Rosa's Child (16 page)

It was fortunate for Susi that Frau Schmidt, herself of Jewish stock, was equally determined to establish the truth. An archivist by training, she too had a horror of loose ends, especially those relating to the Holocaust. After delving once more into Gestapo records she was eventually able to shed new light on the question of Rosa's fate.

Dear Susi

I am writing to tell you that just yesterday I have found a pile of Jewish passports in Nazi police records. Among these was your mother's, Rosa. All the passports in the sack (exactly 50) belonged to people who were deported to Auschwitz on 3 March 1943.

So it seems that Rosa was quite definitely put down for the transport to Piaski in April 1942, as I told you earlier, but got seriously ill with breast cancer and then was sent to hospital, and unfortunately Auschwitz later. The last camp in Munich was still the one in Knorrstrasse. Now the Maria Forster letter makes sense to me.

My best wishes to you

Finally, then, the truth. Rosa Bechhöfer had perished at the most notorious of all the Nazi death camps: Auschwitz. The very name made Susi's blood run cold. Rosa had at last been found. But at Auschwitz, alas.

'I opened this letter,' Susi wrote in her diary, 'and once again I felt my whole inside collapse.'

For here it said that that vile centre of extermination had been my mother's final destination. And yet somehow I had known all along, however much I might have protested to the contrary. But I have this strong image, which I now cannot get out of my head. It is of Rosa walking towards her death. As she is confronted with the gas chambers, with all the people naked and crammed in together, all the time she is thinking to herself - 'I did what I could, I did what I could for my twins.' And that her final prayer would have been for Lotte and me - 'may God save my beautiful daughters.' And to you, my darling mother Rosa, who I was to be with for so very little in this life, I say just one thing: that I have missed you and longed for you all my life. More than you will ever know. May your soul now rest in peace.

As the days went by, Susi thought too of the letters of sympathy, mostly from complete strangers, which had arrived after the showing of her story on television. One that particularly touched her, with its reference to her mother, was from Maureen Goldberg in Leeds:

I am writing to tell you that all my family watched '40 Minutes' last week and we all felt very deeply for you. You have been in my thoughts ever since.

I feel immense sadness for your dearest mother, Rosa. I know that she would have been extremely proud of you.

Shalom

ELEVEN

Susi: A New Identity

F
or many people their middle years are a period of security and stability; gone are the uncertainty and impetuousness of youth. Not so for Susi Stocken. The dramatic outcome of her search for her identity and her parents' fate has obliged her to grapple with problems of a very fundamental nature.

Alan Stocken, who witnessed each stage of the process, if not every detail, nowadays occasionally makes light of his wife's metamorphosis, teasing people with a riddle. How could he possibly have started out, he asks, by marrying Grace, only to now find himself wed to Susi without there having been a divorce, a formal separation or any indeed any change of partner in between? It is a good line for broaching a difficult subject with new acquaintances. But, although the passage of time has taught Susi to smile along with everyone else, her journey of discovery was no laughing matter. There were many times when she paused to wonder whether she would ever adjust to so much trauma and change. A few years on, however, she has only one regret.

'I just wish that I had initiated everything much earlier,' she admits. 'So in a sense I feel that I have to make up for lost time. The most wonderful thing is for that dark cloud of not knowing to have gone. That was desperately important for me. And Susi is now a person in her own right, which I feel is a basic principle of human survival.'

In fact, attempting to dispense with Grace was the one part of the quest which, far from being painful, was a real pleasure. For Grace had been a thoroughly unhappy person, downcast, isolated and depressed, for very many years. However, while to those around her it might have looked as though Susi had killed off Grace, Susi herself does not see it in that way. To her it feels that she has retained and integrated Grace's capacity for caring, in such a way as to make Susi much stronger, much less of a victim.

Central to changing one's identity is the issue of names. While Susi had no difficulty at all in reclaiming the name given to her by her mother at birth, for those watching her search from the sidelines matters were not quite so clear-cut. 'I find it very difficult to accept that she is now Susi,' admits the Reverend Mann. Sometimes I call her "dear" because I don't quite know what to say. So I no longer call her Grace. But nor do I call her Susi.'

Irene Mann has been equally confused. At the head of her letters she continued to use the name she and her husband had given to Susi, but, instead of closing it with the Manns' customary 'Ma and Pa' she seemed suddenly to lose her resolve, signing off with 'as ever, both of us'. Sometimes the situation was evidently so sensitive that even this compromise would not do, with the result that letters to Susi and Alan would open 'Dear Both' and close 'From us both'

At that time it was only first names which were at issue. The effect was nothing like the disruption caused by Susi's decision to jettison her married surname. No longer a Stocken, she henceforth wished to be known as Susi Bechhõfer, the name which appeared on her birth certificate. It was a decision that was frowned upon and even derided by some family members and friends. 'Since making the change back to Bechhöfer,' Susi explains, 'I now feel able to embrace the name which was blotted out so long ago and in so doing more easily accept my German-Jewish heritage. As part of the reintegration of my personality I have had to reclaim Susi Bechhöfer.'

Notifying banks and building societies of a change of name is not a particularly onerous task; nor is changing it officially by deed poll a complex or costly procedure. But could the thoroughly English and Christian persona of Grace Stocken be obliterated with just a few strokes of the pen? In fact, edging towards Judaism seemed to Susi to be a natural step, for she was simply reaffirming the faith she had been forced to abandon nearly fifty years earlier. Yet happy as they were about her decision, it did not prevent members of her newly discovered orthodox Jewish family in New York repeatedly voicing their concern.

'Because we continue to be what we are,' explained Jerry Bechhofer, 'whilst she has to deal with being someone else.' Susi sought to reassure her transatlantic relatives that they should have no worries on her behalf. And for a while she seemed committed to learning about the beliefs and practices of orthodox Judaism. Proud of her rediscovered Jewishness, she found out all she could about the faith into which she had born but which had been denied to her from her infancy. As in other areas of her life, she felt the need to make up for lost time.

And it was not all abstract theology. Wishing to become more familiar with both Jewish prayer and ritual, Susi attended a number of synagogue services. Rabbi Jeffrey Cohen of Stanmore Synagogue devoted his whole Seder service during the spring of 1989 to her story, aware of its symbolic power. 'It did not feel at all strange to me,' Susi noted in her diary, proud, as a practising Christian, to have been able to accommodate this transition. Nor did the Jewish tradition of lighting a memorial candle, in this instance on the anniversary of her mother's death, strike her as out of place. On the contrary, this kind of ceremony was where religions met and was an appropriate way to remember and honour Rosa Bechhöfer.

Yet for all her initial enthusiasm Susi soon realized that she would have difficulty in embracing Judaism in its entirety. There was no disputing that she was being welcomed into the fold, but at times the invitation to acknowledge her Jewishness felt distinctly proprietorial, and she recoiled at what seemed like a claim being made on her soul. There was also the hard fact that, living in Rugby - a town Jerry Bechhofer had characterized as not exactly a thriving centre of Jewish life - she could not suddenly become Jewish in a practical, everyday sense. No local framework existed of the kind that bound together the American Bechhofers, and indeed the orthodox-Jewish culture as exists in England remained alien to her. For this reason she would henceforth adopt a pragmatic approach: taking pride in being born Jewish while in daily life remaining a practising Christian. Her Christian roots, she decided, tugged too strongly at her soul to allow her to return the commitment the Jewish community would without doubt require of her.

Maybe it is because Frederick Stocken's own roots have had less time to establish themselves; or maybe he has a more open mind than his mother. Whatever the case, he soon found himself taking a long, hard look at Judaism from both a theological and a philosophical perspective. At first this came as a surprise to Susi, because her son had never been enthusiastic about her quest and had denied any interest in her family's Jewishness or even the fate of her mother. In time, though, this changed. Free of the pressure of his studies, he began to reflect on how his mother's discoveries might impinge upon him. The simple fact was, if she was a Jewess, then he must be a Jew.

Nowadays Frederick can admit that being Jewish means a lot to him. But, like Susi, he stresses that he remains Christian and therefore goes to an Anglican church. At the same time his faith has not prevented him from wanting to find out all he can about the Judaism. Indeed being Jewish has served to deepen his understanding of Christian experience. To illustrate this, Frederick cites Thomas Cranmer's 'Evening Prayer' of 1552, which begins with the Priest saying: 'O Lord, open Thou our lips', to which the congregation responds: 'And our mouth shall shed forth thy praise.' On discovering that those same words also start one of the Jewish services, albeit in Hebrew, he realized that Cranmer had borrowed from something the Jews had been saying for five thousand years.

Frederick sees his mother as more interested in the blood link that her Jewishness entails than in such questions of faith and tradition. By contrast, for him the most pressing question is: how do you cope when you straddle two major world religions?

In truth, Susi has struggled to bridge this gap and embrace the Jewish faith. But in an area less complex than the matters of the soul she is the first to admit that she is authentically Jewish. For her features are unmistakably both Semitic and East European, as Jerry Bechhofer was quick to point out after seeing a photograph of her before her visit.

When your letter arrived with the striking picture of a young woman I said to my wife: 'How did she get this picture of her mother?' And then I realized it is not a photo of Tante Rosei but of you. You look exactly like your mother as I remember her. You have what is called in German a 'Mishpocho-face'. The word 'Mishpocho' is of course a Hebrew word. It means FAMILY. What a wonderful thing!

Susi's reunion with the Bechhofers and reaffirmation of her Jewishness had its repercussions not just on her immediate family but, inevitably, on her foster parents too. As Irene Mann pointed out:

I can understand that she is happy to meet the Bechhofers, but she forgets that they left both the twins and their own mother to fend for themselves. That does rather annoy me. And if anyone might be thinking of pointing the finger at either my husband or me for not having sufficiently nurtured their Jewish heritage, then let them be reminded that they also happened to be half Aryan too.

Susi does not try to conceal the non-Jewish side of her parentage, what she sees as her German roots. Even before she began her search she had always felt at home in that country and had an immediate emotional response to hearing the German language. But if being both German and Jewish is hard enough, how much more problematic for an Englishwoman brought up in a strict branch of the Christian faith.

My Germanness seems to irritate some people. But I don't apologize for it all. Germany did carry out the Holocaust. Not all Germans were responsible for that though. And I certainly wasn't. So I don't feel that I need to reject my German roots at all. I was denied being a German for many years, just as I was denied my Jewish roots. Now this has been given back to me. In fact I feel rather privileged in that I can now choose how much of the culture I wish to take on board and assimilate.

Susi's friendship with Brigitte Hald, a key figure in her quest, remains strong. 'It's wonderful to have this bond,' says Brigitte. 'I'm so grateful, as a German living in the period immediately after the Holocaust, to have been able to help someone who was so dreadfully damaged by the Nazi regime.'

And Alan Stocken, of course, has stood by his wife through it all. Even when his surname was given its marching orders he accepted it as another part of the complex pattern of adjustment and integration that Susi had started and had to complete. She could not have hoped for a more understanding partner. As far as Alan is concerned, it doesn't matter if Susi is German and Jewish, or Christian and English. He is in no doubt that for Susi the most important outcome of her quest has been the discovery of an identity of which she had long been deprived. For him, it has been enough to see his wife emerge from those difficult years with a new sense of direction.

On 25 February 1989 thirty lone twins gathered at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in London. For all but one of them, it was the first time they had knowingly met another lone twin. The participants were divided into three groups: those who had lost a twin at or around their time of birth; those whose twin had died in childhood; and those who had lost a twin in adult life. It was an opportunity for the survivors to examine together the profound and unique sense of loss caused by the death of a twin, and to find ways of coping more easily with the pain.

Those attending the meeting that day formed the Lone Twin Network, an organization in which Susi is now actively involved. She joined because for many years she had steadfastly refused to examine the crushing pain caused by the death of Lotte/Eunice, a denial bound up with her attempt to survive by distancing herself from distressing feelings. Like Susi's former identity, that pretence has fallen away. Even so, she is the first to acknowledge that, having started so late, her mourning of her sister is far from over.

Four months later another group of people assembled in London for a special celebration: the fiftieth anniversary of the Kindertransport. People had flown in from all over the world to attend, among them a good number of VIPs. Bertha Leverton had worked herself up into a fine state of anxiety, having scarcely slept in the forty-eight hours preceding the opening of the reunion. Nevertheless she summoned up the energy warmly to welcome those who, as children, had shared the same frightening experience half a century earlier. 'Hello, Kinder,' she called out from the podium, and at once the hall was filled with a sense of togetherness.

Yet for Susi the experience was somewhat different:

Even there I was like a lost soul. Because it appeared to me as if everybody else at least had their Jewishness to fall back on. And there was me, with my very English and Christian upbringing. They all seemed to know who they were, whereas I had only just begun to find out about my identity. The cantor sang beautifully in Hebrew, remembering our parents and loved ones whom we had left behind. There was hardly a dry eye between us.

Religion proved to be the one area where Grace might be said to have reasserted herself, because eventually, for all her dalliance with Judaism, Susi decided that:

I can't sit on the fence any longer. I loved the truths taught to me as a child, both at Clarendon and at home: that there was a person called Jesus, who simply loved me enough to go to the cross. I now feel the need to return to these beliefs, Jewish though I am. Because the church is one of the few places where I can and do experience a sense of belonging. It has become clear to me that God is the only answer. How can I accept anything other than the message of the Gospel?

One viewer who wrote to the BBC some time after its screening of Sally George's documentary was of special significance to Susi, as clearly Susi was to her. She was very old and apologized for waiting so long before putting pen to paper. Her name was Miss Grace Weston. Almost forty years had passed since the two Graces had last been in touch. Miss Weston had not been at all surprised to learn from the film that Grace Elizabeth Mann, her former pupil at Clarendon School, was now Susi Bechhöfer. For it was she who had first drawn the fact to the attention of the teenage schoolgirl. Now, so many years after sowing the seeds of a momentous quest in young Grace's mind, she offered some timely and heartfelt advice. 'Just remember all your foster parents did for you,' she urged, mercifully oblivious of what Susi had suffered at the hands of her foster father, 'and thank them any time you have an opportunity. Leave the rest to God, Susi, and with His help try not to be bitter.'