A meticulously researched book from a Frome author provides a moving account of her grandmother’s terrifying escape from Vienna in 1939 that involved smuggler boats and an 18-mile crawl through the snowy mountains to Warsaw.
Travel writer and podcaster, Felice Hardy, was brought up in London, in a conventional family. She was close to her grandparents, David and Liesl Herbst, and would listen to her grandmother’s stories of a happy childhood with her sister, Trude, and of her successful tennis career, gaining the title of Tennis Champion of Austria 1930/31.
‘I knew she met my grandfather in Paris, and that they had left Vienna in 1939 arriving in London before war broke out,’ continues Felice. ‘But there was an air of secretiveness which I never questioned. I regret that now. There are so many things I should have asked.’ One thing Felice hopes to achieve with her book is to encourage people to discuss family histories whilst relatives are still alive to answer questions.
This could have been the end of the story, if not for Felice’s daughter. ‘In 2015, aged 19, she began to show an interest and requested that we go to Austria to see where my grandparents had lived. I booked a flight to Vienna and off we went,’ says Felice. ‘We joined a city walking tour, a large part of which was focused around the Jewish area. It was interesting but I didn’t think it was particularly relevant to us at the time.’
A seemingly inconsequential chat to the tour guide really set things in motion. ‘Her hobby was helping people research their Viennese family backgrounds and, for no charge, she said she would be delighted to look into ours.’
So began the fascinating story. ‘I discovered that both of my grandparents were Jewish and that my grandmother actually had two sisters: Trude and another, Irma, who had a disability and doesn’t appear in many family photographs,’ explains Felice. ‘It also turns out that Liesl had grown up in Jägerndorf which was then part of Czechoslovakia, not Austria as I believed.’ It was suggested that Felice next focused on Prague. ‘I found a researcher at a Prague Museum who then uncovered all sorts of information; things that I’m not even sure my grandmother knew.’
Now totally immersed in her research, Felice learnt how Liesl’s mother and sister, Irma, died from meningitis and a burst appendix respectively in a concentration camp. The other sister, Trude, had been interned in a labour camp in Slovakia with her husband and daughter. They were part of a historic uprising in the camp led by the Slovakian resistance and broke free, only to be tragically rounded up and shot a few months later when German reinforcement troops were brought in. ‘I wonder if my grandmother knew that is what happened?’ questions Felice.
Her grandmother and mother, Dorli, arrived in London as refugees in early 1939, followed by her grandfather via an astonishing journey which included smuggler boats and an 18-mile crawl through the snowy mountains to Warsaw, managing to board a flight to Croydon just before the Nazi invasion.
‘Many people were in denial of what was to come, but my grandfather had great foresight and was determined to flee with his wife and child,’ continues Felice. ‘They were the lucky ones, only granted visas because he had a sister living in London. I think my grandmother never forgave herself for not doing more to persuade her family to come to London with them. So began the survivors’ guilt which I now realise persisted through the generations.’
The deeply traumatic experience changed their lives. ‘When I see pictures of my grandmother from her early years, she is always smiling and happy. But in later photographs she never smiles naturally. She carried terrible guilt,’ says Felice. A decision was made to completely reject the past, perhaps as a way of coping with the present and looking to the future.
So, how to describe the book? It is a family memoir, which deals with the themes of the holocaust, tennis and the search for Felice’s own identity. ‘The first half is about my grandparents and their lives in Austria. It is based on truth but I’ve taken creative licence and imagined conversations that might have taken place,’ she says. ‘The next section focuses on Trude and Irma and what happened to them. The last part is about my grandparents in my lifetime.’ Writing the book has been cathartic. ‘It has taken me an age to acknowledge my Jewish background, but my children are fascinated by our family history and we are thankfully at a point where we can talk about it freely and openly.’
Felice has thoroughly enjoyed the research process and is overwhelmed by the passion for history shown by strangers, from the tour guide in Vienna to Geni.com, a website for creating family trees. ‘Through this, I met a man whose father had been my grandfather’s manager at his factory in Vienna,’ says Felice, ‘and a second cousin living in California who had met my grandparents in London. The whole experience has been inspirational and completely addictive.’
