¶ Intro / Opening
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¶ Jane's Quest for Her Grandmother's Story
I'm with Jane Messer. Jane is an author. She grew up in Australia in a nice suburb with a loving father. But Jane always knew her dad had been wounded by his childhood.
Jane's Dad Michael had been born in Berlin. This is Berlin in the wild years between the two world wars. The family had been well to do, there was plenty of theatre, movies, dinners, laughter, and wild parties, and But when Jane's dad was eight years old, his mother, Bella, brought him and his older sister to England to a boarding school. And then she lifted them things. There were a few fleeting visits, but Jane's dad didn't see his mother again for another thirteen years.
Michael always called Bella Diraben, a raven mother, which is an old German expression for a mother who cruelly abandons her children. He always told Jane. She never loved me. Jane never knew her grandmother Bellow, so she didn't really have anything to go on. But as Jane grew older and had kids of her own, she knew that there had to be so much more to Bella's story. And so Jane went on the trail of her grandmother Bella.
From pre war Berlin to Tel Aviv to Melbourne, to try to understand the choices that Bella made in extraordinary circumstances. Jane Mess's book is called Raven Mother. Hello, Jane.
Hello, Richard.
¶ Father's Childhood Trauma and Inherited Shame
Extraordinary book. Let's start with you and your dad, Michael. How old is Michael now?
He's ninety nine. He turned ninety nine a couple of weeks ago.
How close have you been with your dad from
I think we've always had a close relationship. I'm the eldest. I've got two younger brothers. I think I've just always felt naturally close to him, though he's He's quite an eccentric person. He's sort of distant but warm at the same time. But what I do remember is lots of stories from dad about his childhood. And they were fascinating stories. They were in some ways they were adventure stories.
But he just put them in front of you or did you draw them down from it?
No, no, he would put them in front. We sat down at the table for dinner, for meals, television was off. and my parents did talk. And so my mother was part of these conversations, drawing him out. She was fascinated by his history. So when I was a kid, it was really perhaps them curating these stories. When I came later as very much as an adult, well into my, I guess, late forties.
I had lots of memories of these stories that I would go back and say, What about this? What did you mean when you said that? So I was incredibly fortunate to have been at the dinner table being told these stories.
And how would he talk about Bella?
Well she was the bad mother. I mean he that's how he described her.
Use that phrase Raven Mother.
Well no, that was a phrase I came across when I was living in Berlin but it was an old expression for mothers who abandoned their children and it had become revived to describe women who use childcare. I mean Yeah, I know. Apparently popular in Sweden as well, where they have free childcare. So then I told Dad about this expression when he was talking about Bella and then he said, Yes, she was a rabben mutter.
What was he told? What did he have in his mind was the reason why he'd been dumped in a boarding school in England with the
Ruth. Look, he knew that it was for their own safety. So he and his older sister Ruth, who was five years older. They were eight and thirteen when they arrived at Bunts Court in Kent, in England, taken there by Bella. He didn't know the extent of the Third Reich or the Nazis, but he knew that they were there for their own good. So Ruth was a little bit more aware'cause she was older, but he he was just eight and he was quite a naive
you know, he describes himself as an immature child. I can see that it's probably true.
No, no.
But
It was the problem then that Mum didn't come back to collect him? Is that what the problem was?
Mm my dad's memory is that they arrived there. He believed from what she said that they were there for a holiday for a few days and then she said goodbye and I'll be back in a couple of days. And then she didn't come back. She did actually come back about four or five months later to visit, and another couple of times, but they were brief visits. And for him he just was like she just left. She'd lied to me, she didn't tell me what was really going on, and then she went.
You detected quite a bit of underlying sadness. That was something you could pick up even as a kid.
Yeah.
How did you begin to think that there was an underlying shame as well? Why shame?
really that word only came to me from writing the book, the pro s like when you're excavating things as you're writing and you you're trying to dig deeper, not just into facts but into memories and emotions and and you're asking deep questions. I realise that I had carried or was still carrying this sort of sense of shame and I think it was one from him of of feeling unlovable. I mean one time he said to me, Oh, maybe I just wasn't a likable little boy.
I like that.
Yes, you were. Of course you were. You were just you were just a child like everybody else, and I could tell I mean, this is the thing. After I started to pull out boxes of photographs and I discovered photos where she would hold him with such warmth and friendliness and she was quite playful and and sh they weren't stiff pictures, very playful.
So you can see a fiction in those things.
Absolutely, and he was a playful child too.
But it's really common for kids when families break or there's some kind of disconnection to somehow see themselves as being responsible for this. I wasn't enough, I didn't do this, it was my fault, I I did this. But you said you felt some of this shame. What do you mean? What are you talking about? You went there. What's
No, I know. But I mean I do think if if you're a a reasonably empathic or sensitive person or child, sometimes you do. You take on the i feelings and experiences. And remember I had all these stories And through the writing I realised that I'd carried a shame that I was the child of somebody who hadn't been loved. And then so that made me A bit unlovable too. None of it's rational, but I mean you have these feelings. I mean, I don't have this feeling now. Realising kind of freed me from it.
I it was a burden when I was growing up.
Did that thought when it came into your head really profoundly shock you that you've been carrying this shame for
For nothing. And it was mixed up. I mean it was mixed up with so many other things because it was also mixed up with being Jewish, you know, w with this terrible history. You know, we had the history of the Third Reich on the bookshelf. So this was also my history. I mean we just flooded with images of concentration camp victims naked and starving. And also because it was a secular household.
didn't have a robust religious culture to kind of respond to those images and and metaphors of failure if if that makes sense, which I think would have been h helpful
¶ Unraveling Bella's Complex History
When did you begin to suspect there might be more to Your grandmother Bella's story than these bits and pieces you gleaned around the family table about her as a kid.
Well, a number of things all came together at a similar time. Firstly, I became a mother myself and watching my daughter as a just as a little girl and just realizing that your narratives of your own childhood and what actually happened, there can be these sort of remarkable gaps. And the strength of my feeling for her and and also being with other mothers and young fathers and just realizing the passion that you can have. And so that made me think, Oh, Bella
Bella could have been different, my grandmother could have been different. And then there was also her daughter, my aunt Ruth dying, and saying no one had visited the grave. No one had ever visited Bella's grave. And thinking, hang on, why would that be? Why why has why did neither her children or anyone go after she'd died in nineteen forty nine? And then I became aware of this incredible history of mothers during war and that mothers constantly have to make hard decisions.
to leave their child in a safe place but perhaps go somewhere else or put their child on an unsafe boat in the hope that they'll have a future because they won't have a future where they are now. Through my travels I've met many mothers who go and work as domestic workers in foreign countries to send money home so that their children will be raised. So I I started to have this understanding that Bella was different. was more complex than what my father knew of her.
How was your father when you told him you were going to follow her trail and look into her life and try and find out who she really was and draw up a bigger picture than the one your father had been able to get?
He was really pleased.
He was?
Yeah, because I was going to find out lots of things. It wasn't just about her, but also our relationship to Germany. He had always spoken German, but he had never been back. He had a very ambivalent relationship. I had a very ambivalent relationship to it. I didn't know what I was gonna find out, so he he wasn't ready to be critical of it yet.
He sent you a document he'd put together which was a history of your family that was titled A History of My Family.
Yeah.
How much information was there?
It was r incredibly useful. It was ten pages. It was genealogical. This person was born here. They moved to this city at a certain date. So great grandparents, I think it went back three or four generations. Most of it was facts, but there was some commentary. But in it I realized what a grim family story it was. There'd just be like one line like my father's cousin Felix was taken off the street by the Berlin police for the race crime of having a relationship with a Gentile woman.
My great uncle Felix had been taken off the street by the Berlin police and murdered in the police cell and then I think was dumped on a footpath or something. A letter came two days later to Willie's cousin to say he could pick up his brother who was dead. every third or fourth line there was these incredible stories that we really didn't know anything about. Who were these people? What had happened? W what was happening in Germany then?
¶ Bella's German Jewish Identity and Service
So where did you go to pick up the trail of her life to find out the broader life story of your grandmother Bella?
Well, I went to Berlin twice, so I lived there twice in twenty fourteen and then again in twenty fifteen.
Still family records in Berlin? I mean this was a cratered out ruin at the end of the war.
Yeah, no, no, no. I had to use a genealogist. for that and there are a lot of missing records because of because of bombs and fires and so on. So you have pockets of excellent record keeping which survived the bombing and then yes, there's lots of missing records. I interviewed a few people who had known Dad and the milieu he'd been in when he came to Australia and so I didn't meet anyone who'd met Bella in Australia or or before, but people who are kind of adjacent.
So let's follow the life of your grandmother that was revealed to you on your search for her. She was born in Berlin eighteen ninety three, youngest of five children to Doris and Max. Family is Jewish, but how strongly did they identify as German?
They very much identified as German and you can see it just in the names of the children. Bella, Bella Rosa. Her sister was born Minna, but everybody knew her as Minnie. Another sister was called Charlotte. They made references to the Christian calendar
I celebrated Christmas rather than Hanukkah and I'm not sure.
I think they probably celebrated both. Dad remembers there was a certain level of religiosity, but not much. They didn't often go to synagogues. So th but that was kind of normal. That was a very predominant they valued the Jewish culture, but in their ordinary lives, going out in public, like many Jews, they just wanted to be German.
It's hard to explain, but this was nothing out of the ordinary for German Jewish people at that time, before the the rise of Hitler, that they were you would find a whole lot of patriotic Jewish German people, many of whom served at the front in the First World War, one iron crosses for the defence of the fatherland, all that. This was quite unremarkable at that time for Jewish Germans to be very patriotically German.
Yeah. I mean in the eighteen hundreds there'd been a series of changes to the law which were more inclusive of German Jews and so there was a lot of hope. There was also cynicism and and many Jews were aware that it probably wouldn't get very far. My grandfather was one of those. he says by the time he was seventeen he knew that he would never be accepted as a German, just through all that casual I guess what we call the casual racism that you encounter, as well as institutional blocks.
So Bella's family were quite well to do. What kind of an education did she get? Did she get a fairly liberal education by the standards of the day?
By the standards of the day, absolutely. There was this remarkable movement in education, this sort of big reform movement that Germany was leading in. So she went to Pestalozzi Freubel House. and studied early childhood education, which today we would be thinking of in terms of like Steiner, Montessori.
Right. And when you're hearing that your grandmother was interested in the early education of small children, how did that factor into the story you'd heard that she was a kiddie hater?
Yeah, it just really threw me.
What did she do when World War One broke?
Well, like many Germans and many German Jews, she volunteered. So she had the the training in early childhood education. She then did two or three months nursing assistant training, got on a train from Berlin eight hundred kilometres to near the Baltic coast to a town called Rorschen, which was in East Prussia. The Russians had invaded East Prussia very unexpectedly in August and September. Many children and families were injured, killed, orphaned, deported.
So she was working with a group of children in a care home in Rorshan. Some I think were orphans, some were recovering from injuries.
And when you see the photos of her at that time, what does she look like with the kids?
Really relax. Confident. Verse, physically close. She she often has her arms around them. Just seemed like a very warm person. Young woman. She was quite young. I mean she was only nineteen or twenty, but
Now at some point she was given a pendant for her services to the fatherland for looking after these children. And you wondered about this pendant. Tell me how you came to actually see it with your own eyes.
So my aunt, my dad's sister Ruth, her granddaughter Lisa, who was living at the time at Kotumba, said, Oh yeah, I've got a couple of Bags or boxes of stuff from grandmother? Bella is Lisa's great grandmother. So I took myself off up there, and yeah, there was some remarkable letters by Ruth, and then this pendant in a beautiful box with velvet. on a chain. It shows a woman in in those sort of classical drapes and it's clearly a pendant given to her for her service in World War one.
And what was it like to touch that and see it and hold it?
It was precious. And it must have been precious to her. It obviously'cause she kept I mean if you think of all the migrations that you're doing and your packing bags and having to give things up. You don't give this up, you'd bring it with you. I was proud.
You're proud of her.
Yeah.
¶ Interwar Berlin: Culture, Love, and Threat
So after the war Bella returns to Berlin. She worked in a school welfare board again with kids. Nineteen twenty one, Bella gets married to your grandfather, Willie. Now what were the interesting circumstances of that that union?
Well look, it turns out that Bella was pregnant. And and needed to get married.
a couple of months in when they got
A couple of months in, yeah. Okay.
Then your dad's born in nineteen twenty seven. What are some of the earliest memories he has? His family life in interwar Berlin.
Yeah, he doesn't have many memories of his father because he manufactured caps and hats and he was a wholesaler. Willie's business was was doing really well. So he was away a lot. He remembers that they had nannies because Bella was also working in the business. But he puts that down to her not wanting to see him. Who knows? Could be a combination of both.
He remembers a birthday party or maybe a couple of birthday parties for him where everybody, the guests, though he had lots of friends, would sing Mac the knife.
Right, from the Brex Threepenny Opera.
threepenny opera, which they would be obviously singing in in German. And this was a big song in our childhood because then he could sing it in German, but he also had Louis Armstrong's version. Which is just gorgeous'cause you've got that rich, gravelly voice which kind of brings out all the scary, evil parts of the song.
When you see photos of your grandparents at this time, this is interwar Berlin. Yes, there's the hyperinflation, there's brown shirts, but there's also communists on the streets having fights. But this is Berlin really is the capital, cultural capital of the world probably at this point. This is the Berlin of Exploding contemporary art, abstract expressionism, cabaret scene. This is like Berlin of the film Cabaret. Do you see photos of people? Families uh you f your family at the time.
They definitely like fancy dress parties. They would go out to dinner at nightclubs. They did lots of picnics out in fields and beaches and it's kind of schizophrenic life because you have this increasing level of threat and and disorder and precarity, those extremes of threat and pleasure, of gaiety and fear.
At some point you discovered that Bella began a long term affair. Outside of her marriage. Now when your father told you that this had happened, just tell me exactly how he put Bella's inclinations in the
Yeah. When Dad was about eighty He said to me, Look, Jane, there's one more thing I have I have to tell you. I said, I yeah, please tell me. He said, Well my mother was a nymphomania. And I just laughed. I mean, I just I was like, Dad, no And he's like looked at me and I said, That isn't even a thing. They don't even exist.
What did he mean? Does he mean like she supposedly liked sex or something? That like it was and that's like some kind of Psychiatric development.
Well that she had sex with lots of men. And so then I I was like, W w w why do you think that? And he said, Well that's that's what Willie told me and I said, Well Maybe Willie was angry when he told you and and that's the sort of thing that an angry husband might say about their wife because they've they've had a an affair or they've fallen in love with somebody else. And then we talked a bit about the history of the term.
The old trope that women surrender to their ungovernable sexual desires and all that thing.
Well and then w Freud had kind of amplified it again and in fact you could accuse a woman of nymphomania in a way to get them put into an asylum or as a basis for divorce.
Men never get accused of nymphomania, though.
No, no, they don't. So I was pretty angry with my grandfather about that'cause I think that's a pretty nasty thing to say. But look, he was born in eighteen ninety two and he grew up in a particular generation Of his time.
But when you're going through all this with your dad, did that help your dad? Did he follow your reasoning as you unpicked
There was this just this really sweet kind of relief. I think he really did. feel a burden had been taken off him. Because I could say, look, even if she had a few affairs That's still in the range of normal. Like that's what people do. Men and women do that.
So you've had two psychotic conditions thrown at you. One is that she's kind of psychopathically hostile to children. The second thing is she's a mad sex slave. Yeah.
I haven't really thought about it in quite such blunt terms, but you're quite right.
Right. And it's clearly nowhere near as dramatic as that. Who was this man she was having an affair with? Walter Strauss.
He was a German professor of public health. based in Berlin, that's where they met. He lost his job along with all the other Jewish university people in nineteen thirty three. and a couple of years later was able to immigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine.
How were things in the marriage once your grandfather found out about it? Did she want to leave her husband for this man? And what happened when that didn't happen?
She was suicidal. She was she was very very distressed.
Did she attempt to take around now?
Yes. Yeah, apparently.
You had a copy of Bella's address book. Tell me what you found in this.
So I was looking through the address book, wanting to find Walter Strauss's address, just to know more about him. It wasn't there, and then I saw a little bit of a torn page. And the page had actually been torn out that would have had his address.
Who do you think tore it out?
I think it was probably her, but it might have been Willie, my grandfather, maybe, in anger. It is remarkable. I was in Berlin when I discovered it and I was with Louis, my son, and I went into the other room where he was and I showed it to him. I just had to show it to somebody there and then.
¶ Nazi Rise and Family Flight
So now we come to the year of nineteen thirty three. This is the year Adolf Hitler gets made Chancellor of Germany and all hell starts to break loose. A very well to do suburb called Charlottenburg. How long did they last in this place in Charlottenburg?
Only a couple of months because the Third Reich's laws so many Jews to have to give up their jobs, not be able to sell their produce and so on. So having done quite well, the families started to do less well and and then moved to move further west. And my grandfather was finding it harder and harder to run his business.
What was changing on the streets of Berlin for your family at that time?
More and more violence, I mean street violence, black shirts or brown shirts attacking people, communists and Jews. My aunt remembers during the move being at a friend's house, you know, out of the way. She and her friend looked out the window and windows were being smashed. My grandfather's death. shop was you know, the factory floor, police came in and searched for things. I mean it was just very, very violent and legally a lot is changing.
Tell me about your Aunt Ruth and what she did when she was abused in the street one day on her way to the bakery.
So she'd had to leave the normal school, the the school she'd gone to and go to a Jewish school. She became a little bit more religious and wanted to get the the special bread for Friday and on her walk to the bakery She would have been ten at this stage. And a girl called her a Jew and why don't you leave and go to Palestine, get away. And Ruth didn't say anything, thought about it, went and got the bread, but decided that if that happened again, she was gonna do something about it.
Sure enough, the next time the same girl is there. And Ruth actually slapped this girl's face. And she said that's how Jews can hit to the girl. When I read this in my aunt's autobiography, I was so shocked. I think it's the only time anybody in the family has done anything like that, but good on her. But I mean it was a dangerous thing.
What was the school like that they was in?
The school Buntscourt, it's quite famous in its own way, had clandestinely fled Germany in nineteen thirty three because of the changes to education and the general environment being so threatening.
Were they quakers?
It was sponsored by the British Quakers. Anna Essinger was the school principal. She had studied with Quakers in America, so she received assistance from the British Quakers. They literally in two buses clandestinely left Germany in nineteen thirty three, obviously with the parents' permission, with a number of German Jewish teachers. It was a secular school.
So it's not it's not that kind of boarding school thing you might get in your mind where boys are f are flogged in sort of uh cold showers and
No. You called the teachers by their first name, there was no corporal punishment. Partly because of the war and partly because of school philosophy. They grew their own vegetables, made furniture, had little orchestras Did lots of art, sport, field walks, and the world. Th there was also a rule they had to speak English for a number of reasons, partly because they were living in England, but also they didn't want to create suspicion amongst the locals.
More progressive than most schools today, in other words.
Absolutely. And I mean that's why look so many people, including my father, left that school and went on and had a remarkable life. because of the wonderful schooling and support. I mean the teachers were very aware. I mean, people were losing their families, so it was an excellent school.
¶ Despair, Suicide, and Escape to Palestine
So this is nineteen thirty five. Hitler's been in power for two years, but the Second World War isn't about to start for another four years or so. Your dad's eight years old at this time, and you you'd said earlier. that when Bella had taken the two of them to this school, she said, I'm coming back. It's all right, I'm gonna come back and get
But she did She wasn't able to
But didn't your dad understand why he was put there to put him and his sister out of reach of the Third Reich in England?
Look if it was explained he has no recollection. He just felt abandoned and lonely.
And he was I think.
He was hype.
nineteen thirty six, the temperatures getting hotter and things get worse. You write that back in Berlin, Bella's mother, Doris, your great grandmother, took her own life. Yeah. in despair and terror of the Third Reich?
That is what I have concluded, I think she knew that all her family had either left, her children had either left or were trying to leave. It really wasn't possible for her to leave as a seventy eight year old woman. No country would give her a visa. The highest rate of suicide amongst German Jews during those years was amongst older women because there was nowhere for them to go.
With the Third Reich there was very big increase in suicides amongst German Jews, but also amongst other Germans who were being persecuted by the Third Reich. Communists.
Roma people or Sinti people right across the board. This was a real phenomenon. It's not often talked about. That feeling, that awful feeling that people had living in the lands controlled by the Third Reich, that the worlds were closing in on them.
And look, there's this remarkable archive that the Berlin police kept and which wasn't lost in bombing. Every suicide was accompanied by a report and so there is actually a remarkable archive that documents people's Suicide notes. It's so much part of the culture. It's just constantly being referred to in the newspapers, in novels, in theatre.
Meanwhile, Bella and Willie were making plans to escape. Your dad had thought that his mother had just dumped him in England and never gone back to see him, but you found out she had been back several times. What was she actually doing on these repeated short trips back and forth between Berlin and England?
I think she was doing two things. My aunt writes about Bella sewing cash into her clothing and taking it out of the country and she remembers her unpicking it in the train in London, presumably giving it to a friend or putting it into some safe place. Because Third Reich had huge taxes and you couldn't get money out if you were Jewish. And then she was also visiting the children. And my grandfather also visited one of those times.
So the plan was to escape, but at the time the United States The UK, Australia weren't really taking Jewish refugees at that time trying to get out of the Third Reich. So they fetched up in Palestine, which was then being run under the British mandate after the First World War. They got there in April nineteen thirty seven.
¶ Bella's Wartime Service and Mother's Grief
But what about the kids? The kids are still in England, aren't they?
So yeah, so the original plan was that They would immigrate to Palestine and make a new life there, hopefully, and that the children would finish their schooling. So Ruth was older. She actually joined her parents in early nineteen thirty nine. Dad being a bit younger, I guess they would have perhaps let him continue at the school or if there was a good school to go to, they would have come and got him and he would have grown up in Palestine.
My grandfather couldn't make a living or didn't like being there. Apparently he found the place too hot. Or maybe it was to do with the marriage. Anyway, they applied to come to Australia because he did have capital and he had a business proposition to that was something that was being sought after. The family did get approval to immigrate to Australia, but then there were problems with the administrative paperwork.
And trying to figure that out from Palestine. Yeah. Would have been tricky at the time'cause there's the war in North Africa going on after nineteen thirty nine that's headed towards them there. Now your father had always believed that Bella, his mother, had not gone to Palestine with Her husband, Willie, but with her lover, Waltestrauss. That wasn't true at all.
Was it? No. So a family relative had told Dad that, that Bella had sailed on the ship to Palestine with Walter Strauss. But Bella had come with Willie and
Your father thought that Bella had been partying with friends and lovers in Palestine during the war years. What had she actually been doing in Palestine during the war years?
So in nineteen forty two the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service started to help protect Palestine and also to go to Egypt. The purpose of the ATS was to bring support to the men's army, build roads, drive trucks, move provisions. do communications. A lot of it was physically hard work. They were in the desert. It was quite gruelling. They dug trenches. There's a photo of Bella lying beside one of the trenches that she and colleagues have dug.
So she's digging trenches instead.
Yeah. And I mean I guess, you know, she had leave, you know, she'd come back to Tel Aviv on leave as other women did and and see friends and catch up and sleep and enjoy sleeping in a bed.
Meanwhile the years are rolling on here, do you have any indication how she felt about being separated for her kids for so long?
We don't have a lot of clues, but there is a letter to Ruth where she's sort of looking forward to seeing Ruth and the family again but says, Perhaps you don't need me anymore. You're a mother, you're married. You've got your own interests.
Ruth had grown up at that point and had her own child.
Yeah, Ruth had had my cousin Lee and she'd married
And Bella's r saying you don't need me.
A way, yeah, the childhoods are gone. Her children grew up without her. Because of the war. Because of the Holocaust.
¶ Confronting Palestinian History and Experience
Now as part of this research experience, Jane, you wanted to experience something of the Palestinian experience. Your grandmother had been there for so many years. And she'd been there just before the State of Israel was founded and the Nakbar, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes and their and their lands. Where could you go to find out about the Palestinian experience when you made your trip over to Israel?
So my third trip had become by then quite aware there was a very different history there for Palestinians as to what I'd been learning when I was focused on Bella and her Jewish experience. In that third visit in twenty nineteen, I spent time with volunteer groups. I sought out local Palestinians in Jaffa. I lived in Jaffa rather than in other another area of Tel Aviv.
I did a tour of the Gaza border. I went to Hebron. I tried to inform myself as much as I could. It wasn't something I've done before like that, so it was quite shocking, actually. I realized things Palestinians were far worse than I even had known. I discovered there was this very effective erasure of Palestinian history from whether it be missing street signs and villages that had been raised and built over where there was no acknowledgement of that past history.
To the silence. Just the silence.'Cause I met with quite a number of academics and Jewish academics and they just never talked about it. at all. It's like they're over there, they're somewhere else. And in a lot of ways they are. invisible. They're behind very tall walls. And then at a certain point I realized that I really wanted to speak most to peace activists, whether they were Palestinian or Jewish, because there I would get the dual history and the dual experience.
that I was trying to make sense of. How can you have these two terrible histories of the Holocaust and the Nakba and how do you bring them together in your mind chronologically and and in place?
So I made a connection with a volunteer organisation called Roads to Recovery. What it does is it has a volunteer driver who drive in their own car. They pick up a very ill Palestinian who needs high level treatment, for instance, I might be sick with cancer or or something like that, and drive them with one of their family members or a carer to a major Israeli hospital.
So they were leaving the West Bank from one of the borders. So we had to get up very early, stayed the night at the volunteers, we drove for about an hour and a half. We get to one of the West Bank border gates. It's still very dark. There's these tall yellow lights. There's dust everywhere. Vehicles, people. It's so chaotic. And I look at this sort of border where men, mainly men, are pouring out after having waited for hours to have their papers checked and so on, and then they're getting into
trucks and cars and buses to go to work in Israel. And the volunteer that I was with, Avigdor, put up a l long poll which had the road to recovery flag'cause you really there was just so many people And it was dark and at last they spotted us and we spotted them and this elderly gentleman with a walking stick and his daughter come to us and the gentleman gets in the car at the front with Abigdor and I get in the back with his daughter.
And we drive for another hour and a half or so to one of the major hospitals, the sun comes up, we drive past the West Bank water wall which, you know, has the barbed wire and it's so tall and We weren't really talking much. I did have a little bit of a conversation. But then when we got to the hospital, that was when it really struck me,'cause I just got out. I could get out and I could just wander through the hospital grounds.
But the carer I'll I'll I'll just call her Allie, she sh had to go through a special area which was all glassed and be searched and have her papers checked and scanned and so on, like airport security basically. And it just seemed Terribly wrong that I as an Australian tourist could just walk around freely and not be afraid. And she she was in her own country and was being searched.
While you were there in Israel, was there anything left of your grandmother's Palestine? Was there any house you could go to that she had lived in?
There was early Bauhaus apartment in Circus Street, Tel Aviv. And yeah, I walked there a few times and looked at it and could see the apartment that she'd lived in. The shrubbery was so old, like the plants, the stems were so thick I realised they were the shrubs that would have been there when she was there. Wasn't particularly renovated. It was remarkable.
¶ Melbourne Reunion and Bella's Final Despair
Eventually the family all reconvened in Melbourne bit by bit. In nineteen forty seven, your dad arrived at long last, but by this time he was twenty years old. What kind of a career had he in mind for himself at this point?
He had already decided he wanted to be a scientist and he'd done some study in biology and he started University of Melbourne and did honors there and went on to do a PhD. When he arrived he was just starting his studies.
And then a year later, Bella arrived in Melbourne in nineteen forty eight. What was her arrival like? What was her reunion with her long lost family like?
Look, I don't think it was happy at all. Th her relationship with my grandfather was rock bottom. He was angry with her. He wouldn't go out with her. He had control of finances My father was busy with uni and his friends. He didn't really pay any attention to her. He says he had a few conversations, but he was out a lot.
Didn't feel any connection to her at that point. I think she had a closer relationship with my aunt Ruth because of Lee, who was a little boy, who does actually remember meeting Bella. He was about six at that stage.
What was Bella living in the family home?
Yes, she was so she was living in the apartment with my father and grandfather, but they had separate bedrooms. They weren't No, there's no record of anything except her saying that There's no point to me. I mean she she just said, I can't go out. You can't go out as a woman alone here. We have to imagine a very traditional society, possibly the Jewish community wasn't welcoming possibly because of the breakdown in the marriage.
I think there were they're quite big cultural differences. German German Jews from Berlin, they're very bourgeois, very educated. They're quite different from other Jewish communities and like all communities there's the cliques and the ins and outs and something I'm still curious about about those communities in those years, but she was not welcome.
And then in nineteen forty nine, she'd been in Australia for less than two years. Bella took her own life in Melbourne. How were you told that she'd suicide her?
So for all Dad stories when we were young, I never knew that. I mean he never mentioned how she died. I just knew she'd died a long time before I was born. But when I was in my early or mid twenties, I was at my parents' house and they were hovering around and they clearly wanted to tell me something important. And then Dad says
Jane, there's something I need you to know. And I'm like, you've got to remember I'm a glib twenty something year old and I go, Yeah, what? And he says, Look, your grandmother Bella took her own life. And W he told me some more details about it, that he'd been in Tasmania on a working holiday as a young twenty-two year old.
And had received a telegram and had to rush back to Melbourne and had gone to the hospital and seen her lying with tubes and other things, you know, attached to her in her last hours.
And
hearing it it was just really strange because why were they telling me in this way? And why now? And who was this person even? And yet then me also trying to grasp it, it meant something to him and obviously it was serious.
And was he studying your reaction to this news?
Yeah, because I had been it turned out the reason they hadn't told me was that I had had periods of depression as a teenager and they were afraid that if I had known that my grandmother had committed suicide. that I might have copycatted her, you know, I would have done the same. The revelation then w was that and your great grandmother committed suicide. So Doris took her life and then Bella took her life. And this is something for you to be aware of
That you might have this self destructive gene or something.
Yeah. Something pathological. And that was what was so incredible when I read about this culture of suicide as a way for Jewish men and women to make their decision about when they would die, that they wouldn't die under the hands of the Third Reich, that they would do it on the day they did not want to be deported. et cetera, et cetera. So learning about that was fascinating for Doris.
certainly learning about what an incredible life Bella had had and all that she had done and yes, she had had periods of deep depression, but she was a doer. And then getting to Melbourne there was nothing to do. And she was I think fifty seven by that stage.
Did your father think of this her suicide as a kind of uh A second abandonment of him?
Absolutely. Yeah. It was shocking he felt very guilty, he felt he should have loved her more and said more and been more interested in her, as both Ruth and the everyone felt like that, three of them, Willie, Ruth and Dad. But he did feel gravely abandoned again because there was a letter for Ruth that Bella had written that Ruth showed him. And so all the always he said. Bella never wrote anything to me. She never said goodbye.
But was that true?
We thought it was true. I didn't want it to be true. I had various series and then in December twenty twenty two Seventy years Dad had lived believing that nothing had been left for him. There was somebody at Dad's house, a box was found. In the box there were many letters and two of them were from Bella. In the two weeks before she died, which were effectively goodbye letters, very loving letters to Dad.
But he didn't read them until he was well into his nineties. Well he had read them. He had read them on the at the time. What do you mean? But he couldn't remember them.
What do you mean?
So she he was in Tasmania, she wrote him a letter. And then another letter to Tasmania, very loving, with A lot of emphasis on saying goodbye. Not telling him she was going to commit suicide, but one of them ended, I love you today, I love you I'll love you next year and the year after and forever after. And They were goodbye letters and they were about are you warm enough and s I'm so happy for your studies and
I've put another s pair of socks in the post for you because I know that you can get holes in your socks and are the family feeding you enough with all that hiking you're doing, you must be very hungry. And and I'm so proud you've done so well in your studies. I rang Willie today when the letter came with your university results. I mean we were both we were both crying. I said, Dad, you read the letters, they've been opened and he said, Yeah, I know. He said, I don't remember them.
I think when he received them while he was on holidays, it wouldn't have seemed significant because of course his moody is there and he'll be seeing her in a few weeks. And I guess he the trauma of her suicide just eradicated so much and erased so much. And it just was gone. Was just gone. Even when he read the letters he can't I couldn't remember reading them at the time. And yet they'd been moved from box to box because it was a nineteen seventies Australia Post box.
Maybe if he looked at them again in the nineteen seventies, yet again he didn't remember them, couldn't comprehend what was being said.
What stubble were you in after you read those letters?
I was really, really, really profoundly sad for him. Because this was the goodbye. Even he knew it. And he understood she was being gentle with him, in a way that she didn't need to be gentle with his sister.
Where is Bella now? Where is she buried?
She was cremated there's a little plot for her which I visited. When my Aunt Ruth was dying, Ruth asked me to go to the grave site and said no one had ever been. At that point fifty years had passed. So I said to Ruth, Yes, I will go and visit and she said I I feel such a burden of guilt that I let Moody die. I didn't realise how lonely she was.
¶ The Enduring Power of Stories and Empathy
So your dad had lived with the story he'd been telling himself all his life. Now that he's read your book, how does he feel about Bellinau?
There was a time not that long ago where he definitely felt the burden had lightened. He could see that she had done things that were loving and protective, but in the last couple of years,'cause his recollection has faded in about certain things. He's sort of gotten a bit more resistant. But he definitely has changed his understanding of her? But I think the feeling of abandonment that will never go.
Does he feel a bit more love?
Oh yes. Yeah, he does. I think he feels loved by the process of having his life and his feelings you've given time and space to talk through.
Isn't your book The Act of a Loving Daughter?
He's very proud of me. He he's certainly he says he's but I mean he's a scientist. I don't go in often necessarily for mushy talk.
Isn't this in some ways the story of how you can get trapped in a story you've told yourself as a kid?
Yeah. I've really thought a lot about memory, about how you can remember things that don't happen, and that really important things that you should remember just are gone. They're just not there. And I guess that's why it's important to talk about history and talk to your family and let people ask questions and sometimes go to feelings that are hard. Otherwise we're stuck. We're always stuck and we go.
We hold on I mean, one of the things that I've learned from doing this book at a at not just at a personal level but at a political level is that if there is ever to be a peace in the Middle East between the Jews and Palestinian, if there's anything to hope for there Everybody needs to put some of the anger of the past aside and say, How are we going to talk to each other and how are we going to recognise each other's histories as valid and have compassion for each other?
Jane, it's been a completely amazing story. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Richard.
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Anytime.
ABC Listen Up.
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Today's conversation with Jane Messer was made in the lands of the Gadigal People. Producer was Meggie Morris. The executive producer is Eliza Kirsch. I'm Richard Feidler. Thanks for listening.