Episode 2 — one childhood, four countries
My grandmother pretends that she doesn’t speak German. Not a word. But one day, still in the post-surgery limbo, she called somebody… in German. Actually, she spent her first years in Hamburg and was educated by a German governess, who was with her through all her childhood, until shortly before the war she married a Gestapo man. “ She was a wonderful woman, she was like a mother to me. After the war, I was trying to find her but there was no trace of her…”
The marriage of my great grandmother wasn’t happy. Rega Taube, the mother of my grandmother got married, based on her mother’s choice, without even being introduced to her husband. She knew his last name, Scharf, but didn’t ask what his first name was until they were in the train that was taking them to their honeymoon, first in France and later in the United States.
After their return, this Polish couple of Jewish origin decides to live in Hamburg, where my grandmother is born in 1929. Her father wants to give her a biblical name of Shulamit but her mother disagrees fiercely. The name is chosen randomly from the phone book: she’ll be called Viola (still with Shulamit as her middle name!). Fortunately, Rega has a good political sense and, fearing Hitler, forces her husband to leave Germany before 1933. They settle in Belgium.
Education is still pretty tough at the time. At a camp, at the age of 6, my grandmother gets locked in a room for two weeks for refusing to eat her breakfast oatmeal. And when she wets her pants, all the kids are told to lift her skirt to witness her shame. “ I still remember it today” she was telling me at 85. Here it is for the advocates of the “old time” education.
In 1934, the family moves to London for my great grandfather’s business. Viola goes to school, where she is instructed in religion. At least, according to her, she hears “stories” from the Old Testament. In my childhood, my grandparents were telling me “tales and legends” of the Ancient Rome, Greece, Brazil, Mexico … and the biblical stories were part of them. I don’t think my grandmother was exposed to any religious practice in her childhood. But the biblical stories will continue to interest her, namely in studying English language literature, her future profession.
Her father makes money mostly by stock market speculation. One does not always win in this game. To the point that he is broke and twice all their possessions are taken. “I remember an empty house. Everything was taken away, clothes, toys… I only had one dress and one doll left”. Since the relationship between Rega and her husband were already tense, he returns to Poland and she rests in England.
Then comes the worst idea at the worst possible time. To set things strait, Rega and Viola go for a visit to Poland in the beginning of 1939. At about the same time, Rega’s brother Zyga Taube and his wife decide to stay in the US, where they went on business. They make their son Tad join them from Warsaw. Before getting on the boat that takes him from France to New York, he travels through Germany, at the gates of war, with a passport that identifies him as a Jew.
My grandmothet is not that lucky. Their return tickets to England are booked for … September 9, 1939. At the beginning of the fighting, Rega goes to see count Livio Tripcovitch, the representative of the Adriatic Bank and the significant other of her half sister Lucja. She asks him to arrange visas for Italy. “ If you don’t get me these visas, I go back home. I kill my mother. I kill my daughter. I send a letter to my sister to tell her that and I kill myself”.
