Authors: Jeremy Josephs
Awaiting Susi on her return was a letter from the Home Office. It was in reply to her earlier request for details of her mother's date of entry into Britain. The reply was bitterly disappointing: there was still no trace of Rosa whatsoever. Susi's diary reads:
I am beginning to wonder if she did come to this country after all. Perhaps the CBF document was just a registration number sent by post, as Jerry suggested in his letter. I have reached a blind alley in my search. But I must persevere, turn every stone until I find out what did happen to Rosa. This is the single most important aspect of the whole search.
And persevere she did, for she promptly drafted an advertisement and then forwarded it to the CBF for inclusion in its magazine, read by thousands of Jewish former refugees. Persisting, despite all the evidence to the contrary, in the belief that Rosa had indeed reached England, she made a simple plea that concealed a lifetime of longing:
INFORMATION REQUIRED
ROSA BECHHOFER. BORN 7.7.1898. REGISTERED AS A DOMESTIC SERVANT 30.4.1943. MOTHER OF TWINS. ANYBODY WHO REMEMBERS HER PLEASE CONTACT BOX NUMBER 82. URGENT.
Martina
'S
usi. You've got a sister!' It was Brigitte Hald calling from Munich. Not content with having unearthed Otto's birth certificate and several other important facts about Susi's father, the indefatigable social worker turned researcher had produced a real gem this time. Brigitte had spent nearly a year engaged in fruitless and often frustrating detective work - and then, finally, success. Having come to identify so closely with Susi's goal, she knew as she dialled her number that the news would thrill her friend, and she was proud to be the bearer.
Brigitte hurried through the sequence of events which had led her to learn of this new addition to Susi's family. The key to it all, she explained, had been obtaining the copy of Otto's birth certificate, for this had provided her with a geographical framework within which to concentrate her efforts. From that moment onwards there had followed one lead after another. She had discovered that, long before the eventual collapse of Otto and Luisa's marriage - within six months of their wedding, in fact - Luisa had given birth to a daughter. Susi spotted at once that here was history repeating itself: the child had been conceived out of wedlock, as Susi and Lotte had been before her. But there the similarity ended, for whereas Otto had deserted Rosa on learning of her plight, he had married the pregnant Luisa.
Susi's half-sister turned out to be Martina Uhlitzsch, a 46-year-old married woman born and still living in Leipzig, the second largest city in East Germany. The shock had been even greater for Martina, for it was not she who had dispatched search parties in an attempt to find long-lost relatives. She had always been well aware of the circumstances of her upbringing, indeed unhappily so. Her role in the discovery that Brigitte had made was simply to have been there, and to have displayed, after initial reservations, a willingness to help:
One evening in October 1989 I had a phone call from a Brigitte Hald. She asked if Otto Hald was my father. 'Yes,' I said, 'that's right. He was born on 16 December 1907.' She said: 'You'd better sit down!' Brigitte then explained everything to me. To begin with I thought that perhaps she was having me on, because I do tend to be a bit suspicious. But anyway I rang her back, because nobody could have known that my father was Otto Hald. That was impossible. The story just had to be true.
Just as when she had learned of the existence of the American Bechhofers, Susi was not at all sure what to do with this startling discovery. Alone at home, she had no one at that moment with whom to share it, not even her husband. But then, she had often mused, was there anyone, apart from Bertha and Brigitte, who was truly interested in the outcome of her search? By now used to dealing with these things alone, she quietly thanked Brigitte and, images of Bechhöfers and Halds flitting through her mind, sat down with a cup of tea to watch the early-evening news on the television.
Calm she might have felt, but what she saw on the screen soon changed that. The main story concerned the massive demonstrations in Leipzig, where communism was in its death throes, as indeed it soon would be throughout the German Democratic Republic. Susi recalls:
I just couldn't believe it. To begin with, I didn't even know exactly where Leipzig was. Was it East, West, North, or South Germany? And there on my telly I am suddenly looking at pictures of Leipzig, and I've just been told that I have got a sister there. There - is she out there demonstrating with the crowds, I wonder?
It was not long before the telephone rang again in Martina's home in Mozartstrasse. This time it was Susi calling. Despite the fact that her knowledge of German had long gone and Martina knew not a word of English, their first brief exchange said all that needed to be said for the moment:
'Susi.'
'Martina.'
'Schwester.'
'Sister.'
Susi remembers: 'After those few words we really weren't talking any language at all. We were just umming and aahing. And we know that we are sisters. We were both thrilled. It was a tremendous moment for the two of us. Even though we couldn't really talk to one another, we both knew exactly what was going on.'
At her end of the line Martina was in tears, as was her husband, Detlef. She might not have instigated the search, but she was just as exhilarated as Susi to have found so close a blood link to her father. Ever since the death of her mother Luisa, nine years earlier, Martina had also found herself stripped of all family. Nor had she ever tried to disguise the greatest source of sadness in her life: the inability to have a child of her own. Only a very happy marriage to a caring and supportive man had helped to ward off an ever-present undercurrent of loneliness.
Susi and Martina began to correspond, with Brigitte translating both women's letters for them. To begin with, Martina spoke highly of their father. He had always been full of life, she explained chirpily, and was the very greatest of fun to be with when she was a child. Not only that: he was also a colourful and creative personality with enormous enthusiasm for so many aspects of life. However, as a trust began to develop between the sisters, Martina became less protective of Otto. Slowly the truth began to emerge.
Her father had caused her a great deal of pain. After separating from Luisa he often insisted on taking her with him on jaunts to see various girlfriends. Forty years later, Martina still found the experience painful to talk about. Otto also sent her repeatedly to convey the same message to his estranged wife: In future there will be no more women and no more wine. For Luisa, her husband's legendary charm had long since worn thin, and she would have none of his efforts to tug at her heartstrings by using their daughter as a go-between.
And then came Martina's most grievous wound. Her beloved father - for that he had remained, regardless of his inadequacies - mysteriously disappeared with his housekeeper, never to return. Martina was just eleven at the time. It was similar to the brutal way in which he had treated Susi's mother eighteen years earlier. At least then, had he sunk to it, he could have cited the Nuremberg Laws, claiming in his defence that theirs was a proscribed relationship so that it was best for both of them that it should end. But now, under no legal threat, he could not find it in himself to say goodbye to his own daughter, preferring to slip away into the night.
Nor did Otto's hurried departure mark the end of Martina's suffering at his hands. For she witnessed her mother's anguish too, much of which was financial rather than emotional in origin. Despite her subsequent divorce from Otto, Luisa remained liable for his sizeable debts, largely unpaid tax on income from sales of his welding products in East Germany. The settlement was scarcely equitable: a deserted wife obliged to settle her ex-husband's debts while he paid nothing whatsoever in maintenance.
In the face of these formidable odds Luisa pushed herself hard. She was determined to make up for the absence of a father figure in Martina's life. Whenever she could, she would put in overtime at work so as to be able to take her daughter to concerts, and did her utmost to encourage her obvious penchant for music and the arts. With its strong musical traditions, Leipzig was an ideal place in which to live, and Martina often heard the city's celebrated Gewandhaus Orchestra and Thomaner Choir, and later on was a frequent visitor to the handsome new opera house.
Yet for young Martina the finest music in the land could never compensate for the loss of the man she had adored, and throughout her teens she often wondered if she had in some way been responsible for his flight. She pondered too how different her life might have been if she had been more effective as a go-between. Inwardly she would rebuke herself for not having tried harder. Throughout her adolescence, and indeed beyond, hardly a day went by in which she did not think of her father: her every thought about him a potent cocktail of love, anger and sadness.
Amid all Martina's revelations about their father's behaviour was something else that had an equally profound effect on Susi. One of Martina's letters to Susi contained a photograph of Otto. For the first time Susi could see what her father looked like. But it was not his face or build that most struck her when she first set eyes on the ageing print. The photograph showed a German soldier kitted out in a standard-issue greatcoat, a rifle slung over his right shoulder, and, sitting squarely on his head, the all too familiar steel helmet of the war years. This was Otto Hald, her father. But was he not also the enemy?
'When I saw that photograph,' Susi recalls, 'I was really quite shattered.'
When you embark upon a project like this, you have to be prepared for absolutely anything. And really in a way this is the scenario that I didn't want to see. But at the same time he's my father there, standing in his German uniform. In my fantasy I had wanted him to be this dashing man, who was perhaps somebody I could have loved. I'm not saying that I can't love him. Just that I obviously can't love what he is standing there representing - the enemy.
Then a series of photographs of Otto began to arrive from Martina via Brigitte. Having been deprived of any information about her roots all through her life, Susi felt the need to surround herself with these images of the father she had never known. Her husband was far from pleased. 'It was all very well for her,' he insists, 'but I could hardly understand how she would want to exhibit all of those photographs around the house when he had caused such an upheaval. Otto looks rather miserable to me He was also rather naughty in my view - a ladies' man through and through.'
Susi stands by her decision:
In fact, I put those photographs of Otto up because a lot of the information about my father has been very distressing for me. I just find that out of the two father figures in my life -well, I wouldn't have chosen either of them. I feel as if I have been abused by them both, although in different ways of course. So surrounding myself with his photographs was a way of trying to come to terms with some sort of father figure. So there was a method in my madness.
But her plan was not entirely successful, because with the passage of time the appeal of Otto's portraits began to fade, just like the black and white images themselves. Susi came to realize that the rather doleful figure staring at her from the living-room mantelpiece and elsewhere in the house simply represented pain for everyone concerned. Rosa Bechhöfer had suffered at his hands. Susi and Lotte had too. Eventually all the photographs were consigned to the loft, Alan breathing a sigh of relief as he stored them away.
In the meantime Susi had come to accept her father as he was, aware of the fact that she had 'let Otto off the hook'.
I don't know why, but I do. I choose to attribute a lot of his 'bad behaviour' more to the times than to my father as such, because Otto was Aryan and Rosa was Jewish - and he must surely have been left with no alternative other than to leave her. I just can't bring myself to view him as being all tied up with the Nazis and Nazism. I say that just because Otto was
the
enemy that doesn't make him
my
enemy. What I do realize, though, is that a considerable chunk of the fantasy which I had about my father - as a dashing and debonair young officer who had loved and struggled hard to be with my mother -was, to quite a large degree, hogwash. So that has been rather painful for me to look at too.
Sally George, the TV producer, was aware of the dramatic progress Susi had been making in her search for her roots. During that time they had often discussed the idea of a documentary about Susi. Sally had ruled out the idea of her featuring in the programme on the Kindertransport children, for the good reason that Susi could not remember what had happened to her, whereas she needed subjects who could. In the light of Sally's decision, and knowing how complex a business it was to make a television film, Susi had taken a phlegmatic view of her story's chances of ever reaching the screen. Nor did she imagine that the discovery of a half-sister in Leipzig would change matters much.
But when Susi told her the news Sally saw at once that here was too good an opportunity to miss. She resolved instantly to do her best to be there with a film crew to record Susi and Martina's first meeting. Aware that she must act rapidly, within weeks she had won the necessary consents for a programme to be made. After eighteen months of stop-start discussions and delays, the filming of 'Whatever Happened to Susi?' could at last get under way.
In anticipation of the journey, Susi wrote in her diary:
Back to Munich after 50 years. It is the right time. Here I will absorb my past left behind and integrate it with the present. I believe that Martina is the gift that will replace my father's absence. I thank God for the many many people who are enabling me to make this unique journey.
It was Brigitte Hald who, efficient as ever, had arranged for the sisters to meet in Munich, the collapse of communism now enabling her to travel freely to the West. As Susi waited on the platform at the city's main station, Martina's train was fast approaching the Bavarian capital, having travelled south from Leipzig through an East Germany in transition, before crossing the Danube and entering the last stage of the journey. Although they had exchanged many letters and photographs, both women wondered, with a mixture of apprehension and excitement, what it would be like to actually see and hold each other for the first time.
At last the train pulled in and there was Martina. Beside her was Detlef, Teddy as she called him, who had no intention of missing the big moment. Susi recalls:
And then I saw her. Well, you just want to hold one another and say: 'This is it. We are sisters. We have the same father.' And I can actually acknowledge for the first time that I had a father. That might seem a strange thing for someone in their fifties to say, but that was the truth of it. I was actually able to acknowledge that here was something real of my father - in the form of Martina. So everything inside just opened up and I guess I felt feelings that I've not experienced before. That was quite frightening in a way. But I'm sure that Martina felt the same way. I hadn't bargained for such an emotional moment at all.