Secret diaries that revealed my grandmother’s suffering at the hands of the NAZIS
To her grandchildren, Rosi Schul was a kind, proud, talented and sometimes forbidding German woman with immaculate hair who once, long ago, went on a ‘great adventure’. What she wasn’t was a kind, proud, talented and sometimes forbidding German woman with immaculate hair who was once arrested, imprisoned, herded into a cattle cart and interned by the Nazis, all because she was a Jew.
This deeply moving book by her granddaughter, actress and impressionist Jess Robinson, tells Rosi’s story through her diary entries between October 1938 and March 1943, beginning when she was 23.
Rosi as a young woman
Rosi was brought up in a loving household filled with music and culture. She could play the piano and guitar, and having been surrounded by siblings all her life, it was only natural she find a teaching position.
And where better than an orphanage in the postcard town of Esslingen, near Stuttgart. So perfect was this little town and her life there, that it became Rosi’s ultimate point of comparison, ‘the rolling English hills – just like Esslingen. The people she met – not like in Esslingen.’ Having looked at pictures, you can see her point – idyll would be putting it lightly.
In this new home she could perform plays with the children, who adored her, talk about culture with the headmaster, Herr Rothschild, and form crushes on any boy she fancied. As Jess notes, she was a bona fide Maria, just lacking the nunnery and Christopher Plummer.
It was all too good to be true. At 10.30pm on October 28, 1938, the Gestapo came for her and three of her young charges.
Rosi collected some belongings, then, having said her goodbyes, ‘took little Theo’s hand . . . [and] told the boys to be cheerful.’
Rosi wasn’t to know of the cell she would be held in before the sneering guards herded them ‘like farm animals… anyone not moving quickly enough was shoved roughly’ into the train carriages. Rosi’s act of defiance came when she got out her guitar, which had been delivered to her in prison by Herr Rothschild, and sang to her fellow captives.
Unstoppable: The Nazis were systematic in their removal of polish Jews from Germany
They arrived at the Polish town of Zbaszyn on November 1, 1938. Thousands of Jews slept in stables, barns and on train platforms, with limited access to water or food. What is poignant about Rosi’s diary is that her stoicism and strength is so clear and unfiltered: although young, she had the maturity to know that ‘in the face of such relentless, harsh, terrible power as Germany’s, there is no point in responding with upset, indignation or entreaty’.
Railways station in Zbaszyn
7,000 Jewish people were expelled from Germany by the German Nazi authorities and living in Zbaszyn on the Polish-German border, 3rd November 1938
That maturity is cleverly offset by the second key element to this book. Jess’s own diaries run concurrently to Rosi’s, only they start in 2006.
The result is a fascinating comparison of two 23-year-olds. One surviving the Nazis and the other surviving life and love in Noughties London.
On the day Rosi arrived in Poland, ‘squeezed together like pigs in a pigsty covered in dirt and stinking of body odour’, Jess was sorting out a mortgage.
On the day Jess was assaulted by a taxi driver who ‘stuck his fat tongue’ down her throat, Rosi was thinking about how she could entertain the children trapped at Esslingen.
And when Jess is told she won’t be cast in a play because she looks too Jewish, Rosi is imprisoned and waiting to be deported . . . for being Jewish.
We are forced to acknowledge that, even worlds apart, the experiences of young women are often universal. They love, lust and lose in the same way. What is also clear is how much both women changed. Rosi suffered the unimaginable horrors of internment in Zbaszyn, where she stayed more than six months. The only thing she could do was rely on what she had been doing for much of her life – entertaining and teaching children.
Her main goal was to keep life as normal as possible. The love she has for the children she meets is palpable, and it is such a relief when, in August 1939, she accompanies them on a Kindertransport, finally settling in England while the war raged on.
Jess’s experiences are less intense but still life-changing. She is assaulted twice, lands a job on Dead Ringers (the BBC’s comedy impressions show), buys a flat with her best friend, gets rid of her toxic boyfriend and, just like Rosi, starts teaching.
Family: Jess with her grandmother, Rosi
However, the final part of this book is almost the most affecting.
Alongside the side-by-side diaries runs the story of Jess, her mother, aunt, sisters and niece, affectionately dubbed the ‘cool bitches’, who are on a determined mission to acquire German citizenship. And it is in the run-up to this that Jess asks her Aunt Stephie for all of Rosi’s old diaries, pictures and documents.
This wealth of information unlocks the truth of the ‘great adventure’ Rosi had so carefully hidden for almost 80 years.
But they also confront secrets of their own. Recurrent is the difference in the way Jess’s mum, Jackie, and Stephie experienced their mother Rosi. Jackie, a gifted pianist, was held to the highest standard. If she didn’t practise after school she wasn’t allowed to see her friends. If she put on weight or went out with an unsuitable boy, she was put down, one sniping comment at a time.
Stephie, six years younger, remembers a nurturing, kind and caring woman who was devoted to her. In reproducing the text chains from the ‘cool bitches’, Jess shows how fractious the relationship between siblings can be.
Jackie harbours so much resentment towards her mother, while Stephie acknowledges the difference in how they were raised, yet can’t quite accept the strength of her sister’s feelings.
However, with the book’s progress comes a level of acceptance and peace which comes to a head on the receipt of their German passports.
Movingly written, this final instalment coincides with Jess remembering Rosi at an event at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London. Rosi is reunited with the children who never forgot her. Choruses of ‘you were like a mother to me’ surrounded her.
In both witnessing this reunion and claiming the passports, there is a sense of reclaiming home for a woman who never forgot her beloved Germany and a family who have always felt displaced.