Searching for Papa’s secrets in Hitler’s Berlin
Egonne Roth
Naledi
SKU: SKU: 9781776172672
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It is a strange thing that so often when one goes to a funeral, even that of a close family member, one learns more about that person than when they were alive. It can be a time of exposure to the mysteries of the person who has passed, memories that are shared, the stories recounted, and the strangers. For Egonne Roth her volatile but charismatic father Edgar’s funeral in 1994 was a poor showing of all these things, leaving her hollow, sad, and ashamed at the "indifference of the family".
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It is a strange thing that so often when one goes to a funeral, even that of a close family member, one learns more about that person than when they were alive. It can be a time of exposure to the mysteries of the person who has passed, memories that are shared, the stories recounted, and the strangers. For Egonne Roth her volatile but charismatic father Edgar’s funeral in 1994 was a poor showing of all these things, leaving her hollow, sad, and ashamed at the "indifference of the family". Since she and her siblings had grown up in the Dutch Reformed tradition, the rituals were brief and almost without feeling. Not remembering the Papa she had known.
Some months later Stepsister drops a black file into her lap on a drive up Cape Town’s West Coast. Egonne is startled to find a bundle of papers, in German, and a family tree, but what struck her was the photocopied sheet with no heading where "Ich bin ein Volljude" (I am a full Jew) had been typed. "Suddenly it seemed that Jewish history that had always been foreign to me was in here, touching me directly." And it is in these words that the first steps of a journey are embarked upon.
Searching for Papa’s Secrets in Hitler’s Berlin took up a large part of Egonne’s life, but it places a family history within the broader history of the Europe of World War ll, giving us an intimate glimpse into shattered and rebuilt lives. It uncovers how her father’s experiences shaped her own life. Her discoveries changing Egonne’s life irrevocably, and this moving account of finding her own identity interweaves seamlessly with this historical search.
Sifting through the papers she was aware that this belonged to her paternal grandfather Opa Ernst, who had fled Berlin just before war broke out. He had abandoned his Gentile wife and "mischling" children to escape to South Africa. In 1950 his family, wife Hella and children Edgar (Egonne’s Papa) and sister Evelyn, were able to join him. Hella immediately set about divorcing Ernst and reconstructing her life for herself and the children. That life in South Africa, and those of her children and subsequent grandchildren of which Egonne is one, is documented with painstaking care drawing on the memories that Egonne stored over the years and the anecdotes gleaned from her step-siblings and friends. It is a complicated family rooted strongly in Christian principles, as Egonne herself remarks, she barely knew any Jews and the culture had not featured in her life in any way.
But this was an immigrant family and, as research has shown, immigrants can bury the past to build the future. The tendency to withhold memory is often a characteristic of trauma, silence can be a saviour. Children of Holocaust victims can attest to that. And it is that silence that Egonne strives to break as she moves forward across many years and continents to uncover her father’s secrets and her own identity.
As much as this is a memoir of Egonne’s life, drawing on the minutiae of life growing up in post-war Cape Town, this is also a biography of her larger-than-life, irascible, successful father Edgar, a serial philanderer, who, while divorcing Egonne’s mother Irma after three years, never stopped caring about her. A stepmother comes into play, whose influence, but fairly short-lived marriage, will have far-reaching consequences down the years …
It is a coming of age for the author, of choices made and rejected, of the influences of a complicated family, of conventional marriage to the faithful Lloyd and birthing three children; all chronicled as meticulously as one can when memory is called upon. With the passing of her mother in 1988, and a trip to Israel with Lloyd the trajectory of Egonne’s life starts to change in ways that she could never have imagined. In trying to understand her family Egonne is forced to face the fact of "if only I had asked more questions!" We are probably all guilty of that, taking for granted that our family are who they are until something surfaces that makes us sit up and take notice. And Egonne takes notice.
The second half of the book is devoted to the search she undertakes at the behest of her partner Yehudit. Wanting to make aliyah to Israel, she has to uncover her Jewish roots and the contents of the black file are revisited. Those documents tossed so carelessly on her lap some ten years before become the driving force in her life. Determined to uncover the truth about her father’s years in Berlin at a time when being a half-Jew denied him so much of life, they set out to find his story, and for Egonne to relook at her judgement of him, to know him and herself.
Egonne’s writing is detailed and factual, her research passionate, but she has the ability to recreate the places she visited and the people she met. I felt very much part of the story as I moved with her through the Cape Town of the latter part of the 20th Century, went with her to Auschwitz-Birkenau, followed her through the streets of Berlin, stood silently before the Stolpersteine (memorial stones outside houses commemorating those who had lived there and perished in the Holocaust) and met the people who had known and helped her father, as they fleshed out her knowledge.
An intriguing and at times mesmerizing account and one that bears re-reading.
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