My beloved mother Helen Jones died last year. Some time ago she gave me a treasured wallet embossed with a picture of the Kremlin, given to her by an uncle, who had received the gift from Joseph Stalin. Whether the dictator handed over the wallet personally, who knows, but her uncle, Karl Kreibich, was certainly the Czech ambassador in Moscow post-1945, when Stalin was at the peak of his powers.
Helen grew up in a little spa town in Bohemia. At the age of 11, as German troops marched into the Sudetenland, she was wrenched from her comfortable bourgeois life forever, first moving to Prague and then escaping Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia by train just before war started. She travelled with her nine-year-old sister, Hana, eventually meeting her father at Liverpool Street Station. Despite losing her memory in old age, she could always bring the story back to life. When the train stopped at the German border, soldiers removed everyone from the carriages at gun point, except her and her little sister. I shudder to think what happened to those who were taken from the train. Days later my grandmother also fled, walking over the mountains into Poland, Sound of Music style. Another uncle, Oskar, and a grandmother, Fried, were less lucky. He was murdered in Auschwitz, she died in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
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