Pam Zinnemann-Hope will be at The Book Shop in South Street Bridport from 10a.m. to 12 noon on Saturday 28 July to sign copies of her first full-length poetry collection, “On Cigarette Papers”
Pam grew up in Leeds with her family, and was aware that her parents had come from Germany and that there were aspects of their history that they never talked about. But it wasn’t until her mother died in 1990 that Pam discovered the details of a love story and a family betrayal that had forced them to crisscross Europe, in and out of prisons and prison camps, and finally settling in northern England and establishing a family and a circle of friends that nourished her own childhood. Pam, married to composer Peter Hope and living in Toller Porcorum, opened a box left by her mother and saw a pile of cigarette papers, each written in pencil, most in Russian, a few in German, some on both sides, and all carrying recipes. These were the mementos her mother had collected during her imprisonment in Russia, and kept for the rest of her life. The discovery inspired a journey back through the terrifying, heart-warming and sometimes almost incredible story of the obstacles her parents had to overcome to be together.
Pain’s father Kurt was an eminent bacteriologist, a Jewish intellectual working in a university hospital in Frankfurt. His assistant was Irena, (“Lottie” in the book) a young girl from Naumburg, and before long they fell in love. When she announced she was marrying Kurt, her father, a staunchly anti-Semitic Prussian, told her he would rather see her dead than married to a Jew. The couple planned to elope to the Ukraine, but Irena’s father contacted his friend Goering and told him of their flight. Guards were sent to the border, but they had already crossed.
For a time, from their arrival in 1934, life was happy. Kurt worked in the university in Kharkov, Ukraine, and they even enjoyed a holiday in the Crimea. But in 1937 they were arrested as part of Stalin’s purges and sent, separately, to prison in Kiev. For nine months neither knew the other’s location, but in fact they were in two wings of the same prison. Hitler did a deal with Stalin to get his scientists back and later Kurt and Irena were able to travel to England, where they arrived in May 1938.With existing contacts to a professor in Leeds, Kurt was quickly working again. He had never been a Zionist, and declared himself to be a scientist and not religious. A year later war was declared, and Irena and Kurt were arrested and taken to the Isle of Man, again kept in separate internment camps and without contact.
Perhaps the most dreadful thing about that period, which lasted another nine months, was that all Germans living in England were interned together. Some were Nazi sympathisers, others Jews and members of minority group who had fled the Nazi tide.In February 1940, after a vigorous campaign by British intellectuals and academics, many valued scientists were freed from the internment camps, among them Kurt and Irena Zinnemann. They returned to Leeds where they established their new lives, and Pam was born. But there was, as she remembers, a vacuum in the stories of their early lives, a place never visited in reminiscence. And Pam was aware of what she describes as “inherited trauma” – something that the discovery of the cigarette papers uncorked in a way that nothing in her earlier life had done. She determined to find out what her parents’ lives had been before their flight from Germany, and now her researches have resulted in a book of poetry, “On Cigarette Papers”.
Pam has lived in Dorset since 1986, and has been at the centre of poetry groups across the county. This is her first full-length collection.
