Mom and Granny and Else waited in Calais. The picture of Mom as a little 4 year old was taken in Calais. Mom had been told she was going to Africa soon to be with her Dad..
They had accompanied Grandpa to London, but then had to return.They expected to follow on shortly. Grandpa watched the ferry going back to France, all the way until it docked in Calais. He was not able to get the visas for them.
Perhaps what happened was due to his lack of foresight, and the fact that he was simply wrong. He was always so confident of his opinions. His reliance of his own viewpoint trapped him into running for his own life and abandoning his wife and child, his sister and his parents, to the war.
Grandpa himself managed to get out two months before the war began because he had a document from Skodawerks saying that he had been commissioned by them to buy parts in different places around the Mediterranean. He got the permission from a man on a train who he met by accident who knew his brother Arthur and who knew one of the last remaining ways to smuggle people out. He escaped using letters of recommendation from a factory that the Germans were already using to produce weapons and war vehicles. Grandpa had been a sales manager for an engine manufacturer during the 1930s. The story fit. He got out.
At this time, while they were waiting for the visa in, Mom would go up to strangers excitedly and tell them.
'My Daddy is going to Africa and we are going too. We're going to see my Daddy. And there are animals there like lions and elephants.'
And Else and Granny were full of hope and writing to Richard to tell him just how charming his daughter was telling him what she was saying and asking him to explain what was happening to their visas and waiting for his answer which never came.
The strange thing is that Richard in his letters at the time to Lisa - letters he knew would never reach her - says that he had no idea that war would begin. It would all blow over.
But how many people thought that?
Imagine. Two months away from the outbreak of a world war and you say have no idea that it will start. I find that hard to believe. Germany had taken over the Sudetenland. It was about to invade Bohemia - the City where his Mother and Father lived.
Was the idea to get a South African visa? Was the plan to go to South Africa and then send them a visa? Of course there was no visa and so they returned to Sureness. Did Granny blame Grandpa? I think she did. Was it his fault? He escaped. His Mother and father didn't, his sister didn't, his wife and child had to live through the war in occupied Paris. In his letters from Lorenzo Marques he is going mad with anxiety and grief.
And then Richard is welcomed warmly into the bosom of the Jewish community and perhaps precisely because the pain of memory is unbearable, he puts everyone out of his mind and, except for those dark nights, he loses himself in a mountain of work and in a roaring social life and by the time the war nears its end he has become the managing Director of two companies and Grandpa and his friend Rudi Bechter are notorious philanderers, two of the raciest well off 'single men' in town.
Should he have lived with that pain. I think Uncle Arthur did. Uncle Arthur was sweet but, somehow, broken. Would Grandpa have broken?
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