Mom and dad with Marcelino
This was written a few months before granny Lisa, mom and dad all died, one after the other.
She is ill at the moment with cancer in the bush in South Africa, taking morphine and strong, nauseating doses of chemotherapy. Mom was born in Paris just before the war. Her father Richard was Jewish, and her mother Lisa was German. When granny talked about Germany before the war she would talk about "the inflation, the inflation." And she said Paris before the war was like Paradise on Earth.
They were all into the theatre and the men were into mountain climbing. My Uncle Heini, at the age of 85 was still going up the foothills of the Himalayas. He was a famous actor in the Munich theatre. My mom was precocious, perhaps because she got so much attention from her mother.
The war broke out while my grandfather was on a visit to South Africa. My grandmother was left on her own in occupied Paris with her half Jewish daughter to fend for herself. She got a job in a German military hospital with the help of the Mayor of Suresnes. But many of the French (almost as anti-semitic as the Germans), were a resentful conquered race. My grandmother was German.
My mother, at the age of 4 said to her mother "Mutti, let me speak in French when we do the shopping to avoid problems."
They lived in Suresnes near the race course, where there was a German gun emplacement. A target for the British and the Americans. Mom was often left with the neighbours and in the evening she would watch the grandfather clock tick and tock and hope that her mom would come home intact.
The Nazi's published an edict saying that anyone Jewish or half Jewish had to wear a yellow star, but my grandmother refused to pin one on my mother. My aunt who was living with them, on the other hand, an opera singer, proudly wore her star and was taken of the streets transported in Waggon No 27 and gassed in Auschwitz on arrival. My mother witnessed the arguments with her aunt, intelligent as she was and understood that she, a very young girl was in danger from the Nazis. She took refuge in being a normal little schoolgirl wearing a smart uniform, marching in crocodile formation through the streets of Paris "just like Madeleine", she said. When my Uncle Heini went to try to save my my mother's grandmother he arrived on the day they took her away to be transported to Treblinka.
Once there was a siren and they were upstairs in their flat. My mother begged her mother to go into the shelter until she finally agreed. There was a blast. And when they went back upstairs the walls were shredded with shattered glass. Debris was everywhere. The house next door had been completely destroyed. The door to the flats had also been blown open and that winter, which was particularly cold, Granny and Mom slept, huddling for warmth under the blankets with the wind blowing through.
My mother was gifted, she read le Comptese de Segur when she was very little and wrote poems which, I am told, the school kept. She delighted in pleasing her mother by getting first place and was distraught when she didn't. Mom was moved up, as an eight year old, to study with twelve year olds. She kept getting thinner and thinner until she was diagnosed with malnutrition. She had been giving all her food to the other pupils at the school and eating nothing herself. At the risk of losing her job, granny insisted that mom leave school and come and stay with her at the hospital.
When the war was over the pair of them left to South Africa and found waiting for them a philandering father unable to face the horror of the slaughter of his family and his failure to save his wife and daughter from the sufferings of the war. And at first his wife and daughter were thin and shabby-sad from the war in Europe. They cramped his lifestyle as Managing Director of two companies, too. Grandpa was intellectually insecure. He used to crash into my mother's room and insist that she stop reading. My grandmother took refuge in flowers and her garden. The poor man was in a terrible spin.
After being teased for her English my mother became top of the class in one year. Apart from the oppression at home, life carried on. She went to Witz university and met my father Tony Hall: dad on the steps of the university building, and they hit it off. Their romance was all about anti-apartheid and going on demonstrations together. At the age of 21, after the Sharpeville massacre, my mother joined the Congress of Democrats with my father. Her boss was Norman Levy, a very sweet man who was sent to jail in the treason trial for 7 years.
Apparently our house was like a multicultural hippie commune in those days. At the age of 22 my mother was sent to jail for putting up posters explaining why the ANC had turned to the armed struggle and insulting the dignity of the President (by reminding Voster of his Nazi past).
My father refused to reveal the whereabouts of Mandela after interviewing him as a journalist on the Star and both of them were banned and we had to leave South Africa fast.
They chose to go to newly independent Kenya to support Kenyatta and work on the Daily Nation. By drafting the political platform of Odinga Odinga, my father earned us the enmity of the Kenyan government and they took away all our possessions. Then we moved to the UK where my mom became a feminist and my father worked for Oxfam. After 2 years they went back to Africa to support Nyerere's fledgling socialist government and work on the Standard in the period of Ujama. It was a true hot bed of anti-colonial subversion and we had everyone there. All the leaders of the African revolutionary movements in exile. Marcelino Dos Santos, Augustin Neto, Josiah Jele everybody. In a way it was a centre of things. Richard Gott got everyone on the paper into trouble and so we had to leave again...to Kenya.
In Kenya, my father worked for Oxfam and my mom was involved in feminist politics and became woman's editor of the daily nation. My father went into Ethiopia and revealed the first Ethiopian famine to the world in 1973. He brought Muhammad Amin (RIP) in with him on the second run. In the end Blue Peter started an appeal and he featured in several of their programmes.
I remember how, in a Quaker boarding school in Teeside in the UK, I was teased by the boys. That's your father they said, and I came downstairs to see a Masai leaping round a fire. A week later my father appeared on TV, handsome and black-bearded. No, I had the satisfaction of telling them, now that's my father. Later both my mother and father went to report on the famine in Maharashtra (I think) and we went to India, where they worked for Oxfam.
After India we went to the UK and my dad edited Middle East magazines, he was the editor of "8 Days", you may recall it and he began to get a bee in his bonnet about the treatment of the Palestinians.
My mother meanwhile got an MA in rural development and became one of the pioneers in the field of developing income projects for women for the UN, the International Labour Organisation. My father lost his machismo and became a new man to help her get her degree, looking after us. Mom went on to work for 25 years in the field helping women generate income for themselves and ultimately acting as a senior consultant for the UN in Asia and all over Africa. My Father gave up his high paid job. He refused to take on the editorship of Middle East because he didn't want to be a scab (as there was a strike going on at the time) and left the UK to be with my mother in Somalia. By the time they left bodies were just starting to appear on the beaches and they heard later of all their friends who had been murdered. A constant theme in their lives.
They moved to Ethiopia. In Ethiopia my father restructured the communications arm of the ECA and instead of taking on the top job, again, groomed a very competent successor and moved to be with my mother to Zimbabwe. Wherever my father was, in impossible circumstances, surprisingly good regional magazines started popping up and local journalists were trained up and given opportunities.The last cream puff, as my father called his Magazines, was Africa South and East, based in Zimbabwe and then South Africa.
They are living there now. My father has started a little ecological newsletter called "Heal" and my mom's last trip was to Tanzania to advise on a woman's project there. My mom is a stalwart member of the local ANC, bringing all kinds of different people together in ways they really wouldn't expect. They were both proud to be invited to Veteran's day with Nelson Mandela and recently my father had his 70th birthday. Many comrades turned up including Mac" Maharaj and I gave one of the speeches.
Comments
Post a Comment