Changing Places

Today

The other day I received a lovely email from my Honduran cousin Ernesto, in response to my change of address notification. We'd had such a lovely time visiting my cousins in Honduras this Spring and this was the first time I'd met most of them. "Don't leave it another sixty years", said Ernesto.

Now, Honduras is a third world country and isn't exactly a popular destination for European settlers, so how did I come to have first cousins living in Tegucigalpa?

In My Day

My German mother was born in 1913 to an Aryan mother and Jewish father. She had two older brothers, Heinrich (Heine) and Ernst and a much younger sister Maria.

By all accounts she had a comfortable and privileged childhood in a village near Hamburg. Her father no longer lived with them but they had plenty of everything - good food, company, culture and education.

In 1933, at nineteen years' old. my mother stood on the  brink of of adulthood. She'd matriculated from school and was preparing to enter university where she hoped to study art history, a choice generally reserved for someone who does not expect to face poverty or difficulty.

Also in 1933 Hitler came to power and almost immediately set about dismantling opportunities for Jews and part-Jews. As a result Mamma was barred from engaging in any kind of higher education and her opportunities quickly dwindled to those of manual labourer or domestic servant.

As the situation became worse, she, her brothers and many other Jews and part-Jews who were able to, left Germany. Mamma was following a boyfriend Heinz (was he a chef? I dimly remember her telling me this) who had escaped to the US. She came to England with her English employers, but never left, probably being trapped by the outbreak of WWII.

Heine and Ernst happened to have friends in Guatemala so going there seemed the easiest thing to do. It must have been a long journey by several boats to arrive in a place so different from Europe where little German was spoken and where all your hard-won skills were useless. There Ernst met a Honduran woman (very beautiful, judging by the pictures) married her and settled in Honduras where he had five children and worked for a pharmaceutical company in Tegucigalpa. It was clear that he relied for quite a while on the international brotherhood of Jews who will help their own.

(Heine, although he, too, married locally, later returned to Berlin where his family still lives).

Mamma never saw Ernst again, although they did write to each other.

Their story is matched in many ways by others in the whole history of humanity who have been forced to leave their home by war, hunger or persecution. For some the result was disastrous, for others the key to success. But for all of them it's a terrifying choice, born of desperation, and we should never forget that when considering the position of newcomers into our own country.

I feel sure that if Mamma and Ernst were alive today they would have been delighted at our cousinly meeting. And, no, Ernesto, I'll try not to leave it another sixty years.