Lony’s Love
Wartime letters to a grandson
After 75 years he read his granny’s letters to him
During the war Lony Rabl-Fraenkel, the Jewish owner of the Café de Paris in the Beethovenstraat, wrote letters to her newborn grandson Peter Lobbenberg in England. She yearned achingly for him, but couldn’t visit him. He read the letters for the first time eighteen months ago, over 75 years later. “Words can’t express how I feel.”
A treasure trove of 11 letters
Just eleven letters are the precious possessions of Peter Lobbenberg (76). Each letter sits neatly tucked in a plastic sling. He calls them his “treasure”. A treasure that chartered accountant Lobbenberg did not examine in depth till little more than a year ago. “I tend to run away from my emotions. I was cowardly and couldn’t bring myself to take the risk,” says the Englishman.
The letters to Lobbenberg, who was born in England on 12 September 1939, were from his grandmother Lony Rabl-Fraenkel. The widow of Ludwig Rabl, a German Jewish doctor, she had fled from Berlin to Amsterdam and opened the Café de Paris in the Beethovenstraat in 1939. The café with its terrace soon became a popular rendezvous for other refugee German Jews who had settled in the Beethovenstraat, also known as Brede Jodenstraat (Broad Jewish Street).
Lony was born in 1878. In the late 1930s her daughter Annemarie and her husband Hans Lobbenberg had moved from Germany to England to run an offshoot there of the Lobbenberg/Blumenau family corsetry business. When their son John Peter Max was born, his grandmother yearned achingly for him. Travelling to England was no longer possible, as Germany had declared war in September 1939. Her attempts to get a visa from the embassy were to no avail.
Until he was 32 Peter Lobbenberg did not know that the letters existed. They were in a drawer of his mother’s bureau, stuffed among other documents. “No, it wasn’t a shock. What actually caught my eye were the stamps on the envelopes. I collect stamps,” says Lobbenberg, who flew from London to Amsterdam for the interview.
He gave the letters a cursory look and put them to one side. “Of course I saw they were addressed to me, but my mother had just died, I was having business problems and there were other things on my mind. After the war my mother spoke very little about my granny. I had a very sheltered upbringing.”
For years Lony’s letters sat in Peter’s stamp collection. It was not until a year and a half ago, now himself a grandfather, that he permitted himself to read them. The contents of the letters and postcards – some handwritten, some typed – astounded him. It emerged that the first letter was written one day after he was born.
‘Welcome, my sweet little boy. I am anxious to see you as soon as possible, and I hope you are all right. (…) I think of you day and night, and I am so happy to know you are here. (…) With much love Mutti.’
Sender Grandmother, Café de Paris, Beethovenstraat 9.
Two weeks later Granny Lony, who called her grandson Johnnie, picked up her pen again. This time she wrote in German. “Of course that came more naturally to her”, says Lobbenberg. She wrote how she would love to see him, to take him on her arm, to watch him sleeping, or feeding, or being bathed. ‘I’d even enjoy your crying. But who knows whether your first and maybe your second birthday will pass before we make personal acquaintance.’
Between the lines
She ended the letter with the words ‘Now Granny has to go to bed, although I could chat with you for hours.’
Lony longed to see a photo of Peter, although she feared none would reach her, as sending photos was prohibited.
‘Your Mummy should enjoy each day with you. (…) You’ll grow up much quicker than she can imagine. But when you do grow up, then hopefully there’ll be no war any more. They’ll just tell you about it.’
A few letters later Lony wrote that she had bought a present for Peter, by now “a quarter of a year” old. ‘I play with it, do up the buttons and undo them, and have fun with it.’
Peter Lobbenberg has read and reread the letters a number of times and knows their contents by heart. “She imagined she had me by her side, how she would go around with me. What’s between the lines speaks volumes. All the things she doesn’t say… Earlier she wrote that she’d bought me a napkin ring with my monogram, I’ve never seen it. I’ve got nothing of hers, only these letters. That makes them even more precious.”
In later letters Lony writes tellingly: ‘Be thankful you’re a happy little Englishman, that’s the best thing your parents could have given you.’ And: ‘You’ll come into good times one day, of that I’m certain. I’d like to experience them too. And I’m so curious what will turn out, and how the new beginning will be, and how we can get rid of all the criminals. With much love, Your Granny Lony.’
Lobbenberg nods. “She was so right. She knew the position she was in. I think she sensed that things weren’t going to end well.”
With every letter her yearning for Peter grew stronger. When she finally got three photos of him by a circuitous route, she studied them with a magnifying glass. On the photos Peter was a four week old baby, in the meantime he was already fourteen weeks old. ‘When you come and visit me you can choose whatever you’d like to eat, starting with oysters, lobsters and champagne, down to bock beer, vodka and sausage sandwiches. Not forgetting the tarts. Then we’ll both have tummyaches, right?’
Lony envies Peter’s other granny, who could see him every day. ‘Which is why I’m such a poor Granny. Have you got at least a bit of sympathy for me? (…) When I come to London, we’ll see each other every day. And then you’ll get from me everything that Mummy doesn’t allow. That’s what grannies are for.’ Lobbenberg: “It was her lifeline, her therapy. I was there to rescue her. Through me, she was able to keep a firm grip on the future.”
Apart from the eleven letters to Peter, some ten letters to his parents have survived. In one of the letters, written on 5 May 1940, Lony briefly outlines the unstable situation in Amsterdam. She mentions a state of emergency, an unreassuring speech by the minister, “respectable” Dutchmen being arrested. ‘We don’t know what’s happening from one day to the next (…) Things here are not very good.’
A few days later, on 10 May 1940, the Netherlands fell to Germany. Around this time the immigration authorities were checking passports and residence permits to keep an eye on the number of foreigners. The investigators often dropped by Lony’s café.
On the evening of Saturday 8 June 1940, twenty members of the NSDAP, the national socialist organisation, stormed the café. They smashed eight windowpanes with bricks. The interior was ransacked. Neither staff nor customers dared do anything. The perpetrators fled, but nine of them ran into the arms of two policemen.
The damage was considerable, and Lony was awarded three thousand gulden, writes Frank van Kolfschooten in his recently published book De Beethovenstraat in which he quotes from several of Lony’s letters.
In her letters and postcards Lony says not a word about the incident. “Such a letter probably wouldn’t have got past the censors. And anyway she probably wouldn’t have wanted to worry her daughter.” She merely wrote that she slept badly at night and was taking pills.
Chocolate and whipped cream
In the letter of 26 September 1940 – Peter was now a year old – she pretended that she had him at home with her. She described how she had made chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce as though they were eating together. Lobbenberg: “In her imagination I was there by her side, so strong was her longing for me.”
The last letter to him is dated 11 February 1941. “It hit me right between the eyes. I can’t read it without crying”, says Lobbenberg, holding the letter in his hand. ‘I’m looking at every plane, because I imagine my little Peter is sitting in it and coming to visit his granny Lony.’
She fantasised how the visit would go: with chocolate and whipped cream, a big piece of cheesecake. She described how they would look through the window together and wave at the people in the street, who would wave back at the fair3 haired boy. She would put him in the bath, with a toy boat and a crocodile that squirted water when you squeezed it. Then he could run barefoot over the carpet to his bed, and Granny would tell him stories about his Mummy when she was a little girl. ‘Auf all das freu ich mich ganz schrecklich. Du auch?’ [I’m so terribly looking forward to all that. You too?]
The letter still brings a lump to Lobbenberg’s throat. “I ask myself every day: why didn’t I look at the letters sooner? I knew of course that my grandmother had been transported by the Nazis and didn’t survive the war, but the letters affected me deeply. She loved me even though she didn’t know me and had never met me. I have no words for it. How powerful. I never knew how much she longed for me.”
Now he has a grandchild himself, the penny has dropped. “I have the same intense feelings. I adore my seven year old grandson Sacha and can’t tell you how lovely he is. He comes and stays the night with us every Friday.”
In August 1943 Lony was deported to Westerbork. On 30 December 1943 she wrote another card to an acquaintance in Amsterdam saying that she was well. On 22 February 1944 she wrote a card to her family, via a contact in Amsterdam. She mentioned that she would be going to Theresienstadt. On 10 October 1944 she was transferred to Auschwitz, where she was murdered a few days later. It was not until after the war that this last letter reached her daughter in London.
A year and a half ago Lobbenberg decided to visit his grandmother’s place in the Beethovenstraat. “It was painful. I felt for the first time a gap in my life, a gap that until then I hadn’t even known existed.”
Today he’s visiting the premises again, now the Claudia Sträter fashion store. He looks round in the shop and runs to the back, towards the terrace where an old tree stands. The saleswomen say that older customers still talk about the Café de Paris.
Lobbenberg spreads his granny’s letters over the floor and watches the photographer assess his shots. He sits down. “It doesn’t feel tragic any more. I’ve fulfilled my grandmother’s wish to be here. Only it’s the wrong way round. She herself isn’t alive, but it feels as though she were. What an irony!”
………………
Musical work about Lony
The English composer/conductor Ronald Corp, founder and artistic director of the New London Orchestra, is currently composing a musical piece about the letters that Lony Rabl?Fraenkel wrote to Peter Lobbenberg and his family. The work is being written for a singer and five piece wind ensemble.
Lobbenberg came up with the idea. “I want to commemorate my grandmother and her letters. It’s an amazing story. She was a strong and lovely woman and she deserves it.”
The piece should be finished in two months’ time. “It would be great if it could be performed in Amsterdam.”
From an article of Hanneloes Pen "Een schat van 11 brieven" in Het Parool PS 28-01-2016