I left Munich on the midnight Kindertransport train at the end of June 1939. I returned 11 years later with a group of British students. I had fled the city as a child and returned as a 25-year-old adult. What did I find in this place that had once been my Heimat, the place where I had lived with my parents and brother? What was it like? What were the people like? How did I feel?
It was 1950. There was a tremendous amount of rebuilding going on. People were busy putting things back the way they had been. There was an air of cleanliness about the buildings surrounding me, although they still looked familiar. I was interviewed by a journalist, grateful to find someone who could speak German. What did I think of Munich, he asked. I told him that I was impressed by the place, but added that the people complained a bit too much. After all, I said, who had started the war? The published interview omitted that last criticism.
My family had survived the war. I went to visit a non-Jewish friend of my father's. His wife's remark shocked me: "You did all right then, didn't you! You managed to avoid all this," she said with a sweep of her hand, standing by the bay window. I never went back to see them.
In 1950 no one mentioned Hitler-at least, no one I met. No one mentioned concentration camps to me. No one could rise to admitting to the horrors of the Holocaust. The young students I met were afraid to ask their parents and grandparents what had happened. I only learned that later.
On that first visit I felt cool towards Munich, almost awkward. Then we drove to Walchensee, where we used to spend our holidays. When I saw our little house, I wanted to cry. But there were other people around and I felt inhibited. I wanted to sit in the garden, look at the mountain range in the distance and take it all in. I felt not so much that I belonged to it, but that it was part of me. At first it was difficult for me to accept this. I had adapted to England, linguistically and culturally. Did I still have room for this little corner of Bavaria?
I visited the farm by the lake. The farmer had died during the war, drowned in the lake. His widow came towards me with arms outstretched: "Thank God you're alive," she said, and cried. "In the end we peasants were best off," she explained. "We were still free." I found it remarkable that she had perceived herself to be free. There were Nazis in the village. Everybody knew who was who. They could have denounced her. But she had the food they needed and I suppose that gave her a sense of independence.
The woman from whom we used to buy our vegetables plied me with coffee and cake and wanted me to assure her that the rest of the world was not much different from Walchensee. I suggested to her that the mountains elsewhere weren't quite so high. She was happy with that.
Some years later I visited Munich with my Manchester-born husband. I found myself showing it to him, almost showing it off to him. The same happened a few years later, when we visited Munich with our three little sons. I felt comfortable there-and that was odd. This was the city through whose streets my father was led barefoot and bleeding and with a placard around his neck saying: "I am a Jew and I will never again complain to the police." A photographer happened to have his camera with him and took the now famous picture which appeared in the international press. And yet I could feel that this was a place in which I could now feel comfortable. Many of the older generation had died. But still no one wanted to talk.
A few years later the mayor of Munich invited us back again. By now much of the centre had been pedestrianised. We went to three concerts in one day, to museums, art galleries-and we just bummeled. Then we went into a Bierkeller to order food and drink. And then, suddenly, I was overcome with sadness; I did not know why. Was I crying for something irretrievably lost? My unfinished childhood, perhaps? Or was I sad at the recognition of my attachment? Perhaps it was just the combined smell of Kartoffelsalat, beer and sweet mustard. How emotional smells are!
In 1988 I found myself again in Munich, one of a group of magistrates who had gone there to study the Bavarian system of fines. We visited courts and prisons and the police headquarters where my father had been beaten 35 years earlier. I did a lot of interpreting. The youngish governor of the prison asked me how I came to speak such good German. I told him that I had left Munich as a Jewish kid, to escape Hitler. He put his arm around my shoulder and said with a broad grin: "So we are both M?nchner!" He seemed very pleased with that discovery. I was pleasantly surprised at his reaction.
But it was on my last two visits, in 1996 and 1997, that I found the greatest change. The people I met were all in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and they asked a lot of questions. They were hungry to know what had really happened: "Wie war das eigentlich, was war da los?" They seemed to care. I was touched. One journalist asked me if I now felt English. I answered that you would have to be born there to feel that. So how did I feel? I said that I now felt I was a Bavarian-Jewish Briton. She quoted this in her interview and added that she had heard in my voice a "tender declaration of love for Munich." I learned a lot about myself from these questions. People wanted to know if being asked upset me. I admitted that it did, but I also found it wonderful that they wanted to find out more. But was it too late, they wanted to know. No, I said. It was never too late. Never.
