressed by the way Angela Merkel welcomed refugees into the country, comparing her actions with the weasel words uttered by our own Prime Minister.

It is easy to point the finger at Nazi Germany and conveniently forget that this country's government did very little to help Jews fleeing persecution. The extract from the Daily Mail shows clearly the thinking of many people in the UK, an attitude that we have seen emerge once again thanks to the legitimization of xenophobia during the EU Referendum campaigning.

So here's the plan: I am going to apply for restored citizenship, given that I and my family will soon be restricted in our opportunities to work, study or live abroad by a set of mendacious politicians intent on promoting their own agenda. I have already emailed the German Embassy. Ideally, I'd like dual nationality, so that my family could take advantage of it too.

I am estranged from my family - and my parents are now dead, so I have little original documentation to support my application - no birth certificates or proof of residence, thus I am now researching on the internet, looking for any information about my father's Jewish parents~ my grandparents, whose names I know, but whose faces I never got to see in this world.

Wish me luck!


To be continued ....

A journey to myself

As some of you know, my parents, Hans and Suzanne Flatauer were German Jewish refugees - my mother came from Berlin, my father from Hanover. They met at an international Jewish conference. This was in the early 1930's, when many predicted, correctly, that Hitler's rise to power would mean persecution in some form. Although those who'd read Mein Kampf could deduce what form this was going to take; many people felt equally that the German population would see through Hitler and his thuggish rhetoric, and vote his party out.

As restrictions on the lives of Jewish citizens began, including their right to education (my mother had to leave Berlin University) and attacks on individual Jews went unpunished, they decided it was time to leave. My mother's family, Lotte and Richard Mannheim came with her and settled in Hendon, north London. My father's parents Raphael and Alma, affluent, highly intellectual Orthodox Jews, but maybe not so worldly-wise, decided to stay. They subsequently perished in one of the camps - part of Hitler's deadly 'Final Solution'.

In their absence, my parents' German nationality was taken away, as happened to all who fled Nazi persecution. They never went back, and I was born in the UK, grew up here, suffering racial taunting from time to time - age 7, I remember asking my mother why a kid in my class had called me 'A dirty Jew' when I had a bath every night. I was though, to all intents and purposes, a British citizen. I had a British passport then in time, an EU one. And so my 'story' might have run its course - until two weeks ago, when this country voted to leave the EU.

My parents were stripped of their German citizenship. Now I have been stripped of my EU citizenship. As it currently stands, I and my descendants will soon no longer be able to work, live, or study freely abroad. Once again, other people have removed at a stroke my 'identity'. But this time, I refuse to submit quietly.

This time, I am going to fight back.


To be continued ...