She was not a blood relative but what in German is called a “Wahlverwandte” a relative by choice.

Kaethe had helped to bring up my mother Margot and was pleased to invite Margot’s little son – me – to visit her in Berlin.

Her husband had died early, but had left her well-provided for. Or so he must have thought. But then came the great German inflation. Overnight her annual pension became almost worthless. Soon this pension could have bought her a mere packet of cigarettes. But inflation was worsening from day to day.  The week following it could not even have bought her a box of matches to light last week’s cigarettes.

 Government ministers fell over themselves to rush out emergency decrees. Rent for apartments was frozen. Then came laws to ensure she could not be thrown out of her apartment. It was a large apartment in the elegant West End of Berlin. She took in lodgers, first only for bed-and-breakfast. Later she came to provide full board. She soon came to specialise on Japanese students. They were, she told me, ideal lodgers – never noisy…. always polite. There were numbers of them studying at Berlin university. She learnt to cook some Japanese dishes while they came to enjoy dishes from Provinz Posen – the region she had come from.

 Like my mother’s parents they had all left the Posen (Poznan) region when the state of Poland was recreated in 1920.

 These people were Jews.  They felt German and opted for Germany-proper…. or what they imagined to be inalienably German. Stalin, however, had other ideas and he saw to it that Silesia, or most of it, came to be annexed to Poland.

 Kaethe took me to a puppet theatre. I loved it. For weeks after I got back to my hometown, Breslau, I regaled my friends by re-enacting the fight between Kasper and his villainous enemies. I tried to clobber them with a big stick such as Kasper had wielded. Very unreasonably they would hit back.

I learnt to bow politely in the Far Eastern manner. I still do so occasionally, all these many years later.

She took me up the tall Radio Tower, which had splendid views over all of Berlin.

I loved Berlin. I loved Aunt Kaethe. I mourn her.

She was murdered at Auschwitz.

 

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