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| Brushed
aside by the Nazis
UPDATED
EVERY FRIDAY
Last Update:
Friday 27th May, 2005 |
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content © New Journal Enterprises, 2005. |
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| Brushed aside by the Nazis |
Illa Walter |
He was a renowned painter – but the Naziswouldn’t
let him work. Dan Carrier talks to Erich Wolfsfeld’s
former wife and model.
SHE had been in Berlin for a few months and, despite
the oppressive atmosphere, had found moments when it was possible
to relax.
Illa Walter moved there from the central German city of Kassel
to study modern dance. She had lost her job in a printing
factory’s art department because she was Jewish. It
was 1934 and one weekend friends invited her on a jaunt to
one of the city’s lakes.
Her brother-in-law went for woodland runs with a group of
other Jewish men and he invited her, with other women, along
to sunbathe. As the
y picnicked, Illa noticed one runner was paying her more attention
than most.
“I could feel one man gazing at me all the time,”
she recalls.
He was the Berlin Academy art professor Erich Wolfsfeld and
the meeting was to change both their lives.
Today Illa, 90, lives in Hampstead and gives keep fit and
dance classes to members of the Association of Jewish Ref-ugees
in Hampstead. Her lessons are made up of elderly people whose
memories are similar to her own.
Her flat is adorned with a couple of paintings by her former
husband and mementoes from her life in Germany.
Although they split up and were divorced by the end of the
war, they remained friends and Erich lived close by in Golders
Green.
And she remembers the conversation she had the day she met
Erich.
“He asked if I would like to come to the academy and
look at his paintings,” she recalls.
“I thought he was silly: no girl would fall for that.”
Erich then asked if she had considered sitting for a picture.
This was nothing new to her: she had been modelling since
she was young. “I said I had been painted many times,”
says Illa.
So the pair started talking, but romance was not at first
obvious. For a start, Erich was 30 years older.
“I was far more interested in my dance studies than
being an artist’s model,” she recalls.
In the summer of 1935, she went to Dresden for a course run
by the renowned ballet teacher Mary Wigmann.
But Erich would not allow the distance between the pair to
interrupt his attempts at courting.
He followed her and waited outside her classes. It was off
putting, she remembers, but romance finally blossomed and
they were married in December 1935.
“I was a young person and knew little about art, but
I did think it was wonderful: he had a big studio in the academy,”
she explains.
But their daily lives had a sinister edge.
“You would hear marching music coming down the street
and I’d have to find somewhere to go quickly.
“Nazis would parade and if you did not salute it was
trouble, but there was no way I was going to that.”
She was now modelling for Erich but in January 1936 he lost
his job and was told never to return to the academy. It was
the day after they got married. It was becoming too difficult
to remain in Germany.
“Erich didn’t want to go,” she said. “That
made it harder for me to decide.”
Salvation came from a family friend who had helped establish
the German Reform Synagogue. Illa respected her and when she
said it was time to leave, it was the final straw.
“She said to me: get a domestic servant visa for England.
You must go now.”
Illa’s sister was already in Britain and arranged the
permit.
“My friend demanded I came back in two weeks with the
visa. Do it without fail, she said, so I did.”
It meant leaving Erich behind – but Illa’s emigration
was partly responsible for him surviving the war.
A family of a professor in Sheffield gave her a job. She had
to learn the rudiments of service, from cutting bread correctly
to remembering to serve food with the right hand and wine
with the left. She was hopeless at it, but the family were
kind to her – the professor would help her prepare the
breakfast and she was grateful.
She said: “I showed someone at Sheffield University
Erich’s paintings and they loved them. They knew the
director of the Sheffield museum and he wanted to put on an
exhibition.”
They managed to secure Erich a distinguished person’s
visa as part of the cultural quota that allowed some German
Jews to come to Britain. He moved to London while Illa stayed
in Sheffield, which, she explains, was one of the reasons
they ended up divorcing.
They also got much of his work out of the country –
“I don’t know how – it must have been hard”
admits Illa – and the show started.
Erich came to see the exhibition but two days later war was
declared and the show was cancelled. But the pair of them
had got out alive.
n Paintings, Drawings and Etchings by Erich Wolfsfeld are
at the Belgrave Gallery, England’s Lane, NW3 until May
29. Call 020 7722 5150 for details. |
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