Dolly’s Story
Dolly’s Story by June Morrall
(Photo: My Aunt Dolly owned a clothing boutique in Berlin and loved pretty clothes. Mischa, her dentist-husband sits beside her.)
(This story is based on letters that were translated by third cousin Harriet Isslemann for me…I am still in the process of editing and there are missing details. There are disconnects and there may be errors, to be corrected later, of course–and the missing info to be added…]
In December 1938 Dolly was still typing her letters. She was still a complete human being. The photos I have seen of her show a woman concerned about her appearance–after all that was her business, selling clothing to fashionable women.
Dolly, 33, and her 44-year-old husband, Mischa, remained in Berlin after Dolly’s parents and siblings (including my father and younger sister) sailed for Shanghai. By then, they, too, wanted to get out of Berlin but the noose was growing tighter and where to go, where to go….occupied their minds.
The Nazis forced Dolly to sell her clothing store in Berlin where my mother worked.
Dolly and Mischa began looking frantically for a place to go. Now they wanted out of Europe altogether but the times had changed so much that that had become near to impossible. You needed contacts, influence. Berlin had turned into a frightening place in the late 1930s, bone-chilling frightening.
Dolly had an influential friend, Selma, that she hoped could help them. Selma, her husband Arno and young son Rudy had seen the signs and gotten out of Berlin several years earlier, via Palestine, but eventually settled comfortably near New York City.
Their friendship had grown because both women owned businesses—a clothing boutique and a furniture store. In Berlin a solid bond grew between them, with each being able to count on the other for anything.
Selma’s last letter had sounded so sentimental but was it, really? To Dolly it seemed that whatever she asked, her friend didn’t respond the way she thought she should. Her friend was not ready to bend over backward to help her dear friends Dolly and Mischa get out of Germany.
Perhaps no one took Selma seriously when she revealed her plan for leaving Berlin. Did she get the support she thought she deserved? After all Dolly [and Martin and Edith and Sammy and Luise] thought she could ride the bad times out, until all of them woke up to the folly. Selma had been right; they had been wrong.
Before Dolly’s parents sailed for Shanghai she had begun to reach out to Selma.
Dolly wrote:
“…we are in such a bad position, especially because of our passports, that we simply have to forget all scruples and look for help wherever we could hope to find it. You know how difficult it was to get a visa with passports as ours even in earlier days and still it was child’s play compared to today as almost every country in the world is closed for us. So we go from here to there despairing 20 times a day.”
A way out had come up, probably fraudulent, but Dolly was so desperate that she went for it.
She wrote Selma, “Now I got this opportunity about Montevideo [So. America]…”
Mischa and Dolly thought they could travel to South America, stay there for while, and then try to get into the United States.
“I wrote to you about it,” continued Dolly, still sounding healthy and strong. “Surely you know from other sources as well that one cannot wait much longer over here, it is passed ‘neele’ [the last prayer at the end of the service at Yom Kippur]. We would go wherever we could. Under these circumstances Uruguay would be for us great luck.”
Dolly asked for $1600.
To speed up the answer from Selma, Dolly included money for a return reply by wire but the answers from New York were slow in coming, or not coming at all…as Dolly and Mischa began to do nothing but wait for them.
Dolly wrote again, “So why didn’t you reply? You cannot imagine the tensions waiting for it. We counted the hours a reply would take and if you would have written that you weren’t able to do what I asked, I wouldn’t have held it against you–as I know how much $1600 means (even we’re not used to counting in dollars} but no reply at all?”
She was desperately trying to convey to Selma that things had become horrifying in Berlin, life-threatening. Dolly and Mischa’s lives were in danger.
Still no reply from Selma and Dolly wrote, “As far as I know, by now, Uruguay is out of reach. They don’t provide visas anymore. Even Shanghai has become impossible.” She admitted that they should have booked the voyage to China much earlier. Now they were shut out.
“…I couldn’t manage to decide,” Mischa wrote, taking the blame, “and now it is too late. By now I envy our parents, Martin, Edith and husband.”
Dolly and Mischa didn’t think they’d stay long in Shanghai, it was just a stop on their way to the U.S.
Dolly and Mischa couldn’t believe what was happening around them was real and they could not repond rationally. They were a smart couple slowly drawn into doom.
“What will become of us only God in Heaven knows,” Dolly said.
The letter to Selma was written before Martin left for Shanghai on the 27th of December.
As they racked their brains trying to think of somebody who could help them, Dolly remembered “Livingstone,” a very distant rich relative. There wasn’t much hope but in their most desperate moments they talked about this man Livingstone who could magically change everything, if only he would.
Other business acquaintances, people they didn’t see often but now bumped into were leaving…for Hungary, after selling all their belongings.
Finally word came from Selma and Dolly wrote back, “Everyone has their own trouble and are not in the mood for conversation. Yet the people moving to Hungary were better off. Their situation is a thousand times better than ours.”
Mischa added the latest news: He wasn’t able to reach a businesswoman they all knew. She had closed her business and had no telephone. He congratulated Selma’s son, Rudy on his Bar Mitzvah.
Dolly added a short typed note…”I am still not able to grasp you didn’t reply to our telegram until this day. If you knew how we try day after day to find an opening for the US and then again get confronted with a ‘no’. I believe you would at least have found some words to reply!” She signed the note, “dolly,” with a flourish.
She reminded that the “Montevideo opportunity” was “a great chance…The time with my parents gets closer and closer and closer. I am not my proper self anymore. Do we know we shall see each other again?”
Mischa was still using his professional stationary which identified him as a dentist with an office on Potsdamerstrasse in Berlin.
Dolly and Mischa never got to Montevideo or the U.S. or Shanghai. In October 1939, nearly a year after their parents left Berlin for the “Paris of the East,” they were living in the Paris of the west. But it wasn’t the Paris we often think of, the artistic, carefree Paris, of cafes and long walks in the city of lights. Like Berlin, this was a place falling into the grip of a choking fear.
In the end Paris was their last resort–Mischa had a brother living there and he must have believed they could find a safe corner.
Whatever had happened when their friend Selma left Berlin, whatever they had said to her (because she left so much earlier than anyone else)–they wished they hadn’t. In their depressed state of mind, they analyzed earlier events.
“It is always the same. One comes to the conclusion of advising others without making use of it oneself,” Mischa said. He recalled telling her to relax, that once she settled down in America things would look different. But now that he was in the same situation those words gave him no comfort.
Apparently his earlier letters to Selma had the tone of desperation and now he regretted them, “although I wouldn’t know what to take back…In general the situation is more difficult than I guessed…Taxes, rents, food increase continuously. As immigrants we have special worries. It is very difficult to obtain a residence permit.”
You couldn’t say you wanted to live and work in Paris because “one is barely tolerated…To be honest you can hardly blamed the people for it, for it is crowded with immigrants and more come daily. Wherever you go you hear people speaking German.”
One Sunday they took a trip outside Paris, into the countryside where they felt like they were at an international event. In the restaurants they heard Viennese, Russian, Polish, Italian and Spanish spoken. They way things were at that moment in time, thought Mischa, if all these people got work and residence permits, there would be a stream of loud protests from the locals.
Mischa and Dolly’s biggest mistake, they thought, was staying in Berlin too long. Everything would have been different if they had followed Selma’s example.
“I just had the bad luck to come late,” Mischa said, berating himself. “So what use is my understanding if I myself am the victim?”
Dolly and Mischa first moved into a hotel at 25 Francs a day. It was supposed to be temporary but dependent on the job permit. To save money they ate their meals at Mischa’s brother’s place–and that turned into another worry.
“He [Mischa's brother] is not wealthy, so how long am I going to accept that?”
Soon the hotel became too expensive and they looked for a small apartment to rent. “Even that is rather expensive, what with the furniture. But it would have advantages. We would also get our luggage and wouldn’t have it stored at the [train] station any longer.”
But finding an apartment turned out to be very difficult. There weren’t many for rent.
“One sometimes is surprised about things here,” Dolly wrote her parents in Shanghai, “everything being so different from what we are used to.” Culture clash, that was a big problem, too.
To Sammy, Mischa added a personal note: “Dear dad, a few days before our departure, I went to Mrs. B. She did whatever she could to hasten the estate affair so I could save your money…maybe it is the notary, maybe the authorities do it on purpose which is quite possible as it regards Jewish money, even an emigrated Jew, so what should they be in a hurry?”
The mysterious “estate affair” had something to do with a blocked account.
When Dolly received a letter in July 1939 from exotic, far-off Shanghai, she was elated. For her, it had been a “long, long time,” since she heard form her family and the enclosed “snapshots” were so welcome. “I can’t take my eyes off them,” she said. “I am glad you didn’t change at all. Mommy lost her little stomach but that is no disadvantage. The dear faces are the same and that is what counts.”
The date of the letter from Shanghai was July 13, 1939, the same day my mother, Kay, arrived in Shanghai, perhaps a bit unannounced and after a harrowing voyage that took her to Manila in the Philippines where she fled after sensing that the Nazis were trying to get her, not such an outrageous thought at that time.
Dolly had sent a letter with photos to Shanghai, but there was no mention in the letter that they had received them. The mail was unpredictable, and strange as it sounds, Dolly was unaware that she could mail things airmail; I guess she thought the mail went by ship as plane travel was pretty revolutionary even then.
Dolly’s letter mentioned a French National Holiday. She said the people dance int he streets and everybody is happy. There would be parades and famous singers performing in the public squares.
“We want to go and watch the festivities,” she wrote. She was trying to sound normal, upbeat.
In reality Mischa and Dolly were searching for an apartment, “a little one, just one roomn and use of the kitchen.” They were hard to find, very hard to find, Dolly said, as most apartment are double the size, that is four rooms or more.
“Life here is very different,” she explained but clearly the “difference” was stressful. “One has to get used to all these habits and ways of life. It is not like home! The food and rent are expensive and it is quite impossible to think of building an existence for the time being. The authorities are making great difficulties. We have to wait until the situation changes.”
The “situation” grew graver. Pessimistic, no hope. Life was slipping away from Dolly and Mischa and they had no control.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, my dad, Martin, and his family were rebuilding their lives, the direct opposite of what was happening to Mischa and Dolly. They found places to live and got back into the business they were in in Berlin, manufacturing silk clothing for women. Beautifully tailored blouses and skirts. They were becoming so successful that they received orders for their products from other parts of the world.
It was Dolly’s mom, Luise, who had designed the clothes in Berlin, using housewives to help sew the material. Now, in Shanghai, they were getting back to work, hiring women from the refugee community as well as young Chinese girls.
[Note: please remember that this is an unedited work and there may be disconnects and missing details].
A couple of days after Dolly and Mischa sent a letter from Paris to Shanghai, they wrote another to Selma and her husband Arno, then living in New York City. It was a melancholy letter.
Letters from friends had become an important source of support and connection to their old life, their old world. Every day they waited to hear from Selma in the US but no words were forthcoming. They imagined that she was living comfortably and in great safety and they wondered why didn’t she write back. While waiting, waiting, waiting for Selma to help them get out of France, they wrote to the family in Shanghai.
“I am always glad to receive your mail,” said Dolly. “I feel your nearness. I see and hear you and shall never forget you and hope that we get together again one fine day.” They dreamed of meeting at the weekend house at Falkensee. Falksensee, Falkensee, it was on their minds all the time now, the scene of the happiest times. Dolly wrote of the future, because the present was growing more frightening and her mind turned to the future for comfort. The future, when the war would be over.
In the letter there was a note for everyone:
“Let us hope being together after the war, beginning a new life that can compete with the old one. The Lord Almighty will help us to succeed and we shall be happily together with you, dear parents, as we have been for so many years.”
On December 10, 1939, a year after Dolly and her parents parted in Berlin, she wrote a heart-filled letter to Shanghai:
“Mein liebes Muttchen!”, the letter from Paris began. How deeply sad Dolly must have been as the always-looked forward to Christmas holidays would be celebrated alone.
“By now it is a year since we parted. I think of your last birthday [Dec. 26] we spent together. Early in the morning in our home, the beautifully laid coffee table, the bags with sweets for the journey and the trip and goodbye. We felt so sad at saying goodbye and I know you did not feel any less sad.”
But that was a year earlier. “A year that brought us many disappointments and bad experiences and who knows what else is to come.”
It almost seemed as if Dolly and Mischa had been drawn to a flame. For them it seemed like there was no getting away and the evil flame just kept pulling them, pulling them.
It was wartime and the mail was censored and the mail didn’t come on time and the letters between Paris and Shanghai and Shanghai and Paris were not as frequent as they might have been during peaceful times. In Berlin they saw each other often but now they were isolated and Dolly had no idea how things were going in Shanghai (and, as it was, they were going very well. The family got on its feet quickly and adapted to the new country and new way of doing things} In Paris everything was the opposite, everything worked against them.
Things were getting so bad for Dolly and Mischa that they could only believe it was the same for the family in Shanghai. Maybe even worse.
Dolly and Mischa couldn’t speak French; they were learning the culture and the customs. How frustrating and how doomed they must have felt.
“Now, dear Mom,” the letter continued, “again you celebrate your birthday (which one?) but we are not there this time. This time we have to be satisfied thinking of you at a distance. We imagine seeing you surrounded by our beloved ones who bring you their good wishes….Let us hope we will be together next year–Do I really believe in ‘Falkensee’?
“And life is so beautiful! Or rather life can be beautiful. I did not forget the good times and I believe that’s the same with you. So we have to work hard for it and not give up hope that the good times can be achieved again.” Dolly and Mischa wrote that they “feared the worst is yet to come” and that was “the danger of having to move to the country….This would be really bad as we have rented an apartment.”
What they were saying is that officials wanted to move them out of Paris and into the countryside. This was not a good sign and quite frightening. They had just moved out of the hotel and rented an apartment, a very important step them. At that point having a place of their own meant everything in the world. They disliked living in the hotel and now wondered if they would have to give up the apartment.
“…As I said, one has to hope,” Dolly wrote.
There were closing wishes for a Happy New Year but that meant nothing. Mischa wrote that he was wishing them well so early in December because “at times like these one never knows when you are going to receive this letter.”
And the mail was unreliable. Days and weeks passed without one or the other party hearing a word. Or letters were opened, evidenced by the red “opened by censor” stamped on the envelope. They must have self-censor their own letters before mailing them for fear what might happen if they said the “wrong thing.”
On Christmas day, December 25, Dolly typed another letter to Shanghai. Actually they had been writing letters all months long, proving how lonely and alienated they felt, how desperate they were for the loving warmth of the family gatherings. For Dolly and Mischa this holiday season was empty.
When they lost hope in the future they looked to the past. The present was too horrrible.
“We think of former times and of last year when you were all at our home and then next morning the departure. An entire year, it seems like eternity and still I can’t comprehend it has been such a long time.”
Mischa wasn’t finding work; he couldn’t get a work permit and the only diversion was the new apartment, the one they rented with three rooms. The one that gave them a little happiness.
“The apartment used to belong to a friend’s sister. She took a bigger apartment in the same building.” They bought furniture and were busy making the rooms comfortable, trying to make it cozy.
“Part of the windows have curtains which is due to Mischa’s putting them up. Aunt Hedwig’s tablecloth is decorating the table. The custom here is to put a long small cloth on the table that does not cover the whole surface but I love this one and to me it is something form home which holds warm memories. Also the puppets that Katarinschen (my mother) put on clothes, are sitting in their place.” More things were coming in boxes that hadn’t yet arrived.
And then a painful confession from Dolly: “Dear Mommy, I miss you so dreadfully. It would be such a pleasure to have you here.” She was remembering everything as if it were as close as yesterday. And again it was the thought of the future that gave her some strength: “…it is as if you all were with me and not that far away. So we hope the next year will be a turn for the best and that soon our wishes will come true….Much, much love, your loving Dolly.”
Another note at the end of the letter said Dolly was proud to have “a house of our own again.” She was referring to the new apartment. She wrote of work and alluded to a time of peace. She was amazed that her dentist husband could hang the curtains, she didn’t think he knew how. “Then he makes sure there is no draft by putting wooden ? to the doors because the apartment is not quite war. It has no central heating but fireplaces in front of which one has to place stoves which we had to buy.”
They had to buy a stove, the apartment had no cooking equipment. The kitchen was very cold and Dolly’s hands froze. The apartment was not as warm as the apartment in Berlin–the cold was just a preview of what was to come.
She despaired at the lack of double windows. “It is much more pleasant to feel warm.”
The dining room was painted the same color as Dolly’s sister Edith’s bedroom in the Milastrasse apartment. There was a very small table and the “newest fashion: red leather chairs–it looks very pretty and will look even nicer when we furnish it with our things.”
Their bedroom was dark with a large bed and bedside table and “that’s all.”
But the doubts crept into the Christmas letter, “If we remain healthy and survive, I think I shall be contented.”
What were they leaving out? What didn’t they want their family in Shanghai to know?
When Christmas day came, they had to write another letter. The writing of letters made them feel they could pretend to be closer to the family. In a way it was keeping them going. They could imagine what the family would say when their letter arrived, they could see their faces, their smiles, they could hear their voices, hear them talking.”
What were they doing in Shanghai? they wondered. Was it day, was it night? The war was raging but Dolly and Mischa knew nothing about the movements of Mao Tse-tung, Chairman Mao, who was brutally slaughtering his countrymen in his bid to rule China. Mao was in a war with the Nationalist Party. Russia was trying to protect its front and back doors. Russia feared an attack by Japan while the Germans fought in the west.
December 1939 was a very lonely month for Dolly and Mischa. The letters kept coming to Shanghai, but the letters from Shanghai were not coming to Paris.
Four days after Christmas on New Years Eve, another letter was typed in the new apartment. They’d been there nine days and the furniture had arrived and now they could sleep “happily in their own beds.” Surely they were accustomed to an active social life in Berlin but not anymore. Now they wrote of staying at home for New Years, “again, as happens frequently nowadays.”
And again they mentioned the apartment, the only source of their happiness; it made all their other problems seem smaller. The apartment, the apartment…”Our home is very pretty,” wrote Mischa, “Dolly told you alrady, 3 pretty rooms, a bright kitchen, a small hall. The dining room and bedroom are completely furnished (Dolly would argue with that!) but we prefer the third room where we also take our meals. In there are only some suitcases, a kitchen table and two stools but there we have a blazing stove which is a good thing on cold winter days. In apartments without central heating, one has to purchase stoves and they aren’t cheap.”
Yes, the apartment was terrific but they didn’t have a “carte d’identite” resident permit and that was a key to freedom, to moving around freely in Paris. They had been unable to get one in Paris but the authorites were now telling them that “they want to give us one for the country. We could choose where we wanted to go but I still do hope it will change for the better.”
That meant giving up the new apartment. It sounded as if they had to move right away. Still “there is a real chance they will change it. Then, too, we will receive our boxes with all our belongings.”
Their possessions were few: Mischa wrote, “Until now we have two plates, one has a crack. One spoon of our own, one borrowed. One tea glass and the picnic case. Two pots with dents and one frying pan. That is all–so Dolly can’t be exuberant regarding the cooking.”
That year, 1939, probably for the first time in both their lives, they did not celebrate either Christmas or New Years. “We put it on ice until we all shall be united again. Let us hope the war will soon end.”
Mischa had some very, very bad news to add at the end of the letter. He had heard from a brother who lived in Warsaw, Poland–where the German troops were ruthlessly attacking, followed by further horrific violence committed by the Russians–”He begs me to contact his brother-in-law in America…to help him and his family to get an entry permit as soon as possible.”
“As soon as possible,” he wrote with great irony. It was “as soon as possible” for many people–and for most getting out couldn’t be soon enough. “Of course, continued Misha, “I did what he asked but will it help?…My poor brother, who is cold and hungry, his home having burned down, and I don’t know if he was able to save anything. His two sons are at the Technical High School. The Russians are there now. I believe. God Almighty, what evil those criminals brought into the world!”
Mischa continued with more gloom, “You can imagine our mood…Now comes that fatal message.”
Their life energy was draining as were their finances. At this point, their only hope was their old friend, Selma, who had left Berlin a few years earlier even as Mischa and Dolly pooh-poohed her fears of the Nazis (remember they thought it would all blow over, oh, how they regretted it now). And now their lives depended on Selma’s help, help in every way. And for some reason it seemed that Selma was not coming through.
Meanwhile they hadn’t heard from their friend Selma who was living in New York City and who was their only other lifeline. And when they finally did receive a letter, they didn’t feel relief; they felt her letter was “much delayed,� –as if she wasn’t taking their situation seriously. The writing of letters was part of the problem….they was no communication on either side and a kind of anger arose that threatened to destroy the longstanding friendship. It was a mysterious misunderstanding, a lethal misunderstanding, perhaps.
“We did not hold against you the letter we received [before the war],� wrote Dolly and Mischa. “It was stupid of me to ask that question but anyway, I did it so I was waiting for a reply. It turned out the same way as my request about Uruguay and what just had been brought to know knowedge, my Thea, asking you about Palestine…Your reply came too late. So there was no other solution than to stay put. But as I said I did not hold it against you.�
Something had passed between Selma and Mischa and Dolly. They must have felt absolutely furious with Selma who was living safely in the U.S. and not seeming to help them get out of France.
Mischa said that he had applied for an identity card, which was necessary to live in Paris. They had to pay 400 Francs each to begin the process.
“Of course,� Mischa continued, “this has nothing to do with a work permit.� He knew he would never get one of those.
“In spite of that we felt glad ot get as far as a nice three-room apartment, being tired of living in hotels. I rented the apartment and bought some furniture. Then we received the message that the identity card we coveted was ready for us but we should move to the country before January 21.�
Dolly and Mischa knew no one in the French countryside where the officials wanted them to go. They couldn’t even speak French passably.
“I put in another request,” wrote Mischa with in a hollow hand, “and hope they’ll change their plans regarding us. You, dear Selma, can imagine how glad Dolly was, having a rael home after we have been living nearly half-a-year in Berlin in that empty apartment and after that a long time here in hotels.”
Then, another dark moment: “They don’t seem to like us being happy. The bad luck that began with Hitler is persecuting us even here.”
But he really didn’t want to write about that. “I would have rather waited until my request would be approved of but I have to be patient. Maybe, just maybe, we will be lucky in the end.”
There was the word “patient,” again; patient was a major word in Dolly and Mischa’s vocabulary.
More bad news: Through friends Mischa received a postcard from his brother in Warsaw, begging him to write to anybody to try to get him, his wife and sons out “as soon as possible.” Didn’t he know that Mischa and Dolly wished the same for themselves.
“They who might be able to help do not want to–and they who want to cannot do anything. Life is terrible. My brother was living peacefully in his home in his country. It troubled him how he could help me to get away from the Hitler regime. Now he is one of the poor who need help. His home was burned down and I doubt if he was able to save anything from that hell.”
They corresponded with other old friends and the mail took a painfully long time both ways. There was the Hungarian family, formerly owners of some kind of a factory in Berlin, who had fled and were starting all over again in another place. They, unlike most others, were allowed to take machinery with them.
Mischa told friends about the family in Shanghai. “They had to make some changes in their lines of business,” he wrote, “as the exporting part slowed down due to the war.”
Then back to Selma, more letters were arriving in New Jersey from Paris than vice versa. Selma now lived in Patterson where she had opened a furniture business.
“Why,” Mischa asked Selma, “do you not tell us anything about yourselves? What are you doing? We are anxious to know. You can reach us at my brother’s address [Rue de Chantilly] until we are sure about our case.”
In her own handwriting, Dolly added a note to her old friend Selma. They had to wait for permission to remain in Paris, she said. There was so much agony between the lines. “You see,” she told Selma calmly, “it is not easy. On the contrary, you have less trouble. You can stay wherever you like and everyone can work without having to ask for a permit.”
In a change of tone, one that seemed solemn, Dolly said she was thankful that her parents “had the courage to go to Shanghai.” She received letters from them every two weeks.
Fourteen days passed.
Dolly and Mischa were no longer in Paris; they had a new address. They had barely settled into the apartment they loved so much when they were suddenly sending handwritten postcards from Luchon in southwest France, near the spectacular Pyrenees Mountains. But they didn’t talk about the beauty.
One of the postcards was mailed to East Seward Road in Shanghai, dated 1940, in time for Sammy and Luise’s wedding anniversary. Again there were lines of hope, hope that was fading fast.
“How we would love to be with you but unfortunately there is no possibiity. We have to wait for better times.”
A few months later in March 1940 another card was sent to Sammy M. at the Elite Fashion Group (the name of my dad and his parent’s new company in Shanghai)–this note was mailed via Switzerland.
Dolly and Mischa “longed” for mail. They were living for communications from their family. “By now it is ages since we heard anything from you. There is yet no progress regarding our case of leaving for America. We are waiting for Selma’s affidavits. If they were in our possession by now, there would still be a chance to go. We cabled Selma and hope the necessary papers are on their way.”
But now time itself was distorted, day and night, all of it, not the same.
——————————
Letter from Dolly and Mischa in Paris to my father and his family in Shanghai
July 13, 1939
“So what use is my understanding if I myself am the victim?”
My dearest!
It is always the same. One comes to the conclusion of advising others without making use of it oneself. About half a year ago I wrote to you not to be desperate because once one has settled down everything looks different. But as we now are in the same situation. I completely forgot.
I should not have written my first letter in such a mood of desperation although I wouldn’t know what to take back of it. Anyway, it is the beginning, people have been living here without us. So we have to wait and see. In general the situation is more difficult than I guessed, mainly I suppose because of the danger of war. Taxes, rents, food, etc. increase continuously. We as immigrants have special worries. It is very difficult to obtain a residence permit. One is not allowed to say one wants to build an existence. One is not but tolerated and has to wait for better times.
To be honest you can hardly blame the people for it for it is crowded with immigrants and even more come daily. Wherever you go you hear German spoken. On Sunday we went into the country. In the restaurant at lunch, nothing but Viennese dialect. Now you have to take into consideration that apart from Germans and Austrians, also Russians, Poles, Italians, and recently also Spaniards and Czechs are around. If they would give everybody their residence permit and work permit, then the locals would object.
Up to now they weren’t that severe, I just had the bad luck to come late. So what use is my understanding if I myself am the victim?
We live at a hotel at 25 frs a day that is a seventh of a pound. Meals we take at my brother’s. Up to now he refuses to take any money for it. He is however not wealthy so how long amI going to accept that? Besides the hotel is also too expensive, that is why we want to rent a little apartment. Event hat is rather expensive what with the furniture. But it would have the advantage of taking care of our living ourselves and so being cheaper off. We could also get our cases and won’t have to keep them at the station or the shipping agent any longer. It is not easy to get a small apartment. A room with a kitchenette one can only have in a hotel but you have to pay 40 or 50 frs p.d. One sometimes is surprised about things here–everything being so different from what we are used to.
Dear Dad, a few days before our departure I went to Mrs. B. She did whatever she could to hasten the estate affair so I could save your money. It did not work out, maybe it is the notary, maybe the authorities do it on purpose which is quite possible as it regards Jewish money, even an immigrated few-so why should they be in a hurry? As by now the money is ?, 6% of the blocked account would be available to you. Mrs. B. is going to try a rectification if that is possible without getting Aute into trouble. Where should he find the money to pay the ? tax and the tax for obtaining the property? But if he sells it later on, you will not a penny of it. I would say if you want to give it to him, only under the condition he is not allowed to sell but only lease it. I explained it to him and he agrees but I can’t remember if I also told Mrs. B.
Anyhow, you should write her immediately but please do it a bit more friendly. She let me read your letter and the look on her face told me she was rather depressed. Your letter had a too official tone and showed mistrust.
Greetings and kisses to all of you. Hello Kati, I almost forgot your arrived today. Welcome and you, too, shall have part of the kisses. How was the journey? How much weight did you take on–the food having been very nice, hasn’t it?
Misha
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…to be continued…