July 15, 1939. For my 7th birthday, Aunt Fanny gave me a beautiful poetry album1 bound in brown leather, which even had a little lock on it. I had discovered it long before among the treasures in her shop. On the front left-hand pages she had pasted black paper cutouts, a rarity that no other girl could have in her album. On the last page she had immortalized herself, quite modestly, with a saying that could not have characterized Aunt Fanny’s entire life more aptly:
If you want to be happy in life,
contribute to the happiness of others,
because the joy we give
returns to our own hearts.
After these words, our good aunt must have had a heart overflowing with joy throughout her life. Now, of course, the book went from friend to friend, and each one wrote a more or less meaningful saying in it. Most of them were like this: “Faithful and noble, a German girl.”
My father had already broken his head with his words:
Keep your blood pure, it is not yours,
It comes from far away and flows far away
And is heavy with a thousand ancestors,
And all future lies in it.
Keep the garment of your immortality pure.
Unfortunately, my beautiful poetry album has been lost. On the first night of the Leipzig bombings, I had just lent it to a girl who lived near the exhibition grounds. Perhaps she had already written her saying in it before she had to die at the age of just 12.
- In German it is called a poetry book, in English we’ve called it an Autograph book. They seem to serve the same purpose. ↩︎