After the Nazis stole our family chocolate factory

It all started with a chocolate factory. One day in early 1990, my mother asked me to lunch with a distant cousin, Hilda. She had come to ask us if we had thought about reclaiming the family chocolate factory, which had been seized from us before the war and then forgotten behind the Berlin Wall.

We were amazed. I knew nothing of its existence and my mother had no idea what had become of it. My cousin went on: there were people in the property business in Germany who were buying land claims from Jews, many of whom had no proof of ownership to the homes they had left behind, and were just realising that after all these years they had a right to reclaim what had been taken from them. It was easier for many of them, often old and frail, to accept payment from a third party and let someone else take the risk. If you were Jewish reclaiming your property you got it back at the current value. If you lost your property to the communists you got it back at its value at the time you lost it. It was a complicated subject.

My childhood was not typically Jewish. My family observed the high holidays – Passover, Rosh Hashanah – as well as Christmas and Easter, which was celebrated with a chocolate egg. My brothers scraped through their bar mitzvahs at our very liberal synagogue in Knightsbridge, and I was sent to the Church of England boarding school St Mary’s Wantage, the first Jewish student they had ever had. It ended badly.

Both my parents were born in the UK. They felt the same fierce pride in being British as my grandparents felt about being German. They were proud to be Jewish but they were also invested in being friends with the smart English set. My mother proudly claimed that Princess Margaret had once eaten her chicken soup.

I have very few memories of my maternal grandfather. Kurt Lawton was born in Poland, moving to Germany as a child. He had anglicised his name from Lewandowski when he came to live in London in 1939, so it would be more “palatable” in his new country. We loved visiting him and my grandmother, Anita, at their large mansion flat in Knightsbridge overlooking Hyde Park. He allowed us to raid a dresser in the hall that was filled with boxes of chocolates. He owned a chocolate factory, the Caxton Chocolate Company.

My childhood was wrapped in chocolate. When my father married my mother, aged 19, he entered what he called “the son-in-law business” – running the factory. I was never popular at school other than at the beginning of each term when I would show up with an enormous box of chocolates, which I would use to curry favour with my classmates. At home, the cupboards were crammed with confectionery. Evenings were spent tasting new products, and I would sometimes accompany my dad on trips to industry fairs. I was the child who was literally let loose in a sweetshop.

But our family had deeper roots in the industry. My great-grandfather Hermann had originally founded a chocolate factory, Venetia , in eastern Berlin in 1921. It employed 400 people and the employees liked to call themselves the Venetians. It was a vast compound producing fine chocolate, bonbons, confectionery and marmalade. The company had a football team and an annual steamboat trip for the employees. There was a farm on the property with chickens, ducks and geese, whose produce was donated to a Jewish hospital. It sounded idyllic. But in 1933, one of the family employees, an antisemite called Willy Johannes – I believe it is necessary to name him – joined the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) and became a member of the SS. He applied to the Gestapo to take my great-grandfather Hermann to prison, and force him to sell the company.

“By 1939, my family were obliged to ‘agree’ to a forced sale”

By 1938, my German family was obliged to agree to what is known as a “forced sale” and the business was turned over to Johannes. Their home in the west of Berlin, along with their bank accounts, gold, silver, clothes, furs and jewellery, was confiscated; they were declared enemies of the state and their German citizenship revoked. By agreeing to this sale they managed to obtain all the papers necessary to get the family to England at a time when it was becoming increasingly hard to leave.

My grandfather Kurt was lucky. Maybe with an eye on what was coming, or maybe as an adjunct to his business dealings, he had been in negotiations since 1932 with the British sweet manufacturer Barratt & Co, based in north London. He entered a partnership with them and their production of chocolates started in the UK in 1938. They had to adapt the chocolate to suit English tastes, making them milder and milkier with a shot of caramel. I still have many of the letters and designs that they exchanged, all written on paper headed with an image of the famous Barratt & Co factory. As well as immediate family members, Kurt brought many of his Jewish employees with him, and they settled in Hampstead, becoming naturalised in 1946. His company name became Caxton Chocolate Company, its logo a cherub pouring chocolate over the world.

My father, who had been brought up in England – Jewish but with no religious education – had no nostalgia for Germany. Rather than pork or shellfish, the only things banned from our home were German-made goods. My parents refused to support a country that had destroyed so much and so many. He told me of a business trip he had made there with Kurt, on which he had gone to visit one of the concentration camps. Upon his return to his hotel, the smiling doorman innocently asked him if he had enjoyed his day. He punched him. He was ashamed to admit it, but he told me it was an involuntary reflex.

Dad mellowed over the years. One day, when I was 18, I looked out of the window of our home to see a snazzy dark green, two-seater Mercedes with a huge red ribbon tied around it. A gift from him to my mother – and a somewhat extreme way to start buying German goods, one could say! Maybe he had found his own path towards forgiveness. My father did not live to see a unified Germany; he died six months before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

I have admired the responsibility Germany has taken for its past, and its desire to help make amends. It was one of the reasons I felt comfortable embarking on my application to get the factory back. On a more recent trip to Berlin, I was greatly moved by the Stolpersteine, the gleaming memorial stones laid in the city’s pavements, each commemorating a victim of the Holocaust outside their last-known freely chosen residence. They exist in more than 1,200 cities and towns across Europe and Russia, but when I tried to do this for my family I discovered they are no longer being laid due to the huge demand.

We had no proof of ownership of the chocolate factory. There had been compensations paid for the loss of assets after the war. My mother called an old man, who had come to the UK with my grandparents and had managed the factory, and asked him to swear an affidavit that he had worked there. He told her that my grandfather had entrusted him with a briefcase of papers to look after. It was still unopened in his attic. To our amazement it contained all the deeds and titles to the factory along with all the legal documents showing my grandfather’s change of name and proof of British citizenship. That he had kept it all these years is both a mystery and a gift.

So my mother and I went to Berlin. We met the people who were working with Jewish land claims. They showed us an official document of confiscation issued by the Nazis. There, with a Swastika stamped at the top of it, was my family name with the words “non-Aryan” alongside. It was the document that had officially handed over the business to Johannes. The sign-off at the foot of the document was “Heil Hitler”. It felt like a hammer blow.

We were given the address of the factory, a 10-minute drive from the remains of the Berlin Wall, and also the name of one former employee’s family, who they believed still lived in the area. They only had a name, but no address, for an elusive Herr Fischer.

“One woman took my face in her hands. ‘It ends with you,’ she said”

East Berlin in 1990 was like going from a technicolour world into a black-and-white one. The only thing that looked colourful was my mother. Her backcombed blonde hair, long red acrylic nails and bright clothes made her stand out like a sore thumb. We found the factory on a long narrow street, like a scene from The Third Man. The gates were locked and a huge chain hung across them. We peered through: we could see parts of a large factory built around a courtyard, but the buildings were abandoned. We stood looking at this, once the thriving hub of a family business, confiscated by Nazis, commandeered by the communists and now sitting empty. It was hard to know what to feel.

As we stood in the street thinking, “Now what?”, a man appeared in the distance. He walked towards us, pulling a wheelie shopping trolley behind him. He approached my mother and, in German, asked if he could help us with anything. She told him we were looking for a family called Fischer. He looked at her. “I am Fischer,” he said. She replied: “We are the Lewandowski family.” It was the first time I had ever heard her speak German. He looked at her and smiled. “We have been waiting for you,” he said. Herr Fischer took us into the apartment building next to the factory where he and so many of its former employees still lived. We met the residents, many of whom remembered our family well. One woman, in her 80s, took my face in her hands: “It ends with you,” she said.

Then Herr Fischer pulled out a diary, handwritten in the large German script of the time. It recorded the history of the chocolate factory, from the time of my great-grandparents through to the takeover by the SS and then the communists. It was also filled with illustrations: painstakingly detailed images of chocolates, bonbons in pretty wrappers and pots of marmalade. There were also photographs of my family, my great-grandparents in a carriage, coloured drawings of the new Nazi proprietors in their brown shirts and black boots, and finally a photograph of my parents on their wedding day, sent over from England. I was stunned. Here, in this strange apartment in a monochrome world, was a book containing my history. I had never felt such a profound sense of connection to anything. All the English education, socialisation, assimilation, faded in comparison.

I regret that I recorded none of that day. There were no mobile phones back then. But maybe that is why the memory is so strong. As we left, Herr Fischer gave me a cocoa tin, on it a picture of the factory with its name above. It lives on the table next to my bed. I still dream of finding the diary again.

We reclaimed the factory within a year, and sold it soon after, despite some heirs of Willy Johannes – who had been killed in a bombing – trying to claim it as their own. It was a strange experience; I was very aware that despite the fact that we were coming back to take what was rightfully ours, I felt a sense of discomfort. I assumed that would be closure on a period of my family history – but then came Brexit and the question of my family origins became an issue once again.

I had never given becoming German a second thought. It was my children, who are in their 20s, who asked me to apply for citizenship as they wanted to be able to work in Europe. To be honest, I was more taken by the idea of shorter queues in airports. And so I went in search of the paperwork, but my mother had died and the papers were nowhere to be found. I had to start from scratch.

Applying for citizenship was not easy. I had to find proof of so many things, and with the contents of the briefcase lost in time I found myself re-entering a new world of fascinating research; the required documents included birth, death and marriage certificates all the way back to great-grandparents. I learned much more about my family and their stories. I was in my 20s when this all began but now, 35 years later, I feel a connection to this story that I had never previously entertained.

Once all the paperwork was found it took around two years for the citizenship to be approved. I can’t pretend that my trip to Berlin in 1990 or any of my subsequent trips to try to learn more about my history have been all that pleasurable. I have sat in churches and synagogues and listened to extraordinary music composed in the camps and difficult and brave speeches from government ministers offering apologies and hoping for a brighter, more inclusive future. I’m grateful for this, and hold no animosity, yet wherever I am in Berlin I find myself constantly wondering: “What happened on this street? What happened inside that building?” I can’t help myself. I’m always happy to leave.

Those feelings have become even more acute today. In the recent German elections, the Alternative for Germany – or AfD – party doubled its support to become the second-biggest political force in Germany’s parliament. I winced as I read of Elon Musk appearing at an AfD rally prior to the election, and his suggestion that “there is too much focus on past guilt”, apparently referring to Germany’s Nazi past.

But I liked the beautiful young female diplomat at the German embassy with pale red hair and porcelain skin who handed over the documents granting citizenship to me and my children – who, along with their descendants, will forever hold dual nationality. I felt emotional, sitting there with my kids at the end of a journey that has given us all a much keener sense of history. If having a German passport in any way gives us back the freedom to live as Europeans then I am happy about that.

I am not sentimental about being German but I think it closes the circle. When the diplomat asked what I imagined my family, now all dead, would think of this day, I thought about Kurt and Anita, and hoped they would approve. She admitted that sometimes when she asks people that question she has known them to think about it and say they can’t go on with the process.

In turn, I asked her what it had been like growing up with Germany’s history on her shoulders. “Complicated,” she said with a small smile. “There are ugly stories and SS in my family.” As we were leaving I noticed she was wearing a necklace with a word written in Hebrew. I asked her what it meant. “It’s my son’s name,” she told me.

The last time I went to Berlin was with my husband. I wanted to take him to see the chocolate factory. I gave the taxi driver the address. There was no such street; everything had been demolished to make way for the gleaming buildings of the new east. I suppose that is the nature of history.

But not all is gone. Recently, I was sent a photograph of an elegant art deco mansion in Charlottenburg – the home in which Kurt and Anita had lived with his parents before they left Germany. I was happy to see that there is still something of my family to be found in Berlin, and this summer we will, for the first time, all visit as German citizens. For me, the memory of Germany’s past is where the horror lies, and with all my heart I hope that for the next generation it is not its future they have to fear.