My Disappearing Uncle: Europe, War and the Stories of a Scattered Family
I am reviewing these two books together, as they are very similar both in content and structure. Both authors are British-born children of German-speaking Jewish parents who came to England in the 1930s. Each author has set out on a journey to discover more about them: to sort myth from reality and to uncover the truth they never told.
Henderson’s parents were from Vienna and left before Hitler took over, so they were not strictly speaking refugees. However, this did not prevent their daughter successfully achieving Austrian nationality in 2021 on the grounds that her family were ‘persecuted ancestors’. This is not therefore a Holocaust story and is in fact quite a lighthearted book as Henderson travels Europe to meet her colourful and far-flung extended family. The only member to be imprisoned was the uncle in the book’s title, who was interned by the British and spent a cold winter in a Canadian camp, after which he vowed never to return to Britain and settled in Argentina.
The Memory Keeper is a much grimmer story, and the research caused the author considerable distress. Her grandparents refused to leave Berlin until it was too late and died in the Nazi camps. She includes the anguished correspondence between her parents and grandparents as they plead with the older couple to leave while the elders prevaricate.
For me the main interest in the book lies in the efforts made by ordinary Germans who never knew any of Hitler’s victims to memorialise them, in particular with the Stolpersteine (Stumble stones) set in the pavement outside the victims’ former homes. The families are not alone in remembering them.
