Charlotte Auerbach - The Missing Family

The Missing Family

Charlotte was the only child of her parents, born into a third-generation Jewish family who had lived for several generations in Breslau. In 1933, at the age of 34, she fled to Scotland because of anti-Semitism. Charlotte Auerbach never married and had no children of her own. However, she loved children and noted to friends that she would have sacrified science for having an own family. She unofficially 'adopted' two boys, one, Michael Avern, was the child of a German-speaking companion to her elderly mother. She helped to upbring Michael and gave him later her house in Edinburgh. The other, Angelo Alecci, came from a poor Sicilian family and the Save the Children Fund connected Charlotte with him (Beale 1995). Also, she took care of her ageing mother. In 1989, at the age of 90, she gave her house in Edinburgh to Michael and moved into the Abbeyfield Home in Grange Loan, Edinburgh, which was run by the church. She died five years later, in 1994.

She may always have felt something missing in her life, felt other people with a family, like her cousin, lead a much richer life. In a letter to her cousin she cites Eduard Mörike "Wolltest mit Freuden mich nicht ueberschuetten, und wolltest mit Leiden mich nicht ueberschuetten" - (You did not want to shower me with joy - and you did not want to shower me with suffering.) She wrote that she missed the feeling to be of personal-beloved importance to some people.