In Last Words, Philip Schlesinger weaves a deeply personal narrative about the final moments of his parents’ lives, Béla and Martha Schlesinger, Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi persecution. Their poignant last words recount their early lives in pre-war Europe, marked by war, displacement, and resilience. As Schlesinger reflects on their stories, his own identity emerges—torn between his British upbringing and deep-rooted European heritage.
When my father spoke his last words, we were at home. He was seated in his favourite armchair in the comfort of familiar surroundings shortly before being whisked into hospital to control his pain. A couple of days earlier, my mother who cared selflessly for him during his long, recurrent illness, had called me in distress, so I hurried home to Manchester for the weekend. At the time, I was working in London, barely a month into my first academic job. While he spoke, my mother remained silent, listening intently. The light clack of her knitting-needles interspersed his words. Evening shadows lengthened in the living-room, but I didn’t dare switch on the light, fearing it might break the spell.
My father faced up to the imminence of death while I held tightly onto hope. The devastation wrought by cancer was countered by his stoicism. He spoke quietly and with great effort for over an hour. His decision to do so took me by surprise as he seldom talked about himself. His last words were a monologue, as befits a testament. They were not the last things he ever said but they carried special significance, a clear intention to shape memory. In mid-flow, with typical self-effacement, he paused and said, ‘I hope I’m not boring you.’ ‘Of course not!’, I exclaimed. Later, as he concluded his narrative, he looked me straight in the eye with an embarrassed smile and ventured diffidently: ‘I don’t think I’ll be a guest at your wedding.’ ‘But you will’, I protested, fully believing it. Years later, I realised that he wanted me to accept his heart-breaking absence; to understand that he could do nothing to change it.
His funeral took place five days later. The street was heavy with mourners. We were moved and astonished by how many lives this courteous, reserved, and modest man had touched. Ten weeks later, Sharon and I married, under the deep shadow cast by his passing. In keeping with Orthodox practice, no music was played at our wedding celebration.
Half a century on, it is the contours of my father’s final narrative that I now recall – how he told the story of who he was, manifestly wanting to be remembered in that way. Many years later, never to be outdone, my mother addressed her own arresting last words to me. My recollection of what she said is precise. Their two testimonies have weighed on me. Coming separately from people so intimately connected for years, their last words conjoin as aspects of a larger story, which is mine, of course, as well as theirs. At times, tales told in the intimate sphere connect with the great movements of world history. For sure, my parents’ depositions were profoundly marked by the politics of inter-war Europe. Both became victims of Nazi persecution – Jewish refugees who fled to the United Kingdom from Austria, which had been incorporated into the German Reich.
Béla
One Saturday, early in October 1974, as autumn began to make its presence felt, Béla Schlesinger uttered his last words. He spoke chiefly about the first half of his life – what shaped him before he landed in the UK in May 1939.
My ancestors lived in the sprawling Austro-Hungarian empire, a populous multi-national, multi-religious and multi-ethnic European state, second in geographic scale only to the vast Russian empire. Béla’s parents grew up in small towns in western Hungary. Hungarian was the language both of state and home. His father, Jakob, was a kosher butcher by trade. His mother, Hermine, strictly Orthodox in faith, was the clever daughter of an innkeeper. Béla was born in 1904. Like all his family, he was bilingual in Hungarian and German.
At the close of the nineteenth century, my grandparents moved westwards. There, in the linguistic and cultural borderlands, where German, Magyar and Slav national aspirations contended with one another, Jakob served the long-established Jewish community of Eisenstadt, renowned for its rabbinic tradition. As the kosher butcher he had a key communal role. Orthodox Judaism insists on strict food prohibitions and methods of slaughter. Eisenstadt was then (and still is) the capital of Burgenland.
At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Béla’s elder brother, Karl, was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, serving as a subaltern who was decorated for his bravery. Later, Jakob was also called up; he was in combat as a non-commissioned officer. Aged twelve, Béla became man of the house, a support to his mother and sisters, Margit and Roszi. By the war’s end he had left school. Aged fourteen, he was apprenticed to the family’s butcher shop. He already knew it well: with his father away, Béla helped his mother keep the business afloat. Still a boy, his work included shifting heavy carcases, to the detriment of his physical growth. After World War I, Austria-Hungary was partitioned and in late 1921, following a plebiscite, part of Burgenland was incorporated into the new German-speaking Republic of Austria.
Decades later, the first half of Béla’s life figured large in his testamentary account. During his seventieth-year final reckoning, he chose to conjure up his best times, especially taking pride in his craft. As the eyes and ears of the family business, he travelled to farms in Burgenland to select prime livestock. He judged cattle’s weight by eye, assessing their state of health by touch. Never previously had I heard him speak with such uncharacteristic self-assurance and pride. The sole occupational credential that survived his flight from Austria is a grandly ornate Master Butcher’s certificate. Awarded in 1931, it is printed in a two-tone Gothic German font and hangs framed in my home, although it was never displayed in his.
Béla’s last words were but a partial chronicle. He knew my mother was listening and prudently avoided talk of the vagaries of our family life. That darkening afternoon the memories evoked were touchstones of his identity which had accompanied him into his forced displacement. A naturalised British citizen and patriot, he was ever grateful and loyal to the state that took him in. But he always suffered from the pain of separation from an adored homeland. Uprooted, subsequently he never found work that gave him sufficient dignity, real satisfaction, or a comfortable living. After retiring in 1969, when he visited Eisenstadt for the first time in over three decades, my mother observed that he was exceptionally animated and happy.
Béla was usually reticent about himself but occasionally did discuss his past. Over the years, I learned that in pre-exilic days he was a regular at his local coffee house, meeting friends for talk and card-games. He was a volunteer first-aider in the Eisenstadt Fire Brigade, which he recalled in his last words. Among family papers, I found a testimonial from his fire chief as well as his uniform epaulettes. Béla was a goalie for Eisenstadt in the Hakoah Jewish football league and had held on to his club’s button-hole badge. An autodidact who read widely, he loved jazz and the cinema, was highly au fait with current affairs, and steeped in history and geography. He rode a motorbike: a photo survives of him in leathers, wearing goggles. To hear lectures and participate in discussion he joined a Viennese progressive educational association: membership slips for 1935 and 1936 are amongst his memorabilia. A convinced social democrat, he kept a pistol for self-defence against homegrown fascists. I found a copy of his license. He recounted how he had drawn his weapon to deter a mob from attacking the Jewish quarter on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power in March 1938 that changed everything. He was most truly himself in Eisenstadt.
Adolf Eichmann’s model of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ghettoisation was pioneered in Burgenland. The small Jewish communities of the area were efficiently and rapidly dispossessed and uprooted, forced to relocate to Vienna or to leave the country altogether, if they could. Within a month, the family business was closed by the Nazi state. In spring 1938, Béla was imprisoned. He rarely discussed it and not at all that October afternoon. Once, though, he disclosed that he was regularly beaten up in gaol and forced to run around the courtyard each day.
In August 1938, released from gaol, Béla fled immediately to fascist Italy, which passed its Race Laws that autumn. During this first exile, unmolested by the authorities, he stayed in Milan until May 1939. There are photos of him with other refugees. Béla never spoke in detail about his time there. Once granted official ‘leave to remain’ for six months in the United Kingdom, his French transit visa permitted travel by train from Milan – via Modane – to Calais.
Landing at Folkestone, he was sequestered in Kitchener Camp. Located in Sandwich, Kent, this holding-centre for some four thousand male Jewish refugees was run by British-Jewish bodies under the oversight of the Home Office, the UK’s ministry of the interior. Béla was always positive about his time there. He loved agricultural work and eagerly attended concerts staged by émigré musicians and lectures given by intellectuals. He took his first English lessons at Kitchener Camp.
War with Germany broke out shortly before Béla’s visa expired. He remained at Kitchener Camp until late 1939, when a tribunal concluded that he was a friendly enemy alien. Along with many other Jewish refugees, he volunteered to serve in the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps, an unarmed unit. Early in 1940, his company was shipped to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, where he was stationed until evacuation from Dunkirk at the start of June. Despite its huge significance, he never mentioned this aspect of his military service. Decades after his death, it only came to light when I received his military record.
Béla, who held tightly onto his key official documents, somehow was capable of an awful act of destruction and psychological violence when it came to his own writing. A few years before he died, to my mother’s great hurt he burned all his love-letters to her. She had carefully preserved them, tied in red ribbons. I was there when she discovered their fate. Martha’s furious reproach was met with a sheepish smile and an enigmatic shrug. My parents married in 1941, in wartime Manchester. In contrast to Béla’s conservative small-town upbringing, Martha grew up sophisticatedly in Vienna’s large and diverse Jewish community. My parents were not well-matched. Looking back on the émigré circles they frequented, such misalliances of the displaced were not unusual.
Martha
Martha Bieler arrived in the United Kingdom in spring 1938, admitted under an immigration scheme for Jewish refugee women. This required them to work solely and exclusively as domestic employees. By fateful good fortune, Martha had a long-standing penfriend in the north of England who registered her as eligible for such work. Bernard Sykes, a young journalist, worked at a local newspaper, the Bolton Evening News. Understanding the Nazi threat, he set up a network of penfriends to correspond with Jews in Austria, offering what support they could. Selflessly, Bernard stood financial surety for Martha when she decided to flee her country. She was forever grateful to him for saving her life.
Mr Sykes’s good offices enabled Martha to travel to Bolton in Lancashire, where she became housekeeper to a local surgeon and his family. After a couple of years, finally declared a refugee by a tribunal, she was free to take up employment in war work for a factory manufacturing military uniforms. At home after my brother Ernest was born in 1943, she took in piecework and looked after lodgers. Once both sons were at school, she worked full-time in a succession of increasingly responsible office jobs, retiring shortly before my father died. Highly organised, stylish, and gifted, she kept our family’s show on the road for three decades. finally realising her youthful ambition, in her late fifties, she took up painting, producing accomplished landscapes and portraits, with works exhibited, and sometimes sold.
A decade after my father’s death, Martha moved to London for a new start. She remarried in 1982. Her second husband, Ben Bendoff, was a retired upholsterer who grew up in London’s East End. They took regular holidays abroad, a source of great pleasure for Martha. Given her talent for making friends and offering tasteful hospitality, she created an enjoyable new social life in Streatham, south London, where she did charitable work and helped the elderly. This was a fulfilling period in her life.
After thirteen years, widowed for a second time, Martha found solace in her painting. A few years later, however, her creative work ended abruptly when a fall and broken hip destroyed her long-sustained independence. She recovered neither full mobility nor her confidence. We witnessed a steady, distressing decline in her mental capacity. When she spoke her last words, Martha was in a Jewish care home, suffering from dementia. This time, a little wiser, I wrote a detailed note immediately after our surprising conversation.
Martha was born in Vienna in 1913, one of five siblings that survived beyond infancy. Eldest of three daughters, she was close to her sisters, Bertha and Sofie. She had two older brothers, Emil and Fritz. Martha thought that the loss of three infants had cast a permanent pall over her upbringing. Her father, Joachim Bieler, was a manufacturer; her mother Gittel, ran the household. Martha’s parents were Galicians who hailed from the eastern borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Her maternal grandparents were smallholders. Her parents moved to Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. They were German-speakers also fluent in Polish and Yiddish. According to my mother, the family’s fortunes were always highly volatile, like her father.
I visited Martha on a gloriously sunny day. We admired the garden, then in full bloom, and went for coffee and cake in Nightingale House’s cafeteria. She enjoyed such occasions, responding to the comforting familiarity of the ritual. Although sustained conversation with Martha had ceased, she was almost always glad to be visited.
Often, she forgot what our relationship was, and had also questioned it forcefully. When that first happened, absurdly I pointed to my photo in her album and insisted that proved I was her son. Implacably, she denied it. That bright afternoon, though, she did know who I was. To my astonishment, Martha spoke unhesitatingly for over half an hour, cutting through the desolating fog of her dementia.
Her testament seemed to be a long-delayed unburdening. Béla, she said, did not at first understand how a marriage worked. It took a year for them to become a real couple, as was the case for her parents. She and my father had not really got on. She had not been kind enough to him. Now it was far too late to make good. She had not told him she loved him and thought a lot about this. Although her own mother loved her, she complained, they never had the intimate relationship she had craved. Her father was hardly interested in his children; he didn’t even know their names, she bitterly alleged.
In her teens, Martha attended a famous Viennese progressive school for young women. She often spoke about this. Located in the heart of the city, the Schwartzwald School, she restated, taught her all she knew. There she had learned English and some French. She admired her strong and intellectual women teachers. Once, she painted a snowdrop which was highly praised by her art teacher. Indeed, her school reports, which she kept, record her aptitude for art and handicrafts. Martha recalled with asperity that once, when she went to her father’s study, he had signed her report without reading it. He boasted about her educational success, yet she felt humiliated when he failed to pay school fees on time. She recalled entering Vienna University to study medicine but said she was never suited to the profession, fainting during her first dissection. The fragmentary records she retained show that she entered the University in 1932 but left the following year. Medicine was not her choice. She wanted to go to art school, but her father thought this was unsuitable for a young lady and would not pay the fees. Following her unsuccessful year at the University, her father enrolled her on a secretarial course and insisted that she work in his office. Next came the wrench of forced emigration and many years of unrealised creative potential.
Like Béla, Martha’s last words often reverted to formative moments in her early life. Her schooling was the high point, whereas her parents were a disappointment. She was profoundly sad about her unfulfilling long marriage to Béla. Exhausted by the effort, that day she could say no more and tailed off into sleep. A few months later, aged 95, she died.
In candid moments, before vascular dementia struck, Martha had told me that she did not love my father, although she appreciated his steadfast character and honesty. Sometimes, as a child of whatever age, you unwillingly hear what you already knew about your parents but have chosen not to acknowledge. More than once, Martha revealed that in her mid-twenties her true love was for a man named Hans Schwartz. Part of her Viennese social circle, he too fled to England. One day, early in the war, he travelled from London to tell Martha that his life expectancy was short. Although he loved her, he said they should not marry as she would soon be widowed. She was heartbroken. The wound Hans inflicted never quite healed. I am sure that Béla knew this. Is that why, late in life, he destroyed his own love-letters?
Philip Schlesinger
