I would get impatient with Hugo, because he couldn’t remember Oma and Opa, or even Mama, very clearly. He hardly remembered any German, whereas I had to hang on to the language because that’s what Cousin Minna spoke at home. In 1942 she had married Victor, a horrid old man who she was sure was going to inherit the glove factory. He had a stroke before the owner died and it went to someone else, so there she was, stuck with an elderly sick husband and no money. But he was from Hamburg, so of course they spoke German to each other. It took me longer than Hugo to learn English, longer to fit in at school, longer to feel at home in England.
For Hugo, coming to England at five, life began with the Nussbaum family. They treated him like a son. In fact, Mr. Nussbaum wanted to adopt Hugo, but that upset me so much that the Nussbaums dropped the idea. I see things differently now, see Hugo’s turning to them, trusting them, as the natural state of a five-year-old, not an abandonment of my parents—and of me. Probably if I’d lived with someone who cherished me, my reaction to the idea would have been different—although Mr. Nussbaum was always very kind to me and tried to include me in his regular Sunday outings with my brother.
But I was especially angry with Hugo on V-E Day, because he thought the end of the war meant he would have to return to Austria. He didn’t want to leave the Nussbaums or his friends at school, and he was hoping I would explain to Mama and Papa that he would only come for the summers.
I realize now my anger was partly fueled by my own anxieties. I longed for the loving family I’d lost, longed to put Cousin Minna and her constant criticism behind me, but I, too, had friends and a school that I didn’t want to leave. I was turning sixteen, with two years to work toward my higher-school certificate. I could see that it would be as hard to return to Austria as it had been to come to England six years earlier—harder, since the ruin of war might make it impossible for me to finish school there.
Miss Skeffing, the headmistress at the Camden High School for Girls, was on the board at the Royal Free Hospital. She had encouraged me to do the science course that would prepare me for medical-school entrance. I didn’t want to leave her, or the chance to read medicine. Although I saw very little of Claire these days, since she was starting her junior houseman rotation, I didn’t want to leave her, either. After all, it was Claire’s example that made me stand up to Cousin Minna and insist on applying to the Camden school. Minna was furious—she wanted me to leave school at fourteen to help make money in the glove factory. But I reminded her that since she wouldn’t recommend my father for a job in 1939, she had a nerve expecting me to quit school to take one now.
She and Victor also tried to put a stop to my going to meet friends for Miss Herbst’s music evenings. During the war years, those evenings were a lifesaver. Even for someone like me, with no musical ability, there was always something to do—we staged operas, held impromptu glees. Even during the Blitz, when you found your way around London by guess, I would slam out of Minna’s house and move through the black streets to Miss Herbst’s flat.
Sometimes I’d go by bus: that was an adventure, because the buses had to obey the blackout, so you wouldn’t know one was coming until it was almost on top of you, and then you’d have to guess where to get off. Once on the way home, I guessed wrong and landed miles away from Minna’s. A street warden found me and let me spend the night in their shelter. It was great fun, drinking watery cocoa with the wardens while they talked over football scores, but my little adventure left Minna more sour than ever.
Much as we were worried about our families, none of us—not just me or Hugo, but no one in that group at Miss Herbst’s—wanted to resume life in German. We saw it as the language of humiliation. Germany or Austria or Czechoslovakia were the places where we’d seen our beloved grandparents forced to scrub the paving stones on their hands and knees while crowds stood around jeering and throwing things at them. We even changed the spelling of our names: I turned Lotte into Lotty; Carl used a C instead of the K he’d been born with.
On V-E night, after the king’s speech, I put Hugo on the tube back to Golders Green, where the Nussbaums lived, and met up with Max and some of the others in Covent Garden to wait for Carl, who’d gotten a job with the Sadlers Wells orchestra, which was playing that night. Thousands of people were in Covent Garden, the one place in London you could get a drink in the middle of the night.
Someone was passing bottles of champagne through the crowd. Max and the rest of our group put our personal worries to one side and became riotous with the other revelers. No more bombs, no more blackouts, no more minuscule bits of butter once a week—although of course that was ignorant optimism; rationing went on for years.