“Why did you never tell me about this?” I asked. “My life really began when I met your Dad,” was her reply. “I decided long ago that all our happiness depended on looking forward and not back. I haven’t read it because I know what happened, I was there."
It was an emotional moment for us both. I put my arms around my mother and asked: “Can I have it translated? And might you tell me about your experiences now?”
I was very proud of her response. “Yes,” she said. “It deserves to be read. And perhaps the time has come for me to tell you all that I witnessed. I think it’s a story that should be told.”
So I sent Heini’s 72,000-word memoir off for translation and sat down with Mum in front of the fire in her cosy, neat bungalow in Norfolk. And over many mugs of tea I gently questioned her about growing up in the capital of the Third Reich, memories she had buried in her mind and not spoken of for half a century. I knew Mum’s father was Jewish and they had suffered persecution, but she had never been very forthcoming about the details of the first 18 years of her life.
So it was a shock when she told me of the day when her eight-year-old self answered the door of her home to two uniformed Gestapo officers who demanded she run and fetch her mum. “Just tell us that you will divorce your husband and we will take him away right now,” they suggested to Erna. “You’re a Christian. Why would you want to live with a filthy Jew? Your divorce will be issued in a matter of days and your life and those of your two Mischling children will be considerably better.”
“What does Mischling mean?” I asked my mum, for I had never heard the word. “It was the German word for mongrel or half-breed that the Nazis took to legally define not dogs but people with Jewish and non-Jewish parentage,” she explained.
“That afternoon was the first time I heard myself and my brother described as “mongrels” and it hurt. Our mother politely refused their offer, but I could see how shaken she was. And we found out later that other people in the city did agree to divorce their spouses on these Nazi grounds.”
I felt cold and shivery at the thought and immediately looked up what was in store for Mischlinge. I found my answer on the Yad Vashem website.
In Hitler’s Germany, a first-degree Mischling was someone with two Jewish grandparents. Unless they practised Judaism or were married to a Jew, they were not generally classified as Jews, but they faced restrictions in terms of work and could not marry people decreed “Aryan”.
A second-degree Mischling was someone with one Jewish grandparent. They were allowed to marry “Aryans” with government permission, but they still faced social stigma and exclusion from public sector jobs.
In that moment, my grandmother Erna’s refusal to divorce her husband Sigi Bernstein saved his life. But while he was safe for a while, worse was to come. As Nazi ideology spread across the town where she was born, Mum’s teacher started to wear a Nazi badge in his lapel. Then he wrote to her parents and said she must stop coming to school, he did not want her mixing with Aryan children.
Krumme Lanke, in Berlin, in 1936. Edie is centre front, Erna stands at the far right[Missing Credit]
As mum recalled those frightening times, she would get upset and suggest we stop for a while. I was careful not to pressure her until she felt ready again, so the conversation took many months. Slowly she revealed the growing daily threats against Jews and Mischlinge in Berlin and explained how before long her whole family did not feel safe at home or anywhere else in the city.
Mum spoke softly and without anger as she relived the persecution, the feeling of being singled out, and being made to feel different from her schoolfriends. As the only Mischling in her class, her isolation and fear grew. But there was kindness too, she told me, from neighbours and strangers, often at great risk to themselves. Her big brother Heini and her mother were her protectors, she beamed, but her beloved father became a haunted, hunted figure. And all their lives deteriorated further when the pre-war anti-Jewish legislation took hold, and worsened again when war broke out.
Sometimes as we talked I got more upset than Mum. When she told me how a Russian soldier entered the bomb shelter where they were hiding, tore her away from her mum and tried to rape her, my tears flowed. My caring mum tried to console me, hugging and reassuring me that she had coped, and gone on to have a wonderful life after VE Day, when she met my dad and, later still, had me.
“The world got so much brighter after you were born,” she said, smiling. She had told me this many times over the years, but I never fully appreciated the depth of her words until then. I was born on December 21, the shortest day of the year, so in one sense the world really does get brighter every day thereafter. But for Mum there had always been a deeper meaning, I then learned. I think it was at that moment that I understood she had not shared her story not just because it was so painful for her but because she didn’t want to burden me or Dad. She loved us too much. And even when she did share her story, I think one of her reasons was to help me. My husband had died quite unexpectedly soon after we both retired and she knew that writing this book would give me a focus and purpose.
She was right. When the translation of my uncle’s memoir arrived, it was nothing short of a revelation. And the fact that it arrived in instalments added to its thriller-like quality. Would my uncle Heini survive the cruelty and disasters that befell him, I wondered? As each chapter arrived, I marvelled at his matter-of-fact style. But what struck me most was that he reported what he had seen and experienced without an ounce of self-pity.
It was riveting. Heini Bernstein’s story recalled that of the tragic film character Forrest Gump, who kept finding himself at many of the most important events of the century, but in the wrong place.
That is when I knew that I had to turn my mum and uncle’s story into a book. After 30 years in journalism, I knew a good story when I saw one. But more than that, I knew I had found an important untold story. I found only a few historians and Holocaust scholars who knew the full story of the Mischlinge, people like Mum and Heini. Yet in 1939, there were 72,000 first-degree Mischlinge in Germany and 39,000 so-called second-degree ones. Of course there were thousands more Mischlinge across Europe, many of whom were sent to concentration camps when the Nazis marched into their countries and enslaved them.
When Mum needed to pause, I did my research. I felt I got to know my great-grandparents Robert and Tinchen Bernstein, Orthodox Jews who ran a clothing business not far from Unter den Linden, the tree-lined boulevard in central Berlin, and I felt the the warmth of Friday night dinners at their home, meals which my mum and uncle ate while Nazi jackboots walked the cobbled streets outside their grandparents’ apartment.
Research into my working-class family turned into an epic drama of a book spanning the 1930s to the 2000s, taking the Mischlinge journey from slave labour camps to Buchenwald concentration camp, Auschwitz and the Nazi Death Marches across Europe, to illegal migration to Mandatory Palestine, Israel, life on both sides of the Berlin Wall and, finally, life in London. Some of the Bernsteins survive, others disappear and are murdered, but some do have happy endings in Berlin and London. There are uplifting moments in my book.
My uncle’s memoir is a testament to resilience and full of Boys’ Own-style adventure and chutzpah and unexpected acts of kindness from the least likely places. Both the translator and I fell under his spell. My uncle’s charm and indomitable spirit make what could have been a wholly grim read something different.
In the months that I sat with Mum and recorded her remarkable story, I began to realise that it had been a wise decision on her part not to share it with Dad and I. She had told us just enough about her past not to make us ask too many questions. Instead, she kept her past to herself, hidden in box in her mind, just as she kept her brother’s memoir in a box in her home. It had worked for her and for us.
I had always thought Mum a loving and warm woman, and we had always been close. But now I wondered how she had led such a normal life when the first 20 years of it had been so full of fear and horror. Yes, I had on occasion seen her depressed, but I had mostly seen her happy, very happy. She would say: “Always remember, Sharon, there are many more good people in the world than bad.” And although she had certainly met real evil, she wasn’t anti-German and she never spoke of hating anyone. Her endless optimism and resilience made sense to me now. I could also see why she never let the small stuff bother her.
I have loved learning about and embracing my Jewish heritage through writing this book. Previously, I knew more about Jewish food than I did Jewish history. We were not in any sense a religious family, but both my parents had strong moral values and Mum certainly followed the Torah’s command to love the stranger as yourself. I see now how Mum’s childhood made her a fierce believer in fairness and tolerance and also why she attached such importance to education, having been deprived of one herself.
She gave me a Jewish name but then found me the best local school, a Catholic convent, in London’s Stamford Hill, which fitted my heritage rather well. Dad came from Irish Catholic stock. Back then, I didn’t know that my great-grandparents had been Orthodox Jews, but I now understand that being schooled in Hackney meant being among the Catholics and the Jews.
It took five years to combine my uncle Heini’s hidden memoir with my mum’s oral account and my archival research to produce their true story. During that time, Mum died peacefully in her sleep just days before her 87th birthday. I was beside her. I then spent almost a year trying to secure a literary agent. After many rejections, Tim Bates of Peters, Fraser & Dunlop literary agents was enthusiastic about the manuscript and secured several major publishers to bid for the book and film rights.
[Missing Credit]
Since its publication, strangers have contacted me to say they too are Mischlinge and thanked me for telling their story. I treasure every single letter.
Meanwhile, the Mail On Sunday has called my book “an addition to history.” I certainly hope it tells an important and little-known story of the Holocaust. My family came from Jewish and Christian worlds and I hope I have honoured and immortalised their parentage in my book, together with thousands of other people decreed Mischlinge across Nazi-occupied Europe.
Mischlinge, by Sharon Ring, is published by Harper Collins. From October 6, it will be available in the US under the title The Innocents
Heini Bernstein in his youth[Missing Credit]