AN HISTORICAL EPISODE
Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador, Sunday, 19 October 2008

I have been friends with Lenora Ucko for many years since we met while she was living and teaching in Munich, Germany, back in the early 1970s. Subsequently, she went on to teach at various colleges and technical schools in the U.S.A. She has retired from fulltime teaching and research in Anthropology now, but is very active in StoriesWork (www.storieswork.org).

Henry Ucko, her deceased husband, had been a rabbi in Durham, NC. It was there that I have visited her from time to time over the past few years. Kathleen and I in fact did a song recital in Durham while we were staying with Lenora in 2000. As a thank you for the recital, Lenora gave me a bound copy of songs, which had belonged to her husband’s younger brother, Bernhard Ucko.

Henry Ucko’s father was a rabbi in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, once the home of philosopher Emanuel Kant. For centuries it was German, but has been part of Poland since the end of World War II. Henry Ucko, by the time the war came along, had lived and worked in Berlin before becoming a rabbi in his home city. He left it pretty late, but in November 1939 when shortly after the war broke out, he secured passage on a Dutch ship bound for England. Unfortunately, this ship was either torpedoed or collided with a magnetic mine at night and sank in the English Channel. One hundred passengers died. Eventually, Henry, along with other survivors, covered in diesel fuel and oil and clinging to the lifeboats into which they could not climb unaided, were picked up by a British warship and brought to England. He was wearing only a borrowed matelote’s uniform and wrapped in a blanket. Everything he owned went to the bottom.

The British would not allow foreign aliens to stay on; so eventually he found another Dutch ship that carried him and other refugees to The Dominican Republic, where he arrived in early 1940. He set up a synagogue there, but after the War he made it to the U.S.A. and eventually to Durham, North Carolina, where he established a new congregation before finally retiring there.

No other member of Henry Ucko’s family survived the holocaust. But, I want to tell you the story of Henry’s younger brother, Bernhard. He was an opera singer and had settled in Amsterdam to study and perform. There he met and became engaged to a local girl. When the Nazis occupied The Netherlands in 1940, she and her family hid Bernhard in their house. But, after several visits from the Gestapo or the local police, Bernhard became so afraid for the family’s safety that he decided to give himself up and hope for the best. He was taken never heard from again.

Many years after the War, Rabbi Henry Ucko visited his brother’s fiancee in Holland. She had after the War eventually married and raised a family. Over all the years, however, she had kept Bernhard Ucko’s scores and sheet music. She gave them to Henry, the only tangible artefact of his brother’s life. Many years later, Lenora offered me a bound copy of a Brahms Lieder Album. The linen cover shows sign of age and the colour has gone out of it unevenly. On the marbled inside page of front cover, however, is handwritten in ink, “B. Ucko” in a somewhat Gothic and angular German script. I hope perhaps to do one or two of the songs in the recital in Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador, on 11 November.