Letters of stone

Author – Steven Robins

A powerful story about the Holocaust with a strong South African dimension.

Wide in scope: moves between the present and the 1930s, and between Europe and southern Africa.

As a young boy growing up in Port Elizabeth in the 1960s and 1970s, Steven Robins was haunted by an old postcard-size photograph of three unknown women on a table in the dining room. Only later did he learn that the women were his father’s mother and sisters, photographed in Berlin in 1937, before they were killed in the Holocaust. Steven’s father, who had fled Nazi Germany before it was too late, never spoke about the fate of his family who remained there.

Steven became obsessed with finding out what happened to the women, but had little to go on. In time he stumbled on bare facts in museums in Washington DC and Berlin, and later he discovered over a hundred letters sent to his father and uncle from the family in Berlin between 1936 and 1943.

The women who before had been unnamed faces in a photograph could now tell their story to future generations. Letters of Stone tracks Steven’s journey of discovery about the lives and fates of the Robinski family. Most of all, this book is a poignant reconstruction of a family trapped in an increasingly terrifying and deadly Nazi state, and of the immense pressure on Steven’s father in faraway South Africa, which forced him to retreat into silence.

DAS BUCH 

Letters of Stone. Die Robinskys in Berlin und Süd-Afrika

Robins’ Familie hieß früher Robinsky. Für seine ermordeten Großeltern und Tanten hat Steven Robins Stolpersteine in Kreuzberg und Mitte verlegen lassen. Am Donnerstag dieser Woche liest er aus dem Buchmanuskript „Letters of stone“ und zeigt den Trailer zu einem noch nicht fertiggestellten Dokumentarfilm. Eine besondere Tragik der Familiengeschichte liegt darin, dass ein Großonkel Robins’, der bereits Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts in das damalige Deutsch-Südwestafrika auswandert war, 1908 wahrscheinlich zum unfreiwilligen Helfer für die pseudowissenschaftliche Begründung der menschenverachtenden “rassehygienischen”

Theorien der Nazis wurde: In dem kleinen Ort Williston nordöstlich von Kapstadt half er 1908 als Bürgermeister dem Wegbereiter der nationalsozialistischen „Eugenik“, Eugen Fischer, bei dessen Untersuchungen zu „Rassenkreuzungen” an sogenannten „Bastards“. Zwischen 1927 und 1942 war Eugen Fischer Direktor des “Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituts für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehrer und Eugenik” in Berlin-Dahlem. Auch dies Geschichte dieses Instituts ist Gegenstand der Nachforschungen von Steven Robins, auf die er sich in der Veranstaltung beziehen wird.

Rights: available for international market
Publisher: PenguinRandomHouse South African
Publishing date: January 2016

Agent: Bieke van Aggelen