Category: News

Two more weeks in Adelaide and then it is time to pack the bags and head off to the Reykjavik Literary Festival. Among others I will talk World War 2 and the role of satire when writing about sensitive topics with Timur Vermes, author of “Look who’s back” – a novel about how Adolf Hitler wakes up in Berlin in 2011 (and starts a very successful youtube-channel).

The festival has managed to pull together a great line-up of writers. Apart from Vermes talks will be held by, among others, David Mitchell, Dave Eggers, Stine Pilgaard and Teju Cole.

I have always wanted to visit Iceland, so attending this festival will be a real treat.

Here is some more info about my talk with Vermes

 

 

Yesterday I received an email from my grandfather’s younger brother Georg in Argentina who is one of the people I write about in ”Herr Isakowitz Treasure”

I met Georg for the first time four years ago, when he came to Sweden. He made a great impression on me. Not only because he still had such a joy for life and was happy to travel the world at 91 years of age, but also because in spite of all the hardship he had gone through he somehow had managed to stay warm and kind.

Georg certainly had had a tough life. He first attempted to leave Germany at the age of 15, after having had his fingers smashed by the Hitler Jugend on stage during a piano concert, but ended up in a prison in Hamburg where he was severely beaten and abused.

After a year a friend of the family who was a lawyer managed to get him out of prison. Georg was told that he could not go home, as he would be taken straight to concentration camp. The only option was to leave the country. The lawyer helped to hide the young Georg at a friend’s house and the next day he left on a ship to Buenos Aires. As he had no Visa and came to Argentina illegally he was put in prison when he arrived and was to be sent back to Germany. However after some time in the cell he got very sick, fainted and was sent to a hospital. And the moment he woke up he got up and left.

Georg spent the next few days sleeping in parks, dodging the police and being scared of being caught and sent back to Germany. But he was lucky and bumped in to some Gauchos who took him under their wings and he went with these poor people – people who shared what little they had with him – to the countryside to work.

He worked for a number of years on the lands. Did hard manual labour and slept among the dogs and horses to keep warm. And slowly, through hard work and lucky coincidences, ha managed to build up a decent life for himself in Argentina.

Some 65 years later the city of Berlin contacted him to offer him an honorary citizenship. His first reaction was to say no, but curiosity got the better of him and at the age of 89 he returned to Germany and found, to his joy and surprise, a country where he felt welcome and where many of the young people wanted to hear of what he had been through. For a number of years he spent half his life in Buenos Aires and half in Berlin, but this year, at the age of 95, he finally decided that his travelling life had come to and end.

Being the only one who is left of all the people in the family who fled Germany during the Holocaust, Georg’s opinion of what I have written naturally is very important to me. So when yesterday I received his letter saying he now had read the German version of the book (who came out last month) and that he really appreciated the way it told the story of our family I felt so happy. As for me, getting his acceptance is worth so much more than any review.

At the end of his letter he writes these words about what happened to him and my grandfather, two brothers who came out through a horrible trauma in very different emotional conditions. One with his appreciation of life still intact and one a broken man.

“The Nazis stole our youth, the best time of our lives.  We all tried to make the best of the situation, some succeeding better than others.  Take care of your youth. It is the best thing of all, and it doesn’t come back”

Yesterday “Der Schatz des Herrn Isakowitz” came out in Germany (published by Eichborn). As all of my grandparents were German Jews, and a large part of the book is set in pre-war Germany it will be very interesting to see what the German readers think of the book.

Reviews are already starting to come in. Here is one that appeared in the German version of People magazine accompanied by a short article.

At a book talk a while ago I was asked by a journalist how you know when it is time to pack your bags and leave. The context was the re-surfacing Anti-Semitism and the fast growing support for right-wing xenophobic political parties that could be observed in many places around Europe.

As I did not know how to answer, I told the journalist the story of my grandfather’s sister-in-law Ruth who grew up as one of five children in a well-to-do leafy suburb of Berlin. The family lived what must have been a good life. They had a big house with maids, went on nice holidays and had many friends, Jewish as well as non-Jewish. Having been in the country for generations, they saw themselves as nothing but Germans.

Maybe that is why no one in the family but Ruth took the growing Anti-Semitism of the 1920s seriously. Not her mother, not her older siblings and not her uncles and their families. She was the only one who thought that this was not a country you could live in as a Jew, and as an eleven year-old she asked her mother if she could join a Zionist organisation that had emigration to Palestine as its goal. The whole family thought the girl was completely mad. No one else was even close to being a Zionist. They were Germans and this was their home.

Even when Hitler came to power and the first anti-Jewish laws were introduced they simply could not believe that this silly little girl wanted to leave. These bad times, they told Ruth, would not last for long. So much hate and evil could not exist in the hearts of men. No, Hitler would soon be gone. And, they added, if he didn’t and things ended up getting even worse they still would not leave until it was absolutely necessary – with the last train that left the station.

Ruth did not listen to them, and when she no longer was allowed to go to school she joined a Zionist movement and started working the lands to prepare herself for a life in British Palestine. The Brits, who wanted the area turned into farmland, had promised to give out visas to those who hade the skills necessary to make this happen, and as a consequence Ruth and many other would-be academics left the cities and lived as farmers in Kibbutz-like dwellings in the German countryside. This was how she met her husband Heinz and his brother Ernst, my grandfather.

Four years they worked their way around the countryside without getting a visa and then, on the Night of Broken Glass, Gestapo came and smashed up their house and took all the men to Dachau concentration camp.

But they were in luck. Through fortunate coincidences and more than a little gutsiness Ruth succeeded in getting all of them temporary work permits to Sweden, and thus managed to get them out in time.

Her uncles and their families, all those people who said they would not leave until it was absolutely necessary, were not as lucky. Sure, they did end up taking that last train out, but it did not take them to freedom but to their deaths.

So how do you know when it is time to pack your bags and leave?
I have absolutely no idea. Nor do I understand how come the only one who got it right the last time things went straight to hell was a silly little eleven year-old girl.

Do you?

Denmark’s biggest book club, Gyldendal bogklubber, has picked Hr. Isakowitz’ Skat to be their book of the month.

In their magazine Gyldendals they describe the book as a true gem and a very special story that brings food for thought and gratitude to be alive.

”It is not like any other book you have read. What other novel mixes a sad and dramatic family story about the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust with a light and humorous story about a grandfather, a father and a son who goes on a roadtrip?”

For the book club version of Herr Isakowitz Treasure Gyldendals also have designed a new cover that looks like this:

 

These are stories I have been wanting to tell for a very long time. Ever since, in my early twenties, I started interviewing my family and their friends about how they, as Jews in Nazi-Germany, managed to survive the Holocaust.

But even though I, over the years, have gathered a lot of material about what happened to my grandparents and their gang before, during and after the war, I still did not dare to write about it. Partly because I feared I would not be able to do them justice, but also because every single person’s story was more dramatic than most novels I had read. And I simply did not know how to string them together in a coherent way.

It was my oldest son, some fifteen years later, who gave me the idea of how it could be done. I had just told him the story about the valuables my great grandfather, Hermann Isakowitz, buried on in his land before he disappeared. A story that was just about the only thing my grandfather told his children about the time before he came to Sweden. Having four Holocaust survivors as grandparents, to me this was just one story amongst many. But to my son it was something completely different. It was a realisation that our family had a treasure. And a treasure, he said, you must go and find.

I immediately realised he was right. When an opportunity to go on a treasure hunt appears one should naturally take it. But furthermore, it also dawned upon me that such a trip might be a way to tie all these dramatic stories together.

However, it took a while before we got going. First followed two years of research. I talked to scholars and contacted archives all over the world. I emailed historians, genealogists, museums and anyone else that I thought might help me find out more about what happened to my family and the place where my great grandfather used to live.

And then, in the summer of 2012, my son, my father and I went on a roadtrip from Sweden to Poland. It was a remarkable journey that I am sure I will never forget and that, two years later, resulted in Herr Isakowitz’s treasure. A book that, after almost twenty years time, I finally worked up the courage to write.

It has happened again. Another fundamentalist attack, following the same pattern as the one in Paris. It seems to be a two-step process at work: First attack someone who made fun of your religious beliefs, then try to kill some Jews. In Paris it was Charlie Hebdo and a kosher super market. In Copenhagen, an event where controversial artist Lars Vilks appeared and a Bat Mitzvah celebration.

Many years ago I interviewed Vilks for an Australian newspaper. This was when he was working on Ladonia, an imaginary country in the south of Sweden. Ladonia began as an innocent little prank that, due to the behaviour of the local council, turned into a huge organic piece of conceptual art. I remember thinking that it was exceptionally cheeky and clever. In comparison, the work that earned him a price on his head really was nothing much to brag about. Just a few paintings of Mohammed as a roundabout dog (a short lived Swedish trend where anonymous people placed hand-made dogs in, you guessed it, roundabouts).

Just like Charlie Hebdo, Vilks was making fun of anyone who got in his way, not just Muslims (even though this seems to have been his focus in later years). And even though his provocations were mild in comparison to those of the French magazine, he still did something to offend those who attacked him. As a Jew it seems you don’t even have to do that. Just buying things in a particular super market or celebrating a girl’s 12th birthday seems to be more than enough for someone to want to put a bullet through your brain.

I do not know why all this hate comes to the surface right now, because this is the worst it has been in a long time, but I do know that it must have been brewing for a while. And even if I have always been aware of it lurking there, in the shadows, I guess I have never really believed it would escalate in such a way as it has recently done.

Only a year ago, when my book was first published, I still felt very positive about the state of the world. But now I am not so sure anymore. Not when Jews once more are being attacked on the streets of Europe for no other reason than being Jews.

While visiting my father-in-law in Byron Bay on the Australian east coast I received a message saying that my Danish publishing house, that was just about to launch Herr Isakowitz’s Treasure, was in desperate need of a photograph of me.

Luckily I managed to get hold of family-friend and legendary photographer John McCormick who lives only half an hour from Byron, at the foot of Mount Chincogan outside the little town of Mullumbimby. Up here, by the subtropical hills, John has his house and his studio.

It is a most wonderful place to work. The studio may not have Internet access, but who needs it when you have lizards, the odd carpet snake and a secret Narnia-like cupboard that leads out from your office and into a huge bamboo forest.

Apart from taking pictures of me with his beat-up camera, John was also posing for my three year-old son who, after having observed us adults, had built a camera of his own (using long sticks and colourful flowers).

Here is my favorite picture from the day. One I decided not to send to the publishing house, but keep for myself.

 

Even now, almost three years after we left on our journey to Poland do I receive emails with information about my family from archives around the world.

I have no doubt that without these archives and the dedicated people working there, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to write my book. Without them I wouldn’t have found out what happened to so many of my relatives: How those who survived made their way out of Nazi-Germany, how those who became stateless refugees in other countries struggled to stay alive, and how those who couldn’t get out in time died.

Not long ago I received yet another one of those emails, this time from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) who I contacted when I was putting the book together. They had gone through their International Tracing Service collection and found my great grandfather’s transport card and documents showing him being deported from Berlin to Riga.

It is truly horrible reading. What really gets to me is the contrast between the horrendous crimes committed and the technocratic way in which these crimes were administrated and documented. Like if those deported and murdered were no different from cattle or cans on a supermarket shelf.

Below is the transport card that shows my great grandfather, Hermann Isakowitz, having been deported from Berlin to Riga in January 1942, as well as the transport list for his deportation. Hermann’s name is the sixth from the top on the list. He was on transport number 9 with 1005 other people.