Transmission #61: The End of This is the Begin.
The story of my grandfather, Rudi Lewin.
This is a very different Transmissions this week. It’s not about design, or other bits and pieces that I found on the internet. It’s something else.
It is a story about my grandfather, Rudi Lewin, his experiences as a German Jew in Nazi Germany, and his life after that. I think it’s a story worth telling.
So here it is.
If this letter takes as long as it usually does, it’ll arrive around your birthday, at least that's the intention.
As a gift you will receive the enclosed painting from Hans, which he made for you without asking, and above all I want to send you new pictures of the boys, which can only be taken when Hans can go out again.
I wrote to you earlier that he broke his right leg, quite smoothly and harmlessly, but it will just take some time before he can move properly again. At first it is still in a cast until next week, but it was x-rayed to check through the cast and is healing perfectly.
To get back to the main purpose of this letter: You know what I wish for you and all four of us in the New Year. The most important thing is that you stay healthy and that we will be together in the not too distant future and everything else will be fine. We will both continue to develop internally during this long separation, but since our basic attitudes towards life and things are so similar, we will never move away from each other despite all the developments, but rather the shared gravity of the situation will bind us ever closer together, so that we really will be able to pick up where we were interrupted.
We're fine, really! We have everything we need in abundance, and the boys are childlike and carefree. Their childhood is now a really happy one. There is a nice, comradely relationship between us and I think they have a pleasant upbringing, although of course the fatherly hand is sometimes missing and life with the many and mostly old people in the apartment is difficult.
By the way, with my extensive help, Hans printed the cover of this letter for you with his small typewriter. He's going to school in September, he's already intellectually ready for it, he learns easily and wants to learn. He knows all the numbers, from the trams and shop windows… Physically he has also done well, no longer has any screaming at night, etc., and is growing and eats well. The little one is strong and very healthy, although both have limbs that are a bit thin, but that has nothing to do with their health.
Now a nice birthday Nuschnussh and warm greetings and wishes
D.Tr.
Can you still snore as well as you learned to do in the Broadway tune? I think about it all so often!
Munich, July 20, 1941
This letter was one of the very last that my grandfather, Rudi Lewin, would ever receive from his wife, Gertrud. The chirpy spirit of it, the stoicism, the optimism, the sheer normality of a mother looking forward to her eldest child reaching school age and blossoming before her eyes. The heartbreak of what would happen next.
Exactly 133 days later, she, Gertrud Lewin, and her two sons, Hans who was five, and Michael who was three, would be dead, shot by the Nazis in a forest outside Riga, Latvia, nearly two thousand kilometres from their home in Munich.
When Rudi received this letter, most of Europe was roiling in the midst of German occupation and Nazi rule, and he was exiled across the other side of the world. He had been separated from his family for over two years.
At this moment in 1941, both Rudi and his wife’s movements were heavily restricted by the authorities, but by very different authorities and for very different reasons.
Gertrud was a Jewish woman, somehow raising two small children by herself in an apartment in Munich, in the middle of the German Reich. They were stuck. By 1941, it was forbidden for them, or any other Jews, to leave Germany.
Rudi, also Jewish, also German, was living in a tiny country town called Tatura, in Australia of all places. He was interned by the Australian government in a camp for ‘enemy aliens’, waiting for the madness of the war to end.
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This, as you can probably tell, is not your usual Transmissions broadcast. I’ll forgive you if you just want your usual dose of design, ideas and other flotsam, and tune out for this one.
This is a different flavour altogether. It is a sad story, and it is long.
This is a story that I’ve wanted to share for a long time, a story that I felt compelled to write now. As I watch the Israel-Gaza war play out, and I watch people around me grasp for a side to take, and a truth to believe, I have to reflect on my own family’s history, on our Jewishness, on Israel, and what it means to take sides. What can happen when we draw divisions through our shared humanity, and when we make these divisions the thing that defines us. Where that can take us, and why we must resist it at all costs.
I, too, wait for the madness to end.
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My grandfather’s story is an extraordinary one.
However, it is important to recognise that though it has its own unique flavour, there are many such stories from those who lived through the mess of Europe during the second world war.
I present here a small slice of his story, cobbled together from a box of old documents that have been sitting in my attic for years.
This story is two things. Firstly, it is a warning. But secondly, it is a call for hope.
1.
My grandfather died of a sudden heart attack in 1992, at his home in Haifa, in Israel, where he had lived happily for nearly two decades. He was 83, and I was nine at the time.
Soon after his passing, my mother, working through grief, and through the process of collecting and preserving his documents, sat down and typed out some pages to summarise the series of tumultuous events that shaped her father’s extraordinary life. It was, by that point, family lore.
Here it begins:
Rudolph Martin Lewin was born into a middle class Jewish family in Munich, in 1908. He was the youngest of three half brothers. His father wasn't very fortunate with his wives - each son had a different mother. Apart from that, there was nothing really unusual about this family. They suffered through the First World War. Rudi's eldest brother was killed in action two days before the end of the war.
They, along with the rest of Germany, suffered the injustices of the Peace Agreement and its consequent economic devastation and hyperinflation. Rudi recalled being sent to the shop to buy a loaf of bread and being told to be sure to buy it on the way to school, because by the afternoon, on the way home, he wouldn't have enough money.
Later on, Rudi wanted to become a gardener and went to gardening school. He wasn't very good at it though, so was taken into the family business. They sold those new fangled machines - typewriters.
At age nineteen, he met and fell in love with a 19 year old girl named Ilse. She was studying Dentistry and, not surprisingly, wasn't very interested in a gangly, nineteen year old typewriter mechanic. They went out a few times but she went on to greener pastures.
Life went on. Rudi got over his first love, and, after a while, married another. Her name was Gertrud Samson. They prospered, and had a son. Yet around them Germany’s political and social upheaval only intensified.
Hitler was on the scene and growing stronger and more powerful. Ilse was one of the few to take heed of the "madman" and, in 1933, fled Germany for Palestine with her family.
Rudi was still optimistic. “After all, Germany was a civilised, cultured land with civilised, cultured people - wasn't it?”
It proved not to be the case. The situation went from bad to worse. First he and his family couldn't afford to leave with their household goods, then they couldn't afford to leave and take nothing.
One day in early 1936, Rudi was taken to the Dachau Concentration Camp. I don't know the circumstances and I don't know of his experiences there. That was one subject he refused to talk about. To my knowledge, he never told anybody.
In those days it was still possible for Jews to buy passage out of Germany. He didn't have any money but his wifes' family, who were living in England, came up with the money to buy him out of the concentration camp.
The condition imposed by the Reich was that he leave Germany immediately and with nothing. He accepted the condition with the idea of working in England and saving enough money to buy his family out.
At the beginning of 1939, when Rudi left Germany for England, he left behind Gertrud, his son Hans, and a new baby boy, Michael.
His plan to buy them safe refuge to England would ultimately fail.
And he would never see them again.
2.
When he arrived in England in 1939, Rudi found his way to Liverpool to work.
But in September of that year, Britain declared war on Germany, and a few weeks later, on the 20th of October 1939, he received a summons. Whereas it was his Jewishness that had forced him into exile, now it was another identity, his German-ness, that would force him into exile yet again.
He was no longer welcome in the country that had rescued him from the Nazis.
It was May 1940. Here's my mother Sue, picking up the story:
Rudi was interred in Britain as an enemy alien, a prisoner of war - after all, he was a German, ipso facto, he was an enemy. Ignore that he was a Jew and what he had been through.
In August 1940, he and several hundred other "enemy aliens" like himself were put on board a ship called the "Dunera". No one knew why or where they were going. The rumours were that they were headed for Australia or South Africa, but the hot tip was Canada.
The British authorities had promised them freedom at their destination, that their families would follow, and that they would eventually return, as free men, to England. These promises were a means to keep the internees amenable and pliant. Perhaps, more charitably, they were wishful thinking on the part of the British. Needless to say, none of these promises were kept.
They were at sea for two weeks before they were told their destination was Sydney.
The conditions on the ship were atrocious. Overcrowded, poor sanitation (they were allowed two ten minute walks on deck per day) and very little food. What there was, was barely edible. They ate it anyway.
They were treated as enemies. Many acts of humiliation and degradation were perpetrated by the crew, on the "passengers". A real disgrace to Britain and the British Navy!
In September 1940 the men landed at Sydney with little more than the clothes they stood up in. Most of their belongings had been stolen or thrown overboard by the kindly crew.
From Sydney, they were taken to Hay in outback N.S.W. where they were again housed in camps. There was a great difference between these camps and those in Britain. These camps had no gates, no barbed wire fences and the officers treated the internees with the sympathy and respect they deserved.
Fairly quickly however, these cultured, Northern European men began to sicken with the heat. As a result of a petition, in 1942, they were transferred to another camp at Tatura, near Shepparton in Victoria. The climate there was gentler and there was plenty of fruit picking work available.
Soon the men had organised their social and cultural lives. They had classes in almost anything you could imagine - chess, drama, language, drawing. They even had a camp orchestra. They organised their sleeping, cooking and cleaning requirements.
Life took on a semblance of “normalcy".
The journey of the Dunera and the shameful treatment of the internees aboard it is well documented. As is the enormously outsized contribution that the cohort on board would make to Australian life, business and culture in the years after the war. But that is another story.
Rudi took summary notes of the day to day life of those interned at Hay and Tatura. In them, he talks of the beauty of the early mornings, the dust storms, the flies on your back. In Rudi’s camp - Camp 8 - there were roughly a thousand men interned, 750 of them Jewish, many of them academics, intellectuals and professionals of all kinds. Though their movements were restricted, they were welcomed by the local population. They created their own theatre, newspaper, and their own currency, and were living a strange, not-entirely unpleasant, interstitial life on the other side of the world.
It wasn’t until over a year after his arrival in Australia, in early 1941, that Rudi’s wife Gertrud was able to reach him by post. His exact whereabouts hadn’t been known. She’d been sending letters to Canada in hope, but eventually, somehow, her letters found Rudi in his encampment in Tatura.
That sparked a flurry of letters. For much of that year, Rudi was in regular contact with Gertrud and his children, who were still living back in Munich. Dozens of letters, talking about the children and the waiting, counting down the time until they could be reunited. All the way up until October 1941. And after that, silence.
Here is a copy of Gertrud’s identity papers, from May of that year.
Even before his arrival, the Australian authorities had viewed Rudi through the lens of his German-ness. They had interned him, because he, like all Germans, was a perceived threat to the nation.
But now, two years later, these prejudices had softened, and there was a practical need for skilled professionals in civic life, workers for the farms, and fit men who were able and willing to fight a war in the Pacific. Alongside that, there was also a new identity that was forming in Australia, around what it meant to be an Australian, one that was built less around a shared heritage, and instead built around shared beliefs.
And so in 1942, determined to do his part to fight against those who had destroyed his life in Germany, Rudi joined the Australian Defence Force. Putting the skills he had honed pre-war to good use, he was assigned to be part of the Engineers corps as a typewriter mechanic. He never saw fighting at the front, but he remained with the army until the end of the war in 1945.
3.
Throughout his time with the Defence Forces, Rudi was seeking the whereabouts of his family. He knew that they had been resettled from Munich, possibly to somewhere in Poland, but information was scarce.
He wrote letters to his in-laws, to his family, and to the Red Cross. But he heard nothing concrete.
Then in June 1946, with the war finally over, Rudi received a letter from Hans Shimmler, a family friend in Munich, that confirmed the worst.
After nearly 7 years of separation and endless worry, I truly cannot imagine the cold horror of what it would have been like to read this passage:
It is such a sad letter that I am sending to you I have to write that I am almost afraid to write the full truth to you, dear Mr. Lewin. Life is so full of bitterness and shame that God can give you strength enough to bear the truth. We were deeply shocked when we found out about all this. Oh, people can often be far below the animals if they shed all their humanity: and unfortunately there were more monsters in Germany than we knew back then and than we would like to believe now: Your wife was sent on November 20th 1941, deported with her two children, on a train towards Riga. The train never arrived in Riga. At that time several thousand Jews were transported with her. Today it is known that these poor people all had to get out on the way, and were chased into a forest and shot there.
Confirmation came from other sources too. Rudi’s wife Gertrud, and his two children, Hans and Michael, were dead. Killed by the Nazis, along with thousands of others on the way to Riga, and alongside millions throughout that horrible period.
In 1947, the truth of Rudi’s family emerged unfathomably slowly, in painful letters, shipped around the world. Now, the events of November 30 1941, in the forests outside Riga, have been thoroughly documented. But as time marches on, as generations pass, these events are inevitably forgotten in the dim haze that we collectively know as the Holocaust. Growing up, as I did, in a prosperous and peaceful time, it is a feat of imagination to summon up these ghosts of the past.
Sometimes though, these ghosts, they reach up and shake you by the collar and shout and demand to be remembered.
As I looked through the dusty box of old files, in amongst the piles of letters, old passports and official documents, I found a small tin cigarette case. I shook it lightly, and it made a noise. It was a keepsake box. I opened it up, and looked inside.
Among some old coins, tucked away in this safest of places, I found a set of small photographs. Two children. And as I looked at their smiling, mischievous little faces, something dawned on me. I turned the photos around, my heart stopped completely. And I fell apart.
From Gertrud’s letter:
As a gift you will receive the enclosed painting from Hans... and above all I want to send you new pictures of the boys…
Written on the back were the names ‘Hans’ and ‘Michael’, dated September 1939.
Captured forever, frozen in this little box, these poor innocent children. Here, captured on film, in the last few months of their short lives. Shot dead only because of their Jewishness, their photographs kept in this precious box for years by their father who was interned in a camp and exiled on the other side of the world, only there because of his Germanness.
This is the warning that I want this story to carry: no good can come from dividing people into a group, or a class, or a race, or a religion, or a nationality. That we have far more in our common humanity than in these petty labels. That we have history – right here! – that shows us where we will find ourselves if we follow these ideas of hatred and division to their conclusions.
Herr Schimmler’s words chilling words still reverberate:
Oh, people can often be far below the animals if they shed all their humanity: and unfortunately there were more monsters in Germany than we knew back then and than we would like to believe now
It is of course not just Germans. That we humans are actually capable of such heinous inhumanity and stupidity is a red flashing warning sign hanging above all of us. It is a warning that we should heed at every chance we get.
It is equally shocking that only a few months before their murder, that Gertrud could be so hopeful about her children’s future. Her words echo through time. They should stand as a reminder of how brittle safety can be, and how quickly, how brutally, how totally, it can all fall apart.
We're fine, really! We have everything we need in abundance, and the boys are childlike and carefree. Their childhood is now a really happy one.
4.
This story was going to be a warning, but it was also going to be a story about hope. You’ve had the warning, so here’s the hope.
Over to you, mum:
At the end of the war, Rudi and his good friend were discharged and opened a typewriter and sewing machine shop in Richmond. The partnership between those two men lasted thirty years, the friendship, nearly fifty.
In 1946, by chance, Rudi discovered the address of his former girlfriend, Ilse. She was still living in Palestine but by now was divorced and had a young daughter.
They began a joyous correspondence that resulted in the arrival of Ilse and her daughter in Australia in early 1947.
They married some months later. I am the child of that union.
From then on Dad’s life was a contented one.
His family prospered and his business, although not a huge success, was sufficient to keep us in relative comfort.
He retired in 1975 and my parents went on a five month overseas trip that included Israel. My father had never been there before and quite fell in love with the place.
He was captured by the history, by the beauty, but above all, by a sense of belonging, of being home and, at last, truly safe.
They sold up in Melbourne and moved there in 1978.
And so my grandfather lived in Israel up until his death in 1992. For a multitude of reasons, he had found his sanctuary there.
In postwar Australia, he had experienced a country that was young, unencumbered by the divisive burdens of history that had just torn Europe to shreds. It was, for someone like Rudi, the perfect place for a fresh start.
As a skilled mechanic, he was able to build a business and be accepted into a society as a human being first and foremost, where his Jewishness or his German-ness were parts of who he was, but not what defined him.
After his move to Israel, he came back to visit a handful of times. I was only nine when he passed away, so my memories of him are dim. I remember a gentle, kindly, dignified man with white hair and a moustache, and a thick German accent. To me, he wasn’t just old, he was truly ancient, in the way that’s only possible when the very young look upon the very old. As he spoke, he engendered a special kind of respect, that I could sense, even then.
What struck me as a child, as what strikes me now, is that somehow, he managed to not be consumed by the terrible events that he lived through. By the indignities and the injustices committed against him, and against his family, but that he rose above it, and lived a full and complete ‘second life’, after the war.
In drawing such a demarcation in his life, in creating this new beginning in Australia, he gave himself a blank canvas upon which he could look to the future instead of the past. It is perhaps an inspiration today for those in his adopted homeland of Israel, for those who are unable to escape from a cycle of endless and bloody recriminations, for whom history is an unbearable burden.
To make a break from a torrid past is unfathomably difficult. But it is possible. I have seen proof of it. Actual, physical proof.
In a dusty old box, the one that sits in my attic, is a folder of letters from Rudi to his new partner. Letters written after the war. The letters in which he convinces her to come join him in Australia. On the last page of that folder is a handwritten note, a steadfast resolution to leave the past behind. A rebirth into a new life:
‘The End of this Book is the Begin.’
To new beginnings.
Vale Rudi Lewin, 25/11/1908-14/1/1992
Thank you for making it through this story. It has been a long post, but it is just the barest, most cursory outline of what was an incredible life through tumultuous times. There is so much more to his story. I hope this is enough for now.
I am looking for people who might be able to read some of the letters he and Gertrud wrote to each other in tiny, cursive, incomprehensible German script. If this is you and you’d like to help me translate them, then please reach out.
In the meantime, thank you for reading, and see you again in the future, when regular Transmissions will resume. Be good to one another.
x
Marty
Dear Marty,
Thank you for the very interesting insight into your family history. I will contact you about your grandmother Ilse Lewin, née Heilfron. She studied dentistry and I would therefore like to include her in my encyclopedia of Jewish dentists during the Third Reich (I am a professor of medical history in Germany). Unfortunately, I am still missing some information about Ilse Lewin. I know that she was born in 1909 in Thorn, that her father was a dentist in Dresden before the Third Reich, etc., but details are still missing. Could we exchange information via email? My e-mail address is dgross@ukaachen.de
I would be delighted. Best regards Dominik Groß