Vivien Sieber - How War Changed the Trajectory of Her Grandmother's Life

Our conversation delves into the remarkable life of Vivien Sieber's Czech-born grandmother, who faced adversity and triumphs during World War II. From owning a cinema in Vienna to finding refuge in England and caring for girls who fled their families as part of the Kinder Transport, Vivien uncovers the intricacies of her family's history and shares the lessons she learned along the way.

About Vivien:
Dr. Vivien Sieber worked in biosciences research, education development, learning technology and information literacy at a range of UK universities. She lives in Oxford with her husband and dogs. Since retiring she is learning to make pots and has written Kino and Kinder.

Connect with Vivien:
Facebook: Kino and Kinder
Instagram: siebervivien
LinkedIn: Vivien Sieber

Are we connected on Instagram or Facebook yet? Find me @msheathermurphy

Transcript

How War Changed the Trajectory of Her Grandmother's Life | Vivien Sieber

Stories in Our Roots, ep. 74

Heather Murphy: Hi, Vivien. Thanks for joining me today.

Vivian Sieber: It's lovely to be here. Thank you.

Heather Murphy: Well, could you start by telling us how you became interested in learning more about your family's stories?

Vivian Sieber: Well, I'd always known that my father and grandmother were refugees from Vienna, and that they'd been virtually penniless when they arrived, and that my father was just 17, and my grandmother had gone on to be the matron in a hostel for girls saved by the Kindertransport, first in Tynemouth, which is just outside Newcastle, and then it was moved with only three weeks notice to Windermere in the middle of the Lake District when heavy bombing started.

So I'd always known about the kinder, and when I was a child my grandmother would read out cards or show us photographs and things that they'd sent. And then I had a career as a scientist and persuading people to use learning technology in their teaching. And then I suddenly got made redundant about 10 years ago, which was wonderful, it turned out.

So I had time on my hands. And I, what I inherited from my dad, he died in 2000, was some unpublished manuscripts, a really old attache case with It smelt of must and old letters and it was correspondence mostly between him and my grandmother. Fortunately, it was in English and fortunately, he typed. There was boxes of family photographs and what my dad had done was he simply labeled it Herman, Peter's father. Paula, Peter's mother. And then there were loads of people I didn't know at all. I got that. And then he, before he died, he'd written a report because he wanted to say thank you to the people who ran the hostel, who set it up and funded it. And so he contacted a lot of the kinder, who of course were now relatively old ladies.

And I got these really moving letters from them, describing what it was like leaving their families as young children, adjusting to life in a foreign country, they didn't speak English. And what he'd asked them is what they'd done as they got older, you know, what their lives had been like, their careers, their families.

And so I have that, they also have their contact details. So I wrote or emailed so many of them. I mean, sadly, there are far fewer now than there were, but they were really generous and wrote back and invited me around or spoke to me on the phone or email. They're spread across the world. 

And then we went to Vienna just for a trip. And I very cheekily, I always knew where my grandmother lived, because it's a very, very posh flat. And so I had the address, and I emailed all the residents in these apartments. And we had one invitation to tea, or actually it was coffee, and strudel. And it turned out that our generous hosts it was actually my grandmother's flat. Which is an amazing coincidence. And our host was sort of intrigued by the story, and had already been to the archive. And it was quite clear, his wife said, you don't know what she knows, this is very, could be very upsetting. And so they just waited for me to say something.

So I said, cinema. And they went, yes, produced all these papers from carrier bag about the cinema. And so I had all that. And I just started putting it all together on a timeline, that was a way of sorting it out as the book follows the chronology of history. I did a family tree as well, because I actually had no idea how many great aunts and uncles I had at that stage.

I have to say that the Vienna archives have been phenomenally generous and sent great parcels of papers. And never charged for it was a huge amount of work. And of course, then we had a lockdown so I had lots of time, and it was, good thing to do.

Heather Murphy: So, when you inherited this collection of things from your father, you didn't know much about your family at that point in time? 

Vivian Sieber: I knew some things, you know, like I knew that grandmother had had a cinema in Vienna, you know, and that they'd had to leave, they'd left in 1938. she had a, a very early marriage. That was a disaster. I knew she was born in Bruno, she was Czech, and that they were drapers. What I never knew, and we still don't know, is how she persuaded her family, that what you need if you're drapers in Bruno, is to buy cinema in Vienna.

You know, so I knew that she'd run it with her sister, Zelma. I knew that she then remarried and Herman was my grandfather. But very tragically, he died in a road traffic accident when my dad was five. So I knew that sort of thing. I knew that very few people had survived the Holocaust. I knew that my grandmother was really bitter about Not getting what she thought was a fair price for the cinema. and of course I knew about the kinder, because they kept writing and, going to tea with her and we'd get told about it. But there were these really big gaps of what we weren't told. 

Heather Murphy: And how did your understanding of your grandmother, of who she was, change as you research this more and more?

Vivian Sieber: That's a really interesting question, because obviously, I was in my mid twenties when my grandmother died, she was about ninety. And she was frail. I've had letters from friends, very few people met that I know now met my grandmother, but one or two really old friends, one wrote, said, well, I, you know, when I was introduced to your grandmother, I was told that she was a very determined lady who could be a bit odd.

Now I can completely see now why you might say, well, my grandmother was very determined. Because she lived through a very difficult life and that she might be a bit odd. Well, she was in her 80s by then anyway.

Heather Murphy: Well, and it sounds like she was very determined even before the hard things in her life. I mean, to run a cinema with her sister as women in those early decades of the 1900s, she had to be determined in order to make that successful.

Vivian Sieber: Absolutely. And I mean, the story about her marriage, her first marriage was that she was very beautiful, very tiny, very beautiful, huge personality. And that she married the first man, basically, who asked her to go to, who would take her from Brno province. Vienna, capital, and he was much older than her, and very disloyal, and so she, she discovered that he was unfaithful, and basically just snatched the baby and got on the train and went back to her parents. No discussion, and then she divorced him. And, and the things that have come from the archives, I think like the divorce paper was 1914.

She clearly was very determined. She's very much the public face of the cinema. There are these amazing photographs of her in evening dress and ball gowns and sequins and things. She apparently opened one of the, you know, some of the Vienna balls. I think when she was young, she was very flamboyant.

Heather Murphy: What was it like for you to learn those things about her? I mean, you said she was in her 90s when you were in her 20s. How was that to see a completely different side of her that you hadn't ever before?

Vivian Sieber: I know when I was a sort of curious teenager, because I was a scientist, I used to tend to ask questions about how things worked, what happened rather than any sort of how she felt. and I remember asking sort of questions. She ended up telling me all about going to a private nightclub, for dinner party with just another couple.

They obviously just had, she. Until my grandfather died, they obviously had this gorgeous life. So she would talk about that, but she never talked about my grandfather's family at all. And she, I mean, it's only through research that I realized that I had a great aunt who died just after I was born. by the time she was very old, very, very scared of authority. So she would, you know, we could never persuade her that actually English policemen aren't going to beat you up and arrest you. Can ask them the time quite safely. So that's a change.

And there was this sort of contradiction in her personality because she would always say, Oh, you must be humble. You mustn't stick out, which is actually in my case quite difficult because I'm nearly six foot. and yet she was actually really quite flamboyant underneath, and just occasionally it showed.

Heather Murphy: So it sounds like her life experiences taught her that it was safe to behave one way. And so in her later years you can see the effects of different events, even if that's not what she believed when she was younger.

Vivian Sieber: I think that's startlingly true, but I didn't realise that till I started doing the book, really.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, and I think that's one of the blessings of researching our ancestors and learning them, especially those ancestors that we knew when they were elderly, that we don't understand the complexity of their lives before, and when we do that research to understand everything that went into creating who they were by the time we got to know them, that it can be really eye opening to understand our family members differently.

Vivian Sieber: Yes. I mean, she always tried to be English. she spoke remarkably unaccented English. And she'd learnt English incredibly quick, she spoke no English when she came, and yet within six months she's actually writing very good English letters to my dad. When she first arrived in London, her two sons would, she'd go off to the public library, she needed, you know, there was no space, with a German dictionary she'd given my dad when he was at school, and learn 20 words a day, and her sons would check her every night. She certainly had a very strong work ethic, which she had as long as I knew her.

Heather Murphy: Were you able to learn anything more about her through these interviews with the kinder? 

Vivian Sieber: Yes, well that was, that was the sort of rather wonderful thing because I got this folder and, first of all Elphie invited us to Birmingham to meet her and she talked for two hours, gave us lunch and She showed such kindness and understanding and intelligence. I mean, she was a teenager when she was in the hostel.

And she sort of said, well, the matrons they came from. was running a cinema and the other one was a chef, was a cook. She said they ran businesses, they weren't used to children. And they had boy children. And she said they had no idea how unpleasant teenage girls can be. So there were lots of really interesting insights. And, and that's true of others of the kinder that I've been in touch with. I speak to Inga really regularly. She's now 90 and lives in Wimbledon. and she was only five and a half when she came. In fact, the B B B C Newcastle have done several podcasts now about the the timeout hostel, and they've just done one where they've interviewed Inga extensively. And I mean, it's fairly heart rending because she shows you this photograph of her mum, her older sister, because these are the children of the famous Liverpool Street Station photograph. But there's another one. She had a baby sister who was too small to go on the Kindertransport. So she, she and the mum didn't survive. One thing is the kinder are pretty matter of fact about it.

Heather Murphy: Oh, really?

Vivian Sieber: Inga says, well, I got on and I had a life, you know, I had to, they had to make lives for themselves, didn't they, so you had no family. Ing and her sister got moved from the timeout hostel to Manchester Hostel in 1946. Seven. When, when that one closed, , then they went to Israel and Inga came back.

Heather Murphy: Okay. So these girls that were in the hostel, did they ever get back with their families? What generally happened to these girls after the hostel closed?

Vivian Sieber: one girl's father was already in England because he was in the, in the Army and. It's so long after the war. It's like nearly two years. Mom actually has survived a concentration camp and was sent to Sweden to recuperate because we didn't, they didn't have the medicine we have now, that there's no, induced comas and artificial feeding.

And it was like another nine months before she was fit to travel. By then the hostel closed and the girl was with her dad in, Glasgow, I think, Scotland anyway, when mum comes. Of course mum doesn't recognize her, mum's expecting a six year old. Not a young woman. few others actually had very close family left. Well, some had brothers who then had to take on the role of parents as well, almost. But what is shocking, well, what's surprising to us is the speed that these children are just ejected into the world. So one, Dasha, now she's in Australia now. She was the only Czech girl. All the others were German or Austrian. So she arrived and didn't speak German or English. It must have had a completely terrible time. But she was moved from the Windermere hostel to a hostel in Wales, which was for Czech people. But by then she'd forgotten her Czech.

 And so by the time she was 14, she's living independently in London, being given an allowance. Which we, you know, today we'd find strange.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, certainly. So, your book, it both describes the life of your grandmother and your father, but then also these girls within the hostel as well. 

Vivian Sieber: Yes, I mean basically it starts in about 1880 in Brno, so you've got the shop and the drapers and things. And then grandmother's marriage, and then it's just chronological. 

So there are descriptions of what it was like to be a teenager in Vienna in the early 30s. So you've got the beginning of anti Semitism coming in there. Some of the girls at the kinder from the hostel describe anti Semitism in their childhoods. You know, Elfie talked about how it changed at school and things.

 Grandmother sent people, well, they actually watched, because of where the flat is, they overlooked the Ringstrasse, which is the very famous street that circles with the Grand Palais and things. And they were like in the high, you know, third floor, hidden behind the window, so they actually saw Hitler's triumphal march into Vienna. at that point, grandmother realized she needed to send her son to safety. all the problems they had getting exit visas, equipping him, she tried really hard to persuade her family to leave as well, but failed. Actually, it's much harder for her to get out because the cinema has already been taken by the Nazis. They're being paid less than they need to pay the staff by the Nazis. it was her only asset really. And obviously she needed to leave money for her sister to live off. Her sister had just been widowed and, you know, was in bits and didn't want, couldn't think about leaving. So that was all really, really hard.

see. ended up having to ask a former lover for some money, which must have been really difficult for someone so independent. So I've got pictures of lovers and friends. So I include bits of their stories. And then there's when she gets to London and finds that her first son had moved to London in the early 30s.

He married and moved to London and was working for an Austrian engineering company. But of course, as soon as Hitler takes over the Austrian engineering company, they don't need a sales rep in England. They're making war stuff. So, but he didn't like to worry his mum. So he, you know, he said, Oh, we live in Streatham. It's, it's lovely, you know, the streets are paved with gold. and she gets there to find that actually it's a very hand to mouth existence in a flat that's quite small. It's really full with it, with Peter in it. And so she gets the job in, in Tynemouth.

So I've got a bit about the committee that set up the type, the hostels. I knew some of them very well, because my father went to live with them, with one couple the Freedmans, theoretically, until he found somewhere else, but in fact he never really moved out. So we used to go and stay for Christmas when I was little. 

Heather Murphy: So he wasn't able to stay with his mother. He had a completely separate upbringing from the time that she got him out?

Vivian Sieber: Well, he was 17 and so actually he got a place for refugees at Newcastle University. They had 10 places for refugees with different entry requirements depending on the interview. And what Peter had to do was pass him a trick in English in, sort of, nine months. He got his place. And he went and stayed with the Freedmans, theoretically defined, so he wasn't that far from his mother.

Heather Murphy: Okay.

Vivian Sieber: they were always very close.

Heather Murphy: and then from what I understand your book also goes and explains life after the hostel as well. which I think is important. A lot of times as I've Um, I've interviewed people about family members that have gone through things like the Holocaust or other traumatic life events. Sometimes, they get defined by that traumatic event, and as family members, we forget there was a before and there's an after.

How has it been for you to see your grandmother as a whole from that beginning to the end, rather than just defining her by this period of her life?

Vivian Sieber: there's two things I, did. I asked the question, and here I had enormous help from Helen and Heinz Rupertsberger in , Vienna. it was a question I thought was easy, was how can I find out what happened to the cinema after the war? And... Nothing happens. But then two weeks later, I got an email from Heinz saying, Oh, well, Helen has photographed 120 documents and they're in Dropbox for you.

And here is the timeline of events. Now, we didn't find out everything, but we found out an awful lot. So the one thing about the Nazis is they were actually very careful and kept a lot of paperwork. So you've got documents, how quickly they confiscated the cinema, stole the cinema and what happened after the war as well.

This was something I'd always known, that Grandmother was really quite bitter about what she'd got for the cinema. Straight after the war she was, she couldn't travel because she had lost her Austrian nationality but hadn't got British nationality. My dad by then was in the Navy in Naval Intelligence. So he actually, the Navy was very generous and let him go to, gave him an assignment in Vienna. So he discovered that most of the family had been killed, murdered. And That the cinema was really run down, but he found someone to manage it. There's correspondence there where it's quite clear that one thing grandmother always had was a very sweet tooth. you probably don't realize it rationing in England sugar was rations till the early 50s, and people were clearly sending her sweets and things from Vienna that she definitely appreciated.

 She went back to Vienna a few times and spent a year there trying to get her, trying to sort out the cinema. Eventually it was sold and basically a nephew had escaped to Palestine, spent the war in Palestine, and then came back and put a counterclaim in for the cinema. Now, I can't see how in any way he was justified in that, but... He seems, we, we can't, the final court papers are lost, which is really irritating. We found the papers that say, we can't decide this in this court, we need to go to the next court. But we can't find the next court papers. But the next thing we find is a contract, where the cinema is being sold. but the nephew's got his name on this new contract. what we think happened, is that it's sold, and grandmother is given something, but she always thought she should have, her sister was dead, she always thought she should have, 50 or 100 percent. But then there's an intriguing note from grandmother about great grandmother changing her will, having a deathbed change of will but we haven't worked that one, we haven't worked that one out. But it

Heather Murphy: It's amazing the amount of information that is out there to find about your families and maybe not every story, like you said, you don't know everything, but you know a lot more because you reached out to several different places to learn more about your family. Okay. Mm hmm.

Vivian Sieber: I had so much help. People have been really generous. we actually went to places as well. So the Windermere Hostel, I wrote to Windermere Public Library and explained and then, you know, two weeks later, I got a message saying, Mrs. Karras would be very pleased to meet you. And so we met Mrs. Karras. Now, her late husband had rented the house to the, to the committee.

she explained that he was a widower by the time she met him. And she was a very young bride and he was an old man, which explains how you can have such a long gap. and one thing that's been lovely is of course, she then arranged for us to go and see the house.

Which is, it's a private home, they, they value their privacy. she's known a lot of the stories of the girls. she met Inga, and she actually, she met Elfie, but Elfie sadly died of COVID. But she knows their stories and she's told them stories that they can't remember, if that makes sense.

Or they've told her stories that, of her, of her late husband, who was in the RAF. There's this amazing tree outside the hostel, there's a great big cedar, and they told her about her husband as a very young man, just shimmying to the top of the tree. So it's a lovely circle that's got closed in some ways,

Heather Murphy: Yes. Like everybody is giving and receiving. So what is your hope for putting this book out into the world that people will benefit from and what way is that benefit for you?

Vivian Sieber: story that should be told, because I should bring it right up to 2020. and how I got Austrian nationality, because they've offered a nationality to victims of National Socialism coming down through families. And so I bring it right up to Brexit, which, for me, was utterly terrible and, you know, wanting European passport to be European again.

and this is the experience of meeting my grandmother's niece in Brno. She survived Theresienstadt and made it back to Brno after the war. And I got a bus from Vienna once when the Berlin Wall came down, it was easy. I went met her and I found this tiny, she was very like grandmother, but she wasn't beautiful.

You would put them next to each other. You've got. The beautiful one and the ordinary one, but she's far from ordinary. she just spoke completely matter of factly about being in a camp. I'd known about Fritzi throughout my childhood because she, you know, she used to write and grandmother would send her, you couldn't send money, but you could send vouchers.

And she'd write these thank you letters of the 500 things she'd bought with the voucher that would buy you not much in England. so that, to explain that I've got to explain what happened under the communists a bit. Otherwise it just doesn't make sense. But I think to answer your question is, I think we have to be very aware of how dangerous and how quickly National Socialism happened. We need to be alert that it doesn't happen again.

Heather Murphy: it sounds like an awareness of history helps us to be more cognizant of what is going on now and learning from the instances in the past that created not so great outcomes. But then also that familial part of it the stories about your father and grandmother and all these women that were children and taken away from their families.

There's so many people out there to that have family members that were in similar situations that they can learn more about their family by learning about your family and the lives that your family touched as well.

Vivian Sieber: yes. I think one thing that should be said is how positive the outcome was for most of the kinder. 

Most went off. only funded for them to stay at school until they were 14, that was school living age. many of them later went on, some straight away, but others slightly later, went and did degrees.

two were teachers. You know, they worked in the caring professions. One went off to be a nurse, and most of them have had really fulfilled lives. Most of them got families, with children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. And they, spread across the world, but they did stay in touch very much.

So, although it was Alfie who gave my dad the contact, who generally gave my dad the contact details, but they did have a reunion in London at the end of the eighties.

So there's a photograph of, you know, these really stout continental old ladies, mostly, but they were very intuitive of one another's needs as children. they understood, and I think anyone would understand why you might hide your letters from your parents under the pillow, why they might be so important when you've got nothing. But I think they're still pretty sensitive to each other's needs. Though, I mean, there aren't, there really aren't very many left now.

Heather Murphy: so what is the title of your book and where can people find it?

Vivian Sieber: Well, it's called Kino and Kinder, A Family's Journey in the Shadow of the Holocaust. And you can find it on Amazon or any good bookseller. 

Heather Murphy: All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing your family's stories and the path that you took to learn about them.

Vivian Sieber: Well, thank