II. ENGLAND

I can run and I can hop

(Childrens’ song)

1. Dark Winter

Life is full of choices; one can go one way or the other. However, the foundation of our lives is formed by accidental events, unexpected incidents and decisions initiated by others. I therefore begin my story with the time, place and conditions into which I was born. They form my fertile ground.

I cannot wriggle free of my beginnings, born as I was in December 1942, the darkest winter of war, as a child of Austrian refugees in England. After the war I lived as the child of refugees returning to post-war Vienna, then an occupied city in ruins. The war as well as the first postwar years certainly shaped my life, although I was far too young to really remember anything from that time. However, I know that a long chain of war-related injuries – bombs, shelters, hospitals, isolation, evacuation, coupled with insecurities and traumas my parents carried – gave my young life drama.

I don't remember the sirens of WW2, and yet I kind-of collapse when bomb alarms in Kyiv come on the television. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the war that followed reveal a trace into the country of my childhood and awaken memories of the war I was born into but that I don't have, can't have, even though I know I've experienced it. My body obviously remembers. The images and sounds of today feel familiar and unsettling. The war has determined much of my life, similar to what is happening in Ukraine today and probably will shape many years to come. On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded its neighboring country, Ukraine. Russia's leader wanted a more cooperative government in Ukraine and also an incorporation of Ukraine into a Greater Russia. "Heim ins Reich" was the name given when Nazi Germany in 1938, in a similar move, invaded and incorporated first Austria, then the Sudetenland and later many other European countries. When Ukraine came under total attack, millions fled, were injured and killed. That's what war is.

Ukraine is: my memory of war, my profession and my ancestry. When I hear Ukrainian sirens wailing on TV and see Ukrainian families huddled together in Kiev’s metro stations, a vague memory of bomb alarms in London in June 1944 is awakened in me. Was it like this when my nursery school sought refuge in the London Underground when the Germans began their bombing campaign with V1 missiles over England? V stood for Vergeltung, retaliation, a response to the Allied D-Day a week earlier. I stare wide-eyed at the screen when Ukraine is on: “Was that how it was? Am I the one down there in the metro?” Curious thoughts wander around my brain, I try in vain to find myself in the metro crowd: “Was that how it was when I was on the platform with other children? We huddled together, sang children’s songs, danced in circles and took naps.

In reality, I can't remember anything from that time; I was far too young. I don't remember the crowds on the platforms or the sirens, and yet I collapse when the bomb alarm comes on the television. Kyiv awakens terror and recognition in me. The sound and sight awaken a memory that I don't really have, can't have, even though I know I've experienced it. My body obviously remembers it.1 It freezes. The images and sounds of today's Ukraine feel familiar and unsettling. The war in Ukraine reveals a trace into the country of my childhood and awakens memories of the war I was born into and that gave my life drama, anger and a pinch of my vital nerve. It was a long chain of war-related injuries: bombs, shelters, hospitalisation, isolation, evacuation coupled with my parents' trauma.

A few years ago I pulled myself together and travelled to Withington in the South of Manchester, my place of birth according to my pink hanswritten birth certificate; December 29, 1942 is given as the date. I aimed for the Maternity Ward at the Community Hospital where I was born, but also for the house where my parents lived with me at the time: 45, Clyde Road.

It is easy to get there today: an air plane to Manchester, a train to Withington, a short walk. The maternity ward has gone, a new hospital was opened in 2005. The house we lived in is still there. I always imagined my mother having to walk far on her way to give birth, but no, two blocks away from what then was the maternity ward stands my first home. I went to see the house and stood in front of it staring in disbelieve at a typical English red brick building and greedily absorbing the impression of the place where my life began. Countless white sash windows, an alley of chimneys on the top, and a heap of bins confirm the notion of archetypical Britishness. I gazed at the house a minut or two, a shiver running down my spine, as if only now I had found the last piece of life’s mosaic, the final proof of my existence. “So / this is / where it / began,” I stammered.

2. Who my parents were

When I read other people's life stories, they sound as if the authors knew exactly what kind of family home they came from. Many are able to describe their background in unambiguous terms: a doctor's detached house, a working-class family in a back house, a judge's home in a provincial city, a farm in the countryside... My childhood home wasn't like that. It took me years to realise who my parents really were, what homes they came from, and how they became who they were.

My parents were as different as night and day, although they also had a lot in common. One thing they shared with many others was that they started out small and ended up in good financial standing. They stayed together from the first day they met until death separated them more than 60 years later. They didn't live in bliss and harmony; there was a lot of yelling and screaming in the house, but they lived with each other in solidarity and with great loyalty.

If I had to place my parents socially with a single word at the time I was a toddler, it would be: refugees. Refugee is a generic term that needs neither profession nor place to find the right box to place someone in. Being a refugee is something you learn by doing. It is a fluid category: one is rarely a refugee throughout life. My parents weren't; they later led a completely different life. But in the late 1930s, both my parents fled from Vienna to England – by different routes and for different reasons. If they hadn't run off, they probably wouldn't have survived, they wouldn't have met at an Austrian Centre meeting in January 1942, and I wouldn't have been born in December.

My parents' youth in Vienna, their life in exile in England, and their return to Vienna after the war made a decisive impact on who they were and who I became.

3. Making it into the world_

At the end of 1942, my mother gave birth, i.e. I was born. “The birth was terrible. The water broke at two o'clock in the morning and I had no idea what to do. I sat on the toilet and let things happen. The baby almost dropped into the toilet bowl,” my mother once told me. Having given birth myself, it gives me goosebumps to think about her  situation. Anyway, I made it into the world, albeit prematurely. My mother cried a lot. She cried and cried and cried. She was together with forty women at the hospital, all stangers who spoke Mancunian-English slang, which she barely understood. She felt all alone. My father came to the hospital five days after my birth. He later apologised: “I didn't believe that a baby could be born in December, when it was due in January.” How naive they both were. My mother was alone, far away from family and friends, and my father had many other priorities and didn’t visit before some days into January. According to his register book (which was obligatory for refugees and which he kept), he worked in nightshifts as toolmaker for Moulders Engineer in Altrincham, a busdrive away.

As is the tradition in Great Britain, an employee from the municipality came to the  maternity ward to register the newborn children and issue an handwritten birth certificates with the child's name. My mother was unprepared and had no idea what to call her baby. “What name did you choose?” she asked her bed neighbour. “Helen” was the reply. That's how I got my first name. There are two names on my birth certificate: Helen and Liesl. Liesl is a distinctly Austrian first name; My parents dreamed of returning to Austria as soon as the war was over. My mother hoped to see her parents again, my father wanted to help build a new Austrian society. It was for patriotic reasons I was given this Austrian name. Actually, Liesl was popular with Austrian emigrees. When I was 8 years old, we went on an excursion to an Austrian resort together with others from the former British exile: Nine Liesls participated. Every time a mother called out “Liesl!” nine children would look up believing it was them being mentioned.

When my mother returned to her husband and their rented room with me, their tenancy was terminated because I cried, as babies are in the habit of doing. My parents had to move at once, finding a new place close by, which they did. What a hard beginning for the young parents. My mother never forgot the unjustice done to her in the middle of all the commotion that comes with a newborn. She often commented: "They knew the baby would cry; they could have told as before." My father’s mother, who also was a refugee from Vienna, came over from London to help but didn’t stay; the two woman didn’t get along well. Grandma then went to Brighton where a friend of hers lent her baby clothing. No doubt, seen from today’s standards, they all were quite poor; Whatever they owned could be in a suitcase.

After six months my mother went back to work in a factory sending her baby, i.e. me, to a nursery; she was allowed to come twice during working days to feed me. She was extremely unhappy; She missed her parents terribly, she had no contact with them whatsoever, had no idea where they were as all correspondence with Vienna had stopped as soon as the war began. She knew nothing, did not know that her parents already had been deported and killed, but she feared the worst. And she didn’t like Manchester at all. She had lived in London before meeting my father and had made friends there through the Austrian refugee organisation “Young Austria” at Westbourne Terrace in Paddington after difficult years in other British places.

In September 1943, I was nine months old, my parents moved with me from Manchester to London. The move was risky, my father told me later; it wasn’t easy to find housing and work. First, they moved in with my grandmother who had a little flat at 278, Elgin Avenue, close to the Underground station Maida Vale. Grandma looked after me and picked me up from the Austrian day care nursery which was connected to The Hampstead War Nursery, established by Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna. By end of October, my father found employment as fitter with Clews Petersson Piston Rings, at Mills Lane in West Hampstead. In November, my parents found a small basement apartment at 83, Brondesbury Rd, in Kilburn. We were settled. At least until June 1944 when Germany launched terror bombing raids with silent supersonic ballistic V2-missiles (flying buzz bombs without pilots). They were Nazi Germany’s answer to D-Day, the Allied landing operation in Normandy on June 6th. London. V stood for Vergeltung, vengeance.

My nursery often sought shelter in London’s Underground. I don't remember anything from that time, I was way too young. But I stare wide-eyed at the screen when I hear Ukrainian sirens wail on TV and see Ukrainian families huddled together in Kyiv Metro stations. A vague memory of the bomb alarms in London unexpectedly awakens in me. Curious thoughts float around my brain; I cringe. I try in vain to find myself on the crowded platform together with other kids, singing children's songs and taking midday naps. The sound and the images evoke a memory I don't have, that I can't have. It feels familiar and unsettling. Today’s war in Ukraine reveals a trail into the country of my infancy,

The bombing of London gave my life its first blow. Down there, on the platform of the London Underground, we children infected each other with measles. Afterwards, I was lying with a high fever in my family’s lodging, sheltered in an alcove under a window. One night there was a huge bang: pressure waves blew the window in; shards of glass spread over my cot. My mother came rushing in, looked at me in panic, looked down the street; A house in the neighbourhood had collapsed when one of the unpredictable V-bombs hit. As the night progressed, my fever rose, measles turned into pneumonia and I was hospitalized. After ten days, my mother could come to pick me up again from the isolation ward at St. Mary’s hospital in Paddington. Of course, I only know about this from my mother’s account. While I was in hospital, my parents moved from the destroyed apartment to a terraced house nearby:18, Priory Rd.

When I returned from the hospital, everything had thus changed: my parents lived in a new place, and so did my day nursery. And V-bombs kept coming flying. The authorities called on all Londoners to relocate infants and schoolchildren for as long as the bomb attacks lasted. In August 1944, all the children and the staff of my day nursery moved to Glasgow in Scotland and stayed there for an entire year – without me. I have heard this story from several people throughout my childhood and got it confirmed by the life story of Hannah Fischer, the head of Austrian Center’s preschool group in London (Centropa.org: The Archive, Jewish witness in the 20th century; Country: Austria; Biographies).

“What will happen to the child? Should she also be moved away from the bombs?” – that was the question. The mere thought of sending me away made my mother desperate. My father, on the other hand, thought it to be the only responsible solution in face of the incoming V-bombs. In this generation, a man's word carried the most weight. He contacted a former colleague and friend from his time in Manchester and asked if he and his wife could take me while the bombing continued. – “Yes, of course,” was the answer. “We will be happy to take her; she will be doing well with us.” My mother took me there by train. She hoped to stay with me but that proved impossible. The couple had said yes to take the responsibility for a toddler not to housing a mother with child. My stay with Minnie and Lesley Leah lasted from August 1944 to August 1945. At first I called Minnie ’auntie’, eventually it became ’mummy’. My mother never came to terms with the fact that I used this word for anyone but her. My life with my temporary care family had lifelong consequences for me, as it had for my mother and for Minnie. It left the adults in psychological pain, while I was left with deep longing for decades to come.

4. Unfortunate post-war events

In May 1945 the terrible war was finally over. My mother, heavily pregnant, listened to Winston Churchill's victory speech and danced happily on Trafalgar Square. Five days later she gave birth to a tiny baby girl, my little sister, Hazel, whom I didn't meet until several months later. After the baby was born, my father was sent out to fetch me back from my temporary care parents. When he arrived at Minnie's, she suggested keeping me until the new baby was big enough for my parents and my foster parents to go on a short holiday together with both children. This should give me a chance to get used to my mother again. It was agreed to meet on the first weekend of August, a bank holiday, when my baby sister would be twelve weeks old.

August 6th, 1945 was a very special day: the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. With horrific consequences. Monday, August 6th also turned into a special day for me and my two families. That weekend Lesley, Minnie, and my father set off with me for the weekend on a motorbike with a sidecar. My mother did not come along as planned. Perhaps it was because of the new baby, but it could also have been due to her anger and jealousy. We were on our way to the seaside in the North of Wales. Where we went I do not know; maybe it was the East Beach at Rhyl? It is close to the road from Manchester, and it looks charming on postcards. I need something concrete to imagine the little girl that was me. Arriving, the adults pitched a tent, and my father constructed a makeshift cot out of the sidecar. Allegedly, we all enjoyed splashing in the water.

On the last day of our little vacation, I woke up with a high fever and a stiff neck. A doctor was needed. Lesley, uncle Les, knew one near the Anglo-Welsh border and raced away on his bike. “Mummy, tickle my feet,” I'm said to have whimpered and wailed all the way in the sidecar. The doctor admitted me to a hospital right away due to suspected meningitis. There was no ambulance available, so Lesley also raced me there. At the hospital, a military one, not one specialising in children, which implies that doctors had better resources at their disposal. I was diagnosed with paralytic poliomyelitis, polio. Penicillin was not yet an option. I was, so my father told me, in mortal danger and in massive pain; Yet, I made it through the perilous first days. “It is a miracle that she survived. The girl has a very strong will to live,” the head doctor told my father, who revealed the words to me decades later, when I again was in hospital in a critical condition and he wanted to highlight my strong will to live as a good tool to get well. It worked!

I was known as a smart little patient in the hospital then, probably because I did what I was told, even when it was painful. This has become a hallmark for me. I have tried hard to get access to medical records, but they were not kept. I don't remember the time myself, so I am entirely dependent on other people's references. My knowledge is fragmented: my temporary care mother told me a little, as did my father and my grandmother. A great-aunt who lived in Manchester was allowed to visit me at some point. “Auntie, I can lift my head,” I exclaimed during one of her visits to the hospital, she told me forty years later in a letter. “I cried with joy for hours,” she added.

When a child contracted polio, families were scared because the disease is so contagious. People often started guessing where the infection might come from. During a big polio epidemic in Denmark in 1952, for instance, many believed that children were infected by fallen apples; in other places, other assumptions prevailed: an American novel, Nemesis by Philip Roth, published in 2010, hints at Italian immigrants as the cause of a 1944 polio epidemic. When I fell ill in summer 1945 some people assumed that the contagion originated from an Australian ship with polio-infected sailors that had sunk off the Welsh coast. I have tried to look at ships lost around Wales in 1945 but couldn’t find any relevant wessels, even though there were army men with polio in my hospital. We were treated to massages in hot water. It must have done me some good as it hopefully did for the soldiers.

As soon as doctors let my mother know that I was getting better, she set off to bring me back home. The senior physician refused to hand me over: “It is not medically safe,” he said. “It might slow the healing process if the child is exposed to strain and she might infect siblings.” However, my mother did not give up. She sat down on the floor in front of the physician’s office and refused to move. Finally, the doctor gave in. My mother signed a paper accepting responsibility, and off we were on a train towards London.

My illness and my stay in the hospital, together with the entire set-up with my care mother, affected my relationship to my mother negatively. It turned into the key drama of my life: I was not allowed to say goodbye to Minnie, and I had to leave my teddy bear and my clothes behind. Perhaps they were contaminated, but my mother was convinced that it was best for me to forget everything connected to Minnie as quickly as possible. Nothing should remind me of my time with her. Mum told me much later that I pushed her away, that I didn't want her. I assume it to be true. Her pain and powerlessness were enormous. She strongly felt that I was withdrawing emotionally, that I was being disloyal and mean. She was deeply hurt that I cared for Minnie. But I did. The separation from Minnie left a hole in my soul which it took me decades to locate and fill.

It is a well-described phenomenon in child psychology that young children often do not recognise or want their mother when she returns after having left them, regardless of why or for how long. A child needs time to reconcile. But my mother did not feel that she had abandoned me. It wasn't her fault that I hadn't seen her in more than a year. She felt she had been forced to leave me with strangers. “They took the child away from me,” she complained more than once. When I pointed out to her that this child actually was me, she stared at me uncomprehendingly. To her, the two settings did not relate. She only saw the injustice someone had done to her in a situation where she was weak and not free to choose. – “It was one of the worst things in my life,” she once told an interviewer. This tells me how affected she was. Maybe it reminded her of her own forced separation from her parents. My mother could neither see nor feel how the circumstances affected me. She neither forgave Minnie nor me for loving each other. That I got attached to these people was a slap in her face. She was bitter and never ever spoke positively about Minnie. For me, however, the relationship with Minnie was vitally important.

In the end, Minnie became a taboo topic in our family. I so wanted Mum to forgive me. What there was to forgive, I did not know. I only knew that I had done her wrong. This conflict ruined our relationship and lasted until my mother's death. The abrupt separation from Minnie and the ban on ever mentioning her left me in great sorrow. My childish wish that my mother would come to terms with her fate (and me) could not be fulfilled. Not that my mother didn’t love me – this she did, very much so, but I had a hard time accepting it, because her love was a double-edged sword: she gave, and she took away. I carried a feeling of loss and anger with me. For years, I felt a deep longing for my missing care mother. It was as if I lived my inner life in two entirely different worlds.

When I was a teenager, Minnie wrote to my parents that she would like to visit us with her family. I was very much looking forward to her visit. What I didn't know was that my parents wrote back that they didn't want Minnie to come because it didn't do me any good. It's probably true that I was out of balance while awaiting her. No one told me Minnie wasn't coming. This felt like another huge betrayal and disappointment. My mother’s and my own feelings just didn’t coincide. I loved Minnie; my mother hated her. It was a split, which I could not handle.

My longing for Minnie lasted until I visited her anew thirty years later. She and her husband picked me up at Manchester Airport. We recognised each other immediately in the crowd. Minnie embraced me lovingly; Les was more reserved. “Your lost daughter has come back; you may kiss her,” Minnie urged him. What strong words! The reunion with Minnie and Les turned into a powerful experience. I was deeply satisfied by the unconditional love I met. It was an entirely new experience. Minnie told me that our sudden separation in September 1945 had been traumatic for her. One day when she went to the hospital to see me, I was gone. She fell into a deep depression. After weeks, a social worker persuaded her to adopt a girl my age. Apparently, she expected the girl to be like me, which, of course, she wasn't.

I’ve met the daughter. We were both adults at the time and had both given birth to three children. When I entered her home together with Minnie and Les, I unexpectedly received the most hateful look and the coldest shoulder I have ever come across. Followed by the words: ”Are you finally satisfied now?” There was so much pain in these words that I felt deeply rejected. After this problematic encounter, I chose to withdraw from my renewed contact with Minnie and Les. I thought it to be the most considerate thing to do in the situation; I didn't want to ruin their family relations. I knew that adoption is a difficult emotional thing. Not only that, but I felt that the daughter feared that I was closer to Minnie's heart than she was. After all, she had had to face her adoptive parents constantly comparing her to me. The hostile look is still in my body; I'll never forget it. I’ll neither ever forget that I was the cause of it.

I broke off the contact for the sake of Minnie and her daughter. Or so I thought. Today, fifty years later, I realise that it was probably mostly for my own sake. The situation was far too complicated for me. At the time I had a dream that my mother and Minnie could meet in my home, that they coul sit next to each other on my couch and be friends. It was too naive a dream to come true. My mother was, once again, furious that I had met Minnie, the person she distrusted the most. She punished me for months with icy stares and total silence.

5. Back to family and abandoned again

A handful of adults are standing in a garden. A man lifts me up so I can look over a wall into the neighbour’s yard. My eyes catch innumerable colours from a sea of flowers. What a great start into my new life with mum and dad and my new sister. I was again together with my father to whom I felt so close: he was the only person I allowed to carry me up the stairs, which I was not yet able to climb because of some remaining polio damage. I had to learn everything all over again: walking, climbing, running, and jumping. It felt embarrassing not to be able to. Maybe it was most embarrassing for my parents that I couldn't?

The song "I Can Run and I Can Hop” was part of my life then, despite the fact that it was exactly running and hopping I wasn't so good at. In the long run, polio has not been a great burden in my life. It was not a topic talked about. I developed, however, feelings of embarrassement over all kinds of things I couldn’t do. In a way, I was convinced that by nature one was always able to walk and jump and run, while I could not. My body sensed that my parents were worried whenever they looked at my failures. It wasn't until shortly before I retired decades later that the disease flared up slightly and I got post-polio, as many polio-affected people do. Actually, it was this syndrome that prompted me to dig into the illness of my early childhood. Without that focus, I wouldn't know what I know today.

Returning to London in autumn 1945, I started again in my former day nursery. A few months later, in Spring 1946, my beloved father decided to return to Vienna in order to find housing and work. He left it to my mother to decide if and when she wanted to follow. What I remember are, of course, not the reasons for him leaving, but the fact of it. All of a sudden he was gone! I asked him many years later why he did it. “Wasn’t it difficult for you to be without your family?” I wondered. “Duty, duty, duty,” was his astonishing reply. I gather from these words that his departure was a decision taken not by himself.

He never felt as a refugee, he once told me, but more like one who had left Austria for political reasons, and politics in Austria had changed. That was what he believed, what he hoped for. He obviously had an illusion that he, and all the others who had opposed Nazism, would be welcomed. He was wrong. Nobody wanted them back. Late in my father’s life, I asked him what the most difficult thing he had done in his entire life was. He replied: “That was returning to Vienna. It took courage.” His choice haunted him. Shortly before his death at the age of 90, he asked me if going back to Vienna was the right decision. A little late to ask, I must say!

My mother was deeply unhappy when my father left. Being alone with two kids and full-time work exhausted her. When she was at home, she washed diapers in a big pot on the stove and mobbed floors, always being tired. She cut off all contact with her mother-in-law, my grandmother, who had helped with my pick-up and drop-off from kindergarten. Mum was convinced that grandma allowed Minnie to see me, and that was out of the question. The relationship between the two women, mum and grandma, was tense, both then and in the decades that followed.

Now it was not only Minnie and my father who were gone, but also grandma. I felt really abandoned. How much I loved Grandma but didn't dare because of my mother's anger towards her dawned on me when Grandma died in 1990 at the age of 93. I reacted deeply upset and full of tears. These strong emotions came as a surprise to me, like so much else connected with my early years. I was obviously living after a rule of ’what must not be, can not be.’

For decades, I didn't really comprehend what my first tumultuous years meant for my later life. The events turned me into an angry and vulnerable child. I got furious when someone called me by my English name, Helen, even if just for fun, and I screamed in despair when someone spoke to me in English. Those were inscrutable feelings so powerful that they determined many of my actions in the years to come... as if a stye in my soul blurred my vision. I felt a gap in the course of my life without knowing where it was and where it came from. Probably, I just didn't know where I belonged. Early childhood often is a riddle that one can feel but not remember.

The process of evacuation, my stays in hospitals, and the enforced farewells were the most profound of my war injuries. As experiences in early childhood lay the foundations of one's life, it is no wonder that I became an unhappy child. A childhood, though, does not have to be happy and secure in order to turn into a happy and healthy adult, I have learned. One can change the way one understands childhood. It is never too late to have a happy childhood, a psychological bonmot says. I took the chance to change my problematic inner life at some point by working through my injuries. Life changed. My views changed. Not everything was bad from the beginning. I also learned a lot. Resilience, for example. I also learned languages. I got equipped with social skills, with true friends, with patterns of how to understand the world around me, and with love. There was love, although I did not always appreciate it.

6. After the war

How I missed my father when he suddenly disappeared because he had chosen to find a place to live and work in Vienna. He did so against my mother's persistent attempts to talk him out of it, and despite being fond of working with English workers. He had left Austria in 1938 for political reasons, and politics had changed. He believed, he hoped. He obviously had an illusion that he and others who had opposed Nazism would be welcome. They were not. But he had a strong emotional connection to Vienna, and especially the Viennese language.

Some refugees, mostly artists and scientists who had found satisfactory work conditions in England did not return to Austria, at least not yet. They stayed for years after the war. This applies, for example, to the British-Austrian poet Erich Fried (1921-1988), who was long considered the best German-language poet. Since 1990, Austria awards the ’Erich Fried Prize’ for literature and art (V. Kaukoreit & J. Thunecke: 126, Westburne Terrace. Erich Fried im Londoner Exil. Texte und Materialien. Wien 2001). Like other refugees, he worked in factories during the war, but began to write wonderful poems, was hired by the BBC and chose to stay. He was active in Young Austria together with my mother, but withdrew when communist ideas began to dominate the Centre. He remained one of my parents’ close friends. When they got old, they went on holidays together. I mention this friendship because it once again shows the importance of the exile, for the contact the refugees kept for decades after the war, regardless of their choice to stay in England or to return to Austria and regardless of their political standing.

Refugees had a choice. This is more than most refugees have today. In 1945, a survey was undertaken among the Austrian Centre’s 3500 members on the question of what they intended to do after the war. 859 persons responded that they wanted to return to Austria, 174 said they wanted to stay in Great Britain. 700 had not decided yet. Many did not answer. Refugees could not be certain to keep their jobs after soldiers returned from war. Also, many did not want to continue in war-determined jobs. My closest Viennese friend's father, for instance, was a trained lawyer when he came to England, but dragged heavy sacks in a factory during the war. He returned to Vienna with his family and again became a lawyer. Why should he have stayed a labourer?

The British exile created a community that persisted long after people returned to their homeland. One reason might be that the refugees soon had to realise that they had returned to a hostile country. The Nazi regime had been overthrown, but it took a long time for peoples' minds to change. In this world it was good to have friends. We, their descendants, came to perceive families from the Austrian Centre in London as extended family.

It is my belief that identity has to do with having access to one's history, and when the history is as dramatic as our parents’, they need to have something unbreakable together. It is about trust. Life in Vienna was not easy in the beginning: the anti-Semitism of Nazism was deeply rooted in the population. But the network of the exiled families was strong, and we were part of it. We, i.e. my friends who were born in the UK during the war, came to perceive the exile and the Austrian Centre as a kind of home village.

This is my answer to the question about my parents' background: They were young émigrés who had sought refuge in England. Their lives did not go smoothly. Time and fate shaped them. Usually, when they talked about their time in England, they didn't use the word 'refugee'. They preferred to have been in exile, they were émigrés. This sounded more active. Our parents endeavoured to pass on to us an understanding of life in exile. In England, they learned to live in a democratic country, and they also passed this on as a guideline. They urged us to resist totalitarian systems, although for a long time they did not understand how totalitarian the Soviet system was. They clung to their communist beliefs as a protection against right wing trends, and out of gratitude for the help they had received when fleeing.

As a former member of the resistance movement in Austria, Oskar perceived his stay in England as political exile. That differed from Edith’s way of coping; she felt expelled from her homeland. From early on I understood that there is a difference depending on the reasons for taking refuge: you either fled in despair because you were persecuted, or you deliberately chose to leave your country. As children of two refugees, we could see, with our own eyes, how this difference affected our parents. Our father appeared as an activist, our mother as a victim. I must admit that while I experienced my mother as troublesome, I admired my father. Nevertheless, both taught me a lot: about history, about language and literature and about Marxism and democracy. Not about Jewish issues. We had no Jewish life at all.

In England I experienced serious incidents: illnesses, bombings, evacuation etc. My first years were chaotic; they challenged me emotionally and made me doubt whether I was wanted, loved, and protected. The war years sharpened my awareness of war and its consequences; they also formed my understanding of the existential conditions for minorities throughout history.

7_._ On the way

My mother began her long journey with us towards Vienna half a year after my father had left. She had neither the strength nor the means to stay in London without him. “I was not asked for my opinion. I did what I was told,” she explained later. My father supported her explanation, weighed down by guilt: “To be honest, I decided it all alone. She could decide if she wanted to follow me or stay on her own.”

We, i.e. my mother, my sister and I, went to Paris first, where my mother needed to obtain the necessary documents to enter Austria. Refugees from Western Europe were actually not allowed to return because three million refugees and displaced persons from Eastern Europe had to be distributed and housed first. It is a wellknown fact that the official policy was to delay the return of Jewish refugees as long as possible. Many were afraid of returning Jews who would remind their co-citizens of what they had participated in. But principles are one thing, realities are something else. My mother applied for a visitor visa to Paris. Once in Paris, she could apply for a military permit to travel through the French occupation zone into Austria. France, one of the four occupying forces, could grant the necessary permissions. It helped to have good contacts. This might not have been by the book, but it worked.

It was brave of my mother; how difficult it must have been with two toddlers. She visited French offices and political contacts to collect the necessary documents. Meanwhile I was asked to look after my little sister. I vaguely recall that she was tied to a bed with a blue harness. She screamed quite a bit, or maybe she cried, and I had no idea what to do. I talked and talked, telling her that mum would be back soon. She was such a small, fraile thing, she looked like a porcelain doll; but dolls don't scream like she did. Paris is the first place I really remember. We stayed in a cheap hotel. Of course, I didn't know that it was a cheap hotel, nor where it was located. A photograph shows my mother pushing a pram with my sister and me in fine dresses by her side outside the metro station at Place Pigalle. “It was a brothel,” my mother told us later. “It was the only thing I could afford.”

From there it was by train towards Vienna.

8. England from afar

England has become a point of many returns, not the least because my grandmother stayed in London. So did my father's sister who's children, my cousins, I often visited.

But not only that: when I visited London ten years after the war, I walked down Bayswater Street near my grandmother's place when I suddenly realised that a stranger was following me. I got scared, but when I turned around, he smiled and asked me: "Are you a relative of Oskar, who lived here during the war? You look so much like him." It was true, I looked like him as a child; I could have used my father's childhood photograph as mine. Many years later I met other former Austrian refugees who had stayed in England, when the German language PEN-Club in London invited me to present my book about my grandmother. I took my 90 year old Grandma with me. Many participants at the meeting knew her from common war time experiences at the Austrian Centre where she made sandwiches. That's what I was told. The room was full of love, so full of love. The Austrian Centre in London also accompanied me through my childhood in Vienna as many children of former emigrants were close friends, almost family, whom we could visit without limitations and be welcome. Although I only was a small child while living in England, the afterglow is part of my life and my identity.

Literature:

Ernst Berger & Ruth Wodak: _Kinder der Rückkehr. 2018

Sonja Frank (Hrsg.): Young Austria – _ÖsterreicherInnen im Britischen Exil 1938 - 1947; für ein freies, demokratisches und unabhängiges Österreich._2014

Helen Liesl Krag: Man hat nicht gebraucht keine Reisegesellschaft ... 1988