For years, every Sunday, Ralph Schwab would get dressed in a good suit, put on a bow tie and sit down at a small typewriter in his Joburg home to write.
His family knew precious little about what Ralph (born Rudolph), a German Jewish immigrant who left Nazi Germany in the 1930s, wrote – until 2009, more than 30 years after his death, when Ralph’s grandson Daniel opened a box of letters he found in his parents’ garage.
Daniel says he had seen the box before. Aged 16, he had opened it, but not knowing that his family’s history lay in those 4 000 fragile pages, he closed it again.
Ralph, a builder, entomologist and businessman, was an organised man, so the letters were neatly packaged, wrapped in a thin sheet of paper and bound with a piece of string. Written on thin carbon paper, the ink had started to fade and the paper to crumble. The contents, in German, French and English, detailed the Holocaust through the eyes and words of one man and his family.
“I had never met my grandfather, and my father knew very little about his background. It was as if there was this big black hole I had grown up with in my memory, and discovering the letters provided tremendous detail of where I came from,” Daniel says.
Among the letters are those which Ralph’s parents, Max and Martha, wrote when he first left Hanau, near Frankfurt in 1933. A Jewish youth leader at the time, he had been warned by a friend, Karl Kipfer, that he faced arrest. Ralph travelled for a while before boarding the Union Castle ship Balmoral Castle for SA in 1936, aged 25.
In one, his mother frets about her son, telling him: “Try to live in a good house.” She worries about his clothes and his laundry, his hair and his skin. “The first impression is the best one,” she says.
In other letters, his father Max, a decorated World War I veteran, tries to come to terms with the situation in his home country. Other letters detail the family’s attempts to leave Germany.
Among the letters is one from the SA government rejecting their application to immigrate.
A Red Cross telegram from February 1942 informs Ralph in shorthand that his father has died in a Nazi camp. He had been arrested for buying wine from a non-Jew.
Daniel says one of the most moving letters was from Ralph’s younger brother, Hans, then 17 years old. He is trying to decide what to study, before heading to SA to join his brother. He writes that he’s narrowed it down to locksmith, carpenter, electrician or a specialist mechanic.
In May 1942, Martha and Hans were put on a train heading “east” – the euphemism for the Nazi camps. They were sent to Auschwitz, where they were later declared dead. It is not known how they died, or when. Hans was only 18.
Letters written after the war allow Ralph to piece together what happened to his family.
In a letter to Ralph in 1948, a neighbour describes how, 10 years earlier on Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), he found Martha and Hans cowering in an outhouse after they were attacked and their home was vandalised.
“In your parents’ bedroom everything had been opened up and demolished, even the feathers from the bed covers were blowing around the room in the wind. In the bathroom even the water pipes were broken, and the water was flowing out.”
Ralph was meticulous in his correspondence, keeping copies of everything he wrote, so the letters, now termed the Forgotten Letters, present a view of the Holocaust and one man’s escape from it.
The letters are now housed at the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, preserved in an underground facility.
Copies have been made and the most significant letters have been translated, with funding from the Kaplan Centre at UCT. They also form the basis of research being conducted by Dr Shirli Gilbert of the University of Southampton.
“I’m the third generation. This happened more than 65 years ago. Six million people died and in the future, my kids’ generation could ask: ‘Did this even happen?’
“These letters were written with my grandfather’s not knowing they would be discovered. My hope is that children will be able to learn about this through a personal story. It’s not about 6 million people, it’s about one family and how it was destroyed,” Daniel says.
Richard Freedman, director of the SA Holocaust and Genocide Centre, says the letters present a complete view of the life of someone living in exile. The fact that there is an SA connection is also important.
“They detail everything, from the time he left to the time he spent trying to find his family after the war.
“They detail the life of a man living in South Africa, and his travels back to Germany as he searches for his parents. The whole story is there,” he says.
Weekend Argus