Out of oblivion: the faces of Ilse and Hertha

This weekend, I visited London. In London, I visited Rita. Years ago I interviewed her father about growing up with Charlie, and now I wanted to find out whether she had any materials or information of genealogical interest: Charlie's mother and her grandmother were sisters.

From the very beginning of our renewed conversations, Rita insisted she really has nothing to contribute. Nevertheless, she met with me. While going thru old photo albums, showing me there really were only pictures of her immediate family, she decided to peel off some of them, and have a look at their backs. Two photographs she always took for featuring her mother came out to be clearly labeled as showing Hertha and Ilse, the mother and the child. They were taken in 1937 in Krakow.

I had a beautiful Czech sentence prepared for the book, which read "We will never know what Hertha and Ilse looked like. The faces of mother and sister of Charles Jordan may have been captured in one of the Warsaw ghetto photographs, but even if they were, they are known to us only as 'Jews' or 'victims' today, nameless pieces of the massive crowd of murdered millions." Thanks to Rita, this sentence became obsolete.

The Mother and the Child

Ilse Jordan - Flato