My Wounded Heart

My Wounded Heart

 

Ilse Doerry

Martin Doerry

 

Chair:  Don Guttenplan

 

In association with the Goethe-Institut

 

 [Excerpt]

 

Chair:  Martin, I think that the first thing that strikes anyone who reads this book is immense gratitude for the fact that so many of these letters survived.  It is a rather extraordinary story of how you came to find them and then of how you came to put them in a book.  So, if you don’t mind: how did these letters come to you?  Because the book is mainly letters.  It’s mainly the collective letters of Ilse to her mother and of Lily to her children.  There are some letters from the courtship between Lily and Ernst.  There are some letters from Lily to her friends.  There is also a very concise, very gripping but very concise, narrative provided by Martin.

 

Martin Doerry:  Well, I didn’t know of all the letters up to1998.  In that year my uncle, Gerhard Jahn, the eldest son and child of Lily, died.  His sisters found those letters that they wrote to their mother in the years 1943 and 1944.  So my uncle had gathered all these letters: I’ll have to explain it.  My grandmother was able to send them back.  She had received the letters in Breidenhauer [?] and when she had to leave to go to Auschwitz she was able to send them back, back to her children.  My uncle took them and he never talked about it and so my mother and her sisters were very much surprised when they found them after the death of their brother. 

 

Then they read the letters and they talked about the letters and they talked to me as well.  My mother told me a lot of details and I was very much interested because we had never talked about my grandmother before.  It was a taboo.  Now we were able to talk about her.

 

So, I read the letters.  I read more and more letters.  The letters of her sisters and some other letters turned up.  For the first time I got an impression of my grandmother and I was very much impressed by her.  She was, I think, a great woman.  I was happy about that.  On the one hand I feel sorrow: it was very sad.  On the other hand I was very happy because, for the first time, I got an impression of my grandmother. 

 

I first decided to make a family documentary, just photocopies of all the letters so that everybody could read them.  But after a couple of months I decided to do more, to make a book out of it, because it is such an overwhelming story.  First, of course, I had to ask my mother and her sisters and they didn’t want it.  They didn’t want it because it is such a private story: private letters which were not written to be published.  So we had a long discussion about it but, as you see, in the end I succeeded.

 

Chair:  You twice used the phrase “we didn’t talk about her” and that there was a kind of a taboo.  Ilse, I wonder if you could explain a little bit about the taboo?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Well, I think that for nearly fifty years I never spoke about my past and especially I didn’t speak about my mother.  It was a too painful memory to talk about it.  I think the only person to whom I told the whole story was my husband.  But apart from him, we didn’t tell our children.  We didn’t want to really think of the really traumatic experience we had when we were children.  We didn’t want to talk about it.  So our children knew the fact that they had a Jewish grandmother who had this divorce and was eventually killed in Auschwitz.  But I think that was all I was able to say, and the same happened with my sisters.

 

Chair:  I noticed in the selection, the part that you read, we got a little bit of the sense of even after the divorce Lily putting the best face on her husband, on your father’s conduct.  Because you read a relatively short section of the letters, you don’t get something that you get from reading them, which is that although she doesn’t do this at length it is a sort of constant, very brief, refrain in all of the letters of:  Why doesn’t he do something?  Couldn’t he make a representation?  I found the book a tremendously moving book, but I became so irritated with this man.  Obviously you have had to make your own accommodation with him.  He is your father.  What was that like?

 

Ilse Doerry:  This question is brought up every time, even with you.  This is a fact everybody is irritated by and some of them have a quick answer to this.  But there isn’t a quick answer to it and you always have to consider the time.  You always have to consider the political situation during the 30s and the 40s and my father was, I have to say, a cowardly man.  And he was egoistic.  That made him decide to have my mother divorced.  After the war, when he returned (he’d been a prisoner-of-war in Russia), he didn’t say anything.  He didn’t try to explain anything to his children but we just didn’t want to talk to him any more.  At first we didn’t want to talk to him because we thought he was responsible for the death of our mother.  But when we grew older, when were about 20, 22, 23 –

 

Chair:  By which point you were in Britain?

 

Ilsa Doerry:  Yes, at that time all my sisters and myself lived in Britain.  My father kept on writing letters to us and sending us little things, parcels.  He was longing to get our love.  And then, eventually, we said that the way we treat him is not right.  Our mother would never have treated him [like that] because, as you can tell by the letters that have survived, she never accused him; she never condemned him.  So it surely isn’t up to the daughters to condemn him altogether.  He made a horrible mistake and all of us are convinced that he was quite aware (he is not alive any more), he was quite aware, that his decision at that time made it easier for the Nazis to get hold of my mother.

 

Chair:  Do you think he was aware when he divorced her that this was a possibility?

 

Ilsa Doerry:  Well, he never talked about it.  The official version was that the mother would be protected by her half-Jewish children and he wanted to believe that.  Although he had been warned by friends, he wanted to believe that.  That’s how people are.  I think that any human being is like that.  But very soon, when we had contact with him again, he realised that he was suffering and suffering badly from that decision which he made earlier on.

 

Chair:  And how was he presented to you, your grandfather?

 

Martin Doerry:  Well, I was five years old when he died so I don’t have any strong memories. 

 

Chair:  But as a figure in the family narrative?

 

Martin Doerry:  Yes, but we didn’t talk about him much because it was the same story.  We didn’t talk about Lily, so we didn’t talk about Ernst.  All I know was his name and my mother sometimes, when we had been on journeys, for example, visiting some churches, my mother would say, “Your grandfather loved that”.  Because my grandfather was very much interested in the arts and especially in churches and monasteries and so on.  When we were travelling around, my mother told me that that was what he loved.  So this is one of the very few things I remember.

 

Chair:  And your brother remained in Germany the entire time?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Yes.

 

Chair:  Was his attitude the same as that of your sisters?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Oh yes.  Oh yes.  It was just the same.

 

Chair:  So he wasn’t speaking?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Not in the beginning. 

 

Chair:  And then, did he come round when the rest of you all did?

 

Ilse Doerry:  That’s it. 

 

Chair:  I noticed in the book that you were in Birmingham.  You trained as a nurse in Birmingham.  But it said that you and your sisters were intending to go on to Israel where apparently you found some relatives?  But you didn’t.  Why not?

 

Ilse Doerry:  When we took our finals, we thought, you know, 1948, Israel became a State.  We thought we’d move to Israel.  We have to re-build this country and help them.

 

Chair:  Although you hadn’t been raised as Jews?  You’d been baptised and confirmed.

 

Ilse Doerry:  No, but still we felt very much for them, as I do until today.  I have a daughter who lives there and I go to Israel as often as I can.  I’ve been many, many times.  At that time my sister and myself just said that we would go to Israel.  But then my sister, the next in line, and myself, we met German students and that changed our decision because we got married to these students.  I got married in Birmingham and as my husband was a law student he had to return to Germany and then, after we got married here in Birmingham at my grandmother’s house, I had to return to Germany in 1953.

 

Chair:  What was that like for you, going back to Germany?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Horrible.  Horrible.  It was the last thing I wanted to do. 

 

Chair:  I suppose that some people (you know who you are: I’m not going to mention your names) are going to read this, or see this, as a cautionary tale about the dangers of marrying out.  But clearly you didn’t read your history that way.  I wonder what you would say to people who see the book that way? 

 

Ilse Doerry:  I can fully understand them.  My mother was mourned by her parents.  I mean we couldn’t read many letters or passages from letters tonight.  But there is a letter in there and just this item is discussed between my grandparents and my mother.  They didn’t think it was right to do that.  But, on the other hand, they loved their daughter and they realised that she was ever so fond of my father and so they said: All right, if that’s your decision, do so.  But my grandparents, surely they were against it actually.

 

Chair:  But after this entire history: you are in Birmingham; your grandmother is in Birmingham.  You go to see your grandmother with Martin’s father.  What did you say?  What did she say?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Oh, at that time we didn’t talk about ideas like that, because you never talked about it.

 

Chair:  That’s English reserve or German reserve, that you don’t talk about things?

 

Ilse Doerry:  I think it was the experience that my grandmother had had.  My grandmother was really the only person we had and Jürgen’s mother knew what happens when you get married to a person belonging to another faith.  So she never talked about it.  She knew … what had happened to her daughter Lily so I am sure she was convinced it wouldn’t be any good to talk to me, you know, to talk to me in the same way.  In the first place she wasn’t successful talking to her daughter, warning her daughter.  So she never tried to persuade me not to marry my Aryan husband. 

 

Martin Doerry:  May I add one thing?  Maybe it’s not very popular, but I want to say it.  I think this story does not give us proof that mixed marriages are wrong because in this case it was horrible, of course, because my grandfather divorced her.  But normally it was a shield, a shield for the Jewish partner.

 

Chair:  In Germany, yes.  I was interested to note and since you are a historian I thought that I can ask you this question: There were 28,000 mixed marriages before the Reich, in 1942. 

 

Martin Doerry:  And most of them survived.

 

Chair:  Is there a statistic of how many survived?

 

Martin Doerry:  Nearly all of them. 

 

Ilse Doerry:  And they didn’t get divorced.

 

Chair:  It’s also a question I had in relation to how one evaluates your grandfather.  We know about the women of the Rosenstrasse.  These were non-Jewish women who were married to Jewish men who famously protested in the street, the Rosenstrasse, in Berlin demanding that their husbands be released.  And they got them released. 

 

Martin Doerry:  Well, this story is very complicated and … [inaudible] … I’m sorry to say that!

 

Chair:  No, that’s why I’m hoping you’ll correct this.

 

Martin Doerry:  It’s quite new that we know that the women of the Rosenstrasse were heroes, really heroes because they demonstrated and it was of course forbidden!

 

Chair:  Nobody demonstrated at the time.

 

Martin Doerry:  Nobody did.  So they were heroes.  But on the other hand their husbands were not brought to the concentration camps.  They were only gathered at the Rosenstrasse and they had to do some work for the Gestapo.  Other people had to be deported but not them.  So the story is a little bit difficult.

 

Chair:  More morally ambiguous than I had thought?

 

Martin Doerry:  Yes, it is.

 

Chair:  Well I suppose that all of these stories are probably morally ambiguous.

 

Ilse Doerry:  Perhaps you know the diaries of Victor Klemperer?  You see, his wife stuck to him to the end.

 

Chair:  Yes.  I want to talk a little bit about Germany and what it was like for your in Germany, as someone who on the one hand was Protestant but who had a Jewish mother?  And there is a way in which you didn’t speak about it in the family, as you’ve said, because it was very painful.  Was there also a sense in which it was prudent not to speak of it too much in Germany when you went back?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Certainly. 

 

Chair:  And do you feel that that’s still the case?

 

Ilse Doerry:  No, not any more.  No.  It has changed a tremendous lot.  Also, other generations have grown up since then and that makes a lot of difference.  At first, of course, I thought: Don’t mention a thing.  Then …  … outcast again.  When I went to a restaurant and looked around at the people I thought: Well, what have you done or not done during the Nazi time?  I felt most uncomfortable.  But that feeling has disappeared completely.  People are younger.

 

Martin Doerry:  The generation that was responsible for the Holocaust –

 

Ilse Doerry:  There is hardly anybody still alive.  I am one of the last. 

 

Chair:  Now you said that the only person that you told this whole story to was your husband?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Mmm.

 

Chair:  Presumably before you married?

 

Ilse Doerry:  Mmm.

 

Chair:  And what was his reaction?

 

Ilse Doerry:  He was shocked.  He had never heard of a story like that before.  He was really shocked by it and he didn’t know what to say.

 

Chair:  Shocked because?

 

Ilse Doerry:  He had never heard of it.  I mean he was only a boy.  Not actually a boy.  He was a little bit older than that during the Nazi time, and he had been a soldier.  But nobody ever told him anything of what happened to the Jews.  He was never informed, by anybody.  Well, some Jews ‘disappeared’ in the little place where he lived in the eastern part of Germany but being a boy at that time I don’t think he knew or worried about it.  Actually he didn’t know.  Perhaps they told him, “Oh, they moved to another country” or they moved to the East.

 

Martin Doerry:  May I add one thing?  My father was a prisoner-of-war in England.  He was born in 1925 so he was twenty years old when the war was finished.  So he was a prisoner-of-war in England and he told me once that during these one or two years that he spent in England he became a ‘new man’ because there was a kind of educational training programme in this prisoner-of-war camp.  He learned a lot about democracy and of course he learned a lot about the atrocities which happened in eastern Europe and the Holocaust and so on.  This was the first time that he was told about that.  So he knew what happened, but he didn’t know it when he was a soldier.

 

Ilse Doerry:  Yes.  And I was the first person whom he met who had personal experience. 

 

Chair:  I gather that you are more favourable about the book now that it’s out.  You’re here.  Maybe not: I don’t know.  Feel free to correct me.  I wondered what impact researching this and writing it has had on you?

 

Martin Doerry:  Well, as I said before, there are two major impacts.  The first one was that it was horrible to read all the letters and feel the sad, sad story again, or as … I never had before.  On the other side, I was very satisfied because I got a first very deep impression of what my grandmother was.  She was a really great person.  So, in the end, for me the whole book and the story of the book is a positive story.  I’m very happy about doing it but, on the other hand, I have to admit that for my mother and her sisters it is very hard for them because they didn’t want to remember that time, this horrible time, and I made them do that.  It was not easy for them.

 

Chair:  You are quite a high-profile person in Germany as a journalist.  Do you feel that this has changed the way you are regarded or treated?

 

Martin Doerry:  Well in a way you’re right because I’m Deputy Editor in Chief of Der Spiegel, which is the biggest news magazine in Germany, and we have fixed staff and nobody knew anything about my personal history, which is normal.  But now everybody knows everything.  This is strange, very strange.  And, well, that’s not the problem.  The problem is that if we discuss politics, and we do it every day of course: we discuss our stories and the stories we are going to do and so we have a lot of discussion.  Sometimes, when we talk about Israel or anti-Semitism or the Jews in Germany or the Holocaust, when we talk about those issues, and we do it quite often, sometimes some colleagues say, “Well, it’s ok, it’s ok.  We know.”  So they don’t think that I’m fair.  They think, ‘Well, he has this special history in his family so he is not able to judge in the right way.’  Of course I am angry about that, but I can’t change it.  And that’s a result of the book too.