Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

"I started at the university in Göttingen where Niko and Claudia provided me with room
and board. Klaus, their child, was only five and both parents were absorbed in very busy
research careers. They were very dear to me, but my old relationship with Niko never really
returned. I was abysmally unhappy in Göttingen. I longed for Annika and the lonely woods of
East Prussia. This was the time when my lost childhood overcame me, and I became aware of
Alexandra’s spying."
"I spent all my vacations in East Prussia. George Dadiani sent me 100 Swiss francs
each month which I gave Claudia for room and board. In those bad times of the depression my
Swiss allowance was a godsend. The Bredows paid for my university expenses and gave me
some pocket money as compensation for my work on their estate."
"After Annika’s death I left Göttingen. Unable to concentrate, I spent an entire year
working in East Prussia. In 1925 I joined the Wandervogel, the German youth movement. We
hiked, slept in barns on the way, sang folk songs, discussed philosophy, but not politics. In
1926 I visited Tuscany and Florence and the beaches of my dreams near Venice."
He smiled. "I hiked all over Tuscany and fell in love with the 'land of my conception.'
Mother used to call me her Tuscan child, because of, as she would tell anybody who asked,
my conception underneath an olive tree in Tuscany. Mother could be embarrassingly
outspoken. I would invariably blush at this epithet. I did not find Alexandra’s olive tree, but
tracked down the Wolfsons. They had gotten very old and lived off Sally’s inheritance, but Villa
Tasso, though rundown, was still the paradise Mother used to rave about."
"I met your mother Andrea on a Wandervogel sing-in, as you would call it today, on the
Ludwigstein near Göttingen. Well, you know that she came from Breslau in Silesia. I moved to
Breslau and finished my doctorate at the university there in 1929. We got married in 1930. A
year later you were born."
My father raised his glass and looked at me.
"There will not be many more such evenings between us."
I had many unanswered questions. "I now know that Alexandra went to Uzbekistan
sometime after 1940 and that she returned. I assume Konrad went with her and died in Shakhi-Zabz.
I still don’t know of the reasons and circumstances which took them to Central Asia.
What can you tell me about your sister Sophia? Maybe I can trace her some place."
"She was eleven when I left Georgia. Mother would call her ‘my Georgian girl.’ Sophia
did not look very Georgian. She had dark blond hair and Alexandra’s deep blue eyes, but she
had an unmistakably Georgian temperament, suave, a trifle lethargic, willing to please people
and especially men."
"My parents and Sophia lived at the hospital after the Dadiani house had been
confiscated by the Soviets. It is not clear whether Sophia worked as a nurse or was studying
medicine. In her last letter Mother wrote that Sophia was about to marry a medical man, but
she did not mention the name of her future husband. Mother must have hoped to write again.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union put an end to her letters."
"And the Dahls,"I asked, "what happened to them during the Nazi years? Weren’t they
Jewish? All you have told me about them was that Alexandra visited them in Munich in 1913."
"Yes, Claudia’s father was Jewish. He died in Munich in 1926. Claudia took it very badly,
but he was fortunate. Marie, Claudia’s mother, died in 1936. She was still alive when Niko and
Claudia escaped to New York with Professor Courant’s group. I guess this separation
destroyed Marie Dahl’s will to live."
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