Eleanor Thom
In 2013, after months in Berlin researching the life of my grandmother Deborah Tannenbaum, I approached the German Consulate in Edinburgh to ask about naturalisation through article 116. Before that trip, I’d met a Kindertransportee who had also come from Berlin, and she’d taken my hand and told me how much I would love it there. She was right. I had fallen for my grandmother’s city even as I learned what had happened there to my grandmother’s family.
My son Ivor had come with me on the trip, and it was not lost on me that he was not much older than Ruth, the little daughter my grandmother had been forced to leave behind. As a Stateless Jew, Deborah was expelled in 1938. This was part of an experiment by the Nazi government, a practice-run for the upcoming mass expulsion of Polish Jews. As a single mother living hand-to-mouth, my grandmother faced imprisonment because she stood little chance of arranging emigration or paying for her own travel. But her employer for the past six years, a Jewish old people’s home, cared for her. They offered to arrange and pay for passage, not only for Deborah, but also for her baby daughter. This could have been a real escape, a good story, but it was not to be.
The British government saw in my grandmother a good candidate for a domestic service visa, but dependents were not allowed. They denied the visa for her child, and Deborah was forced to leave Ruth in Berlin with an aunt and her cousins. On March 4th, 1943, when she was five years old, Ruth was deported to Auschwitz in the care of Meta Lewin, my grandmother’s cousin, and Meta’s husband Herbert, a childless couple who, according to an archival record, loved her as their own daughter. Ruth and Meta were murdered on arrival in Auschwitz. Herbert was selected to work, and his death was recorded a mere six weeks later.
In the UK, my grandmother married a British soldier, Duncan Wilson. He was a Scottish Gypsy traveller, and in November 1942 he took Deborah to Elgin in the North East of Scotland to join his mother and sisters. Duncan and Deborah had four daughters, but it was not an easy marriage or an easy family to settle into. Duncan died in 1951, leaving my grandmother to raise her girls alone in a town without a Jewish community. She couldn’t afford a bus or a train to the cities, where there were small pockets of Jewish life. But it was peaceful, and Deborah stayed there till her death in 1980.
Even with few facts to go on, because Deborah never spoke about her past, my grandmother’s story always felt like an important one. I struggled to find Holocaust testimonies that spoke of the community she’d belonged to, the 40% of Jewish Berliners that had lived below the poverty line even before 1933. In most of these extended families there had been no survivors, so there were no testimonies.
My novel, ‘Connective Tissue’ is based on the life of my grandmother, making use of all the archive material I could uncover. There were many documents to be found, because Ruth’s being left in Germany generated a lot of paperwork. My book was published in the UK in 2023 by Scotland’s Taproot Press. It is not, of course, a testimony. Too many unanswered questions about my grandmother’s life remain impossible to answer. But I hope it goes some way to representing the community my grandmother belonged to, and to honouring her.
Eleanor Thom and her children. They have a tradition of taking a photo in
a photo booth on each trip to Berlin
I was invited to speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last year, and an audience member asked me a question which stumped me. They wanted to know what question Deborah would ask me if she were here today. I had always dreamed of asking my grandmother questions, but never the other way around. Later, a Glaswegian friend came over to congratulate me and he jokingly said, “When are you going to write a happy book?” We had a good laugh, and at that moment, I suddenly knew this was exactly the question my grandmother would have had.
Deborah only read what my mum calls ‘trashy romance’. She loved chocolate Minstrels and rescuing wild animals in need. She loved her girls, and willingly took under her wing all the boys they brought home – one of them was my father. Every time Deborah had her photo taken, she stood with one foot in front of the other, apparently to better show off her legs. She knew that life was about joy, and she looked for it in everything. In the one precious piece of video that exists of her, a silent movie made by her youngest daughter’s fiancé in the 1960s, she smilingly peeks at the camera from between the laundry she’s pegging on her washing line. She pokes out her tongue, says something, and dissolves into giggles.
My grandmother was able to forge friendships across boundaries. She was accepted, eventually, by the very insular Traveller family she married into. She even became friends with my paternal grandmother, which I’m told by my mother was no mean feat. I have a black and white picture of the two of them as old ladies, Granny Wilson and Granny Thom, squeezed side-by-side in a photo booth, bespectacled and fur-hatted.
The most remarkable of all Deborah’s friendships, as far as some people are concerned, were with the German women who arrived in Elgin after WW2 as wives of Scottish soldiers. They were my grandmother’s closest friends. She never held ordinary people responsible for the actions of the Nazis, and even before the end of the war, with my mother on her knee, she would take a bus to visit the German prisoners of war who were working in nearby fields. They exchanged stories, and Deborah brought them chocolate and cigarettes.
This is why I never questioned how my grandmother would feel about me and my family members becoming German citizens, which we eventually did after an initial knockback in 2013, followed by a failed application in 2016. I joined the Article 116 Exclusions Group, as it was then known, and discussed my grandmother’s case in detail with them. Deborah’s Statelessness, as well as her being a woman, was what initially prevented my family’s application going forward.
I was walking on a windy Edinburgh beach the morning I heard that in the Bundestag, an amendment to Stag 14 had passed. This meant that the naturalisation of descendants of Stateless people who were normally resident in Germany during the Nazi period, who were persecuted, imprisoned or forced to flee, was now possible. As I scrolled through the news on my phone, tears were blowing sideways off my cheeks. These legal changes all happened thanks to the work of the Article 116 exclusions group and the German ministers whose belief in equality rectified the difficulties families like mine had faced in seeking citizenship. I have something now that the Nazis denied my grandmother: the German identity she had always worn. It was not an identity she could just remove like a coat. Even now, over forty years after her death, Elgin people remember my grandmother as ‘German Dora’.
When my family’s citizenship was granted, many friends in Germany were keen to celebrate with us. There was my former flatmate, who had translated several documents for me, and a family we had swapped houses with, the carers at a Prenzlauerberg kindergarten who had cared for my son when I was working long hours in the archives, our German teacher, and the neighbours at the Berlin flat where we had stayed on our very first trip.
Some of my closest friends from Germany have shared their family histories with me. They too have difficult memories, unanswered questions, and events in the past that are not spoken of. I came to realise we share a very gentle, mutual understanding about this painful past, and it is something which will always connect us. There’s a respect for the past there that others don’t always understand. Having said that, it is such a typical British trait to be cautious about mentioning the war. Remember that episode of ‘Faulty Towers’, when German guests arrive and Basil’s anxiety about mentioning the war results in a total farce?
Our daughter’s German speech and language therapist, Stephan is an expert in his field. He travels all over the world to wean children from feeding tubes, allowing them to eat normally, healthily and joyfully. In 2014, Stephan flew to Scotland to treat our baby girl. We had sought him out in desperation, and much was riding on the outcome of this intensive therapy week. The day before the arrival of our German VIP, our son Ivor, now four, fell and painfully put his teeth through his upper lip. Overnight, like a bad omen, a perfectly square, raised, black scab developed right under Ivor’s button nose. By the time we arrived at the airport to collect Stephan, our son was back to his cheerful little self, singing and grinning in the back seat of the car. With his golden ringlets, chubby cheeks, and a perfectly square scab above his upper lip, the effect was Sistine Chapel cherub with a Hitler moustache. If we had intended to not mention the war to Stephan, our toddler’s new look was Faulty Towers-esque comic perfection. I turned to my husband and said, “Do you think we should say something?”
The week began with a muttered explanation, but soon we were back home, welcoming Stephan properly and opening beers together in the evening. He loved Newcastle Brown Ale. Our baby girl took to him immediately. She seemed to understand that he was there for her, and that this encounter would forever change her life. I credit Stephan with the miracle that happened that week, because my daughter never needed a tube again. And thankfully, our son’s scar wasn’t permanent.
Now more than at any time since the Holocaust, telling the stories of our families feels essential, but one of the most powerful changes that remembrance can bring about is repair, renewed trust, friendship and good will, things my grandmother cherished most.
I’m busy writing a happy book now. I got the idea over the summer, spending an afternoon with my family in a restaurant on the Elbe. Eighty-five years after my grandmother was exiled from her life in Germany, when she sailed into the North Sea from the Hook of Holland, I was watching the huge cargo ships that were leaving the port of Hamburg. They would cross oceans and touch every corner of the globe. It was an impressive sight, emotional and inspiring. It was a good story. We laughed at the eccentric fanfare given to each ship, the cheerful jingles and the ship’s national anthems. In response, there were blasts from the ships’ horns and sailors waving. The ships quickly made headway, their bulk disappearing from view after each received the same kind message from the city. The message was announced over a loudspeaker, spoken by a friendly captain in uniform:
"Hamburg wünscht Ihnen gute Reise. Wir hoffen auf ein baldiges Wiedersehen in unserem Hafen. Gute Reise.” (Hamburg wishes you a good journey. We hope to see you soon in our port. Bon Voyage!)