SPOILER ALERT!
Much of what is told in this story
actually happened. Some more of it probably did. Some parts are complete
guesswork but they do offer a plausible explanation for some things that really
did happen.
Fact
20 Schellberg Street / Haus Lehrs
This house does exist. It has a
Stolperstein laid in front of it. Stolpersteine commemorate victims of the
Holocaust.
Not only was
Clara Lehrs a victim of the Holocaust but she can also be described as a
resister. When the Waldorf School was
closed in 1938 she allowed her home to be used to house the “Hilfsklasse” that
had operated at the school. Before that, anyway, the house, which she built
with her son, Ernst Lehrs, had been used for Waldorf School boarders.
Today we would say
the children of the “Hilfsklasse” had severe learning difficulties. Such
children were normally exterminated by the Nazi regime. There is quite an irony
here: a Jewess, herself persecuted, was hiding other persecuted people.
Clara Lehrs was
Christian, Lutheran and anthroposophist. According to the 1935 Nuremberg race laws
however she was a Jew through and through. This meant that she eventually had
to sell her house at a low price in 1939. She sold it to Emil Kühn, a family
friend and chairman of the Waldorf School organisation. She rented a room from
him for a while. Eventually she was forced to move on.
No one is quite
sure how but the “Hilfsklasse” did survive the Holocaust and managed to carry
on almost uninterrupted throughout and after World War II.
Käthe Edler and Adolf Hitler
It is true that Käthe Edler was
once shown into an ante-room next door to one where Adolf Hitler had a meeting.
It is also true that she had a small gun in her bag. It never occurred to her
to shoot him.
There were several
serendipitous occurrences that helped Käthe and Renate Edler to escape Nazi
Germany. One was that Hans Edler, Renate’s father, had connections who worked
for the government. Käthe Edler was forewarned and did get some help in
obtaining an exit visa.
Getting a child
on to the Kindertransport was not automatic or easy and not all that many
people knew about it. The Edler women were shrewd enough and feisty enough to
get themselves organised. Käthe Edler was also fortunate enough to obtain a job
in England.
This is the type
of detail that editors and publishing houses often frown at. “Never!” they cry.
“That just doesn’t happen in real life.” This is, however, a case of where
truth is stranger than fiction. What perhaps is most surprising about this story,
given the nature of the Lehrs / Edler women, is that Käthe didn’t think to use
the gun.
Renate’s story
Renate came to England on the 28
January 1938. We are now fairly certain that this was with the Kindertranpsort.
Various pieces of information we have form Renate herself and form Käthe Edler
now point to this, though her son, Martin James, thought that some sort of
private arrangement had been made. It is true that her uncles found her foster
parents and they really were the Smiths and they did live in Ealing. It is
likely that her own family paid the £50.00 bond required. So, probably she came
on the Kindertransport but paid her own way and found her own accommodation.
She really was born in thunderstorm
and christened “Klara Renate” instead of “Renate Clara”.
Her father
really used to say “Heil Edler” and she really used to hide spinach in her
cheeks.
This led to an
argument between her father and a passport official that led her to having an
adult passport that later made her passage to England easier. Children up to 17
were allowed anyway to come to England on an identity card but it was easier to
get through officialdom if they had a full passport.
She did not
speak any English when she came to England but she did pick it up very
quickly.
She attended the
Michael Hall School, a Steiner School, and was evacuated to Minehead with them.
The Smith family moved to Gloucester instead. She and her mother spent
Christmas 1941 with them.
Once she was
sixteen she was classed as an enemy alien, class B. She had to report to the
police station every day, the police station was more than ten miles from where
she was staying and she had a curfew. On one occasion she was late because she
had a puncture. A passing policeman helped her to mend the puncture and made no
issue of the fact that she was out beyond her curfew.
She did well in
school, particularly in Higher Certificate and she did like biology. She later
worked in a laboratory. She didn’t get to university but this may just have
been because life was difficult.
She lived with
her mother Käthe Edler and her friend Eva Kaiser in West Hampstead after the
war. They bickered constantly but were really the best of friends.
She had a
nervous breakdown because of worry about both her mother and her father. We are
not sure of the exact nature or of the exact time of this breakdown.
Her parents
divorced in 1942 and it looks very likely that this was forced upon them.
Both Käthe and
Renate took on British citizenship in 1947.
Käthe and Renate
had a few belongings stored in London and these were destroyed by an incendiary
bomb. What exactly they were, where they were held and when exactly this
happened or even how they were brought into England we are not sure. A few
pieces of cutlery and table linen survived.
Renate
encountered much love and kindness and was more fortunate than many other
Kindertransport children.
Dates, weather and war news
All of this has been thoroughly
researched.
Fiction
The German girls’ letters
A group of German girls did write a
class “Rundbrief” (“round robin” or class letter) and did include their class
teacher Hanna Braun. They were the girls form the Wilhelm Löhe School, class
Vb. The letters filled three volumes in exercise books and started when the
girls left the school which changed at that time also. It stopped being a
church school and was taken over by the state – with all that that meant.
Renate was not
actually included in the “Rundbrief”. She had already left the school in
December 1938.
There were too
many girls to include them all as characters in the novel. I have limited it to
six, though do include a set of identical twins. Many of the little incidents
mentioned did happen to one girl or other. Other incidents have been attributed
to various people to help the interweaving stories along. Some of the incidents
come from the invented characters of the girls and others from other research,
and refer to material happenings at specific times and in specific places.
The “Rundbrief”
ran to three volumes. We have Volume 2 available – May 1942 to November 1944.
The girls would be aged 16 to 19 then. We learn much about their
Reichsarbeitsdeinst and Kriegshilfsdienst. There is some romance, too. In the
course of this one volume they grow up a lot.
I’ve had to guess
what might have been in the other two volumes. I’ve stretched the growing up
process quite a lot. They go through various stages throughout the novel:
·
Not understanding the war or even noticing it.
·
Beginning to acknowledge some of the physical
realities of the war and of the general poverty in the late 1930s and 1940s.
·
Feeling slightly uncomfortable about the
morality of the war.
·
Fear.
·
Dawning realisation.
In actual fact, the girls did not find out the
details about Sister Kuna, Renate or the priest from Maxfeld until they met up
in 1980. Whether they do or not in the novel is left open, though we may well
suspect that they find out why Hanna Braun had to give up teaching. Even we are
not absolutely certain of why she did that.
We can only read between the lines in her letters. But it is likely she could not bring herself
to teach Nazi idealism.
The essence of
what is in the real letters does, however, influence the text in the novel.
Even the style of the letters is imitated.
Hani’s Story
Hani and her parents are completely
made up, as are all the characters with whom she interacts, except Clara Lehrs,
Karl Schubert and Emil Kühn. These three characters are also fictionalised.
Renate Edler did
have a very good friend in Stuttgart whose mother visited Clara Lehrs “in the
ghetto.” (Letter to Hanne 1 November 1980.) We presume by “ghetto” Renate meant
when Clara was living in Rexingen amongst the Jewish community there.
Renate often
told us a story about a school in Stuttgart that was not approved of by the
government. The German equivalent of the Home Guard was asked to destroy it.
They refused. Then the Hitler Youth were told to do this. They refused also.
So, they asked the Bund Deutscher Mädel,
with the threat of dire consequences if they refused. The girls set the school
alight, but not before they had got the children out and rescued all of the
teaching materials. Could this have been the Hilfsklasse held in Clara Lehrs’
house? Does the version of this story in The
House on Schellberg Street offer an explanation of how it might have been
possible for the “Hilfsklasse” to survive and carry on after the end of World
War II?
Renate’s story
The other school children, the
children she meets on the Kindertransport, the teachers at the school and the
families she stayed with are all made up.
The details
about when exactly she left the school and when and where she started work are
a little hazy. However, it seemed sensible to hold her back a year to give her
a chance to learn English. We know from one of her letters that she stayed on
at school for an extra year. She may then have benefitted from the 1944
Education Act.
We are not sure
either of exactly when and where she went on holiday but we do know that she
was invited she spent the summer holiday of 1939 with her mother and that she
went camping with her girlfriends.
We don’t know
exactly where she was on VE day, but she may well have still been on a farm in
Somerset and holding a barn dance would
have been a good option for a farming family.
She didn’t meet
up with the rest of the girls from her class in 1947. She certainly went to
Germany that year, to attend a conference, was reconciled with her father and
met her stepmother. As there was no real Hani or Frau Gödde she did not meet up
with them, but she probably did visit her best friend in Stuttgart because in
one of her letters she mentions a conversation with that friend’s mother, a
certain Frau Fink. Frau Fink apologised for what the Nazis had done to Renate’s
grandmother.