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Objects of the Holocaust explores personal testimonies across generations through single objects, uncovering lesser-known histories of the Holocaust and telling incredible stories of family, loss, and survival. Hosted by Professor Tim Cole from the University of Bristol and actress and member of the second generation Louisa Clein, the series features a new guest each week who joins to offer a deeply human perspective on one of history’s darkest chapters.
Objects of the Holocaust is brought to you by the Holocaust Educational Trust, a charity that works across the UK to ensure that the horrors of the past are never forgotten. Find out more and support them at www.het.org.uk.
Michael Attenborough CBE: I have brochures for almost every film dad’s made as a director, but this one is completely different. Its particular evocation was meeting, for the very first time, these very — in my family — very famous women, and a deeply emotional moment.
Louisa Clein: Today we're joined by Mike Attenborough CBE. Mike is an acclaimed theatre director. He has been the artistic director of theatres such as the Almeida Theatre, Hampstead Theatre and the Watford Palace.
Tim Cole: Mike is the son of Lord Attenborough, a well-known and highly distinguished director, and the nephew of Sir David Attenborough, an exceptionally well-known broadcaster, in particular for his role in science and natural history. And he comes from an extraordinary family involved in the arts and the academy and, as we'll learn in today's story, humanitarianism.
Michael Attenborough CBE: My dad once said to me, unforgettably, he said the presence of Helga and Irene in our home taught me one very simple thing: I am my brother's keeper.
Tim Cole: I'm Tim Cole.
Louisa Clein: And I'm Louisa Clein.
From the Holocaust Educational Trust, this is Objects of the Holocaust.
Tim Cole: A podcast which explores the Holocaust through a single object to tell wider stories of family, loss and survival.
Louisa Clein: Mike, thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. It's a true privilege to have you here.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Great pleasure.
Tim Cole: You've brought with you a fairly hefty book. I mean, it's quite heavy. It's soft-back, but it's heavy. It's got 127 pages, says on the front, ‘Richard Attenborough’s Chorus Line’ and has this extraordinary photograph of golden clad male and female dancers holding their top hats in the air.
And flicking through, it's really richly illustrated with these most extraordinary images of actors and actresses, and texts about a movie made by your father.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Dad gave it to me when the film opened, and so it was like a memento of that occasion. But for me, it was a memento of that Christmas and that that that's what it means to me.
Louisa Clein: I want to take you back to… we are in New York 1980s, ‘84 and your father, Richard Attenborough, is directing A Chorus Line. Now I've heard you say before that it's unusual to be directing a movie in a Broadway theatre. But there he is, filming this incredible film on Broadway. And what, three blocks away?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes.
Louisa Clein: You have just transferred a play that you directed at Hampstead Theatre, and it's transferred to Broadway. Amazing. So, there you are, father and son, three blocks away and you are visited by two sisters who are very much part of your family.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes, they were indeed very much part of my father's generation in New York. In America, theatre runs in a completely different way to ours here. Because they have Thanksgiving, Christmas is a bit of sort of anticlimax, really. So, they all work over Christmas. They do two shows on Christmas Day, which would be unthinkable — equity would have a fit.
And so, we were there right across Christmas and my dad said to me, ‘wouldn't it be lovely if we asked Helga and Irene to come and join us as a family to celebrate Christmas,’ and he would invite and pay for Helga and Irene and their respective husbands to come to New York. And that was the first time I ever met them.
Tim Cole: And can you describe that first meeting? Where were you? Was it in a restaurant, in a…?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes, it was a restaurant, and I can actually remember it's called Maxwell's Hammer. And Irene and Helga arrived with their husbands. And Irene was the slightly quieter of the two, or perhaps Helga was simply the noisier of the two, but she was delight, and she called me immediately and insisted that I sit next to her: ‘Because, darling, I'm going to tell you all about your daddy. A very naughty boy. A very, very naughty little boy.’ My father's protesting like mad in the background, his innocence. But I did spend a wonderful lunch, sat next to Helga, hearing all about their childhood.
Louisa Clein: So, you said that. This is the first time you'd met them. But you had known about these two women.
Michael Attenborough CBE: I had, yes, actually from quite an early age. My dad had told us about these two girls.
Tim Cole: We're going to find out more about why that meeting in a downtown Manhattan restaurant was so significant and in particular, why you've brought with you today this wonderful brochure for A Chorus Line. But before we get to that, what would be great is to go back and explore a bit more of your family history and maybe we can start with your grandparents.
I think your grandpa was a, he was at Cambridge as an undergraduate, was a don at Cambridge and then ends up at Leicester. They're living in Leicester.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Well, he was appointed Principal of Leicester University College in 1932, and his task was to convert it — which is a mighty task — into a fully-fledged university. And there's huge tests for how you achieve that status, which of course results in considerably more subsidy and support and so on.
And over the next 20 years, that's what he accomplished. And so, it was converted into a fully-fledged university in 1952. Twenty years, and he then retired. But that was why they were there. They lived on what is now the Leicester University campus in a rather beautiful old building called College House. And they were very much at the centre of university life.
Tim Cole: And they have these three boys: Richard — your dad — and then David and John, is that right?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Actually, weirdly the adjoining building to where they were living was a converted mental asylum, and if you went you would go underground —which you could imagine three little boys certainly did — they went underground and you could find the padded cells and David, to this day, tells the story of my father disgracefully locking David into a padded cell and pretending he'd run away.
But yes, they and they went to Wyggeston Grammar School there, all three of them.
Tim Cole: Can you tell us a little bit about Fred and Mary? What kind of people they were?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Gosh, yes. Well, they were very different people, actually. Grandpa was incredibly intimidating. I was frightened beyond words of grandpa. He's quite severe and very intellectual and very actually quite strict in his way. Granny was all hugs and cuddles and chat and delight and warmth and heaven. They were both very radical, politically. Grandpa was a lifelong member of the Labour Party. Granny was a suffragette and a founder member of the Marriage Guidance Council.
They also did — which is again something I learned later — they also did have an extraordinary open house attitude to their own home. So, although he was the most senior figure on the university campus… for example, whenever they went on holiday — usually to Devon or Cornwall — they would take a working-class kid who'd never seen the sea before with them, just as a matter of course.
I think it was almost impossible to walk into their house and just find the family there. There would always be a sense of open house. And I know from other now, very elderly women in Leicester who joined the university in the 30s and 40s, my granny befriending the wives of academics who arrived, saying ‘you have to come round. You mustn't feel alienated. You must just have a sense of belonging’. And so, everybody felt they had a kind of access to granny and grandpa's home. So, I think, Dave, dad and John must have been used to this sense of a community feel to the house.
Tim Cole: And then in the 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, your granny, so she becomes part of this… she's the kind of major moving force in Leicester…
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes, that she was part of… she was heading up a committee that brought 50, five-zero, Spanish Civil War orphans to come to Leicester from Spain. And she found 50 different homes round Leicester for them during the Spanish Civil War. So, their activism had had was already in motion so to speak.
Tim Cole: I think it's interesting, because I think there is a moment in the 30s where, especially the British left, I think really sees the threat of fascism and in some ways, you know, this is the big ideological battle of the moment. The left versus the right is the battle against fascism. And do you think she would position herself within that kind of intellectual moment?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Oh, unquestionably. I mean, neither of them were Jewish, but they will have seen the alarm bell or heard the alarm bells ringing and seen what was happening and anybody with a remotely sane political compass would have seen the horror coming under the name of Hitler. So yes, they would have been very, very aware of that.
Tim Cole: So, there's the moment the Spanish Civil War in the 30s, mid 30s. Granny, is this — she sounds this extraordinary organiser who is kind of mobilising to house these refugee kids. And then I guess if we get to the later part of the 30s, it feels like Kristallnacht is a really key moment, both for German Jews and also maybe for people like your granny and grandpa, for whom there's a sort of question of how bad Hitler is, or what the Nazi regime going to be like in, say, 1936 at the time of the Olympics.
But then there's this moment in November 1938 where there's a kind of violent turn, you know, maybe thousands of Jewish men put into concentration camps, smashed windows, burnt synagogues. And it's interesting actually one of the things that German Jews talk about a lot is the intrusion into home that suddenly people are kicking down the door and are starting to smash all the crockery in your home. And that feels like this terrifying and frightening moment.
Michael Attenborough CBE: There's nowhere safe. But there was already a scheme working for these kids to come to London. And they had been used — they being my grandparents — been used as a staging post, normally on the way to the States or to Canada.
So, Grandpa would go and pick them up at a London railway station, looking appallingly like kids that were heading for the camps, because they get off the train pale, frightened, nervous, lost, deprived of their parents and not aware at all if they'd ever ever see them again, with their little suitcases and a number — can you believe it — across their chests on a little board. And the number was preordained as to whom Grandpa and Grandpa picked up and he'd bring them back to Leicester. And they would usually stay there for a few days and continue on their journey.
Tim Cole: Which is where the two girls come into the story.
Michael Attenborough CBE: And they joined in that, yes.
Tim Cole: They grew up in an assimilated bourgeois, Berlin Jewish family, where Jewishness is worn quite lightly. They were assimilated middle class Jews and I think their mother was not Jewish? Is that right that the father's Jewish, the mother's not Jewish?
Michael Attenborough CBE: I think that's right, yes.
Tim Cole: So according to Nazi law, they’re Mischling first-degree, which is this kind of crazy system the Nazis draw out of. How many grandparents do you have, and are you fully Jewish or half Jewish or 1/4 Jewish?
Michael Attenborough CBE: At the end of the day, when they were selecting people for ghastly fates, I'm not sure it was a distinction they cared about.
I mean, my wife is, supposedly — she's Jewish for goodness sake — but her mother was not Jewish, and so and that, you know this. But I would obviously think to myself: that distinction is absurd.
Tim Cole: And it's, I mean, I think that the Nazi regime is this kind of hard thing to get our head around, because in some ways it's kind of crazy. But maybe we almost have to think in the sense that they have this kind of weird logic to it? And I think there is this sense in 1935 when they're drawing up these Nuremberg laws that they see families like Irene and Helga's family as the problem, because it's this problem: the Jews and Germans married together. Are they German or are they Jewish? And so, there's almost this sense in Nuremberg laws of like trying to breed out that so that half Jews can't marry…
Louisa Clein: Diluting the German race, isn't it?
Tim Cole: Exactly! And their family even… which is crazy — this is a family that, you know, the dad is a major player in the medical world. He's a doctor in Berlin and he's doing all this extraordinary public health work. But they're seen as this problem because they don't quite fit. They're not German enough, are not Jewish enough. And so, there's an almost this 1000-year plan of let's separate Germans and Jews by restricting who can marry who. And we can get back to kind of clear water between the two, they kind of muddy the waters in the…
Michael Attenborough CBE: Clearly, the Berjach family knew the problem. That they weren't in any way comforted by this, all these confusions and sophistries. So, they just say get the girls out, get the girls out as soon as possible.
Broadly speaking, they had been smuggled out of Germany during the rise of fascism. And it was a scheme very much linked to Leicester University, where my grandfather was working, largely for academics to come out. But then there wouldn't be necessarily permanent emigrations. But to get German Jewish kids out of at Germany at that point, it was clearly extremely important.
You couldn't get a visa here in order to enter the country if you were 17 or over. So, if any of the kids were 17 or over, they simply couldn't come. And Helga and Irene were both below 17. They had an elder sister Uta who was 17 and couldn't come. They'd lost their mother through ill health. They were very apprehensive about their father and the connection with the family and the family — our family and their family — was academic because their father was also an academic and had linked together with my grandfather.
Tim Cole: And it's interesting in the Imperial War Museum with the new Holocaust display, there's a wall which is just plastered with adverts from the Times newspaper in 1938 and 1939. And it's all these kind of helpless pleas from German-Jewish families, adults who are desperate to get a position as a domestic in the UK. They're often academics or, you know, lawyers or doctors, but they're desperate to come and get a job.
And then there's a moment where all of them stop. And that's 1939, September 1939, in the beginning of the war, where no longer is there a possibility to get out. Am I right in thinking that Irene and Helga, they arrived in August ‘39? Is that right?
Michael Attenborough CBE: I'm sure you're right, but it was in the nick of time, that much I do know. And of course, they weren't aware it was in the nick of time, and they were just getting them out of there as fast as possible.
Louisa Clein: They were on route to America, weren't they? They had an uncle.
Michael Attenborough CBE: That's the plan they were going to their uncle Hans. Yeah, in America. But when war broke out, these two girls are very, very shy, very frightened, very inhibited, only with their own language, are in the house.
And all transportation, of course, completely ceased. So suddenly, with nobody knowing how long the war was going to last, the fate of these two girls was sort of sitting in granny and grandpa's hands. So, they decided, in inverted commas, to adopt them. And my father tells me, he told me — this is how I first learned about it — that the family was gathered together and granny said, ‘look, we were a family of five and we're now a family of seven. You've gained yourselves two sisters’. And she said to them — I think granting them a wonderful sophistication of thought — she said to them, ‘you're going to find this difficult. You're going to find this difficult because you're going to think that we love them more than we love you. You, of course, know that's not true. But at this moment in time, they need our love more than you do. And we hope you'll understand’.
And dad said he remembers at the time being completely clear he didn't feel threatened by it at all and absolutely understood. And then, gradually, over the duration of the war, they learned English, they settled in and became an intrinsic part of the family. So as far as dad was concerned, he grew up with two sisters whom he loved very much.
I got a very strong sense from granny and grandpa — and also from my father — that they were wonderful at the way in which they integrated Helga and Irene into the family. So, for example, Helga was passionate to be a dancer, and grandpa organised and paid for dance lessons for her so that you could harness, if you like, their ambitions, their artistic leanings, their inclinations, and so on.
And also, of course, you know, we all know this, don't we? I certainly do. I've got two sons, you know, and you think, ‘oh, well, here comes the second son. It'll be just the sort of mini version of the first one’. Oh, no, it isn't! It's completely different.
And of course, Helga and Irene were completely different from each other. Helga was the extrovert, and Irene was the introvert. Irene the more serious one. But they, I think — as far as I can tell — were brilliant. They being Fred and Mary: brilliant at really getting to know them as individuals, treating them as individuals, treating them as their children.
Louisa Clein: And they enrolled in school.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes.
Louisa Clein: So, they went to the local grammar school.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes, yes. Yeah. And so — and I mean, it's hard to imagine: suddenly you've been brought up for 11-12 years in one city, in one language, in one culture, and suddenly you don't have either parent with you. You're only speaking a foreign language. You're going to a completely different place. I mean, it must have been utterly traumatic. But I equally have to say, if you were lucky, you landed in the home as run by Fred and Mary.
Louisa Clein: I have seen a telegram that is the letter that was sent to your granny and grandpa unfortunately telling them that the father had been killed, or had been transported to Auschwitz and assumed to be murdered. There must have been a moment that your grandparents knew they had to tell Helga and Irene that their father had been murdered, and that must have been an extraordinary responsibility for them to take on.
Michael Attenborough CBE: I think that in this light sense I got of it, was that it was not the death itself, but that feeling of dislocation from another life. So, that I think children develop a kind of potential for compartmentalization, that actually there's a certain life that was being parked in a pigeonhole, part marked past.
Tim Cole: Do they see Mary and Fred as mum and dad?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes, no question. Yeah.
Tim Cole: And they see that. Before their father's death, or increasingly after their father’s death.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Oh, I think before, yeah.
Tim Cole: And then in a sense, it becomes all the more so...
Michael Attenborough CBE: Bizarre, yeah.
Louisa Clein: So, the girls stayed in the Attenborough house through the whole of the war?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes. I think I think they were. 12 and 10 when they arrived in London?
Tim Cole: I think they're 12 and 13. Yeah, 12 and 13 when they come in 1939.
Michael Attenborough CBE: So there's the maths. You know that they’re young women.
Louisa Clein: They're young women when they leave and they make the decision to carry on to America. Why did they go to America? Why didn't they stay in the UK?
Michael Attenborough CBE: I have no idea. I think there must have been that sense that that was always their destination. I'm guessing here, but I'm sure that granny and grandpa adored those kids, though they would have done, would have constantly been aware they're not their mother and father. And that they didn't want them to settle too too much, because — apart from anything else — for their sanity. And I think it would be unbearable to be parted from these two girls later on, if actually they do want to continue their journey. So, I suspect they will have kept that sense of the temporary.
Louisa Clein: My family story is not completely dissimilar in that my mother was given away for five years. And, as you say, this idea of saying goodbye to your real parents, living with other parents, and then coming back after the war — because my grandparents both survived.
And there is a story that when my auntie was given back — she was given away as a six-month-old baby to a different family — when she was given back at the end of the war, that family turned round to my grandparents and said, ‘Six million Jews died; why did you survive?’
Because they didn't want to give back this baby they’d bonded with. And it's like, you know, this feeling — as you said about Fred and Mary — there was a self-preservation in themselves of knowing that they would have to let these girls go.
Michael Attenborough CBE: I think also self-preservation of reality. I mean, the reality was they were not their kids, and that the destination was America, and that Kurt had wanted them to go to uncle Hans. And that I'm sure they will have felt that was something they had to honour. As I understand it from dad, the girls weren't in a hurry. So, they didn't race to the airport. I think they were very happy where they were, and I think, I suspect there was no pressure put on them to hasten their exits to America. But it did eventually happen.
Tim Cole: Do they stay in touch via letters with Fred and Mary, do you know, when they leave in ‘46 to America?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes. And when Irene fell in love with a man considerably older than her who wanted to marry her, he flew from America to Leicester to come and ask my grandfather if he could marry Irene.
Tim Cole: And he said?
Michael Attenborough CBE: He said yes.
Louisa Clein: He really saw Fred as a father.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Fred as the father figure, yeah. But what an extraordinary, gorgeously old fashioned, but extremely touching thing to do.
Tim Cole: And Richard, your dad, does he maintain a contact with Helga during the 1950s or ‘60s, ‘70s?
Michael Attenborough CBE: I don't think hugely, no. You have to bear in mind that we're talking about one of the most terrifying workaholics in history. Dad never bloody stopped, and his diary would look like Hampton Court maze. You’ve never seen a man so busy.
And he became very much a very politically active man, very active within the charitable world. Then, when he diversified his own career from being an actor to being a film writer and a film producer… I mean it’s just ludicrous: we had to book to talk to him. So, I suspect it wasn't something he had time for.
Tim Cole: But it's interesting that in New York, he wants to host this lunch. This Christmas lunch, for these two…
Michael Attenborough CBE: Oh yeah, the emotional bond was hugely strong. He talked actually, interestingly at a number of occasions in London, often at Jewish gatherings, or Holocaust charities, and so on. And he was always invited to so because of Helga and Irene. And he— I could, I remember several times when he spoke, he became very emotional when he was talking about them. Very emotional.
Tim Cole: This brochure, in a sense, just look, it's beautiful, but it looks like anything that emerges from that period about a particular film. But for you, it's about a moment of meeting these two girls for the first time.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Yes, completely. I mean, I have brochures for almost every film that he’s made as a director, but this one is completely different. Because this one it, of course, evokes for me my time in New York. But its particular evocation was meeting for the very first time these very — in my family — very famous women who arrived, and a deeply emotional moment it was, too.
Louisa Clein: Was there ever a moment at the beginning of awkwardness or shyness? Or was it an immediate familial..?
Michael Attenborough CBE: An immediate explosion.
Tim Cole: And can you remember your father greeting them? How did he greet them?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Oh my dad, my dad always greeted everybody with the warmest hugs and embrace— he didn't know what the word inhibited meant. He was just a completely uninhibited man. And he adored them, so they will have been absolutely smothered in his hugs and kisses.
Tim Cole: And can you remember much about your emotions or the conversation or…?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Just incredible curiosity and excitement. I can't wait to get into conversation, because they were witnesses to a period in my dad and my uncles’ lives, which I knew very, very little about.
Louisa Clein: So, Mike, you've spoken so much of the brothers’ relationship with the sisters. Obviously, there is the next generation. I'm interested in how those generations now meet. Are you in touch with Helga's children?
Michael Attenborough CBE: We hadn’t been, but Beverly — her daughter — wrote to my uncle David — my dad passed away 10 years ago — and said that they felt a kind of gap in their lives, which was a whole background of, in Beverly's case, her mother, in terms of her children, their grandmother’s, childhood. They just knew nothing about it. And they said, ‘would you please help us to walk in her footsteps?’
And so, Beverly wrote to David and said, ‘could you enable this?’
And David, being a darling, said, ‘yes, of course!’
And so, Beverly, and her husband and two of her children, adults, came over. And David completely recreated where she went, including where she went on holiday. And he took Beverly and family to College House, where they had lived, walked them up the stairs, said this is your mother, your grandmother's bedroom.
And I met them in the most beautiful imaginable sunny springtime garden in my uncle David's house in Richmond. Of course, the fascinating thing was — you know, if you're sitting at a table with David Attenborough and there are other people at the table, nobody takes their bloody eyes off everybody except David. They'll be staring at David.
And this happened at this tea party. But of course, it wasn't because he was David Attenborough. It was because he knew their mother and their grandmother. And that he was the connection for them, between them and their mother and their grandmother.
Louisa Clein: There is a feeling that had it not been for David, and your father, and John, and Fred and Mary, the girls might not have survived.
Michael Attenborough CBE: Oh, Beverley's letter to David said, ‘we owe our existence to your parents’. So, it was a momentous visit for Beverly and family. Really momentous.
Tim Cole: Do you have any sense of how having those two girls enter their life changed your dad and your two uncles?
Michael Attenborough CBE: Well, I know — dad told me. He was very clear, and he said their presence, in a certain way, politicised the rest of his life.
And he said, ‘without anybody actually lecturing me. I knew in one instant that I am my brother's keeper’.
Louisa Clein: Objects of the Holocaust is presented by me, Louisa Clein and Tim Cole, and produced by Sarah Peters at Tuning Fork Productions.
Original music is by Iain Chambers, and sound design is by Peregrine Andrews.
With thanks to Beth Lloyd, Annabel Pattle, Kirsty Young and Karen Pollock from the Holocaust Educational Trust.
The Holocaust Educational Trust is a charity that works across the UK to ensure that the horrors of the past are never forgotten.
Details of the charity can be found in the show notes.