Remembrance of things past — and a family's escape from the Nazis

CORNWALL — Catherine Hanf Noren has reconstructed her family’s past, which includes accounts of Jews in Nazi Germany, from letters, wedding certificates and lists she found in her mother’s Lime Rock attic.

Included in her collection are letters from her grandfather’s brother and his wife written in June 1941, expressing their distress over their failed attempts to leave Germany.

They died sometime later, in a concentration camp. Their son, Franzl, made it to England on a children’s transport.

“The Nazi stamps on the envelope tell the story,� Noren explained. “Franzl came to Cornwall last summer. He died two months ago, in his late 80s.�

Noren had been working her way through the belongings of her deceased sister and mother, and discovered that many of her friends who were doing the same thing with their own family ephemera. She encouraged them to take those random objects and devise from them portraits of their families.

“If everything is not true, it’s OK,� she said. What matters is sitting down with those scraps and remembering the people who once owned them. “All that junk in the attic may seem worthless, but it is the connection to our past.�

She passed around handpainted textiles and the carved wooden blocks that brought fame and fortune to her grandfather, Moritz Wallach. His bombed-out German factory was returned to him after the war, but the family came to Lime Rock, where he set up a new workshop on the second floor of the family’s home.

“He popularized the dirndl for street wear,� Noren said. “His wood cutouts are a lasting legacy.�

Noren went on to list his accomplishments: a museum in Munich, textiles for a Parisian designer, costumes for the Paris opera. He was recently described as “the Martha Stewart of Germany.�

“He invented branding before there was a name for it,� Noren said.

When Noren was about 3-1�2 years old, her family emmigrated to Australia. She and her sister were sent to a very unusual school there — but they were glad just to get out of Germany. “You went where you could go,� she said.

The experimental school in the Australian bush that she attended for three years taught mostly art and architecture. Australia was fun. Noren recalls a lot of swimming, not a lot of supervision and rides in the headmaster’s Rolls Royce.

“I remember it like a dream. I was never really sure it was real until recently, when I read about it on the Internet. I even found a  letter from a former student who described the same crazy things I remember. I was thrilled to realize I didn’t make it up.â€�

Among the artifacts she discovered in the attic of the Lime Rock house is a stuffed koala bear she got while she was in Australia.

“It’s been around all my life, but I only recently realized it’s a piece of real taxidermy.�

Noren’s book, “The Camera of my Family,� is available at the Cornwall Library.