Books
Review: Life and Love in Nazi Prague
This book is one more remarkable piece in the unknowable and uncompletable jigsaw of European Jewry in the 1940s, says Jenni Frazer
August 27, 2019 09:50
2 min read
This book is one more remarkable piece in the unknowable and uncompletable jigsaw of European Jewry in the 1940s, says Jenni Frazer
August 27, 2019 09:50Life and Love in Nazi Prague by Marie Bader (Eds: Kate Ottevanger and Jan Lanicek. Trans: Kate Ottevanger. Bloomsbury Academic, £20)
Holocaust literature and history form a vast, seemingly unplumbed river, of fiction, fancy, memoir and misery. Life and Love in Nazi Prague is different. It is the true story of a late-life love affair, conducted entirely by letter, between wartime Prague and Thessalonika, in Greece.
Between 1940 and 1942, widow Marie Bader, based in Prague, and her distant cousin, Ernst Lowy, in Thessalonika, exchanged dozens of heartfelt letters, the more heartbreaking because the reader can sense the Nazi net tightening as the war continues.
The letters were found — a cache of 154 of them, all but two of which were written by Marie to Ernst — by Marie’s great-grandson, Jeremy Ottevanger, in a suitcase in the attic of his parents’ house.
Jeremy works at the Imperial War Museum but it is his mother Kate’s painstaking detective work of editing, together with Jan Lanicek, and translating her grandmother’s correspondence, that brings this love story to life.
As Kate Ottevanger quietly records in her afterword, she and her sister did not even know they were Jewish until she was 12, yet one more painful legacy from the past, as Jews who felt they had been singled out for their difference struggled to blend in with their new host communities.
Kate never met her grandmother, who died in the camps after being deported in 1942. Ernst did not survive the war, either.
But the letters — full of longing — show a cheerful and optimistic woman, striving always to look on the bright side and even cheekily invoking the good opinion of “Herr Censor” whom she knew would be reading her letters. Frequently, the exasperated censor adds the note: “Please keep it brief!”
We learn, through her delicate use of language, how restrictions on Jews increasingly made her life difficult, from only two food shopping hours a day (between 3 and 5pm) to having to move flats at the direction of the Jewish Council, which was charged with enacting many of the Nazi regulations.
Jews could no longer use public parks, so Marie’s fresh air was obtained through walks in the Jewish cemeteries. Throughout it all, Marie’s great good humour shines through. Since there are only two surviving letters from Ernst, it is hard to know whether he faced life as a Jew in Nazi Greece with such equanimity.
Marie’s two daughters, referred to throughout the correspondence as “the friends”, had managed to escape to Britain and were living in Sheffield.
It is almost impossible to know, had Marie and Ernst survived, whether the great love affair would have blossomed as Marie believed it would. Perhaps it was the correspondence itself, and the hope it offered in the lifeline of a letter or a card, which kept them going.
Whatever the case, this book is one more remarkable piece in the unknowable and uncompletable jigsaw of European Jewry in the 1940s.
Jenni Frazer is a freelance writer
