It is one of the main regrets in my life that I never met my maternal grandfather, Wilhelm Hollitscher. He died in October 1943, four years before I was born. My family were in Egypt, where they lived until 1949.
My eldest sister, Hannah, did meet him when she was a toddler, aged 19 months, as my mother took her to Vienna in the autumn of 1938, after the Anschluss. My father sent my mother increasingly desperate letters telling her to come back to Egypt before it was too late and, much to his relief, she returned just before Kristallnacht. Our grandfather continued to write regularly to his daughter and, by the time he came to England and Hannah was two, he wrote at least once a week to her creating a magical little story for her or relating an anecdote and asking a couple of simple questions to which she replied by dictation.
We therefore knew he was a writer but, since our mother died in 1954, we knew very little else about him. My much loved late brother, Ralph Oppenheimer, had always been interested in family history. Some time after Google appeared he found that the Wiener Library in London had a diary written by our grandfather. This was started three months after he arrived in England in March 1939, and he filled it in daily, until his death in 1943. It was a big surprise to us, and we still do not know who gave it to the Wiener Library.
Ralph encouraged our interest in the diary and his subsequent cancer and death in 2016 spurred us on. I first went to the library in 2013 to meet the archivist, Howard Falksohn, and look at the manuscript. It was in 14 exercise books written in neat, but to us illegible, German handwriting. The library helped us find a transcriber and then Hannah started the long job of translation.
The diary contained reflections on his personal life, the people he met, and the political situation, commentaries on what he had read and on both British and Austrian radio broadcasts and anecdotes about his life. But what interested me particularly was the daily record of his internment as an “enemy alien” from June 27 to August 31, 1940.
Wilhelm was interned in Huyton near Liverpool. The diary describes both the horrors and creativity generated by the camp. Churchill’s edict to “collar the lot” involved around 25,000 men and 4,000 women being confined behind barbed wire or locked in prisons, including many Jews who had recently escaped similar conditions in Germany and Austria. Wilhelm was 67 and not in good health. He wanted desperately to return to his English home in South London where he was surrounded by relatives. But he also made many friends in the camp and participated fully in its rich cultural life.
One of the people he befriended was Hugo Dachinger. His first diary entry about Dachinger says: “In the Shepton Road, there lives a young painter, Dachinger, by name and appearance a pure Aryan type who has painted the walls of his five person occupied room with very good naked women — a family picture!”
Over a fortnight in August 1940, Wilhelm subsequently described various sittings in his diary, the first taking place on August 5. “Hugo Dachinger is making a pastel picture of me, this afternoon was my first sitting, he says that I don’t laugh and he finds my head interesting.”
He later reports: “Last sitting for painter Dachinger — colourful, quite modern style. It is interesting for me because he sees me such as I am and not as I appear to the world. I look like a Prussian general — a strange resemblance to a photo that my son took of me after my first operation: more severe, more sombre, more suffering.”
The diary documents four portraits painted directly on to newspaper. Dachinger used the front page of The Times because it was the best quality paper he could find. He often left headlines or words visible as commentary on the paintings. He used a brush made from his own hair, toothpaste for white paint and charcoal twigs for sketching and black paint. I was fascinated to read about his methods and curious to know if the paintings still existed.
So I set out on a quest to find a portrait. I started in August 2017 by writing and sending a copy of a photo of my grandfather to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool which had mounted an exhibition, Art Behind Barbed Wire, in 2004. Unfortunately the five male portraits in the Walker Art Gallery collection did not look like my grandfather but the curator suggested that I contact independent art dealers who had previously dealt with or sold Dachinger’s work. I asked for further advice on how to do this and was surprised to receive an email a week later from the curator with an image attached saying she had been looking at the Blouin Art Sales Index, a database they use to value works of art. She continued: “Interestingly my attention was caught by the first item on the list entitled ‘Portrait of a man, head and shoulders’. I think the gentleman in the picture looks remarkably like your grandfather. What do you think?”
I agreed the image did look like him. It was lovely to get my first view of the portrait, albeit in a thumbnail picture. I immediately wrote to the auction house that had sold the painting on June 28, 2016. But they wouldn’t give me details of who bought the painting, citing client confidentiality.
It seemed like I was at a dead end. On March 15, 2018 I was pruning the roses and when I stepped down off our ladder, I slipped and fell back on the stone steps. I injured a rib and was sitting on the sofa watching News at Ten on the BBC and feeling very sorry for myself. When the local news came on there was an item on the Ben Uri Gallery exhibition Out of Austria: Austrian Artists in Exile in Great Britain, 1933-1945. Suddenly Dachinger’s portrait of my grandfather appeared on the screen. Having seen the photo, I immediately recognised it and I leapt out of the sofa in excitement, despite my pain.
The portrait had been bought from the auction house by the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum. They did not know the identity of the sitter and were delighted to find out more about their acquisition.
Since then my grandfather has been the “poster boy” for two more Ben Uri exhibitions and the subject of a talk by Rachel Dickson, head of curatorial services at Ben Uri at the prestigious National Portrait Gallery 2018 seminar on understanding British portraits.
The diary and my grandfather’s subsequent letters also reveal that Wilhelm kept up with Dachinger after they were both released from internment.
My grandfather’s dream was to publish his Huyton diary together with 12 Dachinger pen sketches but shortage of paper during the war made this impossible. It is therefore very exciting to me to realise this dream, on the 80th anniversary of internment. It has also been a delight for me to get to know my grandfather through his diary. He has emerged as an intelligent, kind, positive, warm, funny and charismatic man.
And despite his dream failing during his lifetime, the story has a further happy ending. On April 24, 1943, Wilhelm was a witness at Dachinger’s marriage. And he lived his last few years contentedly, confronting everything that fate had meted out to him with optimism and a zest for life.
Internment in Britain in 1940: Life and Art Behind the Wire by Ines Newman with Charmian Brinson and Rachel Dickson is published by Vallentine Mitchell. The book will be the subject of a Zoom launch on November 26 at 6pm. You can join the Zoom through the Wiener Library events website or by going to Eventbrite listings https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/127152180595/ . The book is available at a 20 per cent discount (from November 26 to December 22) by entering the discount code NEWMAN20 on checkout on the publisher’s website www.vmbooks.com.
