Both Henny and Shanti were born in 1908. The passage of the yearsfrom then until after the Second World War has been recounted for the most partin Shanti's voice. Henny has been silent, or almost silent, throughout.
By the summer of 1994, when I realised I wanted to write this book, she hadbeen dead five years.
I could not ask her about her family, her childhood, her schooldays, her work,her friends, the changing atmosphere in Germanyduring the thirties, her flight to England, her experiences as animmigrant, the war and, in its after-math, her search for her family.
I could not ask her about Hans, about Shanti Uncle, about her mother and sisterand brother. But even if she had been alive, it would have been difficult, inboth senses of the word, to get her to talk about these things.
Aunty Henny was an outgoing but reticent person. Even Shanti did not know whatshe thought of Hans. Even he did not know how she felt when she heard of thefate of her family.
When he was in Berlinin the thirties, she and her family had had too much pride to talk at lengthabout any sense of injury they felt about being excluded, gradually orsuddenly, from the world they had grown up in and the country they had believedwas theirs.
Would I have succeeded in understanding something of what she felt? Would shehave divulged anything? Would she have wanted me to write about it at all?
Would I, in the interests of my book, have been able to discount or excuse thepain to her of probing these wounds? Would I deliberately have put our ownrelationship in jeopardy?
I think it unlikely. And, as a result, this book would have been mainly aboutShanti Uncle. I could not justly have called it Two Lives unless her voiceplayed a role as strong as Uncle's. And, had it not been for a fortuitousdiscovery long after her death in the attic of their house, hers would havebeen a supporting role.
When Aunty Henny died in 1989, Shanti Uncle, in his grief, and reminded atevery turn of his loss, destroyed any pictures of her he could find, and indeedanything that reminded him of her.
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