Family Background

In 1945, the Red Army were supposed to stop short of Graz in Austria, leaving the British to enter the city. They didn’t. My mother was living in Graz at the time. She was nineteen.

She told me everybody stayed put in the city because they were expecting the British. If they’d known the Russians were coming they’d have run away. They must have known from listening to the BBC. Hitler’s government wouldn’t have told them. But my mother wanted to take her horse, Graziella, back to the country, where she came from ‘till things had settled down’.

She met two Russian tanks on the way and they captured her. They brought her to a house where one of the officers locked himself in a downstairs room with her. Luckily for my mother, a soldier came and interrupted the officer’s fun. The officer locked my mother in, but she climbed out of the window and escaped into the high mountains.

She walked all the way to Carinthia, a distance of some fifty miles as the crow flies.

She met a fanatical Nazi up there, who she’d known slightly in Graz. He was on the run too, and suggested they should cosy up together. She managed to escape from him, too. Once some peasants gave her some maize porridge, otherwise she lived on what she could find up there. In the end she was eating the bark of trees and by the time she came down on the other side she was delirious with fever. She collapsed on a road and was picked up by British soldiers, who took her to hospital in Velden.

In the end she got back to Graz, when the Russians had withdrawn, and found my grandmother safe and well because the Russian officer who’d been billeted in her house had protected her. And among the British soldiers who came to Graz to replace the Russians was my father.

My mother was lucky. She was a survivor. She wasn’t raped. She made it through, like Effi and Hanno. But there were countless others who didn’t get away, and when I was a child, I was horrified to hear that even young children were often raped. I was angry, too. Why should the innocent suffer with the guilty? It wasn’t right. It’s not, but it’s what happens.

Another story I was told was that my grandfather was denounced in 1933 and persecuted for refusing to join the Nazi party. That his commanding officer told him to go home and shoot himself, and he tried, but my grandmother stopped him. She put on her best clothes and went to plead for him with a Very Important Person. And my grandfather was saved.

Looking back seventy years later, I can wonder what kind of salvation it was. He was whipped into line. He became part of the Nazi machinery. But my mother and grandmother weren’t made destitute, as they would have been if he’d been hauled off by the Brownshirts to one of their ‘wild’ concentration camps, or just shot. The families of dissidents weren’t entitled to any help from the new Nazi state.

I wanted to find out more about this story, and a few years ago I asked the German Federal Archive in Berlin if they had any material on on my grandfather. They replied that yes, they did have a file on my grandfather, and it was so big I’d need to come to Berlin to read it. I went. Everything I read corroborated the family story. Only it was a Nazi police officer’s association my grandfather had refused to join several years before Hitler came to power.

He’d already belonged to a professional association that was Social Democratic and trade unionist, and in 1933 he was accused of being a Marxist. The story of my grandmother and the Very Important Person fits, too, because the local police authorities decided to demote my grandfather, so did the Silesian police authorities, but when the case went to Berlin, he was reinstated.

It was the story of a man who’d tried to live according to his principles. He’d been out there on the streets trying to control the battles between the Nazis and the Communists, and he’d tried his best to police even-handedly. He believed the police shouldn’t be political.

One of the ‘crimes’ that was laid to his account was that he’d refused to condemn a Communist demonstration that happened after Hitler became Chancellor (but before the wholesale persecution of the Left that took place after the Reichstag Fire. His comment was: ‘The Communist demonstration was authorised.’

He was a policeman to the core, authoritarian, suspicious, but with his own dogged idea of honour. And he was so popular with his colleagues that about ten of them took the risk of writing in his defence when he was denounced.

It was incredible to sit there with the actual documents, to handle the yellowed letter my grandfather had written in his defence on an old-fashioned typewriter. It brought me so close to the events of that time. On one occasion he’d been practising at the shooting range when a colleague had come for him with a motorbike. He’d been whisked off, completely unprepared, to be interrogated by the commission that was trying his case. The man who’d denounced him was a member of that commission.

I’d gone to Berlin almost hoping to find out something bad about him. I’d never liked him, he went in for ‘tough love’ and it alienated me. I thought maybe I’d find evidence of guilt, of participation in the Holocaust. I almost wanted to. He’d been in the Ukraine, he was a policeman. They were known to have carried out atrocities.

In our family it was known that he’d seen terrible things. Maybe he did terrible things, too, but I found nothing to incriminate him. And when I read the file, I felt more sympathy for him than I’d ever done.

I’d seen through a little window onto a small section of what was going on all over Germany in 1933. Of course there were people who were glad to see Hitler come to power. There were people who thought a bit of brutality was worth it, if order and prosperity were going to be restored. But there were other people who hated what was going on and were subdued by terror and kept in line by terror.

I don’t know what my grandfather thought a few years on, when he was getting promotions. Maybe he persuaded himself the Nazis weren’t so bad after all. Maybe there was always a part of him that hated what he’d got caught up in. And when the war came along, of course he wanted to defend his country. But he came home from the Ukraine and told my mother how much he hated what was going on there.

When I was a child, I remember finding a book of pictures of the Nazi leaders in the sitting room in his house. He’d written in his opinion of them: ‘Goebbels, the great liar,’ was one of them. He felt they’d betrayed him.

I did have a strong, strange feeling that he wanted me to tell his story. So I wrote it up and it was published in London Review of Books. But then I decided I’d write it into Kummersdorf, too. Hanno’s father is in many ways a portrait of my grandfather.

My grandfather had divorced my grandmother in the early fifties and she lived with us in England. She didn’t speak English. She loathed Hitler, he was Antichrist, she thought. You had to be careful what you said to her because she’d had so many nervous breakdowns she wasn’t like other people. It had all begun just after my grandfather’s trouble.

Just once, when I was eighteen, I asked her what life had been like in the ‘Hitler time.’ She darted a quick look over her shoulder. The ‘German glance.’ It shook me to see her do that.

She said: ‘The Party women used to come to the house, they’d look everything over, they’d look at all the books on the shelves, then they’d say: ‘You’re scum. You’ll go to concentration camp.’ It wasn’t just my grandfather who was under pressure during those months. And after his reinstatement, she took an overdose, was taken to mental hospital, and was never the same again.

She had another nervous breakdown at the beginning of the war. They came for her with a straitjacket. My mother was terrified she might be killed. There was talk about what happened to mentally ill people in hospitals. The policy had been officially stopped, but people still died mysteriously, and their relations weren’t fools.

My mother used to tell us stories about starvation, about the struggle to survive after the war, when you thought you were lucky if you found a clump of nettles, when the bread was bulked out with sawdust and gave you hideous colic, but you ate it all the same, just to have something in your stomach.

I hated those stories, because they went with ‘eat up your dinner.’ Not because of the ‘starving millions’, but because my mother had starved after the war, and when she was running away from the Russians. And if I said I didn’t like something, my mother would say: ‘If you were starving, you’d eat anything.’

I used to sit there and try to imagine being glad to eat liver, or kidneys, or tongue, or spinach. I couldn’t, it was too horrible. But it went home. My mother taught us to eat the whole apple, core and all, so nothing was wasted. Then a few years ago a bit of apple core stuck in my throat and I had a ten-minute long coughing fit. I decided then it was time to stop behaving as if I was starving.

I started to write Kummersdorf when I went to see Schindler’s List, and felt such an uprush of fury at the slaughter of Jews, I knew I’d have to write about Nazi Germany again. I hadn’t wanted to. I’d thought I’d dealt with Nazi Germany in my first novel. Only I hadn’t.

I wrote a draft. It wasn’t good enough. I put it aside and forgot about it. Then I tried again. Still it wasn’t right. And in those versions, Effi didn’t find her father. I left her walking across Germany with Hanno, hoping. I frankly didn’t think she would. It was after I read my grandfather’s file that I was able to write it properly, maybe because it had given me a sense of what it had really been like for him. So Effi found her father. There were happy endings, even then.