Mother Country: New book tells remarkable story of Holocaust survivor

In new book Mother Country, Monique Charlesworth tells the extraordinary story of her mother Inge, who kept many secrets from her past, including her Jewish German roots, surviving the holocaust and her complicated personal life

But what’s an adverb for?’ said my exasperated 92-year-old mother, calling from Tours, France where she lived for decades. A pupil had asked during her English conversation class and she had worried herself into a grammar emergency. I heard the despair. Though Inge spoke three languages, she didn’t possess grammar in any of them. She was German, half Jewish and a Holocaust survivor – all of which she chose to deny. How fortunate that the French friends who adored this charmingly eccentric ‘English lady’ couldn’t hear her German accent any more than I could.

Inge’s Jewish father had been an active Communist, subject to constant persecution. Since he was an atheist, she knew nothing of Judaism or indeed any faith. Inge blamed him for all their trouble, memorably asking her Lutheran mother ‘why did you marry the Jew?’ In 1939 when Inge was 13, they were expelled from Nazi Germany. She lost her language, home, and security. Her father would perish in Auschwitz. Inge and her mother survived underground in Brussels. Stateless, an illegal alien, she could not go to school so worked in a factory to support them. By the end of the war the resourceful teenager was fluent in French, could type and had secured an office job.

At the liberation of Brussels, she met Tom Charlesworth, an English soldier 15 years older. Marriage gave her a British passport but didn’t last; he left her for another woman. Inge had landed in Birkenhead, where she rapidly learnt English, had us, her two daughters, and divorced. By now an expert in denial and self-invention, she moved us to London and started again. She would have kept her past hidden forever, had my sister not wormed the truth out of her. I was 12 and the revelation changed my life, indeed all our lives. Inge never forgave my sister for being so clever; she could not bear to be found out.

My mother was a woman of energy and intelligence, charismatic and passionate with a gift for languages. Aged 40 she fell in love with a Frenchman, René, who was regrettably both married and a Catholic. A long and secret affair ensued. When she was 60, René’s wife died. Instantly they married. This seemed a little hasty – what on earth did his family think? But Inge didn’t encourage speculation. ‘C’est l’homme de ma vie’ she liked to say – ‘he is the man of my life’ – an epithet I never took literally. Her final decades as an Englishwoman in France were happy ones.

But deceptions have consequences. The profound disconnect between who she really was and who she wanted to be never went away. Dodging conversational potholes made her a gadfly, an infuriating changer of subject. She avoided English people, who would immediately ask where she was from. I too was a threat. Perhaps perversely, I’d chosen the reverse trajectory to hers: studying languages, living in Germany and, like her mother, marrying a Jew. ‘As far as I am concerned you are entering the gas chamber of your own free will,’ she said flatly. For once I defied her. Our wedding was the first time she set foot in a synagogue. Though she grew to love my husband, our visits to Tours unnerved her. I would listen to her jumping through elaborate hoops, explaining to friends that she, personally, had no Jewish blood whatsoever.I wasn’t to talk about the past, or indeed the present. I was never to correct her English, which acquired eccentricities of its own. We got on each other’s nerves terribly – this too was never mentioned. Beyond the obvious causes, our mutual irritation had a deeper cause I couldn’t fathom. I never stopped probing into her background. There was always unfinished business.

I had no idea how firmly in her thrall I remained, until aged 92 she collapsed and died. Eternally in charge, Inge had left instructions for her funeral: no prayers. No flowers because ‘flowers are for the living, darling, not the dead.’ The cheapest possible funeral ‘because nobody will come’. No announcement, because in France a woman is always known by her maiden name. Inge had suffered greatly from this official égalité. She would never travel with friends for fear of them seeing her identity card. Often ill, she could not risk giving her ID to a neighbour to collect a parcel in case they noticed the German, Jewish name.

At the funeral parlour, I learned that an official brass plaque with her maiden name would be affixed to the coffin and inspected before it was sealed. During the ceremony, attendees would approach for the ‘gesture of homage’. What if her friends saw the plaque? And so her problem became mine. The subsequent manoeuvres veered from comedy to tragedy. Taken to register her death by a close friend, I heard myself inventing all sorts of reasons why Inge had been born in Germany, which didn’t include her being German. Defying her ban on flowers, I ordered a vast arrangement covering the entire coffin to hide the plaque. A very Inge-like moment ensued when my daughter impulsively presented armfuls of tulips to ‘the living’. The gathering was moved and so was I, leaping to cover the plaque. Her secret remained concealed to the end.

Author Monique Charlesworth with her younger sister, Lorie, pictured in 1953

That evening, my sister and I – estranged for decades – instantly bonded. We rapidly discovered that Inge had told us lies about each other. Why? Divide and conquer was the only explanation; she must have feared that together we would somehow usurp control.

It rapidly emerged that Inge had concealed many things. She had in fact been 13 when she fell in love with our French stepfather. Their affair was lifelong – she had cheated on our father. I’d never really got to know him because he was blamed for the divorce; Inge cast herself as the quasi-virginal wronged bride. Our stepfather’s family remarked with French insouciance that we were his children – ‘everybody knew that’. Might that explain why a girl from Birkenhead had a French name she’d never much liked? Inge had kept me at arm’s length from René. I’d been denied a relationship with both my putative fathers. Still grieving, I was consumed by a bizarre mixture of upset and rage. How could I have been so blind? How could she have deceived me, her lifelong accomplice?

I threw myself into researching the past of this complex, troubled woman. Poring over photographs and papers I constructed a timeline of her life and that of René, logging innumerable meetings, ferreting out facts. In the German archives I would meet the man who had fathered this woman of secrets and lies. Gestapo files on my Communist grandfather ran to an astonishing 560 pages. A veteran of innumerable courts, internment camps and prisons, he was wholly political, a streetfighter, a leader of men. Like the daughter who blamed him for her woes, he was a master of deception, dogged and obstinate in his resistance. I began to understand who she was, and why. DNA testing would eventually solve the mystery of who my father was. And with knowledge came peace.

I think back to those long afternoons in Tours when we drove each other crazy, me endlessly asking questions – Inge repeating her stories, word for word. My mother’s face wore a particular expression I could never fathom. But now I get it: ‘You think you’re so clever – but you’ll never catch me’. Inge had married her lifelong lover and fooled all the people around her to the very end. Despite the damage, the deceptions and sadness, in her terms, her life was a triumph.

Mother Country: a story of love and lies by Monique Charlesworth is published in paperback by Moth Books on 8 February, £10.99