It may at first seem strange to count one's mother as one of life's encounters. I can only choose the same riposte that she herself did when, for want of a birth certificate for me, she was called on to sign an an affidavit testing the date of my birth; the-section 'Reason for knowing' was completed simply with 'Present at birth'.

In addition to the deep respect that I bore her as a person, there is also a darker and sadder reason for this sense of distance. We had difficulties throughout our lives in fully understanding each other, in fully synchronising our sentiments and purposes and in reaching that closeness of Mother and Son which should have been her due. Much of this distance was due to the times, which determined the parallel life she was called upon to lead. For her, the Nazi threat began to loom before I was five, became palpable three years later when Hitler seized power. It was a time of drawing into oneself, of secrets and of becoming invisible. That withdrawal coincided with the onset of my Father's condition, which shortly afterwards was declared inoperable and terminal. That, too, needed to be kept from the children for as long as possible, especially in all its anxious detail, including the commuting between home and the specialist hospital some 50 miles East of Berlin. Sensitive to all these veils and secret compartments, a child may easily feel shut off from its closest family. Yet despite this sinister background, Mutti contrived to leave me with the most golden memories of my childhood in Babelsberg, described in all its glory and innocence at the beginning of this chronicle.

Nor did the secrecy end there, for then came the preparations for my migration to England, Whitgift and the welcoming Leech family. Except for the visits of Major Leech to Babelsberg, all the logistics had also to be organised behind hermetically closed doors. Friends, neighbours, postmen who brought the mail, and especially children - no one could be relied

upon not to reveal one's secrets prematurely through some incautious remark. All this had already twisted our relationship well before our journey to London signalled our physical separation. The reality of what that separation would mean for her, the pogroms, the rounding up of Jews and the extermination camps, all that remained carefully veiled from my consciousness, until long after Florence Leech made the call that saved her life, days before the parting was due to become absolute.

Even now, I can realise only most dimly what effect this elaborate secrecy and dissembling must have wrought on Mutti. Bad enough the growing social isolation, the sensation of becoming a hunted animal, the struggle to survive economically, the suffering and loss of a cherished husband, the impending parting from all she held dear - all these experiences in themselves will have been intolerable to bear; but the added destruction of her trust and relationship with her children must have added a Promethean dimension of pain and travail. For this alone, Mutti was one of the many great and unrecorded heroines of those dies irae, the days of wrath. She is and remains an integral part of this the story of my life, so integral that there is no clearly defined place for this tribute to her. Yet it patently belongs in the Pantheon of the really great souls it has been my fortune to encounter. Her lifelong admiration for the role of women, particularly in public life, will make her happy to find herself meritoriously in this section lauding Mira Behn and Elsa Conci, plainly the most important and inspired female figures in all this chronicle.

Not long after coming to London, Mutti met Vera Brittain, author of two important books of record of the Great War, Testament of Youth and its sequel, Testament of Friendship. Carved from the same root, the two women developed a firm friendship. This eventually embraced also Vera's like-minded daughter Shirley Williams, who became a founder of the Social Democratic Party and then Leader of the Liberal Democrats. As a member of the International PEN Club, Mutti gathered around herself a number of similarly minded literary and political figures who proved important thinkers and commentators on postwar political development, including in the United States. Mutti's own writings, particularly her poetry volume For Tomorrow and the underlying ethic of The Enchanted Fountain, a set of unsent letters to Finette, fitted well into this ethos of providing the practical and personal foundations for a Nie wieder political construct. Through her companionship with Vali Springer and her son Albert who lived in Tel Aviv, she was also able to observe the movement he founded for a Council of Arabs, Christians and Jews. In these manifold ways, she avidly shared the green shoots of an emerging better world. Perhaps my European activities rounded off this sense that her own suffering, along with that of millions of others, had become an offering to lay into its cradle.

Deep concerns with the state of the world must have beset her at an early age. There are stories of questioning her father, a well established lawyer, about social affairs, and of essays on matters of social justice. Even at play, she was said to have been protective of poorer children, and of weaker ones from bullying. Before long, that concern with justice found its way onto exercise books and then, from her late teens onwards, often into print. Before the arrival of the Nazis, she contributed spirited commentaries to national newspapers and what then were nascent women's pages, mainly decrying poverty and the social attitudes that failed to eradicate it.

I see a great likeness between Mutti's struggles to find her place in the cosmos of existences and those currently being courageously followed by Caroline in her own still fresh and painful search. The two women barely met when alive, and yet there seems to be a living bond between them. In the midst of life, Caroline was bereft of her 28-year old son Paris; instead of deep mourning and withdrawal, she immediately threw herself into organising a memorial service which movingly brought together all the positive forces from Paris's young life. Within three weeks of his demise, Paris rose again in full celebration of his life and virtues by an assembly of men and women of all ages who paid tribute to his exceptional qualities. They were to continue to manifest themselves through actions and signs that clearly showed Paris was - and still is - in the vicinity, able to announce his closeness.

In the fullness of time, it became too hazardous for Mutti to continue living alone. With great good fortune Noretta was able to find a spacious room - almost apartment - in a spotless retirement home in beautiful countryside outside Woking, run by kindly nuns under the watchful eye of a compassionate Mother Superior. With decreasing mobility, her new lifestyle seemed merely a continuation of what it had been in Baroness Springer's Evesham, the years in the gracious flat in Brighton's Lewes Crescent and finally the other Crescent by the Paragon in Blackheath. Two years later, in her 89th year, I received a call from the nuns. On entering the Quiet Room, I found Mutti fully awake, flushed with an inner excitement which gradually grew as I sat beside her for an indeterminate time. At length, she gazed into the distance, smiling beatifically and said, 'Hansi, Du siehst ja grossartig aus!' At first I thought she was complimenting me on my appearance; but she was looking far beyond me to her other Hansi who had left her half a century earlier, and whom she was to rejoin within that hour.

There ended a life lived to sustain those around her, to improve the lot of countless others with whose distress she felt a link, to bring up a brood of orphans and reap remarkably little in return - except what small comfort she could re-create for herself, physically and spiritually. Whether those self-won gains ever came near to compensating the immense losses she had had to bear is a question which will plague me to the end of my own days.