Why my father was abandoned and the empathy I now have for his mother
4/15/202650 min
Jane Messer grew up with a loving father who never really understood why as a child his mother left him and his older sister at a boarding school, so she decided to find out the full story and prove that he was in fact, loved.
Her father Michael was born in Berlin in the years between the two world and to escape Nazi Germany he was sent to live in England as a child.
There were a few fleeting visits but then Michael didn’t see his mother again for another 13 years and he always said she never loved him.
As Jane grew older and became a mother herself, she knew there had to be more to Bella’s story and so she went on the trail from pre-war Berlin to Tel Aviv to Melbourne, to try to understand the choices made in extraordinary circumstances.
Further informationJane Messer's family memoir is called Raven Mother
This episode of Conversation explores family history, the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, suicide, boarding school, Palestine, the Nakba, Berlin, World War 2, immigration, the British Mandated Palestine, memoir.
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First 90 secondsJane Messer· Guest0:00
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Richard Fidler· Host0:05
This is one of those great big gigantic family stories today. I'm with Jane Messer. Jane is an author. She grew up in Australia in a nice suburb with a loving father, but Jane always knew her dad had been wounded by his childhood. Jane's dad, Michael, had been born in Berlin. This is Berlin in the wild years between the two world wars. The family had been well-to-do. There was plenty of theater, movies, dinners, laughter, and wild parties. But when Jane's dad was eight years old, his mother, Bella, brought him and his older sister to England to a boarding school, and then she left them there. There were a few fleeting visits, but Jane's dad didn't see his mother again for another thirteen years. Michael always called Bella die Rabenmutter, a raven mother, which is an old German expression for a mother who cruelly abandons her children. He always told Jane, "She never loved me." Jane never knew her grandmother, Bella, so she didn't really have anything to go on. But as Jane grew older and had kids of her own, she knew that there had to be so much more to Bella's story. And so Jane went on the trail of her