Richard and Lisa's friends on their way to the USA and the UK, Mom in the centre, Else smiling on the right was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942
From 1936 to 1939 friends of Lisa and Richard flowed through their Paris apartment on their way to the the safety of the UK, the USA, Canada and further afield. Most of them were rather wretched, having suffered different degrees of persecution in Germany, Austria and the Balkans. Richard's older brother Arthur and his wife Flora left too. They went to Israel where Arthur continued to work as a journalist.
Arthur and Flora did not leave only out of a sense of self preservation. Arthur's father had supported the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Monarchy; partly because the emperor had resisted anti-semitism and allowed ambitious, young, nominally Jewish boys like him to enter the Staat Gymnasia and assimilate; partly because he loved Vienna one of the great cultural capitals of Europe, partly because he felt he belonged. Arthur was old enough to fight in the WW1. He was 16 when war broke out in 1914. He joined the Jewish regiment. There are pictures of him in uniform. He must have had illusions about the need for a Jewish homeland.
Why did Richard and Lisa stay in Paris until 1939? Why did Else and Richard's parents decide to stay in Prague? Of course Isidor and Regina didn't want to lose the flat they owned in Prague. Perhaps the Steinhardts all lived with the expectation that the situation would improve and that fascism would fade.
Richard and Lisa's friends escaping the war in Europe
But in the spring of 1939 the situation was very bleak for people of Jewish origin in Europe. On March 16th German soldiers marched into the Sudetenland to the tune of the Horst Wessel song. Grandpa's optimism evaporated then. He decided then to leap off to Prague to see how his parents and his sister Else were. To comfort them and reassure them and to find a solution, if possible. The Nazi wolves were at the door.
On the way there he had a fortuitous meeting which saved his life and, possibly, the life of his daughter, my mother, and his wife as well. He met someone who worked for Skoda linked to Arthur who presented him with an opportunity to leave emigrate even at such a late date. Perhaps he was an old school friend of Arthur's, perhaps he was a relative.
Skoda was in the hands of the Germans now and it would be incorporated into producing arms for the German war machine. If Richard's friend could send him a letter of appointment, several official looking letters sending him on a business trip for Skoda around the Mediterranean and Middle East, perhaps he would be allowed to leave by the French authorities.
The letters implied that the purpose of the visit was procurement for Skoda. At the same time, a link would be made with United Machinery in the letters. United Machinery was a London based company with a branch in South Africa. On arriving in Dover Richard could emphasise the business link with United Machinery.
What did they say to each other while they were together in Prague? What did Richard say to his mother and father on that last occasion? Certainly in Richard's desperate letters to Lisa from Lourenco Marques he repeats that he thinks that war would not break out. That the threat of it would blow over. Jewish people were persecuted but I don't think Grandpa and his family believed that mass extermination camps would be set up.
But his parents, Isidor and Regina were extremely worried and he was also worried. It was decided that both Else and Richard would have to leave Europe and that Else would go to Paris, out of harms way. She should live with Richard and family until a way could be found for her to emigrate. Isidor and Regina, meanwhile, would wait out the crisis in Prague.
A year or so later, Isidor is dead of throat cancer. in the Prague ghetto and Regine has become a destitute and starving older woman living with 12 other people in what was once her flat. In her letters Great Granny Regina writes of her fears for Else. She knows that Richard got away before the war broke out. She knows that Lisa and Eve are still in Suresnes.A year later she is deported to Terezin and then is murdered in Treblinka.
Granny Else and Mom waited in Les Mans for a few weeks for the visas which Grandpa was supposed to be arranging. But although he was clever enough to arrange his own departure he was not clever enough to arrange visas for his sister his wife and his daughter. Not to mention his mother and father.
No visa came and by now Granny realized that Grandpa was probably on the boat to South Africa and incommunicado. Reading Granny's letters in French to Grandpa she says. You would be so proud of your daughter. She is so charming and talkative. She goes up to complete strangers and tells them that her Daddy is going to Africa and that soon she will go to Africa to and she talks away and everyone smiles. Else also writes to Richard and says much the same thing. Baby is so sweet, Baby talks so fetchingly. But quickly her angst leaks through and she asks for news of visas and speculates on different options in front of her.
They wait in Les Mans for weeks and then Hitler's armies invade Czechoslovakia and war has broken out. Lisa and Else decide to go back to Suresnes to the flat in the Cite Jardin. Hopes of departure torn. Mom told that she would be staying, that she would be going to see Daddy later.
Later, Lisa hid all Richards documents and invented a cover story which Eve was taught to repeat. 'My father was a Frenchman who promised to marry Mummy, but then he ran away and left us.'
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