Blessings: one family's search for truth and reconciliation

A boy  wondered about a picture mounted in their suburban English home. In the centre stood a younger version of his mother. He asked about the other two in the photograph. Those are my parents: your grandparents. Their name is your name: they are Paul and Paula. So where are they? Gradually the story came out. Inge left their family apartment in Hamburg, eight years before young Paul was born, and never saw them again.  They could no longer be found in Hamburg. Inge did not know exactly what had become of them, but was sure they had been forced by their Government to leave their home, later to be put to death somewhere east of Germany's borders. Why? Had they done something wrong? Not at all. Paula was a cook from Germany's rural south; Paul, Hamburg-born, had worked in the shipyards building U-boats as an electrical engineer in World War 1. They were Jews. The Government that removed them was Nazi, short for the National Socialist Party. Paul and Paula's 'crime' was to be Jewish.

The boy absorbed the injustice of this. Surely this story must be heard and understood? No, it will not, Inge said. It will be forgotten: Germany will move on, as I have with my life - proud of the English woman I have become, of the English husband I married months after arriving from Bremerhaven, of my  service record in the army of the Allies, of my boys whom I send to Sunday School.  Secretly, sometimes, she would open up the pack of letters from Paul and Paula. But she did not show her tears.

Before her death at home in Wales in 1994,  Inge left the letters in the care of her grandchild Beth. Since then, as a family, we have worked to understand these letters - not an easy task as the cramped handwriting, in the pre-war script known as Sütterlin, is hard for modern Germans to follow. But thanks to the help of a number of German friends and groups, a full English edition is complete and available here.

On 4th October 2021, two memorial stones - a 'stolpersteine' for each of her parents - were laid outside the home Inge left on 22nd August 1939, the place from where Paul and Paula were deported on 24th October 1941. Read more about this event.

A biography of Paul and Paula, written by Susanne Rosendahl, accompanies the laying of the stones. Read it on the Hamburg Stolpersteine website here.

Read the story of Inge's early life here.

The final chapter of the life of Paul and Paula took them to the ghetto in Łódź, Poland.

Later in life Inge wrote about this time in a fictionalised form, available here.