Nancy’s father, Rudi, Bertl’s younger brother, lived most of his adult life in London. Debonair and a keen gardener, he picked a fresh rose for his buttonhole every day. Nancy remembers his continental manners and special scents: Odol mouthwash and Musk Ox Essence.
No other father I knew, in days when English beds were made with sheets and blankets, and English food was unadulterated by foreign influences, slept in a feather bed, or ate gherkins, salami, dark rye bread and yoghurt. He spoke fluent and highly literary English, but he never lost his accent and would often accentuate it. He was a great flirt and when younger was given to clicking his heels and bowing when introduced to women.
Like many who survived or escaped the gas chambers, Rudi was riven with sadness and guilt, masked by his presence as a continental gentleman.
Rudi spoke angrily to Nancy exactly once, and her riff on the memory is itself a gem. He threatened to throw her out of the window for some now-forgotten childish crime.
How exactly would he do it, I wondered? The windows of our house were not large. I wouldn’t fit through even the largest of them. Or did he intend to throw me at a window and break the glass? On the ground floor the kitchen window would be best. I could stand on the draining board.
That golden age burned with the Holocaust. Nancy travelled to the places in Europe where her family had lived and some died in the gas chambers.
Maybe I had believed, for far too much of my life and seduced by my father’s stories, that the past was waiting for me intact. The discovery that it was not only lost but deliberately destroyed, was shocking.
I’m sorry that Nancy Kohner, who died in 2006, much younger than I am, didn’t live to read how grateful I am for her book.
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