The Passing of a Special Person

On Saturday 16 May, 91 years old, our Alumna Traute Morgenstern left us. A graduate in Foreign Languages and Literature in the immediate post-war period, Ms. Morgenstern has always worked in Milan, in a professional studio specialized in translations of technical documents and patents. 

Born in Vienna, in January 1929, to a bourgeois Jewish family, Ms. Morgenstern was a direct witness of events that not everyone knows. In the years of the start of the Jewish persecutions, she was a child and lived with her father, mother and little brother Peter, younger by two years. 

Immediately after the dramatic events of November 10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, Traute's parents understood, unlike many others, that Nazism would not spare them. With great lucidity, despair and an act of immense courage, in early December 1938 the two siblings, Traute and Peter, 9 and 7 years old, were put by their parents on a train that left Vienna for the port of Rotterdam, where a Red Cross ship would take them, along with 600 other boys and girls of the same age, to England. It was the first in a series of transports, called Kindertransport, initially authorized by the Nazi government, thanks to a law passed in November 1938 by the English Parliament which allowed the immigration of Jewish children up to the age of 17, with no number limit. This allowed about ten thousand children to abandon Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia, and save themselves from the Holocaust that would tragically follow. 

Traute and Peter left having only a tag on their neck with their name and an identification number and, as immortalized by a photo (then used for the cover of a book on this little known page of the terrible history of anti-Semitism) in which one of them is held by the hand of an English Bobby on their arrival in London, a miniscule suitcase with their few belongings.  

Their parents were forced to say goodbye to them at the Vienna station, without knowing if they would survive and if they would ever hear from their children again. 

Traute and Peter were placed, together with one of their schoolmates and the other 600 children in a dormitory where they stayed for six months and where the members of some generous wealthy Jewish families, called "Guardians", or guardians, took them to their homes. to host them. None of them spoke English and they were not aware of what happened in their country, so it is easy to imagine their sense of abandonment and loneliness, which strengthened the bond between the two brothers. However, it happened that Traute and Peter were separated, hosted by two different families, so during the first years of their stay in England they could see each other only during a few holidays. 

Traute and Peter were welcomed by wealthy families, although not all the children were so lucky. Traute and 20 other children were taken in by generous Jewish families who lived in Kentish Town in London, not surprisingly called "The Even". Their names were Anglicized: from Traute and Peter Morgenstern into Truda and Peter Morgan. Peter, who left his family at 7 years old, 8 years after his departure barely remembered his natural parents. He  decided to stay with his foster family in London after the war and kept the name of Peter Morgan, had many children and grandchildren , who were very close to their Italianized aunt. 

In 1942, foreseeing the imminent start of the bombing of London, the British government asked families to evacuate children. For the second time, Traute had to abandon the new family, bringing with her a few things, a gas mask and an emergency kit. She was transferred to a St Albans family, who however was unable or unwilling to take care of her. So, despite this sad predicament, she was lucky enough to be able to reunite with her brother Peter and together they were "displaced" to the Isle of Wight, at least until the bombing also arrived there. Once again they were separated, but after another year spent in Cornwall, Traute was welcomed by a family in Marlow who lived very close to that of little Peter. They attended the same local school, Whycombe School, which remembered her on Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27), among the donor alumni. 

Meanwhile Traute's parents were forced, within two hours, to leave their home and all their belongings and move to the Vienna Ghetto. Unlike others (Traute's relatives and acquaintances were largely deported to the Nazi camps and almost all of them perished), they decided to try to save themselves. The only frontier opened in Austria was with Italy, an allied nation, so the Signori Morgenstern  came to Milan. The first year was very hard, with little money and without knowing the language. Following the intensification of racial laws, the father was interned in a fascist labor camp in Teramo, while the mother, believed to be a Catholic, remained in Milan. After September 8, 1943, when the Germans took control in Italy, four Jewish internees, including Traute's father, successfully devised escape from the Camp. Once again he had sensed what happened: the prisoners, once gathered up, would be sent to the extermination camps in Germany and Poland. Traute's father, with makeshift means, instead reached his wife in Milan and there, thanks to the generosity and courage of a priest who had already protected his mother, the two spouses were kept hidden until the Liberation. 

In 1945, the Municipality of Milan gave the family, who never wanted to return to Vienna and who was always grateful for the welcome and generosity of the Italians, a small two-room apartment, where the Morgensterns began the reconstruction of the their lives. 

In 1945, at the end of the war, Traute could have returned to Italy and reunited with her family. But still, the desire to build a future based on a qualification and the knowledge acquired led her, with uncommon rationality in a child of her age, to remain in England until 1947. At 18 years old, with a diploma and perfect knowledge of German and English, she decided to return to her parents who managed to survive and lived in Milan. Even without knowing a word of Italian, she decided to enroll at the University: first at the Faculty of Mathematics, where the lack of knowledge of the language proved to be an insurmountable obstacle, and then at the Faculty of Languages (knowing German and English well) of Bocconi, making a friendship unrivaled in terms of duration and depth with my mother, who attended the same Faculty. Since then Traute has always lived in Milan, where she has worked and worked incessantly for others, with unparalleled generosity and confidentiality. In June 1998, Ms. Traute Morgenstern found herself in London with 1,000 other "ex-children" who survived, in an event dedicated to the memory of a unique story that saw them protagonists. Among them professors, engineers, doctors, a Nobel prize winner and ordinary people, coming from all over the world and united by their incredible history. On that occasion, the thousand made a formal request to the Oxford English Dictionary to insert the word Kindertransport into its subsequent edition. 

With these short and perhaps inaccurate lines, taken from the rare stories of Mrs. Morgenstern, I want to remember a special person, alumna of our University, certainly less known than many others, but who with her story conveys to everyone, and in particular to young people, a message that must not be lost: so that you will ever forget! 

by A grateful alumnus