Transcript
Joe Dunthorne (0:00)
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Joe Dunthorne (1:01)
VGW Group Void where prohibited by law 21/ terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste. According to the packaging, it charged your gums with new life energy and left your teeth blindingly white. It was called Doramad, and her father was the chemist in charge of making it. Even before it was available in shops, he brought home samples for his family. They were living in a small town outside Berlin, in an apartment so close to the factory that after cleaning her teeth at night, my grandmother fell asleep listening to the churning of the autoclave. In 1935, when she was 11 years old, they decided to leave Germany, taking tubes of Doramad with them, their suitcases gently emitting alpha particles as traveled a thousand miles east. Later she would learn that the toothpaste her Jewish father helped create had become the preferred choice of the German army. A branch factory in occupied Czechoslovakia ensured that the troops pushing eastwards, brutalizing and murdering, burning entire villages to the ground, could do so with radiant teeth. Not that she ever told me this.
Dorothea Merzbacher (3:02)
You should read history. Really, you know, rather than listening to me to learn this properly, you know.
Joe Dunthorne (3:19)
You'Re listening to Half Life. I'm Joe Dunthorne and this is Episode one Daughter of Radium what I knew about my grandmother's childhood had all come second hand, family anecdotes worn smooth from each retelling. Like on my wedding day when my mother gave me a ring which she said had escaped the Nazis, a story I've been trading on ever since. I hold up my finger, let the polished bloodstone catch the light, then describe my grandmother's escape from persecution with the unique clarity of Someone untroubled by having done any research. My grandmother, Dorothea Merzbacher, was 12 years old. In 1936, she and her family had started a new life in Turkey. Meanwhile, back in Germany, they'd left behind an attic full of letters, winter coats, their good crockery, boxes of jewelry, as well as their money, which was tied up in blocked bank accounts. I proclaim OPEN Philippe Games of Berlin it wasn't until the Summer Olympics in Berlin that they thought maybe it was safe to go back. Tourists and journalists from all over the world were descending on the German capital for what Joseph Goebbels called a festival of joy and peace. My granny and her family decided to go back to Berlin while the whole country was on its best behavior. They found a city where bunting lined the streets and each cobblestone gleamed. It was reported that mosquitoes had been completely eradicated from the athlete's village and instead the LA was now populated with 200 storks. Berlin was smiling so hard you could hear its teeth squeak. Each day Dorothea's parents withdrew the maximum daily allowance from their bank and spent it with the recklessness of knowing it would likely get confiscated at the border. She watched from the back seat as her father drove them north through the center of Berlin, past gliding yellow trams, sports fans with flags around their shoulders, past the rows of long swastika banners that led towards the stadium. The whole street turned red, like staring down a throat, at the sight of which her father's driving became suddenly self conscious. Taking each corner with elaborate care, he drove them out to their old apartment in Oranienburg on the edge of Berlin. It was a small industrial town, but had already housed one of the first concentration camps in Germany. They were relieved to find the key still turned in the lock. Stepping quietly up the staircase, they were careful not to knock against the banisters and disturb their former neighbours. An eye peering from a crack in the door. My grandmother crawled into the thick air of the attic and passed down photographs, letters. And there it was, the bloodstone ring that I now wear on my finger, tucked inside a box of jewelry, which she opened there in Oranienburg.