Truth and the Novel

It was not till late middle age that I finally found out about my family’s past. My parents had hidden it with reason. I had been aware that ours was a particularly small family, but my father had told me - and it was a legend I embraced eagerly - that he had fled Nazi Germany because of his radical theatre activities, walking his way from Berlin to France. From Paris, my parents had come to London. It was when my mother, already in her 90s, went into hospital, that I got hold of their old letters and documents. The first letters I found lying on the table in the downstairs room, as if she had wanted me to read them. Grey bits of paper, thin as tissue, all crumpled up together, all in German. And so began my adventures into the tunnel of the past.