Monique Charlesworth’s children knew not to ask questions to which they didn’t want honest answers. Having grown up with a Holocaust survivor mother in house where secrecy reigned, Charlesworth was determined “to always tell them the truth, no matter how tough that truth was”.
But it was only recently that she understood the extent of what her beloved mother had been concealing. She knew, of course, that Inge had escaped wartime Germany via Morocco as a young teenager, eventually marrying an English soldier. That much Charlesworth had fictionalised in her novel The Children’s War. Beyond that? It turned out she knew very little.
When Inge died in 2019 in France, Charlesworth began exploring her combative, passionate mother’s life story.
It was a life Inge had done her best to create; telling nobody she was originally German, lesser still that her father had been a Jewish communist murdered in Auschwitz. To her friends, even of long vintage, she was merely an eccentric British expat.
Such dissembling was just the tip of the iceberg.
Without offering spoilers, Charlesworth uncovered uncertainties about her own parentage, stark untruths about her mother’s romantic affairs, and overt lies that had paralysed her and her sister Lorie’s relationship. She learned, for example, that her mother’s second husband Rene had believed he was her father; that her real father Tom was not the baddie Inge had made him out to be.
“I was primed to believe my mother was a kind of sacrificial victim of my father, she was virginal, good, she was betrayed, he was the betrayer,” says Charlesworth, the author of four novels and now a memoir, Mother Country, about Inge’s life.
516uoNxsb2L. SY344 BO1,204,203,200
Looking back, she is astounded she never interrogated her mother’s version of events and ignored obvious signs; why, for example was she sent to holiday as a teenager on the French Riviera with Rene and his then-wife? Why did her mother keep quiet about her Jewish heritage?
Her devotion to her mother clouded her judgment.
“I absolutely worshipped her. I wasn’t going to disagree with her, I was the good girl, but there were fundamental chasms that were there in plain sight.”
The book attempts to solve some of the mysteries of Inge’s life, as well as looking at her youth and her father’s endless run-ins with the Nazis, before his deportation to Drancy. Four years after Inge’s death, Charlesworth feels she knows her mother far better — and has some closure.
“As soon as you understand everything, the rage goes away,” she says. “As soon as you understand the reasons for the behaviour, you forgive.”
But in the months after Inge died, she was desperate to sit down with her mother and say, just talk to me, tell me the truth.
“I thought I knew her extremely well — that’s the tragi-comedy in this, I would have said I knew her better than anybody and it turned out there were huge parts of her that I didn’t know.”
She grieves for what her mother’s lies cost. “The moment I thought my father wasn’t my father, and she was dead and was never going to tell me, I was absolutely enraged,” she says. She had almost no relationship with her father “because he was the baddie and therefore to know him was not a good idea”, she says.
“By the same token I never got to discover my stepfather. She was married to him for a decade, he believed he was our father, I was named to please him, and yet we never had a conversation. I had two fathers and I never really got to know either of them.” But she is sanguine, saying her mother did not create the situation deliberately.
“We were collateral damage, these things happened because she protected herself.”
Equally, Inge obliterated the relationship between the sisters; claiming that Lorie had chosen to live with her father, rather than that Inge had essentially turned her out.
“My mother definitely divided and conquered,” she explains. Lorie — a lawyer — interrogated Inge’s stories, whereas Monique — the writer — was happy to embrace the fiction. “She was the child who asked questions, because she understood there was something going on, she was cast as the bad girl.”
Happily, the two are now reunited. “The second my mother died it was like a forcefield was gone. We started talking and once we started talking we couldn’t stop,” she says.
Inge’s mother was Lutheran; she grew up with no Jewish involvement and saw her father’s religion as the source of her troubles. On finding out of her mother’s Jewishness as a pre-teen, Charlesworth, swept away by romantic ideas, felt she’d found her tribe.
“We found out by chance, she would never have told us,” she says. “She literally knew nothing about the religion and associated it with the Nazi horrors and terrible things happening to them. She totally rejected that side of herself.”
“For me it was this extraordinary, romantic thing, the idea of this exotic background, I read Leon Uris’ Exodus and that was it, for me Jews were heroes,” she says. “It was coming home.”
With many children it would have been a passing phase; in fact, Charlesworth ended up converting after meeting her husband Alex while a student at Bristol. He too was a second-generation survivor; his mother had survived the Warsaw Ghetto and narrowly escaped Pruszków transit camp. Their wedding was the first time Inge set foot in a synagogue.
“I only ever was attracted to Jewish guys,” she says. “How much is it something you create in your own mind, and how much is it genuine? I think there’s something in the genetic suit.
When I met my husband I was utterly besotted and wasn’t to be persuaded out of it.”
Not that her mother didn’t try, telling Charlesworth “choosing to be Jewish is the equivalent of walking yourself into the gas chamber, which is pretty tough when you’re young and in love”.
In a twist that would likely have shocked her secular German Jewish ancestors, Judaism has been a defining part of Charlesworth’s adult identity.
“Nobody would say I was a pillar of the community,” she says of West London Synagogue, where she converted and married. But they raised their children as Jews, and she says it’s absolutely part of her, “a beautiful part of me”.
She acknowledges that she has the privilege of being “relaxed” about her Jewishness; for her mother it was life and death. “That is the tremendous luxury that was unimaginable for her,” she says.
While Inge came round to Alex, “it wasn’t possible to conceive of being Jewish as something you could enjoy in a cultural way, in a spiritual way, in a gastronomic way. For her it just was a danger.”
Although the book looks at her mother’s falsehoods in a no-holds-barred way, this is no misery memoir. “I’m not at all a victim, I can’t repine over these relationships,” she says. She’s just intrigued at all the signs she missed.
“I’ve had a really happy life, but as the child of a single mother never to have understood or known any of this is quite puzzling to someone as nosy as me.”
She urges other people to ask questions while they still can — even if she never could with Inge. “The view we have of our parents is this carapace that they create in order to raise us, and so we don’t really know them as people. It’s quite nice to break that and find out what they’re really like underneath,” she says.
But having kept her life under a veil of secrecy, Charlesworth knows Inge “would have been appalled and horrified and shocked and absolutely furious about having her cover blown”. She had sleepless nights worrying about this betrayal.
Still, she thinks and hopes forgiveness would have eventually come. Her mother, the ultimate performer, might well have been thrilled to be the star of the book. “I like to feel she would have enjoyed it.”
‘Mother Country’ is published this week by Moth Books
