The joy of an unlikely friendship is captured in a new book

It was just an ordinary assignment, a journalist sent to do a routine interview. And yet the impact when Chitra Ramaswamy met Henry Wuga was enormous. “It felt a little bit like I’d fallen in love, you know, that feeling walking away from something flying on wings of happiness and exhilaration.”

It wasn’t romantic love though, it was the start of a beautiful friendship between the young writer, the daughter of Indian immigrants and Henry, now 98, kosher caterer to the Glasgow Jewish community who had arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport.

Chitra Ramaswamy

The friendship included Henry’s wife Ingrid, another Kindertransport child, and their daughters. It sustained Ramaswamy through times of loss, and gave her insights into the shared experience of immigrant families. And now she has told the story of this friendship in a book, Homelands, published by Canongate, which has its London launch next week.

That first interview was to mark Refugee Week, and the Wugas were chosen as subjects because they were involved in Holocaust education. They subsequently invited Ramaswamy for lunch, and she recalls, she felt “puffed up and excited” before realising that the photographer and his wife had been invited as well.

“There’s a kind of magnetism and generosity and sort of hospitality about them, which again, are characteristics that I really wanted to write about, in the context of the so called migrant and refugee crisis,” she tells me.

She wanted to celebrate “the warmth of people and and in particular of immigrants and refugees, because we understand what it means to invite someone into your home for a meal, the magic and the importance of that.”

Homelands by Chitra Ramaswamy

The friendship grew, slowly and organically, with meals and shared trips to concerts, and Ramaswamy became increasingly aware of the importance of hearing and tellingthe Wugas’ stories.

Henry grew up in Nuremburg, son of a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father. His parents sent him to the UK in 1939, when he was just 15, saying goodbye at the station not knowing if he would ever see them again. Amazingly his mother did survive the war, but Henry never saw his father again, as he died of a heart attack.

In Glasgow he was looked after by the local Jewish community. But in 1940, although he was only 16, he was accused of “corresponding with the enemy” and was interned on the Isle of Man. Hearing this shocked Ramaswamy, as she hadn’t realised that Jews were interned during the war. And even the Kindertransport was something that, although she knew about it, was important to explore further. Today, she says, the Kindertransport is often portrayed as a government’s initiative but in fact “it was the product of people on the ground and charitable organisations, both Jewish and non Jewish, and both religious and nondenominational.”

These people went to the government and persuaded the then Home Secretary to allow children in — so it was not exactly the great humanitarian gesture that we’d like to think it was. Would it happen now? She doubts it.

Ramaswamy’s parents met and married in India — an arranged marriage — and they moved to London in the 1970s, bringing up their daughters in a world which was “lovely, white, suburban, middle class”. This was another point of contact between Henry and Ramaswamy, finding one’s place in a society where you don’t always fit in.

“Henry is a very unusual figure in that he is a very liberal, proud, Jewish, German refugee, who ended up being a Jewish kosher caterer in Glasgow,” she says. His life was negotiated between “his politics and his service to the community. And I think he walked a very, very difficult line there.”

Perhaps the hardest choice came when his mother died. She had wanted to be cremated. But Henry knew that the Orthodox community that he worked in would not approve. So his mother was buried in the Jewish section of Cathcart cemetery.

Ramaswamy’s mother died of breast cancer while she was writing the book, during the pandemic, and that enormous loss is woven into the story of the friendship. Ingrid Wuga also died in 2020.

Ramaswamy found great comfort in finding similarities in their lives and stories — the sharing of food and music, the warmth of friendship — that remind her that love and loss are universal. The letters sent to Henry by his mother after the war were also a source of strength.

“The letters showed the fortitude, and the bravery of this extraordinary woman who had lost literally everything... nothing helped me more than than this woman who I’ve never met and with whom I share no cultural heritage at all. It’s amazing what gets you through. And she helped me enormously.”

In the book she quotes one of the letters in which Lore, Henry’s mother speaks of a trip to Switzerland as “the land of milk and honey” . Her own mother had used the same words to describe life in hospital.

After her mother died a Jewish friend sent her a card, saying “ Your mother showed love from the saucepan.” Like Lore, she thinks. And when she visits Lore’s grave she is struck by the coincidence that Lore died in March 1979, the month she was born.
Ramaswamy’s parents only met the Wugas — her “adopted Jewish grandparents” — once, at the Edinburgh International Festival.

“They are so different, so the same,” she writes. “ So proud. So metropolitan. So foreign. So British.” All four, she concludes “are people with ‘a talent for happiness’ as the writer Judith Kerr once described her father to me. Only now do I see how inextricable this trait is from their refugee and immigrant experience. How the forging of existence in a foreign country and the lifelong generation of identity it requires depends upon a certain aptitude for happiness.”

Optimism, she adds, is essential for the immigrant. “They came for reasons continents apart. They came for reasons as bound together as the ocean floor. History brought them here. And the shadow it casts is as long as time.”

Homelands: The History of a Friendship by Chitra Ramaswamy is published by Canongate (£16.99)

Chitra Ramaswamy will be speaking at Waterstones Piccadilly on June 14 with tickets available at waterstones.com/events/chitra-ramaswamy-in-conversation-with-ali-smith-at-waterstones-piccadilly/london-piccadilly.