In July 1935, a month before the notorious Nuremberg Laws prohibiting marriage between Jews and non-Jews came into effect, the official Nazi SS newspaper reported the "scandalous" June wedding in Berlin of Klara Noack, a Protestant, to Hans Behrendt, a Jewish engineer.
Hans was appointed as headmaster of a Berlin technical school after his iron foundry was seized by the Nazis. He spent over a year desperately trying to find a safe haven oversees for the school, turning down all offers for his own safety. Hans, Klara and their baby daughter eventually fled to England three days before war broke out, bringing with them over 100 of Hans's pupils.
When he and the boys were taken to a refugee camp in Kent for three months, Klara and their baby were sent to Leeds, from where she wrote to him daily. After they were reunited she began to write a wartime diary.
Hans's mother, who, with a daughter, had remained in Berlin to tend to her dying husband, managed to get letters out via another daughter in Copenhagen until that channel was closed. Reading between the lines of these heavily censored letters and later the 25-word Red Cross messages, a grim picture emerges of her suffering as a Jewish widow in wartime Germany. Also documented is the amazing courage and support shown by Klara's family in Berlin.
The author, who is Hans and Klara's younger daughter, has, with input from her sister, Rosemarie Palliser, translated and ordered the documents and letters left to her by her parents. Through meticulous research she has placed in context the story of her parents' childhoods, their lives together during the 1930s in Nazi Germany and as refugees during the war in England, as well as the ultimately futile struggle for survival in wartime Berlin of her lost grandmother.