By Jonathan Wittenberg
William Collins, £16.99
At first glance, this book may look like just another in a long line of family memoirs recounting the horrors inflicted by the Nazis upon beloved forebears and the new lives built up after the war by those lucky enough to survive. But Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg's chronicle of his "Dear Ones" is far more than this.
Much of his narrative takes off from a remarkable cache of documents he recently discovered, many of them written by (or to) members of his large and extended family as long ago as the late 1930s, and he also shows considerable skill as he interlinks these with the wider history of the times.
Wittenberg writes of his great-grandmother Regina, living in 1930s Berlin, and of her six children, three of whom (including Wittenberg's grandmother Ella) were in Palestine, and we read how Regina tried to get permission from the Nazi authorities to go and join them after the death of her husband. Now, Hitler was no Zionist (pace Ken Livingstone) but, as Wittenberg explains, there was a "strange confluence of interests" between the desire of the Reich to relocate its Jews elsewhere and the needs of the new and growing Jewish settlement in Palestine, and a working relationship grew up between the Nazi government and the "Palestine Trust ("Paltreu"). For a while, indeed, German Jews wishing to migrate to Palestine were more likely to be impeded by the British Mandate, anxious as ever to avoid upsetting the local Arab population.
By the time of Regina's application, Nazi policy towards Jews had hardened and she received a letter informing her that her request had been rejected.
The letter was dispatched on 9 November, 1938, a date that has gone down in history as that of Kristallnacht. Eventually, Regina joined her daughter Sophie in (German-occupied) Czechoslovakia while other family members moved on to the USA and UK.
For a while, letters continued to pass between members of the far-flung family though, as Wittenberg shows, those still within the greater Reich had to become increasingly circumspect about what they revealed. Then, war broke out and further postal communication became virtually impossible.
Remarkably, Wittenberg came across a letter written by Sophie (and her husband) to her brother Alfred in Palestine on 14 January 1943; it was clearly intended for the entire extended family. In it, Sophie says that, with Regina, they are shortly to be sent to Theresienstadt and from there possibly on to Poland: "In this manner we want to say farewell to you all and tell you, my dear ones, where you may be able to look for us after the war."
All three were subsequently transported to Auschwitz and murdered.
Wittenberg has indeed sought out his "dear ones", visited many of the sites where they lived and died, contacted survivors who might have known some of them and, above all, drawn on the letters they wrote to each other to produce what is a profound and touching narrative.
