8th August 2021

 Yesterday my daughter said had I written anything on my blog.  It reminded me of Paul asking the same question, "have you written anything sweetheart" and when questioned why he wanted to know, he  once replied 'because I will know what you are thinking'  So what to write on my blog as the Bike Shed reminds us we need to note the blogs we are thinking too write, sorting through them and discarding on the way. 

Well to day it will be about Leni, I mentioned in my last blog.  She was Jewish and lived to be a 102 years old.  She lived in a small Swiss house near to the train Halt underneath the Chateau de Blonay.  You went down a little unmade track and her house and garden greeted you, one of her friends lived further down.  I have a fading photograph of my daughter and her standing under a large sunflower. Also of going to tea with those delicious Swiss cakes you could buy, and of course the fruit tarts which we would buy on Sunday for dessert.

She lived through the whole of the 20th century, two World Wars and escaped the terrible fate which befell some of her family in the concentration camps.  My granddaughter Matilda found an online Google book written by Leni's nephew and in it he gives a paragraph of her life.

"My father's youngest sister Leni was a free spirit and wanted to be a ballerina but Opa did not think this was a good life for an upper class Jewish aristocrat.  Leni left home anyway and became a dancer with the Hamburg Stadt Oper, during her time there she met and married a British Petroleum oilman and moved to Isfahan, just before the war, becoming a Christian and a British Citizen, and a translator from the German into Persian and English of messages intercepted by the British Foreign Service.  She worked out of the British Ambassador's office in Teheran.  After the war she taught at the Laban Art of Movement Guild in London and retired to Switzerland, where she passed away at 102 years of age.  After her death, The British Foreign Office recognized her war time service on behalf of the allied cause."

Ref;  The Meyerowitz Family from Konigsberg: Contemporaries of Hans-Joachim Schoeps.

And there she is on the right, 50 years ago at my daughter's christening in Switzerland.  It was done at 'grandpa's church' down in Territet.  It obviously wasn't his church, but the English church there where he was a church warden.  There was also an English church in Vevey to serve the people who worked at Nestle and all those rich retirees who took to the slopes of the Les Pleiades mountain.

From the left is Florine a friend from America and a godmother and in the middle my daughter's granny.