Not Drowning but Waving

17-year-old Gerda Lewinsohn, from a wealthy German-Jewish family in Breslau, finally got away. It had taken some planning. That seminal passage on 23 May 1939 from Hamburg to an England not yet at war gave her life a new and exciting direction. She had a future again, there was no looking back, and she always loved getting away. Gerda’s suicide in December 1971, just before Christmas, was the last in a series of getaways, and she grasped it for dear life.

By December 1971 she was fifty. She had lost the appeal of a seventeen-year-old with her life still ahead. It was the second time she had left a family behind, and they let her go. This time by choice and not necessity, she needed to get away from her family, which did not endear her to them.

It took the author - by then in his seventieth year - half a decade to start to see what he had missed. Peter Thornthwaite looked for his mother and her old German-Jewish family in the diaries and family correspondence packed away in five vintage suitcases. He found her and her first family, or as much as could be found of them, in diaries and correspondence spanning more than three decades, from the heyday of the Third Reich to the deaths of Gerda and her brother Gunther, the last of the Lewinsohns.

Remember Who You Used to Be was published in 2023 but it was clear that this was not the end of the search. Not Drowning but Waving reveals what had previously escaped the author’s attention, developing new ways of understanding an elusive woman who happened to be his mother for a while. There was more to Gerda than he had realised.