Timothy Taylor didn’t know about the boxes of old letters, documents and photographs until his sister passed them on.
Oct. 22, 1940, a young German soldier knocked on the door of Dr. Rudolf Kuppenheim, the obstetrician who had delivered him.
The soldier’s task was to round up Jews in Pforzheim, Germany, to be sent to a concentration camp.
He gave the doctor and his wife, Lily, an hour to gather their things. Instead, the couple injected themselves with lethal doses of morphine.
Their son, Felix, journeyed to Pforzheim for the funeral. It was attended by thousands of people — not surprising since his father had delivered thousands of babies in a 40-year career.
But an official took Felix Kuppenheim aside and warned him that the Nazis would arrest him if he showed up at the funeral. So he set off for Ecuador, which had granted him a visa.
Unfortunately he had only one visa — he had to leave his wife and two children behind. He didn’t see them again until 1948.
His elder brother Hans had already escaped to New York in 1939 with the help of his employer. The brothers kept up a steady correspondence through this dark period, and Felix Kuppenheim kept it all, as well as detailed diaries.
Remarkably, his archive survived over the decades in boxes that travelled across continents. In 2019, it was passed on to his grandson, Timothy Taylor, a Vancouver writer and University of B.C. creative writing professor.
The letters and diaries were all in German. But Taylor had an office in the Dominion Building near Stephen Lunsford, a rare book dealer who reads German. Lunsford started looking through the letters and quickly realized they had historical importance.
“He just stops, and goes, ‘This is astonishing,’ ” recalled Taylor. “ ‘It’s a two-sided correspondence. They’re hard to find.’ ”
Lunsford recommended taking the cache to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Taylor did, and the lost world of Felix and Hans Kuppenheim came back to life.
With the help of the centre and UBC’s library, Taylor has been researching the correspondence for the last five years.
Now he’s turned it into a six-part podcast. Funded by the education centre, the podcast, The Hidden Holocaust Papers: Survival, Exile, Return, debuts this week.
The UBC library digitization centre has been working on translating all 10,000 pages of correspondence and diaries, which UBC and the Holocaust centre hope to have online for researchers by 2027. It would normally be a slow, laborious process, but it’s going much quicker thanks to use of recent developments in artificial intelligence to translate.
There are also lots of photographs, and all sorts of documents, including ephemera from Felix’s escape from Germany to Ecuador.
“He escaped by going east through Russia, because Hitler hadn’t invaded Russia yet, so they hadn’t closed that border,” said Taylor, who is putting together a book proposal for the story.
“He escaped by train, and this … was my first indication of how crazy a pack rat my grandfather was. He was like an archivist. He has a detailed itinerary — he has tickets, he has receipts.
“I have a ticket for him aboard the SS Rakuyō Maru, which, interestingly, is a boat that became famous later in the war because the Americans sunk it by mistake, and it was full of Allied POWs.”
Taylor’s grandfather died in 1978 and his archive passed to his daughter Ursula, Taylor’s mother. She married a Canadian engineer, and the family moved to West Vancouver in 1965.
When Ursula was dying in 2006, she had told her daughter to give the collection to Taylor. But he didn’t know about it until 2019, when their father died and his sister brought the collection to Taylor from her home in Edmonton.
There are still mysteries to be unravelled. Taylor’s mother didn’t like to talk about her life in Germany during the Holocaust. She was half-Jewish, and went into hiding on a farm, but her family doesn’t know where.
In the cache was a photo of her with a man who turned out to be anti-Nazi. They tracked down his granddaughter, German book publisher Felicitas von Lovenberg, who was delighted to hear the story.
Taylor interviewed von Lovenberg in Germany, and she brought out a family photo album with the same photo.
“It was a pretty nice moment,” said Taylor.
“We don’t have the full story yet, but we’re getting pretty close to knowing where she was in hiding. I think we have one farm located. This is just happening, live. I don’t even have some of this in the podcast yet, because it’s happening as we go.”
