Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Please don’t worry, and forget everything that Fräulein Württemberger has written to you. Irma is perfectly healthy.

For the first time in my thirty-year practice as a doctor (it’s only when one writes it down that one realises how old one has grown) I deliberately made a wrong diagnosis, and am, strangely, even proud of it. If I have correctly understood Irma (she is a girl who can express herself far better than one would expect at that age), it is very important for you and your children that they remain in Switzerland for the time being. The situation in Germany must be very difficult, probably far more difficult than we can imagine here in safe Switzerland. My nephew Ruben lives in Halberstadt, and what he reports in his letters often leaves me unable to sleep.

I sometimes think that the world has been sick since the Great War, and even today no one has found a prescription for healing it again. Perhaps there is none.

But always expecting the worst doesn’t help either.

I hope that with my ‘misdiagnosis’ I have acted in line with your wishes, and that I have been able to help you (I should have written ‘help you a little bit’, because a little bit is all it can be.) If I can do anything else for you, please let me know.

With very best regards

Dr Arthur Meijer

Brandschenkestrasse 34

PS: Reading it through, it occurs to me that this letter is full of parentheses. My sister Hinda would say: your writing is as chaotic as your thought.

Kassel, 24. 5. 37

Dear Dr. Meijer!

Many thanks for your kind letter. You must be a very nice person.

Luckily your well-meant concern was unnecessary. I have never been concerned about the state of my daughter’s health. Even before Fräulein Württemberger contacted me, Irma had told me everything in a letter. She even crept secretly into the village to bring it to the post office unnoticed. I have the impression that she’s really enjoying the whole conspiracy. She was a diva even as a very little girl.

So by the time Frl. W.’s letter reached me, I already knew everything. This woman who runs the home really seems to know very little about psychology.

By the way: Irma also expresses herself much better than her twelve years would suggest. In other circumstances I would be proud of it, but as it is I worry. It isn’t good when children have to grow up in a time that makes them grow up too quickly.

Irma writes to me that you are a Goliath, and from her that is a great compliment.

I have to explain that to you. She doesn’t mean the Biblical Goliath, who had no chance against David’s sling, but the hero of the bedtime stories that I have told my children for many years. (And which Moses still likes to hear.)

You must have infected me: now I too am starting to write in brackets, even though it was dinned into us in school that that’s the sign of a badly organised mind. (Apologies.)

In these stories, without which my children would never go to sleep, the family got into terrible difficulties of some sort in each new episode. If they climbed a mountain, it would turn out to be a volcano and erupt. If they were travelling on a ship, they would find themselves in a tornado. And so on. The disaster could not be bad enough, because at the very last moment Goliath would always appear and put everything right again. For example if they were about to be run over, he would suddenly be standing there and stop the car. Effortlessly, just with one hand. And smile as he did it. A hero, in fact.

You see: you have made a big impression on Irma.

I had to tell my children the episode with the car over and over again. Perhaps Irma has told you that my husband lost his life in a traffic accident.

I am very grateful for the fact that my children are allowed to stay in Switzerland for now. It is a great relief to me. Ideally they would never have to come back to Germany at all. It’s no longer our country. In Moses’ class they are now practising reading from a picture book: ‘Trust not the fox who roams the heath, nor Jews who all lie through their teeth,’ it is called, and the verses in it are so terrible that one can hardly imagine. There, for example, beside a real Stürmer picture, it says, ‘This is the Jew, it’s plain to see; the greatest rogue in Germany!’

I don’t want my son to learn such things by heart. And possibly recite them in front of the whole class. His teacher was a Party member early on.

The worst thing is that the author of this book is supposed to be just seventeen or eighteen years old. Such a young mind is quickly poisoned.

No, this is no longer my Germany.

I have decided to go to Berlin for a few days, and approach the various embassies. There must be a visa somewhere, regardless of which country it is for! Even though that is very difficult at the moment, particularly for someone who has no money. They say that you can sometimes spend two days waiting in the queue outside the British Embassy, before you can even fill in the application form to emigrate to Palestine.

I would most like to go to America. Do you know anyone there who could issue me with an affidavit?

Forgive me for asking you for something yet again. It isn’t my way.

One becomes so helpless.

Irma writes to tell me that she now has a room of her own with Moses in the Wartheim. Did you organise that too? Then you really are a Goliath.

Once again: I am really grateful to you. It’s good to know that there is someone who cares.

With best regards.

Rosa Pollack

Zurich, 1 June 1937

Dear Frau Pollack,

I am certainly not a Goliath. Heroes are not short-sighted, and they don’t run out of breath if they have to go up a flight of stairs to see a patient. (Although: do we know whether heroes aren’t sometimes exhausted too? I’ve never met one I could have asked.)

(And we live in times in which such a Goliath would have a lot to do.)

Sadly I don’t know anyone in America. My brother-in-law once lived there for some years, and he also promised me to inquire whether one of his old acquaintances might be able to do something for you. But he isn’t giving me any great hopes. His time in New York was a long time ago, and he says that when it comes to asking favours of people they tend to have very short memories. (I’m afraid he may be right.)

I do have a good contact in Kenya who might be able to make something possible. But who wants to go there?

I also asked my brother, who does a lot of work with French companies. He says Paris is overflowing with German emigrants at the moment, and if you can’t speak the language perfectly you haven’t a chance of making a living. If I understood you correctly, however, that wouldn’t be an absolute necessity for you.

Have you actually ever thought of trying Switzerland?

With best wishes

Dr Arthur Meijer

PS: I will be going to Heiden again next week.

‘Until the end of October,’ Fräulein Württemberger said proudly. The tone of her voice made it clear: Irma and Moses had her and no one else to thank for this period of grace. She was one of those people who can constantly rewrite the world and their own role in it.

‘No further extension of the present exemption may be granted,’ she read from the decision by the immigration authorities, ‘and this office can process no corresponding application hereto.’ The official German of the letter skipped as nimbly from her tongue as if it were an essay by her beloved Professor Heidegger. She snapped the file shut and put it back in its place on the shelf, precise to the millimetre. ‘So, until the end of October, and then…’ Her right hand came down on the desk like a guillotine blade.

‘And then?’ asked Arthur.

Fräulein Württemberger didn’t reply.