Andrew Ranicki on his parents and his upbringing

Andrew Ranicki was interviewed by Andrea von Treuenfeld and gave a description of his parents and his upbringing. His interview was published in Erben des Holocaust: Leben zwischen Schweigen und Erinnerung (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2017), 45-55. He gave the interview in German but we give an English version below.

Professor Dr Andrew Ranicki

In April 1958, there was a big celebration in Warsaw marking the 15th anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising. I sat with the neighbours' children in front of the television and watched the report. I was nine at the time and had long known that my parents had been in the ghetto. I also knew what a ghetto was. It was where the Jews had been herded together. Simple as that. My mother once took me to that area when we went to the Jewish cemetery. Her father had committed suicide in 1940. He had been given another grave, but she couldn't find it. Everything was destroyed and neglected. On our way there, she showed me a street and said: "I walked down it and saw the ghetto burning." In 1943, there was about a month when my mother was underground, trying to make ends meet as a Polish maid. She was able to move around Warsaw more or less freely. My father simply looked too dark and too Jewish; he had to hide somewhere during the day.

So I knew early on that the burning of the ghetto referred to the uprising. But my parents were very careful. They didn't tell me everything at once. The older I got, the more they told me. When I was ten or eleven, my mother showed me her impressive drawings from the ghetto, which later became very famous. My parents had already explained to me what we know about the history. They may have kept the personal details from me. It was only from my father's biography that I learned a lot that was new to me.

I was born in London, but in 1949 my parents returned with me to Warsaw, and we stayed there until 1958. I'm sure my classmates' parents knew my family was Jewish, but they kept quiet. I didn't have any bad experiences in Poland because of it. In the early 1950s, anti-Semitism wasn't an issue; that came later. I'm very grateful to my parents that we left early.

My mother didn't want me to emigrate. She had never lived in Germany and she absolutely didn't want to go there. Completely normal. But she overcame it. Firstly, for the sake of my father and the opportunities he had - he had this enormous interest in German literature that no one else in Poland had - and secondly, for my sake. If we had stayed in Poland, we would have had to leave ten years later anyway. I would have been 18 or 19 then, which is a big difference. But then, when we were in Germany, she didn't want me to go to a German school, so I went to the International School in Hamburg.

The Holocaust was not discussed there. Because every child was of a different nationality, you had to be very careful. I think modern history was not taught at all; this topic was left out, even in German schools. Until the early 1960s, Hamburg suffered enormous fire damage from the bombings, and that wasn't discussed either. All topics related to the war were left out. It wasn't just about Jews or the Holocaust, it was a total silence.

Not at home, though! My father always talked a lot and liked to talk; he was a great storyteller. But they were more anecdotes, little about the family. There was another sister in London, Gerda, who ran like Wozzeck through the world. A very dangerous woman! She had my father's temperament, but not his gifts.

He rarely spoke about his parents. Even as a child, I never asked why I didn't have grandparents. At my school, all the children were of emigrants, children of foreigners who also had no grandparents at home. And I had very little contact with Germans, had no hobbies, wasn't in any sports club. However, we also had precious little to do with the Jewish community.

We lived in Hamburg because my father worked for the newspaper "ZEIT". But it didn't help him at all that he lived there. He was excluded from society and from the editorial staff. They already knew he was talented. Everyone knew that. But they thought he was a troublemaker in editorial meetings. Which wasn't entirely wrong, I must admit: he never kept silent. But this exclusion affected him deeply. In Warsaw, he had been a member of the Writers' Association, where my parents had a large circle of friends. Suddenly, that was no longer the case. They both felt quite unhappy, especially my father. He worked at home and relied on the telephone. He was a master of telephone conversation and had many telephone friendships. Although he was ostracised in Hamburg, there was one person who got along very well with my parents: Siegfried Lenz. My father thanked him for this by not writing, or rather, by writing very beautifully about one of his last books much later. He didn't want to jeopardise the friendship.

It was difficult for my mother to be in Germany, although she spoke wonderful German. Although she grew up in Poland, she attended a German school until she was eleven. Until that school became too Nazi-friendly. Then she asked her mother if she could go to a Polish school. She was very gifted with languages and loved going to the cinema. During that time, everything was in the original language, and that's how she learned foreign languages. Even in the last week of her life, when she was already very weak and dying, she was able to speak to my father and me in Polish, to the carers in German, and to my wife and daughter in English.

But at the beginning, it was difficult for her in Germany. She had already become ill in Poland; to fall asleep, she needed very strong sleeping pills. She had nightmares, which my father didn't have. He coped with it through work and duty, Prussian virtues. And he had much more of an opportunity to approach people. It's not as if he didn't care about anything, but he had this strength that we know, for which he was valued and feared. The latter, however, didn't bother him at all, that was a triumph for him; he enjoyed it. He defeated Hitler, so to speak, as Sebastian Haffner noted. His biography was called "My Life" like "My Struggle" - and that was no coincidence.

My parents experienced the persecution together. My father told me several times that my mother almost perished because of it - both mentally and physically. He had a strong will by nature anyway, but his enormous assertiveness was certainly also shaped by his wartime life. When the two of them talked about that time, it was always very serious. Even the lighthearted episodes were serious. It was clear that it wasn't funny, not funny at all.

When we were in a bar, my father made sure he sat with his back to the wall, that was a given. He also shaved twice a day because he believed that if you looked better, you might have a better chance of survival. It always annoyed him that I wasn't dressed properly. I only understood why when I read in the biography that if you wore good clothes, you wanted to do something to have a better chance of survival. Maybe that was even true. But in the end, it was all about luck. It was coincidence, he always said. That my parents survived was a series of coincidences. And they were young; their parents didn't have the chance. The two of them were more adventurous. That's normal, but in this case, adventurousness was life.

As my parents grew older, there was a lot on television about the Nazi era. It was interesting that my mother always wanted to watch the programmes, but my father didn't. My mother never got over it; she never processed it until her death. In her last weeks, I asked her several times: "Does anything hurt?" "Just my soul," she said. She was a very clever but very wounded woman. When she was working in the foreign department at Polish Radio in 1953/54, a visitor came who wanted to go to Auschwitz. My mother went with him but that was a mistake; she came back completely distraught.

My father never visited any concentration camps, nor the Warsaw Ghetto. He complained to me for not asking him about the ghetto. But he didn't understand that whenever he talked, I listened very carefully. Maybe I should have asked more questions. But no, I don't think so. It was too dangerous if you asked the wrong question. "What was it like in the ghetto?" That doesn't work. I was already hesitant; it was too difficult a subject for me, but maybe not for him.

We never returned to Poland. There was a certain shyness, especially on my parents' part. It wasn't anti-Polish, not at all. When old acquaintances from Poland came, they were very hospitable. But my mother didn't want to return to Poland from London in 1949 because, as she said, it was just a huge cemetery. My father, on the other hand, thought it was his duty. He had enlisted in the Polish foreign intelligence service, and if they called him back, he said, he would have to do what was expected of him. This German side, this German virtue! If he had gone to Germany instead, he, who had graduated from high school in Berlin and was a passionate German expert, would have immediately received a scholarship to a university. But then he would certainly have become a professor and not pursued a career as a critic. This path wasn't always easy for my mother. But it was worth it; they celebrated great successes, his successes. And she always wanted to be with him; they depended on each other. The shared Holocaust experience bonded them together.

At the end of his life, my father also spoke about his parents. He reproached himself for perhaps not having done more to save them. They died in Treblinka. Two years ago, someone who had studied the family history sent me the exact details of which train they were on. It was pretty terrible when I saw that in front of me. I don't remember what I thought at that moment. I only know that it was traumatic for my father and mother back then to accompany his parents and her mother to the trains. My father described it in his biography, how he still saw his mother in her light-coloured coat from the KaDeWe.

Twelve years after the book was published, in 2012, he was invited to give the speech in the Bundestag on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January. Actually, it would have been better if he had been invited five years earlier. My mother would have still been alive then. He was too old to write a new speech at the time so I recommended that he simply read this chapter from the biography. This testimony was enough anyway: it had a profound impact.

My parents had an enormous sphere of influence. But there are thousands of descendants whose parents didn't have the opportunity to convey their war experiences. It must be difficult for them: the parents were devastated, they suffered, and the children didn't find out, or only found out later. At least with my father, I was lucky that he came forward and talked. He wanted to see this thing through to its conclusion himself and not have me continue it in his name. I shouldn't break a lance for him. He could break his own lance.

I didn't marry a Jew, which my parents didn't care about, but for once they were too posh to tell me. She couldn't speak German or Polish, and that certainly played a role. My father always had difficulties with my daughter too; he wanted her to be a very good student. She was, by the way, but never quite enough for him! He always wanted this great success for us. Some time ago, I was in Berlin for the first time in the building of the Wannsee Conference. There's a large permanent exhibition there, including quotes like: "We didn't survive Auschwitz for you to only come second." That also applied to my father. He always hoped that I would be as famous as he was.

I like to tell the following story. I have a friend, a German mathematician, who wanted to meet my father. He came, and when I briefly left the room, my father immediately jumped at the chance. He asked him how good a mathematician I was. "Of course, I only said good things about you, but your father seemed dissatisfied. What did he want from me?" he asked me afterwards. I told him: "Actually, just a comparison to Einstein."

There was something to my father's pressure to perform - for himself and for me too. He always wanted me to do more, to be better. "When will you get the next prize?" He thought that if you showed more commitment, that would be enough to become a better mathematician. But you also had to have the talent. I'm not untalented, but I do it out of love for mathematics, not for love of prizes. What he had, the great love for something very specific and extraordinary, I certainly inherited from him. For him, it was literature; for me, it's mathematics. I have another cousin in England, Frank Auerbach, who is a very famous painter. He has the same thing. He's in the studio every day. The three of us have completely different areas, but the same attitude: there is something greater than oneself. Perhaps that's why I never felt my family's history was a burden. It was what it was; I have no problem with it. It's more of an obligation than a burden. The obligation to understand other people and to help them.

I told my daughter everything, in an age-appropriate manner. She didn't ask my parents directly. She spoke German; we lived in Göttingen for a year, and she went to school there, but she was somewhat shy about speaking German with my father - that personality! That said, he wasn't particularly good with children. There was no problem at all with my mother, but she didn't ask my daughter either. However, she was there when we went to Frankfurt in 1999 to see the exhibition of my mother's paintings. Today, these paintings - watercolours depicting everyday life in the ghetto - are on permanent loan to the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.

The fact that her pictures were shown was a triumph for my mother. Firstly, everyone was naturally very nice to her. Secondly, she must have always suffered a little because my father was always in the foreground, and now she could be at the front for once. And her pictures are really good. The paints for them were stolen from a German office or from the black market; you couldn't just go to a shop in Warsaw and buy them. And if a German had seen these pictures, it would have been tantamount to the death penalty. So it was really dangerous for her. She had an aunt who lived outside the ghetto because she didn't look Jewish. She smuggled the pictures out and offered to print them for her, and to get them out with false papers too. She could have left, but not with my father. She stayed with him. My mother was a strong personality. After the war, she tried to go to art school. But she could no longer paint; she was emotionally broken.

My father knew very well what stumbling blocks were, but it never occurred to him to apply for them for his parents. He had the same attitude towards the Holocaust memorial in Berlin: that was something the Germans should do, not Jews. I said that was true for him, of course. But not for me. I had stumbling blocks laid for his parents at Güntzelstrasse 53 in Berlin. I didn't do it instead of my father, but for myself, for my daughter and her (then unborn) son. And the city placed a plaque on the house a year after his death.

Until after the war, my father's name was Marcel Reich. When he was drafted into Polish service, they said: "Now you're no longer allowed to use the German-sounding name Reich; it's not so good." He suggested Ranicki because he wanted to keep the initials. When he went to Germany in 1958, he called himself Reich again, but didn't want to drop Ranicki because he had published many articles and a few books in Poland during the 1950s. That was his calling card, so to speak.

He left it up to me whether I chose Ranicki or Reich-Ranicki. Two foreign names were simply too much, because I already knew at the time that I would stay in Britain. Perhaps that was the influence of my parents. These war experiences marked me in such a way that they wanted to protect me. I'm sure it was no coincidence that I was born in England. My mother didn't want to and couldn't get pregnant in Poland. For her, England was safer. Not that my parents were afraid in Germany. But they thought it would be better for me not to live there. Today, I enjoy visiting Germany very much; I have both British and German citizenship. But I have no desire to live here.

Last Updated September 2025