Red Trees

There is a painting by Paul Klee.

It is called "Angelus Novus."

It's an angel who seems about to move away

from something he stares at.

His eyes are wide, his mouth is open,

his wings are spread.

This is how the angel of history must look.

His face is turned to the past,

where a chain of events appears.

He sees a catastrophe,

which keeps piling wreckage at his feet.

The angel would like to stay and awaken the dead,

but the storm is blowing from paradise

which drives him into the future

to which his back is turned,

while the pile of debris before him,

grows towards the sky.

What we call progress is this storm.

Walter Benjamin.

My father was born in Vienna.

His father was a German-speaking Jew,

born in the Austria-Hungarian empire

on what was then, the border with Poland.

His mother was Hungarian.

My mother was born in Germany,

daughter of a German father from Alsace,

which today lies in France,

and a German mother from Pomerania,

which now belongs to Poland.

For so many years

I've wanted to tell the story of my father and his father.

How both of them were forced out of Europe

for their Jewish origins,

and ended up on the other side of the world.

How they became migrants.

As I retraced the journey of my father

and his parents,

I am humbled by what they had to go through

just to stay alive.

Just to keep going day after day.

František Josef Factory Czech Republic

I was born on the 5th of April 1930,

in Pilsen, today in the Czech Republic,

in a city known for its beer and its cola factory.

At home, I spoke German.

At school, I spoke Czech.

My father is a child.

Other children in the neighborhood

throw stones at him and call him "Jew".

In the face of stones, he walks to school.

He studies. He grows.

At the age of 20, to finance his studies,

and to help my grandmother, Theresa,

my father becomes private tutor to Victor,

son of Jewish entrepreneur, Otto Petschek.

At the Petschek family mansion,

my father meets my mother, Charlotte,

the governess of the children of another Jewish family, the Epsteins.

The Petschek family own a bank

in the center of Prague

and the Johann David Starck chemical factory

in the town of Kaznějov, near the border with Germany,

where my father secures his first job.

In Kaznějov, we speak German in our own circle

and Czech, when dealing with merchants,

public servants or workers.

A relic of old class divisions in which the Germans

regarded themselves as superior to the Czechs.

My father is one of the inventors of

the scientific formula for citric acid.

A harmless additive

used in the manufacture of drinks

to create the scent and flavor of lemons,

also the most efficient food preservative at the time.

I remember the workshop with its lathes

spinning countless machine parts,

the thunder of electric motors

as they drive leather transmission belts

across a blackened ceiling.

I remember, in all this activity,

an oasis of tranquility,

natural light, white walls, order.

Back then, Czechoslovakia was this incredible flowering

of modernity and optimism.

Prague had a booming economy and vibrant cultural life.

Concert halls were filled to capacity.

This was a beautiful, young model of democracy

for the whole of Europe,

born out of the First World War

and about to be strangled by the Second.

Poldi Steel Factory Czech Republic

I grew up in Brazil, in a military dictatorship.

I guess when you grow up under a military regime,

you learn early on in life to take a point of view.

If you reject injustice, you must oppose the regime.

And so, like so many others of my generation, I did that.

And that sentiment stays with you

for the rest of your life.

Years later, I moved to study in London

and I myself became a migrant.

For my father's 75th birthday,

me and my brother, Marcelo, brought him back

to the little town of Kaznějov in Czech Republic.

It was his first visit there for so many years.

We wanted to understand where he had come from.

Here is what was left over

from the building where we used to live.

This is the window of our kitchen

which led to the back of a factory

of glue made of bones.

Over there was my room

and after that, the dining room.

Here was Opa's studio

which was also the living room

in this window here.

It was the nicest place in the apartment.

It had really nice furniture made of natural wood

with a bookcase...

It was a very pleasant place to be.

This was the home where he once lived

and the factory where his father worked.

Everything still stood,

but was barely operational.

We were received by the factory's directors like royalty.

The family of the inventor of the citric acid formula.

Today, all of it is gone.

We travel on to Pilsen and to Prague.

Everywhere we go, my father tells us,

"This person was taken to a concentration camp,

this person was shot,

this person was murdered,

this one committed suicide."

All of those, close friends.

All this, my father witnessed while still a child.

All of this, he never mentioned before.

Suddenly it hits me,

this is a side of my father I had never seen before.

I always thought that my father

was a bit disconnected

from the brutalities of the world.

Those who lived through the horror

of The Second World War,

those who survived

have had to live with a great sadness.

Perhaps the only way to do that,

is to shut the sadness deep inside you.

I learned from my dad and my mum

the habit of making things, creating things.

It comes from his way of seeing the world.

Creativity is a way of living and looking at everything.

He brought all those habits with him

from his homeland in his suitcase.

The knowledge of other cultures,

other talents, other lands.

My father likes to say that for him, work is not a job.

Work and life are one.

It's a joy.

Pentagram Design

When I was little, I used to ask my dad,

"How ugly is this?"

"How beautiful is that?"

My dad instigated in us,

a love for design, art, history,

and almost an obsession with architecture.

Drawing is an idiom we all share.

My brother became an architect and I became a designer.

I remember in Kaznějov,

I gazed from my window on a view of wheat fields

framed by a forest of pines.

A fire blazes in the forest.

Later, I draw the scene in colored pencil.

I select the color red for my trees

and reveal, for the first time,

that I'm color-blind.

I remember a street, lined with chestnut trees.

In spring, the trees are heavy with beautiful flowers

in the shape of candelabra.

In the summer, we make ice cream

with wild strawberries or raspberries

picked from nearby woods.

In autumn, the spiky fruit of the chestnut tree

contains a shiny brown nut.

In winter, we visit relatives in Berlin.

At the zoo, I pose for a photograph with a lion cub.

It scratches my knee and tears a hole in my sock.

There are machines which, in exchange for a coin,

will dispense candies or a chocolate bar.

A Mr. Hitler is in power,

but it's the vending machines I recall.

Our family friends, the Bienenfelds,

have a daughter my own age.

Lisa is sweet and kind,

and before long we are walking arm in arm.

We don't hide this romance from our parents,

who think it adorable.

Annoyed at this reaction,

Lisa and I, soon part.

In the Early '40s,

we moved from Kaznějov to Prague

because my father lost his job in Kaznějov.