Ursula Owen - Single Journey Only: A Memoir

I N F EBRUARY 1933, a month after Hitler became Chancellor, my mother, Fips, discovered she was pregnant. My parents were people who planned ahead; they found uncertainty and disorder difficult. A perspicacious friend of the family suggested they must prepare for the worst: Hitlers intentions towards Jews, he said, were clear and malign. My mother should go to England to have her child, giving the baby British citizenship, which would make emigration easier if that time were to come. So, my brother Peter was born, a forceps delivery, on a cold November day in Leeds, where my mothers aunt Flora part of a branch of the family that had left Germany a generation earlier had settled. Fips returned to Germany two weeks later.

By the time of Peters birth, the Nazi Party had already done the groundwork for its brutal regime; the establishment of the first concentration camp, Dachau, the formation of the Gestapo, the beginnings of forced sterilization. My parents had as yet no definite plans to leave Germany. For the time being my father Werner was able to continue his work. He was a chemical engineer in the Jewish family firm, Gesellschaft fr Electrometallurgie, GfE an international company dealing with non-ferrous metals and providing alloys for the German rearmament effort.

But for others in the family, life was deteriorating. By 1933, Werners sister, sweet round-faced Ilse, three years younger than him, had been prevented from completing her medical studies. In 1935, Hans Sachs, my paternal grandfather was retired, for explicitly racial reasons, as director of cancer research in Heidelberg.

At home in Dahlem, Peter, now aged three, repeatedly refused to give the Heil Hitler salute at kindergarten, making my mother increasingly anxious. She herself was regularly defiant. She continued to go into boycotted Jewish shops and at my fathers office outing to the 1936 Olympic Games, she refused to raise her arm in salute, shaming the woman next to her into lowering hers. This at a time when Nazi propaganda had manipulated mass opinion and paralysed opponents, when constitutional rights had been suspended, when public humiliation of Jews was commonplace in streets and schools and when living in fear of denunciation or the doorbell ringing at an unusual hour was part of daily life for Jews.

Then Werner accidentally ran his car into an SS officer on a motorbike. He was lucky. The officer rang him that night to say hed prefer my father not to report the accident as his insurance was out of date. Another reminder that something could happen to them at any time.

At the end of 1936, my mother went to England, this time to Oxford, again to give birth, where Ilse had settled that year in a community of refugees and sympathetic academics. Peter stayed with my grandparents in Heidelberg. I was born in the Radcliffe Infirmary on January 21 1937, a week later than expected. My father came for the birth but had to hurry back to Germany for work.

It was an easy birth and my mother had family and friends around her. She told me later she loved the hospital staff and felt well looked after, only briefly alarmed when they whisked me off to open up a closed tear duct, returning me to her with a huge bandage round my head. She felt relief at being away from the stresses of life in Germany. It was a happy time for her and she stayed for six more weeks.

Dahlem, to where my mother and I were returning on that March day in 1937, is a prosperous suburb of Berlin, wide tree-lined streets with large villas near woods and lakes. I have a persistent memory of being wheeled in my pram, past the post office, down Knigin-Luise-Strae. We lived in a large apartment at number 30. Apparently I cried at night, having got used to night feeds in the Oxford hospital and my parents put me in a room in the farthest corner of the flat, where we couldnt hear you something of the strictness of a Truby King regime, though Im sure they knew nothing about him. After a week, my father said, I stopped crying. I have later memories of my mother singing my brother and I to sleep with her light tuneful voice