The Kind of Thing That Can Happen at a GASi Event — The Sussex Summer School 2025, Roffey Park, Friday

The Large Group closes. Most folk are off on the coach trip to sunny Brighton and the Pride Parade. A handful of us stay back. A son of mine lives in Brighton: Brighton I know, and fancy a bit of peace and quiet; it has been a full few months. J and I are GASI pals and agree to meet in Reception to go for a walk in the forest before seeing about any dinner.

We meet and with a couple of others, wave off the coach trippers, like parents despatching kids off to camp. J’s friend A is in Reception too alongside a middle-aged man I don’t recall seeing before, a stranger. Turns out they are up for a walk too. I ask the Receptionist about the walks we read about in our Welcome Notes. They are the same as for cycling and there are bikes for us if we would like them. The four of us, after brief introductions and but a moment’s thought, agree this would be a grand idea and off we go to the back of the venue to collect them from the shed. J and A lead the way around the park to the woods – they had crossed to the gate and forest beyond the previous day. It is a beautiful late afternoon. The grass is glowing green beneath the bluest sky and fluffy clouds.

It is a bit of a faff manoeuvring the bikes through the gate. J and A, it turns out, have decided that, having done the forest yesterday, they want to explore Horsham. The man, C, and I don’t fancy that. He, like I, want the forest. And, what’s more, taking in the rough and bumpy forest paths, decide we would prefer to walk. So here we are, perfect strangers at the edge of a forest we know no better than we know each other.

C proposes leaving the bikes propped up on the fence. We don’t have locks. There is no one else around but I hesitate, used to always locking my bike. C quietly somehow assures that the bikes will be alright. I fall in. We begin to walk. The map we have from Roffey is basic and phone signal weak. There was talk in the Large Group about leadership, and companionship. I had mentioned how many of the best arguments with my husband were in the car, map-reading, finding our way in a new unfamiliar place. I think it must have been me – slightly nervous and wondering how to find common ground with this person – who said something about that now, at the forest edge. Will we, I ask, be able to find our way back to the bikes? How? C is nothing if not chilled. I feel I must tell him, warn him, that my sense of direction is not a strong suit. He’s not bothered.

C is German-speaking with fluent English. He is quiet, possibly shy, possibly just quiet. Who will take the lead in speaking, never mind along forest paths? We are the same kind of age. Soon enough within minutes we have established that we have walked many miles with longtime partners, spouses. We have adult children. Slowly, things in common are discovered. I feel more relaxed and the conversation pauses and flows smoothly. C’s fluent English begins our conversation: his father and an aunt lived in England. C asks about my German which is conversational and limited but I have a good accent which makes me sound more fluent than I am. I tell him my parents were Viennese but, being Jewish, ended up in London after WW2. I regret that they didn’t speak to me in German but it is understandable. He is interested and open and asks more. I am happy to tell the short version of my mother’s adventurous and minorly heroic war experience………

………. my mother Helene (Helly) with her family left Vienna at sixteen in 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, for Belgrade where she worked in her father’s fabric printing factory. Three years later, her father died. When war reached Belgrade in 1941, my mother, her mother, older sister (whose husband had been “taken away”) and two year old niece survived the bombardment, abandoned their home and kept moving for about a year until the Italians caught up with and despatched them to a concentration camp on the Dalmatian coast where she remained until the Italian camp commanders required single women to defend the camp from Tito’s partisans. My mother used to say that the Italian soldiers’ hearts were not in it, and she along with two others, managed to escape hidden in a German barge, landing in Cervia on the Adriatic coast and arriving in Rome, still under German occupation. Somehow (many of the details are unclear in my mind) she connected with the resistance and worked on the production of false documents, with a false Italian identity herself. A neighbour in her lodgings got wind of her activities, the Gestapo interrogated her – unsuccessfully from their point of view – and she was hidden until June 1944 when Rome was liberated, in a Vatican safe house. Until she left Rome in 1950, she worked for UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) repatriating refugees. Her sister had emigrated to the US. A miraculous chance encounter with an old friend on a street in Rome, led to her mother in a refugee camp in Bari. Helly brought her to Rome and supported her until her death in 1949. In the winter of that year, on a skiing holiday in Austria, she met my father who was by then living in London. They married in June 1950 and she came to London……

C listened intently and asked about my father of whom I know only that he managed to leave Vienna a day or two before the annexation in 1938 by the Nazis of Austria, the Anschluss, to join his parents and brother who had been in London since 1936, having been forced to abandon their successful retail knitwear business. I think he delayed his leaving to finish his studies. He was nineteen and promptly joined the Pioneer Corps, the army unit which accepted most of the Jewish refugees, and ended up in North Africa. His younger brother and parents were meanwhile interned, as suspected enemy “aliens” in Newbury.

I wonder what it must be like for Germans and Austrians to hear all this. In general it has been a relief, both with GASI colleagues and others, to sense that the history is familiar to them and that they don’t feel personal guilt or that I might hold my parents’ circumstances against them, which I certainly don’t. It was now my turn to ask C about his family. He was as open to telling me as he had been listening (and to amending the draft I sent him)……

…..C’s parents’ families were different. They were Germans who had before and during the war been living in the Sudetenland, a part of what is now the Czech Republic. His father’s family, he said frankly, were German nationalists and Nazis. At some point, his paternal grandfather left politics and joined the Wehrmacht. He was an antisemite until he died. C’s father, who was in the Hitler youth and a kind of child soldier, came to England a middle-aged man where he re-married and lived for nearly thirty years. Hence C’s excellent English, practised during his frequent visits to the UK. C interprets his father’s move to England as a kind of endpoint to his family’s war-stories. C’s maternal grandparents were different again, fluent also in Czech, suspicious about Hitler, with Jewish friends. After the war, the Czechs expelled the Sudeten-Germans and Graz, Austria, was a more attractive proposition than communist East Germany, being under English occupation (until 1955). C’s grandparents and parents then, were also refugees. C was born and lives with his family in Graz.

There we were then, in the forest, the descendents of these enemies of eighty or so years ago, exchanging tales of war, exile and survival. We went on now, to speak of our own lives and how we had found Group Analysis. Both our routes had been pretty circuitous and somewhat accidental although with hindsight Group Analysis was the logical – happy – landing place.

And what of our finding our way in these woods? Without a policy or discussion we landed on taking it in turns to decide, whenever we came to a fork in the road, which path to follow. My original plan had been to walk for about an hour, go for a swim and then find the others to order a takeaway but I was not wed to it. C was more laid back – no plan, in the moment. It was infectious and besides, our conversation was equally – more – important. Blow me if we didn’t end up at our bikes just over an hour since we’d left them. All of that hour was liberating, celebrated by a swim in a pool all to myself and pizzas shared, C and I and the others.