But several years ago,Sonja’s nephew,who lives in Taiwan,visited Melbourne with a bundle of letters that had lain hidden for decades. They were addressed to his mother,Ursel,and Sonja herself. They were written by Toni and Lotte.
Sonja’s nephew felt they should now be hers. And anyway,they were in German and needed to be translated.
My family may never know why Ursel concealed these letters until she died in 1999. I believe grief and trauma shaped her life in ways we cannot comprehend.
I began transcribing the letters with Sonja,as she read them aloud and then translated them from German. When her eyesight deteriorated,I had the rest translated professionally.
In the lines of the delicately folded paper,I saw a mother desperately trying to parent her two children from an impossible distance.
Sonja had been reunited with Ursel in Scotland by late 1939 at the Whittingehame Farm School,which took in Kindertransport children.
Throughout 1939 and 1940,Toni wrote dozens of letters. In almost every correspondence,she pleads:“Please write me everything in detail.”
A mother’s affection leaps from the pages. “Many warm greetings and kisses from your mother who loves you,” she wrote to Sonja.
I cannot reconcile the tenderness Toni expressed for her children with the coolness of her final goodbye in Sonja’s memory. Perhaps Toni wanted to ease the pain of that awful separation? Or maybe Sonja’s recollection of Toni as a remote character has helped her survive the devastating loss of a mother willing to do the unthinkable to save her child?
Lotte’s writing is quite different. It is spicy and teems with sibling tension. She chides Ursel for asking for a “parcel”. “We don’t have any money,” Lotte wrote. “Please be so good and don’t compare yourself to other children.”
I wonder if Lotte had envied her younger sisters and felt she was missing the adventure. “Are there many Jews in Scotland?” she asks. “You must already be very brown. You go to the sea so often.”
Occasionally,Toni offered a glimpse of her despondence. In April 1940,she wrote about her loneliness days before the Jewish festival of Passover and her despair at the prospect of being alone for the ritual meal.
“I can tell you I am very worried about[how] I will spend Seder. I am so wretched because I am alone and last year we were all together.”
The letters gave me an intimate connection to my lost relatives. I had to know what had happened to them.
‘Keep asking questions’
I began contacting Jewish history experts who handballed me between colleagues until I found Michael Wermke,professor of religious education at the University of Jena in Germany. He specialises in Jewish life in Nazi Germany.
I emailed him during the depths of lockdown,and he responded almost immediately. We began corresponding,sometimes multiple times a week.
When databases drew a blank and my search seemed hopeless,Wermke urged me on. “Don’t hold back,keep asking questions,” he said.
I sent him copies of the letters. He explained that Sonja’s survival was only possible because of Toni’s determination. He believes Toni sent Sonja to Steckelsdorf hoping she would escape to Palestine,but changed course when Britain became a more certain option.
Wermke said Toni must have urged and even hassled community leaders to secure places for Sonja and Ursel on the Kindertransport. “She had no money,” he said. “She had only herself.”
This fight to save her children and remain involved in their lives was a form of resistance against Nazi oppression. “It’s very important to show this,” Wermke said. “They were not only hapless victims.”
For a while,Toni appeared to hold hope the family would be reunited. In July 1939,she wrote to Ursel instructing her to remain in Britain rather than trying to reach Palestine alone. “If you go to Eretz[the land of Israel] earlier,it will be a long time until we see each other,” Toni warned.
However,the last letter we have from Toni was sent in May 1940. About this time her life took another bleak turn.
Late last year,I requested a report about Toni and Lotte from the Wiener Holocaust Library. When it landed,the thrill of discovery gave way to the crushing realisation of tragedy.
The library found identity cards revealing Toni was sent to work for the German company,Siemens,in Berlin,which has since expresseddeep regret for its use of slave labour during the Holocaust. Lotte was sent there soon after.
Although the company does not have records of Toni and Lotte working there,it confirmed there were up to 100,000 forced labourers at Siemens,some of whom were undocumented. They were segregated from the broader workforce.
In October 1941,Toni and Lotte were deported to the Lodz ghetto in Poland,where Jews were cut off from the rest of the city and forced into atrocious conditions. Many of its inhabitants succumbed to starvation and disease.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum,about 210,000 people were forced to live in the Lodz ghetto.
The Nazis again used forced labour and by July 1942,there were 74 workshops in the ghetto,many producing textiles for military uniforms.
The deportation to Lodz is the last trace I have found of Toni and Lotte’s existence.
They would never know that Sonja engaged in her own kind of resistance soon after leaving the Whittingehame Farm School. After turning 18 ½,she joined the British army’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. Sonja was designated an “enemy alien” and restricted to limited duties,working as a store woman.
She found acceptance in the army,but also loneliness. “When I had my 21st birthday,I sat there on my own,and I never had a letter or call or anybody wishing me a happy birthday. Nobody,” Sonja said,wistfully. “That’s when I felt really alone.”
After the war ended,Sonja never got the chance to tell Toni and Lotte about how she answered the door in her dressing gown to find a dapper returned Jewish soldier called Ralph Cohen (later changed to Cowan) unannounced at her Glasgow apartment,hoping to meet the beautiful young woman he’d heard about.
“I was just about to wash my hair,” she told me with a glint in her eyes. “He said,‘I’m a hairdresser,I’ll do it for you’.” And he did,running his fingers through Sonja’s hair in the kitchenette sink.
Toni and Lotte were not there to dab away tears at seeing Sonja in her borrowed wedding dress when she married Ralph. In 1947,Sonja gave birth to the first of three daughters in Glasgow whose cheeks Toni and Lotte would never pinch.
When Ralph suggested they move to Australia in 1962 for better work opportunities and warmer weather,Sonja agreed,even though she had barely heard of the place.
And today,her daughters never tire of laughing at how Sonja danced all night to jazz bands on the boat to Australia while they were green with seasickness.
Later,Sonja started working at the Red Tulip factory in Prahran,with plenty of chocolate and no German shepherds to steal it.
I was born in 1979 — the first of her four grandchildren — and her house became like a second home. When my children were born,she demanded yet more hugs and kisses from them — there are never enough.
As dusk settled on Sonja’s birthday party,her restless great-grandchildren rolled around at her feet as guests began to leave.
Despite her failing eyesight,Sonja was struck by the big extended family that had wrapped around her after spending so much of her youth alone.
“I really felt like somebody.”
Yet,I somehow felt the absence of Toni and Lotte at that party. So,I’ll keep searching for them because so many questions remain.
What happened after the letters stopped? Who might they have become had their lives not been tragically cut short?
Toni’s words will be urging me on,imploring me to look for every detail.